I should be writing term papers but I thought I would slip in a quick post. What is a blog for if not distracting one from more pressing work?
It seems like the season for papers on divine omnipotence around these parts. Eric Funkhouser has a new paper On Privileging God's Moral Perfection in which he argues that there is an incompatibility between God�s omnipotence and his impeccability such that we should reject God's omnipotence in favor of God's moral perfection. Even though Eric is my thesis advisor I would normally respond to this sort of thing myself. However I am saved the work since Tom Senor has already beaten me to the punch with God's Goodness Needs No Privilege: A Reply to Funkhouser. When it's between your thesis advisor and your department chair you really have to go with the stronger of the two arguments.
Campbell Brown and Yujin Nagasawa also have a new paper out titled Anything You Can Do God Can Do Better. Brown and Nagasawa set about dismantling the Paradox the Stone which is often used in arguing for the incoherence of divine omnipotence. One of the tacks they take is to argue that the appeal to an ability that is possessed by humans but found lacking in God rests on an equivocation. While I am generally in favor of arguments that preserve God's omnipotence I found the equivocation portion of Brown and Nagasawa's paper puzzling.
Brown and Nagasawa argue that the comparison of God's ability to create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it and Hulk Hogan's ability to create a stone so heavy he cannot lift it contains an equivocation. It is supposed to be an equivocation in that the abilities are different because the stones are of "entirely different kinds." What different kinds you might wonder? Well one is of the kind that God cannot lift. Since the stones are of different kinds the abilities involved represent the performance of two different tasks. They attempt to illustrate this with the following example:
Suppose that Lisa can hold her child in her arms but that Nick cannot hold his child in his arms. In such circumstance, Lisa might claim, �Nick, I have an ability that you lack�that is, the ability to hold one�s own child.� On the face of it her claim is correct. However, if one examines it carefully by focusing on the word �one,� then one finds that Lisa is misleadingly comparing two different abilities. The one is Lisa�s ability to hold, say, her one year old baby, and the other is Nick�s ability to hold, say, his forty-seven year old son.Someone else please tell me that you think this sounds wrong too. To say that there is an equivocation is to claim that there is some lexical ambiguity where in a word of phrase has more than one meaning. Given the examples I fail to grasp where there is some confusion of meaning on the differing abilities. It seems to me that Lisa's claim is correct but not misleading and certainly not ambiguous as to the abilities. Nick simply has a plausible explanation as to why he lacks the ability.
Brown and Nagasawa seem to think that when claiming to have an ability another does not that the focus of the ability must be the same. Yet it does not seem to me that we treat cases of measuring ability in this way. Consider a case where someone claims to have the ability to be able to do more pushups than I. Could I then claim that this is simply an equivocation because I weigh 300lbs and they only weigh 160lbs and that my ability to do pushups and my opponents are really two different abilities? I think not but I am sure some thoughtful commenter will clear away my confusion.
My favorite article on this topic, though it's older, is "The Paradox of the Stone" by Wade Savage. In essence, the solution is that God cannot make a stone he cannot lift, because there is no such stone. (Similarly, he cannot think of the largest prime number, or remember the last sin he committed, because there is no such number and no such act.) This is not, in any meaningful sense, a restriction of divine abilities.
The only 'equivocation' I can see is that the description "make a stone he cannot lift" contains the indexical "he" which will differ in meaning depending on the individual to whom the ability is being attributed. In that sense, there's an equivocation, but it doesn't solve anything in the paradox by itself, so far as I can tell.
This may be Heath's point, and I am just repeating it. If so, I apologize. At any rate, I do not understand why Brown and Nagasawa spend so much time trying to spell out what they take to be an equivocation when the argument under consideration, viz. Argument 4 (Revised Paradox of the Stone), is clearly unsound. This argument goes as follows:
(1) If God is omnipotent, then he can do anything that Hulk Hogan can do.
(2) Hulk Hogan can create a stone that he cannot lift.
So, (3) if God is omnipotent, he can create a stone that he cannot lift.
Rather than making a case that the argument commits some fallacy, I would simply point out that we have excellent reason to think that (1) is false. How so? Because while it is true that God is omnipotent, it is false He can do anything that Hulk Hogan can do. I take it that the Hulkster is capable of doing a lot of things that God cannot do. Like what? Well, like pick his nose, flunk out of college, develop cancer, commit suicide, and so on. Saying that God is omnipotent does not require one to believe that God can do just anything. The fact that He is immaterial and wholly good does place on Him certain limitations, although, as Heath rightly notes, these limitations in no way deminish His omnipotency.