Mormons, Origins and Heidegger

Kind of quiet around here. I am glad I read this post though – the term “metaleptic reality” will come in handy someday.

Yeah, I had to look it up to figure out what on earth was meant. Basically it’s just the ontological divide created by creation ex nihilo. Your point about the Protestant break with Scholastic philosophy is a good one though. Whether Mormons are what you say seems more difficult. I’m not sure too many Mormons adopt such a radical view of Occasionalism. Likewise the strongest Occasionalists appear to be Catholic. So I think it ends up a tad more complex.

I do know Mormons who are Occasionalists. But I think the more common view is that there are rules independent of God which he is subject to in an existential way.

Clark, unless I am radically misunderstanding what you mean by Occasionalism, I would say that Calvinists are far and away the most intense Occasionalists on the planet.

However, in this case I think Occasionalism is beside the point, rather the question is to what degree is divine activity timelessly eternal and invariant, and to what degree is it effectively particular and interventionist. To a Thomist, nature itself, in all its eternal aspects is a reflection of divine rationality, and for God to change the laws of nature would be tantamount to divine irrationality. Calvinists don’t really bother with any such constraints except a more general notion of divine character. Everything is a matter of sovereign decrees which while planned timelessly in advance are interventionist to some considerable extreme.

Since there is a healthy sense of free will and self determination in Arminianism and Mormonism, both tend to be interventionist as well, far more than the Thomists. Interventionism is a definining characteristic of Protestant theology.

Like Protestants, most Mormons don’t care very much about the theological implications of the nature of the laws of nature. The general idea is that God authored them and can suspend them at will. I maintain that idea is theologically incoherent for reasons ultimately related to the Thomist objection.

The big issue here is related to the denial of creatio ex nihilo – if you say God created the (first, primal) nature of all things, that denial is pointless. Mormonism as a theology doesn’t really work unless the first/primal nature of things is self existent and uncreated. Salvation from what?

If you say that God has arbitrary control over primal nature of things (those governed by the laws of physics for example) the whole idea of a *plan* of salvation is meaningless, and Mormonism quickly acquires all the weaknesses of run of the mill Arminianism – theodicy, inexplicability of a suffering Atonement, with none of the strengths of classical Thomism (a basis for natural law and natural philosophy, among other things). Theodicy doesn’t make any sense if God can suspend any law (including the ones governing experience and character) at any time.

From a Thomist point of view, the death of nature is the death of reason and everything that flows therefrom. Anything goes. The same point applies to Mormonism, albeit in a different fashion. Wickedness never was happiness? Says who and for how long?

That sounds like the law of the Medes and the Persians (cf. story of Daniel in the OT). God may voluntarily choose to be bound by his own decrees, he may be constrained by his own honor and reputation, but I don’t think it makes any sense to say the decrees themselves bind him.

God decreed that no unclean thing may enter His presence. By becoming terrestrial beings, it is inevitable that we sin and become unclean. We are forever damned. Yet the pre-existent plan of salvation was a way of returning to him as physical beings rather than spirits that we were. So here we have God’s law precluding our successful return. Rather than changing the law, He instituted the Atonement by which we can become clean or reconciled to God through the sacrifice of Christ. The law was not changed but a way was created for us to return to Him.

I grew up with the idea that all the miracles mentioned in the scriptures were accomplished by the manipulation of the laws of nature, rather than by transcending or breaking them. Who better to manipulate the laws than the creator of those laws.

Rich

I think, Rich, the question becomes what theologically a law is. What constitutes it? What de-limits it? Are there limits? The usual appeal is to legal laws as the constituting metaphor of understanding God. The other appeal is simply to the phenomena of promises and promising with laws being nothing more than promises. The question becomes what of God’s ability to dictate law on others. The question of law is really the question of power. If creation ex nihilo is removed in Mormonism then God’s power is conceived quite differently. This then changes quite dramatically the calculus of power – especially in a world of other ungrounded beings. Clearly God can promise in terms of his own acting but what about his acting in terms of the world around him? To what degree can he promise in terms of others? Agency and indirect promises seem to collide in paradoxes that unfortunately far too few Mormon thinkers have considered.

Mark, I think you’re leaving out the idea of natural laws that aren’t invariant. So you have laws that are the result of certain symmetry breaking but that those symmetries could have broken an other way. This is pretty common in physics. Now one could say that such regularities are really laws. However even if they are only described as such for historic reasons they need to be considered.

I think a discussion of law and symmetry is pretty important.

I do think though you touch upon the Euthyphro dilemma quite well and note it relates to natural law as well. While I’m skeptical of some approaches Blake takes in his books I think his treatment of the Euthyphro dilemma and God is something I fully agree with him upon.