Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

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_Maksutov
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _Maksutov »

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.
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_ClarkGoble
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _ClarkGoble »

Johannes wrote:Thanks for that, Clark. Some very useful and thought-provoking stuff. I had no idea that there was such a similarity between Stoic thought and Orson Pratt's ideas. It's particularly interesting that he seems to have arrived at them independently, or through the channel of 19th century thought.


Well there are several ways to take that. Way back when I first started my blog most of it was about Orson Pratt and trying to figure out his cosmology. It's been quite influential even though surprisingly most people haven't engaged it directly. Anyway, Stoicism is a kind of materialist philosophy that does take into consideration Plato and other philosophers. So ideas like the Logos are in the philosophy. (As an aside neoplatonism is basically just a platonism that takes seriously Aristotle and the Stoics - a lot of neoplatonic cosmology comes from the Stoics) The Pratts as I mentioned start off with a quasi-platonic conception of God perhaps not that different from Emerson. (These ideas were fairly widespread in early America although not always well understood) As soon as you demand materialism but try to maintain the other ideas then a lot necessarily follows. Likewise the Stoics were still influential even in early modernism. So Leibniz and Spinoza were almost certainly influenced by their cosmology. The "pre-established harmony" of Leibniz basically is the logos of the Stoics. And Spinoza's pantheism has obvious parallels to the Stoics. So there's lots of ways he could have learned it indirectly. Also we know he was moderately well read so it's plausible he'd read secondary literature about the Stoics.

I've always thought that the Johannines are profoundly influenced by Platonism. It's been said that John's Gospel, if it was discovered for the first time today, would be pegged as a gnostic rather than an orthodox text (gnosticism being, of course, deeply influenced by Middle Platonism).


Yeah there are strong platonic elements and the way knowledge is viewed is very similar to the gnostics. It's worth noting that while the gnosticism we encounter is primarily Christian many of these ideas had been in Judaism at least to the time of the Babylonian exile. Due to the lack of data reconstructing all this, especially Jewish mysticism as it relates to pagan platonism and mysticism, is controversial at best. Still we know of pre-Christian merkabah like elements (even if merkabah proper in terms of main texts is from late antiquity or early midieval periods) So a lot of the broad categories we have are probably not as absolute as it first seems.

I believe that you can also see patristic writers, long before Augustine, equating the god of the Bible with the god of Greek philosophy when they are addressing pagans for apologetic purposes, but I'm in a bit of a hurry right now and I don't have the references to hand (shades of DCP!).


Oh, I definitely agree. I think I said things to that point. Yet it's Augustine who really first adopts an explicitly platonic conception yet rejects the emanation cosmology of platonism. When platonism pops up in later Christianity, especially among mystics, it's this desire for an emanation model that effaces the ontological difference that usually gets them labeled as heretics. But I'd agree it's incorrect to seeing all this as springing completely out of Augustine. It's a long development and hellenized understanding of Judaism of course goes back to Alexander's conquest of Palestine and likely well before that. When the Jews return from the exile they start to really eliminate the more anthropomorphic elements from their religion which makes it much more compatible with Hellenistic philosophy. Exactly how this proceeds isn't clear although in some ways the documentary hypothesis of the Old Testament composition argues it's still going on during canon formation. Some Mormon apologists argue that the type of Judaism Lehi held was likely quite different from what developed in post-exilic Judaism for instance.

Anyway I'd be the first to note that one can't easily cleave the God of Athens from the God of Jerusalem (to again use the philosophical metaphors) Yet effectively there's a big conceptual difference from God as the ground of being ala neoPlatonism (this isn't quite as well developed in early greek philosophy and certainly not in Stoicism) and an interventionist more anthropomorphic God. Likewise many scholars argue that the earliest views of God in Judaism and earliest creation accounts have a more anthropomorphic God battling pre-existing waters of choas. The absolutism conceptions, especially with the more Hellenized interpretations of Genesis 1, come much later. (Jon Levinson's Creation and the Persistence of Evil is my favorite book along those lines)

What I'd say is the key element of the apostasy (beyond questions of authority) is the ontological gap and the move away from the theistic elements of an interventionist God towards God as being or the ground of being as mattering most. Put in more Trinitarian terms Christianity came to focus on God as the ousia and only considered other elements in the question of Jesus as having two natures.
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _ClarkGoble »

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?


I can't speak to what Mormons in general think of it. (I suspect most are ignorant of the topic and those who aren't probably haven't thought through it much) I can only speak of myself. I think the theological demands of Mormonism require a multiverse although the details of that get messier. Not the least of which are due to the way the multiverse theory has developed in physics (and the lack of empirical evidence for the hypothesis). I think that say the Loop Quantum Gravity model of Lee Smolin won't work for Mormons since universes are created from flat spacetime in way where there's no real causality between the two. Mormons I think need some kind of information flow between universes for their notion of eternity. (Eternity obviously is impossible in the big bang not to mention big crunch or heat death depending upon how the universe ends) String theory is pretty vague here of course. The nature of branes is pretty unclear and string theory's main problem is that it establishes too much to really be helpful.

Of course if there is a multiverse (and again this is the mainstream physics view although string theory has come under sustained attack of late) then that implies a kind of four dimensional block universe which has interesting theological implications. Some people like Blake Ostler have argued against such conceptions although ultimately I don't find the reasoning terribly strong for various reasons. He and I used to go back and forth on the issue. He wants robust libertarian agent free will while I'm more dubious about that ontology. His main argument is that such a notion of free will is necessary to justify the ethics of God judging and punishing us. The implication is there's no four dimensional universe. Of course reconciling that to GR is tricky although there are presentist ontologies of GR. (I don't find them persuasive at all mind you)
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _Physics Guy »

I take it you're saying that Mormonism is incompatible with the simple Big Bang model. That's okay—the model is only the standard one by default, because it's the simplest extrapolation from what we know into regimes that we don't. Nobody really asserts it as fact that the universe truly began.

I wouldn't call any kind of multiverse a mainstream theory at all, though. It's a respectable speculation, but nobody seriously considers it any more than that. And while there was a time when all that fancy stuff was hot, now it's quaint. It simply hasn't produced anything in decades. So it's really not worth spending any effort at all to connect Mormonism with loop quantum gravity or brane-inspired cosmology or any of that. It would be building on sand. I did my Master's thesis on baby universes in supergravity and switching out of that field was a really smart move.

That doesn't mean you have to be reconciled with simple Big Bang theory. It's perfectly respectable to just say that you expect the minimal model to be revised somehow such that the initial singularity is avoided, so that the apparent beginning was really only an extreme episode within eternal time. This is widely held expectation, in fact; it's just that no specific scenarios for how it would work have really panned out so far. Supposing that some scenario eventually will be found is pure speculation, but it's really no more speculative than supposing that the simple Big Bang model will turn out to work right back to the beginning of time.

What does seem pretty clear, though, is that the whole universe was incredibly smaller and hotter around 14 billion years ago than it is now. We have not simply had the same round of space, stars, and planets forever. Whether the Big Bang was really the beginning, or just an incredibly violent episode, things changed big time, back then.

Does it make sense in Mormonism to ask how old God is? Should we imagine God as much older than the sun, or not much older? Should we think that God lived through the Big Bang, whatever it actually was? Or is the current Heavenly Father from a later round of Gods that attained exaltation sometime after the Big Bang?
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _ClarkGoble »

Physics Guy wrote:Does it make sense in Mormonism to ask how old God is? Should we imagine God as much older than the sun, or not much older? Should we think that God lived through the Big Bang, whatever it actually was? Or is the current Heavenly Father from a later round of Gods that attained exaltation sometime after the Big Bang?


It seems unanswerable - at least I can't think of a way to answer it for several reasons not the least of which the theology of what an intelligence is seems non-existent.

My pet very tentative theory is that God was mortal in a different universe and this universe is one of his creations. The fall would then be partially entering into this universe.

I wouldn't call any kind of multiverse a mainstream theory at all, though. It's a respectable speculation, but nobody seriously considers it any more than that.


Depends upon who you talk to. I think physics to be good physics rather than just speculative theoretical model making has to be testable. String theory isn't and never has been. The fad is over thankfully but it's still widely accepted. I'm much more on the skeptic side of things although I'll fully confess the math is well above my head.
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _Physics Guy »

I suppose that exaltation must be a pretty long process, then. I mean, it's not just easy to maintain a Mormon standard of worthiness through a whole lifetime, but still that hardly seems like sufficient background to qualify a being for control of an entire universe. There'd better be a lot more working up to that.

But okay, maybe there is, and Mormon teaching just doesn't go into it much. It's not as though the traditional Christian imagery of gates and crowns and glassy seas is a convincing depiction of a worthwhile eternity.
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Re: Quinn's "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View"

Post by _ClarkGoble »

Physics Guy wrote:I suppose that exaltation must be a pretty long process, then. I mean, it's not just easy to maintain a Mormon standard of worthiness through a whole lifetime, but still that hardly seems like sufficient background to qualify a being for control of an entire universe. There'd better be a lot more working up to that.


Well I think the atonement is pretty central for Mormon thinking. That is the assumption is we'll all fall and make mistakes along the way (although hopefully not serious ones). Interestingly I'd say that most of the 'work' of the Mormon conception of salvation and cosmology takes place in the spirit world prior to judgment. Yet we have almost no information about that. Folk traditions offer a bit more but not that much. So for instance clearly being a member in this life isn't that important since the vast majority of people don't really get a serious try and it. Most conversions presumably therefore take place in the next life.

But okay, maybe there is, and Mormon teaching just doesn't go into it much. It's not as though the traditional Christian imagery of gates and crowns and glassy seas is a convincing depiction of a worthwhile eternity.


There's definitely a lot left undeveloped in Mormon theology. And it's pretty key doctrine that a lot is left to be revealed (including most of the Book of Mormon left to be translated).
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