And dont forget in under one day’s time too. Two if He takes a day to rest. Ok ok, three tops!
Sorry, gonzomax and Valeron have the “rants against priestly pedophilia” franchise, and while you’re welcome to try competing, they’ve got condemning it in the strongest of terms down to a fine art. Der Trihs similarly has the “rants against mercenary evangelists” area covered. But ranting on the issue of dogmatic stupidity (“scientific creationism,” “the nefarious gay agenda,” etc.) have been kind of a tag-team effort, in which many of the Christians here are glad to join the skeptics and non-believers.
The achievers among us talked about this in junior high.
It’s a matter of semantics. Can God (or any kind of supremely powerful being) create an unliftable rock?
It’s sort of like the unstoppable force vs. immovable barrier argument. The definition of an “unstoppable” force is that it can’t be stopped; logically if something can stop it, it isn’t an unstoppable force. What happens if two things meet? Nothing, because the two can’t exist at the same time.
By adding God into the problem you’re adding another layer; Can an all-powerful being act on an object that cannot be acted upon? Logically, no. If God can act on it, it’s not an inactable object. We could sort of skip around it and say that perhaps it can’t be acted upon by anyone but God, but that’s a bit of a cheat. So logically (IMHO) no, an omnipotent being would not be able to create something that it could not act upon. Which kinda makes sense, really; if it could, it’s not omnipotent. Does this mean it’s not really omnipotent? I’m not sure, really. I guess it depends on how you define omnipotent.
I might be inclined to believe you except that it isn’t logical that you sometimes know to leave a period at the end of a sentence and in the same post your mind is uneducated about that tradition. And it is illogical that sometimes you know to put an apostrophe in a contraction and at other times your English teacher failed to teach you to do that.
If you are in high school and haven’t learned the difference in to, too and two, I suggest that you take out the grammar book that your teacher issued to you and see what you have been missing since the second grade. What do you need to learn before you are worthy of a high school diploma?
Note inside that the word English is always capitalized.
Here’s a little paradox for you:
When the principal of your school is handing you your diploma and you reach for it with your hand, the diploma will never travel all the distance to your hand because first, it must travel half the distance.
Welcome to the Straight Dope.
Warmly,
One of the many English teachers who posts here. Tra la, tra la la.
I’ve always felt that this paradox involves a category error. God (assuming she exists) is not an object within the universe who acts on other objects within the universe. The relationship between God and the universe is analogous to that between an author and a story or a dreamer and a dream.
An author is omnipotent with respect to his story. I can’t imagine anyone would dispute that–as an author I’m not even bound by the logic of the real world: I could write about a character squaring a circle or finding a four-sided square or gyring and gimbaling in the wabe.
Could I write about a rock so heavy I couldn’t lift it? Of course I could. I could also write about myself lifting a rock. What I couldn’t (!) do is actually lift a rock in my story. I can cause the rock in the story to be lifted, I can cause a character in the story (even myself) to lift it, but I can’t, as myself, actually do the lifting! Why? Because the rock doesn’t exist in the same way (or in the same universe) as I do.
Does that mean that I was wrong: that I’m not actually omnipotent relative to the story, that I can’t cause anything to happen within the story? Of course not.
Here’s another question: could I write about a rock so heavy that I couldn’t write about lifting it? Isn’t that actually what you’re asking about God?
Finally, I must point out that nowhere in any version of the Bible I’m familiar with is God defined as being omnipotent (or omniscient or omnibenevolent). God is described using the Hebrew and Greek words which are often translated as “almighty” (and “all knowing” and “good”), which is a synonym in English for omnipotent. But those words are descriptive, not definitive. The most that you can do with any argument that includes a word beginning “omni-” is prove that the biblical writers were wrong about at least one of God’s characteristics. Or that at least one of those Hebrew or Greek words was used poetically. I mean, the Bible mentions God’s hand,too, but no one uses that to disprove God.
God could create a task which He could not accomplish. If He were to do so, He would no longer be omnipotent. But He hasn’t, so He’s still OK.
The solution is simple… worship a crazy god.
No need for logic, or sanity.
Crazy God will get you. Worship him, or suffer the consequences.
Christian, Muslim, whatever…
how do you people actually believe this stuff?
I am not trolling…
No, not joking
Thanks for the information in the last line, or I for one would have been misled.
The OP’s argument is a non-sequiter. There’s no logic to stating that if God can’t create a stone he can’t pick up it proves he’s not omnipotent. Hell, I built a garage I can’t pick up, but that doesn’t mean I’m not omnipotent. I mean, I’m not, but my lack of omnipotence isn’t defined by the fact that I can’t pick up the garage I built.
Besides, the whole omnipotence thing is a non-starter anyway. Every sixth-grader who asks, “So if God is omnipotent why is there evil?” shoots down the omnipotence claim.
The paradox in the OP doesn’t prove that God isn’t omnipotent, but that the definition of omnipotence is broken - since by that definition a being able to do everything is unable to do everything. This doesn’t strike me as a useful definition of omnipotence, and a more useful one would be “an ability to do those acts whose degree of difficulty tends to infinity”. Mathematicians are happy with the concept of “limits” such as “in the limit as x tends to infinity” and with the notion that this does not entail actually setting anything to infinity; otherwise differential calculus would be a dead duck, for a start.
So, creating a beef burrito so hot that he couldn’t scarf it? No. Creating a chick so hot that he couldn’t pick her up? No. Ditto for all variations on the immovable object/irresistible force shtick. But creating the Universe ex nihilo? Bringing a dead person back to life? Transforming water spontaneously into wine? That just comes under the heading of “degree of difficulty tends to infinity”, not “logical absurdity”. It’s the difference between being able to evaluate Graham’s Number to the last digit, or doing likewise for the square root of two. One of those is only very hard. 
To **lekatt ** and Poly, this sounds more new age than standard church to me. I had no clue.
It seems like such a nonsense statement, I do not think writing things like this strengthen your argument. I might as well study my Navel to understand the universe while I am at it.
Perhaps you might want to reconsider using phrases like this around the skeptical.
Jim
Don’t let 'em bug you, mawrestler. Everybody on this board at some point in their own lives was presented with this conundrum for the very first time, and although it’s unlikely you’ll get very many to admit it, most were probably as impressed with it originally as you were.
I can well remember the first time I saw it (and this is a gods’ honest true story). I was a freshman or sophomore at the University of Texas and I was sitting on the pot in the men’s room of Pierce Hall (long since torn down). Someone had written the “rock conundrum” (surely it has a name by now) on the stall, and even though I was pretty much an atheist at the time, I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of its simplicity and profoundness. This was nearly 40 years ago and I can still remember exactly where on the stall it was written (on the left side, just above and to the right of the TP roll, and at an angle).
For the Dopers who spend hours a day pouring over debates on these boards, the “rock conundrum” will be seen as a tired old chestnut, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t provide an important and powerful thought process.
For me, it got me to thinking about the limitations of living in a three dimensional world, and how things might be different if we could only graduate to a fourth dimension. (Yeah, yeah, yeah… I was smoking a lot of pot at the time. C’mon, it was the sixties.)
Even now I find it useful to present the question to certain of the religious faithful, just to see how they will dance around their claims that God is perfect and can do anything.
So ignore these blowhards that are trying to make you feel sophomoric. We were all there at one time.
Instead of rocks, I think of it this way:
You have an omnipotent god, who is also all knowing. This god hates sin. Yet, he creates a race full of sinful beings and he knows he’s going to have to send his son down to redeem them at some point since he’s all knowing. Since he’s all knowing, and can do anything, couldn’t he have just created people who would never sin from the get-go? And for those of you who argue about the “free will” aspect. Couldn’t an all-powerful god create a race of people who had free-will AND would never sin? That conundrum seems more relevant to me than rocks.
This leads me to 3 conclusions:
- God’s clueless even though he supposedly knows everything.
- God’s extremely cruel because he created a race of people he knew we going to sin ahead of time.
- God was made up by people who didn’t think things through to begin with.
And yet, one of the standard answers to this is that granting free will without having sin be a possibility is just as much a logical contradiction as making a rock so heavy it can’t be lifted and then lifting it, and the same responses apply.
In other words, in addition to your three conclusions, there is a fourth possibility:
4. There is some greater good that can only (without logical contradiction, perhaps at a level so deep or subtle it’s hard to see it) be obtained by allowing sin.
I’m not arguing for this fourth position here, just saying that it hasn’t been ruled out.
These are the kinds of posts that we will continue to get until I am acclaimed God-King of Earth. You have only yourselves to blame for your continued resistance.
Would not or could not? If they can’t sin, then they don’t really have free will.
I might vote for you (or at least subscribe to your newsletter). Who are you running against?
:: looking up from control of giant fish tank ::
Well, it’s less an election than a campaign of subversion, sedition, murder, and conquest. I’d say more but I have to get back to interrogating Aquaman.
:: turns up the heat on the flame under the fish tank ::