Can God create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it?

[tonychanyt]

Wiki:

C. S. Lewis argues that when talking about omnipotence, referencing "a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it" is nonsense just as much as referencing "a square circle"; that it is not logically coherent in terms of power to think that omnipotence includes the power to do the logically impossible. So asking "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?" is just as much nonsense as asking "Can God draw a square circle?"

In terms of grammar/language processing: not every syntactically correct question has logically coherent operational semantics.

 

[Helmut-WK]

As to that specific question, there is a sort of solution if we apply physics:

• You can only talk of lifting something in a gravitational field. Without gravitation, there is no up or down, hence no lifting.
• So lifting means to move an object away from a greater object (with more mass than the moved object. If I move a cup away from the center of the earth, the cup is lifted, not the earth, for the cup is smaller
• If Gods creates a stone that has more mass than any object in the world, there is no gravitational field in which He can lift this object up. If he wants to lift it up. the first step would be to create an even greater object (with more mass). The second object is not necessarily a stone (it could be a group of galaxies dense enough to create a common gravitational field. Or whatever you can imagine …

If anyone does not think this is a real solution:

So asking "Can God create a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it?" is just as much nonsense as asking "Can God draw a square circle?"

I fully agree.