So, just what are we talking about?

[Chaerophon]

Many philosophers and theologians regard this puzzle about omnipotence as not a very serious problem. What they often say is that God can do whatever is logically possible. God cannot create contradictions, they say, but that is no real limitation of God's power. To talk about an actually existent contradiction is just nonsense, they claim; that God cannot create a stone he cannot lift, or that God cannot create an actually existent square circle, is not any serious limitation of God's power. So, they say, we could say that God can do anything that does not imply a contradiction.

I hate to break it to you and your friend there, but many philosophers HAVE regarded it as a serious difficulty. In fact, the entire skeptic school, among others, regard it as a serious argument. This is far from schoolyard stuff, although you may very well have heard it there, it remains a source of division, even today.

By this definition, God is either subject to the laws of logical possibility, or else he has created them in order to be subjected to them. No argument can deny that. Case closed. The rest is just words. Read it again, and tell me how it's not. Who determines what is a contradiction? If it is not God, then he is not omnipotent. If it IS God, then, his inability to act outside of his own limits is, you guessed it, a limit.

Let me put it in other terms. Imagine that I exist in a canyon in the wild. I have bricks and mortar, and I build a wall, sealing the canyon, that I cannot climb and I cannot knock down. I can't get through it, or around it. (I don't have any tools). Does this suggest a logical contradiction to you? If not, then neither should the notion that God could do the same thing to himself. For God, the stuff of life should be as bricks and mortar. If he has limited himself, then his omnipotence in the purest sense is put into question.