Why are we discussing only Book Two in this thread? It doesn’t even mention the Babel Fish! Come read the entire Oolom Caloophid trilogy of philisophical blockbusters:
Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
… not to mention his pulse-pounding, sense-shattering sequel, Well, That About Wraps It Up for God.
(from the all-too-real book/movie/series/radiodrama The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, copyright patent registered trademark Douglas Adams, all rights reserved, all lefts reserved, no part of this message may be duplicated or transmitted without the consent of Douglas Adams, this message board, and Major League Baseball)
I think the standard theological reply to the question “Can God create a rock to heavy for him to lift” is that No, God cannot create such a rock, but that this does not in any way limit his omnipotence. Omnipotence is then defined as being able to carry out any task or act which does not make a self-reference to the property of omnipotence.
Similar to the paradox of the Barber. Does the barber of a village, who shaves all of the people in the village who do not shave themselves, and only those people, shave himself? If he does not shave himself, then he is one of the people who does not shave himself, and therefore he shaves himself. If he does shave himelf, then he is not in the class of people that he shaves, so he does not shave himself. Bertrand Russell’s way out is to find a problem with the way the sentence is set up. He concludes that there can just be no such barber as described (it is in Quine’s lingo a “veridical paradox”).
Likewise, there just can be no such meaningful concept of omnipotence that incorporates the idea of omnipotent tasks that refer to omnipotence itself. These can be ruled out as meaningless. The residual notion of omnipotence can then be applied without paradox.
So God, if omnipotent, can clearly create a rock of any size. But no matter how big, he can move it.