Natural processes and insights related to the nature of the Godhead in Latter-day Saint thought. Terryl Givens gives a fairly complete and nuanced view of thinking about matter in the formative years of the church and draws three points (Givens 2014). In addition to the material nature of the universe, the role played by laws in the universe was of special concern.
At the founding of the church, an explicitly male anthropometric deity of the same heavenly species as humanity was envisioned. 1 Cosmologists and astronomers commonly refer to the matter of the universe as baryonic matter, which includes both baryons and leptons. He is clear in his book, The Seer, that 'intelligence' is a fundamental aspect of the constituents of the universe.
Perhaps one of the most scientifically informed expressions of this view was found in Brigham Roberts' The truth, the way, the life (Roberts, Larson, & McMurrin 1995). He claims that such particle intelligences, bound together in unity of purpose, manifest as the unity of the universe. Taylor Petrey reviews and criticizes much of the discourse and the problems in the discourse surrounding the idea of a mother in heaven (Petrey 2016).
The material nature of the universe provides a strong foundation in Latter-day Saint thought for an interest in and commitment to science.
Mormonism and the Current Manifest Image of Science about Matter and Embodiment
In the next section, I will expand on these theological ideas and place these theological views of the incarnation of divinity and humans in conversation with current concepts in science, especially evolutionary biology. The death of religion comes with the suppression of the great hope of adventure” (Whitehead 2011:192). Central to Mormon interest in theologies of matter is the idea of bodies, especially the formation of bodies, including divine, human, and non-human.
Agency is a key aspect of the existence of all humans and even God in Mormon theology, which opens the question: “In what ways are living bodies composed of matter important to understanding agency. In the introduction to their edited volume, Material Feminism Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman argue that the materiality of women's bodies is the site of many of women's experiences (Alaimo & . Hekman 2008:3). Karen Barad has also developed a framework called agent realism for understanding embodiment based on the work of Niels Bohr.
With the appearance of life on earth, matter acquired true teleology for the first time in the history of the universe, as Elizabeth Grosz argues in her discussions of the development of life on earth (Grosz. Mormonism accommodates the possibility that the incarnation reflects a divine attribute and condition of God's existence and asks: What if we are embodied in matter because it is part of the imago Dei.” This is a thought experiment that Mormonism apparently takes seriously because it is embedded in many aspects of Latter-day Saint conceptions of divine life and interaction with God—especially in their conceptions of agency. .
Organisms are indeed natural entities, but they are not material things that are completely ordinary (Walsh 2015:1). The development of organs and the integration of the whole organism as an individual unit became the signature evolution of multicellular organisms. Could this understanding of God's attention in creating a universe to be a place where agency appears in the world be a stamp of the imago Dei on people.
In Mormon language, the plurality of gods expressed here can be thought of as the three members of the Trinity and the divine female personage, the Mother in Heaven. In the Mormon scripture known as the Pearl of Great Price, revelations attributed to Smith and attributed to divine influence replace missing portions of the book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible. What the biological evolution of agency in the universe seems to suggest is an intrinsic, emergent property of the basic conditions of matter.
If one embraces, as Mormonism does, an 'inherent' deity, then these features of the universe may also reflect the embodiment of that deity, especially with the view that humans are made in the image and likeness of God. Because there are few formal articulations of the nature of this pre-existing spirit creation and subsequent embodiment, however, it may still be articulated in ways that are less dualistic.
Mormon Material Theological Perspectives: Creation, Be- coming, and Life
Biological representations focused on concepts such as purposeful action in organisms, goals, and navigation in the rich reality in which biological organisms reside. The idea of God's human body is perhaps the strongest form by which the ancient idea of God's body survived the sharp religious and philosophical criticism of the image of God, and, moreover, perhaps the most radical way in which the original-. 3 No single term covers all the members of the Trinity and the Mother in Heaven.
Therefore, in what follows, when I refer to Deity or God, I include all of the above. The relational structure of the universe resonates with current understandings of science as one of an evolving relationship between temporal assemblages of matter in process. As a result, Mormon forms of incarnation imagine a God who is interested in relationships and is changed by them, in ways that conform to current scientific concepts of the material universe.
A God of materiality and embodiment thus has relations with all the material constituents of God's creation, and does not become one with them, as can be seen in a Spinozian theology, but also not completely transcendent as found in more Plotinian structured theologies not. God becomes relationally embedded in the ecology of the material universe as an agent who can influence all the other agents. This role is most clearly seen in Mormon Christology, where the agential aspect of Christ is always conditioned on love, and love is the basis for all action on the part of the Deity.
This idea contrasts with the block universe concept as articulated by Augustine and Einstein. In this view, the creative nature of the universe is manifested in this multiplicity and innovation, and true innovation emerges through the forces of evolution. This 'life' is what the entire history of the universe participates in, and the same events can only repeat themselves.
For example, the historical event of the Incarnation is historical to both the divine and those created as children and creatures. Radically, Mormon materialism places the origin of the universe before God, but God becomes part of the processes of the universe (with the 'universe' here understood as a cosmos more expansive than in the space where the big bang took place). Material conceptions of deity, especially embodied conceptions of the Trinity, require an organismic and even biological conception of God.
This work may include ideas that view God as an emergent feature of the universe, framed by pre-existing relational aspects among the universe's fundamental constituents. In an excellent volume on Mormonism and gender (Petrey & Hoyt 2020), none of the nine theological essays deals with the science of biological sexuality, its evolution, or the rich contribution that the biology of sexuality has made to queer studies. not.
The ecological and biological novelty we find in the world is not only created to be discovered or to provide evidence of divine action, but is also a part of God's nature and being in which we participate. Re)interpretation of early Mormon Thoughts: Synthesizing Joseph Smith's Theology and the Process of Religion Formation.
