This was in the fortune cookie thread as a suggested fortune:
“Could God make a fortune cookie so strong that He couldn’t break it open?”
But in general I wonder if any god has been known to solve a paradox.
Maybe one of the gods of wisdom?
I guess it depens on the god. Not all are said to be omnipotent.
An omnipotent god (if one exists) can resolve a paradox. He can create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it. And then lift it. He’s beyond logic, causality and so forth.
An omnipotent god would just change the rules so there is no paradox.
RIGHT you are! After all, he’s
<drumroll…>
[del]Superman[/del] god!
Seriously, it depends on how omnipotence is defined. Most religious people I’ve heard talk about this question suggest that omnipotence only makes sense within a logical framework, that breaking the rules of logic makes statements meaningless.
Years ago, there was a website called something like “The God Contest.” It was a set of challenges for a God to complete (raising the dead, virgin birth, creation of a new universe, etc.), with the first God who completed the list and submitted proof thereof winning the worship of all humanity.
My favorite item on the list was something like this: “Imagine a circle that encompassed the known universe, with a perimeter comprised of hydrogen atoms. To describe the relationship of the circumference to the diameter, you would only need pi out to 34 decimal places. Round pi off to 34 decimal places.”
An omnipotent God is a paradox. :eek:
All paradoxes must be resolved. I suppose it doesn’t matter who does them.
Yes he could. How he does it we just don’t understand.
Think of it like this, do you understand calculus? Let’s say you don’t, just 'cause you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Now I know you’re thinking “But Mark…SOMEONE ELSE understands calculus even if I don’t”
Well I say to that, “Someone else understand’s these paradoxes you just don’t know them or they are keeping their mouths shut.”
In any cases most paradoxes aren’t really paradoxes; they’re just “verbal illusions,” to coin a phrase; the paradoxical nature is usually a function of the way it was expressed, not its actual reality.
As I’ve said before:
Straight to Hell. Express.
Could God recreate the (hypothetical one in which he exists) universe in a way that it’s exactly the same except he never existed? And would this universe still count as designed or not?
Hey, I wrote that fortune (post 85)! How nice to be appreciated.
An omnipotent God laughs at paradox. And then makes you forget there was a paradox in the first place.
Ah, but can an omni-God devise a paradox that is so fiendish even He can’t solve it?
If the god in question is Yog-Shoggoth it probably just eat the paradox for lunch.
He can. He’ll devise a paradox which he cannot solve, and then he’ll solve it. And both statements will remain true.
I don’t get it. Why is it hard to state pi to 34 decimal places? Is there some complication relating to the perimeter being hydrogen atoms?
I believe the point is that if you know the diameter of the Universe, you can work out the circumference accurate to the width of a hydrogen atom using only the first 34 digits of pi, so would God kindly arrange for pi to terminate at this point instead of carrying on to an infinite number of decimal places, since any higher order of accuracy is useless except for showing off?
@Candyman74: Ah, but can an omnipotent God create a paradox on which this approach will not work? 
It won’t help the argument at all but I was always told to answer it thusly:
It doesn’t matter. It would be against said gods nature to do that, so the paradox would never come up in the first place.
I don’t think it’s against God’s nature, it’s just a bad idea: if God makes a boulder so heavy he can’t lift it, then he looses his omnipotence, and he’s no longer God, he’s just another god.
I thought the standard SDMB formulation was, "Can God make a burrito so hot he can’t eat it?
I disagree—I don’t think that’s what “omnipotent” is commonly accepted to mean. By that standard, an omnipotent God could monkey pink pajama bird. An omnipotent God could vurple duppy-gleep. An omnipotent God could be nonomnipotent.
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that nonsense does not cease to be nonsense just because you put the words “God can” in front of it.