(Released April 25, 2018)

This is not a verbatim transcript.

Some grammar and wording has been modified for clarity.

Nick Galieti: Blake Ostler graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s of art and philosophy and a bachelor’s of science in psychobiology. He then graduated in 1985 as a William Leary Scholar from the University of Utah with a juris doctorate. Blake Ostler has published widely on Mormon philosophy in professional academic philosophical journals such as Religious Studies, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, and Element: The Journal of the society from Mormon Philosophy and Theology, as well as Mormon scholarly publications such as Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Sunstone, BYU Studies, and the FARMS Review of Books. He’s the author of the multivolume series Exploring Mormon Thought. He has also taught philosophy at Brigham Young University as an adjunct instructor. He also has podcasts that discuss his works done in conjunctions with his sons Corey, Jacob, and David.

Fratello Ostler is fluent in Italian, Spanish, and French, conversant in Swedish, and conducts scholarly research in German, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. He loves spending time with his wife and five children and enjoys fly fishing, playing racquetball, four wheeling, and watching BYU Football.

Welcome, Blake Ostler to LDS Perspectives. Thank you for coming on.

What life is about is giving us the opportunity to grow in our ability to love and in our ability to feel love when we receive it. It’s something that none of us are perfected and that we all have a lot to learn about—for us, for whom the example of Jesus Christ is most important. I consider him to be the fullest expression of love, and I’m always amazed when I think about the man who walked around the Palestinian countryside 2,000 years ago who still so greatly influences all of humanity.

Those are the important things: the ability to understand philosophy and the ability to express a theory are not essential to either salvation or exaltation. Nevertheless, these are wonderful things because I believe that they add dimensions to one’s religious commitment. And it is precisely the religious person, it is precisely the devoted person, the person whose heart is fully committed, who will seek with every faculty available to be with God, to understand, if you will, and to more fully grasp what it is that we’re called to be.

And God is used both as a reference to a person, as a reference to a community, as a reference to a title, and as a reference to an essential set of properties. We use the word “God” in all these different ways. I think that LDS thinkers have ranged from all the way from what I’m going to call an absolutist view, which was held, at least to some degree, by the Pratt brothers and by Charles Penrose, who was a member of the first presidency around the turn-of-the-century. And, famously, by Bruce McConkie and to a lesser degree also by his father-in-law, Joseph Fielding Smith, who of course was the prophet of the church. This is a view that when we say God is omnipotent, they really mean it. God can do virtually anything. And when God is omniscient, they really mean in the classical sense, he knows the future, and maybe, in some ways, is even outside of time, as in the classical view. How a Mormon asserts that is problematic, of course.

Then you have thinkers that I think have been more educated in the way that they have approached the issues. I think that B.H. Roberts—though self-taught, he was remarkably well-educated on these kinds of issues, at least for the kind of general discussion in his day—who developed a more or less finitist view of God.

Now, I’m going to distinguish a finitist view from what I’m going to call a limited view. The finitist view is most famously demonstrated by Brigham Young. Brigham Young came up with the view, and he probably thought he was reflecting what Joseph Smith taught—that there is an endless series of gods, that our God learned to be a god by following the laws that had been laid down by those gods. There was a time, an eternity, during which the being that we take to be God was not a god, was not divine, in other words. That at some point in time He actually reached the status of being divine. You know, at some point, there’s a whole lot of matter that the gods just didn’t quite get around to, and it’s kind of modelled on the notion of a son who grows up and becomes self-sufficient and then leaves the farm and goes off and develops his own farm quite independently of his father and the prior family and goes off and takes wives with him to populate the universe. It’s hayseed theology at its most extreme. But, not many people have followed Brigham Young fully in what he taught, and for good reason, I may add.

And then, of course, you have the more moderate view of the Pratt brothers, who were kind of on the other side of that. They opposed Brigham Young. There was actually an ongoing feud between them, as most people know. And so, we have a plethora of views in Mormonism.

On one end [of the spectrum of belief], you have the learned, limited view of God, taught by B.H. Roberts, that when we use terms such as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and so forth, that we have to qualify those given the materialism inherent in Mormonism. By “materialism,” I mean the commitment that, ultimately, all things reduce to matter, or a material substrate if you will. And that God is limited to the extent that he can’t create out of nothing. And so, it follows from the rejection of creation ex nihilo, which shows this myth clearly rejected—that God is limited in respects that the classical God is not.

What’s interesting is most Mormons, I think, have been very unaware that there are actually different views of God being taught. I believe it’s in my third chapter [of volume 1 of Exploring Mormon Thought] where I talk about different views of God in Mormonism, and I have kind of a chart I give between the difference between the absolutist view held by the Pratts and McConkie where God is unlimited and outside of time and the view of Roberts and John Widtsoe.

Widtsoe was kind of the furthest that one can go in terms of the finitism. He modelled God kind of after a scientist (amazing that a scientist like Widtsoe would see God as the most fully developed scientist). It happens all the time still today, so we have this range of views. For Widtsoe, God was precisely more fully like what Brigham Young taught except for he was much more nuanced than Brigham Young, and he didn’t teach that God went to a part of the universe with his wives to populate what hadn’t quite gotten to. The easy way to say this in a few words is: “In the tradition, God is the unmoved mover, and in process thought, God is the most moved mover.” In the tradition, we have these various ideas, and in Mormonism we have kind of a reflection of those ideas.

I’m going to put this kind of into a different light. The knowledge of God is something that comes with us. And the Mormon theory of knowledge is essentially embodied in section 93, where Intelligence is God’s defining essence, and we are called intelligence in the same way. We know God, His light and being are already proceeding from His presence to be embodied within us. But it’s through the traditions of men and the hardness of our own hearts that we shut God out, and, therefore, there’s darkness, and we don’t know God. The short answer is, “We don’t know God because we’ve shut him out.” The real question is, “Can we know ourselves?” There’s this old Greek aphorism, “Know thyself.” And the reason that is was so important is that in coming to know ourselves, we come to know what is already inherent within our knowledge. In terms used by the philosopher [Immanuel] Kant, in this world, we come into this world with categories in place through which we kind of filter reality if you will.

For Kant, these are the logically necessary conditions of experience, but I’m going to expand it beyond that a bit to make sense of it in terms of an experience I think everybody has. You’re in a store and all of the sudden this song comes on that you really like. And you go, “Hey, there’s music playing.” Before that I was completely blocking it out. Or it’s like a husband, are you married?

For Kant, there is a distinction between the thing-as-it-is-in-itself, and the thing as we experience it, okay? I’ll never get the thing inside my head to actually experience it as it actually is. I only see it and experience it as it is “for me.” That is, as I have taken and filtered it through my categories and my past experience. We have a chair in here, and I call it a chair because that’s what my parents called it, but if it didn’t have four legs and it only had three, would it still be a chair? Well, probably. But you understand what I am saying. The chair isn’t in my head to actually grasp it. Kant called what we experience the phenomena and what is the thing in itself as the noumenon, but we never actually reached the noumenon. The fact is that God is a noumenon. Moreover, I mean, we’d have to admit that any believer is going to say the distance between us and God is probably greater than the distance between us and the ability of an ant to understand, Which has virtually no ability to understand. I mean, it’s really just beyond us.

When we approach God, we’re approaching a being whose experience is so beyond where we are that it’s not merely beyond what we imagine; it’s beyond what we can imagine. Can we know God? The truth is subjectivity. When we experience God, if we experience God at all, it’s because God is given in our reality. We find Him in our hearts. We don’t find him by looking across the sea. If we go searching for God, we’re missing what we already know.

Nick Galieti: What is the first question that one should ask in their quest to know God?

Blake: Let me give a concrete story, and I’m going to talk about experiences I had with Neal Maxwell, both because he expressly gave me permission to do so and because I want to talk about a person for whom I have the highest respect and whom I regard as being extremely intelligent—and who was in a position of authority in the LDS Church.

I wrote a paper for a philosophy class taught by Truman Madsen. It was about God’s timelessness. Thankfully, I got an “A”. If you remember Truman Madsen, he was an amazing guy. I loved and love Truman.

He came to me and he said, “You know, you’ve expressed this so well. I wonder if you’d be willing to go talk with Neal about this?” I said, “Neal?” He said, “Yeah, Neal Maxwell.” I said, “What?” He said, “I’ve had this ongoing discussion with Neal Maxwell about why God can’t be outside of time, but you’ve given really good arguments for it. I wonder if you’d be willing to go talk with him about that?”

Nick Galieti:   So you said, “Sure”?

Blake: Yeah. I was an undergrad; I mean, I was a junior at BYU. I was kind of like, “Are you kidding?”

Nick Galieti:   Yeah!

Blake: “Yeah, I’d be happy to go instruct an apostle of the Lord . . .” So, he set up the meeting, and I went with my friend Wally Johnson to talk with Elder Maxwell, and the subject we were talking about was timelessness. Neal Maxwell had written things about, based upon the statement that was in The Times and Seasons, about everything being one eternal round with God, if you’re familiar with the passage.

It was the most amazing thing. We went to the Church Office Building in Salt Lake; we go there and he takes us back into his office. He kicks his shoes off, literally puts his feet up on the desk, lies back, and says, “Truman says you’re here to instruct me and set me straight.”

To my discredit, it didn’t even dawn on me how arrogant this was. I said, “Yeah. I mean, you’ve written these things about God being timeless, and you quote Boethius—a sixth century Christian philosopher; one of the best—and it’s fine for Boethius because he’s a Catholic, and God doesn’t have any material reality about Him, but we believe in a God who has a body. All God’s got to do is stretch out His hands and for anybody that’s a real body. I can ask, “How long does it take to travel between the outstretched distance of His fingers?” So, if God has a body, there’s no way He’s outside of time.”

I gave several other arguments that I also give in my book about why God can’t be timeless. I said, “If God creates and He has a relation to a created reality that’s ongoing, He can’t be outside of time. If God can’t change the past, He can’t be outside of time. If God has any real relation with a temporal being, He can’t be outside of time. If God plans anything, He can’t be outside of time because the plan means that you think about something that hasn’t occurred yet, to bring it about. If God remembers, He can’t be outside of time, and the Bible says He remembers. You may not believe God remembers or you may want to look for some analogical meaning of that, but that’s what it says.

He was an amazing guy because he didn’t seem to have any ego about these kinds of things. He said, “You know, I didn’t really realize the fact that Boethius was in a different theological tradition would have very different consequences for his views of God, but I can see now that he does. I wonder if you would be willing to allow me to write you a letter that you can quote from where we can kind of allow me to correct this impression.”

Nick Galieti:   Wow!

Blake: And he did. I have the letter. He wrote it to me, and I quoted it in a footnote in an article that I wrote for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought called “The Mormon Concept of God,” where I talk about timelessness and God.

We think about God in different ways, but often we don’t understand that the idea we’re using comes from a tradition that isn’t really in any way compatible with LDS beliefs.

I rewrite theology beginning from the assumption that our relationship with God begins in a free choice.

I argue at some length that God’s foreknowledge is not compatible with free will, and I look very carefully at the classical and current discussion in philosophy about that issue. It turns out that literally reams of paper have been printed on this issue [in philosophical journals]—a very high level intelligent discussion.

I come to the conclusion that every argument that’s been given to reconcile foreknowledge and free will won’t work, and that they truly are incompatible. What does that mean?

I redefined God’s omniscience into what I call contingent omniscience. God knows all probabilities in the moment of how probable they are. For instance, if I have stage three cancer, God knows the probability I’m not going to live another year. It’s already given in the way things are. But probabilities are changing all the time, so God’s knowledge of probability is changing. But also, the choices that we make until we make the choices are not known. However, God knows all possibilities.

People immediately will question, well, how could God have sovereignty? That is, how could God have any control over the world in a way that His plans would be realized? So, I redefined omniscience and give a chess player analogy. Okay?

God can’t change the past. He can’t bring about a reality that’s inconsistent with what has occurred in the past. In any event, through the discussion, I come up with a notion of God’s Almighty Power, if you will, and it differs from the view that God can do anything that’s logically possible. I give four conditions, essentially, on what God can do. It has to be compatible with God’s attributes. For instance, if God can bring about anything that’s logically possible. It’s possible for me to sin, but most people hold it’s not possible for God to sin. I think it is possible for God to sin. But certainly, God can’t do things that are incompatible with His basic attributes. God can’t do anything that is brought about freely by another agent. God can’t change the past, and He’s not required to create out of nothing. If the universe has eternally existed and God can only bring about what is consistent with what’s been in the past, and if that is a fact, then God need not be able to create the universe in order to have Almighty Power.

Once we’ve carefully defined what omniscience could mean, given the reality of loving relationships and the fact that God doesn’t create out of nothing, we come up with, I think, a more adequate view of the kind of power that God has. It’s where the rubber really hits the ground. And this is something that I discussed in my second volume: when we’re praying to God to bring things about for us—petitionary prayer. The question then becomes, “Well, can I pray for my friend to make a free choice that I want him to make? Does it make sense for me to pray for the environment in the natural world? Does God have power over natural laws?”

There is what I call a Plan of Salvation view of the problem of evil. This is a fully developed view where the commitment is that what God seeks ultimately is to bring us to a relationship that He enjoys, a relationship of complete love. This relationship is of such supreme and superlative value that it justifies any finite evils that may be necessary to encounter in order to have the possibility of achieving it.

God has set up the world as a school, if you will, to teach us how to come to that kind of relationship over and over and over. I believe that the world is set up so that we get the same issues presented to us over and over and over again until we finally learn to overcome them and learn to love, and then we get to move on. It is like the central message of the movie Goundhog Day.

Human beings are the same way. We are already divine. We have the divine nature inherent within us. We are offspring of God. And I don’t want to say it literally. I want to say it metaphorically in a way that would take me three days to explain, but I’m just going to leave it there. What I want to say is that we have inherent within us this capacity for divinity. And we already express it to extent we express love for one another, to the extent that we fulfill the purpose that we were born to fulfill, to the extent that we show kindness. It’s not as if, though, there is this perfection that is someday we’re going to realize it. I’m already the best me that’s ever been, okay? Just so you know, nobody does me better than I do.

What I want to say about becoming like God is that there’s this challenge already built in. We are already the children of God, and now we are being challenged to be something that we already are. So, there is this being already, but not yet. Because none of us are fully who we are. I mean, the fact is we think of divinity as fully mature humanity. Our humanity is still in the process of maturing, as is divinity, by the way, because it’s an ongoing eternal progression. And this too is constant with process thought, where God is always self-surpassing. Whatever God has realized in one moment, His experience extends into new novel reality the next moment, and it’s more complete.

The commandments are not burdens. It’s not like a military command, “I command you to do this!” It’s like, “Let me give you a hand to assist you to do this.” What is it that God is giving us a hand with? All of the commandments are given for a simple purpose: to teach us how to learn to love one another. If you truly love a person, you don’t steal from them; you don’t kill them; you don’t covet what they have. You get the idea. That’s kind of a minimal standard of love, right? I don’t kill you.

That’s really minimal, but there’s also this maximal standard of love that Jesus taught on the Sermon on the Mount. This is the challenge. It’s like the love a parent has for a child. If my child comes to me and asks me for directions, I don’t just point my finger. I walk the full distance with my child to show him. When my child is shivering, I don’t just give him a coat. I take the coat off my very back and hand it to my child. When my child is angry and hits me or is so angry that they do something inappropriate, I don’t hit them back. I turn my other cheek and say, “You haven’t hit this one yet.” You get the idea. This is the kind of way that loving people respond to each other, and it’s like if I love my wife, it’s not merely that I don’t commit adultery. I love her so completely it doesn’t even occur to me. My heart is set on her, not anybody else. It’s not hard. It’s the easiest thing in the world when I truly love her. Moreover, when I truly love my children, it’s not hard for me to do these things. I delight in doing them.

When I truly love a person, these things that seem hard become very easy, because they are the way my love expresses itself. And there is only one commandment. All the others are just appendages that teach us this one: love each other the way I love you. That’s the commandment. That’s the only commandment. And this is easy if we just be who we truly are—it flows from us naturally.

The problem comes when we engage in self-deception and when we hide from ourselves the truth that we already know; when we try to be something that we’re not; when we try to appear to be someone who we’re not. We must deceive ourselves to hide from ourselves the knowledge of God. We must deceive ourselves to hide from ourselves the love that we naturally give. Every single one of us has essentially this kind of what I call a heart-hardening experience. We conclude at some point, “I’m never going to let anybody hurt me like that again, and so I’m going to be a rock.” It’s like the Simon and Garfunkel song. Rocks don’t feel, but they don’t love either. It’s what we do, we harden our hearts.

Now, if you look in the Book of Mormon, this is the most common expression, and every single problem of the Book of Mormon, the root problem is a hard heart. The solution to the problem is a soft heart or an open heart. In the Book of Mormon, every single problem, the root problem, is actually a hard heart. This is the human problem, and what we’re challenged to overcome. At some point, you got the message (I got it; everybody got it): “You’re no darn good. You’ll never measure up. You’ll never be enough. You’re not as good at that as anybody else. You’re just not worth it. You suck.” Okay. I could go on and on.

We’ve all gotten this message and that hurts to the very core. And so, in order to hide this pain, we choose to stop feeling. We chose to stop being open. Not only will I not let you hurt me like that again, I’m going to preemptively control you so that you can’t hurt me, okay? And then, we can justify all kinds of unloving behavior so that we can avoid being hurt again.

At the root of the human condition there is this choice at a very fundamental level of who we are. We just close down, shut off, build walls, close up, close shop, don’t let anybody in. The problem is, when we do that, we build walls that keep us in, that hide the bushel of light that we have. We put our light under a bushel. We hide it. We don’t share it. We shut ourselves in, and we shut everybody else out. They can’t reach us. It’s as if though we don’t even exist for them because they can’t really get to us. We’re just isolated, alienated.

The challenge for human beings is to overcome this alienation. It’s what atonement is all about. Atonement is this relational reality of opening to let everybody else in, and to let our light shine, and to let ourselves out. To let go, if you will.

Well, we want to encourage people to go pick up a copy of these books. There’s also a podcast that you do with your son Exploring Mormon Thought. Someone can go and download those and spend some more time with the subject, but I think you’ve given us a lot to process at this point.

I want to thank you for coming in. Thank you for your time and talking about this. And again, thank you for writing your books.