Questions
Hard questions, answered directly
If truth is a person rather than a set of ideas, some obvious objections follow — about natural law, about an unchangeable God, about whether any of this collapses into relativism. These are the ones readers raise most often, each answered on its own page.
- Isn’t God subject to natural law?Some Latter-day Saint scholars have argued that the personal, relational truth of the scriptures exists within a larger universe fundamentally governed by idea-truth.
- What of Justice and Mercy in the Book of Mormon?We can misread these passages if we approach them with the assumptions of idea-truth. We import idea-truth assumptions into the text.
- Doesn’t the Book of Mormon describe God as unchangeable?From the perspective of the philosophical tradition, these passages seem to clearly refer to a universal truth and the immutable nature of God.
- Don’t the scriptures describe God’s commandments as “irrevocable”?In the Doctrine and Covenants we read…
- Don’t modern prophets talk about moral law using idea-truth language?Yes, modern prophets and apostles sometimes use the terms and forms of Greek thought to communicate their ideas.
- Does the person-view of truth lead to moral relativism?It is the philosophical tradition’s focus on the unchanging that treats moral relativism as the only alternative to moral absolutism.