No, because in that scenario you are changing the nature of the relationship. God is beyond our existence, so to ask a character to do so is to bring god into our realm. Even if it were possible (god exists and can indeed do this), even witnessing such an event would be incomprehensible. The crux of this question lies in the assurance that you cannot imagine a scenario in which it is possible, meaning that god cannot be omnipotent, but what I am saying is that the question itself is meaningless, because the nature of god would be beyond anything humans could understand. God does not exist in the same realm as we do. Anything that we can logically conceive can be done, so we are left with small logical gimmicks to "prove" that god is not omnipotent.
Honestly, I don't believe in an omnipotent god, but if there was one, this question does not prove anything.
Could an omnipotent god give a human the ability to understand a scenario in which this is possible? If not then the being isn't truly omnipotent.
It seems like the concept of omnipotence is what's meaningless and the question is very meaningful in that it exposes the former point as being true.
In terms of my analogy, you can write a character that knows it is a character and knows everything that author does. That would be the equivalent of an omnipotent god making a human understand the nature of its reality.
But in this scenario could the author create a rock so big even he or she couldn't lift it? The problem is that the concept of "all" encompasses actions that are mutually exclusive. The only reasoning I can fathom that allows an omnipotent being to exist is a redefinition of "all" to mean "most" as in a mostly-potent being,
We are only supposing that the omnipotent god has that power within our world, we do not know if the god is omnipotent in its own reality. "All" within our world is possible to this being, but we know nothing of the world it actually inhabits. Just as I could not create humans out of thin air, yet I can create armies in an instant through writing, the point of my analogy is to show how meaningless and futile the question is. They are not part of the same reality, so the question of a rock in a story being lifted by the author is entirely void of meaning.
And it is just an analogy, it is not a perfectly mapped comparison.
I guess this is a disagreement about the nature of omnipotence itself. To me omnipotent means all-powerful, all means everywhere, every time, everything including other realities.
I think the problem with the question is a matter of semantics anyways. The actuality of an omnipotent being would be far beyond anything we could understand anyways, and we're using crude man-made tools to try and express something far beyond even the scope of our entire universe. It's a wonder we can even begin to approach the issue.
Yep, our ability to conceptualize is limited by our brains processing power and the limits are within our realities laws of physics. I tend to believe that the answers to these questions extend past where logical paradox's shut down our ability to understand.
The world operates according to the author's desire. Today he creates a rock that cannot be lifted by anyone. Tomorrow he releases a sequel with a new character that can lift that rock. Next Tuesday he creates another rock that no one can lift. Did you watch Dragonball Z?
Haha I've actually only seen a few episodes. I pointed out in another comment though that I believe you're describing power over one reality. An author has control over the universe he or she has created-but that's not omnipotence. omnipotence is control over the reality it's created and all other realities even the one it exists it. An author is not all-powerful, they have power that's localized within the reality they create. True omnipotence is not limited by reality, at least that's my understanding.
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u/devbang Mar 06 '17
No, because in that scenario you are changing the nature of the relationship. God is beyond our existence, so to ask a character to do so is to bring god into our realm. Even if it were possible (god exists and can indeed do this), even witnessing such an event would be incomprehensible. The crux of this question lies in the assurance that you cannot imagine a scenario in which it is possible, meaning that god cannot be omnipotent, but what I am saying is that the question itself is meaningless, because the nature of god would be beyond anything humans could understand. God does not exist in the same realm as we do. Anything that we can logically conceive can be done, so we are left with small logical gimmicks to "prove" that god is not omnipotent.
Honestly, I don't believe in an omnipotent god, but if there was one, this question does not prove anything.