Intelligence, An Explanation Based on Agency

Intelligence, An Explanation Based On Agency

A central part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that in this life we are presented with choices. The most important choices are those involving some form of opposition.   That is where we must choose between one alternative that would be in accordance with the teachings and example of Christ and another that would be contrary to those teachings.  If we consistently chose to follow Christ’s policies he promises, through the power of his atonement and his grace, to bring us back into the presence of the Father.   If we, on the other hand, consistently choose the alternatives that disregard Christ’s program, we become subject to an adversary who from the beginning has been allowed to draw us away from Christ and into his own control.   There is a punishment reserved for those who allow themselves to fall under the power of this adversary.

The liberty given us to make these choices according to our own individual will is called “agency”.  Agency was at the foundation of God’s plan for us from the beginning.  Without it we could not choose for ourselves and, as Lehi taught, our creation would have been “for a thing of naught, wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of ‘our’ creation” (2 Ne 2:11).

This issue of freedom to choose, or agency, raises an interesting doctrinal question.  The basic LDS belief regarding our existence is that we are the literal offspring of God The Father; that He is the father of our spirits and that we lived with Him as spirit children from some time immemorial until we chose to come to Earth, accept a new “fallen” state, and begin to take responsibility for our choices; that is until we chose to participate in “the fall”.  We consider our existence, then, to consist of two parts; a physical body received through biological reproduction from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and a much older spirit, that is a literal son or daughter of our heavenly parents.

The traditional doctrine of creation among many Christians today teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were created by The Father totally from the dust of the earth, which itself had been created ‘ex nihilo’ by God, life also being breathed into their bodies by God himself.  The result of this line of thinking is that all the family of Adam, all of us, are 100 percent the result of God’s creative work; that He is totally responsible for our existence. 

Here is where I start to see a problem.  If God is totally responsible for every aspect of our existence, then where is agency?  How can we do anything based totally on our own wills?  Is it our fault if we choose poorly?  Can God create us out of nothing and then make us totally independent of his creative process?  I can’t see how that would be possible.  He might create us and then give us freedom to choose for ourselves, but we can only make choices based on some set of internal values and an internal algorithm for choosing.    That algorithm and those values had to be put into us at the time of our creation.  How else could we acquire them?  How can we be punished or rewarded for our choices and actions if there is no aspect of our existence, including our reasoning abilities, that is not somehow derived from our creation?

If you mix up cake batter a little bit carelessly and put it in the oven and it comes out bad, do you punish the cake?  No, you throw it out and start over until your creation comes out just the way you want it.  Just so, if one of God’s child creations goes bad, and it was truly created out of total nothingness, as some profess, shouldn’t he merely cast it back into the oblivion from which he created it and try again? 

No, there must be something else going on here.  There must be some aspect of our existence that is independent of God and that he is not responsible for; something that predates even our existence with him as his spirit children.  If not, the concept of agency and freedom to truly make independent, personal decisions just doesn’t work.  It is a contradiction to think that God can create a thing ‘out of whole cloth’ as they say, and then endow it with abilities totally independent of that creation.   This sounds like the fairy tale of Pinocchio.

Restoration scripture and the teachings of Joseph Smith give us insight into this issue and a solution to the contradiction with the introduction of the concept of “intelligence”.  Here is a solution that requires no vivid imagination and no great stretching of logic.  It appeals to our reasoning as a simple and logical explanation. 

Joseph received a revelation in 1833 wherein the Lord explained a concept pertinent to this issue of agency and of our being independent of God in this important way.  Christ states twice that our spirits are co-eternal with God.  In verse 23 of Section 93 he states; “Ye were also in the beginning with the Father;” . . . , and in verse 29; “Man was also in the beginning with God.  Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”  Referring then to the “light of truth” , or intelligence, which is within each of us, he says; “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.  Behold, here is the agency of man, . . .” (Sec 93:23, 29-31) (Italics added for emphasis).  Thus we see that something about us is independent of God and can act for itself and that this is the basis for our agency.  Without this there is no existence, or as Lehi said, “no purpose in the end of our creation”.

Joseph Smith also taught: “The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is co-equal (co-eternal) with God himself.”  And later in the same discourse: “The intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will it have an end.”  And again: “Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle.  It is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it.”  Summarizing, Joseph commented: “This is good doctrine.  It tastes good.  I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you” (TPJS 353-355).

This concept, revealed to us by Jesus Christ through the prophet Joseph Smith, eliminates the contradiction between agency and human ex-nihilo creation, by eliminating the latter.  There is a part of us that is totally independent of God’s creation.  It is called intelligence.  We are, then, not two-part beings but three-part.  Our physical bodies are inhabited by a spirit that is a child of our heavenly parents, and that spirit is quickened by an intelligence which had no creation but has existed forever and cannot be destroyed.  Thus we can exercise our own judgement, our own agency, in making moral choices in this life.  God encourages us to follow Christ’s program which leads to salvation (for both the living and the dead).  Satan persuades us to disregard Christ’s way and to follow error and evil. 

It is up to us.  Our intelligence is totally independent of all coercive influence.  God cannot coerce.  Neither can Satan. This is good news.  It does taste good!  Through Christ we can receive joy in this life and eternal reward.  When we do it will be because we (our intelligences) have disciplined our minds to follow Christ’s teachings and to keep covenants and commandments received from him.  All the family of Adam will have the opportunity to accept Christ’s way, but that is another topic.  Let us use our agency to bring happiness to ourselves and to others, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Emotion vs. Spirit

Emotion vs. Spirit: What Am I Feeling?

It was the Sunday afternoon fireside closing an exhilarating week of ‘Especially for Youth” activities.  There were almost 300 of us in the auditorium.  The speaker was amazing.  One minute we would all be laughing uncontrollably together and the next minute he had us all in tears.  The spirit in the meeting was so thick you could cut it with a knife!  None of us will ever forget the wonderful spiritual experience we had that day!

This is a familiar description.  We all know what it feels like to be moved to tears by a good book, or movie, or piece of music, or a speaker.  Is this the description of a powerful spiritual experience?  Maybe so, or maybe not.  Clearly the speaker had a powerful effect on the audience, but the audience reaction may have been purely a response to emotion, and not to the Spirit, or more specifically, not to the promptings of the Holy Ghost.

The true encounter with the Spirit, and the emotional response to a stimulus, can have similar physiological results; a lump in the throat, pressure behind the sinuses, and even the shedding of tears.  The two phenomena may be difficult to distinguish, but it is important to understand that they are different, that they have different sources, and that they lead to different outcomes.  To not understand the difference is to live in danger of deception, for though the emotional response can be used to good purpose in the Lord’s work, Satan can also use emotion as a tool in his arsenal to create either hostility or sympathy in us, according to his desires.   In contrast, he cannot use the influence of the Spirit to further his purposes.

So how is one to distinguish between the true influence of the Spirit and the effects of pure emotion?  This is a complex and sometimes difficult question.  I will try to give a few simple tests followed by a few examples that may help; first a couple of tests.

The Spirit generally operates on us in an individual, personal way.   In the case of the “Especially for Youth” example above, is everyone in the audience struggling to hold back tears?  If so, that is likely to be an emotional response.   Is the speaker in tears?  In that case the audience’s reaction is almost certainly a sympathetic response to the speaker’s emotion, rather than the working of the Holy Ghost. 

Is the experience you are having in a group causing you to have a change in your heart, especially when those around you are not showing any signs of emotion?  Are you feeling truly prompted to change something in your life, or to do something like visit someone or call someone or enroll in a class or serve a mission?   Or is your first concern merely to hide your emotional reaction from those around you?   The true influence of the Spirit will generally be prompting you to do something, not just embarrass you with tears.

If you are having such an experience when you are totally alone, perhaps reading a book or listening to music, and, again, if there is a connected urging to take some action, no matter how simple or trivial it may seem, this is likely a prompting from the Spirit.  If there is no such urging the experience is likely just an emotional one.

One final test, connected to the notion of feeling prompted to some action, is if the experience is opening your mind to some new knowledge or insight or understanding of a question or problem.  It could be a question you have been pondering for some time, or some totally new insight to a problem that you have never considered before.  When new knowledge flows into your mind that is almost always the true working of the Holy Spirit.

Now we will consider a few examples where, with the benefit of hindsight, we can judge whether the Spirit or simple emotion was operating.  The first that comes to mind, it being an example of a large group listening to a powerful speaker, is the community of King Benjamin whose reaction to the King’s words is recorded in the fifth chapter of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon.  After lecturing his people on principles of good parenting, the Law of Imparting, and other principles and rules for living together in peaceful community, the people testified together that through the Spirit of The Lord they had received new knowledge, that a change had occurred in their hearts, that they desired to change their behavior, that they had new insights and could prophecy of future events, and that they wished to make new covenants with God.  There is no mention of weeping either on King Benjamin’s part or on the part of his people.  All of the other tests that we mentioned above are showing in favor of a true experience with the Spirit, not with human emotion.

Another group example, and one that clearly shows the danger of purely emotional power over many, sometimes called ‘mob behavior’, is the band of men who, under the influence of a leader skilled in controlling emotions, worked themselves into a murderous frenzy and took the lives of Joseph Smith Jr. and his brother Hyrum Smith.  This case is in many respects just the opposite of the example of King Benjamin’s people, the one commonality being that both groups were moved to action.

It might be well to mention here that this whole issue is complicated by the fact that there are evil spirits that can work on our minds as well as the Spirit of The Lord.  Their influence can sometimes be deceptive to the degree that we have trouble distinguishing between the two.  This may be a topic for another discussion.

An example of the Spirit working on an isolated individual is found in Joseph Smith’s reading, presumably alone, of James 1:5.  Joseph recalls how this passage prompted him to retire to a secluded wood to pray about a question he had been struggling with for some time.  It is interesting that he reminds us of his visits to the several protestant congregations active in his vicinity, where the preachers successfully worked their audiences into emotional states but after the meetings all returned to their bickering and bad feelings.  Joseph did not seem to be affected by his attendance at these so-called “spiritual” gatherings.  In contrast, the true working of the Spirit urged him to individual action.

A similar experience was had by Parley Pratt in 1830.  After living alone with a Bible in a log cabin in the Ohio wilderness for a year he recounts that he felt driven by the Spirit to leave all of his possessions and embark on a missionary life to fulfill the Great Commission to take the Gospel to every creature.  He did not respond at once, but married and tried his hand at farming before giving in totally to the urgings of the Spirit to begin his missionary activities.  On his way west to visit his and his wife’s families, while traveling by canal boat in the vicinity of Palmyra, New York, Parley was powerfully moved to stop and make some visits.  So affected by this urging was he that he sent his wife on ahead alone while he stayed back, explaining that he knew not why he should do so.  He soon made the acquaintance of a Baptist deacon by the name of Hamlin who told him of the recent publishing of a new book, the Book of Mormon.  Deacon Hamlin loaned him his copy of the book, which, after a day and a night of continuous reading gave Parley the answer to his unexplained delay in this strange place where he knew no one and had no rational reason to visit.

In summary, we should be aware that there is a difference, although sometimes subtle, between a purely emotional response and the workings of the Holy Spirit.  Be wary of group responses.  The Spirit prefers to work on us individually.  If a group seem to be responding emotionally it is probably just that, an emotional response and nothing more, with the interesting exception of Benjamin’s people which has been noted.  Also, the Spirit will instruct us with new knowledge, or insight, or urgings to take some personal action for good.  This, of course, can be counterfeited by evil spirits so we must be on guard.  Our ability to discern between emotion and Spirit can be complicated and cloudy, but we can strengthen our judgment by continuous study of scripture and by participation in sacred ordinances such as the sacrament and the ordinances of the temple.  Remember the Lord’s words; “whoso treasureth up my word, shall not be deceived . . .”