Gods in Regression

“If your God has a God, then your God isn’t really God. You’ve traded the First Cause for an endless chain of finite deities, and a chain that never ends explains nothing.” It is the most philosophically ambitious charge a Protestant brings against the Restoration. It is also, on inspection, the one that quietly borrows its only stopping-point from us.

This is the objection that thinks it goes deeper than all the others. The critic has given up arguing about Christ’s attributes, given up arguing about grace and works, and climbed to the highest rung he can find — the category of deity itself. He believes that one move checkmates the whole Latter-day Saint conception of God. Stated carefully, here is his argument.

The Objection at Full Strength

“Latter-day Saint doctrine teaches that God the Father was once a man who progressed to Godhood — Lorenzo Snow’s couplet, the King Follett Discourse. But a being who became a God must have had a God of his own: the God who authored the plan he was exalted under. And that God had a God. And so on, without end. This is fatal in three ways. First, an infinite regress of gods has no first member, so nothing ultimately grounds the chain — it is turtles all the way down. Second, your Father is therefore contingent: he depends on a prior god and a prior plan, so he is not the self-existent ‘I AM’ of Exodus 3:14, but a product. Third, the Bible’s God is ‘the first and the last’ with ‘no God formed’ before him (Isaiah 44:6) — the very thing your theology denies. Your God is one finite deity in an infinite committee. Ours is the ground of all being. They are not the same God.”

That is the argument at its best, and it deserves to be answered at its best — not by denying the doctrine, and not by retreating into “it’s a mystery,” but by exposing the four confusions the objection depends on. Remove them and the regress does not merely survive; it turns and asks the critic the one question his own theology cannot answer without making exactly the move he is trying to forbid us.

First Confusion: An Origin Is Not the Same as a History

The entire objection rests on a single smuggled word: that the Father, having “once been a man,” must have had an origin — a point at which he began to exist. From there the regress is automatic: a being that began needs a cause, that cause needs a cause, and so on forever.

But the Restoration teaches no such thing. It teaches the precise opposite, and it teaches it as canonized scripture:

Doctrine and Covenants 93:29

“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”

Read that clause as strictly as it is written: the core of every personal being — intelligence itself — cannot be created. Not “was not, as it happens,” but cannot be. It is, in the most literal sense the word allows, self-existent. The Father did not pop into being at the head of a chain of causes. There was never a moment at which he was not. What the King Follett Discourse describes is not the manufacture of a God out of nothing, but the exaltation of an eternal Being — a change in the fulness of His glory, not the beginning of His existence.

This is the distinction the critic erases and must not be allowed to erase. To have an origin is to come into existence. To have a history is to pass through states while already existing. A man who learns to walk did not begin to exist when he took his first step. The sun that rose this morning did not begin to exist at dawn. And a God who “once was” in a different condition than He now occupies did not begin to exist when that condition began. He was always. What changed was His glory, not His being.

The whole regress argument is built to chase down a first beginning. But where there is no beginning, there is nothing to chase. The critic has set off in pursuit of a cause for something that was never caused.

Second Confusion: The Chain Does Not Bottom Out in Nothing

The critic’s most rhetorically effective phrase is “turtles all the way down” — the image of a tower of gods resting on nothing, each one held up by the one below, the whole structure floating over a void. It is a vivid picture. It is also a picture of a theology no Latter-day Saint holds.

In Restoration theology the chain of exalted beings, however long it runs, does not rest on the god at the bottom. It rests on something underneath every god in the series: eternal, uncreated reality — intelligence, the “light of truth” that cannot be made; eternal element (“the elements are eternal,” D&C 93:33); and eternal law (“There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world,” D&C 130:20–21). Abraham saw it directly: the intelligences “had no beginning; they existed before… they are gnolaum, or eternal” (Abraham 3:18).

So the foundation is not the lowest god. The foundation is the eternal order of existence itself, which no god authored and on which every god — including the Father — eternally stands. The turtles do not go down forever onto nothing. They stand, all of them, on bedrock that was never laid because it was always there.

And here is what the critic must be made to see: this is the same move his own theology makes. Classical theism stops the regress by positing a being that is eternal, uncaused, and necessary — God. The Restoration stops the regress by positing a reality that is eternal, uncaused, and necessary — intelligence, element, and law, in which God Himself eternally subsists. Both traditions terminate the chain in something self-existent and beginningless. The only disagreement is about what the self-existent thing is: an abstract simple substance, or eternal personal intelligence dwelling in eternal reality. Both have a stopping-point. Neither floats over a void.

The critic cannot grant himself a necessary, eternal, uncaused terminus and then declare ours illegitimate. If “it simply always existed” is a respectable answer when he says it of his God, it is exactly as respectable when we say it of eternal intelligence and law. He is not objecting to the logic of a self-existent foundation. He is objecting that ours is not shaped like a Greek philosopher’s.

Third Confusion: A Vicious Regress Versus a Harmless One

This is the technical heart of the matter, and it is where the objection actually breaks. Not every infinite series is a problem. Philosophers have always distinguished two kinds.

Two Kinds of Regress

Vicious — each member depends on the prior one for its very existence. Remove the first and nothing in the series exists at all. A train of boxcars with no engine never moves. This is the regress the cosmological argument rightly forbids.

Harmless — the members exist independently, and the series only records some relation among already-existing things. An infinite line of ancestors does not mean no one was ever born; it just means birth has always been happening. The series needs no first member to function.

Now apply the distinction. In Restoration theology, does each god depend on the prior god for his existence? No. Every intelligence is self-existent and uncreated — that is the load-bearing point of D&C 93:29. No god in the series ever brought another god into being. What is passed down the chain is not existence — it is exaltation: glory, knowledge, fulness, the conditions of joy. The prior god is a tutor, not a maker.

That single fact dissolves the objection. The cosmological argument forbids a regress of existence-grantors — because if nothing exists on its own, an infinite chain of borrowers never produces a single dollar. But the Restoration’s chain is not a chain of existence-grantors. Everyone in it already exists, eternally and underived. It is, at most, a chain of teachers — and a beginningless succession of teachers is no more incoherent than a beginningless succession of sunrises. Nothing in the series owes its being to the series. The very engine the critic needs for his argument — “each one would have to be caused by the last” — is missing, because in our theology the existence of the divine is never caused at all.

So the regress is harmless, not vicious. It is a regress of glory bestowed among beings who already and always exist, not a regress of existence handed down a line of contingent things. The critic borrowed the authority of the cosmological argument without noticing that the cosmological argument is about a kind of dependence his target does not have.

Fourth Confusion: Aseity Relocated, Not Destroyed

The critic’s sharpest single word is aseity — self-existence, the property captured by the divine Name “I AM.” His claim is that eternal progression annihilates it: a God with a history cannot be the self-existent One.

But notice what aseity actually asserts: that God’s being is underived — that He does not receive His existence from another. And that is precisely what the Restoration affirms in the strongest possible terms. The Father’s existence is underived. His intelligence was never created, never caused, never given to Him. There is no being and no thing from which the Father’s existence flows. He simply, eternally, is.

What eternal progression touches is not the fact of God’s existence but the fulness of His glory. Aseity is not abolished; it is relocated — from an abstract, partless substance to eternal personal intelligence. The “I AM” is preserved at exactly the level Scripture guards it: God’s being has no source outside itself. He was always. Nothing made Him. That is what the Name means, and the Latter-day Saint affirms it without a flinch.

What the critic actually demands is more than aseity. He demands a specific metaphysical theory of aseity — classical divine simplicity, a God with no parts, no passions, no body, no history, frozen outside time. That doctrine is not in Exodus. The God of the burning bush speaks, relents, remembers, and acts in sequence. “I AM” guards His self-existence; it does not deliver the timeless, partless Absolute of Greek philosophy. When the critic insists it must, he has once again named his true authority — and it is Plotinus before it is Moses.

The Question That Turns the Argument Around

Now the regress, having been defended, advances. The critic’s deepest instinct is that somebody must be ultimate — there must be a final ground beneath everything. He is right. So press him on his own ground: what makes God’s commands good?

This is the ancient Euthyphro dilemma, and it impales classical theism. Is something good because God commands it — in which case “God is good” means only “God agrees with Himself,” and goodness is an arbitrary divine whim that could have gone the other way? Or does God command it because it is good — in which case goodness is a standard above God, and He is not ultimate after all? The classical theist twists between the two: goodness is either arbitrary or it is over God’s head.

The Restoration walks straight between the horns, because it already affirms an eternal order that no god invented. Goodness, truth, and the law by which joy is possible are eternal — co-existent with eternal intelligence, authored by no one, “irrevocably decreed… before the foundations of this world” (D&C 130:20–21). God did not invent goodness, so it is not arbitrary. And goodness is not a rival being standing over God, so He is not dethroned. God is God precisely because He perfectly and eternally embodies and administers the eternal order — not because He fabricated it, and not because He bows to a competitor. He is its living fulness.

So when the critic asks “what is ultimate?” the Latter-day Saint has a cleaner answer than he does. What is ultimate is not a being who arbitrarily wills morality into existence, nor a Form floating above an obedient deity, but the eternal reality of intelligence, truth, and law — perfectly possessed and expressed in the person of God. The critic wanted an ultimate ground. We have one. His own theology, forced to choose between an arbitrary God and a God under the law, does not.

What Scripture Actually Says — and What It Doesn’t

The critic’s third charge was biblical: Isaiah’s “I am the first and the last; beside me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6; cf. 43:10). But read in its own setting, this is the language of covenant exclusivity, not metaphysical census. It is spoken by the same voice that thunders “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) — a command that presupposes other beings called gods while denying that any of them deserve Israel’s worship. Isaiah’s “no God formed” uses the potter’s verb yatsar, the verb of fabrication — the same verb he turns, two verses later, against the craftsman who “formeth a god” from wood and bows to it (Isaiah 44:9–10). A “god formed” is a manufactured god, an idol. Isaiah forbids fabricated rivals to Israel’s God. He is not running a metaphysical inventory of the eternities.

And this matters for the regress, because here is what Scripture conspicuously never does: it never takes up the question of God’s biography prior to and outside our economy. It reveals God as He stands toward us — the sole object of our worship, the Creator of our cosmos, omnipotent and omniscient relative to us, the Father of our spirits, the Author of our salvation, perfect and unchanging in righteousness (Malachi 3:6), the final Judge before whom every knee bows. Every one of those the Latter-day Saint affirms of the Father without reservation. The critic’s regress lives entirely in the one place Scripture is silent — and a silence is not a disqualification. He has manufactured a doctrine out of a gap in revelation and then charged us with contradicting a verse that is about idols.

It is worth saying plainly: the infinite chain of gods is the critic’s extrapolation, not the Church’s catechism. What is canonized is that God is our exalted, embodied Father, and that through Christ we may become like Him (Romans 8:17; 1 John 3:2). The endless tower of god-above-god is speculation built by others on the edges of revelation. The critic is welcome to argue against speculation — but he should not pretend he is arguing against the doctrine the Saints are actually bound to confess.

What the Doctrine Actually Buys

Strip away the “regress” framing and look at what the Restoration’s God actually secures — things the philosophers’ Absolute cannot.

What Is Gained, Not Lost

A God who can truly be a Father. Divinity is a nature that can be shared (2 Peter 1:4, “partakers of the divine nature”). A partless Absolute cannot have real children who become like Him; an exalted Father can — and the New Testament everywhere promises exactly that inheritance (Revelation 3:21).

The Euthyphro dilemma solved. Goodness is neither God’s arbitrary whim nor His master, but the eternal order He perfectly embodies. Classical theism has no third option.

A coherent divine Son. If deity is a nature an eternal being can fully possess, then the Son’s full divinity needs no fourth-century paradox to protect it — He has the fulness of the Godhead (Colossians 2:9).

A God who understands. A Father who knows the path because He has walked it is not a diminished God. He is a God who can be trusted to know the way home, because it is the way He came.

The “regression” the critic mocks is, at bottom, nothing more sinister than theosis taken consistently — the ancient Christian conviction that the redeemed become “partakers of the divine nature,” followed all the way to its end instead of halted halfway by a Greek metaphysic that could not bear its own logic.

The Verdict

The “gods in regression” objection collapses the moment its four hidden confusions are named. It mistakes a history for an origin — but the Father’s intelligence was never created and cannot be. It pictures the chain resting on nothing — but it rests on eternal, uncreated reality, the very kind of self-existent terminus the critic helps himself to for his own God. It borrows the authority of the cosmological argument against a vicious regress — but ours is harmless, a succession of glory among beings who already and eternally exist, never a chain of existence handed down. And it claims eternal progression destroys aseity — but aseity is relocated, not lost: God’s being is underived, which is all the Name “I AM” ever asserted.

Then the argument reverses. Asked what is ultimate, the Latter-day Saint points to the eternal order of intelligence, truth, and law, perfectly embodied in a personal God — and so escapes the Euthyphro dilemma that leaves the classical theist choosing between an arbitrary God and a God beneath the good. The critic came to expose a God too small to be God. He leaves having shown only that our God will not fit inside a fourth-century Greek category — and that his own God, pressed for an ultimate ground of goodness, has nowhere to stand that we have not already stood more firmly.

We affirm the doctrine. We deny every inference the critic smuggles into it. The Father is, for us and forever, the self-existent, supreme, unchanging, sufficient God — underived in His being, perfect in His glory, the ground beneath our salvation and the end of our worship. A God who has no beginning needs no first cause. And a God who is the living fulness of all that is eternally true is not one deity in an endless committee. He is the only God we will ever know, worship, or stand before — and He is enough.