Omnipotence
Omnipotence
The idea that God is all-powerful is an early, foundational principle of monotheism. Part of what distinguished monotheistic religious traditions was their creation stories. Unlike the stories of the gods of Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman world, in which creation involved violence, even disembowelment, the God of monotheism creates singularly, with unrivaled power. In Genesis creation is portrayed in terms of divine commands in the form of speech or in terms of mediated and unmediated action. An action is mediated when another agent is involved (God heals in response to petitionary prayer).
Puzzles arise with respect to omnipotence, however, in two ways: internally and externally. Internal puzzles concern only the attribute itself, whereas external puzzles emerge when the attribute is paired with other divine attributes, such as essential goodness. The most famous of the internal difficulties is framed in terms of a task that an omnipotent being cannot perform. Here is one version, sometimes called “The Paradox of the Stone.”
The most common way to address this puzzle is by refining premise 1 to: An omnipotent being is a being able to do any possible act. There cannot be a stone so heavy that a being who can lift any stone cannot lift it. It only appears possible if we are actually picturing a less powerful being than God. We, as human beings, can build objects so heavy that we cannot lift them, but a being like God who can do anything possible cannot (for logical reasons) create an object that God cannot lift.
We think this is a decisive reply to “The Paradox of the Stone.” There is no need to undertake philosophical acrobatics, as some philosophers do, by arguing that God can do what is logically incoherent or could choose to limit God's powers (create a stone and choose to be unable to lift it). Part of the problem with this argument, by the way, is that by insisting that omnipotence should include the ability to do the logically incoherent, it removes our ability to think about these matters at all.
A more vexing problem with omnipotence arises when the attribute is paired with other divine properties, especially essential goodness, which (contrary to Dawkins's hypothesis) we believe is no mere add-on in theistic religious traditions.
Consider the following difficulty.
The argument might be reformulated by comparing God with a Godlike being that is not essentially good, whom we may call Molech.
Various logical maneuvers have been used in replying to these arguments. For example, it has been argued that an essentially good being can do evil to accomplish a greater good, but this would (presumably) only permit certain acts. It has also been argued that God has the ability to do evil but cannot do evil. (Imagine someone like Mother Teresa: she had the power to push an innocent person under a bus, but given her character, she could not do so.)
We suggest that the more promising reply to these difficulties is to contend that the ability to do evil is not a power that is proper to a maximally excellent being, as has been argued by Augustine (354–430), Boethius (480–526), and Aquinas (1224/5–1275). For free human creatures, our ability to do wrong might be an essential reflection (or the necessary complement) of our ability freely to do good, but for a God with unsurpassable excellence, the ability to do evil is a liability, a condition of vulnerability to corruption and degradation. The power of God is best thought of not in terms of bare power but of perfect, praiseworthy power.
An emphasis on perfect power in a philosophy of God also accords with feminist objections to the concept of God as sheer power. The early modern feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) complained that men tend to privilege brute power in their concept of God:
Man, accustomed to bow down to power in his savage state, can seldom divest himself of this barbarous prejudice, even when civilization determines how much superior mental is to bodily strength; and his reason is clouded by these crude opinions, even when he thinks of the Deity.—His omnipotence is made to swallow up, or preside over his other attributes, and those mortals are supposed to limit his power irreverently, who think that it must be regulated by his wisdom.6
Wollstonecraft counseled, instead, giving primacy to the goodness of God. Here again we see the benefits of considering the divine attributes in their interconnectedness as a coherent whole. God's essential goodness leads us to a more nuanced understanding of the nature of God's omnipotence, which can also have implications for the way we humans understand our own uses of power.
The appeal to perfect power and essential goodness has been used by some Christian philosophers to articulate the ideal unity of wills in the Trinity. Both Richard Swinburne and Stephen T. Davis have contended that supreme goodness is exemplified in the Trinity by ideal self-love, the love of another, and the love of two for a third. The topic is too broad to develop fully here, but we note that the concept of perfect power has been a fruitful one for constructive contemporary philosophical theology.7