I'm sure that many of you have heard some form of argument against the possibility of an omnipotent being able to exist in a manner that is logical. Many of these arguments take the form of some sort of omnipotence paradox.

Here's a relatively popular example of one of those very arguments — the "Rock Argument".

In the Rock Argument, it states that if an omnipotent being does not possess the capacity to create a stone/rock that said being cannot lift, then the being is not truly omnipotent.

From Wikipedia:

"Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it? If he could lift the rock, then it seems that the being would not have been omnipotent to begin with in that he would have been incapable of creating a heavy enough stone; if he could not lift the stone, then it seems that the being either would never have been omnipotent to begin with or would have ceased to be omnipotent upon his creation of the stone."

In all seriousness, it seems that such an argument has little vision as to what omnipotence actually entails. Being able to do any and all things means having the capacity to do any and all things. I fail to see the relevance in assuming that either one or the other possibility must be true, because the argument assumes to have knowledge from the standpoint of an omnipotent being.

The real issue herein is a deceptively common line of illogic. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you heard some variation of it in your early school years.

Say, for example, that you're in kindergarten, and you get some test papers back from an assessment that you took the day before. Let's say that you made the highest grade in the class; a 100, and you — in the confines of your 5/6 year-old mind — believe yourself to be the smartest child in the class, so you exclaim: "I made a 100! I'm smarter than everyone!"

For a lot of people, that statement might seem like a simple turn on something along the lines of: "I'm the smartest student in the class," but, in reality, whoever says the aforementioned statement is actually insinuating something completely different.

Whenever you say that you're smarter than everyone, there's a small detail hidden in the word everyone that seems to be overlooked with unusual frequency. You're actually saying that not only are you smarter than all of the other students in the class, but that you're also smarter than yourself, as well. This is due to the fact that everyone means every being, except it acts as a single grouping.

I know that that's a pretty simplistic — and perhaps frivolous, in a way — example, but that's what we're looking at here; a faulty line of reasoning that would like to believe that it substantiates an argument, because it suffers from the very same line of illogic.

In summation:

Whenever the argument says that an omnipotent being must both be able create an object that he cannot move/lift, while simultaneously having the ability to move/lift any object, it is literally saying that he has to be stronger than himself in order to be omnipotent. It all just goes right back to the same fallacy — "I'm smarter than everyone!"

Yeah, look at the smart guy being smarter than himself.

How ridiculous.

Any questions or further prompts for discussion are more than welcome.

As an enthusiast of Christian apologetics, I'd say that this is a rather interesting counter-argument that I haven't heard before. Most often in the community, most people like to dismiss the argument of the stone by claiming its simply a word game, like with Zenophon's arrow paradox. Hence, I think few philosophers or atheistic apologetics actually use this as a serious argument; however, I've never heard any logical discussion on the fallacy located within this psuedo-logical reasoning.

From my limited thought on this subject, I'd add that this is one of the problems with this argument; however, another is simply that the argument is asking if an omnipotent being can make himself not omnipotent. That almost seems like trying to ask if the color white could make itself black. If white begins to appear black, then it ceases to be white.

I'd like to hear a response to this, but it appears like sound reasoning to me from my limited amount of thought on the subject.

First of all, apologies if necro-posting is frowned upon here, but the temptation to comment was so compelling I couldn't really resist.

You've done a good job at fleshing out what exactly causes the problem in the argument, I feel. Unfortunately, that alone doesn't make your post a refutation of said argument; in fact, I'd say it actually strengthens the argument! Here's why: you said that the problem more or less comes from the absolute nature of words such as "everyone", "omnipotence", etc., making these words particularly prone to self-reference paradoxes, e.g. "Does the set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?" I agree with this wholeheartedly; this is what causes the paradoxes.

The problem, however, is that you can't remove the paradox simply by pointing out what causes it because in this particular case, the paradox stems directly from the definition of the word "omnipotent", and unless you remove that word from the equation, the paradox persists even if you pin it down. The student version is rather easy to refute; in that case, we would simply say, "The claim, 'I'm smarter than everyone!' is false." And then the paradox goes away, because we did away with the statement itself. The omnipotence paradox is harder to refute, because the paradox is encoded in the definition of the word "omnipotence", and if you remove it, you're basically conceding that the argument is correct: because a truly omnipotent being is paradoxical, such a being cannot exist. The paradox is gone in that case, but you are only able to accomplish this by removing the omnipotence as well, which was the whole point of the argument!

So yes, it is ridiculous. It's meant to be, in order to show that the existence of omnipotent beings is logically flawed. It's a reductio ad absurdum. If you say, "How ridiculous," the proponent of the argument with say, "Yes, I agree. It is ridiculous, and since omnipotence leads to such a ridiculous conclusion, no omnipotent beings can exist." This, I feel, simply acknowledges the argument's given conclusion. Just as the statement "I'm smarter than everyone!" must be false, so too must the premise of the omnipotence paradox, "There exists an omnipotent being." Saying that it's ridiculous simply confirms the argument.

To add to it, the premise can be revised in the case of the child example to, "I am smarter than everyone else in this class.

Such a fix isn't possible with the omnipotence paradox.

3654994
This is a beautiful, glorious refutation.
Thank you, good sir, for saving me the trouble.

Now we can discuss if an omniscient being can have its own free will... if it already knows what it will do in the future.

Anyone else concerned about group number?

5831621
What does the group number have to do with the topic of this thread that you decided to necropost in like an asshole?

5831865
Nothing, sorry...
*coughs*
ON THE TOPIC...

I actually solved this paradox... with SCIENCE!!!

A rock that one can't lift, such as a 'god' would have to be SO BIG that it would instantly consume the universe (a black hole, the largest ever) because it's mass would be too much for surface area. If such a black hold did exist then you can't 'pick it up' or 'lift it'.
And of course a 'god' could control this black hole.
Paradox solved.

1446657
You're a Christian?

6236987
Yes.