A Reply to the Stone Paradox Using the Free Will Defense

From guest blogger, Joe.

Could an omnipotent being create a stone too heavy to lift? This can be answered in one of two ways.

1.     If the answer is no, then there is something that this being could not do and is therefore not omnipotent.

2.     If the answer is yes, then such a being would no longer be omnipotent as there would be an activity that he or she could not do.

While this obviously seems quite paradoxical, it can be a real concern for the theist as omnipotence is often taken to constitute part of God’s essence. Supposing that omnipotence is part of God’s essence, failure to have this attribute would seem to entail that God, as traditionally conceived, cannot exist. In this blog post I aim to show that the question ought not prevent the theist from sleeping at night. In order to do so, I will appeal to Paul Tidman’s discussion of Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defense.

Through Plantinga’s writing, Tidman shows that the existence of evil is compatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God. Tidman is able to do so by spelling out a common assumption which Plantinga calls a Leibniz’ Lapse. Tidman via Plantinga claims that this assumption "is to assume that it follows from the fact that God is omnipotent that He can bring about any possible world He pleases" (303).

This assumption is problematic for the following reason. Suppose that there are worlds, one of which is possible and one of which is actual (Tidman, 303). Further suppose that some individual, Bob, exists in or is roughly located within each world. In each world, Bob finds himself in the same situation and this situation was brought about by an omnipotent being called God. In both cases, Bob is choosing what to eat for breakfast. In the first world, Bob chooses to eat a banana for breakfast. In the second world, Bob chooses to eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Both worlds contain roughly the same individual, but in each world a different choice is made. Therefore, the state of affairs that obtains is not ‘up to’ God, rather it is up to Bob. God cannot make it the case that Bob freely chooses to eat the banana because strictly speaking it would not be a free act if it were caused (Tidman, 404). The same holds in the instance where Bob chooses to eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

The main point of this is that there are certain states of affairs that even an omnipotent being cannot bring about. This, I believe, shows why the question concerning the stone requires too much. In this case, omnipotence seems to consist in the ability to do a task that is logically impossible. Much like a Leibniz’ Lapse, this demand is problematic. If omnipotence consists in the ability to do what is logically impossible, God could ‘make’ a world in which bachelors were married males. But this seems rather odd from my perspective because it would entail that God could bring about even odder states of affairs, one in which modus ponens was invalid. My overall point is that omnipotence ought to be viewed solely in terms of what is logically possible. Not only is this more parsimonious, it also rules out ‘odd’ states of affairs wherein the rules of logic don’t apply.

The Stone Paradox

We discussed a piece by Thomas Morris on the nature of omnipotence today in class.  In it, he considers the Stone Paradox.  Here's how he put the paradox:

The question is this:  If God is omnipotent, then can he create a stone which he cannot lift (cause to rise)?  If the answer is 'no' then , the critic reasons, there is something God cannot do, namely, create the sort of stone in question, and so he is not, after all, omnipotent.  If the answer is 'yes', he can create such a stone, then again there is a task he cannot perform, namely, lift the stone once created, and therefore again he is not omnipotent. Regardless of which answer is given, the conclusion follows that God is not omnipotent (p. 408).  

The upshot of the paradox is not simply that God must fail to be omnipotent, but rather it's that omnipotence isn't a coherent property--no being could be omnipotent.

Morris dismissed the paradox as a "silly little brain-teaser." Morris thought that the theist can consistently say that God isn't able to create such a stone and that God is omnipotent. He thought that the description of the action of creating a stone too heavy for God to lift is incoherent and so we do not specify any activity that is beyond God's power when we say that "God can't create a stone too heavy for Him to lift." Morris also suggested that the theist can consistently claim that God could create a stone too heavy for Him to lift while still maintaining that God is omnipotent. Morris claims that "...we can block the inference to his (God's) lacking omnipotence by explaining that the subsequent inability to lift cannot be thought of as reflecting the lack of any power it is possible to have" (p. 410).

I'm going to focus on his second suggestion.  It certainly appears that one has described a possible power when one says "the power to lift that really heavy stone, S, that God just created." But Morris contended that this is a mistake. His argument is subtle. Following Kenny, Morris argued that if God were to create a stone that had the property of being unliftable (even by God), then this "power to lift that stone" doesn't actually pick out or specify any coherent power that a being could have. This is because, the stone is unliftable and it's not possible to have the power to lift something that cannot be lifted. As Morris put it, "Thus, lacking a power to lift S is not lacking a possible power, a power possible to have, and so no such lack would detract from God's being omnipotent."

What do you make of Morris's argument here?  Do you find it persuasive?  How might one object to this line of reasoning?