The Stone Paradox: Can God Be Omnipotent? - WriteWork.
To truly allow man to have free will God would have to restrict his own power in order to be unable to control men and this leads us to the Paradox of omnipotence. Another attempt to prove the problem of evil is the evidential version of the argument. This argument attempts to show inductively that the existence of God is not likely.
Omnipotence. show how omnipotence can be defined differently, how radical omnipotence differs with limited omnipotence and the issue with logic. Then I will show how God’s omnipotence raises some paradoxes and contradictions, by relying on the paradox of the stone and the problem of evil. Finally I will try to answer some questions concerning God’s ability to sin, to bring about the past.
Thus, if God is omnipotent then the scenario is equivalent to creating a square circle, and if God is not omnipotent then we conclude that there are some things God cannot do. As Mavrodes points out, it is God’s omnipotence that makes the existence of a stone too heavy for God to lift a logical impossibility.
From this, the paradox poses no threat to omnipotence because it simply reaffirms (a) and (b) and does not demonstrate an exception as demanded by (2). Again, (3) is false. The first two solutions were challenged by J. L. Cowan, in an essay from the book The Impossibility of God.
The paradox of omnipotence can be avoided by putting God outside time, but the freewill solution of the problem of evil cannot be saved in this way, and equally it remains impossible to hold that an omnipotent God binds himself by causal or logical laws.
L. Mackie, in his essay Evil and Omnipotence, tries to prove that believing in a mighty and all good god is irrational. His primary point of focus is the existence of evil, which, he claims, goes against the existence of an all good god.
God's changelessness does not undermine his omnipotence. Reply to Objection 2: To sin is to fall short of what should be achieved, to fall short is to fail to be omnipotent. Thus it is God's omnipotence is what prevents him from sinning and the inability to sin is not a lack. Aquinas further suggests that God could sin if he chose to do so.