Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: August 03, 2022 03:03PM
My impression: Even exaltation, the concept of eternal progression, was ripped off of the ideas of better men, howbeit with some twists and dialed up to eleven.
When Dick uses the phrase "world without end," that triggers me.
I have a love/hate relationship with this book as I slog through it. What's important to understand is that Smith was not the only one attempting to square the circle between science and religion in the 1830s. Dick walks his reader through the state of science in 1830 to justify things like God and the afterlife, but he also revels in his own love of learning truth, especially scientific truth. He argues from scripture that the heavens, the stars over our heads and all the other planets, are to endure forever, and they constitute the riches of eternity promised to us in scripture. He argues that the elements are eternal, as is the soul of man or "intelligent principle," and then extrapolates logically a version of a quote you are all familiar with: whatever degree of knowledge we attain in this life, it shall rise with us in the resurrection, and we basically pick up where we left off, going from glory to glory by degrees as we learn and grow to all eternity.
He differs significantly from Smith in his strict monotheism. He does not believe that man existed from a past eternity, only in the mind of God. Nor does he believe that man can become as God. He says it will be "like one of those mathematical lines that draws nearer and nearer to another without the possibility of them ever touching." A parabola. So we can eternally draw nearer and nearer to God but we will never be as he is, because conventional mainline American Protestantism says no, and Smith would innovate on Dick's ideas in this regard.
I discovered the King Follett Discourse on my mission and quickly fell in love with it. As I read Philophy of a Future State and remember that sermon in my head, it seems as though Smith was really trying to have a back and forth with Thomas Dick but he had to settle for a gaggle of Mormons who would have settled for anything that came out of his mouth. Many parts of that sermon seem to be direct refutations of Dick's book, and others seem to pick up exactly where Dick left off. I suppose that fits Smith's MO: he took ideas around them, added his own twist as he thought would sell to his own circle of friends, and published and extolled those ideas as revelations that came to him out of the bright wide blue. I loved how Smith extolled learning more truth forever and ever as a virtue in that sermon, and now I see he may have simply picked that talking point up from Dick, the way he goes on about it. Dick describes in some detail the state of the American education system in 1830 which sounds eerily relevant. He laments that we don't encourage the curiosity of schoolchildren to participate in learning like we ought to: instead we tend to beat it out of them and never make the point even though we fill their memory banks with what seems to them random assorts of stuff.
I'm halfway through the book. I don't like how he dismisses the idea that there may be no god and no afterlife out of hand without the discussion it deserves, but this idea was not popular in 1830 like it is in 2022. However, when he describes his love of scientific knowledge and of knowing truth, he hits me right where I live. For the truth, I would discard even a belief in God if that's what it took to know it. Dick would never do this, but he didn't think he would ever need to. In 1830, the Origin of Species was still three decades out from being published and there was no immediately obvious contradiction between science and religion that need alarm any Christian into retreating into an insular fundamentalist bubble to protect his faith. There were, in Dick's view, contradictions between reality as shown by scientific instruments and what the catholic church had historically said that scripture means, but there's no reason a Christian of reason can't have both his faith and the trove of scientific knowledge. The study of nature only magnifies and glorifies God and one cannot properly worship the Lord without the awe of the stars.
It's really good shit, some of it -- even this atheist can admit that. I am sad to think there is no afterlife. It's not a scientific fact that there is no version of an afterlife, but it a vanishing possibility. It's possible. Dick even reasons that if space goes on forever and if the stars are truly infinite and time is eternal, a version of you that might as well be you may be out there somewhere and in conditions approximating something like what we read in scripture about the eternal resurrected state. I mean... that's a stretch for me to acknowledge that this other me may exist and also think that it will in fact actually be me and contain my essence or 'intelligent principle' and suddenly fear for my eternal soul, but it's also a thinker. In 2022, we know the universe had a beginning and will eventually (if current conditions continue to prevail) expand to the point of perfect heat death, so the universe is finite in time. We cannot tell if it is infinite in space, because we will never know what lies beyond the cosmic horizon, which is the furthest we can see based on the fact that light goes yay fast consistently and that the universe has a finite age. But the universe or whatever principle it emerges from (quantum reality?) may create universes all the time, and in that immensity, who is to say what is possible? I personally don't like flirting with the cosmic prospective merely to imagine that hell exists. That's so banal. But the other side of Dick's ideology appeals to me where I live: endless moral and intellectual progression and the freedom and immortality to visit all of the stars and know everything there is to know forever.