Can God Do Logical Impossibilities?

Question 2098

When people ask whether God can do logical impossibilities, such as making a square circle or a married bachelor, they usually think they have found the weak point in the doctrine that God is almighty. The question feels clever. If God cannot draw a square circle, then there is something He cannot do, and if there is something He cannot do, how can He be all powerful? The trouble with the challenge is that logical impossibilities are not really tasks at all, and so they are not the kind of thing that power, however great, was ever meant to accomplish.

This is closely tied to the question of whether God can lie and to the famous puzzle about whether He could create a stone too heavy for Him to lift. All three turn on the same misunderstanding of what omnipotence actually claims.

What counts as a logical impossibility

A logical impossibility is a form of words that contradicts itself. A square circle is a shape that is at once four sided and not four sided. A married bachelor is a man who is at the same time married and unmarried. These phrases look like they describe something, but on inspection they describe nothing at all. They cancel themselves out the moment you examine them, the way a round square dissolves under a second glance. Logical impossibilities are not hard things waiting for enough power to be applied. They are non things dressed up in grammar.

Notice that the failure here is not in any agent who tries to make them. It lies in the description itself. No amount of strength, wisdom, or skill can bring about a state of affairs that destroys itself in the stating. When we say God does not do logical impossibilities, we are not pointing to a task too heavy for Him. We are observing that there is no task there to be done.

God’s power is the power to do all He wills

The biblical doctrine of omnipotence is not the claim that God can bring about any string of words we can assemble. It is the claim that nothing God wills is beyond Him. The position paper states it cleanly. God can do whatever He wills, and He is limited only by His own character. Gabriel tells Mary that nothing will be impossible with God. Jeremiah prays that nothing is too hard for the Lord who made the heavens by His great power. In every case the point is that God’s purposes never fail for want of strength.

A square circle is not something God wills, because it is not something at all. To say He cannot make one is like saying He cannot bake a number or paint the smell of Tuesday. The words run together into nonsense, and nonsense is not made meaningful by attaching the name of God to it. Logical impossibilities are excluded not by a shortfall in divine power but by the simple fact that they correspond to nothing real.

A square circle is not a thing to be done

The medieval theologians put this carefully. They distinguished between what is absolutely impossible and what is only difficult. A great weight is difficult to lift, and greater strength solves it. A square circle is not difficult to make. It is impossible in a different sense entirely, because the thing described could never exist under any conditions whatever. Thomas Aquinas observed that it is better to say such things cannot be done than to say God cannot do them, because the impossibility lies in the object, not in the doer.

This is why thoughtful Christians have never been embarrassed by the challenge. When the sceptic says God cannot make a square circle, the believer can happily agree, because no square circle is being denied to God. There simply is no square circle, no married bachelor, no four sided triangle, anywhere in reality or in possibility, for God or anyone else to make. The list of logical impossibilities is a list of empty phrases.

This is not a limit on God

It helps to remember what we have already seen about the truthfulness of God, that He cannot lie, and not from any weakness. The same reasoning carries over. God’s inability to do logical impossibilities is of a piece with His inability to sin or to deny Himself. In each case the so called limit is really the perfection of His nature shining through. A God who could be self contradictory would not be greater than the God of the Bible. He would be less, because contradiction is a mark of confusion, and there is no confusion in God.

Some have tried to honour God by insisting that He could do even the absolutely impossible if He wished, on the grounds that nothing must be off limits to Him. The instinct is reverent but the result undermines reason itself, and with it our ability to know anything at all, including anything about God. If God could make contradictions true, then the statement God is good and the statement God is not good could both be true together, and the gospel would dissolve into noise. Honouring God means affirming that He is the ground of reason, not its enemy.

Where the logical impossibilities question protects us

Getting this right guards us against real errors. It keeps us from a sloppy view of omnipotence that makes faith look irrational, as though Christians believe in a God who can be talked into nonsense. It also keeps us from the opposite ditch, the modern tendency to shrink God down to fit human limits, which you can see challenged in the discussion of divine immutability. The biblical God is neither absurd nor small. He does everything He wills, and He wills nothing self defeating.

There is a pastoral side to this as well. When a doubter throws the square circle puzzle at a young believer, it can feel like a body blow, as though the whole faith has been exposed as foolish. Knowing that logical impossibilities are empty phrases rather than feats of strength turns the challenge into an opportunity. You can show that the Christian view of God is the most coherent view going, precisely because it grounds logic itself in the consistent character of the Creator.

Logic reflects the mind of God

There is a richer truth hiding behind this whole discussion. The laws of logic are not arbitrary rules that float free of God and then bind Him from outside. They reflect the way God Himself thinks and the consistency of His own nature. God is not subject to logic as though it stood over Him like a higher authority. Rather, logic is what it is because God is who He is, the God in whom there is no shadow of turning and no self contradiction. When we say He does not do logical impossibilities, we are tracing those impossibilities back to the steadfast consistency of His character.

This is why the believer can reason confidently about the world at all. Because the universe was made by a rational and faithful Creator, it hangs together and can be understood, and our minds, made in His image, can follow its order. The sceptic who uses logic to attack God is quietly borrowing from the Christian view of reality even as he argues against it, for he assumes a coherence that only a consistent Creator can finally explain. The challenge about logical impossibilities ends up pointing past itself to the God who is the ground of reason.

So the question that began as an attempt to trap the Christian opens instead into worship. The God who never contradicts Himself, who cannot do logical impossibilities because they would set Him against His own nature, is the same God whose faithfulness we can build a life upon. The very stability that makes a square circle impossible is the stability that makes His promises sure.

It is worth adding that the same point disposes of a whole family of similar riddles. Can God make a four sided triangle, or a married bachelor, or a colourless red object? Each of these belongs with the logical impossibilities we have already considered, and each receives exactly the same reply. There is nothing being described, so there is nothing for omnipotence to do, and the list of logical impossibilities stays a list of empty words.

So, now what?

When you meet this question, do not panic and do not concede too much. Agree cheerfully that God does not make square circles, and then explain why. The phrase describes nothing, so nothing is being withheld from God. Omnipotence was never the power to actualise contradictions. It is the power to accomplish every good purpose of a perfectly consistent God.

Let it also deepen your worship. The God you serve is not a bundle of raw force with no shape to it. He is wisdom and truth and goodness, and His power always moves in step with His character. That is a far greater God than a being who could do anything at all in the loose sense the question imagines, because such a being would be lawless and finally unknowable.

“Ah, Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.” Jeremiah 32:17