If this question is not very original, nor imaginative, or I’ve written it before somewhere, then I apologize for the blunder and you can delete my thread. It’s a little like the riddle of Epicurus. Anyhow . . .
(1) The omnipotent being (X) is able to do anything, including creation of another Omnipotent being (Y).
(2) If Omnipotent X could dictate any action of Omnipotent Y, then Omnipotent Y could not be truly Omnipotent.
(3) If Omnipotent X cannot dictate any action of Omnipotent Y, then Omnipotent X could not be true either.
Therefore: Omnipotence is logically impossible.
So suppose we imagine a kind of Pseudo-omnipotence which is almost logically possible, Call it Pseudo-omnipotence A.
(1) Pseudo-omnipotent-A being (X) can do anything, create or destroy, design or defy, universes as private enterprise. Pseudo-omnipotent-A X can even create Pseudo-omnipotent-A Y.
(2) Pseudo-omnipotent-A X cannot dictate the actions of Pseudo-omnipotent-A Y. Pseudo-omnipotent-A Y cannot dictate to Pseudo-omnipotent-A X. Therefore, they both control private enterprises of universes to any degree.
(3) X and Y can consent- initiating laws which cannot be broken once consented to.
(4) Pseudo-omnipotence-A infinitely begets Pseudo-omnipotence. There is no beginning or end. Time becomes a meaningless paradox.
I think that any entity that had all the power that it was logically possible to have would qualify as “omnipotent”. It would certainly be powerful enough to kick all our asses, which is close enough for me.
Paradoxes exist within human minds only, let it not be forgotten.
Here’s a (short and readable) paper exploring various concepts of omnipotence. It fleshes out a lot of the concepts you mention in your OP. It also addresses Faust’s point.
You know, that’s an excellent example of why I didn’t become a philo teacher. If “I think that any entity that had all the power that it was logically possible to have would qualify as “omnipotent”. It would certainly be powerful enough to kick all our asses, which is close enough for me” doesn’t do it for ya, and that paper does, I wouldn’t have lasted long. I would surely have shot myself half way through writing that piece.
Faust, yeah, I hear ya. I think it comes down to a big picture vs. details personality. Big picture people like the ideas of philosophy, math, physics. But 99% of what the academics do is the details that support the big picture. It’s necessary and often even quite useful, but not very appealing. That’s the hardest thing for me as a mathematician – getting motivated to work through the details when I already have the big picture figured out.
What we are saying is that omnipotence has problems with after the fact things, like the rock it cannot lift, the other or infinite amount of omnipotent beings etc.
We don’t have anything else until it has made something. It doesn’t know about a rock it cannot lift or even a rock, it doesn’t know about itself such that it can create another version of itself.
As such the question becomes; what can omnipotence create? Well it doesn’t know, the first act of creating [that it doesn’t know it is doing] is not a thing because you need cause before you can make a thing, hence the first act is the infinite cause, and that is all omnipotence can achieve ~ as after that comes effect and within that causality.
That is if it is not also omniscient. Though I think we may take a similar route for that, it knows all things yet there is primarily only statelessness to know, that is the ‘all things’. then once the first infinite cause occurs it then knows everything that occurs in all time, as its perception or science is then infinite and stretches across all of creation ~ which itself would occur all at once.
