Wesley Austin
I started this project with the idea to research the influences of 19th century Christian religions in America on Joseph Smith’s ideas of the process of deification. I soon found that there was little that I could find on this topic and that I would have to be somewhat of an expert in this particular area in order to make any significant headway.
As I continued thinking about different approaches to the study of the Mormon doctrine of deification, I came across an article written by Blake Ostler titled “The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought.” I began thinking about the fundamental connection that exists between the idea of deification and the idea of premortal existence and creation in Mormon thought. In order to fully understand the doctrine deification, it is clear that we must first understand the nature of gods and the nature of humans, in addition to the nature of the connection that exists between these two types of beings. So with this in mind, I began to further research and write on the Mormon notion of “intelligence,” “intelligences,” and the doctrine of premortal existence in general. The following is a brief exposition of the central ideas that make up the paper that resulted from these efforts.
God the Father is in some sense the creator and the father of all human beings. At the same time intelligence, which is the essence of intelligences or human beings, is in some sense uncreated. So in one sense God is the creator of humankind, but in another sense he is not the creator of humankind. The two predominant theories in Mormonism with respect to the nature of intelligence are 1) that intelligence is the essence of intelligent beings and as such it comprises such things as the power of volition, consciousness, personality, and the ability to progress; 2) that intelligence is the spiritual matter from which intelligent beings were constructed.
There are many advantages to advocating theory 1). For one, if this theory is true, then God is not responsible for the existence of evil, inasmuch as God cannot be said to have constructed beings who are evil in nature when he could have constructed them otherwise. Let us for the moment assume that theory 1) is true because of the advantages that it affords over theory 2). Even with this assumption, we are still faced with the question of the respect in which we can correctly call God the creator and the father of humankind. If intelligence is the essence of humanness and God did not create intelligence, then in what respect did God create humans?
Let us first focus on earthly parenthood and then work our way back to spiritual parenthood. From the perspective of one who does not believe that humans existed as unique entities prior to their earthly birth, in addition to genetic mutations, the random process of sexual recombination (hereafter “recombination”) would seem to be the essential process whereby a human becomes human, insofar as this is the process whereby an individual gains his or her unique identity as opposed to becoming merely a carbon copy of one or both of his or her parents.
But from the Mormon perspective, the process of recombination cannot be a random process. Since Mormons believe that all humans were originally only uncreated intelligences, they must also believe that it is God who determines the seemingly random process of recombination when it comes to earthly birth. The process of recombination is therefore not random. The process must work such that the essential pre-earthly nature of each being is correctly expressed in earthly terms. The traits of the earthly mother and the earthly father must come together in such a way so as to express correctly the actual nature of the being in question.
My conclusion from the foregoing facts is that if we accept theory 1), then we ought to view God as a creator and a father in the sense that he provides a physico-spiritual tabernacle for intelligences, but not in any other sense. And if this is the case, then the process whereby humans become deified would be the process of more perfectly conforming their actions to eternal law, in the same way that Christ perfectly conformed his actions to eternal law.