Omnipotence

In the monotheistic religious philosophy of Abrahamic religions, omnipotence is often listed as one of God's characteristics, along with omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence.

These positions include, but are not limited to, the following: Thomas Aquinas acknowledged difficulty in comprehending the deity's power: "All confess that God is omnipotent; but it seems difficult to explain in what His omnipotence precisely consists: for there may be doubt as to the precise meaning of the word 'all' when we say that God can do all things.

[7]The adaptation of means to ends in the universe does not argue, as John Stuart Mill would have it, that the power of the designer is limited, but only that God has willed to manifest his glory by a world so constituted rather than by another.

This standard scholastic answer allows that acts of creatures such as walking can be performed by humans but not by a deity.

In response to questions of a deity performing impossibilities, e.g. making square circles, Aquinas says that "everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility.

Referring with respect to an adult neurotic to "the omnipotence which he ascribed to his thoughts and feelings", Freud reckoned that "this belief is a frank acknowledgement of a relic of the old megalomania of infancy".

We are justified in assuming that this megalomania is essentially of an infantile nature and that, as development proceeds, it is sacrificed to social considerations".

In the second half of the 20th century object relations theory, both in the States and among British Kleinians, set about "rethinking megalomania... intent on transforming an obstacle... into a complex organization that linked object relations and defence mechanisms" in such a way as to offer new "prospects for therapy".

D. W. Winnicott took a more positive view of a belief in early omnipotence, seeing it as essential to the child's well-being; and "good-enough" mothering as essential to enable the child to "cope with the immense shock of loss of omnipotence"[15]—as opposed to whatever "prematurely forces it out of its narcissistic universe".

Deities are manifested in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, not necessarily by miracles or violations of the laws of nature.

The need for a modified view of omnipotence was also articulated by Alfred North Whitehead in the early 20th century and expanded upon by Charles Hartshorne.

Thomas Jay Oord argues that omnipotence dies a death of a thousand philosophical qualifications.

To make any sense, the word must undergo various logical, ontological, mathematical, theological, and existential qualifications so that it loses specificity.

The Hebrew words Shaddai (breasts) and Sabaoth (hosts) are wrongly translated as "God almighty" or "divine omnipotence".