Towards Naturalistic Deities

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

"Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." - Voltaire (1694 - 1778) speaking of post-Apostasy Christianity

At The Edge

This will be an exploratory, speculative post. I will examine what I've termed "naturalistic deities" by contrasting them with the traditional conception of a rigidly monotheistic God as defined by most of Christianity. (For my purposes, there is little substantive difference between the monotheistic, monistic, panentheistic, and pantheistic views of God.) I will then attempt to sketch out a tentative picture of the overall pattern we are all taking part in as uncreated Intelligences.

Unnecessary Assimilation

In a strange sort of vanity, we Christians often manage to take pride in our ignorance. "God moves in mysterious ways," we say, chuckling about how wonderful it is that we have faith in the great Mystery and are therefore "in the know" even though we don't know what we're talking about. We may have the reward of being "persecuted" for our fanaticism when others point out the logical flaws in our beliefs, but it's only in the eyes of the little world consisting of fellow believers who revel in the not-knowing. It does not lead us closer to the truth.

On a popular level, I've noticed that we tend to assume that the only ideas which are detrimental to faith are those of a "secular" philosophical bent. Yet I have observed members of our LDS community adopting from traditional Christianity the laziest "proofs" of God's existence (and to a rather disheartening degree) merely because the ideas have been labeled "Christian" by post-Apostasy theologians. In contrast, too often "science" is treated as if it were somehow opposed to "religion," or otherwise suspect.

And in fact, many findings of "science" (as if it were a monolithic entity) are directly opposed to the disembodied conception of deity which has long characterized "the divine" in both "Eastern" and "Western" thought (itself a false dichotomy, since both "sides" are focused on "transcending" "mere" physical embodiment).

The Philosophies of Men

The video below, in which "20 Christian Academics" speak about God, expresses the incoherence of post-Apostasy Christianity quite nicely. "It is easy to find examples of how religious thinking among lay or fundamentalist Christians can result in profoundly irrational ideas. But the evidence that reason is abandoned in Christianity equally comes from the mouths of 'sophisticated' theologians, leaders, scholars and spokespersons practicing it."

Let's run through it:

0:42 Professor George Coyne, Astronomer for the Vatican Observatory says God is not responsible for the supposed "medical miracles" some have reported, even though the common conception of a disembodied God is that He is somehow "omnipresent" and a part of everything which exists. God "loves in this way" because He is the First Cause, the Ground of Being, the Unmoved Mover, the Self-Thinking Thinker Who Thinks Only of Thought. As Maimonides put it: "God is not a body, nor can bodily attributes be described to him, and He has no likeness at all."

1:31 Robin Collins, Professor of Philosophy, actually admits that "It is part of God's plan that evil will occur." If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, etc., and the Creator of All Things, then He is forcing us to experience that evil, despite the fact that - as an unlimited, unconstrained, absolutely all-powerful personage - He simply must, by that very definition, possess the ability to transfer whatever "lessons" we learn through pain and suffering and mutilation and war and disease and death through another means which do not involve such terrible evils. In this view of God, the conclusion is simply inescapable that He is literally causing the evil. There is simply no way around this. If a human were to do such things, we would call them an evil dictator, a mass-murderer, and we'd be absolutely correct to do so. Post-Apostasy religions attempt to answer with a non-answer: "With our limited, finite minds, we are simply incapable of grasping the larger purposes God is fulfilling."

Don't you see the contradiction? If God is all-powerful, why then did He create us incapable of understanding His own plans? If the very laws of nature were created by God, then why did He create them in such a way that we become puppets to His will? "Free will" becomes a cruel illusion if God created the very rules by which we are said to be "free".

1:38 "God foresaw that evil would occur, or at least was very likely to occur." Again, if God is all powerful, the First Cause, the Infinite Absolute, then He is not just a passive witness, not some innocent who merely foresees the evil. He is, by the very definition used to "prove" His existence, the Origin of that Evil.

"So the analogy would be like: if I decided to create a million or a billion free-willed androids, we could just put 'em on an assembly line and then it would create all these androids, and I knew some of them are going to turn, use their choice badly ... I wouldn't say in that case 'I created the evil', I would say 'I created the conditions that would lead to evil.' Maybe you'd find that just a philosopher's way out."

"A distinction without a difference."

"Right."

And he is right - imagine a politician saying those words and expecting to somehow be excused from responsibility.

2:25 "I don't believe in evolution," says the Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson.

"And I'll tell you the reason why: evolution says that because there are these similarities, even though we can't specifically connect them, uh, it proves that this is what happened. Well, let's say someone came here from another planet after our planet has been destroyed by, y'know, terrorism and nuclear weapons and everything, and they find, y'know, some, some Volkswagons and they find some Rolls Royces and they look at them and they say 'Wow, these are really very similar and y'know, they all have, uh, wheels and a transmission engine - obviously, this Rolls Royce is much more sophisticated; it must have evolved from this Volkswagon."

I'll let James Talmage take this one (and using 20/20 hindsight, I can say that he did so "prophetically", from wayyy back 1884):

"In the course of my studies I have naturally been brought face to face with the alleged atheistic tendency of scientific thought and the conflict usually said to exist between Science and Religion.

... I have been unable to see the point of conflict myself - my belief in a loving God perfectly accords with my reverence for science, and I can see no reason why the evolution of animal bodies cannot be true - as indeed the facts of observation make it difficult to deny - and still the soul of man is of divine origin.

The dilemma which has troubled me is this - being unable to perceive the great difficulty of which Scientists, and Theologians, and Scientific-theologians refer - I have feared that my investigation of the subject was highly superficial, for when such great men as most of the writers upon this subject are - find a puzzle, it would be high egotism for me to say I find no puzzle.

... the fancied exit which I see has appeared from my reading some of John Stuart Mill’s writings and I feel ... that if I had none other idea of a Deity that those men have, viz., that of an unknown being, whose acts as Mill says are “contrary to the highest human morality” - I too would hail atheism with delight.

I could never believe in such a God as theirs, not though one should rise from the grave to declare Him to me. And just as certainly do I perceive that there can be no antagonism between the true science as revealed and made easy by the Priesthood, and the God whose attributes and passions of love and mercy are also declared by that same Priesthood …

May 4, 1884 - Have just returned tonight from service at the Westminster Presbyterian Church. The minister spoke against belief in Darwinism and like most ministers whose remarks I have heard or read upon this subject - showed his ignorance.

He spoke much as an ordinary person would - ”Darwin. Oh yes - says we come from monkeys” - then condemns. I certainly think ’tis the ministers themselves who have bred the disgust with which most scientific people regard them - because they will dabble with matters from which their ignorance should keep them at a safe distance.

The speaker tonight brought out many noble principles, but in spite of his eminence as a preacher - self contradiction and inconsistency were apparent.

Really, I do not wonder that any scientific man refuses to belong to a church where he is told nothing but “Only believe & you’ll be saved” - ”The blood of the Lamb is all powerful” - ”take up the cross of Christ” etc. The preachers always talk in metaphors - you can’t bring them down to fact; and anything which will not bear scrutiny when stripped of fine language is to the scientific mind nonsense.

Again, Darwin wrote for those who can understand him: some of whom will agree with & others oppose him: but he did not write for ministers who never read beyond other’s opinions of the man."

3:10 John Lennox, Oxford Professor of Mathematics, says "God is a person." If He is a person, then He is Limited, Finite, contained in space and time. He cannot be unbounded and yet simultaneously bounded. I don't know about you, but I certainly can't "relate" to a "person" who exists outside of space and time.

Dawkins: "Was homo erectus a person?"

"Well I can't decide from looking at fossils whether they were a person or not."

"Do you think it happened gradually? Was there a, uh, moment when a child was born that was a person and its parents weren't?"

"I ... my own feeling is that there was a point when God did something special, but it would be very hard to detect that from any scientific investigation."

"So God suddenly comes and dives into the evolutionary process and said, 'Right, from now on they're going to be persons.'"

Here we should note D&C 88:15, "and the spirit and the body are the soul of man," and 131:7, "there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."

Everything is "matter". Everything is "spirit". It is impossible for there to be an ontological duality between incorporeal disembodied "mind" which exists in a separate realm outside of space and time and the physically-existing world. As Joseph Smith put it in the King Follett Discourse:

"Now I ask all who hear me why the learned men who are preaching salvation say that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. The reason is they are unlearned. They account it blasphemy to contradict the idea; they will call you a fool ... The word 'create' came from the word baurau; it does not mean 'to create out of nothing'; it means 'to organize', the same as a man would organize materials to build a ship. Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos - chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles that can never be destroyed; they may be organized and reorganized but not destroyed."

God did not and could not create from nothing the laws upon which He bases His righteousness upon:

Alma 34:16 "And thus mercy can satisfy the demands of justice, and encircles them in the arms of safety, while he that exercises no faith unto repentance is exposed to the whole law of the demands of justice; therefore only unto him that has faith unto repentance is brought about the great and eternal plan of redemption."

The most dangerous view I see migrating into the Church, especially from traditional Christianity (among other sources), is that God is the author of the physical laws which He abides by. But as we've seen, if God is the "author" of the Eternal Law (if it is truly "eternal" then it could not have an author, but lay that aside for now) then He is the Author of Evil. Despite extremely strong language in the D&C and the Book of Mormon which state that God is Himself bound by external laws, I see us trying to inflate His prestige by saying that He created all things, when clearly the doctrine of uncreated souls utterly precludes this.

Following absolutist Alexandrian philosophy, it's as if we think we won't have a reason to give our allegiance to God unless He and He alone is shown to be the Absolute, Singular Creator of everything from nothing - a remnant of our traditional-Christian heritage. Yet that's a simply ludicrous notion; I don't withhold my love from my parents until I can prove that they created bacteria and quantum mechanics, I love them because they're good people! If we downplay the Divine Council of a plurality of deities showcased so well in the Pearl of Great Price and try to edge back towards a "Trinitarian" conception of the Godhead (found nowhere in scripture) rather than the countless numbers of uncreated intelligences, we lose a vital defense for the Goodness of God.

(Indeed, I speculate that when Christ tells us to pray only to the Father, that He was doing so in order to emphasize (by way of a contrast to the views of His time) the idea that we are His children, not that He is the only Being worth giving honor to. My view is, why not also pray to Heavenly Mother? Further, why stop with Her, or Him - why not the entire Council? Why not, in the end, pray to the united Family, all the Good Individuals who are one-in-heart in the Atonement, which can include us all? When we all become so righteous that there are none "above" or "below" others, we worship the eternal Family of Free Intelligences. God is "more intelligent" than they all, He is the most ancient Purposer, but they - we, potentially - are all taking part in the great Work. Indeed, giving all honor to a single person is a mark of the Accuser, not the God who wants us all to become adopted into His family yet independent in our spheres.)

In one of Orson Scott Card's recent novels, the main character thinks:

"The god of these Americans wasn't one of the old pantheons ... the god was the people themselves. Imagine - a nation that worshipped each other. Not individually, but as an idea. The highest ideal was to make sure that every other (person) in this place had his freedom and enough to provide for his family. Other people mattered."

In Paulsen and Pulido's recent paper, they state:

"In references to (Genesis) scriptures ... (in which) male and female are created in the image of God, Elder Orson F. Whitney (Quorum of the Twelve, April 9, 1906 - May 16, 1931) asked, 'What is this but a virtual recognition of the feminine principle as well as the masculine principle of Deity?' Furthermore, President Rudger Clawson (Quorum of the Twelve, October 10, 1889 - June 21, 1943) ... (said that) deifying our Heavenly Mother (did not) risk ... divided worship. He urged, 'It doesn't take away from our worship of the Eternal Father, to adore our Eternal Mother, any more than it diminishes the love we bear our earthly fathers, to include our earthly mothers in our affections.' Rather, 'we honor woman when we acknowledged Godhood in her eternal prototype.'"

No one has to lose out. This is about the Atonement, the At-one-ment; the reconciliation of all uncreated Intelligences and the giving of mutual worth-ship is eternal and applies to us all. We're all part of the same family, male and female alike, who progress to become Good by learning how to follow the Eternal Law.

Yet back in traditional theology:

4:00 Francis Collins, National Human Genome Research Institute Director:

"Do miracles occur? Where things, uh, happen that are clearly breaking the laws of nature? That's a tough question for a scientist, but actually, it's not as tough for me as maybe it seems. The big question is: 'Do you believe in a God who is interested in human beings and who exists at least in part outside of nature.' If you accept those things, then the idea that God could, on rare occasions, to suit His purposes, invade the natural world and temporarily suspend those laws in a way which to us would certainly have to appear as if something miraculous had happened."

This is sheer nonsense - how can something exist "in part" outside of nature? If "laws" of nature can be broken, then they weren't "laws" to begin with; we simply hadn't read them correctly before.

"Do you have any speculations on how this might happen on a causal basis?"

"In the physical intervention arena, no. I mean, it would be a suspension of the laws of nature, which is very hard to get your mind about how that would work."

"At the quantum level, at the cellular, the atomic, cellular level, species level, y'know, 'who knows', right?"

"We're trapped in these physical laws; to imagine how they could be suspended is just, uh, impossible to get my mind around, but God isn't trapped in them, He designed them, so if He chose to suspend them, He would figure our a way."

"Trapped"? Again, we believe God follows the laws. If He did not, He would cease to be God.

5:10 Unnamed man:

"My own sense of how people come to be believers in a personal God is that you can get a certain distance with these kinds of intellectual arguments but at some point you have to basically decide 'I'm not going to get all the way there.' And that's what I found happening to myself in my 28th year. And that really required, then, for me, a decision: am I going to stop at this point by retaining this sort of perspective of 'that's interesting, and I'm a skeptic but I'm not convinced yet', or have I reached the point where I could no longer resist the conclusion. And I found I had reached that point, and I'm not sure I can completely put that into rational, rigorous, intellectual terms, but it was very compelling and it remains so today."

God asks Isaiah to "come, let us reason together." We believe that when we are inspired, we can have words come to us - terms, explanations, language, in order to communicate with each other. As Joseph Smith said: "I beg leave to say unto you, brethren, that ignorance, superstition, and bigotry placing itself where it ought not, is oftentimes in the way of the prosperity of this Church."

6:25 John Polkinghorne, Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics:

"I believe God interacts with the unfolding creation, but doesn't overrule the acts of creatures."

God is omniscient, omnipresent, a fundamental part of all that exists. But He doesn't overrule the acts of creatures. Yet He is within those acts themselves. Yet they are "free" to refuse Him and Sin. Yet He is also a part of Sin, since He is part of everything. Yet He is supposed to be Good. Yet ... (ad infinitum)

6:34 Another theologian:

"There's been a very big movement in 20th century theology (long after Joseph Smith's time, in other words) to see that while God is undoubtedly as an eternal aspect, God also engages with time, a sort of di-polar - a God who is both connected with time but also outside of time."

Which is a complete contradiction of terms. God doesn't care about time, because He knows He is uncreated and immortal and bound with His body. But that doesn't mean He is "outside" of it; the moment He moves, He was in one place in the past and is now in another in the present, and can move yet again into the future. Time is motion, but it only works if God has a physical body to move around in a preexisting environment.

"If the world is truly temporal, and unfolding, I believe that means that God does not yet know the future. That's no divine imperfection, I mean, I think anyone who's a theist will believe that God will know anything that is knowable. But if the future does not yet exist, then even God can't know it."

If God created and creates the future, creates everything from nothing, and is a part of everything, then how can He possibly not know it?

7:36 JP Moreland, Professor of Philosophy, Biola:

"I have the immaterial world as a category (how can a "world" be "immaterial"?) there's the abstract immaterial world and the non-abstract. The abstract immaterial world includes Platonic Forms, moral values; the non-abstract immaterial world ..."

"Including persons (in the abstract immaterial world)?"

"Persons, including God."

"Okay."

"Even if God is not in space and time, He's still not an abstract form, He's an individual person, and Angels are finite persons."

How can an individual person be a omnipotent First-Cause Trinity? How can an individual person be infinite in a way which contrasts with "finite" Angels?

"Then we have this category of, of, uh, uh, immaterial persons, of which God is one kind and Angels and Demons are another kind? What I'm asking is, in this category, is there anything else other than persons?"

"N-no, not to my knowledge. Uh, I'm speculating - by the way, I'm in both realms; uh, not the abstract and concrete, but the physical and immaterial, because as a person, my immaterial soul is a part of the unseen immaterial realm, but my body is a part of the concrete, physical ..."

"So in essence, now we have of this, of this, non-abstract immaterial realm three things: we have God, we have the finite, uh, persons of Angels and Demons, and we have, uh, the immortal souls that, that, that you believe in, which is definitely distinct from the other, other two categories. So we have three, three subsets of immaterial."

"And even animal ... I believe animals have souls, that they're not physical."

"Okay, I'll give you four subsets."

A mass of confusion and contradictory terms piling up on top of one another. We have our own problems in this area as well, because we have yet to find where exactly our souls are, how the physics work. We even believe in a sort of animism in which all things have a physical aspect to them. But of course neuroscience is itself a field still in its infancy, in which it is admitted upfront that no one knows how consciousness emerges from the various interactions in the brain; where we differ from traditional Christianity is that it is possible to find out. We know that there is something physical, something material happening at a level we're unaware of; we do not consign our consciousness to a separate realm which is definitionally inaccessible. Again, all "spirit" is actually material, is "matter"; "matter" is just another name for "spirit". There is no Cartesian duality, it is merely different layers and levels of the same "stuff", labelled with different names.

9:00 William Dembski, Research Professor of Philosophy:

"What does that history which predates humans show? Well it's a history of, uh, predation, and y'know, parasitism, death, extinction, y'know, you name it. And how do you make sense of that, because here you have humans that come after-the-fact, how, how is it that, uh, y'know, you don't seem to have that good old-fashioned theodicy where humans are responsible for the evil they're experiencing. And so I've struggled with this in trying to form a theodicy - the old way of thinking about the effects of the Fall is that the Fall happens and then things go haywire; well, couldn't it happen that the Fall happens and in a sense God, who is outside of time, changes the past and introduced natural evil, y'know, for the sake of humanity, to be a mirror of their, the Fall. Y'know, and it seems to me that even our understanding of evil, uh, we understand evil by the evils we see in nature. I mean could we fully appreciate evil if we didn't have examples of vipers and parasitism and things like that, I mean, y'know, nature gives us wonderful metaphors for the evil in our hearts."

God changes the past? He overrules all the supposedly "free willed" choices of all the animals who have souls? He introduces death into all living things as a result of one man's sin solely in order to subject us to an object lesson?

... so we'll have better metaphors?

That's not a God, that's a monster.

We have a lot of unjustified folk-doctrine in this realm as well - inherited, I think, from our assimilation of traditional Christian beliefs about the Fall. Too many of us don't take our Articles of Faith seriously, in which we proclaim that "men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression." We try to come up with ways in which we really are somehow physically affected by Adam's Fall. Rather than an archetypal story we are meant to learn from, Adam taints us. This is all unscriptural, inherited from outside sources like Milton, as Trent Stephens explains.

Yet in our Temples, the Fall is our own Fall, and not even a bad thing - as Eve says, if we had not Fallen, we would not have known Joy.

Of course, this gets us into evolution:

11:00 Dinesh D'Souza, Hoover Research Fellow, Stanford:

"If we've been on this planet for a hundred thousand years as Darwinian primates, having pretty much the same brains as we have now, why is it the case that for 95,000 of those years man accomplished virtually nothing? Not having invented a wheel? Not having come up with a cave painting, even? And then suddenly, five thousand years ago, history gets started, history gets started in a lot of different places, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, everybody starts inventing stuff ... it does appear as if some sort of a transcendent breath may have grabbed a couple of those Darwinian primates and breathed something we might call a 'soul' into them."

I am stunned that a Stanford Research Fellow can be so ignorant of prehistory. We have no extant records of what we accomplished in those years (that's the, uh, definition of prehistory), but all the oldest manuscripts, which are always written in medias res, contain implications of many earlier civilizations much older than 5,000 years which are now long gone. We also have, say, pots and other markers of culture from at least 18,000 years ago. He is trying to make an argument from archaeological inadequacy.

And really now, exactly what have we moderns "accomplished" that is so different from our earliest ancestors? We haven't focused on medicine, that's for sure - we haven't cured death for each other. To the contrary, our "accomplishments" are often just extensions of the usual primate-response of "killing anyone we don't like from the other tribe." We've accomplished genocides on unprecedented scales. But humans still mate and reproduce exactly as they always have; they still form families and treat them with cruelly or with grace, the same as always. We might be doing so in buildings of concrete and glass rather than the forest, but we're all still primates under the skin.

Theologian: "I wanted to believe, but my brain was getting in the way."

Joseph Smith, speaking for God: "You must study it out in your mind."

'Nuff said.

12:45 Brian Leftow, Oxford Professor of Christian Religion:

"We have to distinguish between changing God and affecting Him. It's possible to affect something without changing it, if your affect, without changing it, makes it different than it would have been. God eternally, timelessly, hears you. Because of that, because He hears you, He's different than He would have been, had you not spoken. But He's always been in that different state, that he ... let me restate that ... uh, you have not changed God by speaking, but you have made Him to be as He eternally and timelessly is, and had you not spoken, He would have eternally and timelessly been a different way. Suppose God is in time, but He sees the future, as many people think. And ... okay, then 10,000 years ago, God saw you having this conversation, uh, so your having it now doesn't change His cognitive state; He's always, as far back as He was there, and was foreseeing it, He was always in that condition. But you account for the fact that He was in that condition. Eternally. Back through time, as when I was supposing. He's always known, always seeing you doing this. Because of that, you've always had an effect on Him, but you've never changed Him."

Always the insistence on a God who is philosophically, ontologically "unchanging", rather than a God who is "unchanging" in the sense that He will always keep His promises, but who is still eternally progressing (McConkie's overblown hysterics notwithstanding) Always the Fundamentalist assumption (utterly destroying, of course, any hope of Free Agency) that "prophecy" is a perfect vision of the Unchanging, Predestined, Fated Future, rather than a Plan consisting of Promises in which God will act in the ways he has Covenanted to.

This is where we as Latter-Day Saints can and, in my opinion, should posit (and emphasize in our teachings) a time when God became God, a time before He was clothed in His Robes and Crowned by the Common Consent of the Divine Council, as implied in the Psalms. He Progressed to get where He is now, just as we must; let the Anti-Mormons beat us with the “Mormons believe God was once a fallible sinner” stick implied in Lorenzo Snow’s couplet - approved as revelation by Joseph Smith - stating “as Man is, God once was; as God is, Man may become.”

I think that’s the most hopeful, powerful universe I can conceive of - one in which a sinner is always free to repent, be forgiven, and become worthy of love.

14:05 William Lane Craig, Apologist and Philosopher:

"For me the thought that everything perishes in the heat death of the universe is so depressing, so awful, that, um, that it, it, just seems to put a question mark behind everything we do, all our accomplishments, all our deeds, just seem so trivial in light of this cosmic doom that awaits us all."

"But not for me."

"Yeah, I just don't understand that."

"It seems to me ... if I save someone's life, I've done something significant, I've done something important, I've done something whose significance is not in any way threatened, diminished, reduced, one iota by the fact that - whatever it is, 40 billion years from now, y'know, the sun will explode. It's neither here nor there. I've saved a human life, that's what matters, and the fact that it doesn't have cosmic significance doesn't seem to me to undermine its significance."

First off: how an idea makes you feel has little to do with its truth. If it is true, then of course the thought of everything perishing in the heat death of the universe is depressing. The question is whether or not it is true that there is no hope.

But here I also call bull on the atheist perspective. The thought of utter extinguishment is the most terrifying concept imaginable (not that we really can imagine an end to imagining), regardless of how you rationalize nonexistence away. You can save all the lives you want in your finite life, but unless you can save everyone in the universe who has ever and will ever live, it's all a pointless charade.

15:06 Nicholas Saunders, Science and Religion Scholar, Cambridge:

"Is it possible for God to step in and determine an otherwise indeterminate event in order to achieve an action in the world. And that's effectively an idea of God "cheating at playing dice" - Einstein said that God plays dice - or, (rather, he) didn't like the idea of God playing dice in quantum mechanics. Um, theological attempts to fit the two together is effectively where God is playing dice with one hand but then is also breaking the rules with the other. Now, um, the great benefit - oh, this is speaking rather cynically - the great benefit from theologian's perspective is that although you can never prove that God acts in this particular way, you can never prove that he doesn't. And the, um, reason for this is, um, something (Henpole?) rather grandiosely called "The Problem of Epistemic Ambiguity". Um, essentially, you don't know if you've got probabilistic laws in play, which probabilistic law is the active law that is determining that particular event. And in the same way that if quantum mechanics is probabilistic, how do you actually know that it isn't actually God determining something or just chance? There is no way of telling it apart."

This simply makes no sense if God is omnipresent. "I'll step into myself and determine an event within my indeterminate self." The ability to personally intervene, however, makes perfect sense with the God of Mormonism, in which God really can "step in" from time to time, entering into an otherwise chaotic preexisting realm to shape it - partly because He actually has, y'know, feet.

16:20 NT Wright, Leading New Testament Scholar:

"God's differentiated Creation, which nevertheless is designed to work together, ultimately Heaven and Earth, and Male and Female, and that that doesn't seem to be just a sort of accidental genetic quirk that humans are like that, and indeed that the grand narrative of scripture goes right through to a conclusion which is the Marriage of Heaven and Earth, and, and the Bride of Christ and Christ the Bridegroom. And of course, some people would say, 'So the scripture is an ancient and basically homophobic text', y'know - 'learn to distance yourself from it.' And I would then want to say, 'Uh, where do you, which bit of moral high ground do you stand on from which to pass that judgment on this text.'"

If Heaven is - as many traditional Christians have tried to explain it to me - an abstract other-dimensional place separate from time and space, then talking about a "marriage" between it and earth is rather bizarre. If, on the other hand, one posits other physical worlds in our own universe, whose inhabitants become one-in-heart by taking part in the great Plan of Salvation while yet retaining their individuality, then it makes perfect sense.

We believe that the Law is ascertainable by anyone because we all have an innate capacity to choose between our understanding of Good and Evil. God doesn't give us commandments because He's making us dance like puppets; killing people is not bad because God forbids it, God forbids it because it is bad!

If God really, truly behaves like He is said to in the dark parts of Numbers and Deuteronomy, if those books were 100% God-breathed and inerrant and infallible and not largely composed by nationalistic Deuteronomist scribes (as Biblical scholarship suggests), then I’m going to go out on a slender little limb and say that it's God who's wrong to command genocide against innocent women and children, not my finite human morality. I think Joseph Smith wouldn't mind that kind of arrogance; as he says:

"Many important points, touching the salvation of man, had been taken from the Bible, or lost before it was compiled," because "ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors," and "many things in the Bible ... do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me."

17:10 Alvin Plantinga, Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy:

"(God) had all these different possibilities, all these different possible worlds He could have made actual, He wanted to make a really Good one actual, all the best ones contained Incarnation and Atonement, but any world that contains Incarnation and Atonement also has to contain Evil, Sin. And not just a little bit of it; I mean, if all the evil there was was, uh, mere peccadillo on the part of an otherwise admirably-disposed Angel, then it would be massive overkill for there to be Incarnation and Atonement, so there's got to be a lot of it. And hence, any world, any really good world, is going to contain a great deal of evil."

"So God is choosing worlds that have evil, so that tantamounts (sic) to God creating evil. Close to it."

"I don't know that it amounts to His creating evil, but it does amount to His choosing worlds that contain evil. I mean, the evil is a necessary condition of something really good. It's not that the evil gets chosen for its own sake, but this whole world, which contains evil, does get chosen."

"Has to"? If God is the all-powerful creator, contingent on nothing other than His own designs, then nothing "has to" contain anything. He chooses everything. There are no external constraints limiting Him to worlds in which Incarnation and Atonement necessarily need Sin and Suffering and Death. If He is "choosing" these worlds then He is, indeed, the author of all evil.

This type of philosophy is simply a capitulation to Mystery designed to let God off the hook. To the contrary, we believe that God does not have the power to destroy evil, because there is no such power - but we believe He cannot tolerate Sin, which is Death; He shows us how to carve out Gardens of Light and Life where we can create peaceful Zions, shining colonies organized and drifting within the darkness and trying to illuminate it.

"It may be that, um other creatures, other free creatures, have had a substantial hand in the whole development of life on earth, so that all the, all the waste, all the pain, all the suffering that goes along with predation, um, and the whole evolution of life starting, maybe, starting, say, uh, oh, I don't know, maybe 500 million years ago or something like that, all that is also, in the long run, due to the free activity of other creatures. That's a possibility. It's kind of a wild suggestion, and one which nowadays will raise eyebrows, but I don't think that's anything against it."

If you create them from nothing, they are not free, because you determine everything about them. God is yet again the Devil.

18:49 Dawkins:

"Um, sometimes you say that God doesn't intervene, and, and you make a very eloquent case for why it would be a rather undignified sort of thing to do as, as a God; on the other hand, you say He does intervene, uh, when He rescues one child from an earthquake."

Alistair McGrath, Oxford Professor of Historical Theology:

"Concentrating on this one child, okay, right, so we're focusing on that one situation ... I think that in the case of a child surviving what tens of thousands of others did not, then clearly what - you know, others, some have died ... sorry, let me start again ... just, just, um, refocus ... I think in the case of situations where many thousands may have died, for example, as in the recent earthquake, yet one survives, obviously there is this very important question: did God choose to save that one, and if so, what was wrong with all the others? And I think that the natural Christian instinct which I believe to be correct here is indeed to speak of God saving that child, not because God wanted any others to perish, but because God, as it were, chose to save that one. And I think that the whole language here, which we find, for example, in Augustine, is that of God wanting to do something in the midst of a world which is not perfect. And again, the Christian vision of the world is that this is not the way God wants the world to be. It's the idea of an imperfect, a Fallen world, a world of suffering, where things happen which God does not want to happen. And the key point, again, I want to stress, is that I do not believe it represents any failure on God's part that this is a world of suffering, a world of death, a world where things happen which we know God would not want to happen, and at the same time be able to say that in some way, God is able to bring some good out of these disasters, for example by saving a person there, by doing something else there."

This is truly despicable. It's almost as if these people are more interested in winning the debate on God's behalf rather than searching for truth. Partisan cheerleaders.

If God is all-powerful, omniscient, the First Cause, the Creator of All Things, then he could make the perfect world. If He wanted to save all the children, they'd be saved. If something is Fallen, and God is interpenetrating it with his omnipotent power, then He caused it to Fall.

21:05 Freeman Dyson:

"There is a strict lack of determination in the microscopic world, so I think that may not be a coincidence, that it looks something like Free Will. I mean, it's not, of course, I'm not saying that electrons actually has a consciousness of the kind that we have, but it probably has the rudiments of a consciousness, and, and, and in some rudimentary sense every atom has a mind, and, and then, what the brain is simply some sort of apparatus for amplifying the molecules, and amplifying the choices that are made by individual molecules and converting them onto the scale of human beings. So that seems to me to be very plausible, that the existence of quantum mechanics has something to do with the existence of human consciousness. Of course, that point of view is very unpopular among biologists; most biologists think quantum mechanics has nothing to do with it, but anyway, I beg to differ.

The sort of traditional God is thought of as outside of space and time; He sees everything, understands everything, knows everything, and He's also omnipotent very often, but my God is different - He's part of the universe, He evolves with the universe, He doesn't know what's going to happen, so His knowledge increases as time goes on. So He's in doubt just as we are, and, and, of course, our contributions are in fact His, His growth, I mean, He grows through the contributions of creatures like us."

Now we're getting somewhere useful - I knew I could count on good ol' Dyson.

I tentatively agree; God only knows what's going to happen in the sense that He knows what He will do, the promises He will make. He’s lived long enough and learned enough that He can usually guess pretty well as to the consequences of the decisions which societies and individuals make. The glory of God is His uncreated Intelligence, just as it is our own glory, and condemnation. Dyson even has a bit of the uncreated Intelligence thing going - we might simply say that it’s not the atoms themselves, not the quarks and leptons and whatnot that are the seat of the consciousness, but an even deeper layer of “refined matter” wherein emergent consciousness resides and nudges the other layers to produce actions. To every Kingdom is a law given. This is where the cutting-edge discoveries in neuroscience and physics will be helpful in the coming decades.

22:45 RJ Berry, Professor of Genetics, UCL:

"The origin of man is, as I say, something of the order of, let's just say, something of the order of 20,000 years ago. At that time, there were aborigines in Australia, there were Native Americans in the Americas, there were, uh, peoples in the far east, in China. We are, we could not, all be physically, genetically, descended, from a couple living in the Near East. But what we could be, of course, is spiritually descended. If - and this is pure hypothesis - if God's image in us was implanted and then spread to all the species living at that same time ... (inaudible) God makes a distinction which can be really quite helpful: that we were homo sapiens, we're now homo divinus, Divine Man (and Woman, of course). And, um, there'd be no, um, difference in the bones in, uh, this process, so there's no problem about the fossil record humans; the key factor is that at some stage, God put his 'finger' on that original population."

24:08 Denys Turner, Yale Professor of Historical Theology:

"Say, well, God is not any 'kind' of thing, because if God were a 'kind' of thing, God would just be one of the other kinds of things that there are, only a rather different one. So we're not talking about something that's on the map of Creation; we're talking about something which is off the map of Creation, which is why what we're talking ... y'know, how we're talking now is a kind of bamboozling nonsense, if you like. That's, by the way, called 'Negative Theology'; that is to say, knowing that you don't know what you're talking about at this stage. And I think that's the, really what theology is about; it's the sense that on the other side of our language is something which sustains it, which can't be contained within it - and I think this is what Wittgenstein was after, at the end of the Tractatus, when he said 'Well, what underlies how we say things cannot itself be said, and that's what we call 'God'".

This is the crux of the issue, and it all boils down to Alexandrian absolutes which the Western world has been so desperately clinging to all these millennia. Atheists are absolutely correct to denounce religion defending itself with this kind of bamboozling nonsense.

But.

What in the world is wrong with God being "just" another one of the other kinds of things? My parents are "just" a few of the uncountable numbers of parents there are; doesn't mean they're less important to me. What in the world does God's ontological uniqueness have to do with anything? Shouldn't we judge Him based on who He is, what His plans are? Why did we let a debate about His physical nature become the true test of faith? Unless everything that has ever existed anywhere, at any time, was Created by Him out of utter nothingness, then He can't be a True God? Why not? Why can't He "merely" be - as He himself claims to be - the "Governor"? The "Prince of Peace"?

The "Savior"?

An Unnecessary Conflict

Let's be very clear here: it is not their scientific backgrounds which is causing the confusion for the intelligent people in the video - it is their religious backgrounds and premises, and their religious information is conditioned by a post-Apostasy view of deity. The "traditions of their fathers" which claim that the sheer incomprehensibility is a sign of "deep" philosophy.

I see it almost everywhere I look, the one nearly ubiquitous premise: the fundamental point on which these scientific and religious philosophies (which claim to be ever so different from each other) all agree on is that God does not and cannot have a body.

Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley, Kantian metaphysics, German Idealism, the Transcendentalist school, Theosophy and Mystics and Spiritualists, Islamism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Gnosticism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism ...

They all have so much truth and history and beautiful symbolism to them; as Brigham Young says, "The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this Church. As for their morality, many of them are, morally, just as good as we are. All that is good, lovely, and praiseworthy belongs to this Church and Kingdom. “Mormonism” includes all truth. There is no truth but what belongs to the Gospel. It is life, eternal life; it is bliss; it is the fulness of all things in the gods and in the eternities of the gods."

"Such a plan," he continues, "incorporates every system of true doctrine on the earth, whether it be ecclesiastical, moral, philosophical, or civil; it incorporates all good laws that have been made from the days of Adam until now; it swallows up the laws of nations, for it exceeds them all in knowledge and purity, it circumscribes the doctrines of the day, and takes from the right and the left, and brings all truth together in one system, and leaves the chaff to be scattered hither and thither."

"It is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church (Jesus, their Elder Brother, being at their head) to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, … to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people and bring it to Zion."

There is so much truth out there it makes me want to cry sometimes in sheer frustration that I'll never be able to read all the Holy Books, learn all the history of the world; but the sects which the Family of Adam and Eve have broken up into have all been twisted - just a tiny little twist - by the philosophies of men into supporting a disembodied God. They find their clearest expression in Augustine and Aristotle, Aquinas and Philo, who have been synthesized into more worldviews than one can count.

As B. H. Roberts put it:

"'Platonism, and Aristotelianism,' says the author of the History of Christian Doctrine, 'exerted more influence upon the intellectual methods of men, taking in the whole time since their appearance, than all other systems combined. They certainly influenced the Greek mind, and Grecian culture, more than all the other philosophical systems. They re-appear in Roman philosophy - so far as Rome had any philosophy. We shall see that Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, exerted more influence than all other philosophical minds united, upon the greatest of the Christian Fathers: upon the greatest of the Schoolmen; and upon the theologians of the Reformation, Calvin and Melanchthon. And if we look at European philosophy as it has been unfolded in England, Germany and France, we shall perceive that all the modern theistic schools have discussed the standing problems of human reason, in very much the same manner in which the reason of Plato and Aristotle discussed them twenty-two centuries ago. Bacon, Des Cartes, Leibnitz, and Kant, so far as the first principles of intellectual and moral philosophy are concerned, agree with their Grecian predecessors. A student who has mastered the two systems of the Academy and Lyceum will find in modern philosophy (with the exception of the department of natural science) very little that is true, that may not be found for substance, and germinally, in the Greek theism.'

It is hoped that enough is said here to establish the fact that the conception of God as 'pure being,' 'immaterial,' 'without form,' 'or parts or passions,' as held by orthodox Christianity, has its origin in Pagan philosophy, not in Jewish nor Christian revelation."

It renders them all fundamentally incoherent, because they are literally trying to imagine something which cannot be imagined, understand something which they admit from the start cannot be understood, all the while justifying their irrationality through "faith" in something they are definitionally incapable of comprehending.

And because God is disembodied and physically ever-present and the cause of All Things, many of these genuinely good-hearted people, (nearly always unintentionally, to be sure) make Him the author of Evil in the name of incorporeal “Love”. In defending the philosophical attributes of the One True Disembodied God from all rivals, the families break, they scatter; the House of Israel falls apart in the Old Testament just as the various Churches do in the New; the Nephites and Lamanites separate into civil war in the Book of Mormon as the other tribes do in the Popol Vuh; the sectarian world collapses into endless disunity and warfare.

But does this mean that the people who believe incorrectly are Evil, Part of the Church of the Devil, deserving of Inquisitions and Condemnations and ostracism and death? Do we, in our fanaticism, condemn them like Jeanne d'Arc or Giordano Bruno to the fire?

No!

It is the Creeds which are the problem, not the good-hearted people!

"(Others) have creeds which a man must believe or be asked out of their church. I want the liberty of thinking and believing as I please. It feels so good not to be trammelled. It does not prove that a man is not a good man because he errs in doctrine." - Joseph Smith

“We ought always to be aware of those prejudices which sometimes so strangely present themselves, and are so congenial to human nature, against our friends, neighbors, and brethren of the world, who choose to differ from us in opinion and in matters of faith. Our religion is between us and our God. Their religion is between them and their God. There is a love from God that should be exercised toward those of our faith, who walk uprightly, which is peculiar to itself, but it is without prejudice; it also gives scope to the mind, which enables us to conduct ourselves with greater liberality towards all that are not of our faith, than what they exercise towards one another.” - Joseph Smith

"While one portion of the human race is judging and condemning the other without mercy, the Great Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of man, causes 'His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.' He holds the reins of judgment in His hands; He is a wise Lawgiver, and will judge all men, not according to the narrow, contracted notions of men, but, 'according to the deeds done in the body whether they be good or evil,' or whether these deeds were done in England, America, Spain, Turkey, or India.

He will judge them, 'not according to what they have not, but according to what they have,' those who have lived without law, will be judged without law, and those who have a law, will by judged by that law. We need not doubt the wisdom and intelligence of the Great Jehovah; He will award judgment or mercy to all nations according to their several deserts, their means of obtaining intelligence, the laws by which they are governed, the facilities afforded them of obtaining correct information, and His inscrutable designs in relation to the human family; and when the designs of God shall be made manifest, and the curtain of futurity be withdrawn, we shall all of us eventually have to confess that the Judge of all the earth has done right." - Joseph Smith

"If any man is authorized to take away my life because he says I am a false teacher, then upon the same principle I am authorized to take away the life of every false teacher, and where would be the end of blood? And who would not be the sufferer? But no man is authorized to take away life because of a difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate, right or wrong." - Joseph Smith

The solution to these problems will never come through force; to deny man his Agency was the plan of the Accuser. Instead, we may only teach others "by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned."

There is so much truth out there. Is it possible that we might be able to unite it, to synthesize all the histories, to reconcile all the Families with each other, to Gather Zion, by recognizing that we are part of the Divine Council, the endless plurality of Gods? We can carry the Plan of Salvation to people, and all it would take is a slight tweak - God has a body, and is part of a Family of Gods - to allow many of the truths of all the traditions to be salvaged.

"Ye are Gods," Christ said. We and our families and friends and neighbors and nations are the embodied Gods. If the deities were always embodied, that means the sacred texts are not by definition fictions hallucinated by people who were confused about causality. It is the witness of the Divine Body which is the key; and the recognition that our own bodies are divine.

We carry the seeds of life within ourselves. Let that one really sink in. Folks like, say, Leibniz got a bit closer with his little monads, which might be somewhat akin to our Intelligences, but he was still caught up in the "best possible universe". Hobbes at least thought God might be corporeal. Etc.

But few, if any, come with the force of Joseph Smith, who spoke as one having authority:

"When the Savior shall appear we shall see him as he is. We shall see that he is a man like ourselves. And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy. John 14:23 - The appearing of the Father and the Son, in that verse, is a personal appearance; and the idea that the Father and the Son dwell in a man’s heart is an old sectarian notion, and is false."

"God himself, who sits enthroned in yonder heaven, is a man like one of you. That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today and you were to see the great God who holds this world in its orbit and upholds all things by his power, you would see him in the image and very form of a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion and image of God. He received instruction from and walked, talked, and conversed with him as one man talks and communes with another.

In order to understand the subject of the dead for the consolation of those who mourn for the loss of their friends, it is necessary they should understand the character and being of God; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined that God was God from all eternity. (That he was not is an idea) incomprehensible to some. But it is the simple and first principle of the gospel-to know for a certainty the character of God, that we may converse with him as one man with another. God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did, and I will show it from the Bible.

... You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves - to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done - by going from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you are able to sit in glory as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power."

We must emphasize this, because it overturns much of Western philosophy, most of which has proven inadequate to defend the idea of deity: this really is the "great secret": God has a body, and we are His children.

Ether 3:6 And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord, for he was struck with fear.

8 And he saith unto the Lord: I saw the finger of the Lord, and I feared lest he should smite me; for I knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood.

9 And the Lord said unto him: Because of thy faith thou hast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood; and never has man come before me with such exceeding faith as thou hast; for were it not so ye could not have seen my finger. Sawest thou more than this?

Even if Joseph Smith lied his a$$ off about the historical truth of the Book of Mormon (I don't believe he did, but just suppose it), his theology of an infinite number of physically-embodied Gods is nevertheless found everywhere in the Bible, and in the oldest scriptures from around the world. It wasn't until Hellenized monotheism became the dominant philosophical paradigm and swept through the entire known world with the rise of Roman Imperialism that such a view came to be considered "backward" or "primitive".

Growing up in Hawaii, I was raised to consider the Polynesian tales of embodied deities as fantasy; as a Native American, I was told that my ancestors must have hallucinated the Popol Vuh, which speaks of Mother and Father God. Hugh Nibley wrote on this theme, dealing with the post-Apostasy denigration of the Egyptian Isis. Her name means "She of the Throne", daughter of Hathor, "The House of Horus", with Horus as the Falcon used to symbolize one of their Protectors. The mythology was common throughout the Middle East; the Egyptians had an "Atum" like our Adam, and Hathor and Isis were Queens of Heaven, as in John's Vision, Jeremiah, etc.

Nibley notes: "Isis is overthrown by a neat schoolroom syllogism (by Saint Paulinus of Nola, who was a severe monastic in 394 AD, after the apostasy): "Can a woman be a (procreative) goddess? If divine, she cannot have a body, and without a body there can be no sex, and without sex there can be no giving of birth." (Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 523)

So it became a practice, after the Apostasy, to claim that all references to female divinity - even in our own scriptures! - were just metaphors, just allegories, just rhetoric - see Lady Wisdom, or Lutzky's speculation on 'Shaddai' as a goddess epithet.

But the "backward", "primitive" view of embodied deities is the only one which has a hope of making sense of all the evidence - historical, scientific, and moral.

Implications

What are the implications of our view of deity, specifically God the Father?

First off, He is not and cannot be the Author of Evil; He is a naturalistic deity who is trying desperately to pull us along to where He is. Because we are uncreated sparks of Intelligence, we are morally culpable for all our acts, just as He is.

Second, if He could not create Himself, where did His body come from?

This is where evolution and uncreated Intelligence comes in. If God is part of an extended family of deities, why do we assume that His body was not the product of evolution? A "body" implies biology of some sort or another. The "arguments from design" traditionally used to protect post-Apostasy views of God from evolution are, for the most part, worthless. There is no physical creature in the world that cannot be explained by evolution; animals are "perfectly" adapted to their environment (they're not, at all, but let's go with that inaccurate description) because they are the end product of a mind-bogglingly long process of evolution in which anyone who was not well-enough adapted to the environment died.

But what does this have to do with the existence of the Great Governor? We know that He could not create Himself; Joseph Smith told us flat out:

"If I am right, I might with boldness proclaim from the house tops that God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself. Intelligence exists upon a self-existent principle; it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it. Moreover, all the spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.

The first principles of man are self-existent with God. God found himself in the midst of spirits and glory, and because he was greater, he saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have the privilege of advancing like himself - that they might have one glory upon another and all the knowledge, power, and glory necessary to save the world of spirits. I know that when I tell you these words of eternal life that are given to me, you taste them, and I know you believe them. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life; I know it is good. And when I tell you of these things that were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet, and I rejoice more and more."

So we know that He is bound by eternal, pre-existing laws, that He (and the angels, and us, once upon a time) reside on a distant planet. We are "sent" here; it is a process of moving from one sphere, one world, to another. He does not have the power to create us, and neither can He extinguish our Intelligence. But He is kind enough to Organize us.

We live on a planet orbiting a star. In only a few hundred years, we have gone from agriculturalists to

standing on the moon; it is our own lack of will that keeps us bound to Earth. We are learning to

our

deeper, trying to unlock the secrets of consciousness. Is any of this merely far-fetched science-fiction?

The Seeds of Life

This is where the theory of strong Panspermia comes in.

For all their supposed differences, the atheistic "Big Bang" and the traditional-Christian (really just Greek) idea of creation ex nihilo, are essentially the same: all existence had to explode into existence from a single point, before which time and space did not exist. "An explosion did it!" "God did it!" - hardly answers. So why pretend to believe in a first, necessary cause, following (as usual) Aristotle? Why not a multiplicity of causes? As Uncreated Intelligences, we each become a Cause, effecting as much as we can touch. Take existence as a given, and go from there.

But for what purpose? Brother Joseph taught that “Happiness is the object and design of our existence, and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.”

Furthermore, “the great principle of happiness consists in having a body.”

Indeed, “before the foundation of the Earth, in the Grand Council, the Spirits of all men were subject to oppression, and the express purpose of God in Giving (them) a Tabernacle was to arm (them) against the power of Darkness.”

“God saw that those intelligences had not power to defend themselves against those that had a Tabernacle” and so he called them into a Council and agreed “to form them Tabernacles so that he might (en)Gender the Spirit and the Tabernacle together, so as to create sympathy for their fellow man.”

It is the Divine Body housing our Uncreated Intelligence which is our Glory, the Holy Temples which we each dwell within and become a part of, the glorious physicality which is so well-adapted to this planet that we can be warmed by the sun and cooled in the ocean, help our friends and family, make love with our spouses, give life to others.

This physicality is where the alien-astronaut conspiracy theories come so close to truth and yet get it so deeply off-the-deep-end wrong. They desperately twist every ancient myth of the Gods to prove that it is mysterious aliens who visit us (cue creepy music), when it is painfully obvious that all the old Gods are just us "mere" humans. Yet buried underneath their countless errors, guys like von Däniken are so popular because they have latched onto one deeply important truth (which Joseph Smith introduced more than a hundred years before them, more than one hundred years before the first manned spaceflight in 1961): the Visitors are not the transcendent ontologically-unique God of the Western world.

Mere humans? "Ye are Gods." If we choose to be.

How can this be possible? Who created the worlds, if it wasn't God? The Creationist - sweating, desperate - points to the magnificent complexity of the eyeball and claims it can never have evolved.

But why not? Nowhere is it said that the only way to create worlds is through God's power - we only know that He and the Divine Council prepared many of them, worlds without number. Yet we don't need the Council to explain the existence of all planets which have ever been; God can be an Intelligence who mounted a body on another world which formed of its own accord, just as modern science describes the proto-planetary accretion disk coalescing into form from the void. All life on each planet bends itself to creating creatures, growing bodies to house Intelligences.

God did not create the world from nothing; He and the Council found it an empty wasteland, perhaps after one of our many periodic mass extinctions. They seed it with life, calling to all things until they were obeyed. They are Gardeners, not magicians who pop worlds into existence from nothing with a snap. All life is formed from a common genetic root. The Tree of Life, as in the Epics and Sagas, sprouts up between all the worlds, connecting them all, worlds without number, filled with Children of God who are each individually adapted to the worlds upon which they reside - we have earthly bodies now; when we as Intelligences are carried through the dark ocean of space to be reborn in the physically-real Heaven, we will have Heavenly bodies, adapted for life in the new world.

What is “heaven”? The Old English heofon, “home of God;” earlier “sky, firmament,” probably from Proto-Germanic *hibin-, dissimilated from *himin- [cf. Low German heben, Old Norse himinn, Gothic himins, Old Frisian himul, Dutch hemel, German Himmel - “heaven, sky”]. A real place somewhere in the sky - in the same way that, from the perspective of another world, our Mother Earth is merely a tiny light shining in the night.

As stated in 1 Corinthians:

35 But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?

36 Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:

37 And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:

38 But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.

39 All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.

40 There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.

48 As is the earthy [body], such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.

49 And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.

We are an interplanetary, colonizing species, and we don’t even know it, drifting like light during our time between bodies across the immense reaches of the outer darkness, pulled by the Family which governs the stars, pulled back into safety, into rebirth, a remission of our sins as we forget our previous lives for a time until we are ready to reclaim them and take responsibility for our actions.

What the scriptures record is the Intentionality of the act. Think of it this way: a tree can grow from a seed naturally, without any help from another person, entirely "independent in that sphere in which it was created". But we can take the seed and plant it in our own Garden and use it as a food source. In both cases, a natural event is occurring. But in the second case, there is a layer of intentionality inserted in-between.

In much the same way, it seems reasonable to me that God is not the originator of the seeds of life - we are self-existent sparks of light - but rather the Organizer, the Shepherd, the Maker, the Shaper, the Modeler, the Begetter, tending His Garden, the Vineyard which is the world. With our consent, He takes part in the Council which long ago, before the Foundation of the World, formed the Plan of Salvation for His children.

D&C 1:38 says "What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same."

It allows Him to delegate - if there are worlds without number, He can't possibly watch them all, but someone who is as good as Him will become the Watchers, and because they are all part of the same Plan, they are one in heart. They retain their individuality, their personalities, but they are "one" in this way: they are working to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, to give all uncreated intelligences bodies, that they all might have joy.

As Brigham Young said:

" ... Now those men, or those women, who know no more about the power of God, and the influences of the Holy Spirit, than to be led entirely by another person, suspending their own understanding, and pinning their faith upon another's sleeve, will never be capable of entering into the celestial glory, to be crowned as they anticipate; they will never be capable of becoming Gods. They cannot rule themselves (...) but they must be dictated to in every trifle, like a child. They cannot control themselves in the least, but James, Peter, or somebody else must control them. They never can become Gods, nor be crowned as rulers with glory, immortality, and eternal lives. They never can hold sceptres of glory, majesty, and power in the celestial kingdom. Who will? Those who are valiant and inspired with the true independence of heaven, who will go forth boldly in the service of their God, leaving others to do as they please, determined to do right, though all mankind besides should take the opposite course. Will this apply to any of you? Your own hearts can answer."

This opens up a vast vista. God is not alone! He is one father among many in an eternal family! He can love a Wife and Children! We can all be adopted in!

Once we've untangled all this, it becomes a matter of allegiance to those who want to do good, not of faith in incomprehensible Creeds: "Why should I give my trust, my fidelity, to this God, this strange Being who visits us from the sky from time to time?"

Putting It All Together

We are asked to judge for ourselves, and He gives us His great purpose: To bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. In my book, anyone working towards that goal is a True God. We can become a part of this process; as Nibley was fond of saying, He wants us to "get in on it."

If we are the children of the Gods who work through small means, if we are of the same species, if we are capable of knowing "all things" as He does and inheriting all He has, then we should be pouring all our efforts into science, technology, medicine; the example of the Three Nephites should show us that it is absolutely possible for us to overcome death "in a twinkling", if only we knew how. If a dictator were killing the number of people who die "natural" deaths everyday, there would be a worldwide revolt. But we have so little faith that we think there is something inevitable about death. This is simply not the case:

3 Nephi 8 "And ye shall never endure the pains of death; but when I shall come in my glory ye shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality; and then shall ye be blessed in the kingdom of my Father."

It can be done.

We must learn how to pattern ourselves after Christ, become Saviors who rise from the dead for our enormous extended family not by being slothful servants who wait to be commanded, but by exploring through rigorous reproducible experimentation how God goes about binding our souls to our bodies so that we can do the same for others. It's fine for me to trust in God for my personal salvation, but it is unacceptable to me to look at others dying and being unable to do anything about it because I've neglected to study things out in my mind sufficiently to save them:

“The things of God are of deep import, and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity." - Joseph Smith

Edited October 24, 2011 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[Maidservant]

Jeremy, your challenges to the state of knowledge of the shape of reality, as it presently stands in the earth, are important, and I understand your frustration. But thankfully we can be patient with others as they have their own journey and wrestle with God, and they are not (ultimately) condemned for what they do not know [although we are all in a sense condemned by our blindness, otherwise we would enjoy what is possible to be seen]; and, indeed, I am so very humbled and grateful that I have been given the spiritual tools that I have (i.e. the Restored gospel of Jesus Christ), and I watch as other people do their best without this, so I am in awe of them. And many of them come to understandings of reality even without the restored gospel, just because they are so humble to be listening to God.

I agree with you on many things, and I love that you love plainness. I have not, in my own seeking with my Father, arrived at the exact same place you have, so I would disagree, or challenge, or at least still hold in some sort of suspension, many matters upon which you have made points.

"God moves in mysterious ways," we say, chuckling about how wonderful it is that we have faith in the great Mystery I agree whole heartedly with you that all that is God, the universe (multi-metavers), reality . . . is knowable, at least in subject. In volume, maybe not so much, but maybe more on that later if we get to it. I agree that in an ontological sense, there is no religious value of saying that we cannot know; for me, all that is God, all that IS, is fair game as the subject of my questions and seeking. On a personal level, on a zen level, there is a lot that I have to leave unknowable, and just live in the present and with what I have. But I expect that as I progress, all will be revealed (or returned to me, if there is knowledge I lost by entering this mortal plane).

"science" is treated as if it were somehow opposed to "religion," I think most LDS aren't in this spot, by some level or another. For myself, I do not categorize my knowledge into these two categories either, as it seems you have also discarded this. But this works both ways . . . I am not unduly enamored of "science" (self-identified) cosmologies, and my personal seeking places all knowledge under challenge as desired or necessary. Indeed, as you mention throughout, the knowledge and implications of the instruction we received in the Restored gospel, often leads the seeker on a lone path of knowledge that cannot be comprehended by many systems of knowledge still on the earth today, label them as you will.

1:31 Robin Collins, Professor of Philosophy, forcing us to experience that evil, despite the fact that - as an unlimited, unconstrained, absolutely all-powerful personage - He simply must, by that very definition, possess the ability to transfer whatever "lessons" we learn through pain and suffering and mutilation and war and disease and death through another means which do not involve such terrible evils. In this view of God, the conclusion is simply inescapable that He is literally causing the evil. There is simply no way around this. If a human were to do such things, we would call them an evil dictator, a mass-murderer, and we'd be absolutely correct to do so. Post-Apostasy religions attempt to answer with a non-answer: "With our limited, finite minds, we are simply incapable of grasping the larger purposes God is fulfilling."

Don't you see the contradiction? If God is all-powerful, why then did He create us incapable of understanding His own plans? If the very laws of nature were created by God, then why did He create them in such a way that we become puppets to His will? "Free will" becomes a cruel illusion if God created the very rules by which we are said to be "free". Again, perhaps it is best to be patient with one another as we grapple with one of the greatest questions of reality/existence, and that is of evil. I am with you in that I do not conceive of my Father in heaven to be in the God-shape described by Greek philosophy. Evil does originate with Beings--that is, us. My Father in heaven does no evil, and does not permit evil in the sense that anything under his influence will forsake evil. He does permit evil in the sense that the agency of all Beings (that is, us) is always preserved, and we go on to choose evil (if we do). I would describe my Father in heaven as all-powerful. I would not remove that from him, and I take that from ideas such as all things are subject to Him. Anyway, there is so much more to say on these things, and worthy of their own threads.

Also I would challenge the idea of "the laws of nature". That is where I am at in my seeking. "The laws of nature" is also a paradigm construct that we have selected/invented as human beings as we grapple with interpreting reality, and it has indeed provided good fruit to us, but like all paradigms it will pass away so that the next one can come with its fruit and sight to allow us more reality. I find the idea of 'nature' at all to be false, as I have come to see things as 'built' (not only 'created', but 'built'), so for me to persist in seeing nature and having some sort of binary between that which is nature and that which is not, is something that I personally cannot maintain.

To be plain, whereas many posit a LAW previous to a BEING (i.e. laws before God), I have come to where I cannot do this any more for various reasons, and it makes no sense to me. I posit BEING before ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL EVER.

Indeed, if you posit a LAW before BEING (which is fine to disagree on this), then you have a semantic game going (which is also fine), because then the LAW can be called God (which is probably close to what some are conceiving), and then you have your "first unmoved mover" anyway; and still could maintain an idea of a progressing Exalted Man.

"I don't believe in evolution," says the Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson. I don't consider the theory of evolution to be subject to 'belief' one way or the other. I am personally not convinced on the theory of evolution as a matter of thinking (not belief), but that is based on simple, non-theological observations; as well as a few implications in what I think I know from the Restored gospel that do not lead me to postulate in such a way (a mechanical progressive physical creation). But there is nothing about being a faithful Latter-day Saint that precludes making explorations into physical theories of physical existence and I think that evolutionary theory has been a great contribution and an important challenge.

I don't know about you, but I certainly can't "relate" to a "person" who exists outside of space and time. Perhaps. But there are many ways to conceive of space and time that may amount to some interesting reality. And we are all free to explore on these things. I personally don't care in terms of my God or heavenly Father if he can properly be said to be in or out of time and space, it doesn't have the crucialness to me that it seems to have for you. I do have some thought lines that have space and time coming into existence as properties of the atom (or some sub-atomic place), and yet have that which is substance or reality that is not founded upon atoms (such as with the idea that while all bio-life is atomic, not all that is atomic is bio-life; that there are kingdoms of that which exists and/or is created that can be explained without atoms (=matter)). Again, I think another thread, as I can hear myself going into a long explanation on this. My main point would be is that there is much open to challenge, exploration, semantics, speculation, new paradigm, new observation, and even CREATION (since that is what we, as beings, do best).

I don't withhold my love from my parents until I can prove that they created bacteria and quantum mechanics, I love them because they're good people! I want to answer this, but I'm afraid that I cannot be plain in this forum on my relationship to my Father in heaven, but suffice it to say, that my honor and love and following to him is not dependent upon the Greek philosophy of absoluteness. But I do trust in a God that is never weary (to help me), and that is beyond the vagaries of mortal flesh (due to progression).

(Indeed, I speculate that when Christ tells us to pray only to the Father, that He was doing so in order to emphasize (by way of a contrast to the views of His time) the idea that we are His children, not that He is the only Being worth giving honor to. My view is, why not also pray to Heavenly Mother? Further, why stop with Her, or Him - why not the entire Council? Why not, in the end, pray to the united Family, all the Good Individuals who are one-in-heart in the Atonement, which can include us all? When we all become so righteous that there are none "above" or "below" others, we worship the eternal Family of Free Intelligences. God is "more intelligent" than they all, He is the most ancient Purposer, but they - we, potentially - are all taking part in the great Work. I disagree with your conclusions here, although I see where you are coming from.

Indeed, giving all honor to a single person is a mark of the Accuser, I too have pondered on the template as shown in our story on the Grand Council in Heaven and the exchanges regarding Lucifer and Jehovah, and I would tend to agree with you here in substance, although I would maybe have some important details to discuss in another thread.

This is sheer nonsense - how can something exist "in part" outside of nature? If "laws" of nature can be broken, then they weren't "laws" to begin with; we simply hadn't read them correctly before. Ha ha ha. All laws are made to be broken. A Master of a law . . . breaks law. All artists know this, for example. You follow the laws of art, of music, (of creation), until you know them as if you were them . . . and THEN . . . you break them, except not really, because they are still there . . . just handled by a master. An airplane flying in the sky is a breaking of the law of gravity that says you must stay on the ground, and yet there is still the handling of gravity in order to bring into birth the airplane. My point is that we have no idea what can be done with the laws and properties that exist, and I have a suspicion that they are infinitely malleable by a Master Creator, which makes it absolutely crucial that those Masters be GOOD, precisely because anything can be created. But that's me and my state of thinking on these matters.

To me, yes, there is law in all things. My point however is that what we are seeing here in the mortal plane is a very specifically built situation from which we cannot have any full information about what is reality in terms of physicality or substance. The mortal plane, in fact, represents the loss of much law (we have descended, or Fallen) or our access to such laws (celestial), and this is done for a purpose (another thread) so that we can progress on another fashion, which to me would be charity. (=passing the test of being Good Creators?)

still primates under the skin. I've always loved the quote-ish . . . the rising ape/falling angel. However, I have no need for the cosmology of my primate-ness any more than I need the cosmology that I was made from clay. There is more to learn on all of it.

"prophecy" is a perfect vision of the Unchanging, Predestined, Fated Future, rather than a Plan consisting of Promises in which God will act in the ways he has Covenanted to. I agree with this very much. However, I have other ideas on the "seeable-ness" of the future, and of the past, for that matter. Explorations for another thread .

This simply makes no sense if God is omnipresent. I understand God, and I understand heavenly Father, as being omnipresent and omniscience, because both of these things are based on laws which aren't that big of a trick after all, so to speak. Another thread.

I wasn't sure where to stick this, but I do want to point out that there remains Mystery. Whether heavenly Father, as a concrete (not finite) being is directly! responsible for this, I would tend to think not, but perhaps (I would tend to think he is just in awe of it as we are). But if you ever climb a mountain and watch a sunrise through a misty morning, or anything ineffeble like this, you KNOW that there is just some joy or singing in the universe (multi-metaverse) that wants to be born and takes any path to that birth, and that can be seen in ANYTHING, if we just allow the scales to fall from our eyes. This is not in antithesis to any laws . . . but it is soooooooo . . . I don't know! So precious, tender . . . . and also I call this GOD . . . because I do not know what else to call it! So if you have another word, I don't know. And I think that my heavenly Father, as a person, is trying to SHOW ME THIS GOD. This everlasting LIFE infused with LOVE and the SACRED, that simply becomes, whether you call it by a law or not, whether you call it created or uncreated, it just IS, and it is GOOD, BREATHTAKING, and it is EVERYWHERE AND IN EVERYTHING and can be WOUNDED, HIDDEN, VIOLATED (=evil).

So maybe ancient philosophers were trying to get a handle on this, but I do agree they went wrong on it.

For me, this Mystery should never be explained, just revealed and experienced.

the author of all evil. again, "gods" are the author of evil, because that is, unfortunately, us. Heavenly Father, of course, has completely forsaken evil, and we are in the progression to do so also, if we will.

God is yet again the Devil. LDS implications admit that Satan/Lucifer is a son of God, is of the same ontology as God and as ourselves. There is a reason for this admission (template-wise).

If God is all-powerful, omniscient, the First Cause, the Creator of All Things, then he could make the perfect world. If He wanted to save all the children, they'd be saved. If something is Fallen, and God is interpenetrating it with his omnipotent power, then He caused it to Fall. Maybe. But there is still a reasonable discussion that can be had based on what God can do versus what he should or will do. Another thread.

This is where the cutting-edge discoveries in neuroscience and physics will be helpful in the coming decades. And for me, I tend to think the greatest "scientific" contributions to our knowledge of reality (=inclusive of God) will rather be in computer science aka artificial (???????) intelligence; and the "robotics" based on such.

the key factor is that at some stage, God put his 'finger' on that original population." I don't find these kinds of reconciliations necessary for myself. This is a bowing to a cosmology that overarches both traditional science and traditional religion (both of which I challenge), a cosmology that necessitates an "in the beginning" . . . so we are all still bowing to that paradigm, still at the altar of that religion (that's why I consider evolution and religion aka Genesis story to BE the same religion and paradigm, because they both have the same religious and unexamined need for an initial creation, only the details have been changed, ie evolution = the Adam and Eve story, and I'm sayin why?) and I'm saying, hey, try thinking without that.

What in the world is wrong with God being "just" another one of the other kinds of things? My parents are "just" a few of the uncountable numbers of parents there are; doesn't mean they're less important to me. What in the world does God's ontological uniqueness have to do with anything? Shouldn't we judge Him based on who He is, what His plans are? Why did we let a debate about His physical nature become the true test of faith? Unless everything that has ever existed anywhere, at any time, was Created by Him out of utter nothingness, then He can't be a True God? Why not? Why can't He "merely" be - as He himself claims to be - the "Governor"? The "Prince of Peace"? You're right. Heavenly Father is a person. Not "just" a person . . . because persons aren't "just". To be human = god = the most sacred reality there is. I get really excited about it.

all agree on is that God does not and cannot have a body. I agree with you that this loss of knowledge is the one of the biggest blindnesses that the world labors under, by whatever label of system of knowledge.

"While one portion of the human race is judging and condemning the other without mercy, the Great Parent of the universe looks upon the whole of the human family with a fatherly care and paternal regard; He views them as His offspring, and without any of those contracted feelings that influence the children of man, causes 'His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.' ." - Joseph Smith LOVED all your Joseph Smith (and etc) quotes. LOVE IT.

"The first principles of man are self-existent with God." It might be interesting to have a thread about the difference (if any) between pre-existent and self-existent. I think I myself could use a thinking of exercise on this to iron out some questions I have. So we know that He is bound by eternal, pre-existing laws which could then mean, at least semantically, that these LAWS ought to have the name of God, so . . . . .? It's not as clear cut as you hope, I think . . . or at least, we each have to understand the best we can

the Spirits of all men were subject to oppression, and the express purpose of God in Giving (them) a Tabernacle was to arm (them) against the power of Darkness.” Yes.

See, also not sure where to stick this, but as you like to think on nature, and call that which is physical "natural", I cannot do that. So to you, the body is natural, and God partakes in that natural body. Which I don't have a problem with (heavenly Father does of course have a body). But I have long conceived of the body as a technology. So I discarded a 'nature' paradigm a long time ago. So I cannot meet you in perfect agreement on all the details of your thinking, although I would agree in the large stroke.

But why not? Nowhere is it said that the only way to create worlds is through God's power - we only know that He and the Divine Council prepared many of them, worlds without number. Yet we don't need the Council to explain the existence of all planets which have ever been; God can be an Intelligence who mounted a body on another world which formed of its own accord, just as modern science describes the proto-planetary accretion disk coalescing into form from the void. All life on each planet bends itself to creating creatures, growing bodies to house Intelligences. I disagree with your conclusions here, again touching on your acceptance of the 'nature' paradigm. Which is fine, but there are other ways to think about these things. I also agree that you don't need God's power to created a planet . . . you just need enough government funding. Ok, that's a bit of a joke. But all physical objects are built objects; as I am understanding at this point. Just like the church builds buildings, and things which are not the church build buildings. It is the investment of the sacred into the building that makes it godly, not the building itself. BUT . . . all buildings are built .

He and the Council found it an empty wasteland, perhaps after one of our many periodic mass extinctions. They seed it with life, calling to all things until they were obeyed. They are Gardeners, I have thought on this too, but my conclusions are not completely formed.

We are an interplanetary, colonizing species Yes. But we are also an interdimensional species. Not all travel (or transversing) takes places over physical (atomic) space. You are thinking too small when you think 'space ship' (or similar). Yes, space ships, but there is more beyond this thinking.

It allows Him to delegate - if there are worlds without number, He can't possibly watch them all, but someone who is as good as Him will become the Watchers, and because they are all part of the same Plan, they are one in heart. They retain their individuality, their personalities, but they are "one" in this way: they are working to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, to give all uncreated intelligences bodies, that they all might have joy. Yes and no. He CAN watch them all. YES it requires the one-ness of all beings (and all beings are already one, whether they know it or not, but some of us are not conscious of that one-ness yet). Also there are technologies of signal and record that we don't understand yet that I'm sure heavenly Father possesses. (i.e. like we use signals of radio waves). In fact the entire universe is its own signal and record, and completely holographic at all points, so it just remains to have the technology to access that record. The limits you are imagining based on the fact that we are in the mortal plane, do not apply to what heavenly Father has available to him. Another thread?

He can love a Wife and Children! Yes. It's very simple and sacred. It's very plain. We make it too hard.

we should be pouring all our efforts into science, technology, medicine um . . . well, I know what you mean here, and I also do not believe that physical aging and death are necessary (rather a product of our blindness) . . . but we should be pouring ALL our efforts into charity . Just my two cents. (which of course would include much of what you mentioned)

It can be done. Yep.

We must learn how to pattern ourselves after Christ, become Saviors who rise from the dead Yep, and cause others to rise from the dead (spiritually more important than the physical, but both possible/available). Yes, it [=Christ] is one of the grand templates (only exceeded by the template of the Father[Mother]).

Again, I too, wonder very much at the state of our blindness as human beings, and also I confront God in his accountability on that (i.e. what is the purpose of many of the things he has given that are NOT plain)?

I can understand your anxiety to be reunited to your Father in heaven and all that is true and right . So I love what you have to say here, although I would say that in some cases there is more than one way to think on it. (until we all come to know more)

Edited October 24, 2011 by Maidservant

[mfbukowski]

Jeremy-

Fantastic post and good links and references. I am super busy at the moment but I wanted to give this thread a bump and just say that we are very close on almost everything you said.

I don't know if you are familiar with A.N. Whitehead and something called "process theology", but you should look into those things if you are not.

I think you will find for one that you are not alone in your views, and secondly, I think it is clear that you are on the side that history will eventually favor, and I think that most members will eventually embrace these views once they understand them well.

We are a revolutionary church philosophically, but we are still saddled with 2000 years of obsolete sectarian philosophy which should have been thrown out with the Restoration, because it is totally incompatible really with Mormonism, but after all it has only been 150 years, and it has always taken much longer than that for a new religion to find it's theological "base".

I think you may be among those to help give the church what it needs to get past the Neoplatonic Greek philosophy and literalism in which it still inappropriately finds itself mired.

Hope this thread is till around when I get a little more time! Hang in there dude!

[Nathair/|\]

Jeremy, your challenges to the state of knowledge of the shape of reality, as it presently stands in the earth, are important, and I understand your frustration. But thankfully we can be patient with others as they have their own journey and wrestle with God, and they are not (ultimately) condemned for what they do not know [although we are all in a sense condemned by our blindness, otherwise we would enjoy what is possible to be seen]; and, indeed, I am so very humbled and grateful that I have been given the spiritual tools that I have (i.e. the Restored gospel of Jesus Christ), and I watch as other people do their best without this, so I am in awe of them. And many of them come to understandings of reality even without the restored gospel, just because they are so humble to be listening to God.

I agree with you on many things, and I love that you love plainness. I have not, in my own seeking with my Father, arrived at the exact same place you have, so I would disagree, or challenge, or at least still hold in some sort of suspension, many matters upon which you have made points.

Again, I too, wonder very much at the state of our blindness as human beings, and also I confront God in his accountability on that (i.e. what is the purpose of many of the things he has given that are NOT plain)?

I can understand your anxiety to be reunited to your Father in heaven and all that is true and right . So I love what you have to say here, although I would say that in some cases there is more than one way to think on it. (until we all come to know more)

I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on the topic as a whole, but I do want to keep it going in the anticipation of what I will learn. I do want to comment on the part I underlined and colored purple.

The more I learn, the fewer conflicts I see between different points of view. While there are contradictions where A cannot be true if B is true, in many cases where it appears to be so, we are just seeing different parts of the picture. In many cases, A and B are really both true, we just can't see the missing part.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Maidservant -

Thanks for your substantive reply! As I said, it was a speculative, exploratory post, so it'd be beside the point if everyone magically agreed with me. *grin*

(Since the "quote" function on this board is a piece of complete crap and tells me - despite all evidence - that I've got uneven quote tags, I'm forced to tag your words in a different color to have any hope for clarity. Hopefully it's not too harsh on the eyes.) You wrote:

"I understand your frustration. But thankfully we can be patient with others as they have their own journey and wrestle with God, and they are not (ultimately) condemned for what they do not know."

And I definitely agree. If it wasn't clear in my earlier post, I wrote this not in an effort to condemn the people who I believe are mistaken, but to examine (and attempt to refute) their ideas. I'm sure many of the people I quoted are better people than I am, but their ideas are given such common currency that I think their philosophies have a negative impact as a whole, which our unique doctrines can help to heal.

"For me, all that is God, all that IS, is fair game as the subject of my questions and seeking. On a personal level, on a zen level, there is a lot that I have to leave unknowable, and just live in the present and with what I have. But I expect that as I progress, all will be revealed (or returned to me, if there is knowledge I lost by entering this mortal plane)."

Exactly.

"I would challenge the idea of "the laws of nature". That is where I am at in my seeking. "The laws of nature" is also a paradigm construct that we have selected/invented as human beings as we grapple with interpreting reality, and it has indeed provided good fruit to us, but like all paradigms it will pass away so that the next one can come with its fruit and sight to allow us more reality. I find the idea of 'nature' at all to be false, as I have come to see things as 'built' (not only 'created', but 'built'), so for me to persist in seeing nature and having some sort of binary between that which is nature and that which is not, is something that I personally cannot maintain.

To be plain, whereas many posit a LAW previous to a BEING (i.e. laws before God), I have come to where I cannot do this any more for various reasons, and it makes no sense to me. I posit BEING before ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL EVER.

Indeed, if you posit a LAW before BEING (which is fine to disagree on this), then you have a semantic game going (which is also fine), because then the LAW can be called God (which is probably close to what some are conceiving), and then you have your "first unmoved mover" anyway; and still could maintain an idea of a progressing Exalted Man.

I think we're a bit closer on this than I was able to get across in the opening post. Let me try to explain further: because all things are "spiritual" and yet still "material", Mormonism is actually a sort of animism; everything is "alive" in some way. I was also somewhat careless in my terminology; I tend to slip into saying "pre-existent" when often I should be saying "pre-mortal". Nothing can "pre-exist" prior to God or anyone else, and I agree there is nothing before being; according to our theology, all that exists has always existed in one form or another, but has been shaped according to some sort of pattern into an enormously complicated design. Therefore, any "Laws" in nature are actually enacted by the common consent of all the constituent "elements". At the smallest level, there is some sort of "will" or "spark" - something which can convey intentionality. It's really difficult to express this without using metaphorical language, tho.

But this is a key part of Mormonism, because instead of God "creating" all things from the empty zilch of nothingness, He's working with elements which are not contingent on Him for existence. They can do what they will, form laws as they will, and He can only influence them through "persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned." He is not the "author" of Law; He has to abide by it too, just as all other Intelligences do. But by working within those laws, by persuading other Free Intelligences, He is able to organize us in such a way that we can take part in the Plan of Salvation. This is where I disagree with many a Creationist, because they tend to believe that God has the power to break all manner of laws and still be considered "good". They come up with the endless conspiracy theories in which God purposely "created" from nothing, in six days even, dinosaur bones which - by all rational measures - appear to be millions of years old. We get the endless rehashes of Flood and Evolution debates.

I simply don't believe in the kind of God who would set up such meaningless tests by bypassing all known physical laws. If there exist ways to manipulate natural laws which we are currently unaware of, then I think that is simply a product of God being wiser than us, not an example of Him "breaking" the laws.

"I am personally not convinced on the theory of evolution as a matter of thinking (not belief), but that is based on simple, non-theological observations; as well as a few implications in what I think I know from the Restored gospel that do not lead me to postulate in such a way (a mechanical progressive physical creation)."

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on alternatives to evolution. (And I'm not sure how to phrase that question in way that might not be taken as sarcastic, but I'm sincere!) From my study of the subject, I haven't seen many convincing alternatives, at least insofar as the punctuated equilibrium model and the theory of panspermia have contributed important things to the older Darwinian paradigm.

All laws are made to be broken. A Master of a law . . . breaks law. All artists know this, for example. You follow the laws of art, of music, (of creation), until you know them as if you were them . . . and THEN . . . you break them, except not really, because they are still there . . . just handled by a master. An airplane flying in the sky is a breaking of the law of gravity that says you must stay on the ground, and yet there is still the handling of gravity in order to bring into birth the airplane. My point is that we have no idea what can be done with the laws and properties that exist, and I have a suspicion that they are infinitely malleable by a Master Creator, which makes it absolutely crucial that those Masters be GOOD, precisely because anything can be created. But that's me and my state of thinking on these matters.

I quite disagree. (And I've been a professional painter, singer, guitarist, and pianist, so I'm allowed to! *grin*)

Maybe this is just a semantic thing, actually. But what I'm trying to get across is the idea that if God breaks the Law, He is not Good. I think that's what separates Him from the Accuser. An airplane flying in the sky is most certainly not an example of "breaking the law" - it is an example of intelligent people understanding the law more deeply than we had before, which allows for counterintuitive actions (such as enormous 747s to take off from a runway). I guess you kinda acknowledge this when you say "you break them, except not really, because they are still there", but in that case, how can it be said to be a "breaking" at all?

To me, yes, there is law in all things. My point however is that what we are seeing here in the mortal plane is a very specifically built situation from which we cannot have any full information about what is reality in terms of physicality or substance. The mortal plane, in fact, represents the loss of much law (we have descended, or Fallen) or our access to such laws (celestial), and this is done for a purpose (another thread) so that we can progress on another fashion, which to me would be charity. (=passing the test of being Good Creators?)

Yeah, I love the idea that this life is a necessary step in our eternal progression. A probationary period where we learn charity. (People have been rather disparaging towards some feminist scholars, but I'm actually quite in line, to a large extent, with folks like Riane Eisler who think that the negative portrayal of Eve and the Serpent in the Old Testament was largely a product of a sort of male-dominated "Apostasy" from an older version of the story, in which the Search for Wisdom was actually deeply good thing. Same goes for the Asherah. I must say, a big part of why I joined the Church was the Pearl of Great Price, in which Eve notes that if we had not Fallen, we would not know Joy.)

I understand God, and I understand heavenly Father, as being omnipresent and omniscience, because both of these things are based on laws which aren't that big of a trick after all, so to speak. Another thread.

It would fit in this thread too, if you'd like. But again, I deeply disagree; "omnipresent" and "omniscience" are words which are simply not found in scripture. Some Prophets have exulted in God knowing "all things", but this is, in my opinion, hyperbole. (I find the Bible Dictionary completely unreliable in these areas.) A link I just recommended in another thread is: God's foreknowledge: This life shows who we are

I wasn't sure where to stick this, but I do want to point out that there remains Mystery. Whether heavenly Father, as a concrete (not finite) being is directly! responsible for this, I would tend to think not, but perhaps (I would tend to think he is just in awe of it as we are). But if you ever climb a mountain and watch a sunrise through a misty morning, or anything ineffeble like this, you KNOW that there is just some joy or singing in the universe (multi-metaverse) that wants to be born and takes any path to that birth, and that can be seen in ANYTHING, if we just allow the scales to fall from our eyes. This is not in antithesis to any laws . . . but it is soooooooo . . . I don't know! So precious, tender . . . . and also I call this GOD . . . because I do not know what else to call it! So if you have another word, I don't know. And I think that my heavenly Father, as a person, is trying to SHOW ME THIS GOD. This everlasting LIFE infused with LOVE and the SACRED, that simply becomes, whether you call it by a law or not, whether you call it created or uncreated, it just IS, and it is GOOD, BREATHTAKING, and it is EVERYWHERE AND IN EVERYTHING and can be WOUNDED, HIDDEN, VIOLATED (=evil).

I completely agree up to this point! But then ...

For me, this Mystery should never be explained, just revealed and experienced.

... and (arrgh!) I disagree again. For me, knowing more about why I feel that way is essential. Maybe I'm just obsessed with causality. For instance, if I know that evolution has equipped my primate body to react with a rush of pleasure at the sight of a beautiful field in which I have a clear view of any incoming predators, with a few trees where I can find fruit, and a stream of crystal-clear water which I can drink from, and glorious mossy rocks made soft enough for my soft-skinned hairless-ape body to stretch out upon, and a sunset filling the sky with unusual colors which are intriguing enough to spark my interest yet are not threatening ...

... that just makes me like the "ineffable" feeling even more! The physicality of the world doesn't take away anything, it merely adds to the pleasure! Further light and understanding.

"Again, "gods" are the author of evil, because that is, unfortunately, us. Heavenly Father, of course, has completely forsaken evil, and we are in the progression to do so also, if we will.

LDS implications admit that Satan/Lucifer is a son of God, is of the same ontology as God and as ourselves. There is a reason for this admission (template-wise)."

Well, right, but I was responding to the traditional Christian conception which admits of no other God but God and then goes through extraordinary logical contortions in their effort to blame Evil on Him (though that's not what they have in mind when they do so, it is the effect).

"For me, I tend to think the greatest "scientific" contributions to our knowledge of reality (=inclusive of God) will rather be in computer science aka artificial (???????) intelligence; and the "robotics" based on such."

Meh, I have not yet been terribly impressed with AI. It's all commands, not true Intelligence independent in their sphere. I'm much more excited about biology; for all that we hear that biological systems are "like machines", there are some rather important distinctions.

"Heavenly Father is a person. Not "just" a person . . . because persons aren't "just". To be human = god = the most sacred reality there is. I get really excited about it."

Yes! Me too! It's one of the best things about Mormonism, in my opinion. The glorious humanism of it, the humanity inherent to the doctrine of apotheosis. Every body, every person on the planet (and beyond) matters.

LOVED all your Joseph Smith (and etc) quotes. LOVE IT.

Again, me too! That's why I try my best to plaster them into practically every post I make here. *laugh*

"The first principles of man are self-existent with God." It might be interesting to have a thread about the difference (if any) between pre-existent and self-existent. I think I myself could use a thinking of exercise on this to iron out some questions I have. So we know that He is bound by eternal, pre-existing laws which could then mean, at least semantically, that these LAWS ought to have the name of God, so . . . . .? It's not as clear cut as you hope, I think . . . or at least, we each have to understand the best we can.

Yeah, I was a bit careless with my usage there, as I mentioned above. There can be nothing "pre-existent" to our Intelligence, because Intelligences are eternal. When we say "pre-existent", we as Mormons generally mean pre-mortal. Important distinction we should make. But I don't think the laws themselves should be named God; to me, "God" is the title of a person who is successful in "bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." A Savior. The Law that the Savior uses to bring that to pass isn't as important to me giving thanks to the actual person who charitably used that Law to save me and everyone I know from separation with our bodies.

See, also not sure where to stick this, but as you like to think on nature, and call that which is physical "natural", I cannot do that. So to you, the body is natural, and God partakes in that natural body. Which I don't have a problem with (heavenly Father does of course have a body). But I have long conceived of the body as a technology. So I discarded a 'nature' paradigm a long time ago. So I cannot meet you in perfect agreement on all the details of your thinking, although I would agree in the large stroke.

See my further clarification above as to why I don't think we're quite as far apart on this as my opening post might have implied.

We are an interplanetary, colonizing species Yes. But we are also an interdimensional species. Not all travel (or transversing) takes places over physical (atomic) space. You are thinking too small when you think 'space ship' (or similar). Yes, space ships, but there is more beyond this thinking.

I am very, very skeptical of the arguments used in favor of alternate dimensions. The reason is that they tend to devolve into a Neoplatonic fantasy world where we don't have to take the laws of this universe into account, especially when we start positing "non-physical" aspects of the universe. To me, part of the idea of there being no such thing as "immaterial material" it that there is no such existence except that which is "physical". But I agree that we haven't yet dug deep enough into our universe to understand how God moves within it.

"We should be pouring all our efforts into science, technology, medicine" um . . . well, I know what you mean here, and I also do not believe that physical aging and death are necessary (rather a product of our blindness) . . . but we should be pouring ALL our efforts into charity . Just my two cents. (which of course would include much of what you mentioned)

Well, right, that's what I was going for. Medicine to help the sick, technology to extend the life of others. That sort of thing. I just get fed up sometimes with those of us (including me, unfortunately) who just sit around waiting for miracles without trying their damndest to help increase their light and understanding. (There's a great quote from Brigham Young about expecting a harvest without planting seeds, but I can't find the stinkin' thing.)

We must learn how to pattern ourselves after Christ, become Saviors who rise from the dead Yep, and cause others to rise from the dead (spiritually more important than the physical, but both possible/available). Yes, it [=Christ] is one of the grand templates (only exceeded by the template of the Father[Mother]).

Yes! Though I wish we gave quite a bit more recognition to the "Mother" part of that Trinity - we've got all these really cheesy pictures of Christ and the Father (and they're completely inaccurate, since no one knows what they really looked like); why not a cheesy inaccurate picture of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, too? (Better yet, why don't we throw out all of the terrible art we currently use in the Church and get some good stuff? I know, I know, everybody's a critic ... but jeez. Some of our manuals ... *shudder*)

Anyway. Again, thanks for the reply! More than I was expecting of my absurdly-long-post-which-I-assumed-no-one-would-read. *grin*

(I'll get to you when I have more time, MFB and Nath!)

Edited October 28, 2011 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[Calm]

I think the issue with quote tags is the number per post, just break up responses into two or more posts and there shouldn't be a problem.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Thanks for the support and bumpage, bukowski! Much appreciated.

I don't know if you are familiar with A.N. Whitehead and something called "process theology", but you should look into those things if you are not.

I agree; from what I know of it, process theology is a fascinating development. I haven't read much Whitehead yet, but he's been on my list for some time! Any particular book recommendations?

I think you will find for one that you are not alone in your views, and secondly, I think it is clear that you are on the side that history will eventually favor, and I think that most members will eventually embrace these views once they understand them well.

We are a revolutionary church philosophically, but we are still saddled with 2000 years of obsolete sectarian philosophy which should have been thrown out with the Restoration, because it is totally incompatible really with Mormonism, but after all it has only been 150 years, and it has always taken much longer than that for a new religion to find it's theological "base".

I think you may be among those to help give the church what it needs to get past the Neoplatonic Greek philosophy and literalism in which it still inappropriately finds itself mired.

I'm on it! *prints pamphlets*

Hope this thread is till around when I get a little more time! Hang in there dude!

Yo. *points at watch*

(Thanks for the tip, calmoriah! I still bite my thumb at the board software, tho. *grin*)

Edited November 4, 2011 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[elguanteloko]

Let's be very clear here: it is not their scientific backgrounds which is causing the confusion for the intelligent people in the video - it is their religious backgrounds and premises, and their religious information is conditioned by a post-Apostasy view of deity. The "traditions of their fathers" which claim that the sheer incomprehensibility is a sign of "deep" philosophy.

Well, brother, if A collides with B, what did the collision, A or B? If there is a conflict between Religion and their ‘scientific background it sounds rather silly to say that the problem is religion… you could just as well say science is the problem if it only changed to agree with the religious part. IOW, you are saying nothing.

I see it almost everywhere I look, the one nearly ubiquitous premise: the fundamental point on which these scientific and religious philosophies (which claim to be ever so different from each other) all agree on is that God does not and cannot have a body.

This is for many reasons and, personally, I find it rather rude of you to not mention the reasons why traditional Christians believe God doesn’t have a body and confront those reasons head-on while providing your own view and how it solves their issues.

Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley, Kantian metaphysics, German Idealism, the Transcendentalist school, Theosophy and Mystics and Spiritualists, Islamism, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Gnosticism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism ...

They all have so much truth and history and beautiful symbolism to them; as Brigham Young says, "The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this Church. As for their morality, many of them are, morally, just as good as we are. All that is good, lovely, and praiseworthy belongs to this Church and Kingdom. “Mormonism” includes all truth. There is no truth but what belongs to the Gospel. It is life, eternal life; it is bliss; it is the fulness of all things in the gods and in the eternities of the gods."

Well, if you define “Mormonism” to include all truth claims or The Truth, then I guess you can say this. But, clearly, you have to justify such an extreme position (btw, how would you ever know ‘Mormonism’ includes all truth is you don’t know all truth? God told you? Doesn’t sound very rational, does it?)

"Such a plan," he continues, "incorporates every system of true doctrine on the earth, whether it be ecclesiastical, moral, philosophical, or civil; it incorporates all good laws that have been made from the days of Adam until now; it swallows up the laws of nations, for it exceeds them all in knowledge and purity, it circumscribes the doctrines of the day, and takes from the right and the left, and brings all truth together in one system, and leaves the chaff to be scattered hither and thither."

What I replied to you is as much an objection to BY. And, btw, this is something very similar to the view of many Christian traditions so you aren’t really saying anything new here. A Catholic would say that (and I don’t remember who said this or who I heard it from) “If your theology conflicts with your science, you are either doing bad theology or bad science.”

"It is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with professed infidels, or with the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church (Jesus, their Elder Brother, being at their head) to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, … to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people and bring it to Zion."

This is merely motivational talk and at the end of the day has no effect in the methodology. How will you know something is ‘true’ in philosophy if not by doing the same thing philosophers do? How will you know something is ‘true’ in science if not by doing the same things scientists do? Most importantly, how will you know what is ‘true’ in theology if not by doing what theologians do?

There is so much truth out there it makes me want to cry sometimes in sheer frustration that I'll never be able to read all the Holy Books, learn all the history of the world; but the sects which the Family of Adam and Eve have broken up into have all been twisted - just a tiny little twist - by the philosophies of men into supporting a disembodied God. They find their clearest expression in Augustine and Aristotle, Aquinas and Philo, who have been synthesized into more worldviews than one can count.

Again, your views about the conflict of science and religious dogma are NOT all that different from those of Catholicism, for example. The reason philosophers are used in theology is because they provide tools for understanding what one wants to make sense (or at least better sense) of. All those thinkers you mentioned didn’t propose “The Truth” but merely tools for understanding what it (ironically) makes sense to think we won’t grasp completely, that is, God and his stuff. BTW, in all this posts of yours you are only considering so-called natural theology within traditional Christianity… but there are other approaches to theology within Christianity that show probably as much contempt for it than you do. Your representation of traditional Christianity is all messed-up, incomplete, simplistic, etc. You know, like what other people do with Mormons sometimes.

As B. H. Roberts put it:

"'Platonism, and Aristotelianism,' says the author of the History of Christian Doctrine, 'exerted more influence upon the intellectual methods of men, taking in the whole time since their appearance, than all other systems combined. They certainly influenced the Greek mind, and Grecian culture, more than all the other philosophical systems. They re-appear in Roman philosophy - so far as Rome had any philosophy. We shall see that Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, exerted more influence than all other philosophical minds united, upon the greatest of the Christian Fathers: upon the greatest of the Schoolmen; and upon the theologians of the Reformation, Calvin and Melanchthon. And if we look at European philosophy as it has been unfolded in England, Germany and France, we shall perceive that all the modern theistic schools have discussed the standing problems of human reason, in very much the same manner in which the reason of Plato and Aristotle discussed them twenty-two centuries ago. Bacon, Des Cartes, Leibnitz, and Kant, so far as the first principles of intellectual and moral philosophy are concerned, agree with their Grecian predecessors. A student who has mastered the two systems of the Academy and Lyceum will find in modern philosophy (with the exception of the department of natural science) very little that is true, that may not be found for substance, and germinally, in the Greek theism.'

Kant agrees with his “Grecian predecessors” in the first principles? Dude, Kant was as much against natural theology as you are. He rejected all arguments for God’s existence and Aristotelianism at least as traditionally conceive. (there’s a moral argument he came up with but that definitely wasn’t how we take ‘arguments for God’s existence’ to be) You might probably want to get your information on the history of philosophy from people who know. Brother, he is making an assessment on 2000 years of philosophical development in the West… don’t you think you should get more reliable sources before forming such a judgment? Mormons have a bias against philosophy which is well known, probably due more to ignorance than to explicit statements about ‘philosophies of men’ in GAs’ writings.

It is hoped that enough is said here to establish the fact that the conception of God as 'pure being,' 'immaterial,' 'without form,' 'or parts or passions,' as held by orthodox Christianity, has its origin in Pagan philosophy, not in Jewish nor Christian revelation."

Texts do not interpret themselves, brother, and you have to distinguish between what you are doing here (Theology) from Exegesis. When you are speaking to us here you are only giving another stab at interpreting the ‘revealed’ texts we have so saying it isn’t revealed truth and speaking as you are here only shows you lack of understanding of what you are criticizing.

It renders them all fundamentally incoherent, because they are literally trying to imagine something which cannot be imagined, understand something which they admit from the start cannot be understood, all the while justifying their irrationality through "faith" in something they are definitionally incapable of comprehending.

LOL No, man, they don’t say what they try to understand can’t be understood literally. You really think they are that stupid? They say our minds are geared towards God but aren’t capable of full understanding. They also don’t justify their irrationality through ‘faith’ (at least not intentionally). They say that, while we have revealed truth through God’s power as shown in the writings and lives of saints, we get only glimpses of God’s full truth. That we can’t understand FULLY – at least now -(and I mean by this “everything that can possibly be known”) why atoms behave the way they do doesn’t mean we can’t understand something. The traditional Christian position is much more humble than you think it is.

And because God is disembodied and physically ever-present and the cause of All Things, many of these genuinely good-hearted people, (nearly always unintentionally, to be sure) make Him the author of Evil in the name of incorporeal “Love”. In defending the philosophical attributes of the One True Disembodied God from all rivals, the families break, they scatter; the House of Israel falls apart in the Old Testament just as the various Churches do in the New; the Nephites and Lamanites separate into civil war in the Book of Mormon as the other tribes do in the Popol Vuh; the sectarian world collapses into endless disunity and warfare.

Leaving aside your ugly misrepresentation of the statement Christians make that “God is the cause of all things”, this problem isn’t less of a problem for Mormonism. This requires a thread for itself but if you think the problem of evil is less of a problem for the Mormon view of God then you would be wrong. Open and thread about it and we can discuss this… or here since this is your thread, I guess.

There is so much truth out there. Is it possible that we might be able to unite it, to synthesize all the histories, to reconcile all the Families with each other, to Gather Zion, by recognizing that we are part of the Divine Council, the endless plurality of Gods? We can carry the Plan of Salvation to people, and all it would take is a slight tweak - God has a body, and is part of a Family of Gods - to allow many of the truths of all the traditions to be salvaged.

Here’s what I would like to know… Have YOU taken the time to, just as an intellectual exercise, bother and attack the views you espouse here with, at least, as much of a critical eye than you think you do with the views of traditional Christianity? I don’t think you have. What would you think, for example, about the problems with the infinite regression of Gods? Or what about the problems with (as pointed out here by user Tarski before) saying that God has a body like ours and people in heaven are sociable as we are… while at the same time accepting (if you do) that we have certain bodies because of evolutionary processes like natural selection and mutation? Did all the worlds the infinite amount of Gods lived in happened to evolve in the same way we did? Etc.

"When the Savior shall appear we shall see him as he is. We shall see that he is a man like ourselves. And that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy. John 14:23 - The appearing of the Father and the Son, in that verse, is a personal appearance; and the idea that the Father and the Son dwell in a man’s heart is an old sectarian notion, and is false."

Again, LOL. Saying God dwells in your heart is OBVIOUSLY symbolic… even the use of ‘heart’ is symbolic, if you didn’t catch that one. God, more strictly speaking, doesn’t ‘dwell’ anywhere because he is spaceless.

Not even the basics, brother, not even the basics…

"God himself, who sits enthroned in yonder heaven, is a man like one of you. That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today and you were to see the great God who holds this world in its orbit and upholds all things by his power, you would see him in the image and very form of a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion and image of God. He received instruction from and walked, talked, and conversed with him as one man talks and communes with another.

I will suppose, if you follow this quote, that you accept (as did Joseph Smith) the idea of Adam and Eve having been actually two persons and not symbols only… JS uses a pretty physical type of Adam here so it is good to suppose he thought Adam was an actual person (plus other stuff he wrote). So, don’t you think this puts you in a position much against widely accepted science? A Catholic would have no objections to taking Adam and Eve as not having been actual persons… but it seems like you do, if you follow your prophets.

We must emphasize this, because it overturns much of Western philosophy, most of which has proven inadequate to defend the idea of deity: this really is the "great secret": God has a body, and we are His children.

…Much of Western philosophy? Seriously? Because much of Western philosophy depends on the idea that God does NOT have a body, right? Quine, Kripke, Frege, Russell, Hume, Wittgenstein all depended on this idea, right? …and there is nothing to be learned from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Aquinas, Locke, etc if God is accepted to have a body, right? Nice joke, man. I wonder were you get your (dis)information about philosophy and get to be so confident about it.

What are the implications of our view of deity, specifically God the Father?

First off, He is not and cannot be the Author of Evil; He is a naturalistic deity who is trying desperately to pull us along to where He is. Because we are uncreated sparks of Intelligence, we are morally culpable for all our acts, just as He is.

Then He isn’t all powerful, is he? Furthermore, he is extremely limited if this world is his best effort at saving the lives of more than 20,000 kids that die each day of poverty, plus victims of natural disasters, etc. If he isn’t directly responsible (and no natural theologian would say he is) for the evils of the world, then by not doing what is clear he could do he is probably just as evil or neglectful or impotent.

"For all their supposed differences, the atheistic "Big Bang" and the traditional-Christian (really just Greek) idea of creation ex nihilo, are essentially the same: all existence had to explode into existence from a single point, before which time and space did not exist. "An explosion did it!" "God did it!" - hardly answers. So why pretend to believe in a first, necessary cause, following (as usual) Aristotle? Why not a multiplicity of causes? As Uncreated Intelligences, we each become a Cause, effecting as much as we can touch. Take existence as a given, and go from there."

That something can become a cause doesn’t even address the issue the first cause argument speaks about tries to speak of. There couldn’t have been two uncaused causes because there wouldn’t have been plurality in the first place. Not conceptual plurality but metaphysical plurality. Why not? Because then there would have been space. That’s why ‘a multiplicity of causes’ wouldn’t work as well as ‘a cause’.

After this all goes downhill so...

Edited November 4, 2011 by elguanteloko

[mfbukowski]

Jeremy

You might want to check out this site, and this article which is a summary of one of Dewey's books

http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/philosophers/john_dewey.php

[supersnail]

Always the insistence on a God who is philosophically, ontologically "unchanging", rather than a God who is "unchanging" in the sense that He will always keep His promises, but who is still eternally progressing (McConkie's overblown hysterics notwithstanding) Always the Fundamentalist assumption (utterly destroying, of course, any hope of Free Agency) that "prophecy" is a perfect vision of the Unchanging, Predestined, Fated Future, rather than a Plan consisting of Promises in which God will act in the ways he has Covenanted to.

Could you please point me to the relevant writings or speeches of McConkie? Are you referring to "The Seven Deadly Heresies" and the letter to Eugene England?

[supersnail]

Your post is giving me a lot to think about. I guess I'm attuned to the spirit of your post. Studying the D&C and the Pearl of Great Price, I've found my mind dwelling on the same or similar questions, especially about the relationship between God and matter. These are some thoughts I've jotted down, including some unreferenced and unelaborated "but what about this" type comments not meant to be developed or direct refutations of what you've said. I'm not baptized and am trying to understand doctrine as it is currently put out by the church, so I'll understand if anyone thinks I am regurgitating platitudes (or totally misunderstanding some doctrines!). I'll hopefully touch on some things worth considering.

I will examine what I've termed "naturalistic deities" by contrasting them with the traditional conception of a rigidly monotheistic God as defined by most of Christianity. (For my purposes, there is little substantive difference between the monotheistic, monistic, panentheistic, and pantheistic views of God.)

The particular trinitarian doctrine of three persons of one substance hasn't always been so-called orthodox Christianity, or "orthodox" Christianity has not always had a position on the issue. Even post-Apostasy.

I guess few would dispute that on this forum.

The most defining feature of monotheism has been the rejection of idolatry. The issue of idolatry is key, not the nature of the Godhead. (That said, some allegedly monotheistic conceptions of the Godhead are based on philosophies originally alien to Christianity and are themselves manifestations of idolatry.) We should consider the issue of idolatry and the problems raised by monotheism carefully.

Many critics of Mormonism who allege that Mormonism is non-monotheistic fundamentally don't understand the substance of monotheism, and in one way or another their own religions or practices are idolatrous. People interested in the truth shouldn't concede any ground to those critics that is undeserved.

When I pray to the Father in Jesus' name that I may know what the right thing to do is, I'm praying to one god only. That prayer has a monotheistic nature regardless of someone else's view of the Godhead and deity. God may be more complicated than what is suggested by one word "God" or even "Father," but we may miss something about idolatry if we don't understand prayer in its own terms.

LDS doctrine offers a description of God and is suggestive, but doesn't circumscribe God within human categories and theories (which, though inspired, may be treated too literally or absolutely). LDS doctrine leaves a considerable amount open to development or interpretation. The standard works repeatedly alert the reader that much has not and cannot be revealed on this earth regarding God. But also, it is possible to have a personal relationship with God and improve in understanding through the Holy Spirit.

There are various reasons to believe that the LDS faith is one of the most monotheistic faiths in existence. Perhaps some LDS hesitate to own the word "monotheism" when they shouldn't.

Panentheism is a view one might easily confuse the LDS view of God with or read into the LDS view. Panentheism is supposed to address and resolve the perceived tension between science and religion, and philosophically the tension between transcendental and immanentist views of God, which is related to your post. However, there are specific ways the LDS view of God is not panentheistic. That is somewhat tangential, so I'll just say that I wouldn't put monotheism in the same list as panentheism as beliefs are that are individually irrelevant. Rather than considering monotheism as an afterthought, it should be known from the outset that monotheism is central to topic of your post.

On a popular level, I've noticed that we tend to assume that the only ideas which are detrimental to faith are those of a "secular" philosophical bent. Yet I have observed members of our LDS community adopting from traditional Christianity the laziest "proofs" of God's existence (and to a rather disheartening degree) merely because the ideas have been labeled "Christian" by post-Apostasy theologians. In contrast, too often "science" is treated as if it were somehow opposed to "religion," or otherwise suspect.

Without disputing any of that, I note that Evangelicalism and New Age spirituality are both things that might exert an influence as some desire more mainstream acceptance for Mormonism. If we are to avoid the lazy reasoning apparent from some sound bites, we should also hold alleged disproofs to the same high standard and steer clear of ambient ideas many of which don't even pretend to have anything to say about salvation or the Atonement.

The modern Church of Jesus Christ developed separately from the New Age Movement, which came later, though I suppose some would argue there is a connection through Emanuel Swedenborg.

About evil and suffering:

Post-Apostasy religions attempt to answer with a non-answer: "With our limited, finite minds, we are simply incapable of grasping the larger purposes God is fulfilling."

And the LDS answer is different. I assume I don't need to elaborate on this forum.

Much of your post is related to theodicy, reconciling God's justice with the existence of evil.

I gather from some of your statements that you think LDS doctrine offers a superior solution to the problem of evil compared with other doctrines claiming to be monotheistic. I'm inclined to agree. Besides what LDS says specifically, it's clear to me other Christian denominations are losing members or potential converts because they provide theodicies that are unconvincing or are no longer convincing. The way theodicy is commonly taught does have some of the contradictions you discuss, if only because the listener has difficulty processing what is being said.

I do have some disagreement with how your post, it seems, ends up all but rejecting monotheism or at least views monotheism as irrelevant to its point. I also note that while you may envision LDS doctrine offering a superior theodicy, some of the suggestions or suggestive questions in your post seem to contrast with what many LDS might believe. Am I completely misunderstanding your post?

Don't you see the contradiction? If God is all-powerful, why then did He create us incapable of understanding His own plans? If the very laws of nature were created by God, then why did He create them in such a way that we become puppets to His will? "Free will" becomes a cruel illusion if God created the very rules by which we are said to be "free".

There are multiple material kingdoms. Each one has its laws, and some may have their own local deity. The deity itself may be subject to the laws of a larger or higher kingdom. The deity may create the laws in its respective kingdom, laws compatible with higher laws. The deity may be external to what it creates while intervening in it. Agency in a kingdom is real and necessary for salvation or exaltation. We can choose to ignore God's commandments to our detriment.

The answer of some to evil is to say, in one way or another, that God is powerless against evil or struggles with it because of limited power. What I just said above avoids such notions of weakness while allowing for God's supreme goodness. It may be that God cannot create gods out of nothing, but He is powerful with respect to His lawful kingdom or sphere and has created the conditions for salvation and exaltation within that. God doesn't engage in a struggle against evil with an uncertain outcome, but He covenants, and His power to fulfill His covenants is based on principles.

All glory belongs to God, and He alone is worthy of worship. We don't worship a peculiar national or tribal god, or worship the god of another planet, universe, or whatever. Nor do we worship a local deity in distinction from God.

Existing, but unknown gods that have power in unidentified domains elsewhere, acting in accordance with God's will, do not comprise some pantheon of gods of any relevance to us on earth except maybe as a purely abstract idea encouraging us to seek exaltation. These gods warrant no general or particular praise or fear. They are to be neither revered nor shunned, respected nor scorned. And they pose no problem of allegiance or nonallegiance. The characterization of Mormonism as henotheistic or even monolatrist, as opposed to monotheistic, is one-dimensional, simplistic, and false.

If He is a person, then He is Limited, Finite, contained in space and time. He cannot be unbounded and yet simultaneously bounded. I don't know about you, but I certainly can't "relate" to a "person" who exists outside of space and time.

I don't see how your problem would be resolved by saying God exists inside space and time. Even if God existed inside space and time (as we understand them), the main way of relating to Him would still be through prayer. And that is precisely one of the points of monotheism: that we should not have to see God with our own eyes to worship him as we (unfortunately) worship the idols around us. This distance from God is necessary and actually contributes to having a personal relationship with God if you think about how LDS are taught to pray.

Everything is "matter". Everything is "spirit". It is impossible for there to be an ontological duality between incorporeal disembodied "mind" which exists in a separate realm outside of space and time and the physically-existing world.

Just to clarify and make sure I understand this, when it is said that all spirit is matter, "matter" is not necessarily restricted to what we know (or could know in the future in mortal life on this earth) about the laws of nature. One could maintain both that God has a material existence and also that he exists "outside" the universe that is our frame of reference and has power with respect to that universe. As we may exist outside something we create while being able to monitor what's going on inside it.

The most dangerous view I see migrating into the Church, especially from traditional Christianity (among other sources), is that God is the author of the physical laws which He abides by. But as we've seen, if God is the "author" of the Eternal Law (if it is truly "eternal" then it could not have an author, but lay that aside for now) then He is the Author of Evil.

To complicate this, traditionally "evil" has also been viewed in terms of divine punishment.

To an extent, suffering is due to the laws of nature. One could argue even the calamities Job experienced involving the Sabeans and the Chaldeans were due to the laws of nature as well as agency. In the Book of Job, Job doesn't seem aware of the relevance of laws of nature to his situation, and he blames God as if God intended for him to suffer specifically.

Since things like sociology weren't around in Job's time and Job didn't know the laws of nature related to his situation, it is correct to emphasize Job's ignorance and God's superior knowledge and creativity. One might emphasize that God is all-knowing and all-powerful not to deny that the plan of salvation accords to laws that God cannot circumvent or do without, but to oppose the view that the world is lawless or governed conflictingly by different gods. Yes, God and God alone may be said to be responsible. There are laws of nature, though we may not know them. They are there for a purpose, and God knows the purpose for which they are there. Glory to God for organizing what needed to be organized for the plan of salvation and exaltation in His sphere even though He may have done so according to given principles. Have faith, seek after salvation, reject idols, and shun evil and do good no matter what.

Following absolutist Alexandrian philosophy, it's as if we think we won't have a reason to give our allegiance to God unless He and He alone is shown to be the Absolute, Singular Creator of everything from nothing - a remnant of our traditional-Christian heritage. Yet that's a simply ludicrous notion; I don't withhold my love from my parents until I can prove that they created bacteria and quantum mechanics, I love them because they're good people!

One has to know that bacteria and quantum mechanics exist in order to ask who or what created them. People have been dying from infections for millennia, but the germ theory of disease wasn't widespread in the 1820s-1840s. This didn't stop Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon from delivering the revelation beginning with, "Hear, O ye heavens, and give ear, O earth, and rejoice ye inhabitants thereof, for the Lord is God, and beside him there is no Savior. Great is his wisdom, marvelous are his ways, and the extent of his doings none can find out. His purposes fail not, neither are there any who can stay his hand." (A strongly monotheistic statement.) Joseph Smith gave his "allegiance" to God without being specifically shown that God is the creator various things Joseph Smith didn't even know about it.

Whatever order there exists and may exist in the universe is accounted for in God's plan. God alone is worthy of worship. When we divide up reality (the things we know of in our world or the universe) and suggest that God's domain is limited, we head down the road to idolatry. As monotheists, we are not going to be worshiping or sacrificing to Shitala Devi, Apollo, Namtar or whatever to handle a disease, or going to church for one thing, the astrologer/psychic for another thing, a New Age guru for another, a quasireligious secular inspirational speaker for another thing, and the TV for another.

Whether we in a sense will become part of God or the Godhead or even if there are multiple lesser deities existing hierarchically or non-hierarchically, we really do not have the capacity to distinguish and tell which things, areas or aspects of known reality are immediately governed by which deity apart from what has been revealed regarding manifestations of the Holy Spirit. If they are united in purpose, it is sufficient to pray to God only without making further distinction. There isn't more than one god worthy of worship, and our worship of God doesn't in any way conflict with worship of God in another hypothetical world. It is also not my understanding of LDS doctrine that we are to pray to the Father just for now (that the Father is one god among others to be worshiped one at a time), that one day we may be obligated to pray to another god, or that people in other worlds would be correct to pray to some being other than the Father if "Father" has been correctly translated or defined.

I conjecture that there would be no way to distinguish "Heavenly Father" worshiped in another world from Heavenly Father worshiped in this world. There is no god, but Heavenly Father, worthy of worship by anyone. All glory is given to the same one god regardless of the world on which Heavenly Father is worshiped.

Monotheism is central to why the plan of salvation cannot be frustrated. In my opinion, D&C 88 could be interpreted in part as relating "all things" intimately to Jesus Christ and therefore to each other and to the Atonement.

(Indeed, I speculate that when Christ tells us to pray only to the Father, that He was doing so in order to emphasize (by way of a contrast to the views of His time) the idea that we are His children, not that He is the only Being worth giving honor to. My view is, why not also pray to Heavenly Mother? Further, why stop with Her, or Him - why not the entire Council? Why not, in the end, pray to the united Family, all the Good Individuals who are one-in-heart in the Atonement, which can include us all? When we all become so righteous that there are none "above" or "below" others, we worship the eternal Family of Free Intelligences. God is "more intelligent" than they all, He is the most ancient Purposer, but they - we, potentially - are all taking part in the great Work. Indeed, giving all honor to a single person is a mark of the Accuser, not the God who wants us all to become adopted into His family yet independent in our spheres.)

Leaving aside everything I said above, "Therefore ye must always pray unto the Father in my name" is a commandment. There is no alternative revelation that would permit doing something to the contrary. Either it is the truth, or it is false.

About fear of divided worship and adoring something other than the Father:

No one has to lose out. This is about the Atonement, the At-one-ment; the reconciliation of all uncreated Intelligences and the giving of mutual worth-ship is eternal and applies to us all. We're all part of the same family, male and female alike, who progress to become Good by learning how to follow the Eternal Law.

I'd argue there is a difference between worshiping and adoring. We love our parents, but don't worship them, for example.

This is sheer nonsense - how can something exist "in part" outside of nature? If "laws" of nature can be broken, then they weren't "laws" to begin with; we simply hadn't read them correctly before.

Physical, biological etc. systems have laws that even we can intervene in to an extent. They don't cease to be laws.

If you are suggesting that laws should not be needed if they can be suspended, that order in creation isn't necessary for salvation, I would disagree for reasons I alluded to.

"Trapped"? Again, we believe God follows the laws. If He did not, He would cease to be God.

It is possible to think of "laws" and matter in too much of a Euclidean, Newtonian or so-called scientific sense and thus view them as too constraining.

If God has a material existence and is Himself subject to laws, it's not necessarily in that sense. Traditional deterministic ways of thinking may not apply.

That said, I'd agree with the sentiment that having a body should not be viewed as something cumbersome. The scriptures seem clear that having both a spirit and a body is more desirable than having either alone.

God is omniscient, omnipresent, a fundamental part of all that exists. But He doesn't overrule the acts of creatures. Yet He is within those acts themselves. Yet they are "free" to refuse Him and Sin. Yet He is also a part of Sin, since He is part of everything. Yet He is supposed to be Good. Yet ... (ad infinitum)

We experience evil due to our agency and lack of development. God tells us in the scriptures that life outside the Garden of Eden is a life of hardship.

Are salvation and exaltation worth it? Worth the suffering? I guess it depends on one's subjective state. If on some level one doesn't believe that God saves in the first place, many theodicies will be less persuasive. Various things, from the death of a loved one from an agonizing disease to the death of a pet goldfish, become a cause to reject theism altogether.

"If the world is truly temporal, and unfolding, I believe that means that God does not yet know the future. That's no divine imperfection, I mean, I think anyone who's a theist will believe that God will know anything that is knowable. But if the future does not yet exist, then even God can't know it."

If God created and creates the future, creates everything from nothing, and is a part of everything, then how can He possibly not know it?

I'd criticize the quoted words in another way (which I'm surprised came from a physicist who has published books about quantum physics, though I don't know much about Polkinghorne's ideas): that they try to squeeze God into a scientific framework that is actually now somewhat out of date. You mentioned quantum physics. In quantum physics, events in the future can affect things in the present.

I noticed one of the speakers in the video is actually a medical doctor. However accomplished or smart or qualified he might be in his field, I wouldn't consider his statements to be reflective of the best arguments the "other side" has to offer, whether we are talking about some point of theology or even evolution. Carson is in the video because he's famous, not because he's a theologian, a professor of religion, or a philosopher, which in fact some of the speakers in this video aren't. Many if not most are, but some aren't.

This can be a double-edged sword. Statistically, the random LDS on the street is more educated than the average person and more knowledgeable about the Bible, but anyone's reasoning might appear "lazy" if they are briefly questioned by someone who has totally different standpoint and is disdainful and dismissive.

I haven't read Polkinghorne's books on science and religion myself, but then I am not deriding his ideas.

We know that there is something physical, something material happening at a level we're unaware of; we do not consign our consciousness to a separate realm which is definitionally inaccessible. Again, all "spirit" is actually material, is "matter"; "matter" is just another name for "spirit". There is no Cartesian duality, it is merely different layers and levels of the same "stuff", labelled with different names.

Something could be material, but yet inaccessible. Contemporary physics ideas about hyperspace and so-called sub-quantum or hidden determinism even point to a deterministic materialist way of understanding how that could be the case.

I'd agree LDS doctrine poses problems for traditional Cartesianism, but I don't think we'll ever reach the point of being able to describe, in deterministic scientific terms, consciousness at the level at which things are really happening.

There are ontological issues, and then are epistemological issues. Just because we can't know something doesn't it mean it doesn't exist.

Because of our limits our understanding of God may have to remain abstract in some ways, but God isn't just an abstraction.

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"What does that history which predates humans show? Well it's a history of, uh, predation, and y'know, parasitism, death, extinction, y'know, you name it. And how do you make sense of that, because here you have humans that come after-the-fact, how, how is it that, uh, y'know, you don't seem to have that good old-fashioned theodicy where humans are responsible for the evil they're experiencing. And so I've struggled with this in trying to form a theodicy - the old way of thinking about the effects of the Fall is that the Fall happens and then things go haywire; well, couldn't it happen that the Fall happens and in a sense God, who is outside of time, changes the past and introduced natural evil, y'know, for the sake of humanity, to be a mirror of their, the Fall. Y'know, and it seems to me that even our understanding of evil, uh, we understand evil by the evils we see in nature. I mean could we fully appreciate evil if we didn't have examples of vipers and parasitism and things like that, I mean, y'know, nature gives us wonderful metaphors for the evil in our hearts."

God changes the past? He overrules all the supposedly "free willed" choices of all the animals who have souls? He introduces death into all living things as a result of one man's sin solely in order to subject us to an object lesson?

I'm not sure what Dembski is talking about, but what I got out of the words you quote is that we can learn something by looking at animals. (Dembski is an intelligent design creationist, and so not all of the other people interviewed in the video would agree with him, but I'm not familiar with Dembski's views.) A lot of our suffering is due to being mortals who came into existence through reproduction and evolution (if that is the means by which God gave us bodies), because that is how life comes to exist on this earth. We have some of the same problems as other mammals. And we have to work toward a society where there is less suffering. It takes time, but we can leave our uncivilized state (and have). So (and I don't know if this is what Dembski is actually trying to say and it probably isn't), we have reason to believe not all of our suffering is punishment for personal sin. And our suffering isn't punishment for original sin, because we can see that animals experience what we might call suffering. At the same time, we can see what animals without agency do and ask ourselves can't we do better than that.

Whether God does have us experience evil and is still just--again, this is somewhat a matter of what you are willing to believe. If someone thinks heavenly glory is unlikely for any reason or fundamentally doesn't believe that God exists, they will have difficulty with theodicy.

Theologian: "I wanted to believe, but my brain was getting in the way."

Joseph Smith, speaking for God: "You must study it out in your mind."

Mormon 9:27 O then despise not, and wonder not, but hearken unto the words of the Lord, and ask the Father in the name of Jesus for what things soever ye shall stand in need. Doubt not, but be believing, and begin as in times of old, and come unto the Lord with all your heart, and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before him.

Mormon 9:25 And whosoever shall believe in my name, doubting nothing, unto him will I confirm all my words, even unto the ends of the earth.

Always the insistence on a God who is philosophically, ontologically "unchanging", rather than a God who is "unchanging" in the sense that He will always keep His promises, but who is still eternally progressing (McConkie's overblown hysterics notwithstanding) Always the Fundamentalist assumption (utterly destroying, of course, any hope of Free Agency) that "prophecy" is a perfect vision of the Unchanging, Predestined, Fated Future, rather than a Plan consisting of Promises in which God will act in the ways he has Covenanted to.

We may not not know the details, all the specifics of how God does not change, but the idea that God does not change--that "from eternity to eternity he is the same"--puts us on the path of truth. It is the right orientation for us to have. We should not be thinking that one day we might need to worship something other than the Father, that He might one day be absent or somewhere else, or that we could one day give in to our whims instead of being obedient to His commandments. (Even if God had to develop to get to a point where he was going to be the same from then on, He can still be said to be the same from eternity to eternity.)

The ways in which God might change should not alter how we worship Him from day to day or year to year, so the practical meaning of the idea that God changes is unclear (unless we are to abandon monotheism).

Some may view the notion that God changes as being related to eternal progression. The doctrine of exaltation definitely has an impact on how people worship. But I'm not sure what emphasizing the alleged changingness of God instead of His unchangingness would add.

This simply makes no sense if God is omnipresent. "I'll step into myself and determine an event within my indeterminate self." The ability to personally intervene, however, makes perfect sense with the God of Mormonism, in which God really can "step in" from time to time, entering into an otherwise chaotic preexisting realm to shape it - partly because He actually has, y'know, feet.

I understand the word "omnipresent" differently. It has to do with having a constant relationship with something that doesn't have to be right in front of you. No matter where you are, what your personal situation, what strange culture with superficially impressive idols you find yourself in, no matter the year or the hour, you can and should worship the Father.

Omnipresence is not about us being part of God or the world being a part of God except in pantheism and panentheism.

7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

We believe that the Law is ascertainable by anyone because we all have an innate capacity to choose between our understanding of Good and Evil. God doesn't give us commandments because He's making us dance like puppets; killing people is not bad because God forbids it, God forbids it because it is bad!

There is a reason we view the highest font of morality as being located outside ourselves and something to strive to be near. Again, it is has to do with monotheism.

As for the suffering of the innocent: If a whole nation is unrighteous, there are consequences, some of which may fall on innocent individuals. It's not that the innocent are punished by God, and if those consequences include murder, murder is still evil. The scriptures are full of examples of the unrighteous suffering from evil done by other unrighteous people.

Concerning those difficult passages of Numbers and Deuteronomy, modern democracies don't sprout overnight. God expects us to follow His commandments and reject idolatry regardless of our level of development, and thus monotheism is found even in undeveloped societies that are struggling socially and politically and have many advances to make. The point is to reject idolatry, not that killing innocent people is good. Rejecting idolatry is more important than various issues one might have difficulty with especially from a modern standpoint. Rejecting idolatry is key and reduces evil overall.

I realize these words of mine in an Internet forum post may do little to satisfy you, but the topic of monotheism really is important in its own right and relevant.

If you create them from nothing, they are not free, because you determine everything about them. God is yet again the Devil.

You argue that some theologies that let God off the hook actually put God in the position of the Devil. I get that, and that you think LDS theology or LDS theology as you envision in it doesn't have the same problem. However, when we create computers out of parts and materials, we are determining the internal laws of the computer. That is just an analogy using something familiar to us, but the problem remains that the creator is still determinant despite laboring under constraints.

Computers generate heat. That heat is undesirable. We value the output of the computer, though, and the output is usually worth the heat generated. Creating a computer, we are "responsible" for the heat, but it can't be avoided. Could we choose not to create computers in the first place? Well, yes, but would we want to do that?

What you're saying would make more sense to me if you said earth was a planet that God just came across one day in the middle of earth's existence and offered salvation.

The issue of materiality or (differenty) corporeality is, I think, relevant to why the plan of salvation is what it is, but I don't think materiality is key to explaining why Satan is the author of evil and not God as you seem to be framing the issue, in terms of who is the ultimate creator or precondition. Whether God creates out of nothing or not isn't key to understanding why God is or isn't the author of evil.

This is the crux of the issue, and it all boils down to Alexandrian absolutes which the Western world has been so desperately clinging to all these millennia. Atheists are absolutely correct to denounce religion defending itself with this kind of bamboozling nonsense.

Just stepping back from the intellectual aspect of all of this and looking at more of a bigger picture... Unless you are expecting most of the world to be baptized some time soon, I'm not sure what suggesting that the atheism of Richard Dawkins is to be preferred to the "bamboozling" ideas of monotheists would accomplish. Can the ideas of monotheists, however imperfect, not be used as a starting point, or does the world actually need to pass through a stage of atheism before it can arrive at correct doctrine?

Which is a greater hotbed of restored Christianity, Greenwich Village with its New Age spiritualists and atheists, or Mexico City?

That's not just a rhetorical question. I'm coming from an atheist background myself.

Atheism and evolution happen to have great acceptance in the same places. It doesn't have to be that way. Unfortunately, people like Richard Dawkins make it seem that one has to be atheist if one accepts evolution, and then people wonder why others reject both.

Let's be very clear here: it is not their scientific backgrounds which is causing the confusion for the intelligent people in the video - it is their religious backgrounds and premises, and their religious information is conditioned by a post-Apostasy view of deity. The "traditions of their fathers" which claim that the sheer incomprehensibility is a sign of "deep" philosophy.

I disagree. The philosophical paradigm change signaled by quantum mechanics isn't as pervasive as one might think. The linear physicalist deterministic view is still dominant and helps sustain the primum movens view of God.

If one's "scientific" view of matter is so narrow, it's understandable that one would view God as existing apart from matter.

Rapid progress in science, seen in comparison with the apparently relatively little development in theology, has contributed to a bifurcating view of science and religion and maybe also matter-spirit dualism.

Enlightenment and modernist ideas influenced by science continue to impact how receptive people are to LDS doctrine and conversely to non-LDS doctrines.

Also--and I realize this requires elaboration--I believe certain wrong approaches in the social sciences and psychology, though not directly relevant to the nature of the Godhead and deity, have lessened the ascendancy of the LDS viewpoint.

There is so much truth out there it makes me want to cry sometimes in sheer frustration that I'll never be able to read all the Holy Books, learn all the history of the world; but the sects which the Family of Adam and Eve have broken up into have all been twisted - just a tiny little twist - by the philosophies of men into supporting a disembodied God. They find their clearest expression in Augustine and Aristotle, Aquinas and Philo, who have been synthesized into more worldviews than one can count.

Greek philosophy didn't invent monotheism. The adjustment of Christianity to Greek philosophy may be responsible for the idea that God is an immaterial spirit essence. However, it is possible to have a monotheistic conception of God in which God is material and has a body, and is also omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent: a being that not only makes promises that he intends to fulfill, but has the guaranteed ability to carry out His covenants and is alone worthy of worship. A being that can succeed in spite of the apparent chaos in the world, because actually there is order, and He has reckoned the laws of nature in his plan. A being about whose current purposes or ability to have an effect we do not have to wonder, thinking that it is "desperately" struggling with forces unknown to ourselves and itself. A being with whom we all can have a personal relationship regardless of the time or our circumstances, no matter how small or alone we might think we are. Nothing, not some other so-called god nor Satan, can interfere with this relationship unless we let it.

Your own quote reads, "If the veil were rent today and you were to see the great God who holds this world in its orbit and upholds all things by his power, you would see him in the image and very form of a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion and image of God." Upholds all things by his power.

The real problem with conceiving God as not having a body or being immaterial is not that it is the basis of a weak theodicy or that God's power has been basically exaggerated, or that the doctrine is confusing or too difficult to understand. In my opinion, the real problem is that it promotes the notion that bodies and matter are intrinsically evil and discourages us from striving for perfection.

The grafting of Greek philosophy into Christianity or the molding of Christianity to Greek philosophy is in fact idolatry. Whether Calvinist or Roman Catholic, conceptions of an immaterial God are a kind of graven image made and worshiped by men to the detriment of others and themselves.

"they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."

"Ye are Gods," Christ said. We and our families and friends and neighbors and nations are the embodied Gods. If the deities were always embodied, that means the sacred texts are not by definition fictions hallucinated by people who were confused about causality. It is the witness of the Divine Body which is the key; and the recognition that our own bodies are divine.

I'll think more about this, but it seems possible to go too far with this and end up in Platonist territory again. The idea that we are already divine, have forgotten our deity and role in creation, and are reuniting with deity and becoming gods anew by a change in our understanding and a realization of our power, reminds me of Neoplatonism despite the couching in materialist terms.

You have the broad outlines of an evolutionary materialist explanation, but I don't understand how Christ's singular Atonement would fit into that.

The Father and the Son are unlike the Holy Spirit in having a body. The Holy Spirit is material, but doesn't have a body. Materiality and corporeality aren't the same. This is another area where I would have difficulty aligning your emphasis on bodies with existing LDS doctrine.

This is where evolution and uncreated Intelligence comes in. If God is part of an extended family of deities, why do we assume that His body was not the product of evolution? A "body" implies biology of some sort or another. The "arguments from design" traditionally used to protect post-Apostasy views of God from evolution are, for the most part, worthless. There is no physical creature in the world that cannot be explained by evolution; animals are "perfectly" adapted to their environment (they're not, at all, but let's go with that inaccurate description) because they are the end product of a mind-bogglingly long process of evolution in which anyone who was not well-enough adapted to the environment died.

Would such a view of God have been possible in the 1820s-1840s, let alone the 1st century or earlier? On the Origin of Species wasn't published until the 1850s.

It allows Him to delegate - if there are worlds without number, He can't possibly watch them all, but someone who is as good as Him will become the Watchers, and because they are all part of the same Plan, they are one in heart. They retain their individuality, their personalities, but they are "one" in this way: they are working to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, to give all uncreated intelligences bodies, that they all might have joy.

Why should many intelligences emerging in matter by evolution be expected to converge on one purpose?

If we are the children of the Gods who work through small means, if we are of the same species, if we are capable of knowing "all things" as He does and inheriting all He has, then we should be pouring all our efforts into science, technology, medicine; the example of the Three Nephites should show us that it is absolutely possible for us to overcome death "in a twinkling", if only we knew how. If a dictator were killing the number of people who die "natural" deaths everyday, there would be a worldwide revolt. But we have so little faith that we think there is something inevitable about death.

On the one hand, I'd agree a lack of faith is to blame for a lack of effort to bring about the change needed to end some pervasive and persistent evils in society: change which must take place over a long period of time, maybe more than the lifetime of anyone living today. Ending evil is a patient and enduring struggle. Faith should lead to action, not inaction as with some supposedly faith-centered theologies and world views.

A lack of faith could also be responsible for some frantic efforts to slow down or stop aging. God has promised us perfected bodies. If we think God is unable to deliver on that, we may find things like cryonics and biological projects to prevent death more attractive.

The LDS concept of a perfected body is of a body that has also overcome spiritual death. If we don't do works of righteousness, we won't overcome spiritual death. Faith that we can obtain a perfected body should encourage us to do acts of righteousness. Everyone will get a resurrected body, but we would not like to heave a resurrected body and then not receive a heavenly glory. Thus, the promise of a perfected body doesn't mean we may stop trying. Lack of belief in salvation and a perfected body, though, may cause one's attention to become focused on things other than ending inequity.

It's not clear that investing for immortality or life extension technology is more moral than trying to do all we can with the bodies we already have to end agonizing deaths related due war, disease, hunger, and disasters. In fact, I can think of reasons to the contrary. The question isn't one that should be settled by philosophical diktat.

I can see why Mormonism and transhumanism would appeal to each other, but I think the transhumanist view of the unenhanced human body actually has more in common with traditional religious views of the human body as being unfit for divine habitation than with the LDS view of the body as a gift with enormous intrinsic potential currently unrealized by most people. The body is to be perfected, not made physically perfect before dying.

The body's powers can be used for righteousness through spiritual development. The steps toward gaining perfected bodies reunited with our spirits under conditions we'd enjoy are more spiritual than technological. The promise of a perfected body was open to people who lived centuries and millennia ago and didn't have our notions of futuristic technology.

http://claremont.academia.edu/JacobBaker/Papers/239190/God_with_Us_Panentheism_Pansyntheism_and_the_Mormon_Concept_of_God_

http://lds.org/ensign/1987/07/is-the-lds-view-of-god-consistent-with-the-bible?lang=eng

*****

Sorry...I wish the above was in a more tidy form. I don't have much time to write.

I don't mean the above to be in a spirit of combativeness. Some of my posts on this forum reflect a developing intellectual testimony of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, Jesus Christ, and His Church. Part of this grappling with ideas. As someone was who an atheist for many years, since I was a child, I also have a testimony of the Father, that He exists.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Thanks for the substantive reply, supersnail! I've been dying to get back into this thread, but I haven't had time to post much more than quick paragraph-length posts on this board lately (finishing up a reading-heavy term ... oy.) As you no doubt suspected, I disagree with a great deal of what you've included in your posts in this thread, but it's definitely not in a spirit of combativeness, and I did not take your response as such either. I'll be back with a full response myself as soon as I can!

Edited December 2, 2011 by JeremyOrbe-Smith

[Rob Osborn]

It's gonna take me a few days to even tackle one post here. JUst wondering but....Are we trying to set a record for the longest posts? I am only a two finger typer and it may take me a few days of nonstop typing to get my post in.

[Rivers]

Awesome post Jeremy.

Question: Would you consider the priesthood to be part of this Eternal Law which God is subject to?

[LeSellers]

Would you consider the priesthood to be part of this Eternal Law which God is subject to?

It's my view that God obeyed the Law of the Priesthood (for want of a better term), which includes a myriad of other "sublaws", and so made it subject to Him.

The laws of physics exist, and those who obey them are the ones who make those laws subject to their desires. We fly airplanes because we understand and obey the laws that apply (thrust, lift, drag, inter alia.), and aircraft serve us. Those who use cameras obey the laws of light/wave physics that apply (reflection, refraction, absorption, inter alia.) and we enjoy their works.

I believe it is the same with Father: He obeys the laws of the Priesthood, and we see the results, in both the macro and micro worlds.

Lehi

[Rivers]

I think it is worth noting that even though God did not create evil, there is still a need for evil. Accordidg to 2 Nephi 2:11, there needs to be an "opposition in all things" in oreder for righeousness and happiness to come to pass.

[Rob Osborn]

I don't agree that evil has to exist. To me that is like saying that we must subject our children to evil influence in order for them to advance or progress. But, if we are building our homes right, we are trying to remove all evil from our homes. We don't make our children do drugs or steal or watch pornography to help them advance. We would rather they never have these things to negatively influence their lives. Then you have the millennium where children will still be born but there will be no evil to influence them and the scriptures state that they will grow up without sin unto salvation.

I think the correct understanding is that it is necessary that evil has the chance or ability to exist, not that it actually must exist.

[Rivers]

I don't agree that evil has to exist. To me that is like saying that we must subject our children to evil influence in order for them to advance or progress. But, if we are building our homes right, we are trying to remove all evil from our homes. We don't make our children do drugs or steal or watch pornography to help them advance. We would rather they never have these things to negatively influence their lives. Then you have the millennium where children will still be born but there will be no evil to influence them and the scriptures state that they will grow up without sin unto salvation.

I think the correct understanding is that it is necessary that evil has the chance or ability to exist, not that it actually must exist.

That's a good way of putting it.

[supersnail]

Despite my defense of monotheism, my own view that I expressed above (somewhat) is technically within the realm of what's called "finitist" theodicy and theology--and so is brother Jeremy's. They are both finitist though your own view is more obviously finitist. It is within finitism that I support monotheism. I believe God in a finitist theology--but not in all finitist doctrines/theories--could still be one god (or a unity in a single Godhead, of distinct persons) and the only god ever worthy of worship by anyone. A god who can guarantee what he promises etc. and is an infallible moral beacon.

In scholarly publications and elsewhere, some, both for and against finitist theology, have suggested that finitism has to be polytheistic, henotheistic, or monolatrist (in a sense contrasted with monotheism). I disagree. Finitist theology can be monotheistic. As I understand it, LDS doctrine is monotheistic.

I hope that clarifies my position, which isn't very developed in my initial posts in this thread. I'm not a big fan of technical terminology because it can be a turn-off or make comprehension difficult, but I'm trying to put this conversation in the context of what others have already said.

[Arosophos]

Wow! Jeremy, what a beautiful post. It was brought to my attention by a friend that frequents this site.

Many Mormons (and some non-Mormons) who passionately trust in a naturalistic God, and who feel this trust should express itself in active engineering of the fulfillment of prophecies (such as those related to transfiguration, resurrection, renewal of this world, and the discovery and creation of worlds without end) are working together as the Mormon Transhumanist Association to advocate these ideas. Please take a look. You're invited to help us!

Mormon Transhumanist Association

http://transfigurism.org

You may also find the following site interesting. It presents a formal logical argument for trust in a naturalistic God, based on assumptions from contemporary science and technological trends:

The New God Argument

http://www.new-god-argument.com

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on these subjects, Jeremy. I enjoyed reading them.

[supersnail]

Blake Ostler's essay "The Concept of a Finite God as an Adequate Object of Worship" addresses whether God in finitist theology is worthy of worship. He concludes that God in LDS finitist theology is "an adequate object of worship." I'd agree, perhaps for somewhat different or additional reasons, and further specify that God in LDS theology is sufficient for monotheistic worship.

http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=9430

I'm not sure I agree with or understand everything in this essay, but two paragraphs particularly resonated with me.

"The adequate object of worship must possess power sufficient to compensate for the possible eventualities brought about by the free choices of all beings, otherwise God’s power and knowledge would be insufficient to insure the realization of his purposes. The Mormon plan of salvation is such a provision, compensating for the free choices of Adam (humankind) by meeting the eternal requirements of justice and mercy through the atonement of Jesus Christ. Although God is conditioned by eternal principles, he utilizes other eternal laws and principles to nullify their effect without contravening their efficacy, analogous to the way a jet utilizes natural laws to lift tons of steel into the atmosphere, overcoming the natural law of gravity without revoking it. Hence, God is an invincible ally who can insure the realization of his purposes. This has always been the Mormon understanding of God’s omnipotence and miracles: not suspending natural laws but utilizing a complete knowledge of nature to accomplish what is not possible to mortals.

"It should be noted that this concept of power appropriately places the emphasis on God as the object of religious worship and faith, for the point is not God’s unlimited power and knowledge but his purposes and love. God need only possess power and knowledge sufficient to save, exalt, and insure the eternal lives of those who trust in him.3 His knowledge and power certainly exceed this minimal requirement, but he is not thereby a more adequate object of faith. Indeed, the classical definitions of timeless omniscience and unlimited power are quite irrelevant to one aspiring to understand his relationship to deity. Religious faith is more a function of intimacy than of ultimacy, more a product of relationships than of logical necessities. That is why faith in God should make all the difference in the world."

As I suggested, God can be bound by laws, but still have the unquestioned ability to bring His plan of salvation to fruition. Regardless of the extent to which evil is regrettable--but unavoidable--necessary, or desired, God can ensure an outcome, especially one consistent with our agency. He can deliver on his promises.

That is different from any conception of God that views Him as potentially failing.

Much of the second paragraph there also struck me as true. God's power is most important as a matter of whether or not that power is enough to carry out the plan of salvation, and it is enough. People should not extol power for its own sake or make a fetish out of power.

[mfbukowski]

Well again, this thread is clearly in need of a bump in my opinion.

Supersnail referred me back here from the theodicy thread, which was a good thing because I had nearly forgotten about this one, and I feel this is an important thread.

As I see it, my suggestion both to super and Jeremy is that I think it is incredibly important that we pay more attention to our use of language and defining a common LDS theological vocabulary based more on Anglo American analytical philosophy of language than sticking with the old sectarian language of theology.

To a large degree I see the alleged "disagreement" between Jeremy and super as perhaps a linguistic confusion rather than anything of substance. The word "monotheist" appears to be the bone of contention, and I think what we have is the abstract interpretation of 10 symbols (10 letters of the word "monotheism") standing in the way of a unity of understanding which could bring important insight to all.

Frankly, what I have read of Ostler, which I admit at this moment is minimal, seems to have the same problem, and in fact that has been my barrier to reading him in any serious way. I just can't get past the Neoplatonic linguistic categories, end up rolling my eyes, and shut the book.

I think we should adopt a linguistic-constructivist/pragmatic view of truth and language based on the best philosophical theories available to us which speak to the LDS world view, and for me this would include James, Dewey, Wittgenstein and others (including the atheist Rorty who in my opinion is mistaken about one point which throws off his entire view of God) as a basis for an understanding

In my view, God is seen as the "giver of language" the giver of a human context, the organizer of ideas who spoke (perhaps literally or perhaps through 'inspiration'- which exactly is irrelevant) to mankind ("Adam"- a 'real person' or not? Irrelevant), at a given moment in the past, perhaps 6 or 7 thousand years ago, perhaps 20 thousand years ago (again, which is irrelevant) and gave a context - moral language- from which it was possible to build what we now call "civilization", and which continued to evolve from that point. THAT is the difference between the last several thousand years and the previous known "history" of homo sapiens.

The central insight which seems fairly obvious once you really SEE it (ok- grok it- I am a child of the 60's) is that we can only speak about things in language. Pretty basic huh? But guess what- that means all we communicate about- all of philosophy, all of science, all of what we call things ("That's a red car")- in short all of the discourse about reality and ideas and everything- ultimately are linguistic "problems" not in "reality" but in how we speak and understand things.

There ARE no problems but linguistic ones. Suppose we have to tunnel through a mountain. Doesn't seem like a linguistic problem does it? Yet every element of the solution of how to tunnel through a mountain exists in culture- in engineering specifically- and is contained in linguistic representations of what others who have tunneled through mountains have found to "work" for them. These are not abstract truths- they are not entities out there somewhere to be discovered- they are just the linguistic expressions of what has worked for others. On this view, science can be seen as a kind of a huge "recipe book"- "Do this and add this and put it here, and put a current of x volts through it, and it blows up", pretty much like baking a cake.

Taking this to morality, looking at the "Fall", it is my belief that the "Fall from innocence" was precisely based on the realization that immorality was "wrong". The placing of events into a human context linguistically changed everything. And of course nothing IS "wrong" until it can be called "wrong", and that requires language and civilization.

The re-cycling of animals being eaten by other animals suddenly because we have a linguistic context, becomes not just the carbon cycle, but "death". When it is your "mother" who gets eaten by a tiger, your mother who spoke to you and raised you and taught you language and what is "right and wrong" (civilization) and not just another animal who may have born you or not, suddenly you see the "death of your mother" as something incredibly important and hurtful, and not just the death of another chimp in the tribe.

There is no "death" before the "Fall from Innocence" because there is no "evil" to be defined; there is no "death" without the word "death" and all it implies to us- the ceasing to exist of someone we love. That causes pain; a lion eating an antelope does not cause us pain- those animals cannot speak and tell us about "their loss", so of course, there is no "loss".

There is no "murder" when a lion eats an antelope, but there IS "murder" when Cain kills Abel, because both have names. They are two humans now- they have language. They are part of "us". They are like "us" and feel as we do, because they can express those feelings.

They know you should "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" because they can verbalize that in language. God gives us language- and Adam is the namer of all things. Read Abraham 4 and see how many times God creates things by "calling them" the "first day" etc.

God is the giver of definitions and they are incredibly important. In language, in discussions, in the way we think about things, they are all we have to hang our hats on.....so to speak.

[supersnail]

Even if I never used the word "monotheism," any underlying disagreements would remain. And what I call "idolatry" would exist and have an impact even if nobody used language to describe it.

I'm not claiming that idolatry could exist without language. Idolatry came about in a world that already had language. Now, conceivably one could argue that idolatry emerged at the same time as language in general, but that wouldn't be an example of what you're talking about.

The reason we have the words "monotheism" and "polytheism" available to us today is partly because what we call "polytheism" wasn't "working" for Israel. Idolatry doesn't work today either.

If Jeremy wants to argue that the theology or worship he suggests could be monotheistic or that my concerns are exaggerated, I'm open to that.

The problem of evil may itself be considered a linguistic problem from your perspective. I'm not sure how knowing or saying that would be helpful for satisfying one's desire for some degree of intellectual assurance that a religion is viable in the context of the evil that exists in the world.

Differences between theodicies can be significant and practically important. They can have a material impact. Linguistic structures themselves are material. Whether free will exists is important. Whether causes of evil besides volition exist is important. Whether laws exist and in what way are important, etc. Some theodicies lead to views or represent views that ultimately do not support the doing of works of righteousness. I would argue even Plantingan theodicy is problematic.

Edited December 18, 2011 by supersnail

[supersnail]

OK, I'm going to attempt a reply to your post again, mfbukowski, in which you introduce a linguistic constructivist approach. I want to and am trying to see this as something other than a conversation-stopper, which other people familiar with social theory (or not) may easily see this as.

I would agree that the concept of monotheism has a origin, and this origin actually shows that LDS theology is monotheistic. The simplistic dictionary-like single sentence definition of "monotheism" used to claim that LDS theology is polytheistic is atheoretical, and ahistorical in the sense that what monotheists in the past were differentiating themselves from is totally lost. An awareness of the idolatry that exists in the world today, and differences between denominations or religions with respect to that, is also missing. It is to the point that many of those flinging the charge of "polytheism" against Mormonism would be hard-pressed to explain what is wrong with polytheism or why it is harmful. Ironically, many of these critics are themselves idolaters.

Alright, so one approach to this devolution of "polytheism" to something like a cuss word is to just abandon these terms and take up other linguistic patterns. I'm not going to weigh in on that here. I'll just reiterate that there is a real issue behind my use of the word "monotheism" and it should not be dismissed. Idolatry is not a problem just because it has been given a name.

Since we may just end up using the word "idolatry" anyway for a pragmatic reason, albeit more aware of its constructedness, I fail to see what the point is of the self-reflexive or interrogatory detour you seem to be suggesting.