On Omnipotence (or, Can God Make A Circle So Square It's Green?)

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? It's an old riddle, apparently impossible to solve. And it is impossible to solve, for exactly the same reason that it's impossible to solve a wombat or conjugate an orangutan: because those combinations of words are meaningless. If an irresistible force exists, anywhere in Creation, then by definition there is no such thing as an immovable object. The "riddle" boils down to, what would happen if A was not A? That isn't a question, it's noise masquerading as English. And nobody does that to my language. Nobody.

Dost thou feel Puckish, lunk?

The more pernicious example, which everyone has heard, is the question, "Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it?" If He can, then there's something He can't lift, and if He can't, then there something He can't make. Oh no, it looks like He loses either way: so much for God's vaunted omnipotence! Except, again, the question is actually, "Is God more powerful than God," or in other words, "Is A not A?" The real answer is neither yes nor no. The real answer is, "Shut your trap, ya doofus."

God can do any Thing. Creating four beans out of nothingness is a thing, and therefore He can do that. Causing two beans plus two beans to equal five beans is not a thing. It's gibberish. He "can't" do that, because there's nothing there to do. Chesterton argues in Orthodoxy that you can easily tell whether a thing is possible (if only for God) by applying the test of imagination. You can imagine four beans suddenly coming into existence, but you can't imagine two and two not making four. That's because our minds are made in the image of God, and we share in the Fire of Divine Reason.

Sooner or later, my soon-to-be-born daughter is bound to ask me how a loving God can allow people to go to Hell. I'll have to have some kind of response ready, in small person language, to explain the darkest of all mysteries. By that time, her capacious brain should already encompass the business of A being A, so we'll start there. Heaven means freely chosen unity with God—therefore He can't force anyone to go to Heaven. And the alternative to everlasting love and joy is, you know, the lack of those things. It sounds almost ludicrously obvious.

Except it doesn't really satisfy the heart, does it. Here's a simple equation for why your fellow man will suffer for all of eternity, now let's go have lunch. I think we forget that omnipotence means God can do anything, but doesn't necessarily mean He can do anything easily. Remember that He had to rest after making the Earth. And He had to become Sin and actually go to Hell in order to give us the opportunity of entering the Kingdom. He not only endured the anguish and misery of every sufferer, He also endured the ugliness and filth of every causer of suffering. Just to give us the option. If He could have removed the alternative by any conceivable means, isn't it clear that He would have? But He couldn't, and He can't. Giving us the freedom to enter Heaven without the freedom to enter Hell is simply not a Thing.