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Oh no! LDS theology has something in common with Hinduism? That's terrible! Anyways.
Acted on by himself, sure. It's a stretch to say someone capable of changing themselves is not self-existent, and has more to do with the rest of the bundle of Christian theology than with the word "self-existence." It's not that such a being is not self-existent, it's that Christian theology holds that a self-existent being is (for other reasons) incapable of change.
It's more that for both of us, our idea of things that are self-existent explains nothing about why there is something (self-existent being(s)) rather than nothing. This question predates self-existent beings in both cases.
The ontological argument attempts to address this, but I and most others find it unsatisfying, to say the least. Basically just word salad. If existence is a necessary quality of the greatest possible being, is it not also a quality of the most evil possible being? Why is existence only a quality of the greatest possible being?
The latter is also how I'd describe LDS theology. We put off the natural man, and put on the divine nature. We don't really believe in "natures" in the classical Christian way, but inasmuch as you can use the word nature we certainly don't share God's nature yet.
God is definitely like us, but more self-actualized and powerful. I don't think any LDS person would say that he's "just" more self-actualized and powerful though. There's a fundamental difference of type, it's just not as fundamental as in classical Christian theology.
I have my complaints with classical Christian theology too, and don't particularly care to litigate them right now. I just think it's pretty silly to say that LDS people see God as like a superhero. It's just not true. It's your way of fitting LDS theology into classical Christian theology, retaining just enough of LDS theology to make it look silly. Frameworks can't fit inside each other, though; you need to address them on their own terms rather than saying "within my framework your framework is wrong." Yes obviously it's wrong by definition if the argument assumes your framework to be true. That's not a productive conversation to have.
This wasn't meant as an insult. Hinduism has a pretty strong philosophical system. It was phrased as a question because I'd be interested if you saw parallels yourself.
I don't typically argue the Ontological argument because we no longer have the necessary (ha!) shared philosophical background to make the argument sound coherent.
Just the cosmological or rational argument will make the case just as well. I'm not going to go through the whole exercise now in my own words, but I pretty much agree with all said here. (extract from Chapter 3 of Brian Davies' "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil")
If I were to try to distill it into a single comment instead of a chapter of a book, I would say it like this: "God's nature is that which does not need an explanation to exist. It is necessary that there is something that does not need to be acted on, and God is what that thing is. One of the attributes of God's nature is that it contains its existence."
Then perhaps I would give an analogy - "Everything in the world changes when acted upon. The existence of any one state of being depends on actions taken upon its predecessor. It's like a line of people who have the direction to only raise their hand if the person next to them raises their hand first. It doesn't matter if that line is infinite, unless there is someone who always had their hands raised, no hands will go up. Nothing will happen. God is that which already had its hands raised - whose nature isn't 'raise hands when something else raises hands' but who's nature is 'hands are raised by default.'"
And then we can extrapolate based on that other logical traits such a thing would also possess. But I'm expressing this as hypothetical as I have 0 desire to debate God's existence on the Motte.
But mostly, I was wondering if the world-view of LDS has to do with why LDS authors are becoming more popular and the world-view of Catholics has to do why Catholic authors were more popular in the 20th century.
I think, based on your responses to me, that you agree that there is a difference between the two attitudes towards reality. Catholics believe in things like Natures, and LDS does not. Catholics believe that we are creatures, LDS do not. There are other differences that perhaps we could work together on narrowing down. .
These difference might help explain why the rest of modern society likes the fictional contributions of the LDS more than devout Catholics in the past 20 years. It's not due to Catholics becoming less intellectual (look at the make up of the Judiciary.) It's not due to Catholics no longer writing. But LDS writers have been making blockbuster hits and that probably says something more about changes in society than changes in LDS or Catholic doctrine.
Catholic theology would not agree with "we pull off the natural man" but perhaps you define natural man as something like Catholic's conception of Original Sin or something. Cross-denomination communication is hard.
It's not just "the rest" of modern society though; Meyer has sold more works to Catholics than any living Catholic author.
It's got to be more complex than just that LDS theology is more materialist than Catholic. If this were the case you'd expect atheists to be outperforming the LDS by far.
I do think there are theological second-order effect. In some ways LDS theology may speak to materialists more than Catholic theology. We have totally different answers to the most fundamental questions in religion--the problem of evil, the nature of God, the nature of sin, etc. This trickles down to inform author worldviews and sprouts in new and interesting ways from the gnostic theology that has dominated Western philosophy over the past couple thousand years. Maybe that's all it is--we're saying new, interesting things.
Don't they? (Stephen King, JK Rowling, etc)
Otherwise it sounds like we're in agreement here... until you used the term "gnostic theology." Catholicism is pretty anti-gnostic. Bodies are great, Jesus has a glorified body, we'll have one in the resurrection of the dead in the world to come.
Not per capita, as far as I can tell.
I see the idea of God "by definition" as an artifact of Gnosticism. He can't just be God, he has to be, not only the greatest possible being, but the greatest conceivable being, or he's not God.
If you disagree, let me ask you:
Say everything in the Old Testament and New happened pretty much exactly as described. God is perfectly good and loving, he is omnipotent, he is eternal, etc. BUT say he's not the un-caused cause. Say that instead, there was some proto-cause that created God and then blipped out of existence, because that's just how reality happened to happen. Would you, upon learning this from God himself, continue to be Christian, or object that, essentially, your definition of God is greater than God himself, and the God who stands before you is not worthy of your worship because he falls short of your definition?
In the past when I have asked Catholics this question, they have answered that no, that omnipotent being would not be God. It astounds me. It tells me that Catholics, at least the type likely to frequent places like this, are more concerned with Platonism and heady intellectual arguments than with reality.
I call this Gnosticism but it's probably more accurately called Platonism. But I hope you can see where the confusion comes from:
From my point of view, that's incoherent. If there is an eternal uncaused cause it cannot stop existing. If it stops existing it's not the explanation for the grounding of being right now.
Let me try to give my best response to the question:
Let's say there is a uncaused cause that created matter but did not directly will our existence in a special degree. In addition to unformed matter it created Elohim , who then went on to do 95% of what is described in the Bible. I say 95%, because to accept that the God of the Bible is not the uncaused creator of the universe requires me to ignore the parts of the Bible that say He is. Most notably (but not solely) Acts Chapter 17, where St. Paul explicitly identified the God of the Bible with the uncaused cause of Greek Philosophy.
It's not clear to me what sin even is if it's not a crime against existence itself, but I guess sin is now some kind of crime against Elohim. So then he saves us from our sin by sending His son to die for us. In doing so he makes some kind of paradise afterlife possible. I feel like this soteriology needs to be worked out much further, but that's a lot to unpack and I don't think matters too much to the question.
But accepting all that, I would owe this Elohim a debt. He would be a cool dude, a role model, praiseworthy. I should probably listen to what he said to do.
Would he be as awesome as the God I worship right now? No, he would not be. Would he be a god? In the same way Loki in Marvel is a god. At least he intentionally willed my existence so that makes me belong to him in a certain way? But does he actually have the power to do that? Or is he relying on the power of the actual First Cause, and the actual First Cause could constrain him from creating me. It gets messy. I think the most confident thing I can state without doing a years worth of research into a hypothetical is that he wouldn't be as awesome as the God I worship right now.
God did not have to create anything, but choose to create out of an overabundance on generous love.
Gnosticsm can be right on some things and wrong on others. Just because Gnosticsm in general is a Heresy doesn't mean that only the opposite of what they taught is true. They taught Jesus is divine, Gnosticsm being wrong does not mean that Jesus is suddenly not divine.
Gnosticsm holds several incorrect teachings that is incompatible with what you would call Creedal Christianity. The most obvious is that matter is evil. This is contrary to the Gospel. What I would consider the actual biggest problem with Gnosticism is their belief that there is some kind of knowledge, secret words, etc, that is not publicly taught by the Apostles and their successors which is necessary for true paradise.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so just commit sins of the flesh. It doesn't hurt anything but the flesh which is evil already.
There were Gnostics who taught that the body is evil - so flee from all bodily temptations and live an asture life because desiring things of the flesh is like desiring dung.
But all Gnostics agreed that the only way to the best afterlife was to learn some secret code phrase only they knew, to know the true history of the Divinities, to learn something only they were peddling.
That is what made them so horrible and it's also why I think the Internet has brought in a reign of atheistic gnosticsm. We spend all our time dissasociated from our bodies following the influencers that claim to have found that one weird trick to understanding Geopolitics or how to live longer. But that's another topic.
Classical Christians are not necessarily Platonist either. I don't believe in a world of forms. Classical Christians don't have to be Aristotelians either.
That wasn't my question. I asked if he was God, not if he was a god. I'm asking whether, if the being from the Old Testament showed up and told you irrefutably that he was God, but that the nature of God is somewhat different from Catholic philosophy (only in very esoteric ways--not in any tangible way whose difference you'd ever experience), if you would believe him.
The reason I think this question is important is because on some level the philosophy needs to come after the reality. I, and most others, simply don't find the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, etc. to be convincing in the slightest. The reason I believe in God is due to firsthand experience. That's not to say that I've met him, but I've felt his Spirit and experienced miracles that are difficult to explain otherwise.
Those experiences inform my understanding of God. I don't consider myself, or anyone who has ever lived save Christ himself, nearly smart enough to actually "prove" God from first principles, nor should such a thing even be necessary. He simply exists and manifests his love in real life frequently. Just as I see no need to say something like "I am human, and humans have parents, therefore I have parents," since I have met my parents personally, so too do I see no need to logically prove God's existence, nor do I think that such logical proofs can or should define him.
I'm not convinced it's even theoretically possible to prove this kind of thing from first principles--because even if you could, where's your proof that the first principles you chose were correct? We gesture to analogies like the hand-raising one, but those just don't feel true to me or most others, and absent the analogy one only has the bare assertion that the underlying axiom is correct.
Of course there are things I hold to be crucial to the concept of God, but they're much more fundamental than anything you've mentioned. If God were not Good then he would not be deserving of worship. If he is all "good", but his definition of "good" is fundamentally incompatible with mine, then likewise. Otherwise, I'll believe whatever he tells me about the underlying philosophy, which is sure to be greater than anything we can currently understand.
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