True, but what then was the point of your original response to this discussion? You said:
This seems to imply you think the topic of The Paradox of the Stone cannot be approached analytically.
I’d say I approached it pretty analytically in my quadrant analysis. My first and second quadrants probably fail your criteria, which is fine. I also take the LNC as so fundamental that even I think quadrant 1 and 2 are meaningless at a certain level.
But quadrant 3 and 4 are an entirely analytical investigation into this. You see, even if no synthetic statements can be made regarding the unliftable liftable rock, there is still something to be said regarding the topic. You see, this contradiction’s mere expressibility raises questions as to how we are to define God’s omnipotence. I delve into that in quadrant 3 and 4, and if you look at that, then I think you’ll see why your original response was incorrectly dismissive.
Yeah, the unliftable liftable rock is nothing. But just that actually has consequences for what God is. We deal with paradoxes in formal logic too, and although they refer to nothing, they still move mountains, because we painstakingly shape our formal systems to avoid them. The fact that meaninglessness can emerge from the combination of meaningful components has immense consequences for those components and the systems with which we use to combine them.
My view on the stone paradox is that the initial question, “Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot lift it?”, is a logically incoherent one, for to say that God could either be able to make the stone, or to fail to lift the stone, would be two attributes of God that fall under omnipotence. If God could do one of these different things, but fail to do the other, would be to say that aspects of God’s omnipotence are measurably greater than the other one, which would be incoherent. I analogize it this way: When a man makes a boat, then the reason why he could either succeed in being able to lift it and put it in the water, or make it too big to lift by himself, would be to say, measurably, that the man’s physical strength is either superior to his ability to make boats, or else his ability to make boats is superior to his physical strength, or so to say, one specific aspect of the man’s abilities are better than the other. But if God is all powerful, then whatever abilities he has must be infinitely great, or so to say, immeasurably great. But if God’s abilities are immeasurably great, then the different abilities which God has, such as lifting power and creating power, cannot be measurablybetter than each other, or else this implies variations of addition and subtraction between either of God’s abilities, and therefore, God’s Omnipotence would not be true Omnipotence. Therefore, the initial question of the stone paradox fails to understand the logic of infinity and the properties constituting power, and so is not a real question, but incoherent.
If God is omnipotent then She can do anything and everything, But how do we define these words? Does everything mean that God can create a 4 sided triangle?
If the answer to this question is “no”, then we are (in some sense) re-defining these words. No matter what explanation you come up with there are limits to God’s power.
But if we answer yes, then there must be some “higher” form of logic that us mere humans cannot possibly comprehend in which God can create a 4 sided triangle.
I haven’t even the foggiest notion of how this would work.
That said, I do have one vague somewhat incoherent notion. The fact that we human beings can construct these logical contradictions is somehow - even if just metaphorically - a reflection of how our human minds work.
It is highly likely that there are folks out there much smarter than me (like real philosophers and scientists) who are much more knowledgeable about this. Any further speculation about these notions is way above my pay scale.
Greetings, I hope you are well. For me personally I don’t understand the reason to use this word god? Why does something “ god” everything in the context which you’re speaking “a “ it’s called the universe. I know the universe exists, I don’t know that a God exist. Nor is it relevant to me personally. I respect everyone’s right to believe as they wish as long as it causes no one suffer suffering. I personally was raised and educated as a Christian, I converted to Buddhism decades ago. Because for me it works, it’s Home. When the Buddha was asked many times was there a God, he simply always said the same thing it’s irrelevant. He was as constantly if he was a god his constant answer was no when he was asked what he was. He said I’m just a man who is awake. Just personally for me I don’t see why there has to be a different monicker than the one it has, the universe.please be well and happy.
“omnipotence is the capacity for unlimited, infinite power.”
However, omnipotence doesn’t mean you can do the impossible; it just means you have infinite power. Even with all the energy in the universe, you cannot make a square into a circle. That isn’t a lack of power—it’s just definitively wrong
I don’t really understand why it’s irrelevant. Simply drawing an equivalence between God and the universe doesn’t make much as in the context of theism, as God is meant to exist independently of reality, beyond dimensionality and such. Epistemologically, God serves as an objective basis for knowledge and assurance of existence, so the Question of God is very important when discussing other topics like morality, metaphysics, TOK, and existentialism.
That’s my basic sense of this paradox as well. A stone so heavy God cannot lift it - is does not hold up as a coherent thing in the first place.
I also like the simple answer “no, He can’t., but that doesn’t limit God’s power, it demonstrates it.” Because the question itself misconstrues God qua God, as having one or the other limitation, where God is supposed to be unlimited. So either such a stone is not a thing, or such a God is not a thing.
As soon as the heaviest stone exists, it is like a grain of sand to God, feather light. Because any stone, is finite, infinitesimally small to God, should God choose to set the stone apart from himself and lift it.
So my answers are “no he can’t make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it, because such a stone is a square-circle and can’t be conceived; or such a God would set a limit on himself and in doing so, would cease to be God, and therefore would not remain available to try to lift the stone or not.”
The other thing is, God can be conceived as spirit, so what is the “power to lift stones” or to “create heavy stones” to God? Can God create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it? No, because stones have no weight to God at all - he can’t create a stone light enough to lift it either. He doesn’t lift. He creates from nothing. He inhabits. He inspires the stone to lift itself. So asking God what he can “lift” anthropomorphizes God too much. You would have to ask a God like Jesus this, which I suppose is where the question came from.
This seeming nonsense is just as coherent as concerning oneself with human assessment of God’s power to create or lift stones. Does God have hands and arms to lift? Would he have to create those too before attempting this experiment? In that case, couldn’t have have used more raw material now taking up space as his arms and hands to create an even heavier stone? We spin ourselves into conversations that seem may have nothing to do with a God or actual power.
I have no idea why, for what reason, I was given a notification to go on this old thread, but my argument against the stone paradox is this; it is logically contradictory because it confuses what it means for some property to be infinite. To suppose that God could either make a stone too great for himself to lift, or that he couldn’t, implies that certain aspects of God’s Omnipotence—comparing his ability to make things versus being able to move them—are greater than each other, in the same sense that, if a man makes a boat too heavy for himself to push into the water, or cannot make a boat too heavy to do so, that there is an asymmetry between the man’s ability to lift, versus being able to create boats. But if God is Omnipotent, then it couldn’t be the case that God could make something too heavy to lift, or couldn’t, because both abilities constitute Omnipotence, and so both abilities would need to be unsurpassable in relation to other things. Therefore, since this question supposes that some of God’s abilities are surpassable, then they’ve simply failed to understand what Omnipotence is, and so contradict themselves.
Spinoza offers a simple response to the problem by noting that deliberate choice, as experienced by us mortal creatures, can provide no insight into the thoughts of the maker of the universe.
Another approach is that mentioned elsewhere; to see the paradox of the stone as a diagonalisation argument targeting omnipotence.
Diagonalisation will be familiar to those who have studied maths. Cantor showed problems with simple conceptions of infinity by showing that there were more numbers than there were integers. He did this by setting out the integers in a strict sequence, then using a diagonal argument to show that there was at least one number that is not included. Numerical infinity is bigger than you thought.
Omnipotence is just another sort of infinity, and the stone another diagonalisation.
I really should start a thread on this, but that would require more interest than I can at present muster.
I guess the description “pantheism” sets Spinoza apart from other thinkers. I don’t think listing a set of opinions captures the scope of what he was putting forward.
The paradox reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of God.
God is not omnipotent, not all powerful. God is perfectly powerful. Which mean that God cannot use His perfect power for evil or use his perfect power to create perfection.
The perfectly heavy stone is not created. The perfectly heavy stone, like all perfect things, are a part of God. The perfectly heavy stone, as a part of God, can be lifted by God.
