ABSTRACT
Let us turn then to the concept of omnipotence. What does it mean to say of any being that it is omnipotent? Here is one natural definition that seems initially obvious:
Definition 1 X is omnipotent = X can do everything
Some writers have accepted this simple definition. Descartes, for example, thought that God could even do something which was inconsistent with the laws of logic. God could have made the universe in such a way that 2 + 2 = 5, or triangles had four sides. That Descartes should have believed this helps to explain how it is so important to his epistemology that he should be able to prove that God exists, and that God is no deceiver, and why he thinks that an atheist mathematician cannot achieve any certainty even in mathematics. However, most writers have thought (surely correctly) that God cannot break the laws of logic (or alternatively, that he could not have made the laws of logic to be other than they are). (Notice how this thought fits nicely with the idea that God is a supremely rational being, who does nothing arbitrarily or whimsically.) But most writers have also thought (again surely correctly) that this is not a genuine incapacity or limitation in God’s power, since this does not imply that there is (as it were) a realm of the doable from which God is excluded. To say that something is logically impossible is precisely to exclude it from the realm of the do-able. So to say that God cannot do what is logically impossible is not to say that his power is limited in any way.
