This is an evergreen. The question is ultimately not about how heavy a rock God can make (infinitely heavy) or how strong God is in terms of lifting rocks (infinitely strong). The question is this: Can God self-limit?
The "immovable object" is a fantasy - all objects are moveable, given sufficient force. Heaviness is not "the ability to not be moved"! It is a simple descriptor of mass, or of gravity's action upon mass. These are physical properties, susceptible to being overcome by sufficient forces - and an infinite force is a sufficient force.
So the question becomes: can an infinite God choose self-restraint? Can God elect to take on a limitation, to God's infinite power?
Well, it would be quite odd if God couldn't. Even we humans can do that. But there's some biblical precedent for God choosing self-limitation. God became human, eh? Even those who most fully endorse Jesus's divine nature as truly God, don't depict the Lord as wielding Herculean (or even, Samsonian) physical might. Christ is not shown tossing boulders around and such. I really don't think that super-strength was part of the Messiah-powers package. So in at least that one instance, I'd say that there were many boulders that God had created, that in that time and place and person at least, God could not lift - God in the person of Christ, God in human form (but still very much fully God).
If the questioner refuses to allow God's choice to self-limit, then the question becomes an obvious logical self-contradiction - so flimsy it knocks itself over with the unavoidable tautology it calls forth. Strength is definable here as ability to lift. If the heaviness of the rock God can create is infinite, and God's strength to lift it is infinite - where is the supposed limitation to God's power?
Here, the power to create mass and power to lift mass are both infinite. It is logically impossible that either can exceed the other, if both are infinite.
The root problem here is that the questioner fails to grasp the nature of infinity*. If an item is for sale at an infinite price, that doesn't mean that it can not be bought even with an infinite amount of money - if that were the case, then it is not for sale! No, an infinite price means that it can only be purchased with an infinite amount of money. Just so, the infinitely-heavy object: it is not that it cannot be lifted, only that to lift it requires an infinite strength.
Given, a given item may simply be not for sale. Not to be had for any price. It is a matter of decision on the owner's part, and not all hearts are swayed by money (not even an infinite sum of it!). But a physical object cannot decide to be immune to sufficient force. Even an infinitely massive object cannot be taken off the market of being liftable. Yet the question as phrased demands a mass so heavy that it cannot be lifted by a force with infinite lifting power. This is an absurd thing to ask for: a logically-impossible object.
In demanding a logically-impossible object, the questioner is not demonstrating any limitation to God's power, but rather a limitation within the questioner's own powers of reason.
1 comment:
Could I possibly restate it much less meanderingly? A try:
The question reduces to "Can God create a logically-impossible object?"
Sure. God can create an irrational universe, if God so chose. But our universe doesn't appear to be such, thank God.
In our universe, mass is not a quantity that measures "cannot be liftedness." The person who asks for "an X so heavy that it cannot be lifted" may as well ask for "a Y so clean that it can't be seen."
Even if for some cases it follows, it's strictly speaking a non sequitur to express massiveness in terms of unliftability, or cleanliness in terms of invisibility.
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