First a sort of hello. I'm kind of back, but in a passive way.

I spent all day coming up with theorems and things about this issue, and I'd like to share some with you now.

First off, let's make some things clear with some tasty definitions:

A being can be described as "infipotent" if it can do anything and everything, i.e. there is no X which the being cannot do.

A being can be described as "suprapotent" if there is a limit to what it can do, but that limit is not exceeded by any other being, i.e. there is no X which he cannot do but someone else can.

I've made these terms so that I don't have to use "omnipotent," and can instead talk about the two possible definitions for that term.

Now, let's make some assumptions:

1. There is a God.
This isn't really an assumption for this discussion, and there's no real reason to mention it.

2. God is bound by laws of logic.
Now, I've other things that go deeper into this assumption, and I may post them later if anyone argues this point. But this assumption IS valid, because if God isn't bound by logical laws, we can't apply our logical expressions to him. So we can't say he's omnipotent using either of the definitions I gave above. Basically, everything falls apart.

Question: Can God create a being more powerful than himself?

Assume God is infipotent. Now, his infipotence means that there is no X which he cannot do. So there can be no being that can do some X that he cannot, and so there can be no more powerful being. God can't create one, and so here is something which God can't do. Therefore he's not infipotent.

The more alert among you will have spotted a minor contradiction there. We've shown than an infipotent God isn't infipotent, and so there must be a problem with our assumptions. The only assumption we've made is the one about him being bound by logical laws, so that one must be wrong if he's infipotent. QED.

Now, assume he's suprapotent. Choose some action which he cannot do. By his suprapotency, no one else could do it either, and so he couldn't create a being capable of it. So the answer to the question is "no, he can't."

In conclusion, an infipotent God can't be bound by logic and so can't be discussed or analysed, while a suprapotent God is perfectly capable of existing.

I hope you enjoyed that. I'll maybe post a reply to some other of uselessness' statements later, about how Pythag must be obeyed in any potential universe and so on. But then again, I may not. It depends on whether gremlinn beats me to it, and whether anyone cares.

Mat"hello"thew