Divine omnipotence explicates the notion that God is all-powerful, and without question the biblical data supports this attribute. Notwithstanding, we should not take biblical passages literally when they state that God can literally do all things. This would not be to contradict the biblical data, for the biblical authors were not teaching metaphysical possibilities. Rather they were illustrating that God is the ultimate power and authority in the universe, especially in contrast to impotent foreign gods. So if God cannot literally do all things, what is it that he cannot do, and how does this not display limited power in contrast to the biblical data?
To name a few: God cannot cease to be God; God cannot create another God; God cannot sin or do evil; God cannot be less powerful than he is. God cannot do any of these things in virtue of the necessity of his own nature; to affirm them would be logically absurd.
There are other logical impossibilities that God does not have the power to do: in particular, to create a rock too heavy for him to lift, make 2+2=*any other number than 4, or grant person A eternal life and simultaneously condemn person A. Such instances would run contrary to the logical law of noncontradiction. It is not within God’s power to do any of those contradicting things. In fact, in would be inappropriate to think of them as existing things. A married bachelor is not a thing; it does not exist and cannot exist. Whereby doing logically impossible things ought not to be considered impotence, rather, think of God’s inability to do the logically impossible as the upkeep of logic. In a roundabout way, I consider this a display of constancy and wisdom.
In a minority view, God actually can do logically impossible things. They reason that if God created mathematics, he could have made 2+2=*any number other than 4. This is a possible view, but I am not persuaded. The underlying issue is that this view must show that mathematics are contingent entities. But even if they were contingent and God were to create a world in which 2+2=72, then God would not be doing a logically impossible thing. For in that world, it would be logically possible. So, in essence, this point of God arbitrarily creating mathematics is moot. The real question is, are there mathematical entities that are true in every possible world—that is, they are necessary truths. I have not been even remotely persuaded that no mathematical entity is necessary. There are some logically necessary truths. Perhaps this is the best way to explain it: Since God is the grounding for necessary truths in logic and mathematics, to affirm logical impossibilities would be, in a sense, to contradict himself.
In addition to God’s inability to do logically impossible things, logically possible things that are unactualizable are also incompatible with omnipotence. What I mean by unactualizable is that although it may be logically possible, it is not possible within a given situation. Consider an illustration: Although it is logically possible that Adam and Eve would never choose to sin, we have strong theological reasons to believe that Adam and Eve would inevitably sin in any possible world that includes human free will. Consequently, there is no possible world that includes human freedom of the will and the absence of sin.
The biggest question henceforth is do these unactualizable worlds count as limitations on God’s power? If so, it would not be the case that God is all-powerful. Fortunately these cannot be considered limitations for two reasons. (1) They merely exist as human thought experiments; there is no underlying force or entity preventing or undermining God’s ability to actualize these instances. It is not as though 2+2=72 exists in some metaphysical realm too difficult for God to actualize. (2) How would God’s ability to contradict logic or his own nature be greater than not? Would it be greater for God to have the ability to stop being God? I cannot see how it would. To that end, we should not think of God’s inability to do the logically impossible or the logically possible but unactualizable as a limitation or imperfection.
With all that in mind, how can we sufficiently define omnipotence? Too vague is to say that omnipotence is the property of being without limitation. The simple yet insufficient definition of God’s omnipotence, as we have seen in some situations, is the ability to do all things logically possible. As a result, I prefer the definition that in any given situation God can do all things logically possible in that situation.
Christian A. Meister
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