My Pints Interview Angered the LDS (w/ Isaac Hess) – Cup o’Joe LIVE

Joe and Isaac Hess discuss Joe’s last appearance on Pints With Aquinas, that created some controversy among the LSD community.

Transcript:

Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and I’m here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Isaac Hess. Isaac, thanks for coming on.
Isaac:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Joe:
Isaac, we’re going to talk a little bit about Mormonism, which I thought I might … Church of Jews Christ for Latter Day Saints thought you might be a good person to talk to to sort of translate between these two worlds. You want to introduce yourself a little bit and maybe give a bit of a clue as to why I might think that’s the case?
Isaac:
Sure. So my name’s Isaac and I want to apologize right up front. I’m recovering from a cough. So I’ll try to mute myself whenever I cough, but if you hear me cough or clear my throat, that’s why. Yeah. So I was raised a Latter Day Saint. I just grew up through the ’80s and the ’90s and the early 2000s. I went on a mission. I attended BYU. So I was a Latter-day Saint for about 35 years. And then about five years ago, I converted to Catholicism and was baptized into the Catholic Church. And I’ve shared my story on some other platforms before. I’ve been on Matt Frad’s channel and Lila Rose. And so if people want a deep dive on my conversion story, they can kind of go there. But yeah, I still have a lot of connections to the Latter-day Saint community as well.
I have close family and friends who are still LDS.
Joe:
Yeah, I was going to say, it seems like you still have a lot of … I mean, sometimes you have the bitter X member and that doesn’t seem to be your case. You seem to have a great deal of love for the LDS community, maybe certain members in particular that you’re related to and friends and all that with. But yeah, so you’re XMO, I think is the term, but you’re not like a bitter XMO.
Isaac:
In internet parlance, I am XMO.
Joe:
Okay. Just showing, I’m cool. I’m a 40-year-old man being hip to the slang. Super. So for those who are just tuning in, this is called Cup of Joe, both because my name is Joe, but also because we drink coffee together. And I thought it was only fitting to use my Pints of the Quinas mug today. And I’ve got some Trader Joe’s roast and so I’m going to pour myself a cup of coffee. Isaac, you have a little bit of a background with coffee. Now I want to, for those of you who may be tuning in for the first time from an LDS background and saying, Hey, this seems like a slap in the face because of word of wisdom. This is what we do every week. This is not some sort of joke at your expense. So Isaac, that said, you have a story about the siren song of coffee as I’m playing.
Isaac:
Well, so I want to just point out that I am drinking from a new local coffee shop in my area that opened recently. So I’m from the town of Gilbert, Arizona. So if you’re here, look this place up. It’s 90s themed, which is hilarious to me. But I’ve had to remind myself that when I was a kid, things were 70s themed and that’s just- Well, that was a
Joe:
Different arrow. That was like 20 years before.
Isaac:
I know,
Joe:
Right?
Isaac:
So if you want to go and watch Saved by the Bell on a TV they have playing, they have a working payphone and wonderful people who run the shop and excellent coffee. So it’s the nook. I’m promoting them today because they’re in my new favorite
Joe:
Coffee shop. There’s a place like that in the suburbs of Kansas City that actually had … You can play old video games like Mortal Kombat, which is just crazy.
Isaac:
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. People are cashing in on my childhood. So anyway, yeah, so you were joking about coffee. So I’ve always loved the smell of coffee. Growing up as a Latter Day Saint kid, I used to, when I would walk through my local Smith’s grocery store in Orem, Utah, they would have an aisle with fresh coffee beans, the bulk aisle. And I would linger in the aisle smelling the coffee. I thought it smelled quite delicious. So becoming Catholic, the true reward is the fullness of our savior, Jesus Christ, but the secondary reward is the enjoyment of delicious coffee.
Joe:
That’s excellent. I was threatening Isaac beforehand that I was going to tell everyone. Isaac was faithful, but then he sacrificed his recommend in order to get good coffee because he just couldn’t resist the siren song. Okay. Well, anyway, a little bit of background as to what we’re talking about today. As some of you already know, last month I was on Matt Frad’s show, Pints with Aquinas. That episode just dropped on Monday. In it, we talked a lot about Mormonism and explored some of the problems with the system from a Catholic perspective. And in particular, we talked about just how big our differences in our conception of God are and whether what they mean by God even counts as God in kind of a classical theistic conception. I’m positive we’re going to talk a lot more about that pretty shortly. But as you might imagine, both that section and the interview more broadly generated a lot of response.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of backlash from Mormons. I thought it’d be good to get into the weeds, to be responsive to the critiques, to cover some of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And some of the responses are really thoughtful. Some of the questions are well worth answering and some of the memes are just glorious. Mike, could you put up the one meme I was really tickled by?
So for those of you who are listening and can’t see it, it’s the famous office meme where it says corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures and then the responses they’re the same picture. But in this case, it’s me as Pam and the … I think it’s Pam, isn’t that? I’m actually blanking on that.
Mike:
That’s Pam.
Joe:
Okay. But then it’s like, I think it’s Atheist United or whatever, some atheist group and then Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And it’s just like, oh yeah, Joe doesn’t know the difference between these two. As a representation of my position, it’s like comically wrong. As a meme, I thought it was hilarious and I thought they did a really disturbingly good job of plugging me into the meme in a pretty realistic … They got my suit and everything. I was really impressed.
Mike:
Not all of the memes were quite so terrible.
Joe:
No, there were some memes. So I was critical in the same episode of both Mormons and Gropers, and both groups can be a little defensive about any criticism. And so I was simultaneously accused of being a Nazi and a Jew for the same episode. And I’m a third secret thing that is neither of those two. So I thought it’d be good though not to just feed the trolls, but to actually cover some of the thoughtful, meaningful replies. And I want to see at the outset, we are absolutely not going to get to everything and I haven’t even seen everything produced. I’ve tried to watch a lot of it, but there’s hours of stuff. So just to give you a sense of some of the stuff we’re going to try to cover, Ward Radio did a two hour stream with Jasmine Rapley, Luke Hansen, Jacob Hanson, who I realized spelled their name differently and are not, as I assumed, related.
And of course, Carden Ellis, Caden Baylor, all those in favor had a fascinating 80-minute rebuttal with Joseph Lowell and Tara LaCore, who I believe is an LDS convert to Catholicism, looking at more of a philosophical perspective. So we’re definitely going to want to cover that. At the other end of the spectrum, a guy named Shad Brooks said he was going to do an autistic level deep dive, but then ended up producing what appeared to be a kind of crazy three hour long rant where there’s … I mean, it mostly was him kind of crashing out, but there were a few things that he said that I thought would be worth replying to. And I know we’re just scratching the surface. There’s another episode from a Mormon response perspective coming out, I think this Saturday. I know Emerson Green had an 80-minute long response, not to me, but to one of the guys from Ispiring Philosophy when he made the same point that Mormonism from a theological perspective is actually atheistic and we’ll explain what that means.
I haven’t even tried to watch that one. The other ones I’ve at least tried to watch and pull, I haven’t watched every moment, but tried to find the major points to respond to. Can
Mike:
I add a quick thing about Shad really fast? Yeah. So I was watching Shad’s content before he started doing all this crazy commentary stuff years ago, and he really started and found his bones as being a medieval night kind of YouTuber where it’s all about swords and armor and how people lived way back in medieval times. And it was really good stuff, really fun. And it seems like when he started this commentary channel, which I’m sure started out as event, but then once you start going down rage commentary, it becomes a drug, just so you get addicted to it.
Joe:
Yeah. I don’t want that to be this kind of in the other direction. I don’t want to just crash out or rage or do whatever because I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think that brings people closer to the truth. I mean, it can be really cathartic. This is very big in politics, just like yell at the other side, and I don’t think that’s good or helpful, which actually I think is maybe a good segue to the first topic I think we should cover, Isaac. You can take the meme down there if you want. One of the critiques people had wasn’t so much of anything that I said, but just the fact that I was the one saying it, that there’s this question of whether a non LDS person should have been on the show to critique or discuss LDS theology in the first place.
And I tried to be very clear upfront. I did not grow up Mormon. And anytime I’m talking about any system I didn’t grow up in, I’m well aware that things often look different from the inside than from the outside, which can sometimes be an important reason to have an outsider’s perspective, but also means that we can just completely talk past each other, that maybe you have a completely skewed vision. And I’m sure every person on here knows what I’m talking about. You’ve heard people who aren’t of your political affiliation talk about your party and your values and why you believe what you believe. If you’re Catholic, you’ve probably seen a gazillion episodes. I literally had one come out Tuesday of people claiming what the Catholic church believes and getting stuff wildly wrong. And it’s tempting to just say like, non-X people shouldn’t talk about X political group, religious group, whatever.
I think that’s a mistake and I’m happy to talk to you about why I think that. I’m curious your take, Isaac. But yeah, so anyway, I tried to be very clear. I’m going to do my best to charitably, accurately present the Mormon view before critiquing it, but I’m obviously not coming from an insider’s perspective. So some people seem to appreciate that Luke Hansen, Jasmine were very kind about that. On the other hand, if you want to pull up clip one, Chad thought that me trying to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position should be marked as a malicious lie. Do my best to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position.
CLIP:
Again, he’s not, right? If his intention was to fairly and charitably present our position, he would have a Latter Day Saint there to help him or to actually present what it is. All right. This is all coming through a biosource with the intent to belittle and present it as literally the title, incoherent. And so this is, again, he repeats the lie of intent here. And so this is another lie and it is a malicious lie.
Joe:
Okay. So that’s one take. As somebody said, the guy seems very passionate. I think that’s very passionate. So is it the standard, should it be the standard that you can only talk about Mormonism if there’s a Mormon present with you, Isaac? What would your take be on people making this kind of claim? Because I’m sure there are people who are upset that I’m talking to a Catholic who used to be Mormon.
Isaac:
Yeah. I was about to say, you just did it again, Joe.
Joe:
I know.
Isaac:
You clearly don’t learn from your mistakes. I think it just depends. I think there’s room for all sorts of different kinds of conversations. It’s, I think, absurd on its face if someone, and I’m not trying to attribute this to any particular person, but if you were to say basically every conversation about Mormonism on YouTube, say, has to have a practicing believing Latter Day Saint present, that just seems kind of silly. It’s okay for there to be people discussing their understanding of what the LDS church teaches and believes, just as it is vice versa. If a group of Protestants or Latter-day Saints are having a conversation about Catholicism, I don’t think that there’s anything that requires that you have a practicing, believing Catholic present.
Joe:
Right. If you’re preaching in an LDS temple about the great apostasy, I don’t think you need to invite a Catholic in to give the counter to that.
Isaac:
See, you’re just showing your ignorance there, Joe, because they don’t preach in their temples.
Joe:
Oh,
Isaac:
Okay. Yeah. No, I’m just teasing you. But also what I said was accurate. Yeah, fair. So if that’s all you did though, if you never spoke to a practicing Latter Day Saint, if you never spoke to practicing Catholics, if there wasn’t engagement and interaction between the two, if you just sort of shut yourself off from the other side, that’s also really bad. That’s just not intellectually, it’s not a good way of pursuing. So people will say things like, “If you really want to know the truth about what Latter Day Saints believe and think and what our doctrine is and what our history is, you should talk to a believing Latter-day Saint.” And there’s truth to that. That is going to be a crucial part of the process. It’s not the exclusive part of the process though. For any position, if you want to know the fullness of the position, it’s actually very helpful to encounter both the defenders and the critics of the position because they’ll offer different perspectives.
Joe:
Right. I mean, I’ve just used a political example. If you want to know how to think about a conservative policy, you should talk to conservatives, you should also talk to liberals or people who are critical libertarians or you should talk to insiders and outsiders and people who were one and then became the other. I think the echo chamber’s not good. And I’d say that in both directions. I think it’s bad if it’s just Catholics talking to other Catholics about other groups and I’ve been critical of that in the past. And I actually, I hope one thing people take from this, if you’re a Catholic and your knee-jerk response to seeing someone criticize the Catholic church is like, “We are being persecuted, you guys are being so unfair and you can’t substantively say what they’re getting wrong, it looks like whining and it looks like you just are really thin skinned.” And so you should learn from that.
As a Catholic, don’t do that because I think there were people who had legitimate grievances. They said, “It sounds like you’re saying X and that’s wrong or you got this detail wrong and all of that. ” I want to talk about all of that stuff, but then there were a lot of people who were just upset literally. I mean, the comments on Twitter seemed to be mostly people who literally wouldn’t even watch it because it was like, how dare a non-Mormon talk about Mormonism? And to make it more absurd, Jacob Hansen’s been on Pints. I did a dialogue with Jacob Hansen and a Protestant pastor. We had a debate. We’ve been on capturing Christianity together. So it isn’t as if I’m not willing to talk to LDS apologists or people who represent that perspective. I’m happy to.
Mike:
We have a comment from a viewer that I think is actually relevant to this. The great wa asks, why not just read the documents and articles of faith speaking to general followers of a faith is hit or miss on actually getting good information. That’s been my experience at least. And you addressed some of this in your interview on Pines.
Joe:
Yeah. I think, because one of the things I was particularly trying to do is to say this historic belief, there’s been a reversal on it. And so looking just at the present documents without saying, “Here’s this earlier bit of preaching or here’s this earlier lecture at the veil or here’s this earlier removed part of doctrines and covenants.” Even the name doctrines and covenants no longer makes sense because that whole section got removed. Comparing those two things isn’t possible if you’re just going from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints website where all of that stuff is kind of downplayed or scrubbed completely. And also for all the reasons solo scriptura doesn’t work, just expecting people to read the articles of confession or the documents of your faith and come away accurately understanding everything about it, like to just say like, “Here’s a book of Mormon.
Now you understand if everything Mormonism teaches or here are the standard works, now you’ve got everything.” That’s not as workable as I think people imagine it to be. It’s great to say, “I heard somebody claim that you guys believe this and I’m going to cross reference that with official sources.” But I do think if you want a sense of the lived reality of the thing, you sort of have to talk to the people living that reality.
Isaac:
Yep. I agree. And maybe the last comment I’ll make on this, and maybe we should go on to just some of the other critiques that people have made, but there’s different types of conversations as well. So the conversation you were having with Matt, it would’ve been a very different conversation if a practicing Latter Day Saint had been there. It would’ve been inevitably sort of turned into some kind of debate or something like that.
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. And
Isaac:
I’m happy to do that, but you’re right that it’s a different conversation. But it’s also good and fine also to have conversations between people who maybe agree and they’re discussing a different topic and I don’t know. So I agree that no one should silo themselves from criticism or from trying to really … But I think that it’s hard to make that charge against you. It’s true that Catholics and Latter Day Saints have their own lingo. And so certainly there are times when you and Matt would say something I think that I understood what you meant, but I think wouldn’t necessarily translate well. I can’t think of a specific example right now.
Joe:
Well- I can think of one where I got confused by something in a Latter Day Saint source that I referenced and was corrected on. I’ll get to that in a little bit. But when we talk about the protection from error in the temple, when it talks about the elders of Israel being protected from falling into error in the temple, Brigham Young
Isaac:
Teaches- You’re talking the Tabernacle.
Joe:
Sory, Tabernacle. There it is. This is exactly what I’m talking about. Yes, I did mean to say Tabernacle that I read that and it’s like, yeah, okay. So he’s going to preach something in the tabernacle and it’s basically ex- catheter and the word radio guys just laughed at that. You’re importing a Catholic idea of infallibility, that it’s rather a protection of the people rather than a protection of the individual leader. You know what I’m talking about there?
Isaac:
Yes. I can …
Joe:
I do know
Isaac:
What you’re talking about.
Joe:
And I’m sure we can talk more about that as we go, because that’s relevant for Adam God and it’s relevant for some of the stuff about the curse of Cain that Brigham Young said, where he would preach these things that actually were errors in the tabernacle and they weren’t corrected. But how that kind of works out in terms of what it means for his authority and status as a prophet is something that obviously people are going to disagree. All
Mike:
Right. So let’s get into a few of these clips here.
Joe:
One good joke that I wanted to make sure people saw that Isaac, you’re a latte desaint.
Isaac:
Yeah, I saw that.
Joe:
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good. Okay. So yeah, actually there was one other question I wanted to ask you real quick, Isaac. How can non-Mormons navigate this? Because I think the danger on the Mormon side is that it honestly looks a little culty. Now, I don’t think Church Jesus Christ Latter Day saints is a cult, but I do think when you say don’t talk to outsiders, don’t listen to them when they talk about your religion, don’t receive criticism from them, or when that’s the impression you give to the outside world, that gives, I think, a false impression of being cult-like, where I think it’s just kind of a bubble. I think all of us can really fall into that. But on the non-Mormon side, knowing that any critique, any question might run into that sort of response, do you have any tips for how to navigate that?
Isaac:
That’s a good question. And again, I think the way to navigate it would depend again on the style of conversation that you’re having, right? So if you’re in dialogue with a Latter-day Saint, then ask them what they think about what you’re saying. Don’t tell people this is … One thing that is always frustrating to someone, especially if you’re talking to them, is if you say, “You believe X, you believe Y.”
Joe:
Don’t even do that in your marriage.
Isaac:
Yes, that’s a great … Very true. Instead, what you can say from a Catholic point of view, what you can say is the Catholic church teaches X, the Catholic church teaches Y. That can even be difficult within Mormonism as well, because there’s not a unified doctrine in Mormonism about what constitutes doctrine. And so this can be very frustrating sometimes. You and Matt spoke about this a little bit about how you’re trying to critique and understand LDS teaching and theology, but it seems like anytime you get a grasp on it, someone comes along and says, “Hey, that’s not what we believe, or that’s not what we think, or I don’t believe that, whatever.” So if you really want to get in the weeds, I think the best thing to do is to look up the specific critique that you want. And you could say something like, “Latter Day Saint Prophets taught X.”That
Can be a true statement that’s easy to defend. And if you want to engage with a Latter Day Saint, like suppose you’re talking about Adam God theory, I think you can very defensively and clearly say Brigham Young taught the Adam God doctrine. So what does that mean? What are the implications? Was it a church doctrine? That’s a different question. Was it something that was to be believed on pain of sin or something?That’s a very Catholic terminology. By the way, Latter Day Saints wouldn’t speak that way. I’m translating this into Catholic speak. So I think that it can be difficult, but just trying to do your best charitably, trying to understand the other person and seeking not to overgeneralize claims and to leap to conclusions.
Joe:
I think that’s a great … Actually, let’s pivot to Adam God. I know it was not the kind of outline we’d originally kicked around, but I think because you raised that, this is a source of some confusion and some of the pushback is like, “Oh, you’re just quote mining, you’re just taking these misleading quotes from historic sources.” Can you briefly explain Adam God to people who just assume they know nothing about it and this is their first time hearing about it?
Isaac:
Sure. I mean, I’ll try because it’s a confusing doctrine. Brigham Young, the short version is something like this. Brigham Young, after the Latter-day Saints had settled Utah, began at a certain point in his life to preach a doctrine that the God that is our God, and I know this will sound very loaded and strange to a lot of people, is Adam, that Adam is our God. Adam meaning the first man on the earth. So where would he get an idea like this? Well, prior to this, Joseph Smith had taught a progression that Latter Day that humans can become divine and that God himself had once been a man like us or like Jesus Christ. I mean, there’s a lot of different interpretations to what Joseph Smith said, and I want to put that upfront, right? Different people read some of Joseph Smith’s late teachings in slightly different ways, but Brigham Young seemed to read it in a very literal sense that God the Father had been a human that we are all … We kind of exist in this great concourse of being, this kind of cycle where there’s a constant ongoing process of humans becoming gods and Gods then creating more humans, having more spirit children and things like that, who then go on this same journey.
We all kind of go on the same journey over and over again. We go on the same journey as those that came before us. There will be worlds without ends, those who come after us, that sort of thing. So Brigham Young really caught onto this idea. And if you have that idea, then you can start cogently asking yourself, “Well, then what is the identity of our God? Who is he? ” If there’s a sort of never ending, ongoing round of this kind of deification going on, who was our God, right? Does that make sense so far?
Joe:
Yeah, it does. It does.
Isaac:
So at one point in a sermon in Utah and then several sermons afterwards, Brigham Young advanced the teaching that the God of this world was Adam, the same person who was in the garden and who was not just the spirit father of all the people, but actually like the physical origin of humanity and even said things like that, God came into the garden as Adam, brought one of his wives because Mormonism was very entwined with doctrines of polygamy at that time, brought one of his wives into the garden with him and used that to populate the earth.That became the Adam God doctrine. It was controversial when he preached it and remained controversial for the rest of his life. He never stopped preaching it. He didn’t preach it often, but there’s a mistake that sometimes people will be like, “Well, he just preached it this one time.” He didn’t preach it in every sermon, but you can find sermons throughout basically the rest of his prophetic career where he does preach it.
And then after he died, it kind of lingered a little bit and then just kind of eventually disappeared because no one really had really accepted the teaching, I would say, in a deep way.
Joe:
Okay. So that is going to then lead to this question about how to make sense of that from a non-Mormon perspective. Because one of the apologetic arguments is, okay, you guys reversed course on doctrine. And that gets into this big nuanced question that I think is actually kind of hard to answer of what is doctrine, what was considered doctrine in the 19th century. So I guess there’s a couple levels to this. One is you’ll have people who just don’t tell the truth about Adam God and they’re like, “Oh, there was a misunderstanding. There was a misreading.” I saw a lot of people just asserting like, “Oh, he didn’t actually say that he didn’t actually mean that. ” And I would suggest that’s really demonstrably not true. And to see that you have both multiple eyewitness accounts from Latter-day Saints, not from hostile witnesses, Wilfred Woodrow, excuse me, Wilfred-
CLIP:
Woodruff.
Joe:
I don’t know why I was having … I kept wanting to say Woodrow Wilson. Well,
Isaac:
You should have grown up singing a song that we sang that recited all of the Latter Day prophets so we could remember them in
Joe:
Order. There you go. Well, he records it in his journal as saying, “Adam is Michael or God and all the God that we have anything to do with. ” So it’s very clear, not just from the accounts of the transcripts of his sermons, 1854,
Isaac:
To illustrate that it was resisted, another member of the 12 apostles actively resisted this teaching and preached against it. And so it’s very clear that people in Brigham’s time understood what he was saying.
Joe:
Yeah.
Isaac:
Yeah.
Joe:
And it seemed like he’d been saying variations of this, as you said, for years and years. And then eventually this kind of becomes enshrined at the lecture of the veil, right?
Isaac:
It does get inserted as part of the temple ceremony. Yes.
Joe:
So do you want to explain that for non- LDS?
Isaac:
So just high level, the LDS temple ceremony has a section that’s called the endowment. And during the endowment portion of the ceremony, Latter-day Saints make covenants with God, but also receive instruction around God’s plan of salvation. And it does tie into this process a bit about this great course of being that I mentioned, this process of someone becoming divinized and then populating world, that sort of thing. It was more explicit in Brigham Young’s date. And when Brigham Young was alive, there was a section of the endowment that doesn’t actually exist anymore called the Lecture at the Veil, which was a lecture. It originated with, I believe, just a lecture Brigham Young would give or did give once at the end of an endowment session explaining to all the people what they had just witnessed, how to interpret it. It was an interpretive … It was like, “This is how you should interpret what you just went through,” because it’s presented in narrative in a sort of dramatic form with people acting out parts and that sort of thing.
And this was recorded at some point and somewhat standardized. And so we have the record of the Latter-day Saint Temple ceremonies are not public, but what we have is Brigham Young’s secretary wrote down, he basically said, “Hey, we had an update to the lecture on the veil. This is what it says.” And he wrote
Joe:
Down- Is that John Nuttle or is that-
Isaac:
I can’t remember the
Joe:
Name. Okay. I know there’s a John Nudle transcribed account of the 1877 lecture.
Isaac:
So he’s not writing it down word for word. He’s not taking a dictation. It’s not the official thing, but he’s giving the gist. This is what the lecture of the veil says.
Joe:
And here’s what it says, at least if we’re thinking of the same document.
Isaac:
He
Joe:
Said, “Adam was an immortal being when he came on the earth. He had lived on an earth similar to ours. He’d received the priesthood and keys thereof.” Now notice we should get back to that because it suggests he’s receiving them from someone and had been faithful in all things and gained his resurrection and his exhaltation and was crowned with glory immortality in the eternal lives and was numbered with the gods for such he came through his faithfulness and had begotten all the spirits that was to come to this earth Truth. And Eve, our common mother, who is the mother of all living, bore those spirits in the celestial world. And when this earth was organized by Elohim, Jehovah and Michael, who is Adam our common father. So I mean, it’s handwritten. You can tell he’s, like you said, it’s not a word for word transcription, but it’s also very clear what the gist is.
And the gist is very different than what- It just is
Isaac:
What you could refer to as the Adam God doctrine. Right. Right. And it fits with the content of Brigham Young’s other sermons and teachings and the journal entries of Wilford Woodruff and others and things like that. All of this gives us, I think, a pretty high confidence that Brigham Young taught this doctrine and believed it.
Joe:
So I think there’s three ways to go about approaching the Adam God doctrine. I think the bad way is for non-Mormons to say, “You guys secretly believe Adam God, or you guys believe this and this is false.” I think it’s very clear. Adam God doctrine is rejected and even condemned in language that suggests it’s a damnable thing to believe in. Is that fair to say?
Isaac:
Oh, totally fair. So just a quick, funny story. When I was in high school, I grew up in Utah and I would sometimes go up to attend the church’s general conference, which is twice a year. Church leaders speak to all the members. It’s a great spiritual experience for Latter-day Saints. And there’s always Christian protestors out there, usually evangelicals and baptists and things telling us all that we’re going to hell and that we should repent and believe the gospel, that sort of thing. And I remember one of them handing me a tract and as I’m walking in with some of my high school friends and I open it and I start reading it and it was all about Adam God. And we were just laughing because we’d never heard of any of this. So saying things like, and they were somewhat laughable. Mormons believe that Adam is God.
And I remember just turning to my friends and saying, “Where do they get this stuff? They just invent the most random things.” So if you tell a Latter Day Saint today, you believe that God is Adam or Adam is God, it sounds nonsensical to them. It’s completely foreign to their experience in the church and that sort of thing. At the same time, it is rooted in something real within history, I think that we can say with confidence.
Joe:
Okay. Yeah. So bad form would be doing that. Better form, I think would be to say, here’s this obvious contradiction. You’ve got this complete reversal. These two things can’t both be true. You can’t say Adam is our God. Adam isn’t our God. Just the principle of non-contradiction. If it means anything, you’ve got this doctrinal reversal that undermines your credibility as a truth-telling, reliable source of information, religion, particularly when it is the prophet making these false claims and when it’s part of the actual induction ceremony. It isn’t like an optional belief. At one point, Brigham Young explicitly ties it to salvation. Is that right?
Isaac:
So Brigham did. I actually think this is partially evidence that the people weren’t receiving the teaching the way he wanted them to.
Joseph Smith, when Joseph Smith taught a doctrine, the people believed it. When Brigham taught a new doctrine, the people seemed to kind of resist it. So I think from the LDS perspective, I think that there’s a few things. They don’t have a doctrine of prophetic infallibility at all. By which I mean, we believe in papal infallibility, which means that we believe there are at least some instances that when a Pope speaks, you can be confident that what he’s saying is true. There’s not such a doctrine in Mormonism. So there’s no clear criteria by which you can say, “No, no, no. This should have been…” In this instance, he was clearly claiming this or claiming that in terms of infallibility. So there’s that. They’re also still kind of think developing … They’re sort of working through this question right now in LDS theology is like, how do we determine what is church doctrine?
In recent years, they’ve settled on this idea that doctrine is … You can be confident something is doctrine when it’s taught by all of the church’s highest leaders simultaneously, the first presidency and the quorum of the 12 apostles. That is a more recent sort of theological development within Mormonism. Some Latter-day Saints want to kind of backdate that, be like, look, if you were to ask Brigham Young how he thought doctrine was established, he certainly would not have said when we all speak together. So I think the question then becomes something like, what does it mean if you have a prophet who is speaking at a minimum in his role as a prophet and teaches something as revealed by God that is not true, that now you reject? What does that mean about whether that person is a true or false prophet?
Joe:
Yeah. So this is … I tried to make that argument. So Deuteronomy 18 gives this standard, but the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, how may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. So it’s true. I mean, we don’t want to apply a standard of just like everything a prophet ever says and does is going to be right. That’s clearly not the standard that either the LDS hold for themselves or their leaders, nor is it the standard that you are going to get from the Bible because prophets do all sorts of things that are not good sometimes.
But when they’re speaking on behalf of God, if you can’t trust that, then this is not a problem. I mean, even the term prophet you’re speaking for, that’s the pro and prophet. You’re speaking for God. If we can’t trust you to speak for God and not speak for a false God or invent your own ideas and call them God’s ideas, then you’re not a prophet. Now, I want to make clear what the argument isn’t. So if you can play, Mike, if you can play the clip Luke says in word radio that he thinks I’m just saying that there’s a theological problem and that’s the problem. I sent this to him very late, so hopefully this will work. It might just be audio.
CLIP:
But to wrap up, Adam, God, real quick. Okay. So they’re just coming from this completely opposite perspective because the idea, and Joe lays this out a couple different times in the episode, is like, they got God wrong, therefore it’s idolatry, therefore bad, wrong. They’re going to hell if they believe that. And they’re just coming from it from this cretal mindset like you got to get God fililosophically right, and then you’re good to go. You’re there.
Joe:
The best part of- Thank you. I know. Sorry, Luke, you look like Shad and that was my own fault.
Isaac:
Yeah, I was going to say, boy, that’s quite the transformation for Luke.
Joe:
Yeah, or Shad. I mean, obviously from a credal perspective, you’re getting theology disastrously wrong. I think that yeah, sure, that’s a problem. I don’t think that you have to go in that direction because I think it’s probably fair to say that just doesn’t seem to be perceived as a big problem from the Latter Day Saints perspective. I would suggest a different thing. It’s not just you got God wrong, therefore it’s idolatry. I don’t think that’s true. I think you can have wrong ideas about God and it’s not automatically idolatry. But the Old Testament student manual from the Church of Jesus Christ Letter Day Saints website says, “Idolatry is the worship of false Gods, which may or may not involve the manufacturing of images.” So in this case, it seems like from an LDS perspective, not just from a credo Christian perspective, worshiping Adam, who isn’t our God and saying this is the only God we have anything to do with, is very clearly idolatry.
And this isn’t like a personal moral failing. He was preaching idolatry in the tabernacle, insisting that you have to become an idolater to become a member and that your salvation depends on it. I think that is a pretty definitive disproof of at least Brigham Young’s reliability to be called a prophet of God. But I realize I say all of that and people just kind of shrug it off. So I’m obviously missing something and how it’s received. Can you translate … Why is that not just game set match?
Isaac:
I think that Latter-day Saints are more comfortable living in the tension than you would expect them to be. So Latter-day Saints have lived with a doctrine of having living prophets for almost 200 years. And
Joe:
When
Isaac:
You have that kind of personal experience … Okay, let me share just two little anecdotes from my own life. The first is growing up, Latter-day Saints are led by 15 men that they refer to as prophets. All of the first presidency and all of the quorum of the 12 apostles, first presidency is three people. All 15 of them are sustained as prophet sears and revelators by the church. But just growing up, you know that they’ve all said things that the church doesn’t really believe in. There was a really well-known LDS apostle named Bruce R. McConkey in the ’70s and ’80s was kind of when he was at his heyday, I believe. That was just prior to my time. And when I was growing up, he was kind of thought of as like Uncle Bruce, like, yeah, Uncle Bruce, great guy, sometimes says things. Do you know what I mean?
And so I really think that in part, it’s like when you’ve lived with this doctrine long enough and just have the personal experience that for Latter Day Saints, they believe that these are very, very good men who are in tune with God, but don’t always get things right. And they’re comfortable with that, right? I was comfortable with that as a Latter Day Saint. So when you’re Catholic and you’re not used to believing in prophets, you kind of have this vision like, “Well, if there is a prophet, this is what they look like, this is how they’d be. ” Latter Day Saints just have, I think, a different model in their mind than we have. So that’s kind of the first thing. But the second thing is, this is kind of my own personal story too. When I really began to grapple with questions like Adam God or other, looking through church history at the times, and I know we also have on the list to talk about the church’s history with African Americans and people of African descent
In general, I started to ask myself, these prophets seemed to be very confident in what they were teaching at that time, that it was the will of God that it was from God. And now the church basically says it’s not from God, right, what they said. So when they teach me today, if say a Latter-day Saint Prophet says something that they want me to stand up to be countercultural in some way, whether it’s to be faithful to Christ’s teaching on monogamy or heterosexual marriage or just anything, gender roles, anything, just anything that is a bit countercultural and they’re telling me that’s from God, how do I know that they’re not wrong now in the same way that those prophets were wrong then? That was the type of thing that made me start to wonder how I should think about this sort of prophetic fallibility. But if you feel like there’s some independent reason, which most Latter-day Saints do, they believe they have a witness of the Holy Spirit, that the sort of Mormon system is true, then you kind of just abide in the tension
Joe:
A bit. Yeah. I mean, for the record, I have this same maybe just difficulty empathizing with or understanding at an experiential level, the vision of kind of what we might call liberal Catholicism of thinking like, “Oh, we could just reverse doctrine on something like women’s ordination.” And it’s like, well, no, if you think that can happen, what do you think is actually true in a trustworthy way? If we can’t know which things we actually know with certainty and which things are just guesses or speculation or theological opinion, that’s a much bigger problem than one particular doctrine. And that creates this whole system of, well, what do you know? What can you actually place your trust in? Yep. Well, okay, there’s two ways we could go right now. We could talk about the big heat and all the smoke about in what sense we can and can’t talk about Mormonism as atheistic, or we can talk about, you referenced Curse of Cain and the treatment of people of
Isaac:
Africanism. Let’s talk about Mormon atheism.
Joe:
Okay, great. Well, I’m going to backtrack away. Let’s talk about the topic of whether Mormons are atheists. Thank you. That’s a good distinction. Okay. So I’m not going to play the clip just because I want to be kind of respectful of time. I was asked by Matt on the show in what sense we would say Mormonism is or is not atheistic. You can watch that clip for the nuanced answer, but I said experientially, psychologically, it would be wrong to say Mormons are atheists. They were like, “No, no. I talk to Heavenly Father every day or my entire life is built around him, et cetera, et cetera.” And all of that can be true. We’ll put that in one category. But then from a philosophical perspective, if you say, okay, when we use the term God, we don’t mean it here as a proper name. There’s this character in the Bible called God.
We mean broad level, philosophically. Is there a God who made everything or not or is there just an uncreated universe or just matter? Atheists and Mormons are going to say there is not a God who created the entire universe. It’s just matter. Is that a fair thing to say at the outset?
Isaac:
You brought up a lot there. I did. So the last thing I would say, no, I don’t think that’s fair to say. Tell me more. But because of what I’m going to be a little technical on you. You said there’s not a God who created the entire universe, but it’s perfectly possible for a Mormon to believe in multiple universes, right? Even holding a sort of like … So I will just speak autobiographically. When I was a Mormon, my own belief around this, because I had received this teaching that there were many gods that’s very explicit in Mormon teaching,
But we have one Father, our God, right? Yeah. We’re sort of monotheistic in that sense. I did not believe that Mormon teachings about God living by a planet, Kolob or a star. I think Kob is a star. I didn’t think that was literal. I thought that was figurative speech. And I think there’s plenty of reason you can take that figuratively within the LDS system in the same way that we can take lots of Old Testament passages about cosmology figuratively. And I thought of God as the creator of this universe, that this whole everything, everything you could possibly see or find or whatever, there’s only one source of it, one who had made it, and that’s God the Father, right?
Joe:
Can I question that? So I’m thinking about Doctrines and Covenants 93 says, “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence or the light of truth was not created or made, neither indeed can be. ” So how does that work with- When
Isaac:
I say made, I don’t mean made Xenihillo. That’s not what I thought as a Latter-day Saint.
Joe:
So what do you mean by made? What existed before God stepped in and then how does that kind of change?
Isaac:
I didn’t have, and again, this is just autobiographical. I’m not even claiming there’s other Latter-day Saints who have the same view as me. I don’t think I thought about it so deeply. So one point I’ll make is that early LDS prophets definitely thought and taught that there was one universe that our world was like, God was the God of this world and there were other worlds of God within the same universe. But you could also say something like, well, the early Christians had incorrect beliefs about cosmology,
Joe:
You
Isaac:
Know what I mean? That sort of thing.
Joe:
I don’t think that’s like game set match against
Isaac:
The women. Yeah, you reinterpret as you understand better the physical world that you live in and you’re kind of like, how do I understand these scriptures within these other things that I know? So I sort of had this idea, the Big Bang, a lot of times if you’re really love the Kalam argument, what I’m going to say might bother you, but the Big Bang is actually not necessarily proof that the universe began to exist. All it proves is that there was some moment when all the matter in the universe was condensed into an extremely small space, which then expanded afterwards. So why couldn’t God have taken material from something else? Started with the big bang. Do you know what I mean?
Joe:
Oh
Isaac:
Yeah, I do. Something I didn’t have a clear sense. I’m not saying I had a well thought out idea of what it was. I’m just saying there were options open to me, right? It was just kind of like, it wasn’t something that totally didn’t sit with me. There was no way for me to incorporate. So that’s why I’m saying when you say that long thing that you said and you ended it with the God of this universe, I was kind of like, well, it’s complicated.
Mike:
Yeah. Can I interrupt with a viewer comment here?
Isaac:
Yeah.
Mike:
So we have a few LDS in chat. Hello, and God bless you all thank you guys for showing up. One of them has sent in a Super Chat, but also had a comment here that I thought was worth addressing. This is Z Blade Grayson who says, look up the definition of theist and atheist. He’s replying to a different commenter, God meaning eternal and supreme being of the universe, which we do believe, saying that Mormons do believe in a supreme being of the universe, which that created everything it seems as though.
Joe:
Yeah. Okay. I think this is really important to set straight. The difference between God is like the biggest being in the universe or the supreme being within the universe compared to God as what Paul Tillic and others have called the ground of being, this source of being itself is actually a huge and important difference. If you could play clip two, Terre Clacore understood my argument I think better than a lot of the people responding to it, which I think it probably points to me not presenting the argument well.
Mike:
You said clip two,
Joe:
Correct? Yeah,
CLIP:
Clip two. Got you. That not only in like the- It’s
Joe:
Just going to be shad pictures.
CLIP:
Let’s say Nicine Christian tradition, but also the Jewish tradition, the Muslim tradition, and also kind of certain versions of the Hindu and Buddhist Eastern tradition. David Bitley Hart in his book, The Experience of God, he talks about this. They all kind of share a classical view. So it’s easier for them, even though they’re across religious traditions to talk about God because their tradition does kind of converge on that where the Latter-day Saint tradition is different. So that might be what they’re getting at too, that they’re not enunciating it as much as I have here.
Joe:
Yeah. I think that he’s pointing in exactly the right direction. If you want to understand this argument, read David Bentley Hart’s book, The Experience of God, really like pages 28 to 30, we’ll cover this, that he explains that there’s two ways that the term God or God, lowercase G can be used. So we can talk about the gods as just spiritual beings. Elohim can refer to angels and spirits if you want to talk about genies or demons or anything like that. Powerful spiritual beings could exist in the universe. And then from an LDS perspective, you’ve got the whole other issue of spirit matter where what do we even mean by spirit? I’m going to leave that aside. You can have powerful spiritual beings in the universe. You can talk about a God in that sense, but as he goes on to say, to speak of God properly, and this is in the sense in which Orthodox, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, behind a lot of ancient paganism and so on uses it.
We mean the same thing by God. We mean, as he puts it, an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things, and for that reason, absolutely imminent to all things. Those are the common understandings. So when we’re talking just in general, “Hey, do you believe in God?” What we mean is that there are other ways you can use the term God, but in the particular, we might tell you the philosophical sense, that’s what we mean. There is also, I mean, you could say, “Hey, I guess let me put it this
Isaac:
Way.” Can you hear me, Mike? You’re muted.
Joe:
Sorry about that. I was starting to say, let me put it this way. Let’s say you believe there was a guy named Jehovah who was friends with Moses, and he played a trick on him by speaking to him from the Burning Bush. Now, if you said to a believer, “Do you believe Jehovah really spoke to Moses from a burning bush?” Both you and that believer might say yes to that question, but you mean such radically different things by it, that in one sense it’s like, “Okay, well, we wouldn’t call you a theist just because you think Jehovah talked to Moses.” So what I’m trying to say is yes, absolutely. There is very clearly a belief in the reality and identity of Jehovah as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses and Joseph and so on. What I’m suggesting is what is meant by that doesn’t automatically translate to what the rest of the world means by theism.
I mean, I guess two questions for you, Isaac. I know I gave you a ton to work with again. Does that distinction make sense and is that a fair presentation of things?
Isaac:
The distinction does make sense. I don’t know whether it’s a fair presentation of thing. I’m not sure what you mean by that in terms of like, is it fair for the LDS position? I’ve told you over text since your Pine’s video dropped that I’m not a fan of this argument because I don’t think that it … It seems like one of those things that could be classified as technically true, but not useful in any way. You know what I mean?
Joe:
Yeah. I think it is useful in one sense, but I actually largely agree with you. If you’re having a discussion with a Mormon,
Isaac:
I’ll start with- Useful in a narrow set, a narrow context, right? So philosophically, words often have a technical meaning and an everyday usage. I think that that’s pretty clear. And so even philosophically, there’s not a single definition that’s accepted for what theism means. There’s different schools of though within the philosophy of religion. There is a particular classical view that is exactly what you described, where what is meant by theism is a metaphysics in which God is the ground of all explanation, right? That all explanation bottoms out in God in the metaphysics of theism, whereas atheism is a metaphysics where the explanation bottoms out in something else, right? There’s different species of atheism. There’s materialism, there’s non-material atheism, that sort of thing, non-materialist atheism. So there’s this very sort of technical, philosophical debate you can have then. In everyday usage, what people mean, if you were to just go and ask, go pull a thousand people, Joe, off the street and ask them if Mormons are atheists, and I will bet you get a thousand nos and a thousand, you know what I mean?
Joe:
Unless I happen to get fan from Inspiring Philosophy or I know
There’s a religious studies journal article called Our Mormons Theists from a Housecapian. So yeah, but absolutely. I agree with you. The reason I tried to couch it in the terms of putting it in philosophy particularly, and I want to respond to some of the other philosophical critiques that it got, is that if the arguments for God, the classical organs for God, like the Five Ways, Kalam, et cetera, work, a lot of those arguments are going to disprove both an atheist materialist who says matters always existed and it’s not created by anyone. They’re also going to disprove Mormonism, which also, as I understand it, teaches that matter always existed and it wasn’t created by anyone. That actually on those points, an atheist and a Mormon, maybe a less controversial way to put it would be on the major points that Christians disagree with atheists, on a lot of those points, Mormons line up with the atheist side of the equation on things like-
Isaac:
I think that depends on what you classify as the major points,
Joe:
Right? Yes.
Isaac:
If you look at how Latter Day Saints-
Mike:
Oh yeah, please, sorry. We have a viewer comment here from someone who I think was in one of the clips that you showed. This is LDS philosophy saying it’s not even technically true.You should have Joseph read from that video. I’m sorry?
Joe:
I think that’s Joseph Lowell. If it’s not … I guess LES philosophy, let me know. Okay. Sorry, go
Mike:
Ahead. It says, “It’s not even technically true. You showed a clip of Tariq from that video, but none of the sections where I explained in the philosophy of language why the argument doesn’t make any sense.”
Isaac:
Real quick, before you jump in on that, can I just finish my quick thought? I’ll be very quick. Yeah, please. It depends on what you mean by the major points between atheists. If you were to track the lives, look at how Latter Day Saints live versus how atheists live, and you were to try to just classify people like that, you would absolutely put them in the theist camp. They’re praying, they’re living moral lives, they’re striving to repent. Do you know what I mean? So there’s a lot of assumptions baked in if you say something like, “Well, in the major points, they agree with atheists.” I think that’s a pretty loaded, feels like a loaded thing to say to me.
Joe:
That’s fair. I was saying the major points of dispute, not the major points of how life is lived. I agree with you there. If you’re saying kind of a phenomenological plan of life, the way they’re trying to live their life looks much more like the way a credo Christian is going to try to live their life.
So yeah, I think that’s completely fair. And maybe the point that I was making takes too many caveats to even be helpful or useful. I was trying to point out the conception of God difference is not just, “Hey, we both believe in this transcendent God, we just understand his properties differently.” That’s how a lot of people received it. It’s rather that even what ordinary people, regardless of religion, mean by God from a philosophical sense is something that this is actually a point of divergence. So I want to respond to, as I understand Joseph Lowell’s clip. Actually, clip four, I’m just going to let him speak for himself.
CLIP:
Because my view is right and yours is wrong and we disagree, that doesn’t mean we’re not talking about the same thing. And so you just take that same view about Christian Columbus, the same thing that is about water and you apply that to God. It doesn’t matter if Latterday saints are wrong, which we might well be. Even if we have radically false views about God, given some of the details about the way the word God is used in our community and the historical uses of it, I think it’s straightforwardly true that we are still talking about God. And notice that if we’re not, we’re not actually disagreeing with Catholics. If we’re not talking about God, Catholics don’t disagree with us about God because we’re talking about the same thing, right?
Joe:
Okay. So I think that’s a perfectly legitimate critique from one perspective. And I actually teed that up in the interview itself. If I
Mike:
Could also add in there, you use a similar idea of the reference in your own video on the Muslims believing in the
Joe:
Same God. That’s right. I do. And I actually use this same argument about reference in the conversation with Matt Fratt. There is one sense, and if you say there is this character, I’m using Jehovah instead of God just for clarity’s sake, there’s this character called Jehovah in the Bible. We think he really exists. We think he is powerful and he loves us and he has a plan for us. Mormons and credal Christians are going to say, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, across the board. We understand his character, properties of him differently, but we both believe in him. We just understand him differently. That’s Lawul’s argument, as I understand it. I completely agree with that if you’re saying Jehovah in the Bible. But the problem is that from the question of, is atheism or theism true? Again, this is why I tried to give the example of let’s say somebody thought Jehovah was just a friend of Moses and so he really does exist, but he’s just like another guy and he was pretending to be the transcendent God of the universe and he was just hiding behind the bush and talking to Moses.
Does that person still believe in Jehovah? Yeah, in one sense, depends on what you mean. In another important sense, no, they don’t think there is a God of the universe. They just think it was Moses’ friend tricking him. So to say, well, we’re obviously both talking about Jehovah is, again, true in one sense within the narrative, but it’s not true in the deeper sense of, do we both believe that there is this God who spoke to Moses? No. One of them thinks God spoke to Moses. The other one Thinks Moses’ friend spoke to Moses. So it’s not just a disagreement about properties of God. It’s actually a disagreement about whether it’s God or not. And so similarly, if they said, “Well, it wasn’t Moses’ friend, it was an alien.” And Jehovah put things here on this planet, but it wasn’t the transcendent God. It was just an alien from another planet who put things on the planet.
You can find atheists who believe that. You can find atheists who believe life on this planet started because aliens populated it from another world. My argument is the Mormon view looks closer to that, at least the historic Mormon view of beings from another world, Adam and Eve, or God or whatever, populated the planet. That looks more like the ancient aliens atheist than it does classical theism. I don’t know. I know Isaac, you’re going to want to push back on that, so please.
Isaac:
Well, this is reminding me a lot. I want to read a verse from scripture, if I may. Please. Remind them of this and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. And this reminds me a lot of, say, our LDS Christians debate. We’re now arguing our Latter-day Saints theists. You end up spending a disproportionate amount of time just arguing about what the proper understanding of a certain term should be. Because your critiques about Latter-day Saint theology of God I think are largely correct and I would largely share them. When I’ve converted to Catholicism, I underwent what I think of as a type of conversion of my view of what it meant to believe in God. But I certainly, but I’ll just tell you, it did not at all feel to me like I was going from being an atheist to a theist.
It very much felt more like I was receiving more truth, more light, more understanding to expand upon what I already believed. And so I think that my general view in all these types of discussions is I’m just not that interested in having a huge argument with people about whether or not Latter-day Saints are atheists. It strikes them as farsical on its face.
It would strike the average person as being farcical on its face. Therefore, it’s inevitably going to just end up getting into these weeds of like, “Well, what I mean by atheism and what I mean by theism and the philosophical meaning is this and the … ” Do you know what I mean?
Joe:
Yeah, I do. Rather
Isaac:
Than now we’re not really discussing the actual doctrine or what the problems are or why it should be a problem.
Joe:
I think that’s a completely legitimate pushback from both you and from several people who saw it. And I take that point. I actually think there’s a comment, the good fight Tony made at 9:59, he said, “Maybe just rephrase, LDS doesn’t hold to or teach classical theoism.” That’s a very uncontroversial way of putting-
Isaac:
Not only is that uncontroversial, they would agree and they would agree enthusiastically.You take some of the comments that Latter Day scenes like Jacob Hanson has said, and they’re just very clear. They’re like, “We don’t believe in a God who is simple and unchangeable and immutable,” that sort of thing.
Joe:
Right. Actually, I was going to play that in clip five, but you just summarized it really well. Jacob Hanson is
Isaac:
Really-
Joe:
Perfect being theology is not the Mormon view at all.
Isaac:
Correct. They’re totally willing and the ones who really know their doctrine don’t dispute that they don’t share a classical theist worldview.
Joe:
Right. So I guess maybe I should have talked to you about this beforehand. The way I could have avoided that whole controversy is just say, look, they don’t believe in classical theism. There’s good reasons to believe from reason that classical theism is true and those arguments aren’t just going to work against an atheist. They’re also going to work to anyone not holding classical theism like Mormons.
Isaac:
Yeah. If I could ask you a question, Joe, because I talked to you, I wanted to ask you this and I hope you think we have time for it. I don’t know how long you want to go.
Joe:
I can
Isaac:
Go longer. I think people are enjoying the episode. I can go
Joe:
Longer too. Okay, good.
Mike:
I don’t have a ton of time.
Joe:
Okay. You let us know when we have to jump off.
Mike:
Okay.
Isaac:
Okay. One of the things you said in Matt Frad’s interview was, I wish I’d pulled up the exact quote, but you said something, you were talking about Latter Day Saints, they have this, they have that, they have this, they have that. And then you said what they don’t have is philosophy. And I want to ask you both to explain what you meant by that, but also to explain what you think the proper role is of philosophy and revelation. Because for a Latter-day Saint, if they hear something like that, they’ll probably think to themselves, many of them, yeah, right. What do we need philosophy for? We have God’s revelation. Are you subjecting the revelation of God to your human, fallible philosophy and logic? You say our doctrine can’t be true because you’ve thought about it and decided, but if God says it, isn’t it just true?
Shouldn’t our philosophy follow revelation?
Joe:
Okay, that’s a really good question. I would say this, you need philosophy. So I guess two things. You asked two parts in the question. I’m not saying there aren’t good faithful Mormons who are also really into philosophy. Obviously there are. What I mean is that when you have classical theism, particularly Catholicism, has a rich and robust philosophical tradition of how we interpret reality and scripture. And so we can access that tradition and people are going to be critical. It’s too indebted to Greek thought, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a very common kind of critique. There isn’t, as I see it, a similarly robust or universal within LDS kind of system of philosophy or interpretation, which is one of the reasons I think you get things like, “Well, sometimes prophets just get things wrong about God and that’s okay and we move on. ” And you talk to three different LDS about a certain doctrine and you might hear three different answers of, “This is what we believe.
This is an optional view. Nobody believes that. ” And I mean, a lot of the responses come down to things like that. If you ask how many gods are there, does Heavenly Father have a Father? Those kinds of questions. From an outsider’s perspective, it is mystifying where the theology can feel very individualized, but also basic philosophical things like the principle of non-contradiction. You want to just access that and say, “Hey, look, they said this in the 19th century, they’re saying this now. One of those two things has to be false because reality doesn’t just change like that. ” And I mean, obviously things can change over times in terms of a practice, but it can’t just be the case that Adam used to be our God and now isn’t or whatever or that the curse of Cain was this and now it’s not and so on.
Isaac:
It seems like, at least so far, you’re answering my question by pointing out philosophical problems, but I haven’t heard you explain why you could rule out revelation based on philosophy and why that’s not putting philosophy first rather than God’s revelation first.
Joe:
Yeah. So there’s basic ways that we know that things are true. And so even go back to Deuteronomy 18, where if a prophet tells you something is from God and then it’s disproved, you don’t believe the prophet, that we are expected to use reason to take what we’re hearing in terms of alleged revelation and make sense of whether it’s true or not. Now, one of the pushbacks I got on this is, “Oh, you can’t use this Deuteronomy 18 example because you don’t have prophets anymore.” That was in, I think that was word radio. And that’s actually mistaken, but in a technical way, we don’t have public revelation. People still claim things are coming from God or you pray and you think God is telling you to do something. If it objectively violates … I’ll give you an example. If God tells you to do something immoral, you’re praying and you’d have strong sense like God is telling me to go do this thing that is sinful and wicked, we would know from reason, from the rest of the way God has revealed himself, that’s clearly not the voice of God and you should reject that.
One of the ways that we arise above the level of subjective experience is by having something objective to hold onto because subjective experience is valuable. I don’t want to denigrate it, but subjective experience has to be tested. When we talk about test every spirit, you’ve got to test it against something. It can’t just be, “I have a strong sense of X or I feel personally convicted that Y.” There needs to be some kind of reference. And one of the tools God has given us is reason to make sense of these things. Now, God can reveal things beyond our reason, absolutely, but never against reason. There’s a difference between going beyond what we could know on our own and just making contradictory kind of claims. And so when we’re talking about the theology of God, we believe in what’s called natural theology, that in addition to God revealing himself in scripture and through the prophets, he’s also spoken at the level of every human heart.
This is clearest in places like Romans chapter one. St. Paul is critical of the Gentiles, pagans for not believing in God. And he says in Romans 1:19, “For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” So there without excuse for, although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. So we’re told two things. One, there’s a lot about God and about the properties of God that are knowable from reason. And two, that is nevertheless difficult because of the burden of sin, which is one of the reasons God reveals even things that are knowable.
The 10 commandments are all knowable by reason. Maybe you could quibble about keeping the Sabbath holy. Everything else is clearly knowable by reason. That’s not going to be … But nevertheless, God still reveals it. I don’t know. Does that answer your question, Isaac?
Isaac:
It does. I mean, I think that’s a good answer. The way I would answer it very briefly would be something like what you pointed at. In scripture, we’re told to evaluate prophets. Jesus tells us to evaluate them by their fruits. We’re told to test the spirits. And in all of these ways, in all of these things, it requires some kind of reasoning within ourselves to think about what’s being presented to us. And philosophy is just thinking really hard. That’s my favorite definition of philosophy, by the way. Philosophy is just thinking about something really hard.
And you can be wrong about your philosophy just as you can judge the fruits incorrectly, but in order for our human understanding to understand anything, we have to have some ways of not just receiving information, but reflecting upon the information. And the scriptures are abundantly clear that it is possible upon reflection to take our subjective experience and reject it based by preferring something else like God’s previous revelation or just being told something that’s just obviously untrue to us because how else could we judge that what a prophet said was not true? If a prophet said, Nineveh will be destroyed and it wasn’t. And then the prophet said, no, it was destroyed. That’s going to require some kind of epistemology for me to go back to him and say, “It’s not though. I’m looking at it right now and it’s not destroyed.”
Joe:
Yeah, I think that’s a good answer. And other people in the chat have kind of given some other ones. If you thought you heard a voice from heaven telling you that grass is red, you probably are talking to a colorblind demon. I’m paraphrasing heavily. Okay. I know that Mike has to jump off in like seven minutes-ish, but I’m hoping we can at least very briefly, and I apologize for how brief this is going to have to be talk about Curse of Cain because this came up and I think it’s an area where there’s some confusion both about the argument and about the history. So if you could play, Mike, you play clip seven?
CLIP:
Frigging lie. When I say lie, we never believe being black was a curse. Okay? Well, we believe that there was a curse that was aligned to certain lineage, like the curse of Kane, but the curse of Kane was not barring from the priesthood. And even that is more opinion shared by past Christians. The Mark Curse of Kane is a Christian belief that was very prominent in Joseph Smith’s day. At no point did we believe everyone who had dark skin was cursed. And the fact that he is trying to spout that we do is a lie, an absolute bloody lie.
Joe:
Okay. So again, kind of crashing out, I thought it would be good to at least set the record straight in terms of the history there. Do you want to give a brief recap of that or I can just jump into what Brigham
Isaac:
Said? No, I’m happy to do it and I’ll read some quotes. So there may be a technical sense in which one of the things he said was true, which is that most Latter-day Saints would say that the, historically at least, would say that their doctrine on the skin color change or the curses, the black skin was the mark of the curse, but the curse itself was something more spiritual. So the black skin was … In fact, let me just read you a quote.
Joe:
Yeah.
Isaac:
This is from a LDS prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith in a book he published while he was … I don’t know if you published it while he was the prophet or one of the apostles, but I think he was the prophet. And he says, “Was Cain cursed with a black skin?” Technically, the black skin was not the curse, but the mark of the curse. The scriptures do not say that Cain was made black, but we read that his descendants were. We may well suppose that Cain was also black and that this was the mark the Lord placed upon him. So if you want to make a distinction between the curse and the mark … But let me back up. I’m sorry. I jumped right into that. You asked me to explain the history. After the Latter Day Saints arrived in Utah, Brigham Young announced a church policy that people of African descent could not hold the priesthood or enter LDS temples.
And he explained very explicitly the reason that he for this policy was because they bore a curse. A cursed lineage, which I can’t remember. His name was Shaw. What was that guy’s name?
Joe:
Shad.
Isaac:
Shad. Shad mentioned like, “Oh, we believe in cursed lineages.” Well, the church used to very strongly believe that those bearing African descent, those who are of African descent bear a cursed lineage that was cursed by God, and that meant that they could not hold the priesthood, nor could they enter the temples. Yeah, go
Joe:
Ahead. Yeah. So I think, right. So Black in the sense of African lineage, not just anyone with dark skin.
Isaac:
Correct. This was very particularly people of African descent.
Joe:
Brigham Young said in Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, Discourse 25, Persecution of the Saints, et cetera, preached in the Tabernacle 1863. There’s a couple quotes I want to give very quickly. He says, “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood at the seed of cane, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so. The nations of the earth have transgressed every law that God has given. They have changed the ordinances and broken every covenant made with the fathers and they’re like a hungry man that dreameth that he Edith and he awaketh and behold, he is empty.” So he was very clear that forever the law of God, according to this alleged prophet, was against intermarriage with anyone of African descent and a white man belonging to the chosen seed because of this seed of gain.
He also said in an 1859 discourse, as you say, he talks at the mark of the curse. He said, “Cane slow his brother. Cain might’ve been killed and that would’ve put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be. And the Lord put a mark upon him which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race that they should be the servant of servants and they will be until that curse is removed and the abolitionists cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree. How long is that raised to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them? That curse will remain upon them and they never can hold the priesthood or share in it until all of their descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the priesthood and the keys thereof.
Until the last ones of the residue of Adam’s children are brought up to that favorable position, the children of Cain cannot receive the first ordinances of the priesthood.” Is that contradicted by official declaration too, or is that just the fulfillment of what young said?
Isaac:
Well, can I read one more quote? Because I think you read a few from the very early church period. From about a hundred years later in 1949, the first presidency, so this is the highest governing body of the church, the president prophet of the church, plus his two counselors who are also president prophets, according to LDS belief. They issued this first presidency statement that says, “The attitude of the church with reference to the Negroes,” that’s their terminology.
“The attitude of the church with reference remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of a declaration of a policy, but of direct commandment from the Lord on which is founded the doctrine of the church from the days of its organization to the effect that Negroes may become members of the church, but they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of this principle. President Brigham Young said, so now they’re quoting Brigham Young. “Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness?” So here he directly mentions the skin as a curse. “It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood and the law of God. They will go down to death and when all the rest of the children have received their blessings and the holy priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of cane and receive all the blessings we are entitled to.
“So a few things I just want to point out there. So in 1978, the church ended the policy of no longer allowing those of African descent to hold the priesthood. And the church today explicitly says that while they used to restrict people from holding the priesthood, and while past church leaders gave reasons for why, past church leaders were not shy about giving reasons why, as we just read in those quotes, right?
Joe:
Yeah.
Isaac:
They explicitly denounce or disavow, I think is their word, all of those theories. So it is no longer the LDS church belief today that the reason that they were restricted from holding the priesthood and entering the temple was because they were descended from Cain or that they were cursed, et cetera. I would say at this point, there’s not an official church belief as to the why. Some believe it was just a mistake. I think that’s becoming more and more common. It’s clear that the policy did not originate with Joseph Smith, but originated with Brigham Young.
Joe:
That’s a point Carden made. And I want to actually shout that out. But this, from our perspective, I think actually makes the problem worse. If you watch the word radio response, we don’t have time to play the clip now, like 46, 47 minutes in. Carden says,” Yeah, there is this switcheroo, but Joseph Smith originally baptized black freedmen and so they were invited into the priesthood.
Isaac:
“And or gained some of them to the priesthood.
Joe:
Right. And then that gets reversed by Brigham Young, who it seems like is just way more racist than Smith was. And then that gets- Definitely true. … back in the 20th century. So we would say,” Look, Joseph Smith was better than young. The policy ends up in a better place. The point here isn’t, hey, you guys used to do some racist stuff. You can find plenty of racist Christians in history. The point there is you defended these racist attitudes by making false claims about God, and that seems like a bigger problem from the perspective of someone claiming to be a prophet.
Isaac:
Right. Chad said in his clip, well, they got this from other Christians. They didn’t come up with the idea that black people were cursed from Cane or Ham or wherever you believe the curse comes from. That’s true. They did kind of absorb this idea from the broader … There was an LDS spin on it, but they did absorb the idea. But the point is that if someone’s claiming to be a prophet and speak for God, it’s a strange defense at least to sort of say, yeah, yeah, they’re a prophet. They speak for God, but they just sort of imbibed this evil racist teaching that they around and then taught it as though it was doctrine from God for 120 years.
Joe:
Yeah, exactly. So the point is not someone from the 19th century was racist. That’s not a shocking point. You can find that cross denominationally. That’s not it at all. The point is these are people who are listening to the racism of their age and claiming it’s coming from God. And if once you say that about the prophet, that yeah, sometimes they lie or get things wrong about God and claim it’s coming from God when it’s not, that changes what we understand, at least from a non- LDS perspective, that would usually just be disqualifying of like, “Okay, then clearly you’re not a real prophet.”
Isaac:
I know we have to stop, so this will be my last comment and I’ll be quiet after this. And then we’ll close it out. Because I want to end with an olive branch to Latter-day Saints on this topic. You can go back and see times when Popes have spoken and have parroted the wisdom of their own age, even sometimes saying things that we would disagree with now and we’d say, “That’s not right.” They’re just saying what people generally thought back then. So I don’t want to claim that … What I’m going to say is that this has required us as Catholics to work out and understand and develop the doctrine of the papacy, to understand better and have a system to understand better when the Pope is speaking doctrine that we should believe, must believe, doctrine that’s true, and when he might be saying things that just are the wisdom of his own age, do you know what I mean?
Sort of reflecting the time-
Joe:
Yeah. I mean, we’d say we’ve got objective criteria where it isn’t just, do we agree with
Isaac:
It or not?
Joe:
But there are ways-
Isaac:
We have had to develop that criteria over time. It wasn’t obvious what those criteria were necessarily in the year 400 or something
Joe:
Like that. I mean, even St. Peter, the ordinary Christian reception is first and two Peter are divinely inspired. Peter’s sinful actions, whether it’s denying Christ or treating Gentiles as second class Christians in Galatians two, we can draw clear distinctions between those things, but those lines do need to be drawn. So anyone who’s hearing this as there were moral failings of the prophets, therefore LDS false, that’s not the argument. The moral failings are expected. We get it. We appreciate that. That’s not disqualifying. The deeper problem is if they’re teaching false doctrine in this capacity as prophets. And it’s a much more specific kind of critique. Isaac, I really appreciate you being on. I really appreciate you doing this. I would love to go longer, but Mike is ruining everyone’s day. And so no, in all seriousness, Mike, thank you so much for doing everything behind the scenes.
I know it’s a lot harder than it looks, and thank you to everybody who chimed in. Thank you to all the LDS and everyone who responded. And I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to cover maybe more of the responses, critiques, and so on. Maybe it might
Mike:
Be worth doing a part two in the near future.
Joe:
If people are interested in it, I’d be open to it for sure. If Isaac wants to-
Isaac:
I’m open if people are interested.
Joe:
Yeah. I’d say I’m not going to force it. If people are saying, “This has run its course. We get what you mean now,” or whatever, great. If people want more, happy to do it.
Mike:
All right. Thank you everybody. You have a fantastic day and God bless.
Joe:
Yeah. For same as Popri, Joe Heschmeyer. Thank you, Isaac. God bless you.