Where Science Meets the Book of Mormon: Come Follow Me Lesson: July 15-21; Alma 30-31
Alma chapter 30 deals with Korihor, the anti-Christ, and I could begin this essay by quoting the entire chapter. Chapter 31 deals with the Zoramites on a somewhat related topic — Science and Religion. I could write an essay here that is several books long; indeed, I have published several books on this subject — two of which I have featured at the top of this essay — and I am in the process of writing several more. I will try to keep this essay as short as possible by limiting the number of topics I cover and only summarizing those. For a more in-depth discussion I refer you to my books.
Korihor said, as recorded in Alma 30:13-16, “O ye that are bound down under a foolish and a vain hope, why do ye yoke yourselves with such foolish things? Why do ye look for a Christ? For no man can know of anything which is to come. Behold, these things which ye call prophecies, which ye say are handed down by holy prophets, behold, they are foolish traditions of your fathers. How do ye know of their surety? Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ. Ye look forward and say that ye see a remission of your sins. But behold, it is the effect of a frenzied mind; and this derangement of your minds comes because of the traditions of your fathers, which lead you away into a belief of things which are not so.”
Korihor also said that, “…whatsoever a man did was no crime…when a man was dead, that was the end thereof.” (Alma 30:17-18) Furthermore, “…Because I do not teach the foolish traditions of your fathers, and because I do not teach this people to bind themselves down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests, to usurp power and authority over them, to keep them in ignorance, that they may not lift up their heads, but be brought down according to thy words.” (Alma 30:23) “Yea, they durst not make use of that which is their own lest they should offend their priests, who do yoke them according to their desires, and have brought them to believe, by their traditions and their dreams and their whims and their visions and their pretended mysteries, that they should, if they did not do according to their words, offend some unknown being, who they say is God—a being who never has been seen or known, who never was nor ever will be.” (Alma 30:28)
Alma said to Korihor, according to Alma 30:39, 41, “…I know there is a God, and also that Christ shall come…I have all things as a testimony that these things are true…”
I will add here the statement of the Zoramites before discussing these issues. According to
Alma 31:15, the Zoramites said, “Holy, holy God; we believe that thou art God, and we believe that thou art holy, and that thou wast a spirit, and that thou art a spirit, and that thou wilt be a spirit forever.”
The following is taken from my book: The Immortal Messiah: The Physiology of Resurrected Beings, and from my blog for December 18-24, 2023:
The Trinity doctrine argues that God was, is, and always will be only a spirit, citing Jesus’ statement in John, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”1 It turns out that, in the King James Version of the Bible, the word “is” in John 4:24 [shown in italics because it is an added word] was added by the translators and was not there in the original. Thus, the original phrase was: “God a Spirit,” with the verb missing. As English does not work without verbs, the King James translators added the verb “is.” The Darby Bible Translation states, “God [is] a spirit…” emphasizing that “is” was an added term. I make this point to emphasize the ambiguity of the phrase. Why didn’t the translators add the verb “has” instead? “God has a spirit.” For one reason — because in 1611 those translators were already steeped in trinitarian philosophy. Despite the word “is” not being in the original text, nearly all Christians believe that “God is a spirit…” The Catholic Answers website goes even farther, declaring that John 4:24 states that, “God is spirit.”2 They have removed the “a” which was there in the original and retained only the word “is,” which was not there but was added de novo by the translators.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are unique among Christians in that we believe in a God who has a spirit, but who also has body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s, as witnessed by the Prophet Joseph Smith.3 In February 1832, the Prophet Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon bore joint testimony:
And now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, this is the testimony, last of all, which we give of him: That he lives! For we saw him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father—That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.4
We are further informed in Moses chapter 2: “And I, God, said unto mine Only Begotten, which was with me from the beginning: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and it was so.”5
In 1843, the Prophet Joseph Smith revealed that, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.”6
We know, therefore, by revelation that God and Christ have physical, tangible bodies; that we were created in the likeness of the Father and the Son; and that our spirits are made of pure, fine matter. I often have shared with friends and family that if the only belief I had been taught was that of the Trinity, with an incorporeal God and a Christ who, after the resurrection, shed his body and fused with God to somehow become a weird, trinitarian spirit combination, I would want nothing to do with Christianity, and would join many of my fellow scientists as an atheist. I think it is important to understand that often, when scientists reject God, this is the god they are rejecting — the one who is only a spirit and always has been — because this is the only Christian god they know of.
That said, I will now turn to Korihor’s arguments as a broad point of discussion. Much of what Korihor said is the same, almost word-for-word, as what modern atheists are saying. To me, Alma chapters 30 and 31 are the essence of the modern gulf between Science and Religion.
I will begin this part of my discussion with two famous quotes from Stephen Hawking.
Hawking, in my opinion, correctly, pointed out that time and space began at the Big Bang and did not exist before that event. However, physics tells us that what was created at the Big Bang was what Hawking called “normal matter,” which accounts for less than 25% of all the matter in the universe and only 5% of the total universe (matter and energy). We cannot, however, say the same for dark matter or dark energy — the other 95+ percent of the universe. Hawking would have us believe that God is limited by E=mc2, but that equation only describes “normal matter,” which is defined by what we can see or detect because of light (the electromagnetic spectrum; time, space and light are expressed as c in Einstein’s famous equation).
Probably the most famous statements concerning God’s role in the Big Bang, and Creation in general, were made by Hawking. In his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Hawking stated:
“Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observable consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined…One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!”7
I agree with much of what Hawking said. The model I have concluded concerning the creation is that the Gods created the laws, or more correctly, applied already existing eternal laws to this particular part of space to create this universe, along with its space and time. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) God activated the laws governing the existence and behavior of light — and there was light. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:11) God invoked the laws governing plants and seeds — and it was so. In Abraham 4:11-12, the process is more clearly delineated: “And the Gods said: Let us prepare the earth to bring forth grass [etc]…and the Gods saw that they were obeyed.” Another insight into the Gods invoking the laws is stated in Abraham 4:18, “And the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed.”
What I don’t agree with Hawking’s statement quoted above is his insistence that there were no events before the Big Bang because they could not be observed. Hawking said, “…events [occurring] earlier than this time…could not affect what happens at the present time.” Again, Hawking is referring only to what we can see, much like what Korihor insisted: if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist — “…ye cannot know of things which ye do not see...”
During the last few years of his life, Hawking had, famously, modified his position in his 1988 Brief History of Time statement, and was one of the most vocal scientists arguing that God had no place in the creation of the universe. He stated, for example, “The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.”8 In a number of similar statements, Hawking made it quite clear that in his mind, time trumps everything, even God. So, was Hawking right? Was he the official spokesperson for all scientists?
I have great respect for Stephen Hawking’s work and career. He made major contributions to our understanding of the universe. However, the fact that he was a genius and a brilliant scientist does not make him immune to error. It is my opinion that time is one of our constructs invented to describe the visible universe — but over 95% of the universe is invisible, at least for now. As Hawking pointed out, the Hubble space telescope was pointed toward “empty” places in space, as seen in ground-based telescopes and saw numerous galaxies, much older than what had been previously observable. Then the WEB telescope was pointed toward “empty” spots in Hubble’s field of view and visualized even more, even older galaxies — and yet, dark matter persists, still unobservable.
I do not believe that an even more powerful telescope than WEB will ever reveal the nature of dark matter. Such discovery will require some instrument that has not yet been invented. For example, radio waves were first predicted as part of James Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism in 1867. He postulated that an electromagnetic wave could travel through space. Twenty years later, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the reality of such waves in his laboratory by creating an entirely new piece of apparatus, called a spark-gap transmitter. Only with this new instrument, could Hertz demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves, which have existed since the beginning of time.
At present, the only thing we know about dark matter is that it exerts gravitational force, which is involved in controlling the shape of galaxies. In 1930, Knut Lundmark proposed that the universe must contain much more mass than can be observed. Fritz Zwicky used the term “dark matter” in 1933 to explain his observations of galaxy clusters. He proposed that this unseen matter must be present to hold those clusters together. Then, in 1980, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford published a paper suggesting that galaxy rotation curves could be explained by invoking far more matter in galaxies than what can be seen. Furthermore, we think we know that there are spaces in space where dark matter doesn’t exist. That’s about it. Because we know nothing else about dark matter, we know nothing about its relationship to time or space. We have no idea whether or not it was created at the time of the Big Bang — or whether it existed before that event — that’s 75% of all known matter. So, what we think we know about the universe is based upon our imperfect knowledge of the “regular matter,” which makes up, at most, only 5% of the universe.
If we now recognize, as Hawking acknowledged, that there apparently are distinct components of the universe (at least dark matter and dark energy) that we, at present, cannot detect, no matter how hard we’ve tried, then how can we be so arrogantly confident that there are not yet other parts of the universe we can’t detect? In the face of such overwhelming numbers for the known unknown, how can we be so arrogantly confident that God is confined to the, at most, 5% of the universe that we can detect.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. John 4:24
2. catholic.com/tract/god-has-no-body, retrieved 12 December 2019
3. Doctrine and Covenants 130:22
4. Doctrine and Covenants 76:22-24
5. Moses 2:26
6. Doctrine and Covenants 131:7-8
7. Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, p. 8-9, Bantam, New York, 1988
8. Hawking, Stephen, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Bantam, New York, 2018
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