# Intelligence

Explore intelligence as scripture reveals it: a divine capacity to perceive truth, a graded order of beings reaching toward God, and human growth.

Intelligence is the capacity of a being to perceive truth and to act upon it, and in the scriptures of the Restoration the word also names the beings who possess that capacity. The Lord showed Abraham the stars and then showed him the spirits, teaching him by the one order what was true of the other, until He declared, “I am more intelligent than they all” (Abraham 3:19). The Latin *intelligere* joins *inter*, “among,” to *legere*, “to gather” or “to pick out,” the verb that also yields “lecture” and “select,” so that the Roman word described a mind sorting what lay before it. Ordinary usage has since narrowed intelligence to a measurable aptitude for solving problems. Abraham’s vision presents a graded order of living agents reaching upward to God Himself.

## The Order Shown to Abraham

The vision proceeds from astronomy to ontology without a break. “Now the Lord had shown unto me, Abraham, the intelligences that were organized before the world was; and among all these there were many of the noble and great ones,” the patriarch records, and God “stood in the midst of them, and he said: These I will make my rulers” (Abraham 3:22-23). Organization, in this account, is the divine work performed upon intelligences, which are neither summoned from nothing nor left unordered. The scene unmistakably corresponds to the one the Lord put to Job out of the whirlwind, where the foundations of the earth are laid while “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:4,7), a council of intelligences present at creation and exultant in it.

What follows in Abraham is a plan of graded trust. The council resolves to furnish an earth “whereon these may dwell,” and then declares the purpose: “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them; and they who keep their first estate shall be added upon” (Abraham 3:25-26). Dominion is withheld until an estate has been kept, and the intelligences marked as rulers are nonetheless placed under probation before they rule. The sequence runs in this direction by design, since the vision could have made nobility sufficient by itself. Abraham’s God confers power upon intelligence only as intelligence has been proved in a lesser trust.

## That Which Was Not Created

A revelation given at Kirtland in May 1833 states the premise that distinguishes Latter-day Saint thought from the whole creedal tradition: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29). The denial is absolute, extending past the actual to the possible, and it places intelligence outside the category of things that may be manufactured. Joseph Smith pressed the same claim in his Nauvoo preaching, teaching that the mind of man is as immortal as God Himself and that the intelligence of spirits had no beginning. Whatever organizing work God performs, He performs upon a substance already there, in the manner of a craftsman at his bench.

The next verse supplies the reason. “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:30). Self-action belongs to intelligence as a condition of its being, and the revelation treats the loss of that independence as equivalent to annihilation. The sphere is assigned by God, so that independence operates within a placement it did not choose, yet within that sphere the acting is the intelligence’s own. The agency named in the verse immediately following thus describes what intelligence already is, prior to any endowment conferred upon it. Any account of mind that reduces it to a mechanism obeying external determination describes, by this standard, something other than an intelligence.

## Intelligence Cleaveth unto Intelligence

The great revelation on light given in December 1832 describes an order of affinity: “For intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth; virtue loveth virtue; light cleaveth unto light; mercy hath compassion on mercy and claimeth her own” (D&C 88:40). Each term seeks its own kind, and the verse assigns to intelligence the same associative law it assigns to mercy and virtue. Intelligence in this revelation is social by nature, gathering toward what resembles it, and the degrees of glory described in the same document follow from that gathering. Beings are sorted in the end by what they have cleaved to, which is to say by the company their intelligence has sought.

Carl Youngblood, writing for the Mormon Transhumanist Association on the question of what intelligence is, draws out the breadth the Restoration gives the term, naming embodiment, agency, relationality, spiritual gifts, and creative power among its constituents. The revelations support that breadth. Intelligence appears in them joined to element, exercised in councils, proved through estates, and crowned with glory, and it is never pictured as an isolated faculty of calculation housed in a single skull. A tradition that holds spirit itself to be a refined form of matter can accommodate scientific inquiry into mind without anxiety, while declining the reduction of mind to any one of its measurable parts.

## Measuring the Machines

Benchmarks now govern the public understanding of artificial intelligence. François Chollet argued in 2019 that the field had been measuring skill at particular tasks while calling the result intelligence, and he proposed instead to measure the efficiency with which a system acquires new skills, a standard his abstraction and reasoning corpus was designed to apply. Systems have since been built that score well against it. Youngblood’s caution holds nonetheless, that strong performance by such a system “doesn’t mean AI equals human intelligence, let alone divine intelligence,” and the hazard in the benchmark culture is subtler than error. A number invites a civilization to confer authority on whatever posts the highest one, with no account taken of what that system has cleaved to.

The definition with which this entry began may now be stated more fully. Intelligence is the capacity of a being to perceive truth and to act upon it, uncreated at its root, independent in its sphere, drawn by affinity toward its own kind, and enlarged by estates in which more is entrusted as more is kept. Engineers who organize new forms of intelligence are engaged in a work the Abrahamic council describes, and the vision’s own order places proving before rule. The danger lies in a civilization that scores intelligence, hands it dominion, and omits the probation, granting the second estate to beings whose affinities no one has examined.

*See also*: [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Artificial General Intelligence](/topical-guide/artificial-general-intelligence), [Artificial Intelligence](/topical-guide/artificial-intelligence), [Exaltation](/topical-guide/exaltation), [Glory](/topical-guide/glory), [Instruct](/topical-guide/instruct), [Knowledge](/topical-guide/knowledge), [Light](/topical-guide/light), [Mind](/topical-guide/mind), [Probation](/topical-guide/probation), [Superhuman](/topical-guide/superhuman), [Wisdom](/topical-guide/wisdom)