it's a weird argument and, I must admit that I don't like your particular response (sorry).

I don't think it gets at the heart of the matter.

If we believe in an omnipotent God, we have to assume that God could create such a heavy rock. The fact that he 'chooses' not to, becomes sort of irrelevant because the potential is there.

While its perfectly conceivable that God would choose to 'unmake' the universe, I reject the idea that such a thing would happen due to some perceived paradox in the construction of human logic.

Furthermore - I don't like ascribing the 'he chooses not to' line to God. Afterall, he's God. What can we mere mortals know about what God does and does not choose to do. Maybe he's up in his miracle work out room now, making paradoxically heavy rocks, just for fun.

Atheists like this question because the answer always sounds contradictory. Either we have to 'concede' that could can (or could potentially - but chooses not to) end his own existence. Yes, the question reduces to "Well could your God kill Himself?" - but I don't see what's un-profound about that question.

If, in the beginning, there was nothing, and God exists independently, but also as a part, of the universe, we need to recognize the fact that logical paradoxes need not apply to God.

In the Jewish kabbalah tradition, God exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and everywhere in between. The very nature of language is definitional, to limit meaning. The universal idea of space and separation makes it impossible for us to comprehend exhibiting simultaneous states of being and not-being (and everthing - and nothing - in between).

The point I'm trying to make - Do you think my omnipotent God would be worried about uncreating himself in a logical paradox? You think I have to decide to limit what God wants to or can do just so we can put Him into a context that we can understand? Just trying to understand what God actually is will drive you insane because our puny human minds cannot fathom the universe - let alone something that exists beyond the universe and between it, but also as the ENTIRETY of it - in space and time (and dimensions we can't even begin to fathom).

You really think some measly paradox about a rock can stand up to that?
 

So basically you are arguing that God can make himself no longer be omnipotent or no longer exist? That's interesting.

By the way, what do you mean that "This is a standard arrow in the atheist's quiver"? I'm an atheist, and I have conversed regularly with other atheists, and I have never heard it before. It can't be too much of a "standard."
 

I'm an atheist too, and like Mark, I've never heard this question asked by an atheist; only by Christians who are engaging in a philosophical debate!

I think the reason is that to an atheist the question is kind of irrelevant. Who cares what a being can do if you don't believe in that being in the first place? The answer to the question doesn't prove anything either way about God, so what's the point?

I don't think that any particular answer to the question is damaging to the concept of God. If you were to say "No, God cannot make a stone that he cannot lift", then I as an atheist would reply "Fine. That has no impact on my disbelief, but I don't think it's a problem for your belief either."

It's perfectly consistent to say that God is omnipotent and that he cannot perform logically inconsistent acts. He can do anything that it is logically possible to do. Deliberately creating a challenge that is paradoxical is exposing a problem with the question, not with God.
 

I think what is more interesting is how this question brings to light how people perceive god. I think if you answer this question in either a negative or a positive than your image of god is something in a specific form. I lean toward agnostic, but I would answer this question, “What makes you think god lifts things? God isn’t a person, or a thing, but rather a creator. Of course, if he has the powers that many attribute to him, he could create a huge rock, than an even huger rock, and than a hugerer rock….if that makes sense. But if he wanted to move it, he would, not be lifting it, but by the same “magical” way he created it and all other things (sorry I couldn’t hold back all of my sarcastic disbelief about the mythology of god.) In other words; lifting, running, jumping, swimming etc.. are all physical actions that animals perform, not omnipotent creators of all life.”
 

Zachary,

Your "puny human minds" argument is just a cop out. It's used quite often by theists, but it is a cop out nevertheless. It's used to end the reasoning process. The "all things are possible to God" argument is just an assumption. It *has* to be assumed because it can't be proven.

The answer to the question "Can God Make a Rock So Heavy He Can't Lift It?" gets us nowhere. It doesn't prove that God exists. There is no way to prove that God exists. That's the logical problem that thinkers throughout history have failed to accomplish. They have all come up short.

This also means that I don't know for certain that my belief that God does not exist is correct. This is why I'm also an agnostic. I don't believe in God, but I also don't believe that you can know for certain whether or not God exists.
 

Mark - It's not a cop out all... you're just (incorrectly) assuming that religious faith should be logical when, by definition, it is not.

My point stands - you can't apply logic to something that is impossible to comprehend logically. That, itself, doesn't make sense.

Then again, nobody said believing in God was supposed to be easy or logical or rational. I'm sorry if you think beleving otherwise is a "cop-out"
 

Zachary, it's true that religious faith is not logical (in the sense that it is outside logic). But that doesn't necessarily mean that the object of that faith is also not logical (or rather not subject to logical analysis). And, of course, it doesn't mean that he is, either.

A plausible answer to the original question might be that God comes before not only physics, but also logic. That is, in some way, God created the structure of logic, all the infrastructure on which reason and math exists. This also handily gets around the old question of "Who created God?", because the answer would be that God created the very logic that makes such a question meaningful.

The trouble with it as an answer is that if you start down the path of accepting this argument, then argument comes to an end because in order to argue about these things you need to use the very logic that you're saying does not apply.

That is not an argument that it is wrong; it's just an argument that it is impossible to argue about it!
 

I think I will just have to remain by my original position on this in regards to Bob - he's a very fine economist, but if I were ever to discuss religion with him I would quickly react the way I react to Keynesians when discussing economics.

I think von Mises did a very fine job dispensing with the religion debate in Human Action (chapter II, section 11).

Religion is not subject to scientific or praxeological analysis. Or to put it differently: the debate is moot. Theists will never give up their belief in (the) deity(ies), regardless of the argument put forward by atheists.

There isn't anything an atheist can do to convince a theist that there is/are no god/s.

As I said, I think Bob is a fine economist. Newton was a very fine physicist - and his standing as such is untouched by the othe strange intellectual hobbies he has had.
 

Deep. Did the other posters above just imply they can look at a house and say, "There's no such thing as carpenters, they do not exist"?

Because I am, I am the proof of.

A rock to heavy to lift = humans who have the free will to disobey?

If wet matches do not start a fire, could a person assume matches do not start fires?

Prove love exists?

Am I banned? I thought it was just a technical glitch/security flaw. But... Karen DeCosters' blog post about, "car wash libertarians" was pretty good. This isn't one of those car wash blogs, is it?

BTW, the image of the zebra in the tar pit is from a children's christian book I saw ~30 years ago. City fellas might be put off by the reality of it, but it pretty well sums up the Libertarian movement.

Is emotional suffering, physical or is it metaphysical?
 

"Did the other posters above just imply they can look at a house and say, "There's no such thing as carpenters, they do not exist"?"

No, they didn't.
 

We KNOW houses are built by people, hence when we see a house we can reasonably assume it was built by human beings. We have seen human beings built houses before.

However, none of us has seen a deity create a world, and hence it is not logical to look at the world and assume it was built by a deity.

The real difference between the scientific mind and the theist mind is this: the scientific mind can admit that it does not understand. The theist mind does not understand, and therefore calls it God. By giving something we don't understand a name we pretend that we have more knowledge than we do.

There is no practical difference between saying: I have no clue how life came about and God made life. Except, of course, that once I figure out how life DID come about I can say: x,y, and z made life happen, and here is the evidence, while God then moves one step back and is used as an explanation for x, y, and z.

More often than not, the god most theists believe in is nothing more but the God of Gaps.

Of course, in addition to the God of Gaps the presistent theist will sooner or later resort to Tertullian (or his latter day intellectual successor Lewis) and say "credo quia absurdum". That's fine, of course, except then the debate is over.
 

Bob,

Your argument is interesting but inadequate. And, the premise is wrong.

As Christians, it is not our responsibility to defend God before atheists. It is for atheists to defend their lives and beliefs before God.

Some Christians take Colossians 2 as a warning to not engage in philosophical debates. While I do not agree that Christians must shy away from philosophy, I do believe that we must not hinge our faith on the strength of our - wholly inadequate -- philosophical defenses of God and His Bible.

In church today, a man dying of cancer gave his testimony to the congregation. He stated, "I do not believe some of the passages in the Bible ... I believe all of them."

That, my brother, is a sound defense.

Cheers.
 

Bob,

My comments above are not to be read as I believe that you are inadequate. I enjoy your blog postings.
 

"...a warning to not engage in philosophical debates."

I like that Jim, thanks for posting it.

"- wholly inadequate -- "
No doubt.

I thought relgious philosophical debates were more about sprinkling water on a plant. Perhaps a person should only see sticker bushes & on keep walking.
 

It perplexes me tremendously how it is that some people can be so beautifully adept at applying logic to correctly understand the universe (as Bob is in the field of economics) and at the same time be perfectly willing to embrace ideas about reality (religion, mysticism, etc.) that entail the necessary suspension of those same rules for correct thinking.
 

Some general responses, folks:

(a) I have had atheists email me with this question after I wrote a "religious" piece for LRC. When I was an atheist, this was a standard tool in my kit, along with Mises' point that a God couldn't act (because He would suffer no uneasiness).

(b) Obviously God's existence doesn't depend on my musings. But by the same token, deficit spending either does or does not stimulate the economy; my articles don't affect that. Yet if the goal is to prevent a deeper depression--or to save souls--then I will write on these things when I think I can convince a few people to rethink their (in my view) erroneous views.

(c) It is odd that both Christians and atheists are telling me to stop trying to use logic to defend the Christian worldview. It is this sort of thing that motivates me to continue: I am not nearly as well versed in Christian works as, say, in libertarianism or Austrian economics (and I need to correct that deficiency), but if many Christians and atheists agree that it's pointless to even try to make God "make sense," then I have a wide open field for my naive writings.
 

Bob,

a simple question in the Popperian tradition: what does the assumption of God help to explain that cannot be equally explained by non-theist explanations - and does not amount to the God of Gaps?

Or to be more precise: what testable predictions can be made using the God Hypothesis?
 

I'd be impressed just to see God lift a Bic Pen from the ground, who cares about a heavy rock?

There's an extreme leap in logic when you say "He chooses instead to retain his omnipotence". How can you know the choices of God?

The initial assumption of omnipotence is faulty. Why believe in the first place that it is a quality that something can possess?

If you believe in a god that is omnipotent, you believe in a god that works outside the framework of reality.

The idea that "it's god, it can do anything" is just lame magical thinking. That cop out of logic is hard to take seriously.
 

Bob, I don't know whether you were referring (at least in part) to me when you said "It is odd that both Christians and atheists are telling me to stop trying to use logic to defend the Christian worldview."

I was only saying that if you accept certain arguments about God (i.e. that he is outside logic) then you cannot analyse him using logic.

Personally, I see no reason why you should not be able to use logic to defend your religious view. I have a Christian friend who believes the bible is the literal truth, and his view is that other Christians often have too woolly a view of faith. He sees it as something based on evidence; he believes that he *knows* there is a God, and in particular that the bible is true.

Now I, of course, disagree with the quality of his evidence, but I can have a decent argument with him because we at least agree on the method.

As an aside, the captcha for this comment is "ahsses". Do you think Blogger is trying to tell us something? :-)
 

"a simple question in the Popperian tradition: what does the assumption of God help to explain that cannot be equally explained by non-theist explanations - and does not amount to the God of Gaps?

Or to be more precise: what testable predictions can be made using the God Hypothesis?"

"God of Gaps" is really just a characterization of a God theory, it is not an argument against God.

Every ligitimate advance in science does not conflict with theism in general. In fact, many modern sciences and philosophers are turning to theism as our knowledge increases(Hawkins,Flew for example).

Requiring testability as a condition for a theory in science does not seem to be applied evenly today. What can the "theory" of evolotion predict? If you put an animal into a certain enviornment, can evolution predict if, when and what kind of mutation will occur? No. But one can take the animal into the Lab, and cause a certain mutation, and with predictability. But this would not be evolution, what I described in the lab was purposed, directed, and designed. So when the theory of a "designer" is used with evolution, it makes sense. Evolution on its own, predicts nothing.

So theories using God to explain certain phenomena is no less ligit than a theory like evolution.
 

From a traditional reformed Christian view God is not going to do the illogical. He remains consistent to his character. Just like the Austrian economist would not approve of the Fed and its printing Fiat money or doing away with the gold standard because they see both as going against what they stand for.
I would suggest that a random universe is more illogical than one created orderly by the Christian God and kept uniform by the power of his spirit. It seems to me however, that there is faith involved in both scenarios whether it is in science or the evidence for the Bible being true.
 

Dave: internal logical consistency and testability are the hall-marks of a good scientific hypothesis (plus additive explanation).

Evolutionary science can predict the following:

if you create a large (several billion N) bacteria population from a single bacteria, and you expose this population to an anti-biotic substance, then at least one bacteria is likely to survive, and will result in a new population of which many more members will be able to survive the anti-biotic substance.

The explanation is 'random' (no such thing, but that's another debate) mutation resulting from a number of factors.

While evolutionary theory cannot help to predict which specific features of the bacteria are likely to mutate, it can rule out some mutations (a better biologist than I could give you very specific examples of such likely impossible mutations). I am, of course, not referring to genotypical mutations but phenotypical mutations.


You say: "God of Gaps" is really just a characterization of a God theory, it is not an argument against God.

Of course not. It is no argument on the question of whether or not God exists, it is, however, a methodological argument.

The God Hypothesis has no 'added value' from a methodological point of view.

We can do chemistry and ballistic physics just fine without assuming God, but we cannot do chemistry without atomic theory, and we cannot do ballistic physics without the theory of gravity.

Name me a single branch of empirical science that depends critically on the God hypothesis for it to work. I'm all ears.

Interestingly, mathematics, formal logic, and praxeology, too, do just fine without the God hypothesis.

Praxeology, while not empirical, nevertheless allows us to make specific and testable predictions (even though it does not depend on them). Theology does not.

From a purely utilitarian point of view, the God hypothesis adds nothing. That's the whole point.

God may very well exist, but the hypothesis is not refutable by data, and it is self-isolated by its very structure.

So, again, the God Hypothesis has no methodological utility.
 

"It is odd that both Christians and atheists are telling me to stop trying to use logic to defend the Christian worldview. It is this sort of thing that motivates me to continue."

Bob,

As a Christian, I am telling you to stop directing your scarce time toward the effort of using logic to defend the free market and Austrian economics. And I am certain that there is an atheist who agrees.

Now, get motivated ;-)


note: By the way, your God/rock example is not what I consider to be a defense of the Christian worldview. The Bible is sufficient.
 

And here I was hoping you guys would tell us what the duck-billed platypus evolved from.

Ya know when I tell some people about the critter they look at me in disbelief, like I'm lying.
 

In the off hand chance others come back & read this. Being called a sticker bush is not exactly a slam, & it wasn‘t meant as such. The sticker bush is a tough plant that thrives where others perish and provide cover for many other life forms. Life forms which would die without the presence of the sticker bushes, life forms that provide much needed fuel for the survival of larger populations. People learn from sticker bushes, to fear their sharp prick from rushing things or carelessness. Any attempts to water a sticker bush might possibly result in a metaphysical transformation of the sticker bush, or an indirect unintended germination of a pumpkin seed that thrives under or near the sticker bush. Is that why our host wants to try, as we all should, so much as we are motivated to?

Just because an expression appears overly simple or full of errors, does not mean there are no underlying lessons to be learned by those who would be too quick to jump the gun & dismiss everything as stupid. For if there were underlying - purposely left unsaid - ideas worthy of consideration which are quickly dismissed without reflection, who is the stupid one then?
 

God is all knowing. Mises says that action requires uncertainty:
If man knew the future, he would not have to choose and would not act. He would be like an automaton, reacting to stimuli without any will of his own.

So can God act? I want to know!

PS: I am not sure whether asking about God's ability to lift rocks makes any more sense than His ability to make colorless blue.
 

The concept of a rock so big it can't be lifted is analogous to a married bachelor. It's self-contradictory.

God cannot do self-contradictory things - because they are nonsense. It is no limitation of his power that he cannot do nonsense things.
 

Wintery Knight, it's good to know that at least some of us have the ability to fathom the rationality of a non-human mind. Or are you saying that God works within the confines of the human mind? In that case, of course, God would be subject to human analysis and hence no more "God's ways are mysterious". Either God is comprehensible to the human mind or God is not comprehensible to the human mind. I think von Mises made that quite clear. Of course von Mises may have been wrong about the reality of praxeology, but if that is so, then praxeology is wrong.

In short, accepting the premises of praxeology is logically incompatible with the Christian theology. And - it is logically impossible to be a Christian theist AND an Austrian economist. It is, of course, psychologically possible to be both, but it is not logically coherent.
 

Mr. Murphy, your analysis of this issue is incorrect.

God cannot do *anything* that involves a logical contradiction. This is standard Christian theology.

God can no more make a stone so large that even He cannot lift it than he could make 2+2 = 5. Both for the reason that either would involve a logical contradiction.

The conception of God that you're positing is a schizophrenic God: a God who thinks He can do that which is inherently impossible.

God knows He cannot do that, and hence the desire to do that isn't even an option for Him.

God is perfect in all ways, but a necessary component of that perfection is that God is logical, otherwise "perfection" would have no meaning.
 

"a simple question in the Popperian tradition: what does the assumption of God help to explain that cannot be equally explained by non-theist explanations - and does not amount to the God of Gaps?

"Or to be more precise: what testable predictions can be made using the God Hypothesis?"

What does Beethoven's Fifth Symphony help explain? The point being, the idea of God is not a bad scientific hypothesis; it is not a scientific hypothesis at all.

Oh, and James Redford got this one right, Bob. 'Omnipotence' means 'can do all possible things,' not 'can do the impossible.'
 

Gene,

"the idea of God ... it is not a scientific hypothesis at all."

That's what I was getting at.