Is the Concept of God Coherent?
I will conclude that none of the three arguments conclusively establishes the incoherence of God, but that the Euthyphro dilemma comes closest and warrants genuine agnosticism about whether the concept is fully coherent
- The question asks whether the concept of God contains internal contradictions — whether it is logically possible for there to be a God with attributes like omnipotence, omniscience, and supreme goodness - I will consider three arguments which aim to show that the concept of God is incoherent: the paradox of the stone, the problem of freedom and foreknowledge, and the Euthyphro dilemma - A useful framework for evaluating these arguments is Aquinas's perfect being theology — the view that God's attributes should be understood not by scaling up ordinary human concepts but by deriving them from what it means to be a maximally perfect being. This framework will be introduced properly in Point 1 and applied throughout - The paradox of the stone is the weakest argument — Aquinas's framework resolves it cleanly. The problem of freedom and foreknowledge is stronger — Boethius offers a sophisticated response but genuine uncertainty remains. The Euthyphro dilemma is the strongest — even within Aquinas's framework it leaves unresolved tensions - I will conclude that none of the three arguments conclusively establishes the incoherence of God, but that the Euthyphro dilemma comes closest and warrants genuine agnosticism about whether the concept is fully coherent
Section 1: The Paradox of the Stone
- Aquinas's response is convincing. The paradox of the stone only appears troubling if we accept the naive definition of omnipotence as 'able to do anything.' Once we recognise that this definition was never philosophically adequate — and that Aquinas's perfect being framework provides a principled, non-ad hoc alternative — the paradox dissolves. The stone is not something God fails to do; it is simply not a coherent task - The contrast with Descartes is instructive: Descartes' response is ad hoc precisely because it was designed purely to escape the paradox. Aquinas's framework was not. This distinction matters for the essay as a whole — not all responses to these arguments are equal, and the quality of a response depends partly on whether it has independent philosophical grounding
: The Paradox
- The paradox of the stone aims to show there is a contradiction in the idea of omnipotence - Can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? - If God can create such a stone, then there is something God cannot do — lift it - If God cannot create such a stone, then there is again something God cannot do — create it - Either way, there is at least one thing God cannot do, which undermines omnipotence - Without omnipotence, the God of classical theism cannot exist — the concept is incoherent
Descartes: Response 1 — Descartes — God is beyond Logic
- Descartes argues that God created everything, including the laws of logic — God is beyond logic, which is merely a human limitation - Therefore God could create the stone and also lift it, since God can do logically impossible things
: Reply to Descartes — the response collapses into incoherence
- Descartes' response is rightly rejected by almost all philosophers and is genuinely ad hoc — it is a desperate move that undermines itself. If God can do logically impossible things, then the statement 'God can do logically impossible things' must itself be possible, which means it is no longer logically impossible. The response collapses into incoherence. It also has the deeply uncomfortable implication that God could make contradictions true — that he could make it the case that 2+2=5 or that something both exists and does not exist simultaneously. This is not a serious philosophical position
Aquinas: Response 2 — Aquinas's perfect being theology
- Aquinas argues that omnipotence should not be understood naively as 'able to do anything whatsoever' — that definition is what generates the paradox - Instead we should derive God's attributes from what it means to be a perfect being. Omnipotence is the power appropriate to a perfect being — and a perfect being, by its very nature, cannot do anything self-undermining, contradictory, or imperfect - Creating a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift is a logically impossible task — it is like asking for a four-sided triangle. As Mavrodes points out, an omnipotent being could lift any stone by definition, so there can be no such thing as a stone too heavy for God to lift. The task is not a coherent task at all - Crucially, this is not an ad hoc response. Aquinas arrived at this account of omnipotence through a systematic philosophical theology that predates the paradox of the stone by centuries — he was not patching a problem but deriving a principled account of what perfect power must mean. Just as God cannot do evil or destroy himself without contradicting his own perfection, he cannot do the logically impossible — not because of a limitation but because perfection does not work that way
Section 2: The Problem of Freedom and Foreknowledge
- The Boethian response is sophisticated and more convincing than Swinburne's. The conditional necessity distinction is a genuine philosophical move that captures something important — there is a real difference between a choice being necessary because it was forced and a choice being necessary because it was freely made and eternally observed - However, genuine uncertainty remains. The idea of an eternal God who sees all of time simultaneously is itself difficult to fully comprehend from within our temporal experience. And there is a residual worry: if God eternally sees that I will choose X, is it really open to me to choose Y? It seems that from God's eternal perspective the outcome is already fixed — even if that fixing is conditional on my freedom, from the inside of my temporal experience it is hard to see how my choice is genuinely open. As your plan notes: 'it is hard to say as we cannot remove ourselves from our experience within time' - The problem of freedom and foreknowledge is therefore not conclusively resolved, but it is not conclusively damaging either. The Boethian response gives the theist a principled and philosophically serious way of maintaining both omniscience and free will, even if some uncertainty remains
: The Problem of Freedom and Foreknowledge
- If God is omniscient, he knows everything — including all future human actions - But if God knows in advance exactly what I will do, then my action is predetermined — I cannot do otherwise - Therefore if God is omniscient, humans cannot have free will - Free will is a doctrine in mainstream Christianity and seems deeply important to any morally serious conception of God — a God who punishes humans for actions they were not free to avoid seems unjust - Therefore omniscience and free will are incompatible, and the concept of God as both omniscient and the ground of a just moral order is incoherent
Swinburne: Response 1 — Swinburne's cognitive self-limitation
- Swinburne argues God voluntarily limits his knowledge of the future — God could know our future actions but chooses not to, restricting his knowledge to only what is physically determined - This preserves human free will by ensuring God does not know what we will freely choose
: Assessment of Swinburne's reasoning
- Swinburne's response is the weaker of the two available responses and has the flavour of an ad hoc patch. A self-limiting God seems to contradict omnipotence — Anselm argues that being confined within time and unable to transcend it is a limitation, and the greatest conceivable being would not be limited in this way. Aquinas's account of omnipotence suggests a perfect being cannot do anything that contradicts its own perfection, which would seem to include self-limitation. Furthermore, a God who chooses not to know something is not genuinely omniscient in any recognisable sense
Boethius: Response 2 — Boethius's eternal God
- Boethius and Anselm argue that God exists outside time entirely — he does not experience past, present and future sequentially but sees all of time in a single eternal moment - God is ET-simultaneous with all temporal events, including our future actions. He knows what we will do because he eternally observes us doing it — not because he has determined our actions in advance - God's knowledge does not cause or constrain our choices — it is grounded in those choices. God knows I will choose X not because X is predetermined but because God eternally sees me freely choosing X
: The deeper objection — simple vs conditional necessity
- A critic might respond: even if God's knowledge doesn't causally force our actions, if God knows I will choose X then it is necessary that I choose X — I cannot do otherwise, which means I am not free - Boethius responds with the distinction between **simple necessity** and **conditional necessity** - Simple necessity: something that must be the case regardless of anything else — e.g. that God exists - Conditional necessity: something that becomes necessary only given some prior condition — e.g. if you are walking, it is necessary that you are walking, but you could have chosen not to walk, and then it would not have become necessary - When God eternally observes my future free choice, that choice becomes conditionally necessary — necessary given that I freely made it. But that necessity is dependent on and conditional upon my having freely chosen it. God's observation does not remove the freedom; it reflects it - God would not know that I will choose X unless I actually freely choose X — his knowledge tracks my freedom rather than undermining it
Section 3: The Euthyphro Dilemma
- The third option is the most promising response available and is defended by serious philosophers across centuries. It genuinely avoids both horns as stated and is not obviously ad hoc in the way Descartes' response to the stone was — the idea that God's nature is the ground of goodness is a principled theological claim with deep roots in Augustinian and Thomistic theology - However the third option faces a powerful residual objection that even Aquinas's framework does not fully resolve. If God's nature is goodness, then the statement 'God is good' becomes a tautology — it means nothing more than 'God is God.' As Bertrand Russell observed, this drains the claim of any content. We want to say something substantive when we call God good, but if goodness just means 'accords with God's nature' we have defined goodness in a circle - Furthermore, the dilemma can be re-run on the third option itself: why is God's nature the standard of goodness rather than some other nature? Is God's nature the standard because it is good, or is it good because it is God's nature? If the former, we are back to horn 1 — there is something external to God (the goodness of his nature) by which God is measured. If the latter, it seems arbitrary again — God's nature just happens to be what it is, and we are told to call that goodness - The response that God's nature is necessarily good — that a perfect being must be perfectly good — helps here, but only if we have already accepted Aquinas's perfect being framework. And even within that framework, the question of why perfect being theology should set the standard for goodness rather than some other framework remains open - Swinburne's response — that the external standard of goodness in horn 1 is logically necessary and therefore beyond even God's power to change without contradicting omnipotence — is an interesting alternative that accepts horn 1 rather than seeking a third option. But it concedes that there is something beyond God, which many theists find unacceptable
: The Dilemma
- The Euthyphro dilemma challenges the coherence of God's omnibenevolence by asking: does God command what is good because it is good, or is it good because God commands it? - **Horn 1** — God commands what is good because it is independently good. This implies that there is a standard of goodness external to God to which even God must conform. This conflicts with omnipotence — there is something beyond God's control — and with the idea that God is the source of all goodness - **Horn 2** — It is good because God commands it. This makes morality entirely arbitrary — God could in principle command murder, genocide, or cruelty, and they would thereby become good. William Lane Craig accepts this, arguing that if God commanded genocide (as he appeared to in the case of the Canaanites in the Bible) it would be morally good — which he admits feels deeply uncomfortable but involves no logical contradiction - Both horns are deeply uncomfortable for the theist: the first undermines omnipotence, the second makes morality arbitrary and potentially monstrous
: The Dilemma is a false Dilemma — there is a third option
- Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and more recently Robert Adams argue that the dilemma is a false dilemma — it presents only two options when there is a third - The third option is that what God commands is good because it accords with God's perfectly loving and omnibenevolent nature. God neither conforms to an external standard nor arbitrarily invents the moral order — his nature just is the standard of goodness - This avoids the arbitrariness problem: God cannot command murder tomorrow because his commands flow from a perfect, unchanging, loving nature — not from arbitrary choice - It also avoids the threat to omnipotence: the standard is not external to God but is God himself - Adams formalises this: an act is wrong if and only if it is contrary to the commands of a loving God. Goodness is grounded in God's perfectly loving nature, making morality objective and non-arbitrary
- The paradox of the stone fails: once the naive definition of omnipotence is abandoned in favour of Aquinas's principled perfect being theology — which predates the paradox and is not ad hoc — the stone is revealed as a logically impossible task rather than a genuine limitation on God - The problem of freedom and foreknowledge is stronger: Swinburne's self-limitation response is ad hoc and undermines omnipotence, but Boethius's eternal God solution and the distinction between simple and conditional necessity provide a sophisticated and serious response. Genuine uncertainty remains about whether temporal agents can experience real openness if God eternally sees the outcome, but this falls short of conclusive incoherence - The Euthyphro dilemma is the strongest: the third option response — God's nature as the standard of goodness — is the best available answer and avoids both horns as originally stated. But it faces the tautology objection and the re-running of the dilemma on the third option itself, neither of which is fully resolved even within Aquinas's framework - None of the three arguments conclusively establishes the incoherence of God. The concept of God is coherent if Aquinas's perfect being theology is accepted as the interpretive framework. But the Euthyphro dilemma reveals that even within that framework there are genuine unresolved tensions — we should remain agnostic, with the Euthyphro identified as the most serious ongoing challenge to the coherence of God's attributes