That sounds fairly interesting.
The real question of the Omnipotence Paradox is simply: Can an Omnipotent Being limit it's own power in such a way that it can not unlimit it?
Of course, then they are no longer Omnipotent, simply because there is one small thing they are incapable of doing.
We can of course formulate this in another way:
- If X, then not Y.
- N is omnipotent.
- Can N do X and Y at the same time?
There; paradox. If N can't do X and Y at the same time, N is not omnipotent; and if N can do both of thsoe at the same time, then the first axiom is incorrect.
(It doesn't really matter what X and Y are, but let's say they could be: "X=open a container" and "Y=hold the container's lid down." And no playing with "if force is applied to open the container, it is being opened" or such trickery; if the lid isn't opening even a little bit, it is closed; and if it isn't entirely closed, it is considered open. The key is that there has to be a binary condition that satisfies "if X then not Y.")
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.I personally define omnipotence as not "the ability to do absolutely anything", but "having power without limits". So an omnipotent being couldn't create a square circle, not because their power is limited, but because that's a logical contradiction, gibberish without meaning.
I vowed, and so did you: Beyond this wall- we would make it through.Well, concept of a contradiction is something we talk about. But if your supposed object results in a state of contradiction, then you never had an object.
And I think Ira is distinguishing "omnipotence at a moment of time" from a general omnipotence by nature that cannot be revoked. It makes sense. We saw something like omnipotence at a moment in Bruce Almighty.
Another analogy is that you're a carpenter with abilities that can lead to injuries that would disable you from carpentry. Your powers led to the disabling of that power.
edited 17th Jan '13 4:01:43 PM by Trivialis
Honestly, though, I agree that just because you can define some sort of nonsensical scenario doesn't have to mean that you're required to take it seriously. If it's logically impossible it should be by default out of the definition of any concepts you bring in, such as "omnipotence." Demanding that an omnipotent entity must hold the lid open while simultaneously holding it closed means nothing, even though our brains can sort of imagine it. (Or rather, we can try but in the end, for me at least, the only way that I feel as if I've imagined a box that is shut and open at the same time is when I'm actually imagining two boxes.)
That said, I think we can probably get some more out of the physics of the originally proposed scenario of an unstoppable force approaching an unmovable object. Granted, the proposition that the force must pass through the object is a very easy and acceptable solution, but let's rule that out and see if we can come up with anything.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.![]()
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Yeah, but my point is that before such a rock exist the entity is still omnipotent. There's no rock that they cannot lift until they make one.
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He's got what I'm saying. And I found that latter definition to be self contradictory anyway: if you cannot give up your omnipotence than you're not omnipotent because "giving up omnipotence" falls under the umbrella "being able to do anything".
edited 17th Jan '13 5:05:10 PM by IraTheSquire
What happens when a Unstoppable force meets a Unmovable Object nothing it's a trick question the two would cancel each other out.
If I may use an example it would be like Jill Valentine facing the titular monster in ResidentEvil3Nemesis
If you want to make enemies try and change something - Woodrow Wilson"I'd say that they can exist in the same universe, if, and only if, there is no interference between them. "
Exactly. In physics terms, the immovable object in fact has an unstoppable force. It depends on which reference frame you're looking at. If you can't change its own natural course, you can't move it away from it.
edited 18th Mar '13 10:55:00 AM by Trivialis
Fun game! Can I join?
My position will be that since neither "Unstoppable" nor "Unmovable" can be precisely defined, the question is unanswerable. We cant even tell if it's meaningful or not.
"Unstoppable" is an absolute, like "all powerful" or "omnipotent". Human beings have never been able to define exactly what that means, in the sense that we cant conceive what such a thing would really be like. We are unable to imagine anything that is "infinite"- how does one model a system with an infinite quantity of anything? Zeno's paradoxes are enough to demonstrate that we don't really know what we are talking about (the paradoxes arise because distance is divisible to an infinite degree). Humans are incapable of comprehending how a being with infinite power would behave, or how such a being would interact with another being with an infinite power of a different nature. It's exactly equivalent to the following statement:
An incomprehensible concept interacts with another incomprehensible concept. What is the outcome?
The answer, obviously, is "It's incomprehensible." The whole problem may be an outcome of how humans use language to construct symbols of concepts that we cant define, and then treat the symbols as if they were the thing itself (that's the resolution that I've seen for Zeno's paradoxes- the paradoxes are illusions born of the manner in which humans use symbolic language).
Language is not reality. Symbols are mere tools we use to represent our mental experience, but just because we can imagine a thing, doesn't mean that we understand it, or even that the imagined thing has any real meaning.
On the other hand, now I feel a little bit like a straw vulcan.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.But I agree on the language/reality issue. That's the key ingredient to what I consider the best solution of the whole stone argument: omnipotence is about being able to bring any state of things into being, and language is a method for specifying states of things, but not all grammatically well-formed descriptions correspond to states of thing.
God cannot create a potato that is not a potato, because if something is a potato then it is a potato. This is not a limit of God, but a simple consequence of the fact that "a potato that is is not a potato" does not describe anything at all. Similarly, God cannot create a stone that even a being who could do anything could not lift, because that is just as meaningless a description.
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

God is the Unstoppable Force, as he is supposed to be omnipotent.
What he could do is use his omnipotence to destroy itself, and put limitations on his power so that he couldn't lift the rock. It then may then be the case that there is nothing that can lift the rock. I guess in context this means you can't have the 'unstoppable force' and 'immovable object' existing together. The way the God/rock question is usually worded puts precedence on God's power. If you worded it to put precedence on the rock's lack of liftability relationships, you wouldn't be allowed to describe God as 'omnipotent'.
I actually think omniscience is more likely to be paradoxical than omnipotence, but that may be off-topic...