Things that God can't do

Clinton Chisholm , Guest Columnist

Before you feel impelled by the headline alone to call any of your friends to tell them "Mi know lang taim seh dah bway Chizam a wolf inna sheep cloze im ah reptobate [read reprobate]" take the time to read the whole column carefully and think.

Yes, contrary to popular religious belief, the notion that God is omnipotent does not mean that God can do any and everything. A meaningless self-contradiction is not a 'thing' that falls under the rubric of omnipotence. Consider the nonsense, 'God can create a rock so heavy that even He can't lift it up' or 'God can make a married bachelor'.

Let me quote revered Christian thinkers on this issue. As C.S. Lewis says, "Nonsense does not cease to be nonsense when we add the words 'God can' before it." (Cited in Peter Kreeft, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, IVP, 1994, 139).

Contemporary philosophers William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland put it thus: "God's being omnipotent does not imply that He can do logical impossibilities such as make a round square or make someone freely choose to do something" (In their Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, IVP, 2003, 538).

Critics of religion and seekers after truth, including Christians who wrestle with the reality of evil along with notions of divine omnipotence, need to grapple with the interplay of free will and divine omnipotence. We can derive much food for thought here from seasoned philosophers.

FREE CREATURES

Distinguished philosopher Alvin Plantinga, while arguing a case for a possible reason why God allows evil in the world, says, "Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil, and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom. This is the source of moral evil ... a world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all" (cited in Ronald H. Nash, Faith & Reason: Searching For a Rational Faith, Academie Books, 1988, 190).

So then, God could either create a world with free-willed creatures (including the possibility of evil), or He could create a world minus free-willed creatures and minus the possibility of evil, BUT HE COULD NOT CREATE BOTH.

For a more developed treatment of the challenges to theism arising from evil, see the current series on my Facebook page.

The Rev Dr Clinton Chisholm is a theologian. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and clintchis@yahoo.com