Mormon Exaltation Dilemmas, Pt. 2 (w/ Aaron Shafavoloff)

You're entering outer brightness.

Welcome back, fireflies. This week we continue our discussion with Aaron Shafawaloff about his article titled Dilemmas of Mormon Exaltation. We wrap up our discussion of his second dilemma expanding Godhead versus overlapping Godheads. Then we cover his fourth dilemma, Exhaustible versus Infinite Pool of Coeternal Intelligences.

And finally, we cover his third dilemma, Shared versus Independent Dominion Between Gods. And I think we have some scriptural hints that Christians will have their own kind of eternal progression in heaven that's much greater than, I would say, the boring view of Mormon eternal progression. So, there's the Brigham's view that all the gods are always progressing in all their attributes. And then there's the sort of the modern standardized LDS view, you know, B.H. Roberts and at least McConkie and how that's where the other model played out. Because the gods, I'm actually not sure if Roberts held this view, sorry.

At least McConkie did, and it was represented by others like Joseph Fielding Smith. But when the gods max out in their internal attributes. I mean, eternal progression in Brigham's view is sort of you're trailing God on an escalator and you'll someday reach where he's at today, but he'll go beyond that. And it's interesting because if you're both increasing, you're both thirsty for something, you're both not yet satisfied with what, well, you're reaching for something better and you're not really satisfied with who your God is today ultimately.

And you just keep going and going and going. And when God himself is maxed out and in your exaltation, you max out and you become equal with God in your internal attributes. In that view, you stop progressing because God's not infinite. Well, Christians at least I think have available to them the best of both.

Meaning, well, sort of kind of, how do I put this? In the Christian view, God is infinite. So, if we're going to eternally progress, we're not going to max out.

Ephesians 2 says that Christ was raised, seated. He has shown us grace that we might be shown the, paraphrasing here, the endless riches of the kindness of Jesus Christ. And later Paul says, oh, in Romans, oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, who has known the mind of the Lord?

In other words, it's inexhaustible. So, for Christians, if we're going to eternally progress, there's no threat of bumping up against the limits of God and saying, oh man, I guess I've learned everything there is to know about God. I've enjoyed everything there is to enjoy about God. Neither is there the sense that God himself is growing. We have an infinite God. So, God's not, you know, on an escalator. He's not growing and learning.

He's not getting better. So, Christians have the best of it. And we also have a satisfaction and contentment. It's not, there's not this eternal, it's almost like Mormonism makes the problem of a certain reading of Ecclesiastes even worse is that, you know, Ecclesiastes, it gets this fulfillment in Scripture with the resurrection and with the person of Jesus and a contentment and satisfaction in God's goodness and his greater purposes.

And I mean, that's how it works out canonically in the bigger picture. I think there is a point within Ecclesiastes that God is God and he can do what he wants. He even frustrates the affairs of man to remind us that we're not God and he is God. We're human and he's not. Anyway, all that to say, I had a friend named Alex, have a friend named Alex who he was, when he was on his mission, he was just like thinking existentially one night about the system of God, God's helping men become gods, helping men become gods.

And he just had this sudden realization of dread. Like, what's the point of all that? It's not really satisfying to know, to have a personal relationship with the God who is overall, wow, what a privilege. Mormons seeing in, if you could hide to Kolob, that we don't know when the generations of the gods began to be. And so, in effect, Mormons are saying we don't have a relationship with the very first God. And Christians are saying, not only is he inexhaustible, not only is he infinite, not only is he invisible, not only is the source of everything good and true and beautiful, not only is he himself the standard of what is good and true and beautiful, you can have a relationship with him and not some downstream demigod, Superman, cosmic regional patriarch deity, that is a poor hand-me-down deity.

Yeah, I love that. And where my mind went with that is 1 Corinthians 2, verse 9, but as it is written, I have not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that love him. And if Mormonism were true, and it's a restoration of what came before, including plural marriage and the plurality of gods and, you know, God's helping men become gods and so on and so forth, if that's all true, then 1 Corinthians 2, verse 9 has to be false, right? Because I hath seen and ear hath heard, and it's been measured, those things have entered into the heart of men, right?

Marriage, those types of things. So, yeah. Yeah, those are great points. The thought that I had too was, going back to your dilemma, you know, if Jesus goes on to, let's say, start another godhead, so, you know, like there's overlapping godheads, that theory, you know, the Christian hope is always to, you know, to one day have a fullness of communion with God, you know, like our understanding of God is veiled at this point. It's obscured, and we have a very incomplete understanding of who God is and actually being able to fellowship with him. But in heaven, there will be no limits, you know, there will be no barriers, we'll be completely with God, but if Jesus is the father of his own creation, we're only going to, you know, it'll be like, you know, being the child of divorced parents like I am. You know, you'll only see your dad, you know, on weekends or something like that when Jesus comes to visit because he's got his other kids to worry about. So, there is this barrier of communion between Christians in heaven and Jesus if he's off doing his own thing as part of a different godhead. And so, I don't know, that just doesn't sound exciting to me. I mean, I think I've heard someone saying in the past, well, Jesus can, he can teleport instantly, you know, from place to place, you know, he can be here and there, but at the same time, there will be times where, you know, you're separated from him. And so, when you have the bride separated from his bridegroom, and there's a longing, there's a loss there, there's, you know, there's something missing. I don't know, that's the thoughts that came to my mind.

CB. Especially if God is not omnipresent. So, Mormons mock, I don't say Mormons in general, not necessarily as individuals all mock this, but Mormonism and some of its representatives, they mock the omnipresence of God like he's some sort of thin gas that's distributed throughout the universe or just some idea without a mind or he's just, you know, diffused. Well, the Christian classic doctrine of omnipresence is, it's much more exciting than that, than a distributed gas.

It's divine simplicity with omnipresence. So, God is fully present everywhere, but he's not contained anywhere and he's fully present. He's not partially present. A God who can be contained is a God that can't be fully present. A God who's not fully responsible for the existence of everything outside of himself. A God who isn't sovereign over absolutely all things that can't be fully present anywhere. Whereas our God, even before the incarnation, he was fully present with his people.

And I can enjoy that presence now with him. But if God's a distant alien who's just sending his effects from afar, from trillions or billions of miles away from some planet, what is it, next to Kolob, whatever that is, if he's just sort of like emanating from there, it's like it's a home base and he's sending his vibes, his rays of light or his chain of effects, you know, physical material effects across the universe to me, then I'm just kind of saying hi, you know, from afar. That's what is initially presented as a more personable God in Mormonism when it's inspected becomes grossly impersonal. One of the other dilemmas I have on the list, the larger list, is that of eternal law where Mormonism has this eternal law that precedes or predates the gods. It's something that all the gods are conforming to. It's like the rules of the universe. But this law of how things should be, ethical prescriptions, how things are, you know, the nature of cosmic reality, also, that law isn't owing to any personal being. So ultimately, it's an impersonal law, ironically, without body parts or passions. And it is a, I've heard some Mormons call it a governing force, even a force that governs the universe.

That's incredible. This impersonal law, this impersonal platonic form, eternal law without body parts or passions that is not owing to any ultimate personal deity is governing the whole universe. So you have a problem there where it's either this platonic form, which I mean, this is incredible because Mormonism has depicted our God as without body parts or passions, and therefore they reason impersonal, abstract, unrelatable, and not personal. But they have this eternal law.

So some Mormons will say, well, maybe every generation of the gods sort of reinvents the law. It just sort of happens to emerge in a consistent way. And it's not a platonic form. It doesn't really exist. It just sort of emerges over and over again.

Whatever the case, you're still stuck with this universe that is of such a nature that this law keeps emerging, but it's not really owing to any ultimate personal deity or somebody who's personal. It's an idea without a mind. It's an idea without a mind owing to the idea.

It's ultimately as the source of the idea. So I'm not sure how we got on that, but I know Orson Pratt talks about how when we worship God, we're not actually worshiping one particular person. Orson Pratt held the view that when we worship God, we're worshiping the sum of all divine attributes possessed by all the gods. But, I mean, when Mormons have appreciation for the system of the cosmos and the gods and exaltation, I mean, when you really start peeling back the layers, it's like, well, you've got this impersonal law and these gods.

I mean, I could detour with one more on the list. You have these pools, you have a pool of intelligences, presumably one pool. There are multiple categories or pools or collections of intelligences, these co-eternal intelligences. And it raises all sorts of questions about how did our particular Heavenly Father get matched with certain intelligences? Like, is it accidental that Matthew's co-eternal identity, personal intelligence got matched with Heavenly Father? Was it necessary and fitting and suitable eternally that y'all were matched, right? Or was it accidental? And I'm using accidental in the philosophical sense.

Like, it wasn't necessary, it wasn't essential. Could you have been matched up with a different Heavenly Father? If there's no ultimate personal God sort of playing matchmaker between the new gods and the new and the old intelligences, it's this kind of impersonal force.

Anyway, maybe that's a segue into the third dilemma that's listed. I had some interesting thoughts about that. Like, that could solve determinism.

The God of Mormonism wants to have things go a certain way, so he has a completely inexhaustible pool of intelligences, so he can pluck whichever ones will fit the plan just the way he wants. If he had that level of foreknowledge. Yeah, exactly.

Well, if he knows this eternally, then he would have that. But yeah, that's another topic we'll talk about some other time. But yeah, so okay, the third dilemma.

So shared versus independent dominion between gods. I thought this was an interesting one. So would you like to share with us what that is, Aaron? Yeah, I mistook that. So I thought the third one, I misnumbered in my head real quickly. There's another dilemma, sorry for the pause, of the infinite supply or finite supply of intelligences. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. We can actually go into that if you like. Yeah, because that is a segue from what you were talking about. So we can flip them.

Oh yeah, if you don't mind. I forget how many I had listed there. So if there's an infinite supply of intelligences that are co-eternal, and it's a fixed number, and there's no way to add to the number of intelligences, which is the standard model, that's the Joseph Smith model, they're not created, they're not destroyed, then although these gods who are increasing in number are pulling from the infinite supply or collection of intelligences, there will always be an infinite number ready and available, and therefore there will always be an infinite number of intelligences that never get a chance. And so they're doomed. There are some intelligences that will never be adopted, if you will, into the eternal family, because there's always more. There's always more. But if you have a fixed number of intelligences, then you exhaust the supply at some point, and you have to deal with this problem that God is unable to create more intelligences, and so you kind of max out, and there's no more opportunities for new gods to beget to beget children who can become new gods. It's over. You're done.

There's no more. Now, another option is to say that maybe heavenly parents beget new spirit intelligences from the matter of intelligence. So this is a different model, though. This is Brigham's model where intelligence, singular, is a substance, it's the material of the universe from which new identities can be begotten by heavenly parents sexually. But that's not the Joseph Smith model, and that's not the BH Roberts model that tried to synthesize the Joseph Smith model. Joseph Smith's model is that we are co-eternal, that we had no beginning. And this is really, really interesting, because Mormons will often say that they're proud and they're happy and delighted in the fact that we have literal heavenly parents.

And then it raises the question of what do you mean by literal? Because in the Joseph Smith model, in the BH Roberts model, in the gospel principles model, technically Heavenly Father isn't my father, if you get me. He's the father of my spirit body, and he's my sort of adoptive father in that he took me on and relationally took me in and cared for me. But he's really not the origin of me. If I'm co-eternal, my ego, my identity, my personhood is not owing to the fatherhood of God.

It predated me being sexually begotten into a spirit body by heavenly parents. So when Mormons use Acts 17, where it says, in God we live and move and have our being, we're the very offspring of God, I don't think they're thinking clearly about this. Paul is going way beyond Mormon theology here. Paul is thinking that we can use the offspring language in as much as we have our very being. In him, we live and move and have our being. But if the Mormon standard model is right, my inner core co-eternal being is not owing to God, and therefore God's fatherhood is irrelevant to my core existence. So, I mean, you end up having to say that God isn't the father of everybody on this planet.

He's the father of the spirit bodies on everyone's planet, and he's sort of an adoptive relational father, but he's not the actual origin father of ourselves. I forget, I'm sorry, I forget the path we were down of that. That's really interesting because you were talking earlier about how, you know, Latter-day Saints kind of have this gospel principles view of their system, right? But it gets, it washes up against the shore of their actual theology.

And what you just described is a perfect example of that, right? With the idea that, oh, we're literal children of God. And what that says to the Mormon mind is I've got a father in heaven, just like my father here who loves me and will provide everything for me.

But when you ask the question, like you said, what do you mean by literal? And then you start looking deeply at what Latter-day Saint theology and scripture says, you don't end up with literal father. And if you want to take Brigham's view that we had our personal, real beginning at the sexual begetting event, the conception between heavenly parents, that we were not co-eternal identities. Brigham's view is that we actually had our personal beginnings under our heavenly parents. Well, then you just have to say Joseph Smith is wrong.

And I mean, that just keeps raising the question of if you don't trust your prophets, if you don't trust a subset of your prophets on these issues, why should I? So, maybe I'm wrong, but I seem to remember the section where it talks about intelligences and doctrine and covenants. It implies that we had some kind of individuality or personality, even as intelligences.

Brian Oh, yeah. So, as far as I understand, in early Mormonism, this demarcation between intelligences and spirits was not yet developed. It's just that we're co-eternal spirits. And spirits and intelligences are synonymous at this point. And then, Brigham has this sort of spin on everything, which is really an Adam-God framework. A lot of modern LDS theology is a downstream sort of variation echo. Even the idea of spirit birth, as developed by, I mean, a lot of this was shaped by either Adam-God or shaped by the rejection of Adam-God.

The Jehovah Elohim naming conventions for father and son is in part a reaction to, you know, it's a rejection of the naming conventions that Brigham Young had for Brigham Young had for Elohim, Jehovah, and Adam. Anyway, all that to say, there's some essays available online about this. One's by Van Hale. I think Blake Oster's done some historical work on this. There's some really, really helpful articles about how Joseph Smith had a more simple view that the spirits were co-eternal. Brigham Young had a view that spirits, that, you know, we had a beginning.

And B.H. Roberts later tried to synthesize the view of Smith and Young, and that's the main dominant model we have today. Okay. Yeah, I wasn't really aware that there was that synthesis of those two views. But going back to what it means to be a father, you know, the more we talked about it, the more it seems like, with taking the whole scope of LDS belief, it just seems like God's existence is really not that different from ours in the LDS belief, because God cannot create anything from scratch. Humans cannot create anything from scratch. God could not create children from scratch. He has to take pre-existing, chaotic, you know, matter to create our physical bodies. He has to take pre-existing intelligences to create our spirit bodies. Just as human fathers cannot create children from scratch in the sense of, you know, we create their entire spirits and bodies, you know, the spirits came from God, the bodies came from, you know, our biological processes, I guess, based on the energy we get from food, I guess.

You know, so we can't really create anything from scratch, just as God can. So there's really no difference between how God creates children and we create children. Yeah, it's interesting that in the Christian tradition, there's two views on whether we, like, when I say that my dad is my dad, do I mean that he's the dad of my body?

Or do I mean that he's also the dad of me? And there's two different Christian views on this, and I'll tip my hand toward one. One's called soul creationism, whereas that God directly creates the soul and that what's begotten between parents is the body that enclose the soul. I do not favor that view.

I don't know how to pronounce this well. Treducianism, the C, is the view that in God's providence between parents is begotten the whole self. So, my dad is really my dad. I was begotten of my parents. So, they're not just the parents of my flesh, they're the parents of me.

And one of the motivating factors I have for adopting that second position is that I don't want to be a Gnostic. I don't want to think of the body as an add-on to my humanity. My body was integral to my original existence, which is interesting here because, you know, I think this puts Christianity in a better position to honor the human body because it's not as though I existed for eternity as an intelligence and then at some later stage I had a body kind of tacked on as a spacesuit or a sort of a transhumanistic, you know, auxiliary add-on. My body was integral to myself from the very beginning. My whole self was begotten by my parents providentially through the creative care of my God. So, it's good.

It was good from the beginning. It wasn't an upgrade or an add-on to have a body. It was original for the human existence to have a body. Yeah, that's something I haven't quite really, I mean, I've thought about it a lot and I understand there are passages that seem to indicate that God is obviously at work in creating us in the womb. He's knitting us together in the womb.

There's several passages in Psalms. So, I'm like, okay, well, I mean, that can be understood spiritually and physically and, you know, he breathed life into Adam in the beginning, you know, so he obviously didn't have a spirit from a father. So, yeah, that whole issue is actually something I've recently gotten into and I need to think more about it.

I could be wrong about it, but that's my tentative position for now. But just going back to the dilemma, there's really no difference in, you know, in how God creates and man creates in terms of children. And so I think, you know, taking a pre-existing spirit or something, an entity, so God takes a pre-existing intelligence, forms it into a spirit. Man takes, you know, a pre-existing spirit, forms it into a child. And so it really is just, and since matter and spirit are the same kind of thing in the un-Mormonism, you know, spirit is just more highly refined. We talked with Jackson about how there's a wide gulf between man and God. When you really think about all this, you know, from the LDS perspective, the gap keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller in terms of difference between man and God.

So, it is kind of underwhelming when you really think about that, just to think about how the view of God in the LDS perspective, at least from our perspective, is very small. Would you all like to move on to the dominion? Yeah, for sure. So that's the third one, right? Aha, yes.

I had them misnumbered. Yeah, in this one, we've got the question of when newly exalted gods have their own worlds, planets, peoples, material sort of playground sand to work with, and, you know, they have their own section of the multiverse with boundaries, that that's theirs. We'll call that a domain with jurisdiction. There's different divine jurisdictions over different domains of the modern multiverse. There's a question of, is the domain that I develop, is the plot of land, if I could speak simply, is that also under the dominion of my God? In other words, am I a steward of God's own domain? Another way of saying this is Heavenly Father's domain, a subset of Heavenly Grandfather's domain, is Heavenly Father stewarding what was given to Him, but is still under the domain of Heavenly Grandfather, and it's just this travel up. In this scenario, you know, God's really the under steward.

He's the under shepherd. He's nearly not the supreme sovereign over His own domain. So, there's a couple different, you know, spin-offs or variations of this. One is that when God helps others become gods, these new gods develop their own domains that are exclusive to and separate from Heavenly Father's domain.

So, it's additive. They, you know, they find a different sort of uncharted territory, you know, some wild, wild west of the chaotic multiverse, and they say, okay, I'm going to, you know, that hasn't been claimed yet. It's like this unclaimed territory of the multiverse.

Some Star Trek stuff. Yeah, yeah, that no god has yet put dominion over. So, in this model, you've got different gods with different domains that are exclusive from each other. Well, what this ends up implying is that the New Testament is wrong. The New Testament says that God has eternal dominion. It's without boundaries or limits. You essentially have in this one model of independent domains, you have boundaries, you have borders, and then it starts raising questions of like, well, what happens if a god visits the domain of, you know, his spirit cousin or his great uncle?

Like, how do you conduct yourself? Like, in America, like when you are sorry, on earth, you know, if you're an ambassador, and you go visit, say, Bangladesh, or, you know, Russia, or wherever you visit some political figure there, or, you know, governing figure, there's like, you participate in the decorum, and the respect and the courtesies that are appropriate to that domain to show submission to and deference to the people that are in charge there. Does God do that when he visits for sort of a family reunion of the domains of other gods? Anyway, so the bigger rewinding here, the problem here is that if you have exclusive domains that are detached from each other, then God doesn't really have eternal and unlimited dominion. He has partial dominion. And I would add another dominion to this quickly is if there's an infinite amount of dominion out there, and our God doesn't have all of it, then it stands to, and if there's an infinite, I mean, if other people are in if other gods have been at this longer than our God has, then it stands to reason that our God, proportionally speaking, in terms of ratio, has an infinitesimally small dominion compared to the dominions of other gods. So, if you were to ask, what percentage of all divine dominions does our God have of all of them?

And you'd have to say something much less than 100%, much less than 100%, because most of them aren't his. So, you have all sorts of problems here where God is, there's domains where God does not have dominion over, God's domain isn't comprehensive. You know, there's a Christian conscience, either straightforward Christian conscience or a latent Christian conscience, that God has exclusivity over his own domain. We Christians believe that God is exclusively sovereign over his own domain. God isn't sharing his domain with other deities.

He's not reporting to a superior deity on the use of his land. God is, I love this in the book of Hebrews, there's no greater name by which he can swear. So, when God makes a promise, he swears by himself. You know, he appeals to his own self by his own name.

There's no greater name. And so, you know, you've got to answer the question, if I become a god and I have my own domain, is it a subsection of God's own domain? Another question here that pops up out is, well, maybe God, and I had one woman talk to me about this, maybe God sort of grants you a plot of his domain. So, when you become a god, you take a portion of what was God's domain and it becomes yours. It's like, you know, a father granting a portion of his land to his son. So, what was under God's dominion, if you're into the exclusive model here, there's different, you know, shared model or exclusive model, what was under God's dominion no longer is under God's dominion. It's given to his children. In fact, all of the exalted gods just keep taking more of his domain.

And the more successful he is, the more domain he gives out. And you're no longer really able to say with a good conscience that God has eternal dominion over all, without limits, without boundaries, without exceptions. Ted Well, maybe we're just eternal sharecroppers. Chris Yeah, this is much more satisfying when we think about this all being under God's domain. Jared Yeah, I was just thinking about, you know, if God had to have an auditor come in to make sure, you know, he's not cooking the books, you know, or, you know, everything's in order.

It's a pretty weird thing to think about. Chris And it doesn't solve the problem to say, well, all the gods are perfectly ethical, and therefore they're cooperative, and they don't compete with each other. That really doesn't really solve the concerns I'm bringing up here. No, and really, how can you make that claim if you're a Latter-day Saint, right? Because in your cosmology, Lucifer rebels, and he's able to do so because of kind of the supreme concept of Latter-day Saint cosmology, right? Because he's a self-existent being. He's able to rebel against God because he has his own free will.

And so, how can you say, okay, well, all the gods are completely ethical if a self-existent being is able to rebel, right? Jared Well, I mean, so a lot of Latter-day Saints will say that once exalted, they won't fall. And Luther, Luther, Lucifer wasn't, I know that some of them would say the same thing.

More Mormons would equate the two, but it's a Lucifer wasn't exalted. And so, he was not of the sort of deity that would fall. Well, that raises more questions about why on heck are you adopting this classical theism notion that God necessarily is prevented from sinning in the future? Why wouldn't you be open if you're so committed to libertarian free will among all the deities?

Why is that stripped away? If you're defining freedom as the perpetual ability to just choose something other than what you're choosing, then why not say that God can sin? Of course, I'm a Christian, I think of God's freedom differently than that. But there are some Latter-day Saints, historically, who have played out the scenario thinking through what would happen if God fell. And they have surmised that God, if he fell, would basically be replaced. Someone would take his place and someone else in the Godhead would stoop in and sweep in and, you know, take his place and he's replaceable in that scenario. Daishi Yeah.

Yeah. And the fall of Lucifer in the council in heaven on Latter-day Saint cosmology raises perhaps a dilemma you could add to your list if it's not already on your longer list is that is the fall of Lucifer in that scenario a sin? Is that rebellion against God a sin? And if so, then you have a sinful being in the presence of God, which Latter-day Saints would say is impossible, right? If you're not completely perfected and exalted, you can't enter into the very presence of God in the highest level of the celestial kingdom. And so if in the pre-existence Latter-day Saint, you know, pre-existent Latter-day Saints were able to sin and sin existed there, then why were they able to be in the presence of God at that point?

Aaron Yes. Also raises questions. I'm thinking maybe this is off topic, but I've heard Latter-day Saints say that good and evil are eternal. You know, there must be opposition to all things.

So you have it. Evil is has been around longer than God has been God. It's more eternal than God's Godness than his exaltation.

Daishi It's not even dualistic. It's something else. Aaron And it's not something that our particular God can defeat. That's incredible that evil is this multiversal reality that none of the gods have kind of a final fix or a final dominion over.

It's interesting. Christ is said to reconcile all things to himself in heaven and earth. And it stands to reason that reconciliation in one sense for the elect is salvation, but for a subset of the other parts of creation, you know, it's Christ making things right. You know, it's not necessarily salvation for others.

It's he's making all the wrong things right. Well, the God of Mormonism doesn't ultimately make all wrong things in the multiverse right. Evil has a kind of power over God. And if God is if there must be opposition in all things, then God was dependent on evil to obtain his own virtues. And that makes God, you know, dependent on evil. That's Daishi And and, you know, I may offend some Latter-day Saints by bringing this up. But, you know, the line that Lucifer speaks in the temple ceremony, you know, to Jehovah when he's punishing him, why are you punishing me?

You know, I'm only doing what has been done on other worlds, right? It's kind of like if it's just one eternal round again and again and again, and evil can't be eradicated, then what purpose would there be to any kind of punishment? You know, whether it's the eternal kind as Latter-day Saints define eternal or the eternal kind as Christians define eternal. Yeah, we had a conversation, too, with he's a Latter-day Saint.

You probably heard of him, Tariq Lecour. I think you should definitely check out that interview once we drop it, though, uh, because a lot of the questions that we had about the problem of evil and law were actually more from a classical theist perspective, because he says that there's no law without a lawgiver. So there is no eternal law that pre-exists God. So he would say that God created the law.

And I was like, OK, well, I mean, that's how I would, you know, that's how I would explain it. That's not like how Latter-day Saints probably would. Yeah, I remembered why I brought him up, by the way, because we were talking about evil existing outside of God and that God can't destroy your effect. Well, Tariq actually said that he doesn't necessarily see evil as something that must coexist with God. So there could be a point in time in the future, you know, after, you know, the judgment and things like that, where evil doesn't exist. And so I thought I thought I found that interesting because I even asked him about that in the Book of Mormon. It says, you know, there must necessarily be opposition in all things. And he said that I think he gave a response basically saying that that could be related to specifically this temporal existence, you know, you know, after the earth is done with that or, you know, like new heavens and new earth won't need it anymore.

So, yeah, there's there's a lot of things that that I find interesting from him. But but just from going back to a generic LDS perspective and thinking back to how I would have answered as a Latter-day Saint, I don't really know how I would respond to this idea of shared versus independent dominion, because, like you said, we kind of have this implicit asterisk whenever we read the Bible where it says that God has all dominion, has all power, you know, all things, you know, by his power. This asterisk says in the fine print, well, that's only related to this creation. You know, the same thing with Jesus's atonement.

It's infinite, but only for everything that he created. And so everything outside that it's not really our problem. It's not really our business.

Don't worry about it. And so I think there's that's how probably a lot of Latter-day Saints deal with that is they just kind of, you know, agnostically just put it on their shelf, you know, out of sight, out of mind kind of thing. Is that something you've experienced when you've talked to Latter-day Saints here? Yeah, I use this line in response, like tell a story like it's like me saying that my wife is the best cook in the universe for me.

And it's just a it's it's you could say Matthew Eklund is the smartest person in the entire galaxy in this Zoom recording. You know, it's like, you know, Latter-day Saints, they want the the big, you know, unlimited language. They want the supremacy language for God. And then they have a latent Christian conscience that that's appropriate for speaking about God.

And then they take what's supreme. And then they with with a little preposition, they reduce it down to something that's pity, pitiful, and small. And what it does is it ends up making us the reference point for God's Godness or God's greatness. He's great for me. He's great relative to me. He's helpful to me. It's like I become the center of the universe where God isn't being worshiped for who God is. He's being worshiped for, you know, who He is in relationship to me.

Like, there's a really important distinction there. You know, I have a list of other dilemmas that I can blow through real quick if y'all want with much less explanation, but I'll leave it up to you. It's up to you, Paul. How much time do you have left? I know I don't want to keep you up too late. I'm good.

Yeah, sure. I was just going to say, to kind of capstone that last section, though, my personal experience, because like I said, I found your channel through debates and dialogues. And it seemed like for several years, Alma Allred and James White were having dialogues at the University of Utah where I graduated. And it was crazy because like, you know, seeing him in the same auditorium that I took courses in was kind of cool. And I was disappointed that I'm in New York now and I couldn't attend.

I would have attended if I were there. But they were talking about Christ and being creator. And I remember James White just at that time, I was doubting.

I wasn't quite really sure what I would want to believe. But he kind of talked about Colossians chapter one and I'll just go over here. It says, speaking of Christ, he is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation, for by him, all things are created in heaven and on earth, visible and indivisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things are created through him and for him. And the way Dr. White kind of parse that out is he says, well, you know, Paul's basically, you know, he's, he's exhausting all language available to show just how expansive and unlimited God's dominion is says for by him, all things are created. Well, that's already everything in heaven and on earth. Well, that's reiterating is things are either in heaven or on earth visible and invisible. Well, again, something's either visible or invisible. So he's just making it absolutely clear. There is absolutely nothing that God does not, has not created and does not have authority over.

It does not sustain by his power. And when he, when Dr. White was talking about that, I'm like, man, he's got a really good point there. I really didn't have any kind of rebuttal to it. I was like, you know, he's really got a really strong point in that that was part of my journey, you know, doubting and rethinking about how everything works and that God is just the supreme being of all creation. So I just thought I would kind of throw that anecdote.

Yeah. I like to ask, um, this is more of a cheeky context, but, or maybe a confrontational context, but, um, if you went to a family reunion of the gods and someone popped in the door and said, well, the most high, please stand up, who should stand up? Or if someone flew in and said, Hey, we'll, we're the creator of everything on heaven and earth visible and invisible, or the thrones or dominions or principles, principalities or rulers or authorities, everything that's ever been created. Well, the creator of everything that's ever been created, please stand up. Who at a family reunion of the LDS gods ought to stand up.

There's no good answer to that. There's no supreme deity. There's no truly supreme deity, right? And kind of on, on the shared versus independent dominion, um, thought, you know, latter day saints often will point to, you know, Matthew 28, 18, where Jesus says, you know, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And I've had latter day saints quote that to me and say, see like that, that happened at a point in time during Jesus's incarnation. Uh, he didn't already have all power and authority until he had completed his work here. And so, um, you know, thinking, thinking about that in terms of shared versus independent dominion, well, if, if all authority and in heaven on earth has been given to Jesus at a point in time, is that all authority and dominion over Elohim's dominion over Elohim, his father's dominion, you know, it kind of becomes reductionist when you, when you start to think through what that might mean. Yeah.

And from a Christian point of view, it's, it's the incarnate Christ, you know, taking on eternal, uh, well, yeah, he's, he's taking kingship dominion authority in a practical incarnate way. Right. Yeah.

And then latter day saints miss that because they don't have the concept of, of the dual nature of Christ. Right. Yep.

Would you like to go through that list? Yeah. You know, on the issue of creation, we were just speaking about that earlier. It was really helpful for me to think about how creation, um, you know, God, God's God as creator in the Christian worldview is pretty incredible because he created, uh, universal, you could call them essences. So, you know, Matthew is a human, Paul is a human, Aaron's a human to be human. The idea, idea of humanity, the essence universally speaking of humanity, the category of humanity itself was created by God.

Right. The idea of humanity was God's idea. So he didn't merely instantiate humans, Matthew, Paul, Aaron, he created the idea of humanity. And so I I'm an instance of, or I exist and I have essence, but God created both my existence and my essence. Uh, and I have potential.

That's part of what it means to have parts. I have, I have potential. It's not yet been actualized. Well, who I am at what's been actualized is owing, owing to God. And, uh, my potential is owing to God. My existence is owing to God.

My essence is owing to God. Mormonism can't come close to that because the idea of being human wasn't God's idea. And I existed before God had a say in that I'm co-eternal if Mormonism is true, the dominant model of it anyway, and matter in the universe is eternal and has this potential to it that God did not create. He didn't create the matter and he didn't create the potential that was inherent to matter or to the cosmos. So like the furniture of the Mormon multiverse of the essences and the existence, the primal existence and the, and the sort of the inherent potential of what might be in the universe, the Mormon God isn't, the Mormon gods aren't responsible for any of that. It's not merely that they didn't create matter. They didn't create the ideas that are fundamental to the Mormon multiverse or the existence of beings or the potential inherent to those beings. So, uh, the Christian God is responsible as creator for all of that.

That's incredible. I mean, it's God's idea that males and females be males and females, that humans be humans, the diversity of creation, the cornucopia of beauty that is in creation has all God's idea. It's not, he's not a hand-me-down artist. And I, you know, I can thank God for my very existence. I can give him glory that he created me. He didn't just help actualize what was inherently potential to me eternally. He created me.

He's, I owe my very potential and my actualized existence to him in my essence. All right. That's it for this episode Fireflies. Next week, Aaron will be back with us to discuss a number of other dilemmas that he has documented, but not yet worked into an article.

See you then. We thank you for tuning into this episode of the outer brightness podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please visit the outer brightness podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send us a message there with comments or questions by clicking, send a message at the top of the page, and we would appreciate it. If you give the page alike, we also have an outer brightness group on Facebook, where you can join and interact with us and others. As we've discussed the podcast, past episodes and suggestions for future episodes, et cetera. You can also send us an email at outer brightness at gmail.com. We hope to hear from you soon. You can subscribe to outer brightness wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're benefiting from our content, please write a review to help us spread the word. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit that notification bell. Music for outer brightness is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and Adams road.

You can learn more about Adams road by visiting their ministry page at adamsroadministry.com. On the cross where he bore sin. And now I have the righteousness that is by faith in Jesus' name. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus.

For who's sake, I have lost all things. Oh, because of the cross. On the cross, Jesus took away the written code.

The law of works that stood opposed and nailed it there for me. And through the cross, he put to death hostility and did his body reconcile us to God and brought us peace. And I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live but he lives in me. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus.

For who's sake, I have lost all things. Oh, but when I gained Jesus it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross.

Some demand a sign and some seek to be wise, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling bottle of sun, the foolishness of God, but wiser than the wisest man, the power of the cross. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord through which the world has been crucified to me. An eye to the world so I take up my cross and follow where Jesus leads. Oh, I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus. For who's sake, I have lost all things. Oh, but when I gained Jesus it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Because of the cross. Because of the cross.