Can God Create a Stone Too Heavy for Him to Lift?

Can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift? This is a classic dilemma intended to prove that it is impossible for an entity to be all-powerful. If God can create the stone, then His ability to lift is limited. If He can’t create the stone, His creating ability is limited. On the surface, this does seem to show that the concept of being all-powerful is self-contradictory. But is it?

First, we must ask what exactly it means to be all-powerful. It does not mean the ability to do anything we can imagine or put into words, for the simple reason that not everything we can imagine and put into words has a real, coherent meaning. Another way to state this is that to be all-powerful means to be able to do anything that is not self-contradictory. For example, God can’t create a round square, a colorless rainbow, an ocean that isn’t wet, or a room that is both light and dark at the same time. These are not limits on His power because they are not actual things that exist. They are simply a collection of words that have no meaning. We could just as easily say that God isn’t all-powerful because He can’t vegetable translucent vocalize, or because He can’t lfkjsorifkle.

Putting aside the fact that God doesn’t “lift” things in the way we normally think of it anyway, the simple fact is that there is no such thing as a stone that would be too heavy for God to lift. Therefore, we haven’t found any real limit on God’s power.

Furthermore, assuming that the term “God” is taken to mean an all-powerful being, the argument is circular. An all-powerful being and a stone too heavy for that being to lift cannot both exist. As soon as we assume the existence of a stone too heavy to be lifted, we’re assuming there cannot be an all-powerful being, and therefore God must not exist. Essentially we’re saying that the stone exists because God doesn’t exist, therefore God doesn’t exist because the stone exists!

Technically there is a way out of this circularity: we could exclude “all-powerfulness” from our definition of the term “God.” But this would not be the generally agreed upon meaning of the word “God; if He were not all-powerful, why would we call Him God in the first place? It seems to me it would be similar to referring to a “piano” that has no keys, hammers, or strings. But this brings up an entirely different discussion that is beyond the scope of my current focus.

What exactly, though, does it mean to say that God is all-powerful? This is a concept that is easy to put into words, but not quite as easy to grasp (especially for finite minds like our own). I believe it means that God is in no way limited by the material world (which we would expect if He is the creator of that world). He does not operate under any of the constraints that we do, such as time, space, or a finite amount of energy. It is also important to remember that while God is capable of intervening in any logically consistent way in the world, for the majority of the time He simply permits matter to interact with other matter according to the laws of nature. If He didn’t, there would not be sufficient regularity in the universe, rendering things like science impossible.

So, to conclude, God can create any (real) thing, and lift any (real) thing. It’s just that certain concepts we imagine may not be real things (real meaning that they can be conceived of logically and have actual meaning). The limitation is not on God, but on a finite world. The error is in the original question. A better question would be “Can a stone exist that can be both created by God and too big for Him to lift?” The answer, of course, would be no.