Christian and Mormon Debate! Part 3 :: The Trinity

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Christian and Mormon Debate! Part 4 :: Galatians 1 & Joseph Smith

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All right, all right, so we're now going to transition to our next 30 -minute portion, which is discussing the

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Trinity. So this will be fun. So with that, I think you asked questions first last time,

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Jeremiah, so let's give Joseph a chance to go ahead ask some questions and get you in the hot seat.

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Yeah, so if it's OK with you, I'd like to start with some of the kind of philosophical stuff. I'd love to get into the exegesis as well, because there's some really interesting biblical passages that speak to this question.

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But let's see. OK, so what's your, like you said, my background is different than yours.

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I don't expect that you have familiarity with all the philosophical answers to all the questions. But I'd be interested in hearing, so first, do you accept divine simplicity?

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You accept that God has no parts? So, and I'll be super brief with this, but I was looking into, looking at excerpts of his

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Summa Theologiae, and so there is a sense that I accept the simplicity, meaning that God is aseity.

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He's self -existing. He's eternal and transcendent. So the Bible, and we're going to get more into our different worldview perspectives.

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So I affirm the fact that God is just. God is love.

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God is eternal. So there's something simplistic about God being distinct from his creation.

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And I think it's huge to Aquinas' point, and really why I would double down and affirm

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Aquinas' doctrine of analogy, which we'll get into. But I want to concede that when we start thinking about it purely in philosophical terms,

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I get into a web, like I get how God is simple in terms of he is who he is.

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So if you were to hypothetically cut God and take a piece out, well, it's not just going to be his love that you get.

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It's going to be love and all of his attributes. You're going to get the whole thing. So there's an aspect where I agree with that, but within my worldview, his thoughts and ways are higher than my ways.

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I'm seeing through a glass dimly, and there is a huge chasm between the creator and creation.

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There's a huge distinction. So I start to concede to saying, I don't fully comprehend what it means to be

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God the way that the Bible tells us. I can apprehend some certain things about that, but I don't pretend to totally comprehend that.

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So I'm kind of wishy -washy. I believe in the divine simplicity, but only within the confines of how the

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Bible is able to tell us about that. Sure. So just, I guess, as a subsidiary question, it's kind of part of the same idea.

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So to give some background, I think most theologians, particularly today, believe that God is subject to logic, but there have been thinkers like Descartes and Martin Luther who were absolute volitionists.

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God can make the laws of logic mutable. He is not subject to logic. He can do illogical things.

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Which side do you fall on there? Okay. Let me describe kind of how

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I view that, and you might be able to tell me which side it lands on, because I would say God is not subservient to logic.

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I would be like what Greg Bonson said, logic reflects the thinking of God.

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So some people try to divide the essence and substance of God and I'm over here like, I can't see that in the scripture, because my worldview says that it's all scripture.

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That's God -breed. That's the ultimate authority that I should put my confidence in. So I would say logic reflects

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God's thinking. It's not something distinct or above God and he is subject to that.

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Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, but you would say that he can't do things that are logically impossible.

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He can't create a square circle, for instance. So the only limits on his omnipotence are logical limits.

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Does that make sense? Would you kind of accept that, even if it's not subservient? And I would agree,

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God cannot contradict himself. So when

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I say that God cannot be holy, he's not ever gonna be unholy or evil or anything of the sort.

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He's perfect. So that would entail that his holiness is eternal. And I'm saying that this is a reality before the foundation of the world.

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So does that kind of make sense that he can't contradict himself? Yeah, yeah, okay. So that kind of sets up my question.

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And so I think that the person who says that God can do the illogical can really say whatever they want about God.

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And there's nobody way of arguing about the nature of God. But if you agree that God can't contradict himself,

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I see there being difficulties. So what I said in my opening statement was, if we look at a passage like where Christ says, not my will, but thine be done, we seem to have a clear distinction, right?

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They, at least in principle, can have different wills. But it seems to me that that would then contradict divine simplicity by saying there is a real distinction in the being of God in the form of different wills.

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So that would seem to be an internal contradiction. So I understand, yeah, we can't understand the way God is. And so that causes, it makes it difficult for us to really talk very specifically about the way

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God's being is. But it seems like at the level of just pure contradiction, we should be able to make some statements.

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And so, yeah, that seems to me like it contradicts the idea of divine simplicity. Do you have any sort of thoughts about that?

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I'd be interested to hear what you have to say. Let me kind of give my understanding of the Trinity. And I think it may clear up some of your questions.

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And it's not that it's gonna totally solve the debate that's been ongoing. But I think when you understand more of who and what the

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Trinity is, it really does help the conversation. So for one, this is a given, but the

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Trinity is only found by Scripture alone and all of Scripture.

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Like that's the parameters. If I'm gonna allow all of God's words to speak to the matter, that's how I would come away with the doctrine of the

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Trinity. Now, the doctrine of the Trinity, I've heard a lot of people, and I don't know how much you agree with Kweku L, who

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I've tried to listen to. He seems to be like a major figure today for Mormonism. But he just says the

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Trinity is mathematically impossible and contradictory. And you haven't said anything like that yet. But I think he misunderstands a few things.

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And I've heard his dialogue with Dr. White and Jeff Durbin and things like that. But this is what really helps us understand the

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Trinity. We're talking about two separate categories. We're talking about one of, and we're talking about one of personhood or personality.

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Now you alluded to this a little bit in your opening statement. But here's kinda how I understand the Trinity from Scripture that I would believe in monotheism.

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I feel like there's really strong scriptures, Old and New Testament, but really in the book of Isaiah, things that I'm like, man, it seems like there's only one

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God that's uncreated, and any other God would be a form of an idol, and it falls within the realm of creation.

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So you got this one God who is eternal, self -existent, who has revealed himself in three persons.

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Now, once again, I'm not saying one being who also exists in three beings, because I think that's the point where most people say it's illogical, and I would agree with them.

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If we're saying we believe in one being and yet three beings, that totally blows up. It's illogical. God would be contradicting himself.

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So I think when we have a strong understanding of a distinction between being and person, that's gonna help us out with the Trinity. So I got more thoughts with that, but I wanna give you a chance to kind of interact.

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Yeah, so I'm glad you made the distinction. So there are people who argue that the Trinity, even on that formulation, is logically inconsistent.

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I don't believe that to be the case. I agree that because we have different categories, stasis versus substance, or persons versus being, that it's not at level a logical contradiction.

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So my worry is that there is a logical contradiction between the Trinity concept, the

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Trinitarianism, and divine simplicity. Not just within Trinitarianism, but between two different attributes.

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Yeah, so the idea of having three distinct wills, I think it's an easier way of talking about it.

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So you can say there are three distinct persons, how is that simple? But I think it just becomes more acute when you say the scriptures do say they have separate wills or seem to say that.

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So if they have separate wills, a proper distinction, how then can God still be simple?

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In what sense is he even one at that point? That's the contradiction I see. Sure, well, the oneness that needs to be really emphasized that is totally unified and single is

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God's essence, or really the, did you refer to it as the usia,

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I think is what a lot of the literature says, of what God is. That's where the strong unity is.

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So how that fleshes out in scripture is there, so we have what we believe is the everlasting covenant of God, how you have a divine council,

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Ephesians one is the best place to illustrate this out, but you have a council that goes on between these persons in terms of communication and relationship.

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Relationship's gonna be the key to understanding why this is so important. But you have this plan of redemption that will be accomplished.

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So when God speaks the earth into existence, you have everything already determined beforehand by God's sovereign will.

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And so you really have the will of God being carried out with three divine persons.

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So there's a shared will. Now the reason why Jesus can pray to the Father is because he is relational.

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So whether you wanna say this is the single divine will being carried out in relationship, that's one way of looking at it.

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Now Jesus did have a human will, like he truly became man. You have the hypostatic union.

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But we gotta understand that when you step into time and space, that matters.

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So the fact that God added humanity to the second person of the

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Trinity, he is able to retain that relationship with the Son and the Father. That's why he can say the

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Father is greater than I. Jesus stepped down from his throne of glory and became a servant.

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So this is humility. So he can look to the Father positionally and say you are greater than I.

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And when he submits to the Father's will, this is the divine will that was determined before the foundation of the world.

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And Jesus, being the God man, cannot deviate from that because that was a part of the sovereign decree, if you will.

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Does that kinda make sense a little bit? Yeah, so I don't wanna press this point too hard because we wanna talk about other points within the

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Trinity as well. But so this is the last comment I'll make on it. So it seems, I guess I can put it in two different ways, actually, based on what you just said, so that we don't even have to talk about will and we can still raise the question.

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So in terms of relationships, for two things to be related, they have to be relata, right? The things that are related.

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And it seems like in a simple being, so where there are no distinctions, there could not be multiple relata.

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There couldn't be things that are related within that because it's only one thing. So I understand that we posit there are three persons within the being, but if they are individuated sufficiently to allow them to be in relationships with one another, then it seems like we have real distinctions that would violate simplicity.

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And we can make the same point about the hypostatic union, right? So you would, I imagine, say, you would say it's true that God became man.

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You would say it's true that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. But you couldn't, I think, I presume you wouldn't say that God the

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Father was fully God and fully man. There's something that's true about Jesus that's not true of the Father.

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And there are other examples, right? None but the Father knoweth the day that the second coming, that Christ will come again. And so the

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Son does not know. So it seems like if we have true statements we can make about one person of the Trinity and not about another, that we have a real distinction.

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And that would then seem to violate divine simplicity. So that just seems internally problematic for this conception of God that most

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Orthodox Christians hold, not all hold to divine simplicity, but most. Let me kind of respond with a few points.

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And I think it's good that you're bringing this out. So if something had to go for me, divine simplicity or the

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Trinity, it'd be divine simplicity. I would be saying we've speculated about that in terms of philosophy and have got it wrong because my worldview says we can't know anything for certain unless God who knows everything has revealed himself in such a way.

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So you gotta think, I gotta come more from a theological framework. And the thing is, I believe that there is some level of divine simplicity with God.

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We have verses that says God is love, right? So my reference point is myself.

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I can't be the essence of love. I can be loving, but that love can have its highs and lows and it can be worked upon over time.

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God is love. So I'm not exactly sure how that is the case, but that's what scripture tells me.

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So there's some type of simplicity, but even Aquinas would understand the provocative language of saying

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God, which there is, we don't, we can't pretend to understand the complexities of what is eternal.

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And yet there's something simple about it. So I think he was being a little bit provocative in his language. But once again, it's from my perspective, what has

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God said, right? What is theanoustos? What does God breathe? And so I think there's a huge problem within philosophy that maybe you can speak to in a minute, but you have a huge problem, not you, but in philosophy, the problem of the one and the many, right?

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Everywhere you look, how we think is both unified and diverse. You can think of universal principles that are also have particulars that, and how do those come together?

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And since this world is made up of diversity and unity, how in some way does that reflect

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God, right? And so when I read of the Trinity, it's not that I've looked at nature around me and figured out that God is a

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Trinity. I would say we could look at creation and know that there's some profound unity and diversity with God, but I wouldn't come away with the

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Trinity. I would be bound by sola scriptura and totis scriptura, scripture alone and all of scripture.

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And this is what I see. You got the Holy Spirit. I think Acts 5 is a good place to look at for the divinity.

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But once again, it's a comprehensive look of all of God's word. We look at the Holy Spirit having attributes that belong to God alone.

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So that would be a huge argument on my side of saying why I believe the Holy Spirit is divine. You have triadic expressions from almost every author of the

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New Testament when it comes to Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And they're always grouped together as though it's an assumption that, yes, they are all

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God. They share in that which, you know, from the Old Testament says, Israel, the

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Lord our God is one. They fully share in that unity. So this is the Trinity. You got one

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God, and then you have him being revealed in three persons. If we start in reverse order, we can understand that everything exists has being, right?

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Me and you are beings, but then you got some things like a rock or a table or a chair that exist and that are profoundly different than us, right?

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But in one way, how are they so different than you and I? They are not personal, but they do exist, right?

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So we have personhood. We have a soul, right? Now our being, since it's limited and within time and space, our being can only be shared by one person, right?

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So now here's where we really swing the pendulum, and I think the scripture makes the case for, since God and his being is limitless, transcendent and eternal and all powerful, his single being can be fully shared in three persons, right?

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That doesn't mean that I've got it all figured out. I know all the mysteries to the Trinity, but since his being is not like mine, he's able to be personal in a way that's different than our experience.

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This is why Aquinas did have a doctrine of analogy that I really like. You got what? Equivocal language, right?

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That says what? Equivocal language and univocal language, things that says that we can't know anything about God, right?

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He's wholly other, there's no way to know him. I would say that would be problematic from anybody's worldview perspective because we can't have justified knowledge is what

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I would say. Then you got the extreme opposite. We have one -to -one knowledge the same way that God does.

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Well, I don't think that that's being intellectually honest because God is eternal and absolute. So our knowledge has to reflect, right?

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That of the triune God, which makes sense, we're made in his image. We see through a glass dimly, his ways and thoughts are higher than our thoughts.

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So we can have knowledge to an epistemic level humanly, but that doesn't discount the creator creation distinction that Romans 1 brings out.

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And Aquinas held to, like you said, analogical language or analogous language that we can know some things that reflect

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God's eternal knowledge of death. So getting back to the wills, I get the problem, but if we reject that,

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I think we have even bigger problems on our hand. That just, I would say begs the problem or the question of the one and the many.

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I believe God can have this absolute sovereign will that can be carried out relationally within time and space.

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So I get how we may not can answer every questions, but I wouldn't call it an internal contradiction.

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I would say the fact that God is triune gives us a basic basis for relationship and communication and with love itself.

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I believe any religion that would be unitarian, that would affirm one God being only one person cannot be love.

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He would have to create and then be dependent on the creation to be able to have love. Now, since we're on the

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Trinity, you would hold to polytheism, correct? So how do you get the -

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Kind of. Go ahead. Kind of. Yeah, there are multiple divine beings, sure.

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Yeah, we can leave it at that for the sake of this conversation. Right, I would see not only, so my worldview says that God has spoken, right?

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The Trinitarian worldview is a necessary worldview. I'm saying to deny it, you'd have to borrow principles in order to argue against it.

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So I'm just saying, and that's on a scriptural level, which we would stand both on the Old and New Testament.

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But then by extension, because I believe that God not only created his Bible by speaking it, right?

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And ontologically beginning with him, but he carried holy men along by the Holy Spirit to write.

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So he did speak in time and place in ways that we can understand, I would say analogically.

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And so what I'm getting at is, we have a brain, philosophical, right? We can think in terms of philosophy.

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So where does the radical unity come from in a pantheon of deities?

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Yeah, so I meant to comment on your kind of, you know, your opening statement in which you kind of laid out roughly the transcendental argument, right?

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And this idea of the impossibility of the contrary. So generally this argument is used against atheism.

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I would say that the main brunt of the argument is not inconsistent with my position, right?

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So like the preconditions for intelligibility, I think you can get on the

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LDS picture because we do believe in a divine being. You're right that the kind of the major distinction then is on the

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Trinity. We don't believe in a triune God. So most of the time when you see this argument that the triune God doesn't come up.

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So really all the tag argument proves is some form of ontologically necessary being that has some other attributes, right?

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Can I switch you on that real quick? Sorry, go ahead. So you're right, it does give atheism trouble because they lean only on philosophy in their own mind, their reason and their empirical observation.

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However, I believe the transcendental argument starting with the triune God obviously poses problems to somebody that holds to a unitary position.

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Now I agree if you are religious and believe in the divine, well, you are one step closer to what

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I'm saying over atheism. So I'm saying it refutes atheism for sure, but it also refutes

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Unitarianism and polytheism because I'm saying that you gotta be able to account for the one and the many.

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And since you would have to lean heavily, I say heavily, lean on your Mormonism, then we would have both grounds, both philosophical and exegetical hermeneutics, grammatical historical methodology to rightly account for various scriptures.

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So you're right, it refutes atheism, but it also refutes Unitarianism and polytheism, especially when that's the tag argument, go ahead.

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Oh, sorry, I'm less confident about the success of the argument even against atheism.

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Actually, I think it has to make some claims about logic that I think are perhaps not justified, but we don't have to get into that.

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I agree that if the triune form of the tag argument works, it's a problem for the

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LDS position. I'm not confident, one, that the Trinity actually really solves the problem of,

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I mean, so the problem of the one and the many is kind of outside of my real philosophical research area.

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But it seems to me that if we have divine simplicity coupled with Trinitarianism, it's difficult for me to see that it really solves the problem of the one and the many.

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Yeah, I'm kind of skeptical of that problem generally as being a real ontological problem for any worldview.

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But you're right that if it is, and if the Trinitarian form of the tag argument works, it would be a problem for the

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LDS church. I'm just not convinced that we get either of those things to set up that argument, if that makes sense.

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Sure, and we have a different epistemology. You allow more scripture than I do, so I get that.

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But I do have a question. And we may be able to answer this quick because we come from different worldview perspectives.

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But when I read a lot of the Old Testament, so like I'm a strong monotheist. I believe there is one God. Now, if I didn't believe in the

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Bible, philosophically, I would almost want to believe in multiple gods because there's such a strong diversity in this world.

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Well, that's got to reflect some type of massive diversity, right? But how do you understand?

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So let me ask you this. Do you believe, so did Joseph Smith say this, and do you believe it if he did?

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He said, for I'm going to tell you how God came to be God. We all have imagined and supposed that God was from all eternity, and I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see.

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He was once like us, yea, that God himself, the father of us all, dwelt on earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did.

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So I guess step one, do you, did he teach that and do you believe that? He did teach that, that's my, that's from the

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King Follett Discourse, which is one of the last discourses he gave in his life. So it's not canonical.

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That's kind of the first thing to say about that. Okay. I'm not totally sure. I don't have a clear picture of what qualifies as doctrine in the church and what does not.

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I suspect that that statement is not binding on members of the church simply because it's not canonical.

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So I believe everything scripture teaches, I believe probably almost everything that the prophets have taught, but it perhaps is not binding.

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There are, even if you want to say it's binding, there's Blake Osler, who's a

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Latter -day Saint philosopher and theologian, has kind of an alternative interpretation of the

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King Follett Discourse that undermines some of the plain readings that has kind of become the mainstream view within the

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Latter -day Saint community. So I think Blake thinks that it's not necessarily true in Latter -day

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Saint philosophy that God was at one point not divine. So we can say something like God the Father was like Christ was, where he was divine before he came to earth, then came to earth and then returned to godhood, right?

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I would say the common lay view in the Latter -day Saint tradition is to say that God is an exalted man.

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So at one point he was not divine and by obedience to certain laws and ordinances, he became divine. And that's probably the common view.

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So here's the main thrust of my question. I appreciate you're a lot of qualifying that for me.

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But you got verse, and I'll just look at two, even though there's a ton, I got a list here, but you got multiple Psalms that say before the mountains were brought forth, before you ever had formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are

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God. So there's a always sense of deity, right? That I see there.

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And then the Old Testament, I feel like doubled down. It says, before me, no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

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I am the Lord and besides me, there is no other. And then you got scripture after scripture saying that there's one

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God, that there's no other deities. And then I feel like anytime there is mentioning other gods or other deities, it's in the context of idols.

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And then if you search the context out more, then it's idols created by human hands.

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And then you even got like Deuteronomy 32 saying, if a man makes an idol with his hand and starts to worship that, there might be demons that come and kind of interact with that.

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But there's only one true living God, nothing created outside of him, beside him, before him, or after him.

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And so how would you reconcile these seemingly completely contradicting passages saying that there's a pantheon of gods versus that there's only one true and living

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God? Yeah, so a couple of things here. One, I actually think passages like the one in Isaiah are a little bit tricky for Trinitarians.

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So in dexical terms like I or that, my understanding, okay, in natural language,

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I think that the referent of those sorts of terms is at the personal level. And so it would seem to be saying that then the person of Jesus or the person of God the

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Father, depending on who you think is speaking, would be saying, besides me, there's no other God. And so since there's no person being distinction in the

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Old Testament, that seems pretty tricky to me. But we can kind of set that aside. There is the question of monotheism.

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I'm gonna have to touch on that, yeah. Sure, we can, yeah. So there's the question of monotheism in the

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Old Testament. It seems to me there's a growing body of not even

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LDS scholars, but within the LDS kind of scholarly community, it's a very popular position to say that the

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Old Testament is not strictly monotheistic. I mean, there are obviously different historical views you can take on this.

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Maybe it began as some form of polytheism and then through the guidance of God progressed into monotheism.

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But I think a strong case can be made, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, that the Old Testament is maybe henotheistic or monolatrous as opposed to monotheistic.

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So you can look at passages like in Genesis where Jacob has his vision of heaven.

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We have there an instance of the word Elohim, which is the word for God, and the ending grammatically in Hebrew is plural.

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But in some instances, like in Genesis 1, it's coupled with a conjugated verb that's conjugated in the singular.

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So that gives some indication to think it's singular there. But we do have multiple instances of the word Elohim being used in the plural with plural verbs, which seem to indicate that we have multiple divine beings.

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So yeah, one is the Elohim plural with plural verb as shown to Jacob. So then what do we make of passages like in Isaiah and the

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Psalms that seem to say strictly monotheistic? The answer that I've seen is that these passages probably are emphasized by a unique role of Yahweh in the cult of Israel.

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So that won't be a satisfactory answer to many people. I think like with many of the

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New Testament passages we're talking about, you have to choose an interpretive framework. So do you choose to interpret the seemingly polytheistic verses in light of the monotheistic verses or vice versa?

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And so I think it's consistent to say, oh, well, we have Elohim in the plural with a plural verb, or we have like Psalm 82, that seems to talk about multiple gods and not in the context of idols.

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Well, we interpret that in terms of monotheism and we somehow lower that, maybe they're judges, maybe they're angels. On the other hand, you can look at passages like Psalm 82 or passages where there's a plural verb with the word

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Elohim, and we can say, oh, well then the verse in Isaiah or the verse in the Psalms have to be some sort of, you can call it hyperbole if you want, but they're emphasizing the unique role of this

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God as opposed to saying he's ontologically unique. And I think either answer is plausible. I think that the fact that the

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Old Testament writers did not have this robust philosophy, I think it's a little bit anachronistic sometimes.

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I mean, of course you can say God inspired it, but to talk about the person being distinction in the Old Testament when they just really had no concept of that.

29:07

And so, yeah, I think they're both possible and maybe both plausible readings of the

29:13

Old Testament. And so, yeah, that's how I would reconcile those with a polytheistic view, yeah. I just want to kind of respond to some of the points that you made.

29:21

And I get it, like, in my mind, you're coming from a different worldview, so you're going to see things differently.

29:28

You have an extended candle. If we were to take the Old Testament on its own terms,

29:33

I feel like it defines its own context. It defines its own terminology.

29:40

And so I read some of these statements in Isaiah. Before me, no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me.

29:46

I, the Lord, besides me, there is no savior. I am the first and I'm the last. Besides me, there is no

29:51

God. There is a God. Is there a God besides me? I know not any. Isaiah 45,

29:57

I am the Lord. There is no other. Besides me, there is no God. There is no other God besides me, for I am

30:03

God and there is no other. The argument I've heard is, well, this is like ancient smack talk.

30:09

They just have a heightened covenant with this God and just look at all these other religions that say identical language to what the

30:17

Jews had. And I'm a little bit disappointed because it's not identical language. And then there's a huge problem because what

30:24

I see is the Jews distinguishing themselves from the pagan religions that have a pantheon of gods.

30:31

And then you got the Jews saying, yes, we are monotheistic. And that's why we worship

30:38

Yahweh, the one creator God who created everything. And it's interesting you brought up the Elohim.

30:43

I would say, yes, there is a diversity, plurality with God. And I think the

30:49

Trinity answers that. So I didn't know if Marlon wanted to chime in. Marlon, we can't hear you, sir.

30:56

Yeah, I gotta have myself muted a little bit. So I do want you, I do want a little, I guess a little bit more clarification on the one and the many.

31:01

I mean, if it's important for us to be able to account for diversity and unity within our reality, then don't you think,

31:08

I mean, should not a worldview be able to account for that? Because if we take it and say, well, it may not be an important factor.

31:18

If we're talking about a God who created the universe and created the reality that we live in, I think it's extremely important that every question that we have in reality is able to be answered by that deity or by that God.

31:30

So speaking of the one and the many, speaking of unity and diversity, how would you account for that in the

31:40

Mormon perspective, considering that it's polytheistic? That's a diversity, but where's the unity at? Yeah, so the

31:48

Latter -day Saint cosmology, so our view of God is pretty fundamentally different. We don't believe in a creation ex nihilo.

31:57

So we believe in an eternally existent universe in some loose sense of the term universe.

32:02

We're also kind of a pluralistic monism. I think that's my sense of the way that the scriptures kind of entail.

32:09

So monism in the sense that we don't believe that there are two different types of substances, spirit and matter. We think everything is some sort of matter, but there's maybe some maybe strata within matter.

32:18

So we can distinguish between spirit matter and gross matter. But God did not create matter on our view.

32:25

God is co -eternal with it. And so, yeah, I mean, on unity and diversity, it seems like there is an eternal diversity in the

32:35

Latter -day Saint cosmology, but it's all underlying that there is the unity of just one substance.

32:41

We have that monistic picture. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's where I'll end it.

32:47

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So you have a infinite matter.

32:54

How did you say that? There seems to be infinite matter. So there is certainly an infinite past,

33:00

I think. I think that's pretty much entailed by the LDS cosmology. There's probably also infinite matter. So it is infinite in duration and time.

33:06

It never had a beginning. It's co -eternal with God. Okay, so there's something eternal distinct from God, right?

33:14

Yep, yep. So this is where I have problems where, we talked a little bit about this on the phone, but we talked about an infinite regression of God's.

33:26

I don't understand how that system gets started if you go back infinitum. So maybe you could help me understand that process.

33:35

So I think the infinite regression of God's, like I said, is a common reading of the

33:41

King Follett discourse. It's also a common, I would say, lay LDS view. I think within the scholarly community, I mean, I don't know what the percentages are.

33:48

It seems like it's increasingly become popular to say there is not an infinite regression of God's, to say either that God is an exalted man, but he was the first exalted man, or to say that he's been eternally divine.

34:00

I think the latter is easiest to reconcile with scripture. Yeah, did you have a question there? Yeah, because we talked about that, and you said sometimes you lean towards there being an ultimate creator

34:12

God, right? A starting point, if you will. And I'm saying that seems philosophically to be the correct route, right?

34:19

You can't have an infinite regression. We wouldn't allow atheism to make similar claims on knowledge to be able to keep going back, going back.

34:28

And really, I feel like Mormonism or polytheism that claims that presents the same philosophical problem, not only the problem that they stand on the

34:38

Bible, and the Bible talks about God is alone, God is the creator God, and he speaks everything into existence.

34:46

And so this is another problem I see within polytheism, not only the, and it's no surprise that Mormonism wants to have a view over here that says there is a creator

34:56

God, but as far as what the Bible teaches, it teaches that God is perfect. I think most, even philosophers that can conceive of that would say, yes,

35:04

God is the greatest conceivable being, therefore he'd be perfect. So one of my questions that I think relates to the nature of God is since God is perfect, he's a completely perfect being.

35:15

My problem is how can there be a second God where they would have to differ in some way, and that difference would make one of them not perfect anymore if they're distinct in some true fashion.

35:26

So I don't understand necessarily how you can have multiple gods. Yeah, so yeah, those are all good questions.

35:33

So for one, I'm actually stuck with the infinite regress, even if I reject the infinite regress of gods, because there's still an infinite regress of time.

35:40

And so there's an interesting, it's actually one area I've done some research in, the Kalam cosmological argument, if you're familiar with William Lane Craig's work on that, he has actually explicitly turned that against the

35:50

LDS position and said, because of this deductive, scriptural, and scientific argument against an infinite regress of time, the

35:56

LDS position is inconsistent. Blake Osler's written a good paper on that. I'm gonna do a video on that soon on my channel, and I'm also planning to write a paper on kind of extending a couple of Osler's arguments.

36:05

I think, to kind of put it simply, I think Osler's wrong. I think we don't have philosophical arguments against infinite regress.

36:13

So you also mentioned the idea that if we have this greatest conceivable being, there can only be one. So mainstream kind of classical

36:22

Orthodox Christianity does engage in greatest being philosophy and theology. We, I think it's safe to say don't.

36:31

Our conception of God is, I think, less metaphysically maximal. And so there's no philosophical problem at the level of saying that there is one perfect ultimate.

36:42

So like, okay, so like omnipotence is the common example, right, there can't be two omnipotent beings, totally omnipotent in terms of an absolute sense, because one doesn't have power over the other.

36:52

We're okay with multiple omnipotent beings because we don't engage in this maximal, this conception of a maximal

36:58

God. So omnipotence to us is more limited than just logical limits on omnipotence.

37:04

So yeah, an omnipotent God couldn't also create, cause another

37:09

God to cease to exist. That's sort of metaphysical. All right, guys,