God · Objection
Can God create a stone so heavy He cannot lift it? Either way, God is not omnipotent.
Why people find it persuasive
The paradox has the surface form of a clean logical trap: whichever horn you take, omnipotence fails, and it is fun and quotable in a way that makes it feel devastating.
Important distinctions
- • Omnipotence as the ability to do anything imaginable vs. omnipotence as the ability to do anything logically possible.
- • A genuine task vs. a self-contradictory pseudo-task described in the grammar of a task.
- • Limits on power vs. the incoherence of the description itself.
Christian response
- • Explain the classical definition of omnipotence used by theologians like Aquinas: it is the power to do anything that is logically possible, not the power to actualize contradictions, since a contradiction does not describe any coherent state of affairs to be brought about.
- • Show that 'a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift' is a self-refuting phrase, structurally identical to 'a square circle' or 'a married bachelor'. It sounds like it names a describable object, but the words cancel each other out; asking whether God can create one is asking whether God can create a logical contradiction, which is not a coherent question about power at all.
- • Point out that inability to do the logically incoherent has never been considered a deficiency even outside theology; nobody thinks a mathematician is 'limited' because they cannot make 2+2 equal 5, since there is nothing there to be able or unable to do.
- • Note that this paradox was largely already answered in medieval philosophy (it appears in a recognizable form in discussions by Aquinas and later scholastics), so its appearance as a fresh 'gotcha' says more about how philosophy of religion is taught than about any live problem for theism.
Strongest version of the objection
Can God create a stone so heavy He cannot lift it? Either way, God is not omnipotent.
Christian counterresponse
The logical-possibility qualifier is not an ad hoc patch invented to dodge this puzzle; it follows from treating power as the capacity to actualize states of affairs, and states of affairs must be internally coherent to be actualizable at all. The same constraint is applied consistently across every other divine attribute in classical theology, not introduced only when convenient.
Remaining questions
Debates continue among philosophers of religion over precisely how to formally define omnipotence (compare Peter Geach's and others' technical proposals), though these are refinements of a working solution rather than signs the paradox remains unanswered.
Related arguments
For further study
Primary and secondary sources on both sides of this question. Reading the strongest opposing case is part of the work, not a concession.
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology — William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds.)
The reference volume: long, technical chapters defending each major theistic argument, with the best statements of the cosmological, fine-tuning, moral, and ontological arguments.
Five Proofs of the Existence of God — Edward Feser
Classical (Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic) arguments defended in analytic form, with sustained attention to what the conclusions do and do not establish.
The Miracle of Theism — J. L. Mackie
The best twentieth-century atheist engagement with the theistic arguments; read it to see which objections actually bite.
Arguing About Gods — Graham Oppy
A rigorous skeptical assessment arguing that no theistic argument succeeds as a proof; the standard opposing benchmark.
The Existence of God — Richard Swinburne
Builds a cumulative probabilistic case rather than a single deductive proof — useful for seeing how arguments combine.