The Battleground God post triggered a whole stream of comments across the blogworld, which I would link to if I weren’t so lazy/rushed right now. Two questions about divine omnipotence came up.

First, even if we assume that quantifier domain restriction is entirely a pragmatic affair, is it true that making 1+1=72 is in the domain of the quantifier of God can do anything. I think the things there are possible actions, and not because I think that’s some kind of pragmatic intrusion into the semantics, I think that in some pretty good sense that’s all the actions there are. So I think that God could be omnipotent, be literally able to do anything, and not be able to make 1+1=72. Battleground God apparently says this is inconsistent, but I’m not so sure that they are right here.

Secondly, I was struck by this story that Brad DeLong quotes in part in response to worries about logically limited omnipotence:

I don’t recommend playing with God. It isn’t that he cheats, exactly. But the other night we were in the middle of a game, I was about thirty points up, and He emptied out his rack. ZWEEGHB. Double word score and the fifty-point bonus.

“Zweeghb?” I said.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Well…” If you challenge God and you’re wrong, you lose the points and get turned into a pillar of salt.

“Look outside,” He said. So I did. Sure enough, there was a zweeghb out there, eating the rosebushes, like Thurber’s unicorn.

“I thought you rested from creating stuff.”

“Eighth day, I did. Now I’m fresh as a daisy. You going to pass or play?”

The quote is from John M. Ford’s story, “Scrabble with God” (in John M. Ford (1997), From the End of the Twentieth Century (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press: 0915368730)).

Getting back from God to something much more pressing, truth in fiction, is it true in the fiction that God created a zweeghb. I should add that I think if it were said in the story that God created a square circle, then I would say it is true in the story that God created a square circle. (I’ve never been too impressed with that as an example of a logical contradiction, for probably familiar reasons.) I might even say, following Tamar’s suggestion in her imaginative resistance paper, that if the story said God made it true that 7+5 did not equal 12, then it would be true in the story that 7+5 did not equal 12. But did He really create a zweeghb. I’m inclined to say no. This could be evidence that I have a very flat footed response to fiction.