The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 25
a definition of omnipotence. It is a difficult problem, and a useful
discussion of it would lead us deep into the forbidding territory of
technical metaphysics. I will suppose in these lectures that we have some
sort of pre-analytic grasp of the notion of omnipotence, and I will justify
employing this concept in the absence of an adequate definition of it by
pointing out that not having at my disposal an adequate definition of
omnipotence does not make my task, the task of trying to show that the
argument from evil is a failure, any easier. It is, after all, philosophers
who employ the argument from evil, and not their critics, who make
assertions about what God is able to do or would be able to do if he
existed. The critics’ statements about God’s abilities are always denials:
the critics, insofar as they say anything about God’s abilities, are always
concerned to deny that God can do some of the things that various
premises of the argument imply he can do. In my discussion of the
argument from evil, I’ll always simply accept any statement that starts
‘God can ...’ or ‘God could have ...’—unless the thing God is said
to be able to do implies a metaphysical impossibility. (After all—pace
Cartesii—whatever ‘omnipotent’ may properly mean, the proposition
that God cannot do X is consistent with the proposition that God is
omnipotent if X is metaphysically impossible.) And, of course, I don’t
propose simply to assert that some act that God is alleged to be able
to perform involves a metaphysical impossibility; I propose to present
arguments for any such statement.
Aquinas, in the famous discussion of omnipotence that I quoted
in note 5, says that ‘‘whatever implies a contradiction does not fall
within the scope of divine omnipotence’’, and I have been more
or less following his lead. (More or less, but closer to less than to
more: the notion of metaphysical impossibility is richer than the
notion ‘‘implies a contradiction’’.) There is, of course, another, stronger
conception of omnipotence, whose most famous advocate is Descartes.
According to this conception, God is able to do anything, including
(Descartes tells us) creating two mountains that touch at their bases
and have no valley between them. 6 I shall not discuss this ‘‘strong’’
conception of omnipotence, which seems to me to be pretty obviously
incoherent—incoherent because ability (the concept that is expressed
by sentences of the form ‘x is able to do y’) is no more and no less than
the power to choose among possible states of affairs, to determine which
of various incompatible possible states of affairs are to be actual. But I
will make a promise. Our interest in the attribute of omnipotence in
these lectures has to do only with the role it plays in the argument from