I too really enjoyed how Ignorant Sage put it (great name, BTW).

I think that we understand a lot less about God than we think we do.

As for having faith in God, all we need to do is have faith that God is powerful enough and knows enough to save us. God need not have any more power or knowledge for us to have successful faith in him.

The logic path in “operating under some assumption” etc., does not necessarily follow. The entire problem with BRM is that his logic paths often have hidden assumptions or faulty logic grammar. One result is that in those areas we can check, such as “The Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon” or “Blacks will not receive the Priesthood until After the Millennium” BRM was proven conclusively wrong. The same with “No Faithful Latter-Day Saint Who Believes in Christ Can Accept the Possibility of Evolution” — James Talmadge anyone?

I know, it should not be enough that BRM embraced an idea to cause me to instantly doubt it. But the logic flaws are sometimes painfully warped in BRM’s writing.

Speaking of needing to know God for salvation, it is interesting to look at Twelve Step programs and what they insist you know about God (also referred to as “Higher Power” and “The God of Your Understanding”). On the one hand, it isn’t much. On the other hand, it is everything. They work on the concept of applied knowledge of God, a very specific slice of God, without attention or limits or concerns about any other facet of God. What has drawn my attention (once I figured out that the programs did not have much to offer vis a vis grief survival and recovery) is that if a member accepts the one narrow slice of God (that God is a power greater than they are who can restore them to sanity and do for them things they can not do for themselves), the rest does not seem to matter. If they don’t, then the progrsms don’t work.

I’m rambling. Ignorant Sage said most of what needed to be said, at least in the first three paragraphs.

The plan of salvation gets us to where/what God is. And when we get there, we’re given a “white stone”. D&C 130:10 tells us specifically that the stone is to learn of “higher kingdoms”. Seems to me we’ll have more to learn once we’re in the celestial kingdom. It makes no sense to me to sudden wake up, finish a day of “Celestial School” and for God to say “Okay, all done. You know everything know.”

I mean, watching the next generation progress, even being “surprised” by which choice they make, is all well and good. I look forward to it. But I agree with Brigham – to stop learning is damnation, and I don’t believe God is damned. As for faith, all I need to know is that God can save me. I think He’s demonstrated that sufficiently. He is what He is; I’ve got faith He knows how to make me that.

In the end, the question becomes, how would God know that He knew everything? If He didn’t know something, He wouldn’t know He didn’t know it. So I assume He assumes that He doesn’t and that He keeps on trying. And I’m guessing He keeps on succeeding too.

So he isn’t ‘learning’ as such but just seeing his family increase whilst He himself remains unchanging or immutable.

I thought that was the message behind the: ‘this is my work and my glory’, right?

God is omniscient (all knowing).
(Psalm 139:2-6; Isaiah 40:13-14)

God is unchanging or immutable.
(Psalm 102:25-27; Hebrews 1:10-12; 13:8)

Firetag, I accept that ideas around omniscience and omnipotence don’t fit well with contemporary science (though I am certainly not an expert) but I do think that the little I have read, like Ostler, does a good job of dealing with it.

I agree with Douglas that the idea of perfection is not really useful when speaking of God, for a numbe of reasons. I prefer phrases such as: ‘God knows all that can be known’ or that ‘God has maximal power’. Moreover I also value the potential for genuine dialogue (like Hawk) with a God who responds and possibly will change because of that dialogue.

I sense that even everyday members would still think that ‘God is Progressing’ simply because we have been taught it so much, rather than appreciating the differences among LDS thinkers regarding what that means.

I actually like that idea a lot. After studying a lot of Eastern philosophies, I think there is more truth to that than many might want to admit.

Nobody on this board with ideas as strange as mine: one spirit as a collective property of many bodies, analogous to a mind being a collective property of many neurons.

And FireTag — I was coming from the heathen heretic position, so you can pretty much ignore me as most people do.

Simple, God’s progressing – Englund. God’s not progressing, to think so is one of the “Seven Deadly Heresies” – BRM. BRM to Englund, my job is to teach and your’s is to listen. Discussion over.

I answered that “god” is still learning and progressing, just as “he” has ever since men invented him!

That said, I always found McConkie’s “Seven Heresies” approach to this issue incredibly obtuse. McConkie suggested that if deity were still learning, deity could one day learn something that “undid” the entire plan of salvation. That simply makes no sense. In Mormonism, it’s surely axiomatic that anything that deity “knows” is true. Therefore, nothing that deity learned in the future could possibly make the earlier knowledge false.

I’m speaking from a Community of Christ branch of the Restoration here, so Pearl of Great Price isn’t even in my canon of Scripture except where those parts got incorporated into the D&C or the JST individually. No Book of Abraham in our canon.

I personally read the Book of Moses as implying AT LEAST the simplest form of parallel universes, those that arise in our own space-time from our own Big Bang. And the Book of Moses has God saying that those “other earths” were His creations, not those of other Gods.

So I don’t have to think much about other Gods or whether God is progressing. On the otherhand, I’m stuck with a vast number of copies and variants of ME, and have to wonder what is the connection between my spirit and their spirits. Different branches of the Restoration, like different branches of the rest of Christianity, get different questions to ask.

But, I do agree with Ulysseus’s point that string theory/multi-universe/multi dimensions allow for many more possibilities that have yet to be considered theologically. My mom often used to say that many descriptions of angelic visitations could be what would happen when a 4-spacial-dimensional entity enters our 3-spacial-dimensional world.

Could someone briefly discuss England’s versus McConkie’s descirptions (as Rico pointed out in #2). I’m not familiar with them.