Could God create a stone he couldn’t lift? It’s a classic question, whether asked by curious theists or by sceptical atheists, and it does in fact have a kind of answer. The answer is that the question does not make sense
Could God create a stone he couldn’t lift? It’s a classic question, whether asked by curious theists or by sceptical atheists, and it does in fact have a kind of answer. The answer is that the question does not make sense. Contrary to appearances, this is not a cop- out but says something important about the way Christianity has traditionally viewed God.
To answer it, we might ask another question: does God exist? This question may be thought to have a simple answer from the Christian perspective,but there are complexities. Often the question is asked as if, ‘Does God exist’ is a similar question to asking,’Does this computer exist’, and therefore has the same kind of answer.
In fact, Christian scripture and tradition argue that this is not the case. God is not one existing thing amongst many- he is the source of all existence. The existence of the computer depends on God, whereas God simply is; he exists in an absolute sense, the existence of everything else is merely relative. This idea is a very old one- the name which God revealed to Moses, ‘Yahweh’, means something like, ‘I am that which is’ (beating Plato to his conception of god by something like a thousand years).
The point here is that our ability to hold ideas about the world and to express them in language is limited, rather than absolute. This statement about the existence of God is hard to explain or to understand because the idea is beyond the ability of language to adequately convey. The case of the stone is similar. The contradiction seems to be in the idea of being omnipotent. If you are all powerful you can make anything, including a stone you can’t lift. However if you are all powerful you must be able to lift it, which means you didn’t make a stone you couldn’t lift; therefore you cannot be all powerful.
The problem is that there is no way we can have a coherent idea of being all powerful, because such a thing is not a part of human experience or being. The best we can do to imagine such a being is to think of every possible action we can, and imagine those actions to be simultaneously possible. As we have see we run into difficulties doing this. But the difficulties are because language is straining to capture an idea that is at best at the limits of its capacity. That is why the question is ill- posed. It is impossible to properly define all the concepts involved. I said above though that this was not the w