Humbuggery

In this final post in the Series on God, we consider omnipotence, the power to do anything. Possibly the most famous of God’s supposed powers, we’ll see how even God isn’t powerful enough to stop logic.

Logic is not omnipotent, we know this because it’s not even powerful enough to work on anything but itself, without a few simple assumptions. We’ve made those few simple assumption earlier, and were able to see that those 3 assumptions were all it took to strip god of almost all his supposed abilities.

We’ve seen that God is, at best, not much smarter than a PhD, and certainly not omniscient.

We’ve seen that God is definitely not everywhere at once, and we’re about as omnipresent as he is.

We’ve seen that omnibenevolent deity is really hard to talk about, but unlikely at best.

Now we ask a famous question of our aforementions sky-buddy. If you exist, and are omnipotent, can you create a force so strong, you can’t resist it?

There have been many people who have asked this question, the usual response from a pro-omnipotence arguer is one of the following:

• “The question is fallacious, God exists outside of our understanding, and so do his powers.”
• “The question is fallacious, God wouldn’t do that, so the question is immaterial.”
• “We cannot understand how God could do this, because our brains our finite, and his is infinite.”
• “He could create a force irresistable to himself at the present, but as soon as he created it, he would be able to resist it.”

I think it is clear to see, the question posed — if shown not to be fallacious or have an explaination — is more than enough to demonstrate god’s lack of omnipotence. So instead, I will offer the following. I will debunk each of these responses, and offer a challenge — I will do my best to debunk any reasoned, rational response to anyone so inclined to give one to this question. You can leave it in the comments, I’ll collect them, and write a post in the near future containing my arguements against them. I’m fairly confident that Omnipotence is impossible, but I’m not so confident in my ability to debunk explainations of what we’ll call the “Omnipotence Problem.” I promise I’ll do my best to debunk them, and any that I cannot debunk, I’ll leave to other readers to debunk, it’ll be like a game.

So we’ll take the first two responses out in one fell swoop. We’ve assumed at the outset that if God interacts with our world, he must interact according to physical laws and physical comprehension. That is, even the infinite must act finite when interacting with the finite inhabitants of the finite but unbounded universe. Further, we assumed that the Novikov self-consistency principle (NSCP), did not apply for our purposes. Granted, these seem like copouts, and in a way they are. I’m not averse to arguing in the presence of the NSCP at a later date, but for now, it just makes things sticky. On the other hand the “Axiom of Fair play” is something I think is a fundamental truth of the universe, as a being that did not follow such a rule could largely screw around with the physical laws of the universe, cause mass confusion, and in general, mess up the cosmos. I should think that any deity would be averse to doing that, so I’m willing to stand with that belief. If there is substantial interest in me arguing w/o the NSCP, I’ll write another post, but for now, we can consider the first response bunk via the Fair-play axiom, and the second because even if God chose not to, would he still have the capability to do so?[1]

The third response also falls under the Axiom of fair-play, since we’re talking about a physical, real force. Often the omnipotence problem is stated as “Can God create a rock he cannot move.” This wording helps to show the inherent physicality of the objects we’re dealing with. The reason I did not state the problem this way is simple, the response to the modified statement is “God wouldn’t move the rock directly, he would simply move the universe around it.” This statement fails because it assumes we could tell whether the rock or the universe is being moved. Technically, when I move my computer from my living room to my bedroom to the kitchen or wherever, I could claim that in reality, I am moving the entire universe around me, and the appearence is that I am moving my computer. If there is no reference to determine who is moving what (eg, an outside observer with some kind of background reference), then my claim is completely valid. An analogy is to imagine yourself in the middle of the galactic void, all around you is darkness, you turn on your handy flashlight on your space suit and notice a small rock floating near you. You notice the rock is moving from left to right. You raise your flashlight to see to the left of the rock, and see a giant asteroid you are moving towards. However, I’m an outside observer looking on your position, and I notice that, in reality, the asteroid is moving toward you, and you were moving past the small rock. The question is — whose interpretation is correct? The short answer is, according to relativity, both of our observations are valid, because neither of us have a valid frame of reference to base a consistent view of what is going on. So, to say that “God moves the universe around the rock” is equivalent to saying “God moves the rock”, because we have no frame of reference. Furthermore, the responder assumes the universe can be moved, which is not known a priori. In any case, this response is broken on the grounds that we assume god is acting in a physical, finite way, so we should be able to understand what he’s doing. This response is also at the heart of the “God of the Gaps” argument, which is “We don’t understand how it’s done, so God in his infinite power must be doing it.”

The final response is probably the most interesting, in that it presents God with a fundamentally different kind of omnipotence. Up till now we’ve assumed omnipotence to mean “actual infinite power”, this response weakens that to be “potential infinite power”[2]. In that, God could create something at time t, which is immovable, but at the same time, Gods power at time t must grow to be able to move the object he just created. The problem with this is that, since god’s power is growing at the same time he creates the object, then isn’t it true that the object was never really immovable, which means god never really created the immovable object. The answer is to say that one or the other must have it’s power diminished or increased at time t+dt where dt is an “infintessimal” amount of time[3], if the force is created and loses power after some finite, but very small amount of time, then God was not omnipotent for that amount of time- and I would argue that leaves room to ask if he could create an object which never diminishes in power, and is more powerful than himself. Which I would then argue constitutes a question which potential omnipotence can’t solve. I would further argue similarly for the other case, when god’s power grows to beat the newly created force. I would ask, “Can you create a force which is not only stronger than you, but grows in power fast than you can?” which again leads to the paradox.

Alright, consider this thread open for business, if you have a potential solution to the omnipotence problem, or find a flaw in my reasoning, please let me know, I’ll try to keep an eye on the thread and answer the questions/debunk reasons. Please keep it civil and as well reasoned as possible.

Also, as mentioned, if I can’t figure it out, I’ll leave it here, and occasionally toss them in thier own thread. We’ll call it “Unresolved Mysteries.”

/Joe

[1] A preview of the argument against the NSCP, the questions that the NSCP is normally applied to are not questions about whether someone did or did not do something illogical, the NSCP says as long as someone doesn’t do anything illogical, they’re okay. So in reality, the NSCP doesn’t particularly apply to my question of whether God is capable of something. It would be like me asking whether if you could go back in time and kill your grandfather, and you responding “I wouldn’t do that, so it doesn’t matter.” We’re working under the assumption that all this is possible, what are the consequences of such a thing happening, the validity of the hypothesis is irrellevant, we’re asking what the possibility is. You’re response is to challenge the assumption by saying “I wouldn’t do that.” Here, we ask whether god has the capability to resist an irresistable force he created, whether he would or wouldn’t is irrelavent, because if he doesn’t have the capability, he is not omnipotent, and if he does, he is not omnipotent. This hearkens back to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, in that we’re asking a question in a Hofstadter-esque “Strange Loop”.

[2] I’m implicitly assuming you know what the difference between actual and potential infinities are, in case you don’t, I’ll explain them quickly. A potential infinity is best described as being fundamentally unbounded, for instance, I could present you with a computer program that displays an infinite list of primes, but at any given point in time, only contains a finite number of prime numbers (in fact, I do similar things like this all the time in lazy languages like Haskell). This program has the potential to have an infinite number of primes, but never does, in reality, it’s calculating each new prime as it comes up. Actual infinity, on the other hand, is actually having an infinite number of something, that is, my prime-program, if it were “actually infinite” would have to store an infinite amount of data (the locations of all the primes on the number line). We can see that this is inherently impossible in this case. Summarily, Actual-Infinite means actually having an infinite number of things, and Potential-Infinite means having the ability to produce an unbounded number of things.

[3] technically infintessimals are bad math, but if we understand the notation x+dy to mean the limit (y -> 0) of (x + y), then we should be okay mathematicially.

Sources include: wikipedia, freethoughtpedia, ironchariots wiki, etc. Look up articles on Omnipotence and thier subarticles. I read most of them.