What Is Omnipotence?

The widespread view for centuries among believers is that God's power is vast. God is the almighty creator of the universe, the originator of reality, and is capable of altering any state of affairs to suit his desires. But it has turned out to be difficult to spell out the details of just what this maximal amount of power is. The temptation for those who have not reflected carefully on the implications is to simply conclude that God has the power to do anything. Let's call this Omnipotence_A. This power, if a being had it, would include the capacity to do anything that is logically possible: create or destroy material objects, raise someone from the dead, create the universe from nothing, and so on. But if we take the notion of "anything" seriously, then this question arises: What about acts that are contradictory, paradoxical, or self-limiting? Could an omnipotent God create a square circle, or a married bachelor, or make it so that 2 + 2 = 5? Could such a being avoid unavoidable occurrences, or do things that cannot be done?

The general consensus among philosophers and theologians is that Omnipotence_A .generates paradoxes and it is an incoherent way to define God's power. The particular problem that renders Omnipotence_A nonsensical has come to be known as The Stone Paradox.

Consider this act: creating a stone that one cannot lift. Alternately, we could consider the class of actions where you generate a problem that you cannot address. I can load up a large wheel barrow with sand so that I cannot move the wheel barrow. I can build a garage that I cannot lift. I can dump out a bucket of sand and then not be able to put all of the grains of sand back into the bucket in exactly the arrangement that they were in before. That is, for finite beings, there are a number of actions we can perform that produce an act that we cannot perform. Can God create a stone that he cannot lift?

The answer must either be that God can create a stone that he cannot lift, or God cannot. There are no other alternatives. Let us consider the first case. Suppose a God who is capable of doing anything creates a stone that he cannot lift. Now there is something that God cannot do, namely, lift that stone. So there is something that a being who can do anything cannot do--which is a paradoxical, logically incoherent result.

Consider the other alternative. Suppose that a being that can do anything cannot create a stone that he cannot lift. Now, once again, there is a logically contradictory situation. Being able to do anything does not include being able to do anything. Again, the result is incoherent. That is, what does "anything" even mean, if it doesn't mean what we take anything to mean?

It appears that there are always acts that God cannot do, so it doesn't appear that it is possible to have the property of Omnipotence_A.

It might be tempting to respond to the paradox of the stone this way: "Look God can do anything. He can create a stone that he cannot lift. And then he can lift it." This response is mistaken because if God then lifts that stone, he failed to perform the task that was described. God failed to create a stone that he cannot lift. He created a stone that he can lift. If he lifts it, then there remains something he cannot do--create a stone that he cannot lift.

There are some other considerations that undermine omnipotence defined as "the power to do anything." Call this problem "The Enhanced Problem of Evil." When confronted with the Problem of Evil: "if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why is there so much pointless suffering in the world?" many people will offer responses such as, "some suffering is unavoidable in order to build moral virtue," or "some evil is necessary in order to contrast with goodness," or "perhaps there are some greater goods that God could not achieve without allowing some lesser evils," or "God can make us free, or he can make us do good acts, but he cannot make us freely do good acts," and so on. Now notice that in each of those answers, there is language outlining some things that not even God can do: "unavoidable suffering," "necessary evils," "could not achieve," or "cannot make us freely. . . " and so on. That is, all of these answers to the problem of evil are predicated on the notion that there are some things that even God is capable of doing. God does not have the power to avoid unavoidable suffering, eliminate necessary evils, or make us freely perform some act. The problem for the theist is that she cannot both attribute the power to do anything to God and impose this list of "cannots," and "could nots," on God in response to the Problem of Evil. If God can do anything, including avoid the unavoidable, then he is not limited and should not have to tolerate suffering in any of the ways typically described by attempts to reconcile God and evil. Another way to put it is that if we attribute Omnipotence_A to God, then there can be no justification or explanation of evil.

In response to these problems and others, philosophers and theologians frequently introduce another account of omnipotence. Omnipotence_LP is the power to do anything that is logically possible. This power, if a being had it, would include the capacity to do any act that does not generate a logically contradictory state of affairs. So this being could create a world that has free rational beings in it, but it could not create a world that both has free, rational beings in it and that is a void world with nothing in it. Understanding omnipotence as LP resolves several problems. Now, the Stone Paradox can be dismissed--creating such a stone is an unintelligible, logically incoherent act. And the wide range of popular answers given to the problem of evil now make some sense again. Responses to the Problem of Evil such as, some kinds of suffering are necessary to achieve a greater good, evil must exist to present a contrast to good, the evil committed by free moral agents is not evil that God can prevent, and God accepts evil as a cost for a greater good, all presume that God has omnipotence_LP. The common preliminary conclusion that many people draw is this: God, if he exists, can at most be omnipotent_LP

Some similar arguments have led philosophers to puzzle over omniscience, or knowing everything. We can introduce a parallel distinction between having all knowledge, and having all knowledge that is logically possible to have: omniscience_A

and omniscience_LP In recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that there are serious problems with omnipotence_LP as well. It turns out that even this account gets mired in logical problems. There are a number of challenges when we take an ordinary property like "power" or "knowledge" that is sensible at our finite level and expand it to a God-worthy scale. We will not pursue the complicated details of these arguments here, but for some more information, read the entries on omnipotence, as well as the entry on atheism (written by Prof. McCormick) at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.