Friday 9/12/14

The first question ever selected as our LifeTeen Question of the Week comes from Brian Gill. Brian asks:

Can God make a rock so big that even He can’t move it?


No.






…Oh, you’re still here? Okay, let’s break it down then.

Obviously Brian is trying create a paradox based on the idea that God is omnipotent, a fancy word that just means He is all-powerful and can do anything. An omnipotent God should be able to create literally anything, so creating a rock of that size should be easy, but at the same time, omnipotence would imply the ability to move literally anything. We have a paradox.

Luckily, this paradox is relatively easy to work our way out of. Let’s start with what we know about God. We know that He created the universe, and we know that God can move the universe. This means that a boulder of immovable mass (we’ll call it a BIM because I like abbreviations) would have to be bigger than the entire universe. When we deal with things of that size movement always needs to be put into a frame of reference. In our daily lives, we use earth as our frame of reference. We say we have “picked something up” when we move it further away from the earth. We say we have “moved” something when we change its location relative to the rest of the world. We use the Earth as our frame of reference for a very simple reason: it’s the biggest thing that we interact with and its gravitational field is our strongest sense of orientation.

Let’s ignore gravity for a minute. If there’s no gravity, there’s no sense of orientation. There’s no up or down, there is only towards earth and away from earth. If a man were to push himself away from the earth then from his perspective, he would have moved the earth. After all, Newton’s second law says that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. That means that we push the world every time we jump. Sure, the world has an unfathomable amount more mass than an individual person, so it’s not like we’re going to change the orbit of the world by any measurable amount, but we are going to change it.

…Which brings us back to our BIM. An object of that size would have to float in space. We will sidestep the fact that our understanding of physics would dictate that it collapse in on itself and form a black hole so powerful that our entire universe would be crushed by saying that it exists in a realm of creation entirely separate from the one we inhabit. (phew, that was a close one!) If God could get to it, which He must if He created it, then He can move it.

I think what Brian really wants to know is can God create something beyond His total control. The answer to that question is yes… well, sort of. God can create things and then decide not to control them. For the best example of this, look in a mirror. If it were His will, He could control us like puppets. Instead, God gave us free will. He may guide us, or gently move us to see the world in a certain way, but He does not take control of our physical bodies and rob us of our autonomy.

As for our BIM? When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, “something’s got to give.” It’s not going to be God.


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