A Thought Experiment: Is Mormonism Ultimately Non-Theistic?

[_Runtu]

It seems to imply that time is not linear, which is hard to reconcile with the cause-and-effect idea behind eternal progression (that following the plan of salvation is the cause leading to the effect of attaining godhood).

Back in my believing days, I saw time as nonlinear, as an expanding sphere with God(s) at the center. From the center, God can see everything as present here and now. For us, time is measured as a length on the outside of the sphere, but to God it is all present.

I don't know. It used to make sense.

[_floatingboy]

No infinite like recursion. With no Stack-Overflow Error to prevent it from recurring forever.

I dunno, I just keep hearing the song "I'm my own grandpa" in my head, and seeing this in my mind:

[_Aristotle Smith]

I don't think Mormons can actually sustain the concept of 'theism' and nor do I think they should. Let me explain:

Theism is a philosophical term, not a theological one. It doesn't just mean God, but a formulation of God that adheres to the ideas of omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, being eternal and being involved in human affairs.

MfBukowski rejects Platonic ideas about God and I think he has a point.

I wanted to riff on bringing Platonism into this. Mormons actually do bring Platonism in the back door, and in a way that shows they are not traditional theists.

I think most Christian theists who are Platonists would posit that God is the source or the location of the eternal forms. Mormons can't do that because of the whole eternal progression of the gods thing. Because if one of those gods was the location or source of the forms, then that would be the god to worship. Eternal progression kind of kills that idea.

But, Mormons would still like to posit eternal things like justice, mercy, and law. However, the Mormon God can't be the source of those forms/ideas. The solution is for Mormons to become much more traditional in their Platonism and see the forms/ideas outside of God. I think this is way most Mormons interpret passages like Alma 42 and D&C 130:20-21. The passages are not consistent, especially Alma 42, almost like the author knew he was going too far and so he threw in a couple of phrases to avoid making the traditional Platonism too blatant, but I think that traditional Platonism is in the background.

However, I think the author of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith, didn't know Platonism at all. He simply hit upon some ideas that are like Plato's by accident. So when I say "Plationism" it's shorthand for "ideas that look like Plato's but do not related genealogically to Plato's ideas."

[_floatingboy]

still thinking about this recursion thing. and again, i'm a dummy when it comes to math/physics and the like, so pardon my ignorance. by infinite recursion i understand an infinite nesting of things. but does that by definition exclude the possibility of a starting point? and how does the concept of a torus or an "eternal round" fit in with recursion? if recursion refers to a procedure which repeats itself as part of its procedure, how do you see this as fitting with what the OP is asking?

[_floatingboy]

and one thing that occurred to me while reading this thread was that, as far as occam's razor is concerned, billions of years of evolution resulting in life as we know it is certainly a simpler, more plausible answer, even as dependent on infinitesimal odds as i understand it to be.

[_Calculus Crusader]

How about if there was no first God.

What's the smallest positive rational number?

Infinite regress may not be very pretty from a philosophical point of view, but I don't see any logical prohibition of it as such.

Actually, I've wondered if the chain of gods might be infinite in length but connected back to itself like a torus. The torus would also fit nicely with the idea of a ring which Joseph Smith mentioned in the King Follett discourse. Consider the set of rational points bounded by 0 <= x,y < 1. In other words the unit square but with 1 connected back to 0 on each side--a torus.

If the set of rational points isn't appealing because there's no specifiable preceeding / folowing point, consider instead the set of points of the form 1/n where n is a positive integer.

This reads like something Prof Tarski might have pondered back in the days when he used to traverse the road to Shambhala. In any event, trying to tart up Joe Smith's chicanery and delusions with mathematics is a serious disservice to the later.

[_Darth J]

How about if there was no first God.

What's the smallest positive rational number?

Infinite regress may not be very pretty from a philosophical point of view, but I don't see any logical prohibition of it as such.

Actually, I've wondered if the chain of gods might be infinite in length but connected back to itself like a torus. The torus would also fit nicely with the idea of a ring which Joseph Smith mentioned in the King Follett discourse. Consider the set of rational points bounded by 0 <= x,y < 1. In other words the unit square but with 1 connected back to 0 on each side--a torus.

If the set of rational points isn't appealing because there's no specifiable preceeding / folowing point, consider instead the set of points of the form 1/n where n is a positive integer.

This reads like something Prof Tarski might have pondered back in the days when he used to traverse the road to Shambhala. In any event, trying to tart up Joe Smith's chicanery and delusions with mathematics is a serious disservice to the later.

Please elaborate.

[_Jason Bourne]

Certainyl LDS canon allows for an Eternal God. The D&C talks of an Eternal God of all other gods. I think this is why Blake Ostler believes that LDS scripture does allow for an First Cause God and rejects the idea that this God was ever a man like us.

I agree.

Also, I read the KFD to say Jesus was doing that which he saw the Father do. In other words at some point the Father was savior of a world like Jesus was doing on our earth. I can wrangle this idea this way. God, the Eternal God of all other gods, was the intelligence that was more intelligent then all others put together. He figured out for His own progression and our their needed to be a mortal experience. So he created a world, peopled it, entered mortality as that worlds savior and then got the ball rolling from there. This seems plausible in LDS thought. And remember in LDS thought Jesue already was at god level before his mortal life.

[_harmony]

And remember in LDS thought Jesue already was at god level before his mortal life.

Which is really not fair on so many levels.

[_bcspace]

So in some way, it seems that the first god somehow progressed from being a man to being a god with no god superior to him, and no savior to intervene. It would be like the complete realization of some Nietzschean superman.

I have hypothesized that the first God(s) became such after an evolution of trial and error. Now that they are there, they have devloped a much more efficient way.

Jainism holds that while there are many gods, there is no supreme being creator God as most theists would tend to think of God. Similarly, while Mormonism is henotheistic in that it teaches that there are many gods besides the three Gods that are explicitly worshipped in Mormonism (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost),

I used to think we were henotheistic too, and as far as I can tell, no one believed that until I brought it up years ago. However, considering that the term was developed to describe Roman and Greek systems, I have come to realize that LDS are not henotheistic at all. We do not worship (pray to) any of the other Gods.

is there really any ultimate supreme being over the multiverse in Mormonism? It does not appear so, as this thought experiment may illustrate.

I've never thought so. I've always imagined a scatttered (throughout the multiverses) civilization of Gods though it is not unreasonable to think that certain factions gain power from time to time. All speculation of course.

And if that is the case, isn't Mormonism, like Jainism, "polytheist, monotheist, nontheist and atheist all at the same time"? (Mormons would be henotheistic, not polytheistic, however.)

No. We have nothing to do with the other Gods.