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Giving up omnipotence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Scott Hill
Scott Hill*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, 352 Bartlett Hall, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
*
*Email: sahil0@philos.umass.edu
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Abstract

For any essential property God has, there is an ability He does not have. He is unable to bring about any state of affairs in which He does not have that property. Such inabilities seem to preclude omnipotence. After making trouble for the standard responses to this problem, I offer my own solution: God is not omnipotent. This may seem like a significant loss for the theist. But I show that it is not. The theist may abandon the doctrine that God is omnipotent without scaling back the extent of His power and without denying that He has all perfections.

Keywords

abilityimpossible states of affairsperfectiontraditionalismrevisionism

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Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 97 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2014

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