#896 God’s Power

Dr. craig’s response

Your question, Jackson, is related to God’s attribute of omnipotence, which I’m writing on in my forthcoming Systematic Philosophical Theology. With respect to divine omnipotence, philosopher Brian Leftow astutely observes that what we find in Scripture is testimony to both the power of God and to the range of things that God can do. Leftow illustrates the difference between the two: “I might be physically and mentally strong enough to win a chess match, but be unable to do so because I do not know the rules. . . . Again, two people might be able to accomplish the same tasks; if one does them easily and the other strains to equal the first, there is a difference between them, which intuitively does not consist in the range of tasks they are able to perform.”[1]

This largely overlooked distinction yields insight into scriptural restrictions on the range of God’s power. For while Scripture affirms repeatedly that God can do all things, the Scripture also states bluntly, “When God desired to show more convincingly. . . the unchangeable character of his purpose, he interposed with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible that God should prove false, we. . . might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us” (Heb 6.17). The passage exemplifies Leftow’s distinction. It takes no more raw power to break a promise or violate an oath than to keep them, but God is too good to do such things, and so they are impossible for him, lying outside the range of things he can do. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself” (II Tim 2.13).

Leftow rightly observes that most medieval and contemporary analyses of omnipotence focus on the range of things that an omnipotent agent can do, to the neglect of his power. For example, although Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso entitled their account of omnipotence “Maximal Power,” such a title is more appropriate to a description of God’s unlimited power than to their account of the range of God’s power.[2] Ironically, it is the agnostic philosopher Erik Wielenberg who has provided the most adequate and interesting account of omnipotence simply in terms of maximal power.[3] On Wielenberg’s account, for any agent S:

O. S is omnipotent if and only if there is no state of affairs such that S is unable to bring it because of a lack of power on S’s part.

Wielenberg’s account is properly an account of maximal degree of power. We cannot measure maximal power in terms of units, but we can give an explication of what it is.

Leftow maintains that Wielenberg’s account is in itself adequate but nonetheless incomplete with respect to omnipotence. He maintains that we must consider the range of S’s power as well. It seems to me that we can obtain an adequate account of divine omnipotence by combining Wielenberg’s account with Flint and Freddoso’s. That is too complicated to explain here, but in my forthcoming volume on the divine attributes I show how it may be done.