emergence

Do you think that you could ever, Through all eternity, Find out the generation Where Gods began to be?

I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of improbability as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered . . . It may even be a superhuman designer—but, if so, it will almost certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I don’t believe for a moment) our universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient advice, forgiveness and redemption, the designer himself must be the end product of some kind of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe.

It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script webapplets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a simulated computer – inside your desktop.)

Our Father in Heaven was begotten on a previous heavenly world by His Father; He was begotten by a still more ancient Father; and so on from generation to generation, from one heavenly world to another.

Our God is a natural man . . . where did he get his knowledge from? From his father, just as we get our knowledge from our earthly parents.