It seems some can swallow whole camels, but then they strain at gnats.
Before I shut down for the night here ...
Here's the deal, as I see it. The initial contention was "can God do 'whatever He wants'?"
I argued yes.
Why?
Two main reasons. First because I am a catholic and I pray the daily office, the psalms kind of rattle around in my head, and I remembered that psalm 115, which is a doozy in any event, says God does whatever pleases Him.
Now before I get to the second reason I want to point out that one of the things to which we are called is transformation by the renewal of our minds, right?
Now the normal everyday mind looks at the common ideas of omnipotence and decides that, well, there are things God cannot do. But the mind offering itself to God for transformation finds something else.
It finds that it has been holding onto a bad idea of power and freedom.If it is willing to let those old ideas go, then we find that Psalm 115 can be right at the same time as the passages quoted to show an apparent (but not real) limitation to God's power.
Note, it's important that the Psalm says God DOES whatever pleases Him. There is no unactualized potentiality in God. In fact there is no potentiality in God at ALL, He is all act and no potency. He does, he always has done and always will do and right now does what he is.
As it happens, speaking academically, this kind of thought arises from Aristotle and comes to the Church largely through Aquinas. While non-Catholics are telling us we are not Scriptural enough, it is our Scholastics who give us a way to affirm with enthusiasm what the Bible says about God.
We are all swallowing the camel of the Divine inspiration of a collection of books the youngest of which is almost 2k years old. It is the gnat of Aquinas which seems to cause the gag reflex.
Just sayin'.