MARK 6:5 -- IS GOD OMNIPOTENT?

To accuse Jesus of not being God because he was not able to do something (i.e. a lack of omnipotence) is no different than accusing God the Father of not being God because of the things he couldn't do (see post on “Mark 6:5 Is Jesus omnipotent?”). I have run against atheists who try to find something or other that God can't do as proof that if He does exist, He certainly is not all-powerful.

This is, in fact, one of the two key pillars upon which the classic definition of the problem of evil is based:

    God is all-powerful.

    God is good.

    A good God would have created a perfect world.

    This is not a perfect world.

    Therefore: either God is not good or not all-powerful, or He does not exist.

I have already discussed this issue in some detail in an earlier post titled “Theodicy: The Problem of Evil” for those who are interested. But the bottom line is that the above reasoning is no more decisive than the arguments of Job's friends concerning why Job was suffering.

I first ran up against a form of theodicy when in high school. A friend got this example from his atheist father. The supposedly unanswerable question to ask theists was: If God is all-powerful, can He create a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift? One could immediately object against the obviously anthropomorphic way it describes God as if he had hands and arms and the very dubious reasoning that mere weight makes something powerful. But the main problem with the question lies in the definition of omnipotence.

I apologize for not being able to remember where I got these definitions from, but they all make sense:

    1. A deity is able to do anything that it chooses to do.

    2. A deity is able to do anything that is in accord with its own nature (Thus, for instance, if it is a logical consequence of a deity's nature that what it speaks is truth, then it is not able to lie. See Hebrews 6:18)

    3. If it is part of a deity's nature to be consistent then it would be inconsistent for said deity to go against its own laws unless there was a reason to do so.

    4. A deity can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible for anyone to bring about in that situation. So he can't make 2 + 2 = 5 for instance.

    5. A deity is able to do anything that corresponds with its omniscience and therefore with its world plan.

For example, I Timothy 2:3-4 states that God desires everyone to be saved; and II Peter 3:8-9 says that he does not want anyone to perish, but for all to come to repentance. But if God wants those things to happen, why doesn't He in his omnipotence make it come to pass? Unless one believes in universal salvation, as some do, the answer has to lie in some sort of self-imposed limitation God in His infinite wisdom places on Himself or in the inherent impossibility of all being saved without violating their free will.

Here is another related criticism I got off the internet from an atheistic source. Matthew 19:26 says that God can accomplish all things, but He is apparently defeated by some chariots in Judges 1:19. The first thing to note is that “he” in the Judges passage refers to Judah, not God.

Next, the Matthew reference does not guarantee that God will do all things just because He can.

Also, even though the presence of chariots is given as a reason for the failure of Judah's army, there is obviously more to it that that considering that God has no trouble whatsoever in defeating an army of chariots three chapters later in Judges 4-5. In an ancient Jewish targum (commentary), the explanatory phrase “after they had sinned” was added to Judges 1:19 to make that point clear.

The same thing is true of Jesus' “inability” to carry out miracles in Nazareth as stated in Mark 6:5. The mere fact that He was ableto heal some demonstrates that one must delve onto the subject in a little more detail before arriving at any hasty conclusions.