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 8
This is the eighth 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 gets into the nitty gritty of why portions of the birth account are not the dumbest lie ever. If you missed the first seven installments you can…
Jesus: True Myth and True History
Though the Jesus story gives us every reason to believe it is substantially rooted in history, it has a curious, and fascinating, relationship with myth and legend. The story of God coming to earth, being born of a virgin, manifesting a heroic, counter-cultural love toward outcasts, dying for the people who crucified him and then…
Is there Archeological Support for the Reliability of the Gospels?
One of the many tests historians typically submit documents to in accessing their historical reliability concerns the extent to which archeology supports or undermines the historic claims the document makes. So we need to investigate the extent to which archeology confirms, or refutes, aspects of the Gospels. Before we address this question, however, a preliminary…
Sermons: Resurrection Principle
Is the resurrection of Jesus true? The entire Christian faith rests on if is or not. In this short sermon clip, Greg Boyd goes through a few historical proofs as to why this is true. It is important to remember Christ’s resurrection and the meaning, purpose and principle behind it. In the full sermon, Greg…
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
How Details in the Gospels Support Their Historicity
*This essay is adapted from G. Boyd & P. Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). For a fuller discussion, see P. Eddy & G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007). There are a number of questions historians ask when they are trying to assess the historical value of an ancient document that claims to report…