How to Gain Infinite Wisdom

Option One: Live Forever

In yesterday's blog post, I barely mentioned God's infinite wisdom, and then I thought "how could God's wisdom be truly infinite?" Wisdom comes with experience. Experience comes with time. Theoretically, by that logic, God would have to have existed forever for His wisdom to be infinite. But if God is just like us (only a lot farther along in His Eternal progression), then He must have been created by His Heavenly Father, just as we were created by Him. Before that time, He wouldn't have existed, at least not as a sentient creature, so the time He has spent having experiences and gaining wisdom is finite. Absurdly enormous, but still finite. How can God have infinite wisdom, assuming that I'm correct in thinking that He has only existed for a finite amount of time? I've thought of at least two ways.

Option Two: Get a (Few) Mentor(s)

Let's say that a young man is twenty years old. He has twenty years of experience, and the wisdom of a twenty-year-old. That's not all that impressive. But let's say his father was twenty years old when he was born, making the father forty years old now. The father has forty years of experience and the wisdom of a forty-year-old. That's better. And if the young man follows the counsel of his father, he'll still have only twenty years of personal experience, but he'll act with the wisdom of a forty-year-old. And let's say that this young man has a grandfather who's twenty years older than his father is. By gaining wisdom from him (perhaps through his own father), the young man can gain some of the wisdom of a sixty-year-old, and so on.

For us, this model has to stop somewhere, because great-great-grandfathers don't live forever. Eventually, they'll depart, and when they do, they'll take their wisdom with them. That's exactly what God did after His mortal experience, and exactly what His Heavenly Ancestors did after theirs. However, if our Heavenly Father still gets guidance from His Heavenly Father, and His Heavenly Father gets guidance from His Heavenly Father, and so on, then our Heavenly Father has a possibly infinite number of mentors with a collective, nearly-infinite number of eons of experience and wisdom between them. (Incidentally, we can link ourselves to this chain of wisdom by hearkening to the counsel of our own Heavenly Father, thus enabling us to make decisions inspired by the wisdom of a counsel of Gods.) That is an incredible amount of wisdom, but it's still possibly finite. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of having no beginning, and if there was a beginning, that means that there has only been a finite amount of time in which the creatures of the universe could gather wisdom, so only a finite amount of wisdom has been gained.

Fortunately, there's another way to gain wisdom, besides personal experience and word-of-mouth, and it is by this method that God has gained infinite wisdom in His own right. Even if there's no one guiding Him or given Him advice, and even if He has only been around for a few short eons, He still has an infinite - that's right, infinite - amount of wisdom. Here's how:

Option Three: Become Omniscient

In his message, Converting Knowledge into Wisdom, President Marion G. Romney defined knowledge as "acquaintance with, or clear perception of, facts," and wisdom as "the capacity of judging soundly and dealing broadly with facts, especially in their practical relations to life and conduct." President Romney also said that part of the reason we don't have infinite wisdom is because we don't have all the facts.

When I said that we gained wisdom from our experiences, I forgot an important piece of clarification. In truth, we gain wisdom from learning from our experiences. Experiences give us knowledge, which we can then convert into wisdom. If a person gains knowledge another way, such as by reading a book or becoming omniscient, they will have gained knowledge that they can convert into wisdom without having to have gained that wisdom by personal experience or by being given advice. Since God knows everything, He knows the wisest course of action in any given situation, and thus He has infinite wisdom.

Omniscience is, as I understand it, part of the package deal with Godhood. When we become Gods, we'll become omniscient, and we'll gain infinite wisdom. The "when" part of my previous statement might be optimistic, but part of what I meant to say was that we won't gain omniscience before then. Until then, we can gain wisdom by the previous two methods. We can learn from our own experiences, and we can learn from God. God will often share wisdom with us, and when He doesn't, it's probably either because He thinks we have enough wisdom to make good choices on our own, or because we think we do. Trusting in our own wisdom is foolish because our wisdom is very, very finite. God, on the other hand, has infinite wisdom, and He's usually willing to share. That's why "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Psalms 111:10); because being wise enough to listen to God grants us access to an infinite supply of wisdom. God does have infinite wisdom, and by being wise enough to follow Him, so can we.