Justified True Belief

(P1) Every moving or changing thing requires an external cause of its motion. An infinite regress of causes explains nothing and grounds nothing. + This argument draws on Thomas Aquinas's First Way, the argument from motion, and works in concert with two arguments already established in the Natural Theology section: the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which demonstrates the universe cannot be infinite in the past and requires a transcendent uncaused cause, and the Leibniz Contingency Argument, which demonstrates that contingent beings cannot explain their own existence and require a necessary being as their ultimate ground. Together, these arguments converge on the same conclusion from three different angles. Here the focus is Aquinas's First Way applied specifically to the Mormon chain of gods, showing that the structure Mormon theology requires is precisely the structure these arguments prove impossible. (1) The First Way: everything moved is moved by another. - Aquinas observed that things in the world are in motion or undergoing change. A thing in motion is being actualized, meaning a potential is being made real by something else. A rock falls because gravity acts on it. A seed grows because nutrients and sunlight act on it. Nothing moves or changes purely on its own. - This means every instance of motion or change requires an external mover. The mover causing A to move was itself moved by something before it, and so on. - The critical question is: can this chain go back infinitely? (2) An infinite regress of movers explains nothing. - Aquinas argued that an infinite chain of movers, in which every mover depends on a prior mover to give it the capacity to move, cannot actually explain why anything is moving at all. - The illustration is exact: imagine trying to explain why a train is moving by pointing to an infinite line of boxcars, each one being pushed by the car behind it. No matter how far back you extend the chain, if there is no engine at the front, nothing moves. The chain does not self-explain. It requires a starting point that does not itself need to be pushed. - Infinite chains of dependent causes are not explanations. They are philosophical procrastination: explaining motion by appealing to another motion, and another, and another, without ever arriving at something that grounds the whole. (3) Therefore there must be a First Mover that is itself unmoved. - Logic requires that the chain terminate in something that moves without itself being moved. Something whose action does not depend on a prior cause. Something whose very nature is to be, rather than to become. - Aquinas calls this the Unmoved Mover, a being of pure actuality with no unrealized potential, no dependence, no change. This is not one more link in the chain. It is the foundation that makes the chain possible at all. - This is precisely what historic Christianity has always claimed about God: he is the self-existent, uncaused, unchanging ground of all reality. "I AM WHO I AM." (Exodus 3:14). "Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." (Psalm 90:2).

(P2) Mormon theology explicitly teaches an infinite chain of gods, each dependent on a prior god, with no First Mover and no self-existent foundation. Aquinas's argument collapses this structure entirely. + (1) The Mormon chain of gods is precisely the infinite regress Aquinas refuted. - As established in the preceding argument, Joseph Smith taught in the King Follett Discourse that God the Father was once a mortal man who progressed to godhood. His own Father was also a god who had once been a man. Joseph Fielding Smith, the tenth LDS President, confirmed the implication plainly: "The Prophet taught that our Father had a Father and so on." - LDS Apostle Orson Pratt extended this even further, stating that the chain of divine ancestry stretches infinitely into the past. There is no god in the Mormon system who was not himself once a mortal dependent on a prior god. - This is the textbook infinite regress Aquinas dismantled. Every god in the Mormon chain is contingent: their existence depends on a prior god, who depended on a prior god before him. There is no engine at the front of the train. There is no Unmoved Mover. There is no self-existent foundation. (2) Three specific failures under the Aquinas framework. - First: an infinite chain of Mormon gods explains nothing. If every god became a god through a process overseen by a prior god, then the existence of any god in the chain is always borrowed from something before it. You cannot explain why anything divine exists by pointing to an infinite line of dependent divinities, any more than you can explain why the train moves by adding more boxcars. - Second: you cannot build necessary existence out of an infinite stack of contingent beings. Each Mormon god is a being who might not have become a god, who went through a process, who depended on another to guide that process. Stack infinitely many contingent beings on top of each other and you still have nothing that had to exist. The house of cards has no table. There is no necessary foundation beneath the entire structure. The Leibniz Contingency Argument (see Natural Theology section) makes this same point from a different angle: contingent things, things that could have failed to exist, require an explanation outside themselves, and no collection of contingent things, however large or infinite, can collectively provide what each member individually lacks. - Third: the Mormon God does not provide an Unmoved Mover. The God Mormons worship was himself moved from mortality to divinity by a prior divine agency. He is not the source of motion. He is one more instance of it. He cannot serve as the ultimate explanation for why anything exists or changes, because he himself required an explanation. (3) The Mormon God is therefore not the God of Scripture, philosophy, or coherent theology. - The God of Isaiah says: "I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God." (Isaiah 44:6). A being who was once a mortal man guided by a prior God is not the first. He is not the last. He is one contingent being among an infinite chain of contingent beings. - The God of Exodus says "I AM WHO I AM," expressing pure, self-grounded existence. The Mormon God's existence is not self-grounded. It was achieved. It was given. It depended on conditions outside himself. - The God of classical Christian theology, the God of Aquinas, Augustine, and the Nicene Creed, is not one more member of a cosmic pantheon. He is the uncaused cause, the ground of being itself, the one in whom all contingent things find their foundation. That is a fundamentally different kind of being from the God Smith described.

(C) Therefore, the Mormon conception of God fails the most basic test of rational theology: it provides no ultimate ground for existence, no unmoved mover, and no self-existent foundation. It replaces God with an infinite chain of dependent beings, which Aquinas demonstrated eight centuries ago cannot explain anything. + (1) The argument is not merely philosophical. It is theological. - The God of the Bible is not simply one very powerful being among others. He is the being whose nature is existence itself: "I AM." Every other being exists contingently, by receiving existence from outside itself. God alone exists necessarily, by his own nature. - Mormon theology replaces this God with a being who received his divinity from outside himself, who was actualized by a prior god, who is one more contingent being in an infinite chain. This is not a nuance or a secondary disagreement. It is a completely different answer to the question of what God is. (2) This matters for salvation, not just philosophy. - If God is himself a contingent being who progressed to divinity, then the ground of salvation is itself contingent. The being in whom Latter-day Saints place their trust for exaltation is not self-existent. His own existence was dependent. His own status was achieved. The chain of dependency continues all the way up, with no foundation beneath it. - The God of Christian theology is the one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). He does not merely exist; he is the source of existence. That is the God who can redeem, sustain, and bring creation to its end. (3) This argument was not answered by Smith, and has not been answered by LDS theology. - Joseph Smith delivered the King Follett Discourse less than three months before his death, with no philosophical engagement with the implications of infinite regress. The modern LDS Church has quietly retreated from the doctrine without addressing the philosophical problem it creates. The evidence for this retreat is not secondhand. In an August 1997 interview with TIME magazine, President Gordon B. Hinckley was asked directly whether the Church still holds that God the Father was once a man. He replied: "I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it... I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it, and I don't think others know a lot about it." The sitting President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the LDS Church claimed not to know whether his own institution still teaches a doctrine Joseph Smith proclaimed as central revealed truth three months before his death. That is not doctrinal correction. That is institutional reticence in the face of an unanswered philosophical problem. - The argument from motion was formulated 800 years ago. The Mormon chain of gods was formulated in 1844. The critique, that an infinite chain of contingent movers cannot explain why anything moves, applies to Mormon theology with the same force it applies to every other infinite regress. It has not been answered. It cannot be answered within Mormon theology's own framework, because the framework requires the very kind of infinite regress these arguments prove impossible. - The Kalam Cosmological Argument (see Natural Theology section) reinforces this from a different direction: an infinite past series of causes is impossible, since an actual infinite cannot be traversed to arrive at the present. If the chain of Mormon gods stretches infinitely into the past, the Kalam argument applies directly: we could never have arrived at the present god if the chain had no beginning. Yet here we are. The chain must have a beginning, and Mormon theology provides none. See also: • Natural Theology: Kalam Cosmological Argument • Natural Theology: Leibniz' Contingency Argument