We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Can God Make a Rock So Big that Even God Cannot Lift It?
Article by Dan Kent
The moment you confess your belief in God, I have found, some clever fella will emerge from the crowd to stand before you and ask:
“Can God make a rock so big that even God cannot lift it?”
It’s a trap, of course. If you say: “YES, God can make such a rock,” clever-fella will accuse your God of being limited, since God has made a rock God cannot lift. If you say: “NO, God can make no such rock,” clever-fella will say your God is limited, since God cannot make the rock. Either way, according to clever-fella, God is limited. It seems a person who believes in God has no safe way to answer.
But we do have an answer. The answer is: No, God cannot make a rock so big that even God cannot lift it.
Are we exposing God as a limited, powerless fraud with this answer? I don’t think so. God cannot make such a rock, true, but not because of a limitation in God. Rather, the rock carries within itself all of the important limitations.
God cannot make a married bachelor, either. Bachelors, by definition, simply cannot be married while still remaining a bachelor. There can be no such bachelor. Rocks also contain limitations. Namely, a rock simply cannot be so big that God could not lift it. There can be no such rock. God’s inability to make such a rock reveals no limitation in God just as God’s inability to make a married bachelor reveals no limitation in God.
Hope this helps. Rock on!
Category: Guest Contributor
Tags: Apologetics, Omnipotence
Guest Contributor:
Dan Kent is the author of Confident Humility: Becoming Your Full Self Without Becoming Full of Yourself and the series The Training of KX12. Dan preaches as Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood Minnesota. He also hosts and produces ReKnew’s Podcast Greg Boyd: Apologies & Explanations. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Related Reading
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 7
This is the seventh of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg argues against Ehrman’s claim that the Roman census in the birth narrative was fabricated. If you missed the first six installments you can find them here, here, here, here, here and here.
Podcast: Dear Greg: My Husband is Anti-Theist, What Should I Do?
A godly house with an unbelieving spouse. Greg discusses unbelieving partners. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0418.mp3
Isn’t Faith Inherently Irrational?
Is Faith Inherently Irrational? Many people seem to assume that faith is giving credence to things that don’t make much sense and for which there is little or no evidence. Take the doctrine of the Incarnation, for example. This is the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus is “fully God and fully human.” Now, to many…
Is the Book of Acts Reliable?
(Note: We apologize that certain German vowels didn’t translate onto this site). Introduction The book of Acts is of critical importance in the contemporary debate about the historical Jesus. The reason for this is straightforward. Those who deny that the original, historical Jesus made divine claims for himself, performed miracles and rose from the dead…
Why Did It Take SO Long for God to Reveal Himself in Jesus?
Greg talks about why it took God so long to reveal himself in Jesus. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0048b.mp3
Finding an Alternative Jesus
The “Newly Discovered” Jesus One of the most common, and most disturbing, refrains heard in the media’s coverage of contemporary radical views of Christ is that New Testament scholars have recently “discovered” new sources of information about Jesus that contradict the Bible’s own view of Jesus. It is claimed that works such as the Gospel…