I would say that someone who believes in a God other than that of "classical" theism is still a theist - I really can't imagine why I would not call a polytheist a theist. Sure, in Western culture, tradition, and philosophy, there are certain constants that are held about God (even, apparently, among those who don't believe in God) but I don't see what makes those absolute definitions.
No definitions are absolute, I suppose. But one could turn the question around: what is it that makes the Mormon God, or indeed any conceived entity, "God"?
Well, as I said, His influence extends everywhere even though His physical body doesn't.
I understand that. It just seems to me that if God is
located somewhere that isn't here then that gives him at least an emotional remoteness, no matter how well he may be able to influence where I am. Whereas if God is located nowhere, he is no less right here than he is anywhere else. I suppose this is just a matter of feeling rather than a rational objection.
I wouldn't say we believe God is entirely atemporal, but He doesn't experience time the same way we do. But yes, I don't see why atemporality is inherently greater.
I suppose, again, because a being that is constrained by time is not master of it.
To my mind, atemporality is closely connected to incorporeality. The traditional Christian view - which is inherited from Judaism and from Greek philosophy alike - is that God is the creator of the universe. And that doesn't just mean that he fashions the universe into the form that we see, as described in Genesis and in the
Timaeus, but that he is the source of its being. It exists from moment to moment only because God sustains it. God is not one of the objects within the universe - not even an incorporeal object, if any exist - but
that which makes the universe possible. That is expressed in Aquinas' claim that God's essence is existence. It's also expressed more primitively in Irenaeus' image of God holding the universe in the palm of his hand. Gregory of Nyssa calls God's will the very substance or essence of all things. Occasionalism, which was popular among medieval Muslim theologians and early modern Christian philosophers, is a more radical expression of this view, ascribing to God not merely omnipotence but omnificence - i.e. everything that happens, God does.
It also makes God far more intimate. A God who sustains all things, without being numbered among them, is surely far closer to
me than a God who's sitting on another planet somewhere. This is why so many mystics have dwelled upon the divine transcendence - because, paradoxically, it makes God closer and more able to be directly perceived. I can't perceive a God who is physically remote from me, at least not directly; at best he can influence my perceptions remotely so that I have whatever experience he wants me to have, but that is not the same thing as directly perceiving him because the causal relationship between object and perception is not the correct one for direct perception.
There is also the important medieval view that God is the realm of possibility. That is, all possible things are possible because they exist as ideas in God's mind. (This
is something that came from Greek philosophy, namely Middle Platonism, but which was filtered through Augustine.) Leibniz expressed this very clearly in his proof for God from the fact of contingency. Things could have been otherwise than they are; therefore there are possible entities and possible situations which are not actual. But if there are to
be non-actual possibles, they can only
be in a mind that perfectly comprehends all things, and that is the divine mind. So God is effectively understood as logical space, in which possibility and impossibility are defined. That, again, means that God could not be a temporal or physical creature, because he is logically prior not merely to the universe that actually exists but to all non-actual universes that could have existed. He is the ground of possible existence as well as of actual. If he weren't, how could he be God?
It seems to me that any entity of whom at least some of this isn't true wouldn't really be God, because God must surely be the greatest possible being, and an entity that didn't have this relation to the universe wouldn't be the greatest possible being. But an entity which exists (solely) within space and time couldn't have such a relation to the universe, because space and time are features of the universe. How could an entity which exists (solely) within space and time make space and time possible? That doesn't seem to make sense.
Plotinus, Why would God not being "here" make any emotional distance if He is omniscient? God doesn't have to be in a location to know intimately what is going on there.
Like I say, it's not about God's ability to know or act upon remote locations. It's just the idea of him being somewhere that isn't here. I just find that very distancing.
It is the Greeks who gave us a view of God that is atemporal and acontextual, which I would argue does not necessarily fit with pre-Greek Biblical understandings of God (such as that he walked in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and that he spoke with Moses face to face). In the LDS view, it was the Hellenization of Judeo-Christian theology (mixing it with Greek philosophy) that helped bring about the present confusion about the nature of God.
I think that that is an over-simplification. As far as I know, most Greek philosophers didn't think like that. Obviously the Stoics thought that God is physical and locatable (although they weren't entirely sure exactly where he is), and so did the Epicureans; it was basically the Platonists who rejected this idea. But the Platonists did not generally think of God as atemporal, as far as I know - although one might interpret Plotinus and the Neoplatonists in that way, and I think one would be justified in seeing some kind of commitment to divine atemporality in the Middle Platonists, although I don't think they really drew out this implication. The notion of divine atemporality developed within Christianity at around the same time - with Origen, and then more explicitly with Augustine and finally with Boethius. But to what extent this idea was taken from non-Christian philosophy, and to what degree was a development within Christian philosophy, I'm not sure. I certainly don't think it was a matter simply of taking an idea from the pagans and shunting it onto Christian theology.
Indeed, the only Christians in antiquity who defended the notion of divine corporeality were those who conceived of God in terms drawn from paganism - namely the "anthropomorphites", as they were dubbed, in Egypt during the "first Origenist crisis" of the early fifth century. These were mainly Coptic monks who were used to thinking of the divine in physical terms because they were converts from traditional Egyptian religion, and they clashed with those monks who came from overseas and who had been trained in the Origenist tradition.
Other than them, the only ancient Christian writer I know of to think of God in bodily terms is Tertullian, apparently under the influence of Stoicism, but he certainly didn't
defend that view explicitly or indeed say what he meant (which is why it's not certain to what degree he even held it). So I just don't think that most ancient Christians thought of the divine in physical terms, whether they were influenced by non-Christian thinking or not; and to the extent that they were influenced by non-Christian thinking, whether popular religion or philosophy, that tended to lead to the view of God as corporeal, not incorporeal.
In the LDS view, centuries of debate and confusion were cleared up when Joseph Smith was visited by God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ, in a grove in 1820. Our understanding of God (i.e., as having a physical reality and not being just an amorphous being) begins from that revelatory experience, and in the LDS view is consistent with other Biblical figures who said that they saw God (i.e., Stephen, Ezekiel, Moses).
I can understand someone who is attached to another view of God saying that this sounds strange to them. To give some perspective, to my ears the Anselmian approach of first defining God and then checking to see if God is like that is pretty strange as well--to me it sounds like us making criteria rather than going to the source and finding out what His criteria are.
The Anselmian approach
isn't first defining God and then checking to see if God is like that. It's first defining God and then checking to see if
anything is like that. Isn't that what we normally do? If someone were to ask me whether a wingle exists, I would start by asking them what a wingle is, and then go on to wonder (and perhaps investigate) to see if I think anything answering to that description exists. I wouldn't just pick up something at random and say, "Yes, here's a wingle" and conclude that a wingle is whatever I've just picked up. Similarly, if I'm asked whether I think God exists, surely I should start by establishing what we're taking "God" to mean - otherwise I won't even know what I'm being asked, let alone what the answer is to that.
Greek philosophers never claimed to have seen God, but decided based on reason that the divine must be atemporal and acontextual after they came to the conclusion that the pantheon of contextual and temporal gods of their culture were rubbish. Christian theologians came along and decided that the Greeks were on to something, and began dismissing scriptural references to God's physical reality as merely metaphorical. It would seem to me that going back to the source and seeing what prophets who experienced theophany described Him as would be more fruitful.
Plotinus claimed to have experienced God, of course, although not very often.
More to the point, though, what about Christian theologians who experienced theophany and were quite adamant that God is immaterial? Again, Origen is a prime example; he wrote about his mystical experiences of God in a way very uncommon for the time, and argued at great length that God absolutely must be immaterial. And Gregory of Nyssa is an even better example, since he wrote quite long treatises about the experience of God - taking Moses as his model - and was also quite adamant that God is immaterial (and that the story of Moses, with the theophany passing from light to cloud to darkness, symbolises how the mystic first realises God's presence but then realises that God transcends the senses and finally that he transcends the reason). It wasn't just a matter of arid theologians taking ideas from the Greeks on the basis of rationality and ignoring the experiences of those who claimed to have encountered God. They constructed their understanding of God on the basis of their own experiences of him. Now even if the theophanies described in the Old Testament really are to be taken literally when they talk about God in physical terms, what makes them more reliable sources than those who also report theophanies but stress quite explicitly that God is not physical?
One aspect of the LDS view of God that this discussion seems to be missing is that although his physical body is in just one place at a time, we understand that His Spirit is able to extend to the entire universe. Not sure if that makes a difference for you, but we don't see God as limited by his physical body, but rather like Eran said, enhanced by it.
So is the Spirit non-physical, then? Or is he physical, but permeating the universe?
Along those same lines, we wouldn't see Jesus as being limited or downgraded when he took on a physical body and condescended to live a human-like life. If we were to see the physical as inferior to the spiritual (or God as limited if He is in a physical body) then would it follow that Jesus was less god-like while incarnate? If God doesn't have a physical body, it would also make one wonder why Jesus would go through the bother of being resurrected after death--I mean, once he got free of the encumbrances of physicality, wouldn't He want to stay that way? Or was the resurrection just a trick or ploy to deceive his disciples, and then Jesus discarded that body after He ascended into heaven? Why go through the whole farce of letting his disciples touch his wounds and see him eat with them, if there is ultimately nothing physical about God?
This is very puzzling to me, so it would be worth having the LDS view spelled out a little more. From an orthodox Christian point of view, whether Jesus became less godlike in virtue of being incarnate depends on your model of the incarnation. If you think that the Son was actually transformed into a physical human being, then yes, that would seem to follow. The usual model, however, conceives of the incarnation in relational terms. The Son is human in virtue of the fact that he is
united to a particular human body and mind. So the Son does not literally
become flesh; rather, he is embodied
in flesh, without being identical to it. He remains incorporeal and indeed atemporal, even though the physical body of Jesus is both corporeal and temporal. (Brian Leftow has defended this view extremely cogently in his paper "A timeless God incarnate" in Kendall and Davis' volume
The incarnation: an interdisciplinary symposium.)
Also, in orthodox Christian theology, the union is permanent. When the Son becomes embodied, and becomes human, he remains human and certainly remains embodied. The resurrection isn't some kind of temporary trick - it demonstrates, among other things, the Son's commitment to his human, embodied state. Again, that does not affect the intrinsic incorporeality of God, if God is indeed intrinsically incorporeal, since Christ remains incorporeal
in his divinity (i.e. his divine part, the Son himself, remains incorporeal). It is only
in his humanity that he is corporeal (i.e. his human part, the human body and soul) - although the Son is still legitimately said to
be corporeal
inasmuch as he is united to that human body and soul, and they are his. It's just like in
Avatar: a human being can jump around the trees of Pandora and enjoy naughty activities with blue ladies by controlling an "avatar" to do so. The mental union between the human and the avatar is so close that, in a sense, the human can say that he is really doing these things, he is really there in the forest, and even that he has really become one of the blue people. Yet in another sense he is not there, and he remains what he always was. Similarly, in the orthodox conception of the incarnation, Christ can be said to retain the divine properties even while he has human properties that apparently conflict with them. And he can be said to be embodied, to be physical, to be present in time and space, and to suffer and die, even while he can also be said to be none of these things, depending on how one looks at it. And this is a permanent state of affairs, at least for the Son.
Now if the Son is incorporeal, it makes sense to me to suppose that he could acquire a body. I'm not totally clear on what it means to
have a body, but provided that being identical with a body is not the only way to have one, I don't see any reason to think that an incorporeal being, if such exists, couldn't get one. But if the Son is corporeal to start with, then it becomes rather baffling. If he already has a body, how can he acquire another one? Yet if he doesn't acquire a body in the incarnation, then what
is the incarnation? What does it mean to say that "the Word became flesh" if was already flesh?
In the LDS view, one of the purposes of Jesus was to come and show us what God is like. The two are one in nearly every meaningful sense--to know Him is to know God.
So too in orthodox Christianity; he is, as Irenaeus said, the "visible of the invisible". But that at least supposes that there is that difference between them, that the Son is visible (in the incarnation) and the Father is invisible. What is shown is not the physical form of God but his character - that's what is important.
There is an article that may interest Plotinus that may help to elucidate the LDS view of God as a temporal and contextual being, and how it differs with other views of God.
http://www.brentdslife.com/article/upload/relationality/Family Values and Relationality.pdf
It was written in 1998 by Brent Slife, a professor of psychology at BYU. He's not LDS, but much of what he says here is consistent with LDS perspectives. There are a few parts I would differ with, such as on p. 26 when he describes Christ as changeable--perhaps it would be clearer to say instead "able to respond to His people." An acontextual and atemporal god is one that stands apart from His people, does not bind Himself to them in covenant relationships, does not feel anything in response to them, is always the same regardless of them. If we are looking for an intimate God who responds to prayers, feels compassion for our sorrow, or even has an opinion at all about an individual, He must needs be a part of this time and context. Regardless of whether He has a physical body, I wouldn't want a god who stands apart from time and space.
That's an interesting article, although I have to say that I don't really see how the author's arguments help to defend a temporalist understanding of God. It seems to me that what he's arguing against is not really atemporalism, but a form of temporalism which is combined with changelessness. He's opposing a conception of the world where there are unchanging laws which always determine what God, who moves unchangingly through time, does. He says that such a conception would make God unable to choose anything and morally inert.
Perhaps that is true - although I don't think it is - but even so, it's quite distinct from a conception of the world in which God isn't moving through time at all but stands outside it. I don't see why such a God couldn't understand the world, have opinions about it, or act upon it, including answering prayer. Where we have temporal relations to other events in the world, an atemporal God would just have logical relations instead. E.g. I "respond" to an event by reacting to it, doing something that temporally follows it and is part-caused by it. An atemporal God, by contrast, "responds" to an event (perhaps a prayer) by performing an act that he wouldn't have performed had that event not occurred. He doesn't have to be temporal to stand in that relation to the event. Certainly he couldn't experience emotions as we do, although perhaps he could have timeless attitudes, and these could also be related to events or people within time by atemporal relations of priority and posteriority in the same way.
As I've said, to say that God is atemporal and aspatial isn't to make him "stand apart" from time and space - it's to involve him extremely intimately in them, since it is to make him the supporter and sustainer of time and space, something he couldn't be if he were located solely within them. It is to give God a direct and intimate relation to every thing and every point within time and space, equally, which he couldn't have if he were spatially or temporally limited.
But again, no doubt this is all just about rival intuitions. This is, naturally, a basic problem with theology, which at heart is all about articulating your intuitions. If someone else has different intuitions from you then you don't really have any means of reaching an agreement.
But yes, I can see why that image would stand out in one's mind.
