“The concept of God is incoherent. Discuss”
God is conceived of as a (supernatural) being that is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, all good, all just and all merciful. These attributions appear to create logical difficulties, sometimes singly, sometimes when taken together, though it is in some cases necessary to add facts about the world (such as the existence of evil) to create the incoherence. In such cases, it is the whole picture of the nature of God plus aspects of reality that is held to be incoherence.
Firstly God is Omnipotence. Omnipotence by definition means that God is all powerful. If God were all powerful, he would be able to do anything, which would include any act which he can overcome with his own power. For example; creating a stone so heavy, that he could not lift it. However the suggestion that God makes a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it is actually a contradiction and so logically this makes it impossible. One might react to this by saying that God is indeed so powerful that he can defy the laws of logic. However, a better response, in my view, is that ‘being unable to do what is logically impossible’ is not a genuine limitation on God’s power, since any proposition that purports to say that some logically impossible act has been performed is in fact nonsense. In such a proposition, no act has really been described. Omnipotence does create problems in other areas.
