Omniscience and maximal power

Religious Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 289-306

  Metcalf, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

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EID: 47249093002     PISSN: 00344125     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034412504007061     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. Two reasons for this abandonment are sophisticated versions of the free-will defence and of the unknown-purpose defence. A response to a deductive argument from evil must only show the possibility that some evil is metaphysically necessary for some greater good, and it is not particularly hard to tell such a story
2. Wes Morriston 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection: are they compatible?', Religious Studies, 37 (2001), 143-160
3. See also Wes Morriston 'Omnipotence and the power to choose'. Faith and Philosophy, 19 (2002), 358-367
4. Theodore M. Drange 'Incompatible-properties arguments: a survey', Philo, 1:2 (1998), 7-20
5. By 'positive atheism' I mean the belief that God does not exist. There is some debate about the meaning of 'atheism' and some parties feel it need not refer to disbelief, but rather simply to unbelief
6. This term did not originate here, but rather has become fairly common in the literature. It may derive from Thomas P. Flint and Alfred J. Freddoso 'Maximal power', in Alfred I. Freddoso (ed.) The Existence and Nature of God (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 81-113
7. Flint and Freddoso 'Maximal power', 84
8. There is a further schema of tasks that God cannot perform, 'to perform x where x is a task not performed by an omnipotent being', but we should avoid a definition of 'omnipotent' that describes a property no being can possess; therefore let us alter T-omnipotence one more time to be 'the ability to perform any task that is not defined such that an omnipotent being has not performed it'. This definition avoids circularity because the sense of 'omnipotent' above is de dicto, part of the description of the action rather than one of the properties of the being in question
9. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz provide similar examples. See Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz The Divine Attributes (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 169-171
10. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz have pointed out that Flint and Freddoso's account requires the possibility that counterfactuals of freedom are true, but there are reasons to think such counterfactuals are necessarily false. For a counterfactual of freedom to be true, it seems as if there must be a causation or entailment relation between the antecedent and the consequent, but if such a relation exists, it seems the consequent cannot therefore describe the action in question as 'free'. See Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz 'Omnipotence', in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 edn), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=〈http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/omnipotence/ 〉
11. Morriston Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection: are they compatible?'
12. See Wes Morriston 'Omnipotence and the Anselmian God', Philo, 4 (2001), 15-18, for a similar response to this objection
13. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 'Omnipotence'
14. Morriston 'Omnipotence and the Anselmian God', 17-18
15. T. J. Mawson 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection are compatible: a reply to Morriston', Religious Studies, 38 (2002), 215-223
16. Morriston 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection: are they compatible?'
17. Mawson 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection are compatible', 221
18. Morriston 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection: are they compatible?', 156
19. Morriston 'Omnipotence and the Anselmian God'
20. See Hoffman and Rosenkrantz in The Divine Attributes, 108. If God is maximally great, He is incorruptible, and this entails that He cannot lose any of His essential attributes
21. Flint and Freddoso 'Maximal power'
22. It is an interesting question what an omnipotent being would be like, if we adopt S-omnipotence. This being would have a minimum of essential attributes that preclude the ability to bring about states of affairs of the form 'some person freely does T', where T is some task. If we were to take God's limitations as a starting point, it seems that the omnipotent being would be non-omniscient, material, morally neutral, contingent, and within time
23. It is important to ask whether this God would be compatible with the God of the Bible. Jesus in Matthew 19.26 and Mark 10.27 asserts that all things are possible with God, but perhaps he could be taken to be saying that anyone can be saved with God's help, or that God can provide anything for any human
24. I am grateful to Kenneth Clatterbaugh, to Philip Osborne, and to anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments on this article