There is an online version of The Christian Index, The voice of Georgia Baptists since 1822. What interested me was their response to the Omnipotence Paradox, the question can omnipotent God make a stone too heavy for him to lift, or draw a round square. I have my moderate answer to try and solve this paradox which I will provide during and after I have first quoted some lines from and responded to the magazines’ article, printed May 6, 2019, by Paul Baxter, answering this paradox. The title of Baxter’s article is: Why can’t God make square circles?
Baxter: “ . . . I am now perhaps ready to deal with the question of ‘Why God can’t make square circles?’ Of course, this is a question used by atheists and agnostics, questioners and doubters who are troubled if downright angered by the seeming failure of a supposedly omnipotent God to create a pain-free world peopled with happy creatures. The up-front, trigger question is far easier to answer than the latter question that is at the root of many angry atheists and doubting Thomases.
Let’s deal with the first question? Why can’t God make square circles? The short answer is God does not go against His nature, cannot ‘deny Himself’ (2 Tim 2:13), cannot be illogical or nonsensical. It is self-contradictory to make square circles, or things that are not.”
My response: God cannot deny himself or goes against his nature. He cannot be inconsistent and illogical. He cannot be nonsensical, be self-contradictory or make things that are not.
These seem to me to be solid answers from Baxter and Christian as to why God is omnipotent but unable to do self-contradictory acts. It could be too that self-contradictory acts as nonsense, illogical and non-existing are acts that are immoral, and God’s power has no connection to evil or immorality.
Christian assume that God is omnipotent. I do not: God the Father, God the Mother and Jesus are extremely powerful but not all-powerful. Fate, the One, Being/No-Being/, All/Nothing, all-powerful and all-powerless, is omnipotent half the time, and powerlessness the other half the time. Fate’s world is a world of logic, consistency, sense that are logically real and existent, and then it is a world of illogicality, inconsistency, senseless that are real and unreal. In that world an omnipotent God could draw a square circle one time, and a minute later that would be impossible.
This is my moderate, approximate answer to this question and it likely is not satisfying to anyone, and will be rejected with scorn and ridicule. What truth is on the level of Fate, the ultimate deity and non-deity, the One, logic, reality, consistency and sensible may not exist there, or be a type of intelligible answer that we will never possess, or at least not now at our present state of knowledge and not understanding ultimate issues.
If the Mother and Father and Jesus are not omnipotent but near omnipotent it really is the same question could they draw a round circle, if they are less than all-powerful. The answer is not most of the time, and we refer to my moderate answer above for a qualified yes. Have I solved the problem or just punted the question, the football, to another level of deities (resolvable or not in the realm of Fate), as an answer (yes, some deity can draw a square circle), or just made an unanswerable or not as-yet-answered, problem unanswered but lost in the midst of obscurantism (no, deity can draw a square circle). I do not know.
Let us return to what Baxter and Christians: I got some good answers on a short u tube video but lost the video, so I will say that that narrator said that God can be all-powerful, but bounded by His nature so he could be omnipotent in power. He can do the possible consistent with his nature, but not the impossible, which has nothing to do with his nature. It all is a discussion of possibility not power so God is very powerful or all-powerful but cannot do the impossible, which does not and cannot exist; God cannot make a stone he cannot lift or draw a square circle. This metaphysical answer seems sound and probably is close to what Baxter is offering, above, and below, also sound.
Baxter says God cannot go against his nature, be illogical, nonsensical, deny his nature or not be self-consistent, not self-contradictory.
If the theistic Objectivists are right, God cannot lie. God is not a contradiction. God is consistent, posing these impossible tasks for God is a lie, nonsensical and contradictory. It could be not undertaken let alone be accomplished-- to attempt to draw as square circle, an impossibility.
God is all-powerful within his nature and does and must live in accordance with the rules that he set for the world (the laws of nature). God created the world and set up laws of nature to run it, and that set of rules are his promise to the world to allow it to be moral, free, good and operate lawfully with beneficial regularity. God would not deconstruct the Logos guiding His cosmos by drawing a round square for that would be breaking his promise, and God does not do that.
Baxter: “C.S. Lewis has explained the ‘intrinsically impossible’ perhaps better than anyone. In his ‘The Problem of Pain’ he writes how if something is self-contradictory it is absolutely impossible—called intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility within itself—God’s omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. –intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.
It is no more possible for God than the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God . . . “
My response: Whether the questions raised under the omnipotence paradox are revealing or attempt to show that God is attempting contradictory tasks or is self-contradictory or not, Baxter and Lewis see existent God as self-consistent, logical, necessary, true and all-powerful because His possible range of actions are behaviors that can be conducted in reality, are possible, and there God’s range of power is unlimited.
Intrinsic impossibilities, these contradictory questions asked about God to trap God (and undermine belief in God) and believers, are about scenarios that do not exist; thus, they are nonentities. God is real and the world is real, so God’s power is used in ways consistent with the laws that regulate reality. God is truth and these fantastic contradictory pseudo-questions are unreal and lies that do not exist. Consequently, God will use His power in the world for the betterment of the world. God would not respond to a challenge for a domain that does not exist.
These pseudo-questions are about impossibilities that do not exist and are not true, and God’s omnipotent forces are, powers used to love, stabilize, build, maintain and create.
To make stone so heavy that one could not lift it or draw square circles would be the power of powerless, if anyone could contradict truth and reality by making contradictory states of affairs come into being in the realm of nothingness—either such happenings would never occur or would be in the realm of Non-Being under Fate or Satanism, and this is just unsupported speculation.
Fate could draw a square circle when all-powerful, or more likely in Fe’s all-powerless phase of existing.
It could be that God not being able to draw a square circle, or make a rock so heavy that he could not lift it is just nonsense as alluded to by Baxter for these reasons: it could be that if consistent and the three laws of thought apply not only to thought but to reality, then under Aristotelian, binary logic, contradiction is nonsense, false and does not exist. To ask God to do contradictory tasks that are false, cannot exist and will not exist is a phantasm, an imaginative pseudo-challenge to God’s omnipotence (if you are a Christian, Jewish or Islamic monotheist) or near omnipotence (what I the theological moderate and polytheistic religious believer posit).
It is asking silliness of no consequence because it does not exist. This is no successful atheistic attack against theism The atheist seeks to discover embarrassing contradictions in God’s holy books, God’s character, behavior, doctrines and the wicked actions of followers of a good deity as signs that God does not exist, or is not all-good, for contradictions are nothing (do not exist in the world), are a lie and false, so if God is self-contradictory or immoral, God cannot exist or is not worth following; atheists want to depict God as a social construct, a false, anthropomorphic, figment of the fertile if feverish human imagination
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