If LDS theology is true (and that's the real issue, not particular discrepancies in the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith's or Brigham Young's character or whatever) then the idea of "God's Law" makes no sense. God as we know Him (Elohim) is only the God of this planet, where the Law has been given not to kill, rape, torture, etc. Other planets, in LDS theology, have their Gods, and presumably, their own rules to live by. However, is it even possible to imagine another world where murder, rape, etc. are considered good? (Hint: no) Therefore, the moral law is universal. Therefore, God, since He is only the God of this planet and was only a man at one point, must be under the Law. Of course, God is not fallen like we are, and possibly no other planet in the universe is fallen, so they might not have been expressly given the same kind of codified Law that we have, but they would still not regard murder, rape, etc. as good. The Law is therefore above God, and it is not His. Further, if God is under the Law (not under the judgement of the Law as we are, but still abiding by its precepts, even if doing so is as natural to Him as breathing is to us) then God has no authority to forgive us for transgressions against the Law. Furthermore, it makes no sense to speak of sins against God, since we must really be sinning against the impersonal universal moral Law.

Mormonism (as I understand it) posits that the universe is self existent, and that it contains a number of self existent spirits whose purpose is to progress towards Godhood. However, if there was no creation, then the universe has existed for an infinite amount of time (even if it has gone through several Big-Bang-Big-Crunch cycles, if you want to believe in that.) Therefore, all of these spirits have had an infinite amount of time to progress. Even if some (like Elohim) presumably have progressed faster than the rest of us, no matter how slow our rate of progression is, we have had an infinite amount of time in which to accomplish it, so every spirit in the universe should already be a God or a Mrs. God or at their final destination (terrestrial kingdom, telestial kingdom, etc.) If you go back sixty trillion years, we should all still be at our final destinations, as we would still have had an infinite amount of time. Furthermore, if you need a God to embody you to become a God, then how did the first spirit to progress to Godhood do so without having a God already around to embody him?

On the other hand, I have heard some Mormon arguments that seem to imply that Elohim did in some sense create us, but that doesn't work either, since He must have been created Himself, and the God before Him, and the God before Him, and so on ad infinitum, so you either have two possibilities; there was a God-plus at the beginning who started it all, in which case worshipping Elohim is idolatry and we should be worshipping this God-plus, or you run into the infinite regression fallacy, of just an endless string of Gods creating Gods back through infinite time

Updated on 10 March 2001

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