omnipotence

   One naively assumes that omnipotence is the power to do anything. But this definition immediately runs into trouble: God is omnipotent and yet there appear to be actions that God lacks the power to do - God does not have the power to learn or to make himself nonexistent. One popular way that Christian philosophers have employed to get round this problem is to define God's omnipotence in terms of states of affairs, saying that God has the power to bring about any state of affairs. But this is also problematic, as we may see by considering the state of affairs of Peter's freely denying Christ. This state of affairs was brought about by Peter, but it seems that God did not have the power to bring it about, for it seems that if God had brought it about that Peter denied Christ Peter would not have done so freely. So it seems that Peter has a power that God lacks. The traditional response to this has been to claim that this is not a real power, though opinions vary over precisely why it is not. There is also debate among Christian philosophers over whether the second person of the Trinity kept his omnipotence in the incarnation.

   See freedom; God, nature of

   Further reading: Brink 1993; Hill, Daniel J. 2005; Urban and Walton 1978