God's Omnipotence

Some people refer God as the Omnipotent, that is to say a being that has unlimited power, and is able to do everything. God has four different attributes, he is omniscient, simple, eternal and omnipotent. The latter raises some difficulties, and paradoxes. In a first part I will show how omnipotence can be defined differently, how radical omnipotence differs with limited omnipotence and the issue with logic. Then I will show how God’s omnipotence raises some paradoxes and contradictions, by relying on the paradox of the stone and the problem of evil. Finally I will try to answer some questions concerning God’s ability to sin, to bring about the past, and to do things not done by him. Does God’s powers have a limit, could it then be possible that God’s omnipotence isn’t logic ? The concept of omnipotence and God is not that easily understood. Indeed many philosophers have different conceptions of God’s extent of power. Omnipotence is a kind of supremacy, all-powerfulness. Following that definition, the omnipotence of God is an absolute, and radical one. This is Descartes’ view, according to him God can do the logically possible as well as the logically impossible, he can make a square circle and change the laws of mathematics. Indeed, ‘God can do whatever we are able to understand, but not that He cannot do what we are unable to understand. For it would be presumptuous to think that our imagination extends as far as His power’ (Descartes, 1630). In other words, it is for us Humans impossible to imagine and understand a notion as illogical as a square circle, however God created everything, and that includes logic. Therefore it is for him perfectly possible and coherent to draw a square circle, or make the number 2 higher than the number 9.
However Aquinas claims that ‘this phrase, God can do all things, is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible’ (Peterson, 2001, p.124). The definition of omnipotence being God is able to do