Editing Omnipotence paradox (section)

=== Paradox is meaningless: the question is sophistry ===
Another common response is that since God is supposedly omnipotent, the phrase "could not lift" does not make sense and the paradox is meaningless.<ref name="ReferenceA">The Problem of Pain, Clive Staples Lewis, 1944 MacMillan</ref><ref>Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion by Paul Copan, Chalice Press, 2007 page 46</ref> This may mean that the complexity involved in rightly understanding omnipotence—contra all the logical details involved in misunderstanding it—is a function of the fact that omnipotence, like infinity, is perceived at all by contrasting reference to those complex and variable things, ''which it is not''. An alternative meaning, however, is that a non-corporeal God cannot lift anything, but can raise it (a linguistic pedantry)—or to use the beliefs of Hindus (that there is one God, who can be manifest as several different beings){{citation needed|date=December 2021}} that whilst it is possible for God to do all things, it is not possible for all his incarnations to do them. As such, God could create a stone so heavy that, in one incarnation, he could not lift it, yet could do something that an incarnation that ''could'' lift the stone could not.

The lifting a rock paradox (''Can God lift a stone larger than he can carry?'') uses human characteristics to cover up the main skeletal structure of the question. With these assumptions made, two arguments can stem from it:

#'''Lifting''' covers up the definition of '''translation''', which means moving something from one point in space to another. With this in mind, the real question would be, "''Can God move a rock from one location in space to another that is larger than possible?''" For the rock to be unable to move from one space to another, it would have to be larger than space itself. However, it is impossible for a rock to be larger than space, as space always adjusts itself to cover the space of the rock. If the supposed rock was out of space-time dimension, then the question would not make sense—because it would be impossible to move an object from one location in space to another if there is no space to begin with, meaning the faulting is with the logic of the question and not God's capabilities.
#The words, "Lift a Stone" are used instead to substitute capability. With this in mind, essentially the question is asking if God is incapable, so the real question would be, "''Is God capable of being incapable?''" If God is capable of being incapable, it means that He is incapable, because He has the potential to not be able to do something. Conversely, if God is incapable of being incapable, then the two inabilities cancel each other out, making God have the capability to do something.

The act of killing oneself is not applicable to an omnipotent being, since, despite that such an act does involve some power, it also involves a ''lack'' of power: the human person who can kill himself is already not indestructible, and, in fact, every agent constituting his environment is more powerful in some ways than himself. In other words, all non-omnipotent agents are concretely ''synthetic'': constructed as contingencies of other, smaller, agents, meaning that they, unlike an omnipotent agent, logically can exist not only in multiple instantiation (by being constructed out of the more basic agents they are made of), but are each bound to a different location in space contra transcendent [[omnipresence]].

[[George I. Mavrodes]] responded to this paradox by arguing that the question itself is self-contradictory. He wrote:<blockquote>"On the assumption that God is omnipotent, the phrase "a stone too heavy for God to lift" becomes self-contradictory. For it becomes "a stone which cannot be lifted by Him whose power is sufficient for lifting anything."...

...it is the very omnipotence of God which makes the existence of such a stone absolutely impossible, while it is the fact that I am finite in power that makes it possible for me to make a boat too heavy for me to lift."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mavrodes |first=George I. |date=1963 |title=Some Puzzles Concerning Omnipotence |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183106?origin=crossref |journal=The Philosophical Review |volume=72 |issue=2 |pages=221–223 |doi=10.2307/2183106 |issn=0031-8108}}</ref></blockquote>Additionally, he also points out how the question is sophistry. Suppose the objector insists that it's a coherent question, then we reply by affirming that God can create such a stone. It may seem that this reply will force us into the original dilemma. But it does not. For now the objector can draw no damaging conclusion from this answer. And the reason is that he has just now contended that such a stone is compatible with the omnipotence of God. Therefore, from the possibility of God's creating such a stone it cannot be concluded that God is not omnipotent. The objector cannot have it both ways. The conclusion which the objector wishes to draw from an affirmative answer to the original question is itself the required proof that the descriptive phrase which appears there is self-contradictory.

[[C. S. Lewis]] argues that when talking about omnipotence, referencing "a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it" is nonsense just as much as referencing "a square circle"; that it is not logically coherent in terms of power to think that omnipotence includes the power to do the logically impossible. So asking "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?" is just as much nonsense as asking "Can God draw a square circle?" The logical contradiction here being God's simultaneous ability and disability in lifting the rock: the statement "God can lift this rock" must have a truth value of either true or false, it cannot possess both. This is justified by observing that for the omnipotent agent to create such a stone, it must already be more powerful than itself: such a stone is too heavy for the omnipotent agent to lift, but the omnipotent agent already can create such a stone; If an omnipotent agent already is more powerful than itself, then it already is just that powerful. This means that its power to create a stone that is too heavy for it to lift is identical to its power to lift that very stone. While this does not quite make complete sense, Lewis wished to stress its implicit point: that even within the attempt to prove that the concept of omnipotence is immediately incoherent, one admits that it is immediately coherent, and that the only difference is that this attempt is forced to admit this despite that the attempt is constituted by a perfectly irrational route to its own unwilling end, with a perfectly irrational set of 'things' included in that end.

In other words, the 'limit' on what omnipotence 'can' do is not a ''limit'' on its actual agency, but an ''epistemological boundary'' without which omnipotence could not be ''identified'' (paradoxically or otherwise) in the first place. In fact, this process is merely a fancier form of the classic [[Liar Paradox]]: If I say, "I am a liar", then how can it be true if I am telling the truth therewith, and, if I am telling the truth therewith, then how can I be a liar? So, to think that omnipotence is an ''epistemological'' paradox is like failing to recognize that, when taking the statement, 'I am a liar' self-referentially, the statement is reduced to an actual failure to lie. In other words, if one maintains the supposedly 'initial' position that the necessary conception of omnipotence includes the 'power' to compromise both itself and all other identity, and if one concludes from this position that omnipotence is epistemologically incoherent, then one implicitly is asserting that one's own 'initial' position is incoherent. Therefore, the question (and therefore the perceived paradox) is meaningless. Nonsense does not suddenly acquire sense and meaning with the addition of the two words, "God can" before it.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> Lewis additionally said that, "Unless something is self-evident, nothing can be proved". This implies for the debate on omnipotence that, ''as in matter, so in the human understanding of truth: it takes no true insight to destroy a perfectly integrated structure, and the effort to destroy has greater effect than an equal effort to build; so, a man is thought a fool who assumes its integrity, and thought an abomination who argues for it. It is easier to teach a fish to swim in outer space than to convince a room full of ignorant fools why it cannot be done.''{{cn|date=May 2025}}

'''Paradox assumes the rock has already been created'''
In 1999, Matthew Whittle asserts that it should not be outside the scope of powers for an omnipotent being to make itself non-omnipotent, so indeed making a rock too heavy to lift is possible for God. The follow on question "Then can he lift it?" assumes that the rock has already been created, so the correct answer would be "Assuming he makes the rock, no". And if asked "Is God thus not all powerful?", the correct answer would be "God is indeed all powerful until such time as the rock is created". The "Paradox" then is not really a paradox.