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
Is Jesus Unique?
The Search for a Non-Unique Jesus Built into the naturalistic assumption that drives the liberal New Testament search for the “man behind the myth” is the notion that, whoever Jesus was, he cannot have been utterly unique. The laws that operate in the world today, including the laws of human behavior, have always operated. And…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 3
This is the third of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? If you missed the first two installments you can find them here and here.
Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?
Trying to get around the Resurrection While Jesus’ life, claims, and miraculous ministry set him far apart from all other human beings, it is his resurrection more than anything else that stamps him as the one and only Son of God. But, precisely because it sets Jesus apart as unique and requires an affirmation of…
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…
By Chance or By God
pure9 via Compfight Is the world here by chance? Are we a product of an impersonal force that got the ball rolling and then history came about in what could be described as an “accident”? Greg’s father, an skeptic at the time, put it this way, “[C]ouldn’t we just have come about by accident? Isn’t…
Podcast: How Can We Be Confident in Christianity With SO Many Other Religions in the World?
Greg considers the abundant religious perspectives available to us, defends faith in Christ, and considers whether agnosticism is appropriate—all in less that 6 mind-bending minutes! http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0259.mp3