A finite God and the regress of gods

If the Father had a Father, there is either no first God or an unexplained first exception; either way 'God' is one member of a species.

What the Church claims

God the Father is the supreme, eternal, 'Most High' God whom alone we worship.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. Set beside the King Follett discourse and the plurality of gods, 'supreme' and 'eternal' become hard to hold in their ordinary sense. Ostler's reconstruction is coherent, but it keeps the words by changing what they mean, and what leaders historically taught does not survive the repair. Contested: the doctrine is unstable rather than impossible.

The record

In the contemporaneous Clayton report of the 7 April 1844 King Follett discourse, Joseph Smith taught that God 'was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh'.
In the 16 June 1844 'Sermon in the Grove' Smith said 'the doctrine of a plurality of Gods is as prominent in the Bible as any doctrine'; later pages of the Bullock report contain the argument that a Son implies a Father who in turn had a Father, summarized in.
Early interpreters took this as a chain of gods: Orson Hyde said 'our God is subject to still higher intelligences', and Widtsoe and B. H. Roberts read it the same way.
Beckwith's three arguments: an actually infinite past cannot be traversed; given infinite past time eternal progression should already be finished; and a finite knower cannot progress to infinite knowledge.
Ostler answers the Kalam-style arguments by saying they apply finite arithmetic to transfinite sets, that a beginningless past is not 'formed by successive addition', and that an always-existing universe is at least logically possible.
Ostler also removes the regress altogether with 'kingship (monarchical) monotheism': the Father is eternally the 'Head of the Gods' and other gods are his subordinate sons, citing Abraham 3:19 'I am more intelligent than they all'.
A 2022 Dialogue article, 'Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist?', tests Ostler's reading against the two 1844 sermons and concludes that kingship monotheism is not what they teach; only its published abstract has been consulted here.

The moving target

1844-04-07: God was once a man on a planet as Jesus was.
2014-02: Affirms human deification; says little has been revealed about the first half of the Snow couplet and little is taught.

The exchange

Blake T. Ostler

An infinite past is coherent; Kalam arguments equivocate on infinity. Since LDS cosmology already has eternal matter and intelligences, an infinite series of divine generations adds no new problem.

The answer: This is a reasonable answer to the Kalam objection specifically - many secular philosophers also reject Craig's arguments against actual infinites. But it answers coherence, not explanation: an infinite chain in which every God is made God by a prior God never accounts for why there are any Gods or any God-making law at all, and it leaves 'our' God as a local, non-unique being. Beckwith's second argument (why is progression not complete after infinite time?) is also not touched by the set-theory point.

What they get right: Critics (especially evangelical ones) overreach when they treat the impossibility of an actual infinite as settled; it is not.

Blake T. Ostler (Exploring Mormon Thought vol. 3; 2022 interview)

There is no regress. Correctly read, Joseph taught one eternally supreme Father; his mortal sojourn was like Christ's - a divine being taking flesh - not a promotion from mere humanity.

The answer: This is a philosophical repair, not the historic teaching. Hyde, Widtsoe, Roberts and the plain sense of the 'Son without a Father' argument support the regress reading, as does the Snow couplet as generations of members learned it. A 2008 Juvenile Instructor review leans to the regress reading, and a 2022 Dialogue article argues that Ostler's alternative is not what the 1844 sermons teach. If Ostler is right, prophets and apostles misunderstood the nature of God for 150 years, which carries its own cost for prophetic reliability.

What they get right: The sources are reports of sermons, not dictated revelations, and they are genuinely ambiguous in places; Ostler's reading is possible.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

On the historic reading the Father is one link in a chain. That gives a dilemma. If the chain is infinite, nothing explains why there are gods or a law of exaltation, and the being Latter-day Saints worship is not unique or ultimate - Beckwith's charge. If the chain has a first member, that being was never a man, the Snow couplet is false as a general principle, and the first God is an unexplained exception. Ostler's kingship monotheism takes the second horn and drops the historic teaching; the Church's own essay neither affirms nor denies it and says 'little is taught'. A doctrine about the identity of God on which the institution now declines to take a position is itself evidence against the claim that the Restoration restored clear knowledge of God.

The apologetic case

Ostler: infinite pasts are coherent; scripture calls the Father 'more intelligent than they all' and 'Head of the Gods'; Joseph's 1844 language compares the Father's mortality to Christ's, who was divine before his mortality, so nothing requires a God above the Father. Worship is owed to the Father because of his perfect love and his role as our Father, not because he is the only member of a metaphysical kind.

What would change this

Discovery of an 1844 source in which Smith unambiguously denies any God above the Father; or an official statement adopting Ostler's reading.

Closely related

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.