Is God Impossible?
Okay, another post about God. As you know, God in the Western tradition is usually understood as a being who
i) is all-powerful,
ii) is all-knowing,
iii) is all-good (perfectly good / maximally good), and
iv) created the universe.
Here are some reasons for thinking that such a being is metaphysically impossible.
1. Could God Make a Stone so Heavy He Couldn't Lift It?
If no, then he's not all-powerful, since we just found something he can't do. But if yes, then he's also not powerful, since there is something else he couldn't do, namely, lift that stone.
One answer to this: "Yes, he could make the stone that he couldn't lift, and then he could lift it too. God is so powerful that he can make contradictions true." I think this answer, however, is meaningless nonsense. To me, the idea that God "is so powerful that" he can make a contradictory sentence true is similar to the idea that God is so powerful that he can make it the case that some glubs are trish (where neither of those words has any meaning). No, that really isn't a question of power.
A better response: an all-powerful being can bring about anything that it is metaphysically possible for a being to bring about. There is, however, no metaphysical possibility in which God is unable to lift a stone. So God cannot bring that about.
2. Omniscience & Free Will
If God is omniscient, then he must know everything we're going to do before we do it. So we must not have free will, since at every future time, we will have to do whatever God already knows that we're going to do.
You could just deny that humans have free will. (Not a popular response among theists.) Note, however, that if the argument succeeds, it would seem to also show that God lacks free will, since even God must do whatever he already knows that he's going to do. This might also imply that God is not all-powerful.
Another response is that God doesn't know our free choices before we do them; rather, he just knows everything atemporally. Maybe God is "outside time", and from his extra-temporal perch, he just sees us freely choosing whatever we choose at each time. I don't like this, though, because I think the claim that God is "outside time" simply makes no sense. I don't know what it means for a conscious being to be 'outside time'. I think this is another case where people have been tricked by the existence of a form of words into thinking that they're saying something.
Surely, if "outside time" means anything, it at least means that the thing that's said to be outside time cannot perform actions that occur at particular times, cannot causally interact with temporal events, etc. But theists do not think this about God.
A better response would be that there are no determinate facts about the future choices of beings with free will. God knows all determinate facts but is not required to know "facts" that don't exist.
3. Can God Do Bad Things?
Can God make a mistake? Do evil? Commit a sin? If not, then He's not all-powerful, since there are things he can't do.
Response: (i) The ability to make mistakes doesn't really make you more powerful. (ii) God can perform evil actions, but he chooses not to; that's what makes him good. (iii) Maybe a being can commit an offence against itself, in which case God can sin, though, again, he chooses not to. Or, if you think it's metaphysically impossible to commit an offence against oneself, then God can't sin, but this doesn't conflict with his omnipotence (see sec. 1 above).
* * *
Those are all old problems, which I don't find very impressive. Now here are some other problems that I haven't heard anyone mention before . . .
4. An All-Good, All-Powerful Being Is Impossible
A perfectly good being always does the best it can do. That seems like an analytic truth. An all-powerful being can bring about anything that's metaphysically possible. Therefore, a perfectly good, all-powerful being would always bring about the best metaphysically possible outcome.
However, there is no best metaphysically possible outcome. For every possible state of the world, there are better ones. Even if there are infinitely many happy people, there could always be one more happy person. Or a higher order of infinity of happy people. Several other values (besides happiness) also have this feature of lacking any maximum point.
Conclusion: there cannot be a being that is both all-powerful and all-good.
In other words: suppose God creates a world. No matter what world He creates, you could imagine another god who would have created a better world. That other god is better than our God. Thus, our God is not maximally good.
(Note: It does not help to suppose that God creates an infinite multiverse. There could always be a better multiverse.)
5. Impossible Infinities
If he exists, God is infinite in various ways. Infinite knowledge, infinite power. Maybe infinite goodness? If he's omnipresent, then I guess that means he is infinitely large too?
On my account (Approaching Infinity), infinite extensive magnitude is possible, so God could be infinitely large. However, infinite intensive magnitudes are impossible. Infinite knowledge, intelligence, power, and goodness would probably qualify as infinite intensive magnitudes. So this kind of God is metaphysically impossible.
To tie this to some of the motivation for my theory of the impossible infinite: if there were a God, He could actualize many of the scenarios that appear in the paradoxes of the infinite. For instance, God could move marbles in and out of an urn fast enough to realize the Littlewood-Ross paradox. He could create a pile of opaque slabs of stone, with alternating colors, each slab being half the thickness of the one underneath it -- thus realizing one of Benardete's paradoxes. He could create Thomson's Lamp and flip the switch infinitely many times in an hour.
Thomson's Lamp, in case you missed it: The Lamp starts out on, gets switched off after 1/2 hour, on again after another 1/4 hour, then off, then on, etc. At the end of 1 hour, is it on or off?
That's the easiest of the paradoxes to explain. For the others, read my book.
What prevents these paradoxes from being realized, in my view, is basically that they require infinite energy within a finite spatiotemporal region (hence, infinite energy density, which is an intensive magnitude). It seems to me, however, that God would have either infinite energy density or some other form of infinite power that would enable him to realize the paradoxical scenarios, e.g., to flip a switch infinitely many times.
6. Impossible Necessary Beings
Some theists say that God is a necessary being (a being who could not have failed to exist). Some consider this essential to the definition of "God". It's allegedly established by the (bogus) Ontological Argument and is needed in Clarke's version of the Cosmological Argument to block a regress.
I think this is an absurd idea -- obviously impossible on its face. If a conscious being exists, it obviously could have failed to exist; there's no way of imagining the being so that it couldn't have not existed. (Compare: is it conceivable that "x doesn't exist" should be a contradiction, where "x" is the name of some person? Obviously no. Is it conceivable that "x doesn't exist" should be inconceivable? Again, obviously no.)
So if that's part of the definition of "God", then God is obviously impossible. That is why I charitably avoid building this in when I explain the concept of God.