Can God do the logically impossible? An answer to the omnipotence paradox
Words have meanings.
I point out this painfully obvious fact because, even though we are aware from our first year that words have meanings, we don’t always put much effort into figuring out the meanings of the words we use. This is egregiously obvious when you listen to our political discussions these days. People seem to throw around -isms and -phobias without any idea of what they actually mean. The results are painful, as a few minutes of watching or reading the news will show. Nobody learns anything when we twist language to suit our opinions.
So when we talk about God, we should know what the words we are saying about him mean. Otherwise we are not going to learn who he is or get to know him.
One of those words we use is omnipotent. The meaning is pretty simple: all-powerful. In other words, God can do anything. Jesus makes this clear, when he says, “With God all things are possible.” (Which happens to be the motto of my home state of Ohio!) The angel Gabriel also agrees; he told Mary that she was going to have a son as a virgin, “for nothing is impossible with God.”
That’s great! We can feel very confident entrusting our entire lives to One who is able to do anything. He can overcome any opposition and bring us through any trial. Nothing he says will ever fail. We can put our total confidence in such a God. And One with the ability to do anything at all is so beyond our comprehension that we should rightly be in awe of and worship him.
But words have meanings. What exactly does it mean that God can do anything? Can he lie or do wrong? Can God do the logically impossible, like make a squared circle or, as many a clever skeptic has asked, make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?
Some might be inclined to answer yes, as the philosopher Rene Descartes did. God’s mind is so infinitely greater than ours that he could do things we can’t comprehend. But then, if logical comprehensibility is unnecessary, does that mean God can fail? Does it mean he can cease to exist? Can he fall from heaven like Satan did? If you still want to say yes, then when you say God can do anything, it means God could either succeed or fail. He could do either good or evil. Of course, so can we. Being able to succeed or fail, or to do good or evil, is not a spectacular or infinitely good quality. So if we go down this rabbit trail of saying God can do the logically impossible, the word “anything” — when we say that God can do anything — loses the force of its meaning. And if God can do things like fail or do wrong, it’s also hard to present God as the greatest possible being, since he would be a being capable of failure — and that is not as great as a being incapable of failure.
Now, for the record, I don’t actually know anyone who claims that God can do things like destroy himself or become Satan. Almost everyone agrees that God can’t do some things. Even the Bible agrees when it says that “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6:18). (The idea being that, because God is perfect, and by definition every word God speaks is truth, it is logically impossible for him to lie.) What we have more trouble with is explaining — particularly to unbelievers who want to hear why God makes sense — why God can’t do such things, and why, if there are things he cannot do, we still say he can do anything. How can we say that and still say that the idea of an all-powerful God is sensible and worthy of worship?
Well, the reason is because these things God cannot do are not actually things at all.
Think of a pink and purple spotted dinosaur with ten legs, three eyes, and roughly the shape of a bowling ball. Such a creature has almost certainly never existed, and is pretty absurd to think about, and almost certainly couldn’t actually survive, but it’s logically possible. If genetics wreaked its havoc on some poor species of creatures, it could exist. A mutant dinosaur is a coherent, if ridiculous, thing that could exist. And because God is omnipotent, he could create such a creature.
But think of a square circle. What would that look like? You can’t, and it’s not for lack of imagination or scientific knowledge. It’s because no matter what shape you imagine, it will either not fit the definition of a square or a circle. Unlike a mutant dinosaur, a square circle is not a thing that doesn’t or can’t exist. It’s not a thing at all. It’s a nonsensical jumble of words that doesn’t form any kind of meaningful concept.
That’s true for all impossible objects, and it’s also true for impossible actions. When someone asks if God can create a rock too big for him to lift, that’s asking if God can be all-powerful and not all-powerful at the same time. When someone asks if God can do evil, that’s asking if God can be perfectly good and yet flawed at the same time. It’s not a limitation on God that he can’t do or be these things, because they aren’t things at all. They’re incoherent jumbles of words that don’t correspond to any actual or theoretical objects or actions.
Why does this matter? A couple reasons:
First, so we can understand better the experience of the power of God in our lives. No, we don’t need to be able to articulate the answer to the omnipotence paradox to experience God’s power in our lives. But the better we know God for who he is, the more we can appreciate what his power actually does and doesn’t do. For example, God has chosen to give us free will, but he cannot make someone freely do something — because that’s logically nonsensical — and so he lets some freely choose to do evil. He can’t make others freely choose to be saved, so he performed an act of radical love to draw us to him. (An issue which I will explore in a near-future post.)
Second, so we can better explain the power of God to others. We may understand God’s power from experience, but others do not. Those of us who know God are responsible for introducing him to others who don’t, and for helping one another get to know him better as well. When others struggle to understand how God could be all-powerful or if these paradoxes make it impossible for God to even exist, the more knowledge we have of them, the more help we can be to those with these questions.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to do several posts exploring the attributes of God, and what they do and do not mean, and what difference that makes in our lives. Anyone who has an idea or suggestion on a question or topic you’d like to see discussed, feel free to contact me by social media or leaving a comment!
