A Rock and a Burrito

No, I haven’t lost my mind; I know that must be what you were thinking when you read that seemingly click-bait title. Rest assured I could have come up with much worse. So anyway, this article is an answer to a common question thrown at Christians to make them doubt their belief in God, and to make the skeptics who hurl such a challenge feel more secure in their unbelief when their Christian victims fail to give an adequate answer. What I am about to lay out for you is known as the “Omnipotence Paradox.” Here is the question:

Can God create a rock so heavy that He could not lift it?

A Californian apologist also heard this question in Mexican-American form:

Can God create a burrito so hot that He could not eat it?

The point of this question is to suggest that whatever option you choose will disprove God’s omnipotence (God’s attribute of possessing all power, or being “all-powerful”). In other words, the skeptic is trying to say, “If God can make a rock too heavy for Him to lift, then He is not omnipotent. If God cannot make a rock too heavy for Him to lift, then He is not omnipotent. This question, in whatever form it has been used, has given many unsuspecting Christians much grief, although that grief is absolutely unnecessary, for there is a misunderstanding of terms at its root.

The skeptic falsely believes that if he or she can get the Christian to admit that there is something that God cannot do, that they will have successfully destroyed the believer’s conviction that God is all-powerful. However, the word “omnipotent” does not mean, “able to do anything.” Rather, it simply means “all powerful.” Merely not being able to do something does not make one any less powerful. For example, many people have rightly pointed out that God cannot lie. This is because lying is inconsistent with God’s moral character. Likewise, God cannot do that which is logically impossible as it would be inconsistent with His rational character.

Apologist and philosopher Michael Jones also explores a deeper philosophical aspect of the omnipotence paradox, and I have included his video on the subject in the recommended resources at the end of this article if you’re into making your brain explode. Jones builds the case that the presence of limits does not reduce one’s power. Consider the following: As a person’s power increases, they are increasingly limited in what they can be afraid of. A being who has power over all else cannot experience fear, but does this decrease their power? Not at all. Thus, there are some limits that accompany omnipotence without restraining or depleting power.

Furthermore, Jones explains that the logically impossible does not exist in reality, and therefore cannot be called a “thing.” The atheist philosopher Nicholas Everitt said the following about the omnipotence paradox: “To say that something is logically impossible is precisely to exclude it from the realm of the do-able. So to say that God cannot do what is logically impossible is not to say that His power is limited in any way.”

As a matter of fact, professional philosophers generally don’t use the omnipotence paradox to argue that God does not exist. At the end of the day, the only people who keep this question in their arsenal of challenges to the Christian faith are skeptics with a pop-level understanding of God’s omnipotence, which is not the correct theological understanding of the divine attribute.

So can God create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? Can He make a burrito so hot that He cannot eat it? The short answer is “no.” He cannot do what is logically impossible, because the logically impossible does not, and cannot exist in reality; like a square circle, or a married bachelor. That is why we call it “impossible.” There is nothing incoherent about God’s omnipotence based on any question containing a logical contradiction.

The omnipotence paradox, along with so many other horrible arguments against God, is dead.

Recommended Resources:
Video: Omnipotence Paradox Debunked by InspiringPhilosophy