Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of God, Part 17.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about God's attribute of divine omnipotence, and I suggested that the doctrine that God is omnipotent doesn't mean

that you can say God can do blank and just combine that with any sort of words, like make a round

square or sin or act contrary to his nature. I suggested that a rough-and-ready

definition of omnipotence would be that God can bring about any state of affairs, which

is logically possible for someone in that situation to bring about. And that would mean that the limits to God's power

are simply those of logic. And when people talk about logical impossibilities,

they're not really talking about things that God cannot do because those are not things at all. They're

just contradictory combinations of words. And so when the scripture says that God can do

all things, I think that what it means is that what this definition implies, that he can do

or bring about any state of affairs which is logically

possible to bring about for someone in such a situation. Yes, Jim asked me to repeat the

definition. The definition is that God can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible for anyone in that situation

to bring about.

God can bring about any state of affairs which is logically possible for anyone in that

same situation to bring about.

So no one could bring about the state of affairs, for example, of God

making a rock heavier than he can lift. Nobody can bring about the state of affairs of God's

sinning, of a morally perfect being committing a sin. Nobody could bring it about the different counterfactuals of

creaturely freedom are true than the ones that are true that correspond to persons

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