The Phenomenon of God

With greater scientific advances, it seems that we are increasingly able to explain the world without reference to an outside force--a God, the supernatural, or magic.

With enough creativity, of course, it is possible to come up for a way that science and God can co-exist. I might argue, in fact, that if this seems impossible to  you, you have simply not been creative enough.

Regardless of our scientific knowledge, however, explaining how God came to be has always been problematic. If He is more advanced than any of His creations, then how could He have come to be before them? If He always existed, then why didn't everything else also always exist (or did it?)?

There are many hints in Mormon theology. The prophet Lorenzo Snow, for example, was known for the couplet: "As man is, God once was; As God is, man may become." Joseph Smith taught that we were once something called "intelligences," which may have existed for as long as God has: "God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them" (TPJS, p. 354). In the D&C we read: "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (D&C 93:29). In addition, we have the following from Spencer W. Kimball: "Our spirit matter was eternal and co-existent with God, but it was organized into spirit bodies by our Heavenly Father" (The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 5, Salt Lake City, 1969).

These various statements (and others like them) suggest that there was man of some form, and God of some form, that existed from "the beginning" (whatever that means) and that God, being greater, became invested in helping man progress.

We do not know what that means scientifically, or how it relates to evolution, but with enough creativity we can certainly come up with some speculations. It is possible, of course, though we certainly have no evidence of this, that God is the end-product of evolution in the same way that man currently is. It is possible that God, having evolved to a point of superior knowledge and integrity, then reached across time or space or dimensions to intervene in our evolutionary process, or at least to comfort, counsel, and uplift us--and occasionally to interfere with human events based on His superior knowledge. It is also possible that evolution only looks like evolution but that the artifacts we find are the result of some slightly different process--such as the improved attempts of a Creator--in the same way that computers have "evolved" through the progress of mankind as creators. All this is speculation, of course, and there are endless other ways that we might imagine religion and science being simultaneously "true."

These thoughts, however, are a distraction from what matters. What is important is not whether we can solve the problem of God's existence. We probably can't. What matters is solving the problem of why His existence should matter to "us."  The critical issue of our lives is learning to use His existence to make ourselves better than we might have been otherwise. The religious don't always succeed at that, but those who do find a joy that makes life more meaningful.