Bill Vallicella coincidentally had up a post mentioning Mormon conceptions of God this week.  His main argument is fairly simple.

Briefly, God cannot be a physical being because no physical being is a necessary being, and God is a necessary being.  By definition, God is the ultimate ground of the existence of everything contingent. Briefly, God cannot be a physical being because no physical being is a necessary being, and God is a necessary being.  By definition, God is the ultimate ground of the existence of everything contingent.  (He is more, of course, but at least that.)  As such, he cannot himself be contingent, and so cannot be physical.

Now in one sense that’s fine. However it merely pushes the question back a step. Why is God defined as the ground of all things? This isn’t a scriptural definition. People try and draw this as a definition from inferences out of scripture. (Such as God is creator) It demands the crucial step of unifying the questions about God from Athens (the ontological ones) with the questions about God out of Jerusalem (the interventionist ones).

From a Mormon perspective I think we see much of the great error of traditional Christianity as precisely that move. (I don’t want to say this is how Mormons conceive of apostasy because we typically see it in terms of priesthood authority – but I think for many Mormon thinkers it is precisely this redefining of God that is the theological problem)  I believe that the older Jewish view is actually much closer to the Mormon conception of God. (Which isn’t to deny some differences – but on the major ontological issues they adopt the same stance) A great discussion of this older view of God can be found in Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil.

I think that ultimately to put the debate in the terms traditional Christians use Mormons think we ought distinguish the deistic questions from Greek philosophy (the question of Athens) from the theistic questions from early Hebrew thought (the questions of Jerusalem). To us the fundamental problem during the rise of Christianity was to see those questions as being about the same thing. It’s not that Mormons think the questions of Athens are inappropriate. We just don’t see them as questions about God as a person.

To add, I think denying the physicality of God is difficult for a Christian given basic Christology. That is Jesus is considered fully God and is physical. I think the only difference for a Mormon is to see many questions of Christology as applying not only to Jesus but to the Father as well. But from a Mormon perspective to criticize the Mormon position philosophically is really to run headlong into a denial of Christology which seems fairly problematic for a Christian to do.

With regard to the question of whether God is a necessary being I actually think Mormons can embrace that position although they need not. (Put an other way Mormonism doesn’t deny God as a necessary being) One possibility within Mormon thought is to simply say everything uncreated involves necessary beings. I think the more popular position is simply to deny there are necessary beings in terms of individuals although some do see the Father as a necessary being.

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I don’t know if it is just being in my 40′s now and noticing the deterioration of my body (primarily the dreaded far sightedness that’s started to show) but I am starting to pay a lot closer attention to a lot of these studies. I’d really like it if I could be in my 60′s and be as healthy as now. The biggest excitement were those mouse studies that may have found a way to reverse a lot of aging effects. Now of course lots of things look great in mice studies that don’t work in humans. And this relies of stem cells and scientists really have found a good way to produce the massive quantities of stem cells all these stem cell therapies need. (In a few cases you can harvest them from the patient – but in general getting stem cells is still the biggest issue)

Of course this is all an area where there’s more hype than results. Further even if drugs and treatments get on the market there’s not guarantee they’ll be widely dispersed. Rather once approved they’ll probably be limited to more narrow treatments whether people want it that way or not.

There’s lots of stuff that has looked very fruitful. Even if they are limited you have to hope that some will have success with minimal side effects in larger human studies.

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Physicists are surprisingly good in the verbal area. Not the top but quite high.  I’m not sure why that is. My theory is that the way physicists solve problems ends up utilizing a lot of verbal rather than mathematical reasoning. Typically the hard part in physics is figuring out the problem so you can make it mathematical. The math phase is often the easiest part. (To a physicist anyway)

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He told me of a Mormon friend who in conversation with an Evangelical Protestant had asked him whether a Christian who committed adultery would lose his salvation.  The Evangelical answered, “No.” The Mormon followed up with this query, “What if the Christian had murdered someone? Would he then lose his salvation?” The answer, again, was “no.” Then the Mormon asked, “Well, what if he had become a Mormon?” The Evangelical answered, “That’s a good question. I don’t know.”

With Evangelicals considering only Gingrich and Santorum for their endorsement, Beckwith argues they are making a similar calculus.

Now I’m not entirely sure that’s fair. After all if one is doing a calculus in terms of results then it might be better to have someone who behaves unethically but gets the results one wants. If I pick a doctor I want the one who’s going to make me most healthy not necessarily the one who lives the best life. Likewise I can see Evangelicals finding Gingrich’s personal life abhorrent but thinking a Mormon as President might normalize acceptance of Mormonism leading to fewer Evangelicals much more than Gingrich would lead to more adulterers.

That said it has long been interesting to me that some Evangelical opposition to Mormons seems so much stronger than opposition to other things. It’s one thing to say something is theologically wrong. But frankly most lay Evangelicals believe lots of things that Evangelicals formally think is just as heretical as how they perceive Mormon belief. Why emphasize one rather than the other?

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As I mentioned in the BCC thread a few things seem really off. They have the rate of self-identification as Mormon at nearly 2% whereas previous self-identification studies such as the 2008 ARIS one had us at 1.4% (and fairly consistently over the last 20 years). I’d discussed that back a few years ago.

The population rate isn’t the only head scratcher though. They have the rate of people attending church at least weekly as 77% which is better than what most wards claim as their attendance. Tithing paying is listed at 79% which seems astoundingly too high. (I think the Church lists it at less than 50%) There are a few other head scratchers. Why for instance do only 94% of self-identified Mormons think Monson is a prophet? While that’s a high figure for any survey I’d think that to self-identify as Mormon would entail that acceptance. The only thing I could think of was that some other Mormon faiths such as fundamentalists or RLDS were picked up in the survey. (Pew said there were very few non-LDS but it’s hard to know what that constitutes)

I think the reason for the problems with the survey is some bias due to how they sampled. Pew admits that Utah and southern Idaho were the dominate locations surveyed. On the one hand that makes sense. There are a lot of Mormons there. On the other hand I think it really biases the results since the behavior of Utah Mormons is somewhat different from non-Utahns. When nearly everyone in your neighborhood is LDS and you often socialize at Church it’s different from having one or two wards in a big city and fewer Mormon acquaintances.

It appears like they tried to match percentages to the population of such states. Mormons are very common in the west and unsurprisingly 71% of respondents were from the west with 34% from Utah. They don’t give the breakdown for other states but I bet California and Arizona had a reasonable number of respondents as well.

While the survey is a little misleading it is interesting for giving a look at how Mormons think. Mormons definitely still have a persecution complex – although the survey was rather ambiguous over what the responders perceive as discrimination. As I mentioned at BCC I’ve frequently heard things said about Mormons that were the name changed to black or Jew would be blatant racism. Yet I don’t think most Mormons remotely face the kind of job discrimination that blacks or homosexuals face.

The most surprising figure I saw in the survey was the rate of mission service. 27% said they’d been on a mission. When you stop and think that only men are encouraged to go and about 25% of Mormons are converts that’s a pretty staggering number. Given some of the other stats I’m not sure how to take that. Ditto on the food storage question. They have 82% having food storage. I just can’t believe that’s true. 82% of the people regularly attending my ward in Provo don’t have that unless one is pretty liberal about how one answers.  (i.e. well, I have stuff in my freezer)  I think there are a lot of projections to “ideal Mormon” in the responding rather than what people are actually doing.

An other interesting bit was 54% saying drinking was morally wrong. I think the survey gets at an ambiguity since if you’ve committed not to drink then it would be morally wrong to break ones commitment even if alcohol isn’t intrinsically morally wrong. But that’s a nuance perhaps unfair to expect from a survey like this – I think some of the moral questions fall into that. So for example in general people might think it wrong to divorce but in specific situations think it the moral thing to do.

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