Q&A: Why Can’t God Create a Stone He Can’t Lift?
Why Can’t God Create a Stone He Can’t Lift?
Question
I heard your lectures on free will, and you argued that creating a stone that the Almighty cannot lift is a logical mistake.
But I didn’t understand why, since you yourself say that the Creator can choose to limit Himself—for example, to create a world with gaps in the information, such that He Himself will not be able to know what will happen.
That is, there was a universe in which God knew everything, and then He created a reality in which He cannot know everything.
In Genesis it says that God promises not to bring another flood again. Isn’t that another example of this kind of limitation? He has the power to bring another flood, but that would make His promise meaningless; since it is not reasonable that God is a liar, one can understand this to mean that He cannot bring another flood.
Why can’t that be the answer to the stone He can’t lift?
“Yes, He can decide to limit Himself and create a reality in which there exists a stone that He cannot lift.”
Answer
To create a world in which people have free choice, and therefore there is no such information. Those are not gaps. Gaps would be existing information that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know.
I’ll just clarify that my explanation is not an excuse for the difficulty. It shows logically that there is no difficulty. Therefore there is no need for alternative explanations. It’s roughly like looking for alternative explanations for the fact that if all human beings are mortal and Socrates is a human being, then he is mortal.