The unliftable rock: the nonentity answer, Descartes' cheat, the empty set
If an all-powerful being really exists, they should be able to limit their own future power — which means they'd stop being all-powerful. Hey, I'm Salt. I'm Grace. Okay, so it's the ultimate playground philosophy question. Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?
Right. It sounds like a trick. But theologians and philosophers have been fighting over this puzzle for almost a thousand years. Because it forces a binary, right? If he can't build it, he lacks a power.
If he builds it, but then, but then he can't lift it, he also lacks a power. The paradox hits you either way. But the Islamic philosopher Averroes hits this head-on around 1180. He writes a treatise called Tahafut al-Tahafut. It argues that divine power just doesn't apply to breaking objective rules, um, like geometry or logic.
So God can't make a square circle. Yes. Thomas Aquinas formalized that in his Summa Theologiae between 1265 and 1274. Aquinas says a logical contradiction isn't a real thing. It's a nonentity.
Huh. So failing to do a non-thing isn't a lack of power. You can't ask someone to draw a four-sided triangle, and then call them weak when they fail. That makes sense. But Grace, does everyone just accept that logic binds God?
No. René Descartes goes the other way. He took the, uh, radical Cartesian view that an all-powerful deity transcends logic itself. So God can make the unliftable stone and then, somehow, lift it anyway. Wait — what?
It hurts the brain. Descartes argued that the rules of human reason are just things God created, so God can break them. I mean, that sort of feels like cheating. You just say "magic" and walk away from the paradox. Which is why 20th-century analytic philosophers hated it, Salt.
They brought the problem back to language. In 1967, C. Wade Savage published a paper showing the rock problem's just a linguistic illusion. A pseudo-task. How does a pseudo-task work?
Savage says if a being has an infinite capacity to make stones, and an infinite capacity to lift stones, those two things are fully compatible. The set of stones too heavy for this being to lift is just logically empty. Okay, that's new. So the rock itself is the contradiction, not God. Right.
You're basically asking God to build a stone that can't be lifted by the, by the guy who can lift anything. The grammar forms a sentence, but the words don't describe a possible object. That feels like a pretty clean way out. It is, but skeptical philosophers weaponized the paradox anyway. J.
L. Mackie wrote a landmark paper in 1955 called Evil and Omnipotence. He argued the whole concept of omnipotence is basically incoherent. Why incoherent? Because of the self-limitation trap.
Mackie says a truly omnipotent being must have the power to bind itself, to, you know, limit its own future power. But the second it does that, it stops being omnipotent. So the definition cancels itself out. Exactly. Mackie says the minute you give a being the power to alter its own rules you create this endless regression where it either can't bind itself and so it isn't all-powerful right now or it does bind itself and so it won't be all-powerful tomorrow.
It breaks down. Seriously? Yeah. And this isn't just a 1950s debate. As recently as June 2026, Richard Swinburne and Michael Huemer had a public debate.
They're still actively contesting whether infinite magnitudes — like unlimited divine power — even hold together metaphysically. So are theologians just stuck defending a broken word? Some are dropping it. The term "omnipotence" brings all this Greek philosophical history about infinite magnitudes. So some modern thinkers suggest we just, we just go back to the word "almighty".
Almighty. Meaning what, practically? Meaning God has all the power that matters for a relationship with humanity. But we stop treating him like a, well, like a theoretical physics equation that has to balance on a chalkboard. That's — I don't know, that feels like a big concession.
You're admitting the language failed. Maybe. But the shift to "almighty" is really about intent. When medieval writers used those big absolute terms, they weren't trying to build an airtight logical system. They were just trying to express reverence.
And we turned it into a math problem. We did. We asked for the schematics of a miracle. And the paradox of the stone's what happens when you push that human language to the breaking point. It really does leave you wondering if our logic is a tool for finding truth, or just a cage that kind of limits our imagination.
Thanks a lot for listening to Daybrain.
Leave your email and we will let you in as soon as Daybrain opens up.