Reading Club: Ostler 2

I think that what binds the Godhead is the Light of Christ. I believe that in 1835 this concept still was being developed, and it would easily be indistinguishable from the Holy Ghost, as the Light of Christ seems to be the power through which the Holy Ghost works many of his works.

It could be that same light emanating from each member of the Godhead that allows them to share thoughts, feelings, concepts, desires, and will. I haven’t read volume 3 yet, but from studying vols 1 & 2, I would presume this is Blake’s concept, as well. I wonder if the light of Christ is the spiritual fluid that Pratt envisioned….

As it is, most non-scholar Trinitarians I’ve met are modalists, and do not understand how that differs from the definition of Trinity. I do not see how average Mormons, who have had the separateness of the Godhead stressed to them for over a century, can easily return to a concept of oneness in the Godhead without using some instrument, such as modalism, to guide them along.

Gerald Smith

Typo city. That’ll teach me to use an iPhone. Color me very embarrassed. Feel free to call me Global.

Just a note. Over at BCC there was a discussion of the Holy Ghost where I bring up that things are a tad trickier than it first appears.

Well one way to put the anti-realist issue is to say mind is only modifications of the person. That is there is nothing beyond the persons.

That in discourse the persons are the emphasis is without doubt. I don’t think it follows from that that the divine shared mind is merely the persons. That is the question is whether one should eliminativist about the Spirit.

I think it erroneous to move from the question of emphasis to the elimination of the Spirit in the sense of Lecture 5.

As I said I don’t want to argue that this nominalist position is right or wrong. (And even Pratt’s odd spirit fluid ends up being nominalistic) Rather I want to argue that the Scholastic Realist point of view is compatible with Mormonism. Which is a much weaker claim.

Theologically, especially this century, many make a distinction between the Light of Christ and the Holy Ghost. I think this is on the basis of the idea that everyone has the Light of Christ but not everyone has the gift of the Holy Ghost. However I confess I always saw the distinction as a matter of degree rather than kind. (And without looking I seem to recall that new member manuals make that sort of distinction also)

The issue of whether the Light of God (or Christ or whatever) is merely influence (i.e. communication) independent of a medium for communication is an interesting one. I was reading Brigham Young on this issue last night and almost made a post out of it. I guess I can put some of what I wrote here instead. Young to me seems kind of inconsistent.

It’s quite interesting since the key aspect of nominalism comes from Brigham Young while he was attacking Orson Pratt.

“Attributes can be made manifest only though an organized personage. All attributes are couched in and are the results of organized existence.” (JD 10:192)

and

The Holy Ghost, we believe, is one of the characters that form the Trinity, or the Godhead. Not one person in three nor three persons in one; but the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are one in essence, as the hearts of three men who are united in all things. (JD 6:95)

Up to that final nominalistic analogy Young was actually giving the doctrine of the Trinity against modalism. Young’s view appears to be that any attribute is merely element organized. One might put it in more modern terms as all attributes are merely matter disposed in a particular way. The problem for Young was that Pratt’s spiritual fluid wasn’t a personage. But would Young be accepting that some divine properties need a person to manifest themselves as a divine attribute yet simultaneously depend upon something more fundamental that is not personal?

I should note that Widstoe, while not going quite into the weirdness that was Pratt’s spirit fluid does end up with something stronger than nominalism.

The chief agent employed by God to communicate his will to the universe is the holy spirit, which must not be confused with the Holy Ghost, the personage who is the third member of the Godhead. The holy spirit permeates all the things of the universe, material and spiritual. By the holy spirit the will of God is radio-transmitted, broadcasted as it were. It forms what may be called the great system of communication among the intelligent beings of the universe. The holy spirit vibrates with intelligence; it takes up the word and will of God as given by him or by his personal agents, and transmits the message to the remotest parts of space. By the intelligent operation and infinite extent of the holy spirit, the whole universe is held together and made as one unit. By its means there is no remoteness into which intelligent beings may escape the dominating will of God. By the holy spirit, the Lord is always with us, and “is nearer than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” The intelligent earthly manifestations of the holy spirit are commonly spoken of as the natural forces. It is conceivable that the thunders and the lightnings, the movements of the heavenly bodies, the ebb and flow of the oceans, and all the phenomena known to man, are only manifestations of the will of the Lord as transmitted and spread by the measureless, inexhaustible, infinite, all-conducting holy spirit. (Widstoe, Rational Theology 72-73)

Thus for Widstoe, if I follow him correctly, the attributes are from persons but the substance is intelligent in a more derived sense yet is also necessary for shared intelligence and law itself. If I dare cast this into more philosophical language I’d say that the substance has mind-like qualities but can have no divine attributes since a conscious person is necessary to move from intelligence to personal attributes. The distinction might be cast as that between a sign qua sign and the acting on a sign by a person.

Now of course, like Pratt, I suspect Widstoe still is thinking of some remnants of the 19th century scientific theory of aesther. And, like Pratt, is giving it a religious twist. Note all the physics analogies tied to electronic transmission.

Ignoring the exegesical question for now of whether this can be found in scripture or in Nauvoo teachings I think the real question for Blake is whether this substance is significant. I think Blake might say it’s just a field for messaging with no significance beyond acting as a medium for communication by persons. And that is of course a reasonable reading of that Widstoe passage as well. The reason to think Widstoe has something else in mind is his idea of an universal intelligence.

God, possessing the supreme intelligence of the universe, can use energy in accomplishing his ends, but create it, or destroy it he cannot. Undiminished, everacting, universal energy will continue through all time. The sum of matter and energy, whether they are different or alike, will always remain the same. Universal Intelligence. In one particular, however, the Gospel goes beyond the teachings of modern thought. The Gospel teaches that, associated with the universal energy that vivifies universal matter, and possibly identified with it, is universal intelligence, a force which is felt wherever matter and energy are found, which is everywhere. The forces of the universe do not act blindly, but are expressions of a universal intelligence. That a degree of intelligence is possessed by every particle of energized matter cannot be said; nor is it important. The great consideration is that, since intelligence is everywhere present, all the operations of nature, from the simplest to the most complex, are the products of intelligence. We may even conceive that energy is only a form of intelligence, and that matter and intelligence, rather than matter and energy, are the two fundamentals of the universe! (ibid, 13-14)

Constant action or movement characterizes the contents of the universe. The multiplicity of actions upon one another, of the various forms of matter—energy and intelligence, composing the universe, must cause an equal multiplicity of effects. Intelligent wills, in their constant activity, must and do produce an increasing series of reactions or changes among the forces of the universe.

Each set of new effects becomes the cause of still other effects. Thus, in our universe, as we conceive it to be constituted, increasing complexity or variety would seem to be the resultant law from the operation of universal forces. This is the great law of nature, to which every living thing must conform, if it is to be in harmony with all other things. In a universe controlled by intelligence, it is only natural to find everything within the universe moving towards one increasing purpose. As new light has come to man, the certainty of this law as a controlling one has become more and more emphatic. (ibid, 20)

This suggests that universal intelligence is energy (and Widstoe is thinking of Einstein’s relation of matter and energy) and that while God has the universal intelligence he isn’t the universal intelligence.

Now one might reply that this is just as weird and wild a theory as Pratt’s with the same problems. It seems though that Widstoe could distinguish between personal attributes and intelligence. I think though that Widstoe is definitely moving to a more Stoic view ala Pratt. God the person is God precisely because he is one with this universal intelligence.

The questions I’ve not really brought up though is the questions of

a) what makes communication possible
b) what makes the good possible (which is slightly different from the question you ask)
c) are intelligences the same and if so in what sense
d) is there an infinite regress
e) what enables God to be God

Now (d) is the most controversial and originally I was going delve into that first since that’s more or less the order you engage with them in your third volume. Instead I think asking the more fundamental questions is more useful. It’s a more Heideggarian approach of asking what makes something possible.

As you may know some Evangelical and even Catholic critics suggest that despite the LDS tendency to see the apostasy as due to Greek thought our own problem is that we are two Greek. That is the questions of ultimate existence are not asked but merely swept under the rug. In effect we end up like a gnostic approach where the ultimate God remains hidden and we only worry about and worship the demiurge.

Now I don’t think that fair yet in an other sense there’s something to it. We posit intelligences (whatever they are) without asking about the question of being itself. While I think the traditional Trinitarian way of approaching the question is wrong that’s primarily because of what creation ex nihilo introduces. But the question of the ousia remains largely unthought in Mormonism. I’m not saying we have to think it in the way most Trinitarians did. And there is a sense in which the traditional Mormon critique of the Trinity is correct. Trinitarians aren’t treating the substance as a substance the way Mormons assert. Yet in an other sense they usually are guilty of the onto-theological approach that has largely ruled philosophy since at least Aristotle of conceiving of ousia metaphysically. That is as an entity. And as an entity even if it isn’t a traditional substance it is still a substance. Now this is not essential for thinking the Trinity. (And is partially why Heidegger found such a good reception among many Christian theologians) But to the degree the ground of God is a reasonable question the question must be asked.

Now the critique I mentioned by the Catholic and Evangelicals that I think is quite good is whether the ultimate ground, which we “deny” as essentially related to God is just the ground of the universe itself. That is if intelligences are co-eternal with God, uncreated, and ungrounded, then it seems all divine beings whether in their actualized state or as “gods in embryo” share a common essence that makes their divine nature possible.

How to deal with this?

I want to address this with the question of the spirit and first call into question the physicalist interpretation of spirit (as found in Pratt, Widstoe and frankly many more), then take up the metaphysical question and finally engage with the more ontological question (in the Heideggarian sense of the term)

“Attributes can be made manifest only though an organized personage. All attributes are couched in and are the results of organized existence” (JD 10:192)

Ihis statement is not quite consistent. The phrase “made manifest” implies that attributes have a logical or conceptual existence prior to physical realization. The idea of a “real similarity” is critical to the philosophy of Ockham for example.

“Are the results of” on the other hand sounds rather anti-realist, however, in the same manner as belief in ex nihilo creation. I just don’t think someone can invent the number three, or “justice” for that matter. I would say that any attribute (however conceptual) that cannot be expressed in terms of fundamental self existent realities is meaningless.

Joseph Smith said that he was “seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.”

If that was not some sort of negative spiritual influence, I can’t imagine what would be. My point is that short of multiplying media unnecessarily is seem rather likely that any medium can be exercised for both good and evil. Are we to posit a second spatiotemporal substrate for the transmission of negative spiritual influences? Or does evil (in whatever form) have one arm tied behind its metaphysical back?

“entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem“. That is Ockham’s razor or “the law of parsimony”. A pretty good rule of thumb I should think.

In fact, I was just reading about Algorithmic “Solmonoff” Probability which combines the law of parsimony and algorithmic information theory to give a reasonable basis to the idea of “a priori” probability.

One can consider a hypothesis to be compatible with a set of minimal universal (prefix) Turing machine programs that produce outputs in agreement with the hypothesis given an arbitrary input. All else being equal you then say that the a priori probability one of those Turing machines is actually correct is 1 / ( 2 ^ len(p) ) where len(p) is the bit length of one of the compatible, minimal length programs, and thus the a priori probability of the hypothesis as a sum of such expressions over all hypothesis-compatible Turing machine programs. Pretty neat stuff.