[shasarak]

I've never had much sympathy with that argument. I realise that what you're supposed to say is along the lines of "if the answer is 'yes' then there is something God cannot do (lift the stone) and therefore He is not omnipotent, but if the answer is 'no' then there is something He cannot do (create the stone) and therefore He is not omnipotent". But frankly I think that's rubbish.

The answer to the question is clearly "no", and that doesn't set any limits on God's omnipotence because the concept of "a stone that is too heavy for an omnipotent God to lift" is meaningless. It's like suggesting that God is not omnipotent because He can't create a triangle with 4 sides. Clearly, He can create triangles, and He can create things with four sides, and He can even simultaneously amend every single person's grasp of English in such a way that the phrase "four-sided triangle" actually makes sense. But to say that He can't create a four-sided triangle is no different from saying that He can't create a habbityglabbityglibbityglotchet. It is possible to string together individually meaningful words in English in a way that is grammatically consistent but which makes the whole phrase semantic gibberish; "four-sided triangle" and "a stone too heavy for an omnipotent God to lift" are prime examples.

While we're at it, obviously the egg came before the chicken - unless you're a creationist, in which case the chicken came first.

(Actually that reminds me of a cartoon: chicken and egg in bed together, chicken happily smoking a cigarette, and the fed-up looking egg muttering "well, I guess we figured that one out.")