The stone paradox asks whether a God who can do anything can make a stone too heavy for God to lift.
Tagged: Arguments against God Divine Attributes
The paradox asks whether an all-powerful God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it. If God cannot create such a stone, there is something God cannot do; if God can create it, there is something God cannot lift. Either way, the argument claims, there is a limit on God's power, and so the idea of a being who can do absolutely anything appears to be incoherent.
The challenge is not only about stones: it raises the wider question whether omnipotence itself can be defined without contradiction, and whether a being with unlimited power is a coherent idea at all.
The Argument in Form
- God is omnipotent, able to do anything.
- If God is omnipotent, God can create a stone too heavy for God to lift.
- If God creates such a stone, God cannot lift it.
Conclusion: Therefore, God both can and cannot do something, so omnipotence as unlimited power is incoherent.
Proponents and History
The stone paradox has roots in medieval discussions of divine power, where thinkers asked whether God's power extends to the logically impossible. In the twentieth century, philosophers including George Mavrodes examined the paradox closely, and it became a standard test case in discussions of omnipotence. The paradox is often presented alongside wider questions about whether the divine attributes can be held together consistently. Its endurance shows how much turns on the definition of omnipotence.
Standard Responses
Classical theists, following Aquinas, reply that omnipotence means power over all things that are logically possible, not power to do the logically impossible. A stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift is not a real task but a contradiction in terms, like a square circle. Mavrodes added that the paradox trades on a confusion: the description of the stone changes what counts as lifting it, and once the task is stated clearly, no genuine limit on God's power follows. On this definition, omnipotence remains coherent because it was never a claim to do the impossible.
References
- Concepts of God (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Free / open access
- Omniscience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Free / open access
Related Across the Site
- Argument from Non-Belief Argument — The sheer scale of unbelief in the world is said to fit naturalism better than theism.
- Cosmological Disproof Argument — Modern cosmology is said to remove the need for a first cause of the universe.
- Divine Hiddenness Argument — If God were perfectly loving, reasonable people would not remain without belief; yet many do.
- Foreknowledge and Free Will Argument — If God already knows infallibly what each person will do, the future seems fixed and human freedom seems lost.
- Omnipotence and Omniscience Incoherence Argument — The divine attributes themselves are said to conflict, so that no being could hold them all together.
- Ontological Disproof Argument — The ontological argument is said to fail because existence is not a property that can be built into a definition.
- Problem of Evil Argument — The suffering of the world is said to count against a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
- Teleological Disproof Argument — Evolution and natural explanations of fine-tuning are said to remove the need for a designer.
Related Arguments
- Omnipotence and Omniscience Incoherence — The divine attributes themselves are said to conflict, so that no being could hold them all together.
- Foreknowledge and Free Will — If God already knows infallibly what each person will do, the future seems fixed and human freedom seems lost.
- Cosmological Argument — Everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist, so the universe has a cause.