Yesterday my friends and I were having a theology discussion, and there was a friend who's an atheist asked us this question(which he couldn't answer himself) so i would like to look for an answer among you my friends, here is the question:
If God is almighty and capable of doing and controlling everything, is he able to create a world that he cannot control?
I hope i could explain the point clearly.
This question is extremely difficult and I've never seen the problem of omnipotence spelled out in this way, but I'll take a crack at it. No attempt to answer this question will be fruitful unless some clarificatory work is done first, so that's what I'll try to do (though my jargon-laden rambling may cause some to think my remarks are more obfuscatory than clarificatory.)
The question itself is ambiguous as far as I can tell. We should distinguish between two ways of interpreting this question. On the one hand, the question might be asking if there is a logically possible world which, just in virtue of the way it itself is constituted, is something that God cannot control and if God could create such a world. On the other hand, we could interpret the question as asking whether God could create a world and relinquish his ability to control it even though there is nothing about the way such a world is constituted which puts it beyond God's control.
I don't think it makes much sense to answer in the affirmative to the first interpretation. It seems to me that it would be a genuine logical impossibility. God (assuming he/she/it is omnipotent) could not bring a world into being which is by its very nature not under his control because there simply
is no such logically possible world. I suppose that the paradox does not arise on this first interpretation though my thinking here is a little fuzzy. It seems to me that to admit to such an impossibility is just to acknowledge God's omnipotence anyway and that to infer the contradictory is to get confused by mere words. Again, my thinking here is a bit fuzzy.
If we were to answer in the affirmative to the second interpretation of the question, we would have to admit that there are logically possible worlds which God cannot control but not because of how such worlds are constituted. We would have to say that such worlds are out of God's control because he, by his own volition, relinquished his control. This is where it gets problematic. If God relinquishes his control, then there is something that God cannot do which is at least putatively logically possible, namely controlling certain logically possible worlds. Does this undermine God's omnipotence? It's not clear to me one way or the other. On the other hand, is God's omnipotence undermined if he
cannot relinquish his control over a world? I don't have an answer but intuitively it seems like it would be easier to reconcile God's ability to relinquish his control over a world with his supposed omnipotence. This is in need of a lot more analysis. I think I'll pursue that in a future post.
Lastly, I've found that a good way to deal with this sort of question is to explicitly spell out what premises and inferences are involved. We can formulate the paradox in the form of the following argument.
P1: If God is omnipotent, then God can do everything.
P2: Either God can create a world he cannot control or God cannot create a world he cannot control.
P3: If God can create a world he cannot control, then there is something God cannot do.
P4: If God cannot create a world he cannot control, then there is something God cannot do.
P5: If there is something God cannot do, then it is not the case that God can do everything.
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C1: There is something God cannot do (via P2, P3, and P4)
C2: It is not the case that God can do everything (via P5 and C1)
C3: It is not the case that God is omnipotent (via P1, C2, and modus tollens)
I suppose that a good way to resolve the paradox is to find something wrong with the above argument. One way is to attack P1. I think the concept of omnipotence needs to be analyzed rigorously and we need to decide what is supposed to be meant by 'everything' in P1. That is, we need to determine the scope of that particular quantifier. I have no idea if that would help at all. These are just some of my inchoate, disorganized thoughts on the matter. More to come later.
I moved all the discussion I'm referring to to a new thread.
