Another gospel principle I struggle with in this way is perfectionism, though I suppose that's closely related to omnipotence; does perfection imply omnipotence, among other things? What happens to individual-ness upon reaching perfection (a state good Mormons are promised to arrive at in the afterlife)? Is there more than one way to be perfect? Our flaws have a large defining role in our personalities. What will it mean to lose these? According to Mormon doctrine, God was once an imperfect human on another world with its own God before becoming a God himself. We are all to become Gods of our own worlds if we are righteous on Earth. But God, as a man, must have had personal tastes and preferences. He must have preferred spending time with some people over others. He must have disliked certain people, certain things. Does He maintain those preferences even as a God, meaning that he dislikes some of His children and likes some more than others (though He loves them all), or is all personal taste necessarily replaced by a love (and like) for all, made bland by the fact that it is all-encompassing, upon becoming a God? And what about talents? Doesn't perfection imply mastery in all things? That represents the loss of another large set of personality traits.
Last week, I was reading about philosopher and Unitarian Charles Hartshorne. I think his ideas about God lead to less contradiction than those I was taught growing up:
Despite his personally irenic spirit, much of his work was polemical. Hartshorne argued on two fronts. Against classical theism he insisted that its views were neither coherent nor religiously satisfactory. He taught that the idea of divine perfection embodied in the tradition affirmed only one side of what is truly involved in perfection, that is, the element of immutability and absoluteness. But true perfection includes perfect relatedness and thus change. What remains changeless is God's perfect responsiveness to all that is changing.
Hartshorne opposed the classical doctrine of omnipotence. In its clearest form this implied that all events, just as they occur, are determined by God. This tradition cannot affirm creaturely freedom or avoid depicting God as directly responsible for all sin and evil without inconsistency. Hartshorne taught, in contrast, that God creates the conditions that provide the optimum balance of order and freedom. Within the limits set by God, creatures determine the details of what happens. Much that occurs takes place by chance interactions of diverse decision-making creatures. This, too, expresses the divine perfection.
The other front on which Hartshorne argued was against the widespread loss of confidence in reason. This expressed itself in the dominant philosophical community as an abandonment of metaphysics and of constructive philosophy generally. In theology it led to fideism. Hartshorne showed that traditional arguments for the existence of God could be formulated cogently when the idea of God for which they argued was a coherent one. He gave special attention to the ontological argument in this regard. He insisted that either God necessarily exists or it is necessarily true that God does not exist.
(From the article CHARLES HARTSHORNE: THE EINSTEIN OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1897-2000 By John B. Cobb, which I read via the Harvard Square Library.)
I wonder what I would believe now had I been brought up to believe in a more "coherent" God, as Harthorne describes. Would I still have come to the conclusion that there are inconsistencies in any general idea of a God?
