From: geb@cs.pitt.edu (Gordon Banks)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Omnicient
Date: 20 Nov 92 18:35:33 GMT
Reply-To: geb@cs.pitt.edu (Gordon Banks)
Followup-To: talk.religion.misc
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh Computer Science

In article <nyikos.722049541@milo.math.scarolina.edu> nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes:

>Not necessarily.  There seem to be at least three views:
>
>1.  God does not perceive time as we do.  All times are equally present
>to him.  [William James calls this the "block-universe" view.]
>
>2.  God creates individuals and does NOT know ahead of time all that
>they will do. [William James endorses this view.]  Orthodox Christianity
>generally frowns on this view since God's "omniscience" is usually taken
>as a given, but "omniscience" could, IMHO, be interpreted to mean knowing
>all that IS happening or has happened.
>
>>The mormon point of view says that God knows the heart of every one
>>who has lived, and will yet live. However the soul of Man is co-eternal
>>with God. There is a part of Man which is _not_ created by God.
>>God may know everything about Man, but God does not determine Man.
>
I would have to disagree.  The Mormon point of view (that of Joseph
Smith and Brigham Young, at least), would seem to be much closer
to that of William James (#2), with the exception that Mormons
believe that man's intelligence is not created nor made nor indeed
can be.    Of course, many scriptures came through
Joseph Smith that also use the "omniscient" rhetoric, but I would
very much challenge the assertion that the Mormon God is omnisicient
in the same sense orthodox Christianity means it.  In my opinion,
it contradicts free will.  I would refer the curious to Sterling
McMurrin's treatise "The Theological Foundations of the Mormon
Religion" where he specifically discusses the similarities between
Joseph Smith's theology and the philosophy of William James.  I
believe James was aware of this and interested in the Mormons for
that reason.

>This is the first I have heard of this aspect of mormonism.  Does it
>teach that the soul was once a part of God but split off from it at
>some point, like the Gnostics and Manichaeans did, or does it teach
>that souls were always separate and distinct from God?  

It teaches basically that the basis of man is intelligence, which
is neither created nor made.  In the beginning, according to the
Book of Abraham (one of Smith's revelations) God found Himself in
the midst of other intelligences, of which He was the most intelligent.
Some Mormon theologians such as Brigham Young, seemed to 
consider intelligence as a substance rather than being eternal
discrete entities, but I think the mainstream has held that the
intelligences were always discrete and individual.  BY said once
that the fate of Satan and the damned was to have eternal retrogression
of their powers back to primeval intelligence, where they would lose
their individuality and be "reorganized" again into new individuals,
this being the "second death".  
This, of course, is not a generally accepted Mormon doctrine, but is
quite interesting.  Anyhow, the idea is that God, being the greatest
intelligence, eventually "organized" the others into spirits or souls
or whatever you wish to call them.  These are His spirit children,
which eventually became humans.  Those intelligences who are faithful
follow a path of "eternal progression", obtaining a physical body
and progressing on the same path previously trod by God
to become Gods themselves after being resurrected
from the dead.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gordon Banks  N3JXP      | "I have given you an argument; I am not obliged
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu   |  to supply you with an understanding." -S.Johnson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Xref: sparky talk.religion.misc:21607 alt.atheism:21717