The Omnipotence of God: Power, Paradox and Free Will

The omnipotence of God is His power to do everything that is logically possible and consistent with His own perfect nature, a power that nothing outside Him limits or measures. The classical tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas, defined it with great care, and that definition settles the famous puzzles quickly. The question it leaves open is harder and closer to home: if God has all power, is any power left for us? Below we set out the classical account of this member of the attributes of God, the texts behind it, the omnipotence paradox, and five rival accounts of how divine power relates to human freedom, each at its strongest, before showing where the Many Beings series lands.

Key takeaways

• Omnipotence is power over everything possible. For Aquinas, God can do all things "possible absolutely," and a contradiction is no thing to be done.
• What God cannot do is part of His power. Augustine taught that God cannot die, be deceived or lie, and is Almighty because He cannot.
• The stone paradox is the easy problem. The live dispute is power and freedom, where Calvinist, Molinist, open theist and process accounts divide.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps both powers whole. Where open theism and process theism trim God's power to free the creature, and a strong Calvinist reading lets His power absorb ours, it holds His power absolute in His frame and ours real in ours, because His power sustains our freedom.

What is the omnipotence of God?

Omnipotence means, literally, being all-powerful. Said of God, it names His power to bring about whatever can be brought about. Thomas Aquinas gave the definition that most of the tradition has kept. In the Summa Theologiae he writes that "God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely", and he explains why the phrase "possible absolutely" matters: "whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility." A square circle is not a hard task that God declines. It is no task at all. Aquinas draws the conclusion with care: "it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them."

Augustine had made the same point from the other side, in a sermon to catechumens preparing for baptism. "God is Almighty, and yet, though Almighty, He cannot die, cannot be deceived, cannot lie; and, as the Apostle says, cannot deny Himself. How many things that He cannot do, and yet is Almighty! Yea therefore is Almighty, because He cannot do these things." Death, error and falsehood are failures of power. A being that could suffer them would have less power. In The City of God he puts it in one line: God "is called omnipotent on account of His doing what He wills, not on account of His suffering what He wills not."

Modern philosophers restate this classical doctrine of God with more precision. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that omnipotence "has been analyzed in terms of the power to bring about certain possible states of affairs," and describes a sense of maximal power in which "no being could exceed the overall power of an omnipotent being." To say God is omnipotent, then, is to say that no possible being could be more powerful than He is. In classical theism, His power is also no part He has. By divine simplicity it is His very being, acting.

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Is God all powerful? What Scripture says

Is God all powerful? Scripture's answer is yes, and it gives the answer in prayer before it gives it in doctrine. Jeremiah, ordered to buy a field in a city about to fall, begins his prayer here:

"Ah, Sovereign LORD, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you." (Jeremiah 32:17, NIV)

When Sarah laughed at the promise of a son in her old age, the Lord answered with a question: "Is anything too hard for the LORD?" (Genesis 18:14, NIV). When the disciples, astonished at how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom, asked who then could be saved, Jesus answered, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26, NIV). The power in view is God's power to give life and to save, which no creature has.

The New Testament's great title for God is pantokrator, the Almighty: "Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns" (Revelation 19:6, NIV). Scripture joins that power to His holding of all things in being. The Son is "sustaining all things by his powerful word" (Hebrews 1:3, NIV).

Scripture also names what God cannot do, and it names them as glories. It is "impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:18, NIV). "He cannot disown himself" (2 Timothy 2:13, NIV). "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone" (James 1:13, NIV). This is Augustine's point in the Bible's own words. It is also why the tradition counts omnipotence among the incommunicable attributes: creatures have power, but no creature has all power.

The omnipotence paradox: can God make a stone He cannot lift?

The omnipotence paradox asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it. The classical answer is that no such stone is possible, and failing to make a contradiction is no loss of power. Either answer seems to name something God cannot do. If He can make such a stone, there is a stone He cannot lift. If He cannot make it, there is a stone He cannot make. According to Wikipedia's survey, Averroes in the twelfth century and Aquinas after him both addressed it.

The modern replies follow Aquinas. George Mavrodes argued in 1963 that the question is self-contradictory. If God is omnipotent, "a stone too heavy for God to lift" names nothing, so failing to make it is no lack of power. C. Wade Savage put the same point positively: "God can create stones of any poundage and God can lift stones of any poundage." The "cannot" in each horn of the dilemma marks a contradiction dressed as a task.

Harry Frankfurt, following Descartes, offered a bolder reply: God can make the stone and then lift it anyway. He asked whether there is "any greater trick in performing two logically impossible tasks than there is in performing one." The reply is clever, and it shows what is at stake. If God can do the contradictory, the paradox vanishes, but so does every argument about God at all.

The stone is therefore the easy problem, and Aquinas settled it in a sentence. One lesson remains, though. The paradox works only by setting God's power against itself on a single scale, as though His power to make and His power to lift were two quantities that could be weighed against each other. The same picture of power returns in the debate over human freedom, where it does far more damage.

Can God do the logically impossible?

The classical answer is no. René Descartes held that the eternal truths of logic and mathematics depend on God's free will. God, he wrote to Mersenne in 1630, "was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal." In a 1648 letter he went further: "I would not dare to say that God cannot make a mountain without a valley, or bring it about that 1 and 2 are not 3." Alvin Plantinga named this view universal possibilism, the claim that for God everything is possible, contradictions included.

Its motive is reverent. If the laws of logic bind God, they seem to stand above Him as a master He must obey, and a God with a law above Him is not the self-existent Lord of all.

The cost is too high, and William Lane Craig has said so. Universal possibilism, he writes, "has been rightly rejected by almost every other Christian philosopher," because "It asks us to believe, for example, that God could have brought it about that He created all of us without His existing." A God for whom contradictions are possible has made every statement about Him as true as its denial. The classical reply removes the motive without the cost. The truths of logic are not a law outside God. In Craig's words they "just are representations of the way God's mind essentially thinks," and for Aquinas a contradiction lacks "the aspect of possibility" because it is no way that anything could be. God's aseity stands, for nothing outside Him binds Him.

Is omnipotence coherent?

Yes, on the right analysis, though defining the omnipotence of God precisely has proved harder than affirming it. Early analyses said an omnipotent being can do any task it is possible for that being to do. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives the standard counterexample: McEar, a being who "essentially has the power to do only one thing, namely, scratch his ear." McEar can do everything it is possible for McEar to do, and he is not omnipotent. Philosophers therefore moved to analyses in terms of states of affairs and maximal power, the approach of Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso's essay "Maximal Power," which Craig endorses. Omnipotence, Craig writes, "should be defined in terms of ability to actualize states of affairs."

A second objection is moral. Nelson Pike argued, as the Stanford Encyclopedia reports, that we praise God for His goodness only if He had the power to do evil and did not. The classical reply reverses the inference. Aquinas writes, "Therefore it is that God cannot sin, because of His omnipotence," since sin is a failing, and failing is not a power. Craig makes the same point in the modern idiom: because of God's essential goodness, a state of affairs in which God does evil is "broadly logically impossible," and so "inability to bring about such a state of affairs is no infringement of omnipotence."

If God is omnipotent, is there room for human freedom?

Here is the live dispute. Every tradition below answers yes and differs on how. The Stanford Encyclopedia observes that "an omnipotent God is not required to have power over the free decisions of non-divine agents," and the whole question is what that sentence means. Does God's omnipotence stop at our freedom, or reach through it, or hold it in being? Five accounts answer, and each sees something true.

The theistic personalist worry

Brian Davies coined the term theistic personalism for the view that God is a person in much the way we are persons, only without our limits. From that vantage the classical picture raises a hard question. The classical God knows and wills the whole of creation in one eternal act, and that seems to leave every creaturely act already settled before the creature acts. Power, as we know it, is shared out among agents: when one ruler has more, his subjects have less. If God has all of it, it seems we have none, and our choices are a puppet's movements.

From where we stand, this is a good point, and it drives the open and process revisions below, both of which limit God's power, by choice or by nature, so that the creature can be free.

The Calvinist reading: power that reaches every act

John Calvin refused to imagine a distant or idle Almighty. God's power, he wrote, is "not the vain, indolent, slumbering omnipotence which sophists feign, but vigilant, efficacious, energetic, and ever active," "intent on individual and special movements." On this reading, which the Reformed tradition develops into a full account of the sovereignty of God, nothing happens that God's power does not direct.

The strength of the view is security. If no event escapes God's power, no event can overturn His promise. Its critics press two points. Human freedom must then be compatibilist, a matter of acting on one's own desires rather than of real alternatives, and the authorship of sin presses on a power that directs every act. Many Reformed and Arminian writers answer the second with God's permissive will, the claim that God permits what He does not cause.

The Molinist account: Craig and middle knowledge

William Lane Craig defends a different route, and his intuition comes first. He defines omnipotence as the ability to actualize states of affairs, and on that analysis no being, God included, can bring it about that a creature freely does something, since a free act produced by another is not free. That is no limit on power, any more than the square circle. Through middle knowledge, God's knowledge of what any free creature would do in any circumstance, God can still govern the whole. Middle knowledge, Craig has said, "makes the divine decree reckon with human freedom," so that "God's ultimate purposes are achieved through the human free decisions rather than in spite of or against them."

That last sentence is exactly right, and any adequate account must keep it. The overreach lies only in the machinery. Critics press the grounding objection, asking what makes those counterfactuals true before any creature exists, and Volume One argues that the extra category of knowledge is unnecessary once God's own frame and ours are distinguished. The view has its own article on Molinism.

Open theism: power voluntarily restrained

Open theism, developed by Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders and William Hasker, affirms God's power and holds that He restrains its use for love's sake. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the view, "Though omnipotent, He has chosen to invite us to freely collaborate with Him in governing and developing His creation." God may intervene at any time, but "He cannot both respect our libertarian freedom and guarantee that we will do specific things freely." In creating, He "takes the risk that many of us will reject Him."

The strengths are real. Libertarian freedom is honored, prayer matters, and God is not the author of the evil He hates. The weakness is the guarantee. A God who has restrained His power at the point of our freedom cannot promise how the story ends. He can only manage it with unmatched skill, and the believer who needs a settled promise is handed a forecast.

Process theism: persuasive, not coercive, power

Process theism goes further and denies that God ever had coercive power at all. Its slogan, in the Stanford Encyclopedia's account, is that "God acts by persuasion rather than by coercion." Coercive power is "the ability of one actual being to unilaterally bring about the decision of another actual being," and "In process metaphysics, no individual possesses this ability." Alfred North Whitehead objected that theology had given God "the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar," and later process thinkers such as David Ray Griffin and John Cobb developed the account.

A God who lures rather than forces is not responsible for the evil free creatures do, and love that coerces is not love. But a God who can only persuade can guarantee nothing, cannot be the God of creatio ex nihilo, and cannot finally defeat evil. Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, reaches its answer to evil with "no diminished God," declining "the revision of omnipotence by which process thought clears the divine of responsibility."

Volume One weighs each of these accounts chapter by chapter, and it is free to download.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism resolve power and freedom?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single error: one term carried across two frames as though it meant the same thing in each. On power, the strong Calvinist reading lets God's power absorb the creature's, while open theism and process theism shrink God's power to set the creature free. FICT keeps both powers whole by granting that each side has a real point.

The theistic personalist reads power from our finite, human frame, and from there the worry is sound. In our frame power is a quantity shared among agents, and one agent's control is another's loss. The classical theist reads power from God's own frame, and from there the claim is sound as well. The two frames differ because God's nature and ours differ in kind, and a being's nature fixes how it perceives, as the series' opening chapters argue.

Scripture itself uses "power" and "powerlessness" in two senses, as the series' reading of dynamis and koach shows: the weakness of a nation that cannot stand before an army, and the deeper powerlessness of a soul that cannot make itself righteous (Romans 5:6). In God's frame, absolute power is the power by which anything exists at all. In ours, finite power is one creature's ability to act within a world of other creatures.

The free-will dilemma assumes that these are one kind of power on one scale, so that whatever God has, we lack. Once the two are told apart, it dissolves. God's power is not a larger supply of our kind of power. It is the power by which there are creatures with power. Volume One's Theorem of Ontological Sustenance states it: God grounds and sustains the finite world without replacing the creature as the real cause of its own acts. His sovereignty, in the book's words, "is perfectly exercised precisely by sustaining the creature's finite contingency, not by mechanically overriding it." Paul said the same to the Athenians: "For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28, NIV). "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17, NIV). He is the ground of being, not one more being competing for room.

The omnipotence of God is therefore the condition of our freedom, not its rival. A weaker God could not hold a free creature in being, and an omnipotent God is the one who can. Paul holds both sides in a single charge to the Philippians:

"Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose." (Philippians 2:12-13, NIV)

God remains able to determine a choice when His purpose requires it, as Scripture shows in the hardening of Pharaoh (Exodus 9:12), and Volume One calls this His extraordinary providence. In His ordinary providence He is under no necessity to dictate our choices, and He sustains choices He does not dictate. As the book puts it, "When a person exercises finite sovereignty, it does not infringe upon God's absolute sovereignty."

Craig's intuition stands: God's purposes are achieved through free decisions. FICT reaches it without Molinism's third category of divine knowledge and without open theism's restraint of God's power, because the frames, once distinguished, already hold both. Is this relativism, or mystery under a new name? Neither. There is one reality and one truth about it, known in two modes, and the difference between the modes follows from the difference between God's nature and ours, fixed before any dilemma was raised. The statement of FICT sets the position out in one place.

The full argument is the central chapter of Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, and you can read it free.

Does God's power make prayer and Christ's weakness unreal?

If the omnipotence of God holds everything, does asking Him do anything? Volume Four answers that petitionary prayer is a genuine secondary cause: God wills the prayer and His answer together in one eternal act, and the prayer carries real weight in that act. "Real causal weight on the creature's side; zero change on God's side." Prayer is a real cause without God having to change His mind.

The same question presses at the cross. Paul says the Son "made himself nothing" (Philippians 2:7, NIV), and kenoticism read that as the Son laying aside omnipotence for a season. Volume Four reads it otherwise. The limits of Christ's earthly life were real, and they were the limits of the human nature He took up: "a metric constraint, not an attribute divestment." The kenosis, in the book's phrase, is "the humility of addition," the infinite Person living truly within a finite frame, where He could hunger, grow weary and suffer without ceasing to be Lord.

Paul learned the shape of divine power in his own weakness:

"Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" (2 Corinthians 12:8-9, NIV)

Aquinas saw the same thing: "God's omnipotence is particularly shown in sparing and having mercy."

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, shows how prayer can be a real cause before a God who does not change.

Frequently asked questions

Can God do anything?

God can do anything that is possible and consistent with His perfect nature. Aquinas teaches that God "can do all things that are possible absolutely." A contradiction, such as a square circle or a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift, is a set of words that names no task. In Aquinas's phrasing, such things cannot be done; it is not that God cannot do them.

Can God lie or sin?

No. Scripture says it is "impossible for God to lie" (Hebrews 6:18, NIV), and Augustine taught that God "cannot die, cannot be deceived, cannot lie." These are not limits on God's omnipotence but expressions of it. Lying and sinning are failures, and failure is a lack of power. Aquinas draws the conclusion directly: God cannot sin "because of His omnipotence."

Does God limit His power to give us free will?

Christians answer differently. Open theists hold that God restrains His power voluntarily so that creatures can choose freely, and process theists hold that God's power was never coercive to begin with. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers that no limit is needed. God's power is the power that sustains our freedom in being, and our finite power works within the world He sustains, so the two never compete on one scale.

If God is all powerful, why is there evil?

The dilemma David Hume gave to his character Philo asks whether God is able to prevent evil but unwilling, or willing but unable. The classical answer keeps both God's power and His goodness: He permits finite evil for purposes consistent with His goodness and will not allow evil the last word. The article on why God allows suffering takes the question in full, and Volume Two answers it without diminishing God's power.

What is the difference between omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence?

Omnipotence is God's power to do all that is possible. Omniscience is His knowledge of all that is true. Omnipresence is His presence to everything He has made. In classical theism they are not three separate components of God but one simple God known under three aspects, and each raises its own version of the same question: how God can have it without crowding out His creatures.

Where to go from here

The stone was never the real threat to the omnipotence of God. The threat was a picture of power as a fixed supply, so that every ounce God holds is an ounce we lack. Each tradition guarded something true against that picture. Calvin guarded the reach of God's power into every event, Craig its working through free decisions, and the open and process theists the reality of the creature's own agency. Read with God's frame and ours kept distinct, the omnipotent God and the free creature stand together as Creator and creature, and neither diminishes the other.

Volume One sets out the case for sovereignty, power and freedom from first premises, and it is yours free. The series carries the same method into evil, time and changelessness.