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Mormonism: Impossible (Part One)

Mormon doctrine is logically impossible.

It is no secret that Mormon doctrine teaches that God was once a man on another planet in the distant past, and because he was such a good man on his planet, he was exalted to being the God of his own planet, which we call Earth.[1] This seems to lead to the question…


How many gods are there in Mormonism?


It seems safe to assume that this man, who became God was not the only person on his planet. The question is, how many other men became Gods of their own planets from this same planet? Further, who was the god of the planet that populated that planet? What planet did he come from? Etc.? Etc.?

Do you see the issue here? In order for Mormonism to work, it requires an infinite past. There must be infinite Gods, there must be infinite planets, and there must be an infinite amount of past time. 

I want to make this as simple as possible, but even still, it will take some thinking. I can assure that if you think about this and understand this concept, it is a sharp dagger that slices Mormonism open for all to see the incoherencies of this man's religion.

 

Here is the argument:

1. Mormon doctrine requires a physical, actual, infinite past.

2. A physical, actual, infinite past cannot exist.

Therefore,

3. Mormon doctrine is logically impossible.

 

If anyone were to refute either of these two premises, it would seem that they would shoot for the second premise (It would seem impossible to refute the first premise because Mormons tend to write everything down, which enables everyone to see their mistakes). So the task before us is to prove that a physical, infinite past does not exist.

What makes Mormon doctrine logically impossible is that we are stuck in the present moment (which we call today) and not the moment of tomorrow or the next day because they have not happened yet, this means that there cannot be an infinite number of days in the past. Infinity would have to go both ways, past and future. In order for there to be an infinite amount of days in the past, there would have to be an infinite amount of days in the future. The days past would not be an infinite amount of days because we stop at “today.”

 

Dr. William Lane Craig, the author of Reasonable Faith writes:

“[al-] Ghazālī argues that it is impossible that there should be an infinite regress of events in time, that is to say, that the series of past events should be beginningless. He gives several reasons for this conclusion. For one thing, the series of past events comes to an end in the present—but the infinite cannot come to an end… If the regress of past events were infinite, then it would be impossible for the present moment to arrive.”

 

It is pretty simple... Like children who always like to be king of the hill, they say things like, "Infinity plus one" and so on. The problem is, one cannot really add anything to infinity because it would always be infinity. We cannot add another day to a past infinite regress of days with today or tomorrow.

Since Mormon doctrine is so attracted to cosmology, let’s see how WLC goes further on the absurdity of infinite regress:

“Second… Suppose Jupiter completes an orbit once every 12 years and Saturn once every 30 years and the sphere of the stars once every 36,000 years. If the universe is eternal and these planets have been orbiting from eternity, then each of these [cosmological] bodies has completed an infinite number of orbits, and yet one will have completed twice as many or thousands of times as many orbits as another, which is absurd.”[2]


Because planets, even in our own solar system, revolve around the sun at different amounts of time, then how can an actual infinite even be possible? How could one planet revolve twice as much as another planet and yet both of them revolved around the sun an infinite number of times? The answer is that it is impossible.

 

Not only does a physical, actual, infinite past not exist logically, but it also does not exist scientifically. The Second Law of Thermodynamics shows us that if the universe were eternal, it would have run out of energy by now.[3] Think about it. If there is a finite amount of energy (which we know that there is because we can observe not only old cars rotting away in fields, but we can also see that the stars eventually burn out), in an infinite amount of time, then we would have run out of energy an infinite number of years ago. But this is absurd, because we still observe and experience energy.

 

Mormonism is logically impossible because an actual, infinite past is logically impossible. It does not follow that an infinite amount of days exists because we can go no further in days than today. It does not follow that the energy that we are experiencing in our solar system today is from eternity past.

Mormon doctrine cannot be true because it requires an infinite past. The answer to the question posed above, “How many gods are there in Mormonism?” is zero. Mormonism is Impossible.

 


For more, see my book on Mormonism: 

https://www.amazon.com/Mormonism-Refuting-Fundamental-Apologetics-Latter-Day/dp/1662885377/ 

Also check out Mormonism Impossible (Part Two): the Law of the gods!


Written by Nace Howell through the grace of the Lord Jesus.

  © Nace Howell, 2022 



[1] Section Six 1843-44, p.345-6. http://www.boap.org/LDS/Joseph-Smith/Teachings/T6.html

[2] William Lane Craig. Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics. Crossway: Weaton, 2008. 96-97.

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