This is probably one of the first arguments you ever heard against an omnipotent God. It feels airtight when you’re fourteen. You might have even wondered why it doesn’t just settle the matter — why aren’t theologians packing up and going home?
Because it doesn’t work, and it’s worth understanding why it doesn’t work, because atheists make weak arguments too, and this is a textbook example. Use it against any non-trivial opponent, and you’ll lose. So let’s take it apart.
The standard escape
The trick the theist uses is to redefine omnipotence — or rather, to insist on the definition serious theologians have used for centuries. Omnipotence does not mean “can do absolutely anything you can put into a sentence.” It means “can do anything logically possible.”
Logical impossibilities aren’t things that an omnipotent being fails to do. They aren’t tasks at all. They are strings of words that appear to be tasks but refer to nothing. A round square isn’t a difficult shape; it’s not a shape. Making 2+2=5 isn’t a hard sum; it’s not a sum. A married bachelor isn’t a rare kind of person; it’s a contradiction wearing a noun.
So the question “can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it?” is, on this view, in the same family. It’s not a feat. It’s a contradiction with a stone in it.
Aquinas put it bluntly in the Summa: it is more accurate to say that such things cannot be done than to say that God cannot do them. The limitation is in the description, not in the agent.
Formalising it doesn’t help.
You might think you can rescue the Argument by writing it out more carefully. Let X = “create an object that its omnipotent maker cannot lift.” Now ask whether God can do X.
But the contradiction is now baked into X itself. By stipulation, the maker is omnipotent — meaning, on the standard definition, capable of every logically possible act, including every possible lifting. So X reduces to: “create an object such that some logically possible lifting is not performable by a being who can perform every logically possible lifting.” That isn’t a coherent task. The Argument hasn’t found a flaw in omnipotence; it has smuggled the contradiction into the premise and acted surprised when it came out the other end.
The Everitt move
Nicholas Everitt, in The Non-Existence of God (2004), notes a further wrinkle that’s worth sitting with:
“It is not logically possible to pick up a stone which an omnipotent being has made unliftable.”
This one is subtle and often missed. Suppose, for the sake of Argument, that God can create such a stone — an object stipulated, by an omnipotent fiat, to be unliftable by anyone, including its maker. Then the act of lifting it is, by construction, a logical impossibility. There is no possible world in which it gets lifted, because its very identity as “the unliftable stone” rules that out.
So the failure to lift it isn’t a failure of power. It’s the same kind of “failure” as not being able to draw a round square. The stone’s unliftability is part of its definition, not a measure of its weight.
This gives the theist two consistent moves, and they can pick whichever they prefer:
- God can make the stone, and cannot lift it — but neither fact threatens omnipotence, because lifting it was logically impossible from the start.
- God cannot make the stone, because the description “stone unliftable by an omnipotent being” is incoherent. And again, the inability to perform incoherent tasks is not a defect of power.
Either way, the Argument doesn’t bite.
Why this matters
Notice what’s happened. The paradox was supposed to be a dilemma: whichever horn the theist grabs, omnipotence falls. But once you accept the standard definition — and the standard definition is not some recent dodge; it’s been the mainstream view since at least Aquinas — both horns turn out to be cushions.
You can dig in and insist that “real” omnipotence must include logical impossibilities. Descartes, to his credit, actually held something like this view — that God could have made contradictions true. But almost no theist will defend that position today, and it has its own brutal problems (if God can make contradictions true, then “God exists” and “God does not exist” can both be true, and you’ve argued yourself into incoherence rather than out of it). So you’re left swinging at a definition no one is defending.
You could also try to argue that the move to “logically possible” hollows out omnipotence to the point of triviality — that a God who can only do the logically possible is doing no more than what’s metaphysically on offer anyway. There’s something to this, but it’s a much harder, more interesting Argument than the stone paradox, and it doesn’t yield a quick win.
Better arguments exist
If you actually want to push against the classical conception of God, the problem of evil is in a different league entirely. Not the version that any first-year theology student can deflect with a free-will defence, but the version that focuses on gratuitous suffering — suffering that no free agent caused, no greater good requires, and no soul-making narrative needs.
A lightning strike sets a forest on fire. Animals — sentient, capable of suffering, incapable of moral choice or spiritual growth — burn alive for hours. No free will is involved. No human is taught a lesson because no human is watching. No greater good is plausibly served that an omnipotent being couldn’t have achieved by other means.
The theist has responses, of course. Sceptical theism: we can’t see why God allows it, but maybe there’s a reason beyond our grasp. Soul-making for the souls of the animals. Natural-law arguments: God set up consistent physics and won’t intervene. Each of these has been written about at length.
But notice the asymmetry. The stone paradox can be dispatched in a sentence: “Omnipotence doesn’t include the logically impossible, next question.” The problem of evil cannot. It forces the theist into increasingly elaborate auxiliary commitments — about God’s hidden reasons, about animal consciousness, about the value of natural regularity — each of which has its own costs. That’s what a good Argument does: it doesn’t get refuted, it makes the other side pay.
And the burden of proof
The final thing worth saying, and the thing that should structure all of this, is that atheists don’t actually need a knockout Argument. The atheist’s position isn’t “I have proven God does not exist.” It’s “I haven’t been given sufficient reason to think God does exist.” Those are different claims with different burdens.
Believers sometimes try to flip this: prove there’s no God. But you don’t have to prove there’s no Zeus, no Russell’s teapot, no invisible dragon in the garage. Withholding belief in the absence of good evidence is the default, not a positive claim that needs defending. The stone paradox is an attempt to force a knockout — and that’s part of why it overreaches and breaks.
These things go deeper, of course. Thousands of books, centuries of Argument, and the only honest way to engage is in small pieces. Until next time.
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