Talk:Omnipotence paradox

The question simplified

Basically this question is just asking, "Is God so powerful that he can have a weakness?"

Since God is All-Powerful, he cannot have a weakness (a.k.a. he cannot create a rock he can't lift), and that is what makes him omnipotent! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.164.236.198 (talk) 16:48, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

No, it's not. It's a question asking: can god do something even he can't undo? If he can, then there is something he can't undo, so he's not omnipotent. If he can't, than he's not omnipotent simply because of that. 178.222.94.208 (talk) 16:32, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Logical answer to this via the Actus Purus

If God is "pure act" as Thomists & Scholastics maintain, and is therefore in potency to nothing else, then God's act would become as it were, a fact (something put over to the power of an act) that puts everything that *was* God into the potency of, say, the stone which he could not lift; but since God continues as act and not fact, the objective/factual God would be limited, but it would make, as an object, a new one-true-God that would then become something that transcends the former abstracted fact about God. God would in essence make his entire history obsolete, as a shell of his former self, but it would be an abstract fact that he would immediately transcend being himself act rather than fact. Unrelative subject rather than relative object of a past instance, no matter how pervasive the past instance was in encompassing all his nature formerly.

This could be interpreted as the nature of 'Lucifer' or the devil, as God's most powerful angel; he was an extension of God made from the omnipotence of God to do something that would in fact limit his omnipotence, leaving behind a 'husk' or 'shell' of everything that God was before the need of the paradox and being nearly omnipotent in every other capacity. Take for example of 'two-prong'd' symbolism of Satan; a pitchfork, cloven hooves, two horns; everything is 'split', duality as opposed to unity, separateness, the necessary of observer and thing observed. For one thing to exist as manifest, it needs another for its contrast as that 'one, single, sole, thing' to be realized.

This calls to mind the paradox of nonexistence: if nothingness were truly without principles of any type or degree; then staying still and having no qualities is a quality of stasis & fixity in emptiness which defines and limits the infinite lack of qualities nothingness must maintain to truly be nothing. Therefore being & nonbeing are the same, and prove their infinity of lacking anything by becoming (or existing as act, and not fact) all things, or infinite fact, which continually negates act but is always in the potency of it. This passage from oneness to everything is the process of duality, or "God's most powerful angel/messenger", which does nothing else but bring dissent & strife by the conflict of multiplicity (though to justify the unity and wholeness of God). God, being always oneness, always pervades all duality. God = the unity of unity & duality - the Devil = the duality of unity & duality 74.209.54.156 (talk) 17:28, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Kenotic conception of omnipotence.

I know Kierkegaard has had a viewpoint in his work that has been interpreted as Kenosis with regard to the idea of omnipotence. Has any author associated this type of position to the idea of an overcoming of omnipotence paradox to the knowledge of anyone? Nagelfar (talk) 03:20, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

What I would love to see somewhere!

I am one of those (probably rare) fellows who reads symbols better than text. if there were a symbolic offering of this (either given or linked) I'd love to read it.

I would also like to see a few other members of the "family of semantic paradoxes". Are there any interesting variations other than thoes paradoxes with other objects substituted for 'rock' and other actions substituted for 'lifting'? (eg. "can god create a banana which he cant scratch his back with?")

For instance I think the question "Can God do something that he cant?" might be an interesting variation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markopolo141 (talk • contribs) 12:36, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Stone does not work for Omnipotence Paradox

The use of a stone for this argument should have died out with Sir Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravity. Lift is a function of gravity and has no meaning apart from gravity. So Newton's theory provides two possible ways to answer "yes" to the question without paradox: remove gravity or make the stone so large that it is the largest source of gravity in the universe. When there is nothing bigger to lift it from, it cannot be lifted. Somewhere in the universe, such a "stone" exists.

As for the Immovable Object vs. the Irresistible Force, "He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed," Jesus Christ says according to the Gospel of Matthew as translated by the New International Version of the Bible. In two phrases, Jesus shows that He thinks of both as being the same thing, as the Irresistible Force being projected by the Immovable Object.

DeanDaleFry (talk) 02:09, 5 January 2012 (UTC)