If God is omnipotent

“If God is omnipotent, then He must be able to create a rock that He himself cannot lift. But if God cannot lift such a rock, He is not omnipotent.”

So goes the apparent paradox, but Rabbi and physicist Abraham Skoka, in his book with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the future Pope Francis), On Heaven and Earth, is quick to point out that, “God is above and beyond any logic and its paradoxes. Maimonides explains that He knows everything in its complete form. We have only limited knowledge. If we had the same understanding that God has, we would be gods ourselves.”

It seems to me that if we had the same understanding that God has, we would not be gods, but we would be God. One being, and only one being, can have such knowledge, and therefore one being and only one being, can be God. If there were more than one God, then God would not be omnipotent. Why can’t there be two
or more co-equal gods? Because that would imply there was a deficiency in God. There is a deficiency in man, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Man needs woman, and woman needs man to compliment each other. But there is no need, and therefore no complimentarity to God. As Thomas Aquinas would point out, there can only be one Unmoved Mover; only one Uncaused Cause. For all we know there could be an infinite number of ‘middle men’ between us and the Supreme Being but ultimately the source of all knowledge, power, goodness, love, justice, etc can only reside in one being. All of those qualities are only one quality in God: knowledge, love, justice …they are indistinguishable in the source they originate. They become diffused, distorted, and corrupted the further from the source they get. Of course, the separation is not a physical distance but an intellectual, emotional, or psychological distance. If we are created in the image of God, then that presupposes we have some insight into the nature of God. So why the vast gulf between us? Christians believe it is due to original sin. How do we get closer to God? Through love. What is love? A giving of the self. Acceptance. Unity. Does love not attempt to bring together disparate states of mind so they are focused toward the good? And what is the good but a striving for the Divine Will? The Divine Will is completeness, and when one expresses love he strives for unity in order to achieve peace. 

We can’t put God into a box and trap Him in a paradox, because we do not have the capacity to understand what God really is. Can the created really understand the creator? Interestingly, I believe this holds especially true for those who believe we are merely the products of evolution and natural selection. The origin of life remains a scientific mystery. At what point does non-living inorganic matter become living organic matter? And when that happens, how can random mutations propelled by natural selection - or any other natural phenomena – result in a single-celled organism becoming one of most mysterious and complicated things in the universe: the human brain? And how does it come to pass that the human brain - composed of the disparate particles violently ejected and propelled by the Big Bang (like everything else in existence), come to be organized at all – let alone organized in such a way that it recognizes and understands its creator? 

It doesn’t.

At least, it seems impossible. But with science the answer is always the same: time. The passing of time - billions of years of it – produced atoms, molecules, amino acids, DNA, cells, and every living and non-living thing on this planet as well as all the stars and galaxies throughout the universe. That was it: only time. And if it’s determined that something could not have evolved in a certain time frame, the clock is turned back. For the religious or spiritual, God (or the gods) created everything, but for the non-believers time created everything.

Whether or not our creator was God or the Big Bang it strikes me as profoundly ignorant and arrogant to think that we can truly understand the source that brought us into existence. We can hope and/or pray for glimpses of reality and understanding, but that is the best that we can do. No single man is smart enough or blessed enough to truly grasp reality, so we need to rely on information and revelation passed down through the ages. For those who dogmatically hold that only their inquiry into the nature of reality expresses truth while condemning other sources of inquiry as mere superstition - as scientists and like-minding people do - can only lead to a skewed understanding of the human condition. Where do our glimpses of understanding come from? For scientists they come from theories and experimentation. For Christians they come (in a sense) from theories and experimentation. Scientists apply the scientific method; Christians apply revelation, tradition and doctrine. Scientists reject hypothesis that fail to explain the real world and replace them with those that conform to observation. Christians discard primitive superstitions and replace erroneous and incomplete belief with a theology built upon a firm bedrock of philosophy, tradition, and doctrine, and dogma. Science is built upon a scaffold of trials and errors. Christianity is built upon a contradiction: the contradiction of a suffering messiah who slowly pulls back the deep layers of revelation as the centuries tick by. Science and Christianity both interpret (or reinterpret) and analyze their findings in light of greater understanding, but both adhere to a central core: a core that cannot change and must remain stable or they will collapse into utter incoherence. It is fashionable for atheistic scientists to attack religion, especially the religion that gave birth to modern science – Christianity - and denounce them all as only superstition while stating or implying that we can only know the truth through science. That’s like disowning half our bodies. There is scientific evidence that people have been “wired” for religion from the earliest archeological record. If this is true, then man may not have invented religion – as the atheists would have it – but that religion invented man. It may precisely be our belief in the supernatural that resulted in our separation from our closest biological relatives. Chimpanzees reportedly share 99% of our genes. Perhaps if they start believing in the supernatural they too may some day ponder their existence.

Back to the paradox I started with. There are two points I want to make and have already made the first one:

1)      God can’t be trapped in a paradox.

2)      I don’t have to settle with using the first point and will disprove the paradox myself.

God is omnipotent and can therefore lift any rock He creates. God is also vulnerable and there are many rocks He can not lift. Both are true. God the Father is pure being who is changeless, timeless, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but God the Son took the form of a weak human being. Since it was the will of the Father that the Son walk among us, so it was also the will of the Father that the Son suffer our physical limitations.