Inconceivable!

Written by Ziz

Sometimes people call things inconceivable when already conceiving of them. If you know how to generate predictions from it, you’re conceiving of it.

Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it? If so, he’s not omnipotent, because he can’t lift it. Else he’s not omnipotent because he can’t. Contradiction. An omnipotent god can’t exist.

Someone who believes this can probably predict, for any given rock, whether God could lift it. They can also predict, for any given size, whether God can make a rock of it.
They can be more confident that God has this trait when he lifts and creates bigger and bigger rocks. They can be confident he doesn’t if he wants to and doesn’t.
Isn’t that enough?

Principle of explosion, motherfucker. I could just as easily deduce that God CAN’T lift any of these sizes of rock.

You can deduce that verbally. But I bet you can’t predict it from visualizing the scenario and asking what you’d be surprised or not to see.

It’s still a logical consequence of that model. Word thinking is better at getting at weird things. Weird or not, it’s there.

Are they the same model though?
“Create a rock so big God can’t lift it” is only an action if “so big God can’t lift it” is a size of rock. Which, according to the omnipotent God hypothesis, it’s not.