Question

discuss on freewill vs. omnipotent in philosophy.

Answer 1

The occurrence of evil, despite the existence of a perfectly loving and perfectly powerful God, poses a theoretical and existential problem. The Scottish philosopher David Hume  put the problem in the form of questions: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

The free will defense solves the problem of evil by claiming that creatures have power to exert freely some control over their circumstances. Creatures can use freedom for good or evil; evil results from improper creaturely use of freedom. The free will defense solution to the problem of evil provides a basis for claiming that creatures, not God, are culpable for the genuine evil that occurs.

The question of omnipotence is one of the most elaborated among the attributes of God. There are a lot of debates, for example, concerning the so-called ‘paradox of the stone’: Is God capable of creating a stone that He is not capable of lifting? If He is, then God is not omnipotent, as there is a thing that He cannot do, He cannot lift the stone. If He is not, then God is evidently not omnipotent. Unfortunately some authors obscure the problem by adding superfluous details such as the weight of stone, the time of creation, etc. There are substantial grounds for believing that such concepts are applicable only to the phenomena of the physical world and their mechanical transfer to the domain of the divine is not valid, because it leads to categorical confusion.