God

Hedcut illustration of John’s account includes the idea that “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24), which Joseph Smith’s inspired revision renders with “For unto such hath God promised his Spirit.” — Psalm 82:1 pictures God presiding over “the congregation of the mighty,” a heavenly assembly connected to the Latter-day Saint reading of *Elohim* in Psalm and Genesis.

God is the creator and ruler of the world, a word used in two senses that pull against each other: the incorporeal being of classical theology, without body or parts, and the embodied person, presiding among divine beings, whom Restoration scripture recovers from the Bible. Latter-day Saints apply the word to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who together form the Godhead. The most common Hebrew word for God, ‘elohim, is plural in form and related to ‘el, an ancient Semitic word for a god and a name of the high God, yet when it names the God of Israel it usually takes a singular verb. Defenders of an incorporeal God often cite Jesus’s words “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24), which Joseph Smith’s inspired revision of the Bible renders, “For unto such hath God promised his Spirit.”

The Congregation of the Gods

This recovery of ancient perspectives extends directly to the setting of the divine council. Biblical texts frequently situate God within a congregation of heavenly beings. Psalm 82:1 declares that “God [‘elohim] standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods [‘elohim].” While older rabbinic interpretations often reduced these latter “gods” to mortal magistrates, modern biblical scholarship aligns with the Latter-day Saint recognition of this scene as a literal session of the heavenly assembly. This paradigm resolves the long-debated plural formulation in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image.” The Book of Abraham removes the ambiguity entirely, portraying creation not as creatio ex nihilo but as an organizing effort by the divine council: “they, that is the Gods, organized and formed the heavens and the earth” (Abraham 4:1).

A Body of Flesh and Bones

Central to this theology is the physical embodiment of the Father. As articulated in an 1843 revelation, “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit” (D&C 130:22). Their unity is understood as oneness in purpose for which Jesus prayed in John 17. The King Follett discourse expanded this trajectory, positing that God Himself is an exalted man dwelling in the heavens. Drawing upon these concepts of the Godhead and the divine council, Lincoln Cannon has articulated a model of Deity as an exalted community of persons seamlessly sharing power⁠—a framework that underpins the philosophical arguments he developed alongside Joseph West.

The New God Argument

In formulating the New God Argument, West and Cannon propose that a substantive hope in the future of humanity logically entails a corresponding trust in God. Rooted in the premise that human civilization will likely survive to attain vastly expanded technological capacities, the argument posits that a civilization securing such power without an equivalent expansion in compassion would inevitably self-destruct. Therefore, a surviving, highly advanced civilization would inherently demonstrate profound compassion and would likely possess the capacity to create worlds emulating its own evolutionary history. Consequently, our reality was likely engineered by beings both vastly more powerful and more compassionate than ourselves⁠—a conclusion that closely parallels the Latter-day Saint conception of Deity. While critics challenge its probabilistic reasoning, and classical Christian theologians reject its premise of a God who emerges from within the temporal universe rather than standing outside it, the argument offers a modern framework for faith based on technological extrapolation and the simulation hypothesis.

Offspring of God

Crucially, the doctrine of literal divine parentage serves as a firm bulwark against the modern impulse toward idolatry. The Hebrew term tselem, translated as “image” in the Genesis creation account, is the exact vocabulary utilized elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible to denote the physical statues of pagan deities. Within ancient Near Eastern temple ideology, God placed living, breathing images of Himself into the terrestrial sphere, standing in stark contrast to the inert, carved idols of surrounding nations. Isaiah relentlessly mocked the absurdity of the craftsman who venerates the wooden construct of his own hands. Today, similar impulses manifest in efforts by Silicon Valley technologists to synthesize religious veneration around artificial intelligence. Yet, as Paul observed in Athens, humanity is the literal offspring of God. This doctrine simultaneously validates the New God Argument’s hope for humanity’s exalted trajectory and enforces a strict caution regarding our technological creations: because we are the offspring of God, we must not suppose that the divine nature can be replicated in silicon, code, or any other medium “graven by art and man’s device” (Acts 17:28-29).