Quotations

The man of God is consequently divine and is already holy. He is God-bearing and God-borne.

The matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. . . . So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.

The primary task of theology is the reconciliation of the revelation to the culture, to make what is taken on faith as the word of God meaningful in light of accepted science and philosophy.

The typical Mormon conception of a miracle is that the miraculous event, though entirely natural, is simply not understood because of deficiencies in human knowledge. From the perspective of God there are no miracles.

The origin of life whether human or inferior, must be lodged in some character whom I have not seen! Follow it back, no matter whether it be for six thousand years, six millions, six million millions, or billions of years, the figures and numbers are immaterial, I must have come from some source, my natural philosophy teaches me this. But, leaving the natural philosophy of the child free from false tradition, let us inquire.

First Presidency, 1931: The position of the Church on the origin of man was published by the First Presidency in 1909 and stated again by a different First Presidency in 1925: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, declares man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity….The scriptures tell why man was created, but they do not tell how.”

The power of God is the worship He inspires… The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.

The present is an age of progress, of change, of rapid advance, and of wonderful revolutions … humanity seizes the lightning, tames and subdues it, and makes it the bearer of its thoughts and dispatches.

The purpose of creation as it must appear to us in our highest approaches to an understanding of it . . . is God’s movement toward self-reproduction.

The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured (not excepting even that of old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity!