The Omnipotence Paradox

The Omnipotence Paradox asks whether unlimited divine power makes logical sense. The famous version - “Can God create a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it?” - traps the theist either way: if God can make such a stone, there is something God cannot do (lift it); if God cannot make it, there is also something God cannot do. Either answer seems to defeat omnipotence. We score it 35/100 for soundness: the simple stone version is largely solved by redefining omnipotence as “the power to do all logically possible things,” but deeper versions about self-limitation still bite. The paradox traces back to ancient philosophy, but Averroes gave it serious treatment in the 12th century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the most influential theistic response, and 20th-century philosophers like J.L. Mackie and George Mavrodes sharpened both the attack and the defense.

The Core Paradox

The paradox can be stated as a formal dilemma:

1. Assume God is omnipotent - God can do anything.
2. Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?
3. If yes, then there is something God cannot do (lift the stone). God is not omnipotent.
4. If no, then there is something God cannot do (create such a stone). God is not omnipotent.
5. Therefore, omnipotence is self-contradictory, and no omnipotent being can exist.

The argument is powerful because it seems logically airtight. The question is set up so any answer - yes or no - leads to the same conclusion: omnipotence makes no sense. This is not just a puzzle about God’s strength. It is a challenge to the very concept of omnipotence as traditionally defined in theistic theology. If omnipotence is logically impossible, then any god defined as omnipotent - including the God of classical theism - cannot exist.

Major Variants

The stone paradox is the most famous version, but philosophers have developed several others that probe different sides of unlimited power.

The Stone Paradox

The classic version asks about creating an unliftable stone. Its appeal is its simplicity - anyone gets the dilemma right away. But this simplicity is also its weakness, because framing it physically invites responses about what “lifting” and “heaviness” mean for a non-physical being. Most modern philosophers treat it as a thought-starter rather than a rigorous argument.

The Ability to Sin

Can an all-good, all-powerful God choose to do evil? If God can sin, then God might not be perfectly good. If God cannot sin, then there is something God cannot do. Thomas Aquinas addressed this directly in the Summa Theologica, arguing that the inability to sin is a perfection, not a limitation - just as the inability to fail is not a weakness in a mathematician who always gets the right answer. Critics respond that this redefines “power” to exclude certain abilities, which is exactly what the paradox challenges.

Creating Another Omnipotent Being

Can God create another being that is equally omnipotent? If so, could that being override God’s will? If two omnipotent beings disagree, whose will wins? This variant suggests omnipotence must be singular - there cannot be more than one omnipotent being - which raises questions about whether omnipotence makes sense at all, since a truly unlimited power should be able to duplicate itself.

The Self-Limitation Paradox

Can God permanently limit God’s own power? If God can give up omnipotence forever, then God can become non-omnipotent, meaning omnipotence is not a necessary property. If God cannot give up omnipotence, there is something God cannot do. This is arguably the most interesting variant because it resists the standard “logical impossibility” defense better than the stone paradox. Self-limitation does not obviously involve a logical contradiction - it involves a being changing its properties over time, which makes sense.

Making True Contradictions

Can God create a square circle, or make 2 + 2 = 5? This variant directly tests whether omnipotence extends to logical impossibilities. If God can break the laws of logic, then logic itself depends on divine will, and any rational talk about God becomes impossible. If God cannot break logic, the question is whether that counts as a real limitation.

Theistic Responses

Theistic philosophers have developed several strong responses to the paradox, making it one of the easier challenges to theism.

Aquinas’s Redefinition of Omnipotence

The most historically important response comes from Aquinas, who argued in the Summa Theologica (I, q. 25, a. 3) that omnipotence means the ability to do all things that are logically possible. A “stone so heavy that an omnipotent being cannot lift it” is a logical contradiction - it describes an object with the contradictory properties of being made by omnipotence and being beyond omnipotence. Since logical contradictions do not describe real possibilities, the inability to do them is not a limit on power.

On this view, asking “Can God create an unliftable stone?” is like asking “Can God create a married bachelor?” The question is grammatically fine but logically meaningless. It does not describe a task God fails at. It fails to describe a real task at all. This has become the dominant position in analytic philosophy of religion and is accepted by many atheist philosophers too.

Descartes’s Universal Possibilism

Rene Descartes took the opposite approach, arguing that God’s omnipotence extends even to logical impossibilities. God could make contradictions true, create square circles, and make 2 + 2 = 5. On this view, the laws of logic themselves depend on God’s will. The paradox dissolves because God can both create the unliftable stone and lift it - the contradiction is no obstacle to absolutely unlimited power.

This position is bold but pays a heavy price. If God can break the laws of logic, then no reasoning about God is reliable, because any conclusion could be negated by divine say-so. The claim “God exists” could be true and false at the same time. Most philosophers - theist and atheist alike - reject Descartes’s position because it destroys any possibility of reasoning about God at all.

Mavrodes’s Logical Analysis

Philosopher George Mavrodes published an influential 1963 paper arguing the stone paradox is a pseudo-problem. He showed that “a stone which an omnipotent being cannot lift” is a self-contradictory description, like “a round square.” The question asks us to assume both that a being is omnipotent (can lift anything) and that there exists something it cannot lift. These assumptions contradict each other, so the question does not describe a real possibility that an omnipotent being should be able to do.

Mavrodes’s analysis has been widely accepted in the philosophical literature. Critics note, though, that it works best against the simple stone version and does not fully address the self-limitation variant.

The Frankfurt-Style Response

Some philosophers draw on Harry Frankfurt’s work to argue that omnipotence should mean maximal power rather than absolutely unlimited power. An omnipotent being has more power than any other possible being and can do any coherent task. This “maximal power” definition avoids the paradox entirely while keeping what theology actually needs - a being with maximal power is still the most powerful being possible, which is what theistic doctrines actually require.

Historical Background

Questions about the limits of divine power began in ancient philosophy. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and other early Christian thinkers debated whether God could change the past - an early version of the omnipotence paradox. The Islamic philosopher Averroes gave the paradox serious attention in the 12th century in his commentaries on Aristotle, where he explored whether divine power must follow the rules of rational possibility.

Aquinas addressed the paradox in the 13th century, producing the response that would dominate Christian philosophy for centuries. His distinction between absolute and logical impossibility set the terms of the debate: real omnipotence means the power to make any logically possible state of affairs actual, not the power to do the logically impossible.

In the medieval period, the paradox was also tied to the broader debate between voluntarism and intellectualism. Voluntarists like William of Ockham held that God’s power comes before logic - God wills what is possible, and the possible is whatever God wills. Intellectualists like Aquinas held that God’s intellect recognizes eternal truths that limit what is possible. This debate still shapes how theologians think about omnipotence.

The paradox came back in analytic philosophy in the 20th century. J.L. Mackie raised it as part of his broader argument against theism in The Miracle of Theism (1982), while Mavrodes’s 1963 response in The Philosophical Review became the standard theistic counterargument. The exchange between these two set the terms for today’s discussion.

Modern Philosophical Status

Among today’s philosophers of religion, the simple stone paradox is widely considered solved. The Aquinas-Mavrodes response - that logical impossibilities are not real tasks and therefore do not count as limits on omnipotence - has broad agreement across the theist-atheist divide. Philosopher Peter Geach famously dismissed the stone paradox as a “pseudo-problem” that trades on a bad definition of omnipotence.

But the more sophisticated variants are still active research topics. The self-limitation paradox is the toughest. If God can permanently limit divine power, this seems to involve no logical contradiction - self-limitation is something finite beings do regularly. Yet if God can do it, omnipotence is not an essential divine property, which conflicts with classical theism’s claim that God’s attributes are necessary rather than optional.

The paradox has also intersected with debates about divine simplicity - the doctrine that God’s attributes are not separate properties but are identical with God’s essence. If omnipotence is identical to God’s essence, then God cannot lose omnipotence without ceasing to exist, which provides a way around the self-limitation variant but raises its own difficulties.

Recent work by Erik Wielenberg and others has linked the paradox to the broader question of whether traditional theism’s cluster of divine attributes - omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, aseity (existing independently) - is internally coherent. Even if each attribute can be defended on its own, the combination may create tensions. The omnipotence paradox is one strand in this larger coherence challenge.

Relationship to Other Arguments

The Omnipotence Paradox connects to several other arguments on this site. Its closest tie is with the Ontological Argument, which defines God as a maximally great being. If omnipotence makes no sense, maximal greatness makes no sense, and the Ontological Argument’s central concept collapses. On the other hand, if the Aquinas-Mavrodes response works, omnipotence remains a coherent part of maximal greatness.

The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge raises a parallel coherence challenge for omniscience. Together, the two arguments attack the two most famous divine attributes: unlimited power and unlimited knowledge. If both paradoxes succeeded, the traditional God concept would be doubly incoherent. The self-limitation variant of the omnipotence paradox also connects directly to the foreknowledge problem: can God choose to not know the future?

The Problem of Evil depends on omnipotence as a premise. If God is all-powerful and all-good, God could and would prevent pointless suffering. If the omnipotence paradox destroyed the idea of omnipotence entirely, it would actually weaken the Problem of Evil by removing one of its premises. In practice, since the paradox is largely handled through the logical impossibility response, it has little impact on the Problem of Evil’s force.

The Euthyphro Dilemma is structurally similar - a question designed so that either answer creates problems for theism. Both arguments use dilemma structure to expose internal tensions in theistic concepts, though they target different attributes (power versus moral authority).

The Free Will Defense also depends on specific claims about what omnipotence can and cannot do. Alvin Plantinga argues that even an omnipotent God cannot create beings who freely choose only good, because this describes a logically impossible task. This is exactly the Aquinas-Mavrodes move applied to a different context, showing how the omnipotence paradox’s resolution has practical consequences for other theological arguments.

Our Scoring

Soundness: 35/100. The omnipotence paradox raises a real conceptual challenge, and its logical structure is valid. But the score is moderate-to-low because the main version - the stone paradox - is widely considered solved by the Aquinas-Mavrodes response, which redefines omnipotence as the ability to do all logically possible things. This response is accepted not only by theistic philosophers but by many atheist philosophers too, including those who reject theism on other grounds. The more sophisticated variants - especially self-limitation and the question of whether logical impossibilities are real limits - keep the score above trivial. The paradox also loses points because it is a coherence challenge to one specific divine attribute rather than a direct evidence-based argument against God. A being could be extraordinarily powerful without being omnipotent in the classical sense, so even a fully successful paradox would only refute one specific version of God.

Personal God: 25/100. The Personal God - all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and actively involved - is the version most directly threatened, since omnipotence is an essential part of this definition. If omnipotence is incoherent, the Personal God as traditionally defined cannot exist. But the low-moderate score reflects the broad philosophical agreement that the simple paradox is solved, and the more sophisticated variants, while interesting, have not shown that omnipotence (properly defined) is actually self-contradictory. The score also accounts for the fact that even if classical omnipotence needed some qualification, a “nearly omnipotent” personal God who can do all logically possible things would meet basically every religious purpose. The gap between a God who can do all logically possible things and a God who can do absolutely anything, including logical impossibilities, mostly matters to philosophers rather than to religious practice.

Creator/Designer: 40/100. A Creator or Designer is moderately affected. While many creator concepts include omnipotence, the core idea of a being that created or designed the universe does not strictly require unlimited power - only enough power to create a universe. A creator who is hugely powerful but not classically omnipotent would be untouched by the paradox. The higher score versus Personal God reflects that design arguments sometimes quietly rely on maximal power (the designer must be able to fine-tune physical constants, create matter and energy, etc.), and if omnipotence is shaky, the scope of the designer’s abilities becomes an open question. Still, the paradox does not come close to refuting the idea of a powerful creator - it challenges only one specific way of describing that creator’s power.

Higher Power: 45/100. An impersonal supernatural force or consciousness behind reality depends least on the specific concept of omnipotence. A higher power need not be “omnipotent” in the classical sense to be supernatural and powerful. The paradox attacks a formal philosophical concept - the maximal property of omnipotence - that mostly matters for the God of classical theism, not for a vaguer transcendent force. The score is still below 50 because some versions of a higher power do include a notion of unlimited or absolute power, and the paradox’s challenge to whether any entity can have truly unlimited power has some relevance even to looser supernatural concepts. The higher score versus Personal God reflects that a higher power can more easily fit a redefined or qualified notion of power without losing its essential character.