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Why God Can’t Change His Mind

This Rock Volume 20, Number 3   March 2009     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   The Courage to Do What Herod Didn’t Do: He Left the Gay Lifestyle for the Church By Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.   Who’s Deluded? An Atheist Just Doesn’t Get Aquinas By Christopher Kaczor   Why God Can’t Change His Mind   Aquinas Proves Atheists Are Closer to God than They Think By Mark Brumley   Dawkins’ Debunkers: A Reading List By Andrew M. Seddon   Four for Good Measure   The Cost of Discipleship: Catholicism in China By Anthony E. Clark   Damascus Road The Splendor of Truth Brings an Episcopalian Minister and His Flock Home By Fr. Eric Bergman   By the Book Are You Saved? If Only! By Tim Staples   Eyes to See The Artist’s Intention By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told In the Name of Science By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

Is Dawkins correct that omnipotence and immutability are mutually exclusive? It is true that we can do things that God cannot do. For example, we can kill ourselves, we can be deceived, and we can get injured. God cannot die, cannot be deceived, and cannot be injured. However, that God cannot do such things does not mean that God is not all-powerful because the potential to die, to be in error, and to be injured really indicates not a perfection but a lack of perfection, not power but a lack of full power.

Is changing your mind a power and perfection or a lack of power and perfection? If you do not know something and you change your mind to knowing it, such a change makes you more perfect. But in Thomas’s view, God already knows everything. So if God were to change with respect to knowledge, it would not be a manifestation of perfection but a falling away from perfect knowledge. Therefore, omniscience and immutability are not self-contradictory, but rather different characteristics that necessarily belong to the first cause we call God.