[This is a draft intended to be developed into a top-level post - it wouldn't feel wrong to make it such right now, but it wouldn't quite feel right. I am not entirely sure how to end it or if I could generalize better at the end. I kind of like the ending I have, but I'm not sure if the point overall is coherent enough. Thoughts/suggestions/criticism would all be appreciated. ETA: The problem here may be that this is actually a follow up (or a footnote) to another article I've been thinking of about Weasel Words and the art of misleading through langauge; related to my earlier post on Not Technically Lying]
When I was a teenager, I remember hearing a couple of riddles that I thought were neat:
"Could God draw a square circle?"
"Could God create a stone so large that even He could not lift it?"
Let me just disclaim that this post has pretty nothing to do with religion. I just think that these are great examples that many people may be familiar with. That said, consider: do either of these problems pose a threat to the existence of an omnipotent God?
The answer, as will be clear on a full exposition, is a resounding "No." These are terrible, awful, misleading arguments, and the second one illustrates a relatively common trick used to sneak past an audience's intellectual defenses.
These riddles both fail to provide relevant counterexamples for the exact same reason, even though the second may seem to make more sense. The first is simpler: a square circle is not a thing. In a practical sense, we can put the words next to each other, but there is simply no way to translate the sound "square circle" into some kind of expectation or thing in the real world, in the same way one could translate, "red barn" or "white unicorn" into an expected observation. It is impossible for anything to be both square and circular, so the fact that God cannot do something that cannot be done does not limit His omnipotence. By the same token, God could not create a married bachelor (using the strict definitions of the terms), as a bachelor is an unmarried man. The inability to violate the law of non-contradiction does not appear to be a legitimate refutation of omnipotence. If we taboo, "square circle," there isn't really a meaningful way of describing the thing you are insisting God be able to draw.
"A stone so large that God cannot lift it," is exactly the same thing as a square circle. It sounds like a problem, since it's showing that God can't create a big enough stone. But an omnipotent being could presumably lift an object of any arbitrary size. Therefore, no stone could ever meet these criteria. If we taboo "so large that God cannot lift it," there is no actual weight you could describe such a stone as having. Presumably, God could lift a stone that weighted 3^^^3 tons, or even 3^^^^^^3 tons. You've created a hollow adjective: a descriptor whose actual meaning makes an argument self-evidently bad, but which is appealing if you don't actually think about it. It's not Not Technically Lying, because it isn't untrue, it's meaningless, which makes it harder to detect (though less common).
This is an extreme example. Usually, hollowness allows a speaker to be vague enough that they sound like they have a point when a clear definition of their terms would disprove this. Offenses in common language are usually a bit less egregious. "The president hasn't done enough to fix the economy," comes to mind as an example. What exactly, should he have done? There has probably never been a president in history whom people would generally agree has done "enough to fix the economy;" indeed, most economists would question the power of the president to seriously influence such things. "Hasn't the president failed to end the recession?" may be technically true, but it isn't really useful to call someone a failure for not doing something they lack the power to do. This example is merely illustrative; it is often easy to create descriptors that make your conclusion apparently foregone, despite their actual lack of substance.
Using such slanted terms is among the darker of the Dark Arts. It plays on its audience not by appealing to the irrational vagaries of the human mind; such efforts are, at least, often transparent. Rather, it masquerades as a rational argument, requiring complex nuance to refute. For those who are not disposed to disagree, it can escape the defense mechanisms of even a cautious mind. Understanding this concept can make it far easier to pinpoint the error in some beguiling arguments.
I find this post very interesting, but I disagree with your examples about God. This comment is rather lengthy, and rather off-topic, so I apologize, but I wanted to bring it up because your post features these questions so prominently as examples.
Specifically, I don't think that the answer to the questions about God can be written off so easily as "no". It seems to me that the questions "Could God draw a square circle?" "Could God create a stone so large that even He could not lift it?" are asking about the bounds on omnipotence.
Suppose an omnipotent being exists in a universe, and that universe operates under some fundamental laws that among other things define what can exist vs. what is a contradiction. It seems fairly obvious, based on the standard definition of omnipotence, that the omnipotent being should be able to do all things that do not violate these fundamental laws and cause a contradiction. I'll call this Level 0 Power.
"Could God draw a square circle?" is asking about what I'll call God's Level 1 Power. It is asking "Does an omnipotent being have the power to change the fundamental laws of the universe?", or, if you like, "Can God reprogram the universe?" If God is in charge of the rules, then presumably he could rewrite them such that things which are currently a contradiction are no longer a contradiction. In terms of the circle/square question, this seems kind of silly, since circles and squares are not contained in the universe but are products of formal systems invented by humans. Alternatively we could ask "Can God make 1+1 add up to something other than 2?" and the answer is "Of course; even mathematicians can do this, by redefining the axioms or working in the integers (mod 2) or something." In terms of this example, then, Level 1 Power is asking "If the universe is a formal system of sorts, can God change the axioms?"
Suppose God has Level 1 Power and can change the axioms of the system (or systems) he creates. This isn't so hard to imagine; it's like a human programmer rewriting a piece of the code in the middle of running a simulation. But the question about whether God, if he existed, actually had such a power, seems like it would be a reasonable subject of discussion for theologians.
"Could God create a stone so large that even He could not lift it?" is yet a more difficult question. Is it asking about God's Level 1 Power? I think it depends on where omnipotence comes from. If God is omnipotent within the system because that's the way he coded it, then it is asking about God's Level 1 Power: all he has to do is go into the code for the universe and change the part that says he should be able to lift all stones. But if God's omnipotence is something that exists independent of the system, then this question is asking whether God can change the rules which define himself.
Anyway, your answer of "no" to these questions indicates not that the questions are worthless but that you assume an omnipotent being could only have Level 0 Power.
I think this post is right on. I think we are IN this universe with a brain to match it, with 3-d, separation of time and space appropriate to non-relativistic speeds, and so on strongly coded in.
In terms of any powerful god, she either "lives" in a much larger universe than ours, which kicks the can down the road (is there an omnipotent god who created that universe?) or she essentially comprises the entire universe. What other way to have an entity which "knows" how every particle moves at every instant other than having that enti... (read more)