about God????

Question

first, they say that God can DO ANYTHING (i.e. make things disappear, make me tall, short, etc.)

second, they say that God can CREATE ANYTHING he desires (i.e., earth, human, stars)



so, can He create a rock that He cannot carry?

if he can create such, then there's one thing that he can't do...

that is, he can't carry the rock that he just created.

Answer 1

That's only one paradox. What about creation or existence of evil. Is evil in accordance to god's plan or is he unable to get rid of evil. Either way, he's either benevolent or omnipotent, but not both.

What about the existence of predation, parasites, deformity, child rape, disease and all the other evils in the world. Was it god's plan to let Hitler incinerate 6m of his Chosen People?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Will you be praying to a god to move that Planet Killing Asteroid bearing down on us, or would you rather believe that NASA scientists will devise an interdiction plan to nudge it from its path?

Totally believing in god for improving your health and not relying on modern medicine will return us to the days of yore when our life expectance barely reached 30.

Answer 2

To say God can do anything is, like any attribute we might give God, a dualistic attribute, and as such is automatically contradictory.

Put to the point, if God can do anything, then there is already something God cannot do, namely, God cannot not do anything, which creates a contradiction/paradox.

Thus to say God can do anything is necessarily incorrect, just as it is incorrect, ultimately speaking, to say anything of God whatsoever. But because we are forced to use language and concepts to describe God, we can only do the best we can do, in which case "God can do anything" is about as close an approximation we can come to the truth.

To answer your specific question, could God create a rock that he could not carry, to carry something is a quality of a relative being (for only relative beings "lift" other relative entities) such that the real question is, could God make Himself/Herself into a relative being (because if that is not answered, the issue of carrying a rock becomes moot)? To that, the answer is obvious yes, as Jesus Christ, if one accepts Him as God, would be a perfect example. And I'm sure there were plenty of rocks Jesus could not carry . . . If one is not comfortable with Jesus as an example, there are numerous examples of God incarnating in form throughout the religious and spiritual traditions (a New Age view would be that you yourself are such an incarnation, for example). If one rejects the notion of God, well then the whole thing becomes moot. One can, of course, reject the notion of God taking on relative form, but the point is that, theoretically speaking, yes, God could create a rock that He could not carry. There is nothing theoretically problematic about that.

Answer 3

No,

He cannot. He can create a rock but god cannot create anything that he cannot carry since he is god ge can do anything by your definition. But there really is no proof that if there was a god that in fact created the universe and life that he can do anything.


To say he cannot create a rock that he cannot carry is just a word game. Because he your saying he cannot create something that he cannot do which is ambiguous. Since he can do anything and create anything thru a holy ghost in the bible just for you your info Jesus the Master Worker Created the Earth in the bible while he was in heaven not god but he did it thru god.

God can create anything. To create something that he cannot do is impossible since he can do anything. To say that is one thing he can not do is not logical reasoning. Its like a double negative

Answer 4

I don't suppose it would earn me 10 points were I to point out that we clearly live in a naturalistic universe, and as such, logically contradictory concepts like omnipotent gods are impossible and thus don't exist....

Gods are nothing more than magical thinking, remnants from our more primitive past when we relied on religions to explain what science couldn't then explain and to reinforce societal hierarchies. Thinking about what a god can or can not do is merely an exercise in solipsism.

Answer 5

Well... If it is really His will - no to be able to carry the rock He´s just created, then yeah, He can, for it would still be a reflection of his will in either way. Regards, Gabriel.

Answer 6

You're assuming that God has a physical being that would carry objects.

I believe God is beyond that, an Unknowable Essence that transcends human thought. Whatever we think God is, God is not.

A painting does not comprehend the painter.

Answer 7

First of all, your use of "anything" is ambiguous. Secondly, this is the Problem of Divine Omnipotence, to which this species of the problem is often referred to as The Problem of the Stone, and it is not much of a problem anymore in comtemporary philosophy of religion. The standard answer, after disambiguating your question, is that God can do anything logically possible.

To ask if God can create a rock that he cannot carry implies (1) An anthropomoprhism to God--God does not carry anything because God has no body; (2). If God cannot create the stone, then there is something God cannot do; (3) If God can create a stone that He cannot lift, then there is something God cannot do--lift the stone. Either way, there is something God cannot do, and that is supposed to put God's omnipotence in question. That is the paradox.

There are a number of ways philosophers and theologians tackle this paradox. The first is the internal incoherence solution. Here, the paradox is seen to consist in a contradiction, thus rendering the paradox a pseudo problem. It is essentialy the claim that the sentence, " A stone too heavy for God to lift" is semantically equivalent to the sentence, " A stone that cannot be lifted by Him whose power is sufficeint for lifting anything." This clearly is a contradiction. And since self-contradictory acts are not the proper objects of omnipotence, the paradox dissolves. This is George Mavrodes, among others, analysis of this issue. See Mavrodes, "Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence," in The Power of God: Readings on Omnipotence and Evil, by Urban and Walton. Also in "Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, by Pojman.

Another attempted solution is the conditional omnipotence solution. This is basically the claim that God has the ability to make a stone that He cannot lift, but chooses not to do so. This means that it is in the power of God to do so, but God's will has no reason to choose to perform such an act. It follows from this that an omnipotent being can choose to cause himself to no longer be omnipotent, which always remain a power that the omnipotent being may or may not choose to exercise. So, as long as God never wills such an act, God remains omnipotent. This, however, does redefine the concept of "omnipotence" to mean, not "not capable of failing or being frustrated" to " not actually ever failing or being frustrated." The difference lies in the shift of modality. This is like the difference between a chess champion who is undefeated because there is no one capable of defeating her, and a chess champion who is undefeated because she only accepts matches with opponents whom she can defeat. This is basically Richard Swinburne's view. See his The Coherence of Theism.

Another way of solving this paradox is to argue that the paradox itself suffers from incoherence due to a meaningless description. Some philosophers contend that creating a stone to large to lift does not actually describe any act that an omnipotent being cannot do. The expression, "cannot create a stone" implies that there is a task that God cannot perform, and that, therefore, God is not omnipotent. But the statement, "X cannot create a stone which X cannot lift" is semantically equivalent to, "If X can create a stone, then X can lift it." This is a very interesting answer to the paradox (in my opinion). This is the sort of slution Wade Savage gives. See his "The Paradox of the Stone" in the above mentioned The Power of God.

There are a number of things that need to be worked out by anyone using the paradox as an argument against God's omnipotence (and usually hence, His existence), or by anyone trying to solve the paradox. One of these is a robust understanding of the different ways in which actions may be understyood. One is as the direct object of the action. Another is too describe actions in terms of their relationship of the object to another object or the reaction to it by another person. This will amount to differences between intrinsic properties and relational properties.

So another attempted solution falls out of this formentioned distinction. The expression, "A stone that God cannot lift" does not state how heavy the stone i, but is a description of something God cannot do. It does not describe the stone, hut what the effects of making a certain stone would be--that a particular agent cannot lift it. So, in this analysis, the statements "God can make an infinately large stone" and God can lift an infinately large stone" are both compatible with the sort of action description of the paradox sentence "Can God create a stone that He cannot lift." If this is correct, there is no contradiction in God's om ipotence. this is similar to Millard Erikson's solution in God the Father Almighty: A Contemporary Exploration of the Divine Attributes.

See also the following:
1. Nelson Pike, "Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin"
2. Harry Frankfurt (athor of On Bullshit, and On Truth), "The Logic of Omnipotence"
Both in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, by (ed.) Pojman
3. The Divine Attributes, by Hoffman and Rosenkrantz
4. Anthony Flew, "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom" in Critiques of God: A Major Statement of the Case Against God (ed) by Angeles
5. Peter Geach, "Omnipotence" in Providence and Evil, by Peter Geach, and it is also in Philosophy of Religion:Selected Readings, by (ed.) Rowe and Wainwright.
6. Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology, by Thomis V. Morris
7. Thomas P. Flint and Alfred Freddoso, "Maximal Power" in The Existence and Nature of God, by (ed.) Freddoso, and in Philosophy of Religion:A Reader and Guide, by (ed.) William Lane Craig.

Have fun!

Answer 8

No God cannot, and that only proves God's infinite power. God can take every element ever roll it into one and still lift it. This attempted paradox is flawed in that it tries to assess power by limiting it. How can an inability to do something be seen as power?

Answer 9

Yes God could create a stone so big even He could not lift it but in His wisdom WOULD NOT.

Answer 10

a more intelligent question would be, can God create something that he himself could not destroy, and the answer is free will.