About this topic
Summary Omnipotence is the property of being  all-powerful, and is one of the traditional divine attributes. Philosophical discussion has centered on the project of giving an analysis of omnipotence which is both self-consistent and consistent with the other traditional divine attributes, such as necessary moral perfection. The most discussed objection to omnipotence is the Stone Paradox, also known as the Paradox of Omnipotence: could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy the being couldn't lift it?
Key works The contemporary debate on the coherence of omnipotence was launched by the brief discussion in Mackie 1955. For a more detailed rendition of the Stone Paradox, see Cowan 1965. Further difficulties for definitions of omnipotence are raised by La Croix 1977. The most discussed contemporary theories of omnipotence include Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1980, Flint and Freddoso 1983, Wierenga 1983, Wielenberg 2000, and Pearce & Pruss 2012.
Introductions Handbook and encyclopedia articles include Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1997, 2008, Leftow 2008, and Pearce 2011.
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  1. Strategies for Stage II of Cosmological Arguments.Simón Tadeo Ocampo - manuscript
    The following article will examine three argumentative strategies to address a recent topic of debate in the philosophy of religion known as the "Gap Problem." It aims to study the "Stage II" of cosmological arguments, where the goal is to establish the theistic properties or attributes that identify the first cause or necessary being with the concept of God. The unique contribution of this study lies in the formalized and systematic presentation of the various solutions proposed by authors in the (...)
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  2. Logic and Agency: problems in identifying omnipotence and rational consistency.Daniel Pech - manuscript
    ABSTRACT Given the complexity of the Cosmos, and of the contingent observer, it is axiomatic that the obverse of the law of identity includes a complex reverse: a thing not only is only what it is, it also is not all those things which it is not. But, given the possible combinations of knowledge and ignorance regarding a given topic, any number of various conflations of the two sides of this axiom is possible regarding that topic. Further, given the extent (...)
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  3. God, Über-God, and Unter-God.Noah Gordon - forthcoming - Religious Studies:1-16.
    I examine two related arguments for the claim that if God is omnipotent, God cannot lack abilities such as the ability to do evil or to act irrationally. Both arguments concern the idea that omnipotence is inconsistent with being dominated with respect to abilities. I raise new issues in the formulation of such dominance principles about ability, and attempt to solve them. I also discuss and reject existing objections to these arguments. I conclude that these arguments are promising but not (...)
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  4. Against God of the Truth-Value Gaps.T. Parent - forthcoming - Analysis.
    Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy—it concerns a power that God neither has nor lacks. Yet this ends (...)
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  5. Lewisian Worlds and Buridanian Possibilia.Boaz Faraday Schuman - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    Many things can be other than they are. Many other things cannot. But what are statements like these about? One answer to this question is that we are speaking of possible worlds: if something can be other than it is, then it actually is that way in some possible world. If something cannot be otherwise, it is not otherwise in any world. This answer is presently dominant in analytical philosophy of language and logic. What are these worlds? David Lewis famously (...)
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  6. God and the Problem of Logic.Andrew Dennis Bassford - 2023 - Cambridge University Press.
    Classical theists hold that God is omnipotent. But now suppose a critical atheologian were to ask: Can God create a stone so heavy that even he cannot lift it? This is the dilemma of the stone paradox. God either can or cannot create such a stone. Suppose that God can create it. Then there's something he cannot do – namely, lift the stone. Suppose that God cannot create the stone. Then, again, there's something he cannot do – namely, create it. (...)
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  7. Theism and Secular Modality.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    I examine issues in the philosophy of religion at the intersection of what possibilities there are and what a God, as classically conceived in the theistic philosophical tradition, would be able to do. The discussion is centered around arguing for an incompatibility between theism and two principles about possibility and ability, and exploring what theists should say about these incompatibilities. -/- I argue that theism entails that certain kinds and amounts of evil are impossible. This puts theism in conflict with (...)
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  8. Catálogo de los manuscritos romanos sobre la disputa De auxiliis.David Torrijos-Castrillejo - 2023 - Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca.
    This book lists the manuscripts related to the 'De Auxiliis' Controversy that are preserved in Rome. This dispute is one of the episodes in Spanish intellectual history with the greatest international resonance, if we take into account the commotion caused in Rome and the secular repercussions it will have within the Catholic and even Protestant sphere. This theological controversy also involves highly topical concepts that attract the interest of contemporary philosophers. This book contains a complete list of the manuscripts preserved (...)
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  9. Audenter loquor. Esperimenti mentali e controfattualità nel De divina omnipotentia.Roberto Limonta - 2022 - Noctua 9 (1):50-78.
    Beginning in the 1990s, the medieval historiography has devoted increasing attention to the presence of thought experiments in the medieval philosophical sources. Following the line drawn by King, Perler, Grellard and Marenbon studies, this paper aims to use the concept of thought experiment as an historiographical category to explore the issues of Peter Damian’s dilemma, in the chapter I of De divina omnipotentia, about the capacity of the divine power to restore the virginity of a maiden who has lost it. (...)
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  10. What the Problem of Evil Properly Entails.I. Neminemus - 2022 - Social Sciences Research Network.
    It is sometimes thought that the Problem of Evil entails the inexistence of God. However, this is not the case: it only entails the inexistence of an omnipotent-benevolent god, of which the God of Classical Theism is an example. As for ‘limited’ deities such as that of process theology, or malevolent deities such as that of dystheism, the problem of evil is not a problem at all.
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  11. Descartes on Necessity and the Laws of Nature.Nathan Rockwood - 2022 - Journal of Analytic Theology 10:277-292.
    This paper is on Descartes’ account of modality and, in particular, his account of the necessity of the laws of nature. He famously argues that the necessity of the “eternal truths” of logic and mathematics depends on God’s will. Here I suggest he has the same view about the necessity of the laws of nature. Further, I argue, this is a plausible theory of laws. For philosophers often talk about something being nomologically or physically necessary because of the laws of (...)
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  12. The Metaphysics of Creation: Secondary Causality, Modern Science.James Dominic Rooney - 2022 - In Eleonore Stump & Thomas Joseph White (eds.), The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-125.
    This chapter moves from the most fundamental parts of Aquinas’s metaphysics to Aquinas’s thought about the created world, and especially the way in which things in the created world are able to act as beings in their own right, without altering their dependence on the creator. The result is an account of the causality of creatures that does not impugn their connection to the more basic causality of the Deity and that allows this part of Aquinas’s account to be compatible (...)
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  13. Poder divino y libertad creada en la modernidad temprana.David Torrijos Castrillejo - 2022 - Scripta Theologica 54:9-34.
    The article explores the modern distrust of God as a threat to human freedom. The teachings on the relationship between freedom and grace sustained by the Spanish theologian Luis de Molina have some features that could be related to this distrust. Divine providence is preserved in his system by a somewhat deterministic conception of the human psyche. Thus, freedom is not completely safeguarded but a certain suspicion about Divine power is introduced nevertheless. As an answer to these difficulties, the author (...)
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  14. A biotheology of God’s divine action in the present global ecological precipice.Lisanne D. Winslow - 2022 - HTS Theological Studies 78 (2):7.
    Theological discourse surrounding the environmental crisis has rightly brought to the forefront human agency as a primary causal determinant. However, this article explores a theistic divine action position toward an account of the present global precipice that the earth and all its creatures teeter upon. The first section offers a preferred view of divine action theory, Divine Compositionalism, with explanatory power to account for an ever-changing planet. Furthermore, Divine Compositionalism is used to ground the role of God as Creator and (...)
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  15. Predestinación y libertad. Escritos en torno a la controversia de auxiliis.Domingo Báñez & David Torrijos-Castrillejo - 2021 - Pamplona: EUNSA.
    Edition of the opuscules by D. Báñez on De auxiliis controversy. There is the critical edition of three manuscripts and the first Spanish annotated translation of the opuscules. The Latin text is disposed together with the translation. An introduction situates the opuscules in its systematic and historical context.
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  16. The ethics of Epicurus and its relation to contemporary doctrines.Jean-Marie Guyau - 2021 - New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Academic. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson & Federico Testa.
    This is the first English translation of a compelling and highly original reading of Epicurus by Jean-Marie Guyau. This book has long been recognized as one of the best and most concerted attempts to explore one of the most important, yet controversial ancient philosophers whose thought, Guyau claims, remains vital to modern and contemporary culture. Throughout the text we are introduced to the origins of the philosophy of pleasure in Ancient Greece, with Guyau clearly demonstrating how this idea persists through (...)
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  17. Reflections on Human and Divine Authority: History, Christology, Omnipotence.Andrew Hay - 2021 - Heythrop Journal 62 (2):302-310.
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  18. Undoing the Past. Necessitas per accidens e logica temporale nel De divina omnipotentia.Roberto Limonta - 2021 - Noctua 8 (1–2):138-175.
    Peter Damian’s letter 119 De divina omnipotentia is characterized by two main issues: the dilemma about the God’s capacity to restore virginity to a woman and the question about the possibility of undoing the past. Despite the interweaving between these topics, they have to be distinguished in several respects. Aim of the paper will be, firstly, to isolate the two questions, starting with their textual loci; secondly, to focus on the dilemma about the divine capacity to undoing the past, showing (...)
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  19. La Puissance et son nombre, d'Abélard à Kepler.Édouard Mehl - 2021 - Rivista di Storia Della Filosofia 4:668-685.
    Power and its Number, from Abelard to Kepler. Catholic theology has always held, contrary to what the philosophers say, that God can do everything: his power is infinite, he always has a reserve of power and this reserve is not exhausted in the opus creationis. Thus, God's power is divine because it is incomprehensible. Therefore, there is an essential equivocity in the potentia Dei, which cannot be confused with the power of nature. What are examined here instead are some of (...)
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  20. What is God's Power?Graham Renz - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (3).
    Theists claim that God can make a causal difference in the world. That is, theists believe that God is causally efficacious, has power. Discussion of divine power has centered on understanding better the metaphysics of creation and sustenance, special intervention, governance, and providing an account of omnipotence consistent with other divine attributes, such as omnibenevolence. But little discussion has centered on what, deep down ontologically, God’s power is. I show that a number of prominent accounts of power fail to model (...)
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  21. ¿Qué fue la “segunda” escuela de Salamanca? A propósito de su deriva metafísica y la disputa de auxiliis.David Torrijos Castrillejo - 2021 - In Simona Langella & Rafael Ramis Barceló (eds.), ¿Qué es la escuela de Salamanca? Sindéresis. pp. 357-392.
    This article exposes the concept of "second" Salamanca's School, i.e. the followers of Vitoria in a second generation that teach in Salamanca during the last years of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth. The author shows that there is an important continuity among the first and the second School and revisits the aspects which have been seen as negative for the School: the developing of metaphysics and the De Auxiliis controversy. The metaphysics as such cannot be (...)
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  22. A Zhuangzian Critique of John Hick’s Theodicy.Leo K. C. Cheung - 2020 - Sophia 59 (3):549-562.
    Hick’s soul-making theodicy defends the omnipotence, omniscience, and all-goodness of God in the face of evil. It holds that the end of the creation process is the development of human beings into children of God. In order to achieve the end, an evil-dependent soul-making process must be employed. It then concludes that, because the end is so valuable, the omnipotent and omniscient creator’s not having prevented the existence of evil is morally justified and thus not in conflict with her being (...)
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  23. Omnipotence Ruins Divine Friendship but Process Theology Saves It.Ruslan Elistratov - 2020 - Process Studies 49 (1):73-76.
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  24. Divine designation in the use of the Bible: The quest for an ‘all-powerful God’ (the omnipotence of God) in a pastoral ministry of human empowerment.Daniel J. Louw - 2020 - HTS Theological Studies 76 (4):14.
    In our exposure to weakness, vulnerability, loss, anguish and different forms of impairment, the following pastoral theological questions arises: What is meant by divine almightiness within the human need for spiritual strength, empowerment, encouragement and well-being? The epithet of almightiness (omnipotence, pantokratōr) gave birth to fictitious and speculative associations, even fear and anxiety: The paralyzing fear of God Almighty – divine intoxicating and spiritual pathology. Instead of a pantokratōr-definition of God, a paraklēsis-infinition of God is proposed. This paradigm shift is (...)
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  25. Divine Power, Friendship, and Theodicy.Paul K. Moser - 2020 - Process Studies 49 (1):54-72.
    This article examines the kind of power available to a God worthy of worship, in connection with the prospect for a full theodicy for the world's suffering and evil. It portrays how such a God would seek to relate to people with uncoerced reconciliation to God as a gift having definite expectations of them. To that end, God would be elusive and hidden at times, including regarding ultimate purposes, to minimize the alienation of humans from God. We have no good (...)
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  26. Caracterización teológica de la cosmología de Platón en la apologética de Atenágoras.Estiven Valencia Marin - 2020 - Albertus Magnus 11 (2):63-83.
    Algunos elementos de la filosofía platónica establecidos en tratados apologéticos de muchos escritores cristianos entre los cuales se encuentra el ateniense Atenágoras y su conocida obra πρεσβεία περὶ χριστιανῶν, cuya versión del helenista y teólogo español Daniel Ruiz será el objeto de estudio en el presente texto, demuestran un especial interés por la exposición de la cosmología. Si bien esta temática hace las veces de un intento por demostrar racionalmente la trascendencia de lo divino y la seguida generación del universo (...)
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  27. Thealogy Matters.Carol P. Christ - 2019 - Feminist Theology 28 (1):20-34.
    In this article Carol P. Christ states that ‘thealogy matters’ because religious symbols not only articulate meaning but also provide orientation for ethical decision-making. Rejecting the notions that religious meaning is delivered from on high and that traditions must be uncritically accepted, she proposes a model of ‘embodied theology’ in which individuals and communities take responsibility for religious worldviews. She asks us to question Jungian theories of the feminine, images of the Goddess in patriarchal traditions, models of ritual practice in (...)
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  28. God and Other Necessary Beings.Matthew Davidson - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    There are various entities which, if they exist, would be candidates for necessary beings: God, propositions, relations, properties, states of affairs, possible worlds, and numbers, among others. Note that the first entity in this list is a concrete entity , while the rest are abstract entities. Many interesting philosophical questions arise when one inquires about necessary beings: What makes it the case that they exist necessarily? Is there a grounding for their necessary existence? Do some of them depend on others? (...)
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  29. ‘All is Foreseen, and Freedom of Choice is Granted’: A Scotistic Examination of God's Freedom, Divine Foreknowledge and the Arbitrary Use of Power.Liran Shia Gordon - 2019 - Heythrop Journal 60 (5):711-726.
    Following an Open conception of Divine Foreknowledge, that holds that man is endowed with genuine freedom and so the future is not definitely determined, it will be claimed that human freedom does not limit the divine power, but rather enhances it and presents us with a barrier against arbitrary use of that power. This reading will be implemented to reconcile a well-known quarrel between two important interpreters of Duns Scotus, Allan B. Wolter and Thomas Williams, each of whom supports a (...)
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  30. The Relation between Creation and Lordship in light of a onotheistic viewpoint.Hussein Hammouda - 2019 - Al-Daleel 2 (5):9-40.
    This paper tries to address one of the most important problems in the field of intellectual and religious studies, namely the relation between monotheism in creation and monotheism in lordship. The article discusses the concept of each of them separately, besides studying the problematic relation between the Creator and creation according to intellectual analytical-critical method. This study concludes with certain results, the most important of them are the following: there is an accompaniment relation between creation and lordship on one side, (...)
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  31. Infinite Power and Finite Powers.Kenneth L. Pearce - 2019 - In Benedikt Paul Goecke & Christian Tapp (eds.), The Infinity of God: New Perspectives in Theology and Philosophy. Notre Dame University Press.
    Alexander Pruss and I have proposed an analysis of omnipotence which makes no use of the problematic terms 'power' and 'ability'. However, this raises an obvious worry: if our analysis is not related to the notion of power, then how can it count as an analysis of omnipotence, the property of being all-powerful, at all? In this paper, I show how omnipotence can be understood as the possession of infinite power (general, universal, or unlimited power) rather than the possession of (...)
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  32. Does a Truly Ultimate God Need to Exist?Johann Platzer - 2019 - Sophia 58 (3):359-380.
    We explore a ‘Neo-Cartesian’ account of divine ultimacy that raises the concept of God to its ultimate level of abstraction so that we can do away with even the question of his existence. Our starting point is God’s relation to the logical and metaphysical order of reality and the views of Descartes and Leibniz on this topic. While Descartes held the seemingly bizarre view that the eternal truths are freely created by God, Leibniz stands for the mainstream view that the (...)
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  33. Essere è volere. Il problema dell’onnipotenza in Duns Scoto.Gian Pietro Soliani - 2019 - In Fabrizio Amerini, Simone Fellina & Andrea Strazzoni (eds.), Tra antichità e modernità. Studi di storia della filosofia medievale e rinascimentale. Parma: E-theca OnLineOpenAccess Edizioni. pp. 263-358.
    The aim of this article is to examine Duns Scotus’ account of divine omnipotence. I shall firstly consider his doctrine of the objective possible and the distinction between logical potency and metaphysical potency. Secondly, by drawing on Scotus’ main texts on divine omnipotence (especially the Quodlibet VII), I will argue that, in his view, God’s omnipotence is not demonstrable, but at the same time is not an irrational concept, as Aristotle and many Medieval philosophi claimed. Finally, I shall discuss the (...)
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  34. Nature, God, and Creation: A Necessitarian Case.Yasin Ramazan Basaran - 2018 - Dissertation, Indiana University Bloomington
    The theistic doctrine of creation highlights the significance of the world's dependence on God. For this doctrine, a variety of justifications have been offered based on the ontological and epistemological commitments of a philosopher or theologian. In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that the theistic doctrine of creation is strongly justified when on the one hand the integrity of nature is established by affirming causal necessity while on the other hand the sovereignty of God is maintained by affirming divine (...)
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  35. Theism and Dialetheism.A. J. Cotnoir - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):592-609.
    The divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence have faced objections to their very consistency. Such objections rely on reasoning parallel to semantic paradoxes such as the Liar or to set-theoretic paradoxes like Russell's paradox. With the advent of paraconsistent logics, dialetheism—the view that some contradictions are true—became a major player in the search for a solution to such paradoxes. This paper explores whether dialetheism, armed with the tools of paraconsistent logics, has the resources to respond to the objections levelled against (...)
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  36. The Classic Age of the Distinction between God's Absolute and Ordered Power: In, Around, and After the Pontificate of John XXII.Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo - 2018 - Franciscan Studies 76 (1):207-266.
    In more general terms, many mediaeval authors—and not only theologians—used the distinction between God's ordered and absolute power to emphasize how, on the one hand, in an 'orderly' way, the realm of nature reflects God's freedom of choice, leading to the existence of a radically contingent order of creation; but also how, on the other hand, in terms of divine absoluteness and in the economy of salvation, God is never bound in his action, which is truly inscrutable and lies above (...)
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  37. Potentia Dei y su concurso en el mundo natural según Juan Duns Escoto.Enrique Santiago Mayocchi - 2018 - Dianoia 63 (80):3-27.
    Resumen Juan Duns Escoto configura su pensamiento filosófico desde una perspectiva cristiana, en la que la acción divina omnipotente crea y conserva las criaturas. Toda obra del creador ad extra es contingente, de manera que la realidad física recibe ese añadido en el nivel ontológico y operativo. Los objetivos de este trabajo son dos: determinar el alcance y la modalidad en que la potentia Dei actúa sobre el mundo natural según el Doctor Sutil y resolver una posible inconsistencia cuando este (...)
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  38. Divine Conservation, Concurrence, and Occasionalism.Edward Ryan Moad - 2018 - International Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):209-225.
    Occasionalism is the doctrine that relegates all real causal efficacy exclusively to God. This paper will aim to elucidate in some detail the metaphysical considerations that, together with certain common medieval theological axioms, constitute the philosophical steps leading to this doctrine. First, I will explain how the doctrine of divine conservation implies that we should attribute to divine power causal immediacy in every natural event and that it rules out mere conservationism as a model of the causal relation between God (...)
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  39. Voluntarist theology and early-modern science: The matter of the divine power, absolute and ordained.Francis Oakley - 2018 - History of Science 56 (1):72-96.
    This paper is an intervention in the debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what has come to be called ‘the voluntarism and early-modern science thesis’. Though it subsequently drew support from such historians of science as J. E. McGuire, Margaret Osler, and Betty-Joe Teeter Dobbs, the origins of the thesis are usually traced back to articles published in 1934 and 1961 respectively by the philosopher Michael Foster and the historian of ideas (...)
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  40. God’s Power and Almightiness in Whitehead’s Thought.Palmyre Oomen - 2018 - Process Studies 47 (1):83-110.
    Whitehead’s position regarding God’s power is rather unique in the philosophical and theological landscape. Whitehead rejects divine omnipotence (unlike Aquinas), yet he claims (unlike Hans Jonas) that God’s persuasive power is required for everything to exist and occur. This intriguing position is the subject of this article. The article starts with an exploration of Aquinas’s reasoning toward God’s omnipotence. This will be followed by a close examination of Whitehead's own position, starting with an introduction to his philosophy of organism and (...)
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  41. La noción de providencia según San Justino.David Torrijos-Castrillejo - 2018 - In Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa, Mercedes López Salvá, Nuria Sánchez Madrid & Ignacio Sanz Extremeño (eds.), Los orígenes del cristianismo en la filosofía, la literatura y el arte II. Madrid: Dykinson. pp. 271-290.
    This article examines the notion of providence in the thought of St Justin martyr. First, it is shown the relevance of the question for St Justin, since it was an important topic in his time. Secondly, the comparison to the philosophical context provides a more complete view of St Justin’s position. Thirdly, the notion of providence is considered in the whole of St Justins’ thought. So, the author can conclude that Christian philosophy requires a particular providence which nevertheless allows human (...)
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  42. God of the gaps: a neglected reply to God’s stone problem.Jc Beall & A. J. Cotnoir - 2017 - Analysis 77 (4):681-689.
    Traditional monotheism has long faced logical puzzles. We argue that such puzzles rest on the assumed logical truth of the Law of Excluded Middle, which we suggest there is little theological reason to accept. By way of illustration we focus on God's alleged stone problem, and present a simple but plausible ‘gappy’ framework for addressing this puzzle. We assume familiarity with the proposed logic but an appendix is offered as a brief review.
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  43. Misunderstanding the Talk(s) of the Divine: Theodicy in the Wittgensteinian Tradition.Ondřej Beran - 2017 - Sophia 56 (2):183-205.
    The paper discusses the unique approach to the problem of evil employed by the Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and ethics that is primarily represented by D. Z. Phillips. Unlike traditional solutions to the problem, Phillips’ solution consists in questioning its meaningfulness—he attacks the very ideas of God’s omnipotence, of His perfect goodness and of the need to ‘calculate’ God’s goodness against the evil within the world. A possible weakness of Phillips’ approach is his unreflected use of what he calls ‘our (...)
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  44. The All-Powerful, Perfectly Good, and Free God.T. Ryan Byerly - 2017 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 8:16-46.
  45. Thomas Aquinas on Logic, Being, and Power, and Contemporary Problems for Divine Omnipotence.Errin D. Clark - 2017 - Sophia 56 (2):247-261.
    I discuss Thomas Aquinas’ views on being, power, and logic, and show how together they provide rebuttals against certain principal objections to the notion of divine omnipotence. The objections I have in mind can be divided into the two classes. One says that the notion of omnipotence ends up in self-contradiction. The other says that it ends up contradicting certain doctrines of traditional theism. Thomas’ account is frequently misunderstood to be a version of what I call a ‘consistent description’ account (...)
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  46. Metaphysics in Richard Bentley's Boyle Lectures.Patrick J. Connolly - 2017 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 34 (2):155-74.
    This paper explores the metaphysical system developed in Richard Bentley’s 1692 Boyle Lectures. The lectures are notable for their attempt to argue that developments in natural philosophy, including Newton’s Principia, could bolster natural theology. The paper explores Bentley’s matter theory focusing on his commitment to a particular form of mechanism and his rejection of occult qualities. It then examines his views on the nature of divine omnipotence. Finally, it turns to his understanding of gravitational attraction. While some recent commentators have (...)
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  47. Why the Perfect Being Theologian Cannot Endorse the Principle of Alternative Possibilities.Samuel Director - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):113-131.
    I argue that perfect being theologians cannot endorse the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. On perfect being theology, God is essentially morally perfect, meaning that He always acts in a morally perfect manner. I argue that it is possible that God is faced with a situation in which there is only one morally perfect action, which He must do. If this is true, then God acts without alternative possibilities in this situation. Yet, unless one says that this choice is not free, (...)
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  48. Divine Power and the Spiritual Life in Aquinas.Heather M. Erb - 2017 - Studia Gilsoniana 6 (4):527–547.
    The role of divine power in Aquinas’s spiritual doctrine has often been neglected in favor of a focus on the primacy of charity, the controlling virtue of spiritual progress. The tendency among some thinkers (e.g. Polkinghorne) to juxtapose divine love and power stems from the stress on divine immanence at the cost of divine transcendence, and from an evolutionary (vs. classical) view of God with its ‘kenotic’ theodicy. A study of the ways in which divine power grounds and directs the (...)
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  49. Is Berkeley's God Ominpotent?Daniel E. Flage - 2017 - Review of Metaphysics 71 (4).
    In both the Principles of Human Knowledge and the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, George Berkeley provides a description of God’s attributes immediately after his arguments for God’s existence. Neither description deems God omnipotent, yet shortly after each he freely uses “omnipotent” and its synonyms to describe God. Why is this? The author argues that his reluctance to ascribe omnipotence is God is the reluctance of a careful philosopher, his willingness is that of a religionist, and his account of (...)
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  50. Divine Powers in Late Antiquity.Anna Marmodoro & Irini-Fotini Viltanioti (eds.) - 2017 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Is power the essence of divinity, or are divine powers distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? Are powers such as omnipotence, omniscience, etc. modes of divine activity? How do they manifest? In which way can we apprehend them? Is there a multiplicity of gods whose powers fill the cosmos or is there only one God from whom all power(s) derive(s) and whose power(s) permeate(s) everything? These are questions that become central to philosophical and (...)
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