I haven’t done a blog post for a while. Part of the reason is that I am now doing podcasts with Edwin Lin. But I also feel that part of the reason was that my blog posts tended to be on the long side and that meant a considerable investment of time and effort, one that I wasn’t always up to.
I do have a lot of ideas that would be well covered by short posts, so I think I’ll try to write more short posts with the occasional longer post.
The following is something I already posted on Facebook. I’ve also written it in several other places. It happened to come up recently.
Recently the following question was raised: “Can God make a rock too heavy for him to lift?”
I’ve written about this before. Some people see it as a difficulty for the concept of an all-powerful God. But it’s really not that hard.
The answer is “No.” At first this seems like a paradox. But if you think a bit, you’ll notice that this does not limit God in any concrete (pun not intended) way. God can make a rock of any size, composition, etc. etc. Having made such a rock, he can then lift it. God’s ability to create rocks is unlimited, and his ability to lift rocks is also unlimited.
The trick is that everything is hidden in syntax and terminology. If you unfold it a little, you get the following:
God: An all-powerful being
Too heavy to lift: a relationship between two entities. This relationship is external to both entities. That is, whether rock X is too heavy to lift by entity Y is not an essential feature of rock X, nor is it an essential feature of entity Y. Neither entity depends on the relationship for its essence.
To illustrate this, assume that there’s a rock in my backyard that I want to get rid of, but it is too heavy for me to lift. For health-related reasons I decide to take up free weights as an exercise program. After a couple months I go out in the back yard and suddenly I notice that I can lift the rock. I am still the same entity and the rock is still the same rock, but the relationship has changed. (You could argue that I’m not the same being, and in one sense that is true, but whether or not I can lift the rock does not affect my essential being, nor does it affect the essential being of the rock.)
It is important to note that “being too heavy for an all-powerful being to lift” is a contradiction. It’s like asking if God can make a square circle. It is a logical impossibility and therefore meaningless.