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The Catholic Church teaches that God is the infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Creator of all things visible and invisible. He is not merely the greatest being among many — He is Being itself, the uncaused First Cause upon whom all other existence depends. God did not become God; He simply is, without origin, without development, and without limitation.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses this with precision: "God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end" (CCC 213). He exists outside of time, unchanging and self-sufficient. The divine name revealed to Moses — I AM WHO AM — is not incidental. It expresses the very essence of God's nature: pure, underived, absolute existence.

This teaching is grounded in the classical Christian tradition, affirming what theologians call divine aseity — God's complete self-existence and independence from all other things. Everything that exists does so because God holds it in being. God holds Himself in being by what He is. He is not a product of any prior cause, process, or progression.

The doctrine of the Trinity flows directly from this understanding. The one God exists as three co-equal, co-eternal Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each fully divine, none subordinate in nature to the others. This mystery of divine unity and distinction has been carefully guarded since the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the Council of Constantinople (381 AD), always insisting that the three Persons share the same divine substance — one God, absolutely and eternally.

The biblical witness on God's nature is consistent and sweeping across both Testaments.

God's eternity is not merely endless duration; it is the absence of any beginning whatsoever. He was not formed. He was not preceded by anything or anyone.

These passages from the prophet Isaiah are among the most unambiguous in all of scripture. God Himself declares not merely that He is the greatest god, but that no god preceded Him and no god will follow. The very concept of an infinite regression of gods is excluded by the divine testimony itself.

The scriptural contrast between God and man is not one of degree but of kind. God is categorically unlike man in His being. He did not progress from humanity to divinity.

This foundational declaration — the Shema — is the heartbeat of biblical monotheism. Jesus Himself quoted it as the greatest commandment (Mark 12:29). It is not the proclamation of one god among many who happens to be ours. It is the declaration that God is singular in His very being.

Joseph Smith's mature theology, particularly as articulated in his famous 1844 King Follett Discourse, presents an entirely different framework. In that address, Smith declared: "God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens... I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form." He further taught that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22).

LDS theology proposes that God the Father was once a mortal man who lived on another world, progressed through obedience to eternal laws, and eventually attained godhood. His divinity was achieved, not inherent. Furthermore, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not one God in substance but three separate divine beings. LDS theology also acknowledges other gods — those who presided before the Father's exaltation — and potentially gods who will follow, since faithful Latter-day Saints may themselves attain exaltation and rule over their own spirit children and worlds.

If God the Father had a god before him, and that god had a god before him, LDS theology requires an infinite chain of gods stretching backwards through eternity with no first cause, no uncaused originator, and no absolute foundation. As the LDS couplet attributed to Lorenzo Snow states:

The Bible is clear that God does not have a body as men do. Jesus declared, "God is spirit" (John 4:24). After the Resurrection, Jesus told His disciples that "a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have" (Luke 24:39) — implying that prior to the Incarnation, the divine nature was not embodied. Furthermore, "no one has ever seen God" (John 1:18), and God alone possesses immortality, "dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16).

The very existence of a created universe demands an uncaused First Cause. If every god was created or exalted by a prior god, there is no foundation to reality — just an infinite regress with no explanatory ground. This is not merely a philosophical problem; it is a biblical one. Isaiah 43:10 explicitly rules it out: "Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me." God declares His absolute uniqueness with no predecessor. The LDS god of infinite regression is precisely the god this verse excludes.

The idea that humans can attain genuine co-equal divinity contradicts the entire arc of biblical teaching. When Satan tempted Eve in the Garden, the lure was precisely this: "you will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). The Catholic tradition reads this as the primal temptation — the desire to usurp God's unique status rather than receive the gift of communion with Him.

While Catholic theology does affirm theosis (divinization) — that believers become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) — this refers to participation in God's life by grace, not the acquisition of independent godhood. Creatures do not become uncreated. Saints are glorified; they do not become new gods ruling their own universes. The distinction between Creator and creature is eternal and absolute.

The cumulative LDS picture — multiple divine beings, gods before God, gods after God — is polytheism, regardless of the label applied. This is in direct, irreconcilable tension with the monotheism that God Himself proclaimed through the prophets of Israel and that was affirmed by Jesus Christ.

Beyond the biblical problems, the LDS model suffers from severe internal incoherence. If God the Father was once a man subject to eternal laws and governed by the god above him, then the Father is not the ultimate ground of reality — those eternal laws are. But where did those laws come from? If from a prior god, that god is also not ultimate. The regress never terminates in anything that can actually explain the existence of the universe, law, or being itself.

The Catholic God — infinite, self-existent, and absolutely simple — is the only conception of God that can genuinely bear the weight of being the Creator and Sustainer of all things. He is not the product of a process. He is the ground of all process, all being, and all law.

Furthermore, if men can become gods, then the line between Creator and creature dissolves entirely. The biblical story is not the story of creatures ascending to become gods. It is the story of the one true God condescending to redeem His creatures and bring them into loving communion with Himself — without erasing the infinite qualitative difference between Creator and creature.

The Catholic understanding of God — infinite, eternal, incorporeal, absolutely unique, triune, and unchanging — is not a philosophical imposition on biblical faith. It is the careful synthesis of what scripture consistently teaches across both Testaments, developed and guarded by the Church through centuries of prayer, reflection, and conciliar definition. The God of Isaiah, the God of the Psalms, the God whom Jesus called Father, and the God whom Paul proclaims as the one from whom and through whom and to whom are all things (Romans 11:36) — this is a God without predecessor, without equal, and without end.

The LDS vision of God, however sincerely held, is a different God entirely — a finite being who became divine, surrounded by other gods, open to succession by human exaltation. No amount of shared vocabulary can bridge that chasm. And the biblical witness — patient, consistent, and thunderous — speaks with one voice against it.