Omnipotence and the 'Delimiter of Possibilities' View
Aquinas notes that some analyses of omnipotence have a serious problem: they reduce the apparently substantive claim "God is omnipotent" to the trivial claim that God "can do all that He is able to do." Now, perhaps it is true that to be omnipotent is to be able to do everything God is able to do (or at least that omnipotence entails this), but this is hardly an illuminating analysis. In several places in his Anselmian Explorations, Thomas Morris defends the view that the Anselmian God is the 'delimiter of possibilities.' This view has been endorsed by other Anselmians, and...
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Topic(s):
Alexander R. Pruss
,
Alfred J. Freddoso
,
Alvin Plantinga
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Divine Necessity
,
Historical Thinkers
,
James F. Ross
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Omnipotence
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Thomas Aquinas
,
Thomas P. Flint
,
Thomas V. Morris
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Divine Power, Alternate Possibilities, and Necessary Frankfurt Cases
Much of the difficulty in analyzing the notion of power comes from the various limitations of creaturely power: our powers come and go, and they are not infallible (sometimes we have the power or ability to do something, and nevertheless fail to do it when we try). These are the sorts of cases which derailed conditional analyses of power. However, an omnipotent being would have none of these limitations. In our paper, Alexander Pruss and I exploited this fact to develop an analysis of omnipotence, or unlimited power, without the need for a prior analysis of power. This approach has...
Continue reading "Divine Power, Alternate Possibilities, and Necessary Frankfurt Cases"
Topic(s):
Abilities
,
Alexander R. Pruss
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
Divine Attributes
,
Harry Frankfurt
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Metaphysics
,
Modality
,
Omnipotence
,
Philosophical Theology
,
Philosophy
,
Thomas Reid
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"Understanding Omnipotence"
"Understanding Omnipotence," co-authored by myself and
Alexander Pruss, has been accepted for publication by
Religious Studies! Cambridge University Press's latest copyright agreement permits authors to post preprints on their personal web-sites, so I have made the complete text available
here. Also, here is the abstract:
An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence.
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