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I loved this quote from chapter 10 of the Joseph Fielding Smith manual:

So far as the philosophy and wisdom of the world are concerned, they mean nothing unless they conform to the revealed word of God. Any doctrine, whether it comes in the name of religion, science, philosophy, or whatever it may be, if it is in conflict with the revealed word of the Lord, will fail. It may appear plausible. It may be put before you in language that appeals and which you may not be able to answer. It may appear to be established by evidence that you cannot controvert, but all you need to do is to abide your time. Time will level all things. You will find that every doctrine, every principle, no matter how universally believed, if it is not in accord with the divine word of the Lord to his servants, will perish. Nor is it necessary for us to try to stretch the word of the Lord in a vain attempt to make it conform to these theories and teachings. The word of the Lord shall not pass away unfulfilled, but these false doctrines and theories will all fail. Truth, and only truth, will remain when all else has perished.

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It turns out that CreateSpace only charges $3.65 to print a 24-page picture book, color, full bleed. That’s…incredible. You do pay shipping ($3.59 in my case), but still — $7 to print a picture book for your kids? Very, very nice. I threw together a dummy book to test print quality, and my copy arrived today, ten days after ordering it.

In general, I’m quite pleased. Print quality is very good. I’ve taken some photos below (with no postprocessing, but my iPhone camera added a bit more contrast than there actually is in the book).

Notes

• The book is perfect-bound, so it won’t open as flat as it would if it were saddle-stitched. I don’t think they have saddle stitch as an option.
• The paper isn’t glossy.
• Colors aren’t quite as vibrant as they are on screen — blacks aren’t as dark, etc. But for actual use — reading to kids at bedtime — they’re quite fine.
• Colors that are similar to each other can be a little harder to distinguish, but anything with sufficient contrast should be okay.

Photos

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A quick animated GIF I threw together:

I made the initial animation in Blender, using the wave and displace modifiers and some postprocessing in the node editor. Then I imported the frames into After Effects and did a little more processing (added grain, some color adjustments). I exported the frames as a PNG sequence and then converted them to a GIF using ImageMagick on the command line:

convert -delay 1x20 *.png -resize 500x500 -layers optimize +dither -colors 32 output.gif

More animations coming in the near future, hopefully.

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This essay is part of a series called Why I Believe.

First, what I believe: that there is a God, a kind, loving Heavenly Father who created the universe and who is the father of our spirit bodies. Further, I believe that he cares about us and that we can have a personal relationship with him, for before we were born we lived with him in heaven, and we’re now on Earth in a mortal probation for the purpose of becoming more like him. And, most importantly, I believe that someday we will return to him.

This post won’t cover all of that, but I’ll talk about some of the rational reasons I have for believing these things — arguments that provide enough plausibility to persuade the logical side of my brain that I’m not completely irrational for believing in a hyperintelligent extraterrestrial.

Who is God?

To clarify terms, when we ask whether God is real, we mean an intelligent, all-powerful, all-knowing being who created the universe, and beyond that we mean the particular God who talks to Judeo-Christian prophets, according to said prophets. In other words, we’re asking whether our particular conception of God is real.

First, could a God exist? There doesn’t seem to be any reason why not. It’s easy to imagine that there are other living, sentient creatures that we can’t see right now. Seeing the power spectrum among us, it’s also not hard to conceive of beings more powerful than we are. Given how much we don’t know about the universe, both in structure and in other solar systems and galaxies, I don’t see how anyone can rule out the possibility of a God, at least in theory.

The traits of God

If God does exist, what would he be like? A concept or abstraction? A cloud? Spacetime itself? In theory, God could be anything.

While I don’t discount the possibility of finding sentient life in forms wholly foreign to us — like an intelligent comet or galaxy cluster or a lifeform that only achieves sentience near black holes — I have to say that based on what we can observe, namely that the only sentient thing around is humans, it follows that if there is an intelligent, all-powerful being that created something as complex as the universe, it’s not unreasonable to think that such a being could also be humanlike. It’s not mandatory, but it’s not impossible, either.

So we have a God who could be humanlike, albeit much advanced. If God is a person, the next question is this: is God good? Bad? Something in between?

If God is evil, selfishly bent on causing pain and getting gain — if an insanely powerful, demented, corrupt being had created this earth and is manipulating everything — wouldn’t things be far worse than what we see? In spite of all the darkness in the world, we still see rampant love, hope, friendship, kindness, compassion, service, and more. If God were a dark god, I don’t think he’d allow much of that.

If God is a mixture of good and evil, like all of us, then we’d expect to see both kindness and capriciousness, love and jealousy, sacrifice and selfishness. It wouldn’t be hard to interpret things this way (especially the Old Testament), and I think it’s a possible scenario.

If God is good, then we’d expect to see lots of good in the world, and we do. I think we would also expect to see pain and suffering, and in a moment I’ll explain why. God being good means God is kind, loving, full of compassion, building things up rather than tearing them down. This is the kind of God I naturally want to believe in, because things are too bleak otherwise. It also matches with what I see around me.

The children of God

If God is a living creature, it stands to reason that he, like almost all living things we’re aware of, would procreate. It’s possible that superintelligent beings are all sterile, but it’s more likely that they do reproduce.

Procreation perpetuates species — horses give birth to horses, not cows; apple seeds make trees that make apples, not monkeys or daytime television; humans give birth to humans, not mountains or stars or dolphins. (Sidenote: are there any biological examples of creatures that don’t follow this pattern? I’m curious. It wouldn’t negate what I’m saying here, but it would certainly be intriguing.)

So, based on what we saw all around us, it makes sense for the offspring of God to be of the same kind as God, and to start as infants in godhood, eventually growing up to be adult gods.

For the children of God, are the godlike powers innate, like breathing and sleeping, or are they learned, like walking and doing calculus and building a house? Given what I see here on Earth, I’m led to believe that the children of God — us — inherit a small amount of godlike power (love, procreation, etc.), but must learn or earn the rest.

Now, if God is good, and if he wants us to become like him, it stands to reason that he would only want us to gain full powers of godhood if we too are good and wise. If he were to give these incredible powers to irresponsible, wicked, selfish people, they would naturally become evil forces of destruction, wreaking war across the universes (Hitler + omniscience + omnipotence = bad), and God would be complicit — he would be their enabler. So it makes sense to me for God to vet us thoroughly, limiting these powers to those of his children who prove that they really are truly good and not just putting on a show.

The plan of salvation

A good way for God to vet us seems to be to put us in a sandbox and give us lots of opportunities to choose between good and evil, to make choices that matter. To be worthy of godhood, people have to love goodness — it has to be who they are at heart, something that won’t change once they’re uplifted (to use science fiction terminology) to godhood. Otherwise you end up with cruel gods creating worlds and populating them with children just so they can watch them suffer.

So we’re here on Earth in the middle of the vetting. I don’t know why a test like this requires that we don’t remember what came before, or why we have to relearn everything about God and goodness, relying on faith and belief. I suspect it’s partly because of God’s compassion and mercy — if we know full well that God is there and that good and evil exist, and if we then choose evil, we’re far more culpable. At that point it’s more likely that we’d keep choosing evil, stuck on a track that ends up being irredeemable almost from the beginning (cf. Satan and his angels). If we can’t see God, however, then there are more opportunities for us to repent and decide to start choosing good. Less damning, more hope.

The problem of pain

This is often seen as a reason to think God isn’t there, because how could a loving God allow bad things to happen? But given the reasons for the test — to see if we’ll stay true to God and righteousness no matter what — I don’t see how it could be any other way. Bad things have to happen. Otherwise our loyalty to good can’t be fully tested, and we can’t be trusted with those powers of godhood. We have to be tested and tried through a wide variety of experiences.

People ask why God doesn’t prevent more bad things from happening (because it’s clear that he does, from time to time). But I wonder why God ever interferes at all. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very grateful for answered prayers and averted danger. But we talk about pain and suffering as a refining fire, and it’s true: the really hard trials are the things that push us most toward godhood, strengthening and clarifying our loyalties. Since that’s the whole point, it would make sense for life to be one massive trial after another. And yet for most people it’s not that way — it’s an alternating flow of good and bad, blessings and sorrow. I suppose if life were a continual flow of bad, after a certain point in the barrage we’d just give up. Whatever the case, God often lets wickedness and natural disasters and disease and death run their course. It’s all part of the test.

Also, suffering provides more opportunities for people around the sufferer to have love and compassion and to serve. Our family has been on the receiving end of that with our daughter’s cardiomyopathy. While I certainly wish she didn’t have this heart problem, I can see how God uses it to bring about more good in the world, and to test not only me and my family but also those around us.

Prayer

I have too many answered prayers on a regular basis to chalk it up to placebo effects or wishful thinking or even chance.

Evidences of God

In general, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that all of this — the universe, Earth, etc. — happened on its own. Even with an infinity of universes where probability dictates that something like this must happen, I have a hard time believing that what I see around me is merely the result of billions of years of iteration and blind evolution. If any of this is real in any way, it’s far easier to believe that there is an Architect behind it.

A sample of other evidences:

• Our universe just happens to have all the right parameters so life can exist.
• Gravity. Not only does it make it so galaxies and stars and planets can form, but simpler things like the fact that we can walk and run and jump with relative ease, and the fact that there’s a ground for us to do those things on, and that the atmosphere is there so we can breathe.
• The sun happens to be at the right distance to give us just enough heat and light. And the photons that stream from the sun at such a high speed, bouncing off things in such a way that it not only lights our world (which is a miracle) but also gives us colors (which is a second miracle). And by the way, we just happen to have these rods and cones and eyes to receive all that data, and we just happen to have brains that can interpret it. Ditto for sound waves and ears. This is crazy. (Sure, there are still real things we can’t see or hear, but the fact that we can see or hear at all is amazing.)
• The complexity of human physiology. Considering how many things can go wrong at any point, it’s a miracle that anyone ever stays alive at all, period.
• The way we can eat and digest a vast variety of food, enabling us to live all over the planet. And to have delight and joy in our daily sustenance. And the fact that things like delight and joy exist as emotions.
• The relative lack of accidents on freeways.
• Consciousness and thought, which is why we’re able to talk about all this in the first place.
• The arts.
• Love and friendship.

Conclusion

It’s entirely possible to look at all the things I’ve listed and interpret them as natural phenomena, as odd facets of human neurology. In the end, I choose to see it as God. I don’t yet understand everything about him or why he set things up the way he did, but I know that believing in God and living his laws makes me happier (I know this because the periods of doubt and sin have unquestionably been the least happy parts of my life). And I’m okay with not having all the answers yet.

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Five very short stories, based off a writing prompt my friend Jonathon Penny posted yesterday. (Things got a little out of control. Apparently I like writing about aliens.)

Story 1

When the aliens finally came, just a week before the rogue planet—the one we didn’t see coming till two weeks before that, when it was too late to do much of anything except arrange the deck chairs and say a few prayers—when they came, we thought maybe they could save us. Just maybe. But we were wrong. They came, not to save us, but to be saved. And the thing slithering through space after them—well, let’s just say we were grateful the planet got us before it did.

Story 2

When the aliens finally came, our xenolinguists were stumped. The aliens didn’t talk, at least on any frequency that we could see. They didn’t chitter. They didn’t make signs with their heads or the appendages we arbitrarily called hands. They didn’t seem to grok the equations the mathematicians showed them. They didn’t reverse the magnetic fields around themselves like the swimmers do down in the outer core. (Most people still think of the swimmers as aliens, by the way, and I suppose they are in one sense, but you could make a strong argument that they’re more native to the planet than we are.) Then we figured it out. It took us longer, you see, because they lived on the outside of their ship, and our suits didn’t pick up smells from the vacuum, and long story short, Milner—the one from New Canada—somehow noticed the constantly shifting scents, and one thing led to another. Heaven knows what the aliens thought we’d been saying to them all that time. Anyway, it wasn’t long before they were hugging the astronauts like long-lost relatives, and next thing we knew they’d taken a chunk of Brooklyn—a big one, too—right up into their ship. Haven’t seen them since.

Story 3

When the aliens finally came, they arrived not in large ships, but in a hail of small cocoons that fell scattershot across the East Coast. At sunrise the next morning they wriggled out, small like a grain of rice, and burrowed down, gnawing at the dirt and rock, growing bigger and bigger. We didn’t notice any of this, mind you, until buildings and subways started collapsing and sinkholes began showing up everywhere. Terrorists, we thought. By the time we realized what had happened, it was too late.

Story 4

When the aliens finally came, sir, no, I wasn’t at my post. I was…hiding. Yes, sir, I understand. No, not at all, sir. They appeared to be shapeshifters, sir. Knots of tentacles, shiny, all over the place. Real tall one second, short and stumpy the next. Sometimes they were in two or three or ten places at the same time. Weirdest thing I ever saw, sir. No, she’s doing fine, sir, thank you for asking. They say what I saw was, uh, fluctuating cross-sections of higher-dimensional beings. No, sir, I don’t think I understand it, and if I may say so, I don’t think I want to. Thank you, sir.

Story 5

When the aliens finally came, ribbons of light all a-dancing in the sky, they put the northern lights to shame. Some fools on the news said something so beautiful couldn’t be evil. Me and my folks, we bundled up quick and got out of the city, went down south into the jungles, to get as far away from other people as we could get. Apparently we weren’t the only ones with that idea. We’ve been holed up here for a month now, listening to the explosions up north. Lost my oldest to a snake bite. Lost my second oldest to a spider bite. My wife’s been down with the trembles for five days. I don’t know what those aliens can do, but it’s looking like it can’t be much worse than this jungle.

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This is a rough, experimental proof of concept showing how an assertion-based genealogy app could work. The basic idea is that you type in the facts you know (usually from a record you’ve found), and the app pieces together the people and relationships. Here’s the video:

And a screencap:

Notes:

• I’m not very good at After Effects. (Thus the oversize mouse cursor I threw together, the less than ideal pacing, etc.)
• Overall, the idea of assertion-based genealogy continues to intrigue me. It feels simpler — I add a source and list the facts/hypotheses found in it, and the system takes care of linking it all up.
• Toward the end of the video, the mouse clicks on the first fact and it dims, and Domenico and Mariantonia disappear from the chart area. The idea here is similar to toggling a layer’s visibility in Photoshop — disable a fact to see what the chart looks like without those conclusions.
• I didn’t mock this up, but I envisioned the right (empty) sidebar being used for analysis, somewhat like my Family Analysis prototype, and for flagging errors (a father born after his child is born, a mother dying two years before she gives birth, etc.).

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My friend Scott asked on Facebook for my response to two posts by J. Max Wilson, one on rejecting living prophets by following future prophets and the other on the limits of prophetic fallibility. I’ve been meaning to blog something along these lines anyway, so here’s my response.

We were always a peculiar people, but the culture of the world seems to be diverging more and more from the doctrines the prophets teach, which means those doctrines (and those prophets) will keep growing more embarrassing and unpopular and awkward.

And yet I think this is good for the Church. It helps people with lukewarm beliefs decide whether they really do believe that God speaks to prophets today and that we can trust both the prophets and their message. It’s all about the prophets.

As for the fallibility card, I’d rather play it safe and follow the current prophets, because assuming that they’re wrong and that future prophets will correct them is, as Max said, a shaky, dangerous path. Yes, continuing revelation means some things have changed since Joseph Smith’s time. But a lot of things haven’t. Yes, future revelation may allow same-sex marriage and ordination of women and even a lesbian, female prophet. But it may not. To my understanding, God has told us to live by the revelation we’ve actually received, not the revelation we hope we’ll receive someday.

The question, then, is whether God wants us as a people to urge the prophets to try to receive new revelation on these matters. Yes, revelation usually comes in response to questions, and God does want us to ask questions. But people are acting as if the prophets haven’t already been asking these questions of God all along. Considering that God seems to believe they have good judgment (since he called them as prophets in the first place), I think we can safely assume they’ve asked.

(Sidenote: I don’t feel comfortable demanding transparency from the prophets as to whether they’ve asked God about these matters, etc. Suits notwithstanding, this is the church of God, not a public corporation or a secular government. If we believe they’re prophets, we should trust them to do what God called them to do.)

We obviously need to treat each other with Christlike love and respect in all of this, but some ideas are in fact wrong and dangerous (whether blatantly or subtly so) and need to be spoken against, especially in this day of calling good evil and evil good. In a way it feels like we’ve entered a new(ish) war against the prophets, and that’s no good. God does call prophets and we can in fact trust them. And when what they’re saying is very unpopular, we should then trust them all the more, because it’s far more likely that the world has strayed than that the prophets have fallen.

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This experiment takes the style introduced in January and uses it for a family pedigree (this time with real names and dates from my Italian side in Morrone del Sannio):

Three generations would have been better than four (mostly because of spacing). There’s also a bit of redundancy — people on the main lines show up twice, once as a child and once as a father/mother. Overall, though, I like being able to see the children of each family across multiple generations.

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A few weeks ago the FamilySearch blog posted about Source Tracker, a web app that hooks into FamilySearch and shows you which U.S. censuses your ancestors should have been in, and (more importantly) which ones have already been sourced. For example:

Yes, please. It’s brilliant. And it makes it really, really easy to see where the holes are — in mine, for example, you can see that I need to find Mary Louise Chambers in the 1880, 1930, and 1940 censuses. Clicking the magnifying glass takes you to a search for that person in that census. I’ve spent a fair amount of time these past couple weeks going through and hunting people down in the censuses (and I still have a lot to do, as you can see).

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