The Paradox of Omnipotence Revisited

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (3):435-445 (1974)
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Abstract

A. Either God can create a stone which He cannot lift, or He cannot create a stone which He cannot lift. If God can create a stone which He cannot lift, then He is not omnipotent. If God cannot create a stone which He cannot lift, then He is not omnipotent. Therefore, God is not omnipotent.In a paper published in Analysis I tried to show that any attempt to find something wrong with all arguments of the general form of A above, any attempt to resolve the “paradox,” must fail, that the reason these attempts must fail is that at least some arguments of this form are essentially sound, and that the only thing which makes these arguments seem paradoxical, their conclusion to the effect that God is not omnipotent, is, like at least some versions of the arguments to this conclusion, quite correct.

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Citations of this work

Impossibility Arguments.Patrick Grim - 2007 - In Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 199--214.
On the number of gods.Eric Steinhart - 2012 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 72 (2):75-83.
The Omnipotence Paradox.Douglas Walton - 1975 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (4):705-715.
The omnipotence paradox, modality, and time.Gary Rosenkrantz & Joshua Hoffman - 1980 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 18 (4):473-479.
The Unmakable-Because-Unliftable Stone.Murdith McLean - 1975 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (4):717-721.

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References found in this work

The Paradox of Omnipotence.J. L. Cowan - 1965 - Analysis 25 (Suppl-3):102-108.
Omnipotence.Julian Wolfe - 1971 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):245-247.

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