The nature or attributes of God - Power, knowledge and goodness
Clarify divine power, knowledge and goodness, distinguish logical limits from voluntary restraint, and examine why freedom and just judgement create apparent conflicts.
Omnipotence and logical possibility
Omnipotence means divine power is unsurpassed, but the content of that claim needs specifying. Does it include contradictory descriptions, or all logically possible tasks? A square circle does not describe an exceptionally difficult shape; it combines incompatible conditions. Failure to produce it need not indicate a lack of power.
Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae I.25.3, treats omnipotence as extending to what is absolutely possible, excluding contradictions. This is a useful scholarly account, rather than the only possible definition. It makes logical coherence part of stating a task. God's inability to make a freely undetermined act determined in the same respect is then different from inability to perform a coherent action.
The stone paradox asks whether God can create a stone God cannot lift. If yes, there seems to be a lifting limit; if no, a creating limit. The logical-possibility reply questions whether a stone too heavy for an essentially omnipotent being is a coherent task. The critic is combining maximal power with its absence. A reply must show where the contradiction lies, rather than merely declare that God can do anything.
One could instead propose power beyond ordinary logic. This seems expansive, but makes reasoning about the attributes difficult: if contradictory claims can all hold, saying God is good no longer clearly excludes evil. A critic of logical limits asks why logic constrains God; a defender answers that a contradiction fails to describe a possible object of power, rather than identifying an external force stronger than God.
Self-limitation and permission
Divine self-limitation means God voluntarily refrains from exercising a power, for example to permit genuine creaturely agency or maintain a stable natural order. The action remains possible; God chooses a reason for not doing it. Logical impossibility instead means the proposed action is not coherently available. These are different explanations.
A skilled teacher may be able to supply an answer but choose to let a learner work. This illustrates restraint, not loss of ability. Similarly, a defender might claim God allows a free decision instead of preventing every misuse. The analogy shows the distinction but cannot establish that every divine non-intervention is wise: a teacher should intervene if the cost becomes disproportionate.
Self-limitation therefore reconnects with the problem of evil. Respect for agency can explain some permission, while a critic asks why God does not prevent harms that leave a victim with less freedom. Stopping an assault need not determine the assailant's earlier intention. The defender must explain the scope and moral reason for restraint, rather than infer justification from the word freedom.
Power and goodness also interact. If God cannot act wickedly because perfect goodness is essential, is that a limitation? A defender says moral perfection excludes defects rather than depriving God of a valuable ability. A critic asks whether meaningful choice remains if no contrary action is possible. The answer depends on whether freedom means access to alternatives or acting from one's own character without coercion.
Omniscience, time and free choice
Omniscience ordinarily means knowing every truth. It is not knowing falsehoods as true or believing contradictions. The difficulty concerns future free acts. If God infallibly knows today that a person will choose A tomorrow, can that person instead choose B? If B occurs, the alleged infallible knowledge was mistaken. If B cannot occur, the critic asks in what sense the choice is free.
Libertarian freedom requires that a choice is not fully determined and that alternatives are genuinely possible. A compatibilist account can call an action free when it follows the agent's own reasons or desires without relevant coercion, even if it is determined. Distinguishing these accounts prevents the claim that every theory resolves the same problem merely by using the word free.
Knowing an act does not ordinarily cause it. Watching someone open a door does not force them to open it. This rebuts a causal objection, but the infallibility objection asks a different question: could the observed or foreknown action have been otherwise? An account must explain the relationship between fixed knowledge and alternatives as well as deny coercion.
Time provides competing answers. A timeless God knows all events in an eternal present rather than predicting from an earlier moment. An everlasting God lives through succession and may limit knowledge of undetermined future choices to what can coherently be known. These proposals change how knowledge is related to time; they are developed through Boethius, Anselm and Swinburne in the next lessons.
Goodness, justice and coherence
Omnibenevolence means perfect goodness or love. It does not simply mean giving everyone whatever they request. Concern for all persons can require rejecting a request that harms another. Just judgement concerns whether reward, blame and punishment appropriately respond to responsible action. Mercy and justice must therefore be interpreted together rather than reduced to indulgence and severity.
If God fixes an agent's wrongdoing and then punishes it as freely chosen, a serious fairness problem follows. If God merely knows a genuinely responsible choice, knowledge need not itself make judgement unjust. This is why Boethius connects foreknowledge, freedom, reward, punishment and prayer rather than treating time as an isolated puzzle.
Conflicts among attributes can be apparent because definitions are unclear, or substantive because precise claims cannot all hold. A coherent account might retain all truths as known but reject a particular assumption about time; another might qualify which future facts are knowable. It is necessary to resolve a genuine contradiction if the belief is to be rationally coherent. It is not necessary to answer every unanswered question in order to avoid contradiction.
The cost of a resolution matters. Giving up goodness removes the original fairness problem by abandoning the benevolent God. Restricting knowledge or redefining freedom preserves some claims but may change familiar religious expectations. A justified judgement should state what is retained, what is revised and whether the revision still serves the account's purpose. Calling attributes mysterious invites humility, but does not alone explain how incompatible claims coexist.