I’ll have to take this link up in earnest after I finish rational theology.

So occasionalism is roughly the claim that the laws of physics are descriptions of God intelligently moving objects and not abilities within matter.

I think the evidence is very much against Widtsoe pushing occasionalism. Rather he pushes a strong version of Mormon materialism. This from chapter 3:

Matter in its essence is eternal, that is, everlasting. Whether the various known forms of matter may be converted one into the other is not definitely known, though it seems probable. Any such conversion would, however, leave the total quantity of matter or its equivalent unchanged. God, the supreme Power, cannot conceivably originate matter; he can only organize matter. Neither can he destroy matter; he can only disorganize it. God is the Master, who, because of his great knowledge, knows how to use the elements, already existing, for the building of whatever he may have in mind. The doctrine that God made the earth or man from nothing becomes, therefore, an absurdity. The doctrine of the indestructibility of the essential elements of the universe makes possible much theological reasoning that would otherwise be impossible.

Put an other way, I don’t think Widstoe is necessarily being problematic. Even if it isn’t a true occasionalism then it is nearly so. i.e. God has the power to leave his fingerprints on everything.

Of course I don’t buy occasionalism so perhaps I’m not the one to defend this thesis.

I don’t think there is much of a problem in the way Widtsoe refers to the beginning. It seems pretty clear to me that he is preaching that while our spirits have no beginning, there is a beginning point to our sentience as “man”. In others words, we spent a long time as lesser intelligences until we progressed to the level of intelligence that qualifies us to be humans in mortality (as opposed to, say, Cro-Magnon man I suppose?) That sounds very much like what Pratt taught to me — that pre-earth spirits work their way up the intelligence ladder even through the intelligence levels of the animal kingdom. Here is more from chapter 4:

The being which later became man, even in the first day possessed intelligence. That is, he was aware of the external universe; he was able to learn, and by adding knowledge to knowledge, to learn more. Then, as now, the universe was filled with matter acted upon by many forces, and an intelligent being in the midst of the interaction of forces and matter, must have become aware, measurably, of what was going on. From the beginning, the ego of man has been a conscious being, saying to itself, “This is I; that is not I. My life is apart from the life of all the rest of the universe.”

So it appears to me he is simply saying that all intelligences — no matter what level they exist at — have at have a basic sense of self. But he keeps things really quite vague so it is impossible to pin down his thoughts on these things from this text alone.

I am aware that McMurrin didn’t accept the historicity of the BofM, but I just don’t see how it muddied any waters. It seems that when you wrote “Long before McMurrin muddied the waters…”, what you meant was more accurately “Long before McMurrin wrote about Mormon theology (who, by the way, I have problems with because he did not accept BofM historicity)…” Is that about right? I should know better than to ask, but what was the war fought by Ostler? [grin]