# Abundance

Discover how “abundance” in LDS scripture and Mormon Transhumanism points beyond mere wealth—toward a regenerative economy of life, covenant flourishing, and shared human potential.

The word “abundance” does not enter scripture quietly. When Jesus declares in the Gospel of John that he came so that humanity “might have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), the statement should be taken at face value. Nothing in the surrounding text narrows the promise to inner states or metaphorical fullness. The plain grammar of the claim points toward more life — richer, longer, more capacious, less constrained by the grinding arithmetic of scarcity and mortality. The same gospel records the feeding of five thousand from five loaves and two fish, with twelve baskets of leftovers gathered afterward. The surplus is the signature of a different economy, one in which genuine sharing creates more than existed before the sharing began.

[Image: John 10:10 describes a regenerative economy where sharing results in a measurable surplus.]

This is where the Mormon Transhumanist understanding of abundance begins: a flourishing economy that humanity is invited to build through its own compassionate work.

## **The Covenant Economy**

[Image: The Hebrew scriptures speak of a literal promised land, flowing with milk and honey; a tangible reward conditioned on collective faithfulness.]

The Hebrew scriptures cast abundance within a covenantal framework. The land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8) is a tangible promise of divine providence, conditioned on collective faithfulness. The Psalms celebrate a God who “opens his hand and satisfies the desires of every living thing” (Psalm 145:16). The prophets—Amos, Isaiah, Micah—read material scarcity as diagnostic evidence of covenantal failure. When the powerful amass wealth and fail to share their substance with the needy, the earth withholds its increase. In the prophetic tradition, the relationship between moral order and material abundance is understood as causal rather than illustrative.

Mormon theology inherits that logic and sharpens it. The Enoch narrative in Moses 7 presents the highest social achievement of a covenant community as the condition in which “there was no poor among them”. It describes a people whose abundance was real enough, and whose covenant commitment deep enough, that no member of the community suffered want. Doctrine and Covenants frames the same ideal economically: “every man seeking the interest of his neighbor, and doing all things with an eye single to the glory of God” (D&C 82:19) — and section 78 makes the soteriological stakes explicit: "if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things" (D&C 78:6). The United Order and the Law of Consecration are institutional attempts to set forth this principle—imperfect, historical, but pointing toward a genuine distributive ideal that Mormon theology has never abandoned.

The pattern recurs across the canon with striking independence. Enoch's city is similar in many ways to the Jerusalem church, where the believers "had all things common" and distribution was made "as every man had need" (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35). The same can be said of the Nephites after Christ's visit, of whom Mormon writes that "they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor" (4 Nephi 1:3).

The Nephite decline narratives follow a cyclical pattern: righteousness produces prosperity, prosperity breeds pride and stratification, inequality generates conflict, conflict leads to suffering and societal collapse. The pride cycle is the natural consequence of abandoning the covenantal obligations by which abundance is shared and thereby sustained. 

To arrest this descent into societal stratification, the Book of Mormon offers a specific solution. Jacob’s temple sermon is instructive here. Addressing a divided community, he urges the Nephites to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots: "Think of your brethren like unto yourselves, and be familiar with all and free with your substance, that they may be rich like unto you." He then lays out the remedy in two sequential steps. A society must prioritize the kingdom of God first; only then may it seek riches, and strictly "for the intent to do good—to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted" (Jacob 2:17–19).

## **Scarcity as a Solvable Problem**

[Image: The energy demand for modern data centers is growing exponentially. Scarcity yields to greater innovation when compute power becomes abundant.]

What the prophetic tradition names as a moral failure, technology increasingly names as an engineering problem. And the two diagnoses address the same reality from different angles.

Energy is the master resource. Nearly every form of material scarcity is, at some level of analysis, a function of energy availability: food production, water purification, manufacturing, transportation. Solar energy costs have followed an exponential reduction curve for decades. The long-term implication—energy approaching near-zero marginal cost at scale—would cascade across the entire material economy in ways that are difficult to overstate. Scarcity of food, clean water, and manufactured goods is substantially an energy problem, and energy is becoming abundant.

Nanotechnology extends the horizon further. The promise of productive nanosystems—the capacity to construct arbitrarily complex structures from raw materials with molecular precision—represents a transition from manufacturing as a labor-intensive process to manufacturing as essentially an information problem. Eric Drexler’s vision of the “universal assembler” remains aspirational, but the intermediate stages—precision nanoscale fabrication, lab-on-a-chip diagnostics, engineered nanocoatings and nanostructures—are already delivering. The long-term direction is toward a world in which the difference between “designed” and “built” progressively collapses, and in which material abundance becomes, like information, essentially non-rivalrous.

Information itself is already there. Unlike physical goods, information is not consumed by sharing. The digital economy has demonstrated non-rivalrous abundance at scale: text, music, genomic data, software, and now artificial intelligence-generated expertise can be reproduced and distributed at near-zero marginal cost. The practical implication is an effective abundance of knowledge and cognitive assistance previously constrained by the scarcity of trained human attention—with direct consequences for medicine, education, law, science, and virtually every domain in which expertise has historically been a bottleneck.

Cellular agriculture, precision fermentation, and vertically farmed food production are decoupling nutrition from land, climate, and conventional supply chains. Gene editing is accelerating crop optimization. Lab-grown meat and microbially synthesized proteins are converging on food systems in which caloric scarcity is not an irreducible feature of the human condition but a legacy problem of pre-biotechnological agriculture.

On the longest timescales, space colonization and asteroid mining expand the accessible resource base by orders of magnitude. A civilization capable of harvesting the material and energy resources of the solar system has, in practical terms, escaped the closed-system constraints under which all of human history to date has been conducted.

## **Death, The Awful Monster**

[Image: The boundary of death: a grave closed over time and reopened by resurrection hope.]

There remains one form of scarcity that endless material wealth cannot cure: the scarcity of time. No matter how much energy or food we produce, humanity is bound by a biological countdown. Death acts as the ultimate physical barrier to human potential, but it need not dictate how we live our lives. Gautama Buddha taught that the constant awareness of our mortality—the realization that our time is strictly finite—is a compelling reason to do everything with purpose. This aligns deeply with his core philosophy of impermanence (*Anicca*). Because human existence is fleeting and constantly in flux, nothing we hold onto will last. Yet, rather than rendering life meaningless, it is precisely this fragility that gives our choices such immense weight.

Mormon theology confronts the reality of death in a way that distinctly separates it from mainstream Christianity. Rather than viewing the afterlife as an ethereal escape, it emphasizes a physical, flesh-and-bone resurrection (D&C 130:22; Luke 24:39). In this view, Godhood itself is an embodied, material state—the ultimate perfection of the physical form rather than an abandonment of it. As Moses 1:39 declares, God’s core purpose isn't merely to help us cope with death, but to completely conquer it, granting humanity literal immortality and eternal life.

The vision of a Millennial Earth that the Mormon Transhumanist tradition returns to repeatedly is, in this light, a vision of abundance so complete that it includes the abolition of involuntary death—and, still more strikingly, the resurrection of those who came before. As Brigham Young taught, and as Mormon Transhumanists have elaborated, the work of resurrection is not a unilateral divine intervention but a collaborative achievement in which the living participate on behalf of the dead. “Saviors shall come up upon Mount Zion” (Obadiah 1:21)—a plurality, doing the work of redemption for those who cannot do it themselves.

Pushing the abundance ethic to its limits means ensuring that both the living and the dead inherit this blessing. We must harness our deep moral conviction and technical genius to build a world where no one is permanently excluded.

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## **Abundance and the New God Argument**

The [New God Argument](/community-voices/opinion/2019-09-17-lincoln-cannon-new-god-argument-version-3-4) provides a structural foundation for understanding why abundance and Godhood are inseparable rather than contingently associated. The argument holds that a superhumanity of sufficient intelligence and compassion would, among other things, create conditions for the thriving of those within its care—including, potentially, those who preceded it. Godhood is not distinguished from humanity merely by power but by the moral use of power: by the degree to which that power is directed toward the abundance and flourishing of others rather than hoarded for the benefit of a select few.

This is a direct challenge to any theology that frames divine omnipotence as self-contained and self-sufficient. A God who withholds abundance that could be shared is not, in Mormon theological terms, a very good God. The trajectory of intelligence toward Godhood is, on this account, a trajectory toward greater compassion and greater generosity.

The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation asserts that the ethical use of science and technology to enhance human capability is a direct extension of God’s own work. As we master artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, boundless energy, and the cosmos itself, we take up the very tools required to join God in the grand project of making all things new.

## **Direction OVER Destination**

Abundance, in the end, is not a state to be arrived at and enjoyed passively. The parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-33), a recurring touchstone in Mormon Transhumanist thought, suggests a different model: something small, almost overlooked, that grows by its own internal logic into something that provides shelter and sustenance.

The abundance this tradition envisions — material, biological, cognitive, relational, and eventually cosmic — grows the same way, by accumulated work. It requires an accurate account of what is currently scarce, the technical means to reduce that scarcity, and the covenantal discipline to share what gets produced.

*See also*: [Charity](/topical-guide/charity), [Fulfill](/topical-guide/fulfill), [Generosity](/topical-guide/generosity), [Money](/topical-guide/money), [Need](/topical-guide/need), [Poor](/topical-guide/poor), [Post-Scarcity Economy](/topical-guide/post-scarcity-economy), Prosperity, [Relative Poverty](/topical-guide/relative-poverty), [Replenish](/topical-guide/replenish), [United Order](/topical-guide/united-order), [Welfare](/topical-guide/welfare)