Another episode of strange hobby horses that are inappropriate for Sunday school, but totally appropriate for strange blogosphere musings. 

One of the more intriguing speculations of Latter-day Saint cosmology is the idea of a sort of chain of creator Gods. (For a more thorough theological and historical development of the idea, see here and here). The idea that there is a God behind the God and so on is distasteful to traditional Judeo-Christian faiths who are used to seeing our proximate God the Father as the ultimate ground of all existence. 

Some might immediately rejoin that we’re basically traditional monotheists unless you take some weird interpretation of King Follet discourse, but the notion of the multiplicity of Gods is more deeply interwoven in our theology than that, and is not simply one possible interpretation of a sidebar sermon near the end of Smith’s life: Abraham’s creation account repeatedly describes “the Gods” organizing the world and taking counsel together (Abraham 4:1, 26–27), while Doctrine and Covenants 132:19–20 promises that exalted couples “shall be gods.” Other passages complicate the classical picture in different ways: intelligence is uncreated and the elements are eternal (D&C 93:29, 33), while Alma argues that God would “cease to be God” if justice were destroyed (Alma 42:13, 22, 25), etc.  

[After I finished writing this I saw that Christopher Blythe and Jonah Barnes posted a podcast on infinite regress in LDS doctrine a few days ago, I enjoy both of their content, so check them out.]

To shift gears, one of the more Debby downer findings of the early 20th-century was the incompleteness theorem by logician Kurt Godel. I don’t pretend to understand all the particulars (I read a book that was supposed to be the readable public-facing version of explaining the theorem, but gave it up after deciding I simply didn’t have the IQ RAM for it, maybe in the next life), but the tldr is that any attempt to create a series of rules that exhaustively described mathematics/logic would itself contain statements that couldn’t be proven by the said system. In order to show that one system of rules is consistent you need a system of rules outside of that system, and then to show that that system is consistent, you need another meta-system justifying that system, and so on and so forth. So if God has a book written in math that shows that math works, he’d need a book outside of math that confirms math’s consistency. And then he’d need a book outside of that. 

On a related note, when children pester people with a series of unending whys and demands for yet another onion layer of epistemic justification, they are actually surfacing a deep philosophic problem. 

From the timestamp to minute 5

There are several major schools of thought about how to resolve the unending whys: foundationalism posits that there is some belief that is so intuitive it is itself self-justified as an axiom, while coherentism argues that you can have chains of justification that loop back on themselves as long as they are coherent to each other, and infinitism posits that there can literally be an infinite chain of reasons. 

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to argue for infinitism, but the Latter-day Saint cosmology does allow for more creative possibilities for justification than us-> God as the Absolute. If my take on Godel is correct, Latter-day Saint cosmology may be more compatible with the incompleteness theorem than traditional Christianity. If God is the author of a logical system that justifies and describes everything, that God system itself cannot be shown to be valid and consistent by itself, it needs another system above it to do so. Sort of a logic version of the old paradox about God creating a stone so large He can’t lift it (or, my brother the theology PhD’s favorite joke–theology, can God create a major so useless that even he can’t get a job in it?). Of course maybe once we hit the Absolute the normal rules of logic that made up Godel’s proof don’t apply, but part of us having a reasonable faith is that God doesn’t get to make 2+2=5, or win chess games in one move without changing the rules. 

Maybe the why behind the interconnectedness of the physical and moral that we have with God is describable in some kind of meta-system one step back in the divine chain of being. Maybe it is divine command theory turtles all the way down with Gods, meta-meta-languages, and Cantorian power towers of infinite sets of all infinite sets of all infinite sets, with Aleph to the power of Aleph to the power of Aleph. Or maybe it’s a finite number of steps back. 

And then quantum mechanics showed us that maybe our axiomatic, most commonsensical beliefs can actually be quite wrong, and maybe that extends to logic emanating from our evolved meat computers of brains, but with problems like infinite regress we might not even have an easy option of an intuitive, commonsensical off-ramp to choose from even if we wanted to as we try to get our heads around the realms of the Gods with our puny tools of proofs and human logic.