Not Quite Far Enough
Dialoguing with Amos Wollen's being "just a little bit Mormon" and going "just a lot bit Mormon"
The Axiological Problem: “If God exists, what greater good is served by all the evil he permits on Earth? The axiological problem, in other words, has to do with value. Given all the badness in the world, what’s the goodness, if any, that makes allowing the badness worth it from God’s point of view?”
The Deontological Problem: “If God exists, and he allows evils for the sake of some greater good, how does he have the right to use us as a means to that end?…Put more precisely, the question is about how God — if he exists — can sit and watch all the evils we endure, and maybe even cause some of them (earthquakes, the evolution of parasites, etc.), without violating any deontic constraints.”
The Nye-ill-ist Problem: “If God, why Bill Nye?”
I will freely admit a checkmate on #3, I have no idea why Bill Nye given God, but as a middle millennial I have fond memories of the theme song and near unhinged pace of the television program on public TV. This is far from justification, however, and amounts to only so much nostalgia. I don’t know that I could ever account for the Science Guy.
In affirming a species of Premortal Existence Theodicy as a Latter-day Saint (LDS), I thought this a decent opportunity to explore the implications of our particular brand of theodicy over and against the rejections Amos lays out to the theodicy and highlight some particularly Mormon twists to this idea.
I want to start by highlighting some of these differences and then consider the objections Amos raises. I’ll then postulate a few responses to both the axiological and deontological problems, and I’ll do my best with axes and bunny-bedders.
Going Just a Lot Mormon
The first issue when invoking Mormon Thought™️1 here is to realize that the LDS does not conform nor necessarily assent to God “conceived of in a traditional, plausible way…a morally perfect being.”2 This has been treated at some length by LDS theologian Blake Ostler in a few arenas,3 but suffice it to say that the LDS is going to affirm a concept of God which is morally praiseworthy, but is also significanly morally free: God could indeed choose to do other than He does. Put another way, on the LDS position God could logically choose to do evil.
The LDS is also going to balk a little at the line: “I’m just going to assume — for the sake of your valuable time — that these theists are wrong and that if God exists, he’s a moral agent who always does what’s his duty.” This largely because of at least one scriptural example found in The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, which a LDS affirms as part of their scriptural canon.4 Eight pages in, you get the episode of Nephi, an ancient Israelite, who sneaks into Jerusalem to recover written records from a man named Laban. While he’s being “led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which [he] should do,”5 he’s prompted by that Spirit (which is taken to be the influence of God) to cut off Laban’s head (oh yes, Laban is inebriated), and eventually complies.6 This raises quite a few obvious questions respecting duty and the morality of God. They aren’t much different from the obvious contenders in the Old Testament accounts dealing with divinely-sanctioned slaughter, the flood, the akedah, etc., but this one is much more personal and we get the benefit of Nephi’s internal monologue as the scene plays out. I leave this here as illustrative, and can post on it later, but will note here that I am persuaded by viewing this along the lines of the I-Thou relation which is sought by God along the lines of Martin Buber.
Amos then goes on:
In what follows, I want to suggest an answer to the deontological problem of evil. Even if the strictest forms of deontology are true, and some acts and omissions are just wrong, there’s a plausible way to get God off the hook for every such evil he part-causes or declines to prevent.
Here’s the basic proposal: each of us — before our births — consented to God allowing us to suffer through the evils we do. In this act of consent, we waived whatever rights we once had against God — at least for short stint of time on Earth. Consequently, God doesn’t violate any deontic constraints by letting us suffer.
We have to tread carefully here. Philosopher James Spiegel—in a paper her wrote on this topic—frames the idea as follows:
[F]or any given person, […] all of the pain and suffering she experiences in this world was chosen in advance, prior to her soul’s union with her earthly body, and thus was a result of the exercise of her own free will.2
But if what we consented to was “all the pain and suffering” we endure, then it might turn out that none of us has ever had our rights violated by anyone, which no deontologist will want to say…
Here is an easy fix: the theodicy shouldn’t say we consented to the suffering we endure; what it should say, rather, is that we consented to God’s role in that suffering — either to his passive role in standing back and letting the evil take place, or to his active, causal role in the evils we end up enduring.7
I would interject here that while considering suffering and the problem of evil, LDS will need to be aware of three kinds of evil, which I define thusly:8
Moral Evil: Those species of evil or suffering which are inflicted as the result of choices by free agents. Rape, murder, bullying, etc. would typify this category.
Naural Evil: Those species of evil or suffering which happen based on natural phenomena. Natural disasters, disease, perhaps even animal suffering would apply here.
Circumstantial Evil: Those species of evil or suffer which come about as a result of the failure of constructed systems which cannot be neatly attributed to a moral agent nor to natural causes. I’m thinking here of freak accidents the brakes failing on a brand new vehicle and crushing a child at play.
The crux here is that in Mormon Thought™️, God is not responsible for the evils mentioned because of a few key factors with respect to the LDS concept of God:9
God is embodied; Father, Son, and Spirit are separate and distinct personages, each with their own spatiotemporal location.10
There are entities and structures which are co-eternal with God.11 These include the constituent elements of material existence (element in LDS parlance),12 the constituent elements of personal identity (intelligence in LDS parlance), and perhaps also a framework of laws by which God must abide. This obvious due to the point above in that God is embodied, therefore certain laws of physics should also pertain, but these may also include certain constraints on His justice, mercy, and miracle-granting-grace (which I take to be His attitude toward human beings).
God did not create ex nihilo.13 To put it another way, God is not the only necessary being.14 The LDS is going to say that God didn’t even create you, nor could he.
With respect to the classical problem(s) of evil, this is enough for Mormon Thought™️’s standard “way out of the conceptual incoherency generated by the traditional theological premises…to not go in. [Joseph Smith’s] revelations circumvent the theoretical problem of evil by denying the trouble-making postulate of absolute creation—and, consequently, the classical definition of divine omnipotence.”15
This, I hope, is enough to illustrate to Amos that God could be absolved of the burden of responsibility by just this sort of radical premortal acceptance and consent to the mortal process in Mormon Thought™️: God is probably not responsible for evil per se (from the fact that there are coeternal realities with God), and so premortal agents will consent not necessarily to every particular evil they will pass through, but they accept the conditions that inhere in the mortal state before experiencing them.
This is also important as a LDS will want to affirm something like Libertarian Free Will. The issue a LDS would have with Spiegel’s formulation is the choosing of every particular suffering: if it is known beforehand, and assuming at least one of the parties knows it infallibly, can there be free will? This is an old problem, but one which LDS thinkers would grapple with in different ways; that’s another post for another day.
With that framework, I’d like to take Amos’ objections from a LDS standpoint.
Objection #1: The Power Difference Objection
You nailed it here. The only Mormon spin I would put on this is the fact that God in LDS thought desires peers, and that God is in fact the fullest expression of humanity itself: God is conceived of as a glorified and divinized human being. This is usually horribly misconstrued and misunderstood (sometimes I think intentionally), but is treated fairly well in a Master’s Thesis by Jordan Vajda, OP (who eventually converted to the CoJCoLDS) entitled "Partakers of the Divine Nature:” A Comparative Analysis of Patristic and Mormon Doctrines of Divinization. It is not easy to find, but worth a read if you can do it.
The difference between your the-rapist and the God of Mormon Thought™️ is that there is no real way that having sex with your therapist is going to also turn you into a therapist. However, LDS will take seriously what both El and Jesus said with respect to “Ye are gods,”16 it wasn’t just judges or angels. LDS scripture has it his way:
50 And again we bear record—for we saw and heard, and this is the testimony of the gospel of Christ concerning them who shall come forth in the resurrection of the just—
51 They are they who received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on his name and were baptized after the mannerof his burial, being buried in the water in his name, and this according to the commandment which he has given—
52 That by keeping the commandments they might be washed and cleansed from all their sins, and receive the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands of him who is ordained and sealed unto this power;
53 And who overcome by faith, and are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, which the Father sheds forth upon all those who are just and true.
54 They are they who are the church of the Firstborn.
55 They are they into whose hands the Father has given all things—
56 They are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fulness, and of his glory;
57 And are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son.
58 Wherefore, as it is written, they are gods, even the sons of God—
59 Wherefore, all things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Esoterica aside, on Mormon Thought™️, right relation with God yields a godly relation, a divine existence. No amount of therapy could do that. I don’t mean to lampoon here, I’m serious. In some way this mortal experience is the vehicle by which that process of right relation takes place, and if the power differential is one that is both truly loving and offered, it becomes pretty null.
Objection #2: The Transformative Knowledge Objection
This one you did well on, too, in my opinion. The Mormon spin would be something like: since even spiritual existence is material, and God Himself is embodied, there is the possibility of knowing pain to some degree before mortality. To go the other way, Mormon Thought™️ is also making use of an interesting motif that was present in Enochic literature and which shows up in LDS scripture: the weeping God.17 That and, given what I said to Objection #1, Transformative Knowledge is the point.
Objection #3: The Memory Objection
This is the one I’m most interested in, and you’ll find some resonance here with Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. I won’t appeal too much to them here, but the idea of anamnesis being the method of learning is and interesting one.
Blake Ostler has argued in his 4th volume (see footnote 8) for the idea that love is a necessary component of what it means to be fully divine, and that in order for us to truly “will the good of the beloved”18 it must be a truly untrammeled choice: God must give us a free opportunity to either choose or reject loving relation with Him. This, I think, is best illustrated in LDS scripture as narrated by God:
32 The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;
33 And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;
34 And the fire of mine indignation is kindled against them; and in my hot displeasure will I send in the floods upon them, for my fierce anger is kindled against them.
35 Behold, I am God; Man of Holiness is my name; Man of Counsel is my name; and Endless and Eternal is my name, also.19
There is a real sense for the LDS that God puts something really at risk with this as well, enough for him to weep and become indignant. Some theodicies in LDS thought will also put at risk His very existence,20 while others will take a more Kierkegaardian route positing that relation with imperfect and unloving beings causes God real pain.21 Either way, we aren’t the only beings at risk in LDS thought.
Conclusion
This has been fun,
. Looking forward to your part 2, and I’d love to see what this does (if anything) for your thoughts on Pre-Existent Theodicy.Amos doesn’t do this explicitly except as a jab in his subtitle and in alluding to Terryl Givens’ book When Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought (Oxford University Press, 2012). I use Mormon Thought™️ ironically here to describe broadly the possibilities upon accepting the revelations of Joseph Smith, though the largest branch of this movement is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and said Church has moved away from the moniker. I pertain to that organization, but still find utility in the broad term and will be using it that way. It is also not meant to stand in for official positions of the Church, these are my views.
see Ostler, Blake T. “Moral Obligation and Mormonism: A Response to Francis Beckwith.” FAIR, August 15, 2016. Also Ostler, Blake T. “A God Who Is Morally Praiseworthy: A Response to Carl Mosser.” Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology 4, no. 2 (September 2008): 53–73. It’s treated at length as well in his first volume of Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God (Greg Kofford Books, 2008)
Latter-day Saint relation to their canon is also different than many other Christian denominations. Though colloquially a LDS might hold to something of an inerrantist view of scripture, the basis in continuing revelation and LDS revelations themselves (being open) refute this idea.
See 1 Nephi 4:6
See 1 Nephi 4:10-18
These inspired heavily by Blake Ostler’s 4th volume, Exploring Mormon Thought: God’s Plan to Heal Evil (Greg Kofford Books, 2020)
Perhaps the most accesible treatment of this set of ideas comes from a speech delivered at a 1999 BYU devotional entitled Joseph Smith and the Problem of Evil by David L. Paulsen, but has also been treated extensively by Ostler (see footnote 8), Sterling M. McMurrin in The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (University of Utah Press, 1965), Truman G. Madsen in Eternal Man (Deseret Book, 1966), B.H. Roberts in Mormon Doctrine of Deity (Deseret News, 1903) and the Seventy’s Course in Theology (Church Publication, 1910) as well as The Truth, the Way, the Life (unpublished during his lifetime, BYU 1996), John A. Widtsoe in A Rational Theology (Church Publication, 1915), Paley P. Pratt in Key to the Science of Theology (Church Publication, 1855), and many others.
These will all differ in some particulars, but the general points I give above are what I take to hold across all views. This serves also to point out that LDS thought is not a monolith, which frustrates some, but is just the nature of the beast.
see D&C 130:22
See D&C 93:29-34, also Alma 42:13-25, Mormon 9:19, Abraham 3:19-23.
see D&C 131:7-8. Here you get the basis of Mormon materialism. Even spirit is material. This is not to say everything is reducible to matter in Mormon thought, but categories of soul and body (for example) exist on the same continuum.
This from the famous (or infamous, depending on your persuasion) interpretation in Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse delivered in 1844 before his death.
See Psalm 82 and John 10:34-36.
See Moses 7:28-34. This serves to show that God is not impassible, even God can cry. See also John 11:35-36. This was also the subject of a Terryl Givens book of the same name. See The God Who Weeps (Ensign Peak, 2012).
Thank you, Thomas Aquinas for that one.
Moses 7
This from Cleon Skousen in a talk titled The Meaning of the Atonement. The JS Foundation here is a little pseudo-academic in my opinion, but it’s the easiest place to get a transcript of the talk. Basically here God is beholden to His subjects to be moral, and I think there are problems with it, but there you have clearly illustrated what the stakes might be for God in some LDS circles.
Here I’m thinking of Kierkegaard’s story of the King and Maid from his Philosophical Fragments. In a similar way when we repent in LDS thought we’re brought back into a “marriage” with God which causes him pain and the real risk of loss, since we’ll probably sin again.