Omnipotence

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Why this paradox is flawed.

Definition

Omnipotent is an adjective that is generally used to refer to a deity who has unlimited power and is able to do literally anything, with the word being a combination of "omni" (which means all) and "potence" (which means power, strength or potency). A being who would qualify for this has no limitations at all due to its power not having any boundary, and is capable of using every kind of ability that may or may not exist, at any degree of potency that it wants. Such an entity would also be Omnipresent due to it having the power to exist everywhere and nowhere, and Omniscient due to it having the power to know everything in existence, including every information that can or cannot exist in the past, present and future.

Answering the Omnipotence Paradox

A very common thing that is usually brought up about omnipotence is the paradox of the stone, that being "Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?", which is a question that has both the answers leading to him not being omnipotent, as if he can create it, he has created something beyond its power, thus he's not omnipotent, and if he can't, it means that there's something he cannot create, which leads to the same conclusion.

However, there are two different interpretations on how to refute this paradox.

The answer of the Scholastic current

The first interpretation of Omnipotence is the one of the scholastic current, which is also the most defended and used in theology.

According to it, the paradox is made due to omnipotence having a wrong interpretation, with the correct one being that God is capable of doing anything that is possible in its own nature, with paradoxes being impossible because of them being nonsensical, and thus meaning nothing in the first place. This answer was first made from Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential philosophers and theologians of all time, who explained in his Summa Theologiae that God is capable of doing just what is "absolutely possible", it meaning that is compatible with the subject, such as making Socrates sitting, and not the "absolutely impossible", where the predicate is incompatible with the subject, for example that a man is a donkey. As another example, Thomas brings up the idea of everything being compatible of the idea of being, except non-being, meaning that making being and non-being at the same time is illogical, thus impossible to achieve in the first place.

George I. Mavrodes, another philosopher, argued in defense of Aquinas that God cannot draw a square circle because of it being a self-contradictory task, and thus impossible due to it being nonsense and not because it's a limitation to his power.

The same line of thought was followed from Clive Staples Lewis, who, other than being a lay theologian, was also the author of the popular The Chronicles of Narnia. In his works there are also christian apologetics such as The Problem of Pain, where he explains that while God is capable of making miracles, he cannot make nonsense such as giving to a creature free will and at the same time preventing it to get free will, meaning that he cannot perform such an action not because of his power getting an obstacle, but because of nonsense still remaining such, even when God is involved.

Most of the scholastic authors follow the law of noncontradiction, which states that beings with contradictory properties cannot exist, such as married bachelors or a circle that has the circumference shorter than the diameter. However, it must be reminded that an omnipotent being cannot be limited from an external force, because by its very definition it is limitless and cannot be restrained by anything, meaning that the only thing that is on par with it is itself and nothing else. In fact, the philosopher William Lane Craig defended this with the idea that concepts such as logic and math are simply aspects of God's mind and a representation of how he thinks and reasons, rather than external objects that restrain his power.

The answer of the Anti-scholastic current

The second interpretation of Omnipotence is from the anti-scholastic current, which is however mostly discarded due to it being extremely simplistic to the point of leading to illogical conclusions, though it's still followed from multiple philosophers.

According to it, an omnipotent being both can and can't create such a stone as it is not bound by logic at all, and thus can perform even self-contradicting actions or create logically impossible situations, answering not only this paradox, but other ones such as the problem of evil. While the origin of this current is mostly uncertain, one of its most notable followers is René Descartes, who argued that God can perform not only logical actions, but also illogical ones, no matter the absurdity of said actions. However, this line of thought is considered fallacious and nonsensical, as it requires also the possibility that God can create humanity while also not existing, as Craig pointed out.

Others argue that God's nature in itself is paradoxical due to it following the paraconsistent logic, where a situation and its negation are true at the same time. One of the ones who argued for it was the cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who claimed that due to God being the maximum and his existence being infinite, he can have both positive and negative properties despite those being contradictory. Others are Jean-Yves Béziau and Newton da Costa, who argued that God himself is a paraconsistent being with many paraconsistent properties in order to explain his existence.

Harry G. Frankfurt used a similar line of thought, explaining that given that God is supposedly capable of performing an impossible and self-contradicting action, that being creating a stone that he cannot lift, he can also lift said stone, because if he can perform one logically impossible task, nothing says he cannot perform more of them, as he wouldn't be bound from the limits of consistency, meaning that God is capable of handling situations that he can't handle.

Anti-scholastic believers mostly use logic itself for their argument, including paradoxes which can actually exist in real life, such as the liar's paradox (although it's a paradoxical statement rather than an impossible situation like married bachelors) other than paraconsistent logic.

Why we don't use this term

Despite omnipotence in itself has many paradoxes and multiple philosophical views, we do not assign this power to any fictional character.

The main reason is because that other than omnipotence in itself being impossible to concretely prove on any conceivable level, it also would be completely unapplicable to characters because of our policy on basing on just the feats they have shown for both Tiering and Powers, thus it would be an extreme NLF to assume a character is omnipotent in the literal sense of the word just because of them being the supreme being of their verse, and thus statements of omnipotence, no matter how complex or elaborated, cannot be used as any kind of evidence.

Although Meta Dimensional to Transcendent tiers are within the "Omni" category in our Threat Levels, the name is simply a way to reffer to these characters being in the highest tiers of our system because of the degree of transcendence they have compared to the characters of all the previous tiers, rather than describing them as being literally omnipotent, as the reason why they are in these tiers is mostly just raw power, which however is not enough to get all the versatility of omnipotence, hence even the strongest Transcendent characters do not have omnipotence listed in their "Powers and Abilities" section.