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3.3: Can God do the Impossible? (Tom Metcalf)

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    Tom Metcalf28

    18.1 Analyzing Omnipotence

    To say that something is impossible means it can’t happen, or can’t be done. So none of us can do the impossible. That fact seems true by definition: something impossible is something that can’t be done. So we can’t draw square circles. We can’t make 1+1 equal 3. We can’t create an object that’s all red and all green at the same time. We can’t destroy an immortal being.

    Why, then, does anyone need to talk about God’s doing the impossible? Because many people, philosophers and laypeople alike, have thought that God is a very special person. The ‘Anselmian God’ is defined as a maximally great being. Let’s define ‘omnipotence’ like this:

    Omnipotence

    A person is omnipotent at a certain time in a certain world if and only if for any situation that it’s possible at that time in that world to bring about, either:

    (1) that person can bring about that situation at that time in that world; or

    (2) that person can’t bring about that situation, but only because that situation comprises someone else’s freely choosing something.

    Of course, as you can see, that definition doesn’t require that an omnipotent being be able to do the impossible. But maybe we’re putting too many limitations on God. Maybe we should have defined ‘omnipotence’ this way (cf. Descartes 1991: 25):

    Voluntarism about Omnipotence

    A person is omnipotent at a certain time in a certain world if and only if for any situation (possible or not), that person can bring about that situation at that time in that world.

    We would then have said that God can do the impossible.

    Why would anyone want to say that? Well, maybe limiting God’s power to what’s possible just seems like detracting from his greatness. (I’ll follow the Anselmian tradition in referring to God using masculine pronouns, but I don’t mean to imply anything in particular about God’s gender.) According to most Anselmian theists (cf. Anselm 1998: Chapter II), God is a being greater than which none can be imagined. Maybe it just seems greater or better to be able to do the impossible, not merely the possible. In the rest of this entry, I’ll argue that Anselmians have good reason to embrace this view of God’s omnipotence as truly unlimited.

    If you believe that an omnipotent God really can do the impossible, then you believe in a theory that’s sometimes called ‘voluntarism’ or ‘absolutism’ about omnipotence (cf. Pearce 2019). God really could make a square circle, or make 1+1 equal 3.

    In the rest of this chapter, we’ll look at some cases in which we might wonder whether God can do the impossible. I’ll explain why Anselmians should seriously consider accepting voluntarism. Yet first, I’ll have to say a bit more about what we even mean when we use the terms ‘possible’ and ‘impossible.’

    18.2 Possibility and Impossibility

    I’ve been using the words ‘possible’ and ‘impossible,’ but we need to be clear on exactly what we mean. There are actually several senses of those words, but four are the most important for our purposes (cf. Vaidya 2018).

    (1) We say that an event is ‘physically’ possible if and only if it is compatible with the laws of physics as they actually are. As far as we can tell, the laws of physics forbid accelerating an object up to the speed of light. They also require that objects with mass accelerate toward each other, and that energy not be created nor destroyed.

    (2) We say that an event is ‘logically’ (or sometimes ‘narrowly logically’) possible, roughly speaking, if and only if formal logic alone can’t prove its impossibility. The standard system of logic you might learn in college doesn’t have ‘the event doesn’t happen’ as a theorem.

    (3) We say that an event is ‘conceptually’ possible if and only if we can imagine its occurring. Maybe we can imagine a mountain made of gold, and a unicorn, but we can’t imagine an object that’s all red and all green at the same time.

    (4) Last, we say that an event is ‘metaphysically’ possible if and only if it could happen, in some most-basic sense of ‘could.’ This last form of possibility might be the most-difficult to describe. One way to think of it: It seems metaphysically possible for an object to accelerate to faster than the speed of light, but it doesn’t seem metaphysically possible for there to be a square circle. The former event is limited just by the laws of physics, but the latter event seems limited by something deeper or more fundamental. Put another way, there just seem to be certain “laws of reality itself” that allow some events or objects and forbid others.

    This last sense of possibility isn’t merely physical possibility, for the reason just given with the example of the speed of light. It’s not merely logical possibility, because presumably there were laws of reality itself before anyone even came up with any system of logic. It’s not just conceptual possibility, because presumably whether we can conceive of something actually depends on various contingent facts about our brains. Instead, metaphysical possibility is, once again, a concept of whether reality itself permits or forbids some event or object, independently of any mind’s beliefs or concepts. Notably, however, most philosophers assume that conceptual and logical possibility are guides to metaphysical possibility, albeit imperfect guides (cf. the essays in Gendler and Hawthorne 2002).

    We can now understand our question,

    ‘Can God do the impossible?’,

    in a clearer way. We’re not asking whether God can do what’s metaphysically impossible. By definition, he can’t. No one can. If God can create a square circle, then square circles are metaphysically possible. We’re also not asking whether God can do what’s physically impossible. Pretty much everyone agrees that he can. (Maybe he actually wrote the laws of physics, anyway.) What we’re asking, instead, is whether God can do what’s logically or conceptually impossible. Could God actually create that square circle?

    Okay, but why do we care about this question? The quick reply is that the answer to the question will tell us a lot about the nature of God himself. It may also help us decide whether God exists, because it has quite a lot to do with various traditional arguments against the existence of God. Several arguments purport to show that God is impossible, because there are things he can’t do, that an omnipotent being should be able to do.

    18.3 The Paradox of the Stone

    You may have heard an example like this one before (cf. Mackie 1955: 210):

    Could God compose a guitar solo so difficult that even he couldn’t play it?

    Initially, neither answer seems satisfying. If we say ‘yes,’ then it seems we think there’s something God can’t do: play the solo. If we say ‘no,’ then it seems we still think there’s something God can’t do: compose the solo. Does God need to be able to compose the solo in order to count as “omnipotent”? Well, let’s look at our definition again:

    Omnipotence

    A person is omnipotent at a certain time in a certain world if and only if for any situation that it’s possible at that time in that world to bring about, either:

    (1) that person can bring about that situation at that time in that world; or

    (2) that person can’t bring about that situation, but only because that situation comprises someone else’s freely choosing something.

    Consider the situation, ‘a solo is composed such that the solo’s composer cannot play it.’ That situation is certainly possible in our world right now. I could do it in five minutes. So by our definition of ‘omnipotence’ so far, this example would show God to not be omnipotent.

    One might consider the following, amended definition—

    Omnipotence

    A person is omnipotent at a certain time in a certain world if and only if for any situation that it’s possible for that person at that time in that world to bring about, that person can bring about that situation at that time in that world—

    but that isn’t a good solution. It counts too many people as “omnipotent”; McEar, the being who can only ever possibly scratch his ear, turns out to be omnipotent (cf. Plantinga 1967: 170).

    Maybe the following is a better solution. We define ‘omnipotence’ like this:

    Omnipotence

    A person is omnipotent at a certain time in a certain world if and only if for any situation that it’s possible at that time in that world to bring about, either:

    (1) that person can bring about that situation at that time in that world; or

    (2) that person can’t bring about that situation, but only because either:

    (a) that situation comprises someone else’s freely choosing something; or

    (b) that person’s inability to bring about that situation isn’t due to a lack of power on that person’s part (cf. Wielenberg 2000).

    We would then say that it’s not a lack of power that prevents God from creating the stone. Just the opposite—he’s so powerful that he can’t create the stone. Of course, there may be further problems lurking here. For example, we might need some way of figuring out when some inability counts as a lack of power. It might be puzzling to think that God has a power that he necessarily can’t exercise; surely if you really have a certain power, then it’s possible that you use it (cf. Pearce 2019: § 2). And there might be other ways to lack the ability to do something, ways that don’t intuitively seem to be lacks of power, but still seem incompatible with omnipotence (cf. Morriston 2002). For example, suppose that McEar Jr. is psychologically incapable of doing anything other than scratching his ear. He just has an extreme revulsion to it, and in fact an extreme revulsion to changing what it is he has extreme revulsions about. I’d still say that McEar Jr. isn’t omnipotent, even though it’s not really a lack of power that prevents him from (say) scratching his nose.

    Therefore, we might want to consider another solution. So let’s consider voluntarism: let’s say that God can indeed create the stone, but he can also lift that stone that he can’t lift. That is, he can do the logically impossible. This seems to preserve his omnipotence. Of course, it requires our saying that it’s metaphysically possible to do the logically impossible. Maybe that seems ridiculous. But of course maybe we’re already in that vicinity if we’re talking about God in general. We’ll come back later to thinking about how costly adopting voluntarism might be; for now, we’re looking at some of the benefits.

    There are other ways that voluntarism might save us from problems with the Anselmian’s conception of God. Let’s look at some possible incompatibilities between God’s divine attributes.

    18.4 Divine-Attribute Incompatibilities

    Omnipotence may actually be impossible to possess. But even if it’s possible to possess, it may conflict with other attributes of God. Here I have in mind two: omniscience and moral perfection.

    First, if God is omniscient, then maybe he knows everything it’s possible to know. I suggested defining ‘omniscience’ in something like this way:

    Omniscience

    A person is omniscient at some time if and only if for any true proposition that it is possible to know at that time, either:

    (1) that person knows that proposition at that time, or

    (2) that person doesn’t know that proposition at that time, but only because the proposition:

    (a) contains a paradoxical reference to itself (for example, ‘This sentence is false’); or

    (b) contains an indexical reference to a particular knower (for example, ‘I do not know this sentence’); or

    (c) is a proposition that it would be impossible for a rational being who knew every true proposition to know.

    It seems to follow from this definition that there are some propositions that it’s impossible for God to learn, or to wonder about, because he already knows those propositions. For example, it’s impossible for God to learn what’s contained in some sealed envelope, but it’s not impossible for me to learn that (cf. Metcalf 2004). Of course, you could imagine that God might simply forget the proposition and then re-learn it, but Anselmians generally take God to be timeless and immutable. If so, then he can’t forget anything. (He can’t perform the action ‘to learn what’s in the sealed envelope without forgetting it first,’ either.) Similarly, you might think a being is greater if it has its perfections necessarily than if it has those perfections contingently, and so God isn’t just omniscient: he’s necessarily omniscient.

    Second, the case for the incompatibility of omnipotence and moral perfection is basically the same (cf. Morriston 2001). Can God do something evil, or intend to do something evil? It doesn’t seem so, if he’s morally perfect. And as before, a case can be made that God would really be necessarily morally perfect, so he can’t temporarily reduce his moral goodness in order to do something evil.

    Here, voluntarism may offer a way out. The voluntarist simply says that God can indeed learn things he already knows, and he can indeed commit evil while remaining morally perfect. Yes, that’s conceptually and logically impossible. But God is special.

    18.5 The Costs of Voluntarism

    We’ve seen several reasons for accepting voluntarism: that omnipotence actually extends to the logically or conceptually impossible. Still, there may be costs.

    First, we might have the strong intuition that it’s metaphysically impossible to do what’s conceptually or logically impossible. If so, then we thereby have the strong intuition that God is impossible. In turn, we may have to compare our evidence that God exists and our evidence that voluntarism is true on the one hand, with our evidence that it’s metaphysically impossible to do what’s logically or conceptually impossible on the other. Otherwise, we just have to conclude that God is impossible.

    Second, it may become very difficult to defend theism in other ways. According to the Problem of Evil, an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being wouldn’t permit gratuitous evil, but such evil exists. Theodicies attempt to explain why God would have a morally sufficient reason to permit such evil after all. But if voluntarism is true, such reasons disappear. God could violate everyone’s free will, for example, while simultaneously also preserving it.

    Third, it may imply that we have to be skeptical about our judgments of metaphysical possibility. We normally rely on conceptual and logical possibility (cf. Gendler and Hawthorne 2002) to tell us what’s metaphysically possible and impossible, but not anymore. (How do I know a gold mountain is possible, even though I’ve never seen one? Because I can imagine one.) Still, this may not be so bad, if the only real violations come from God’s miraculous interventions.

    For these sorts of reasons, voluntarism remains unpopular. But accepting voluntarism means solving a host of divine-attribute incompatibilities, and truly preserving God’s maximal greatness. Therefore, can God do the impossible? If we accept voluntarism, then it depends on what we mean by ‘impossible.’ But we will have decided that God can do what’s conceptually and logically impossible, which is a very striking conclusion.

    References

    Anselm, “Proslogion.” 1998. In Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), pp. 82-104.

    Descartes, René. 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Volume 3: The Correspondence). Ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Gendler, Tamar Szabo and John Hawthorne (eds.). 2002. Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

    Mackie, J. L. 1955. “Evil and Omnipotence.” Mind 64 (254): 200-212.

    Metcalf, Thomas. 2004. “Omniscience and Maximal Power.” Religious Studies 40(3): 289-306.

    Morriston, Wes. 2001. “Omnipotence and Necessary Moral Perfection: Are They Compatible?” Religious Studies 37(2): 143-60.

    Morriston, Wes. 2002. “Omnipotence and the Power to Choose.” Faith and Philosophy 19(3): 358-67.

    Pearce, Kenneth. 2019. “Omnipotence.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = https://www.iep.utm.edu/omnipote/.

    Plantinga, Alvin. 1967. God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Vaidya Anand. 2018. “The Epistemology of Modality.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/...-epistemology/>

    Wielenberg, Erik W. 2000. “Omnipotence Again,” Faith and Philosophy 17 (1): 26-47.

    For Review and Discussion

    1. What are the types of “impossible” things that we can talk about? Which ones of these are more problematic for God than others?

    2. What does “volunteerism” mean and what are its benefits and drawbacks?

    3. If God can’t do the impossible, is God the most powerful thing? That is, is there something more powerful than God, and that’s a being that can do the impossible?


    This page titled 3.3: Can God do the Impossible? (Tom Metcalf) is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Noah Levin (NGE Far Press) .

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