Physics Guy wrote:If it's fundamental to Mormonism to reject creation ex nihilo, what do Mormons make of the Big Bang? It looks awfully much like creation ex nihilo: time and space themselves began, a finite time ago. So do Mormons have to hope that the reigning theory of scientific cosmology will prove wrong, and let the universe be eternal after all?
Or should we hope to pin down the time at which God the Father was born as a man, on some other planet? Perhaps ten billion years ago? Perhaps only eight? Is God twice as old as the sun? Or only just a bit older?
If the only God with whom we humans have to do organized this solar system, and then waited 4.5 billion years to put humans on Earth, so that they could persist unto exaltation, then it seems as though it must take around 5 billion years to go through a generation of Gods. That's about how long it takes big stars to form, fuse their way up to iron, and explode in supernovas that scatter heavy elements into space, to enrich the next generation of stars. Astronomers recognize three such generations ("populations") of stars; our Population I sun's grandfather* was a stellar Adam (a Population III star that formed from pure primordial hydrogen and helium with virtually no heavier elements).
So if Mormon Gods take about the same length of time to exalt a new generation of Gods, it would seem that the God of God's God must have had no progenitor. Spontaneous abiogenesis has a hard enough time forming microbes. How did it work for that very first God?
I'm not really asking these as snarky gotcha questions to shoot down a Mormonism that I imagine to be defined by what are probably just old speculations, and not really church doctrine. My point, though, is that modern science is surprisingly compatible with a transcendent God who made everything, but a material God who is made of flesh and blood, and simply organized pre-existing matter, seems kind of hard to place within modern science.
It's fine if you don't think about it much, but once you do, doesn't it all start seeming like science fiction? Are these Gods really different from super-powered aliens like the ones in Star Trek and Marvel comics? Entities like that aren't necessarily implausible. They just don't seem like Gods.
(*The sun did not have just one grandfather, or even just a few. The sun probably incorporates atoms from many earlier stars, plus a lot of primordial hydrogen and helium that had never been part of any stars before. But some of the sun's atoms are now on their third star.)
PG, very interesting speculations. You've put your finger on why I'm an agnostic rather than an atheist. I recognize that we can reasonably postulate that intelligent life exists and it might be a much more "advanced" species and civilization. Under some definitions these beings could be considered "gods" or "godlike" (Clarke's Third Law). It still leaves unresolved issues relating to morality and the afterlife, in my opinion.