What do Mormons believe about God?
Joseph Smith believed that God was once a man. On page 345 of The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith we read:
We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see. … It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another, and that he was once a man like us.
But John 10:34 says, “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” Doesn’t that verse endorse Mormon teaching?
No, it doesn’t. Jesus is quoting from Psalm 82:6. He is responding to the charge of the Jewish religious leaders that He was guilty of blasphemy when He claimed to be the Son of God. So Jesus responds and says, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”
Jesus is pointing out that in judging the people, their own forefathers had been called “gods”—lowercase “g.” As judges, they were representatives of God, hence they were called “gods.” So Jesus is saying, in effect, that since human judges were called “gods,” it is certainly right and proper that God’s only Son be known as “the Son of God.”
Jesus is not claiming that man evolves into deity. Jesus is simply saying that the title “Son of God” applied to Him should not be considered blasphemous. So John 10:34, though it is often used to support Mormon belief, does no such thing.
Mormons believe that there is a mother god and a father god. Gordon B. Hinkley, Mormonism’s fifteenth president and authoritative Mormon apostle, wrote:
Logic and reason would certainly suggest that if we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven. That doctrine rests well with me (The Teachings of Gordon B. Hinkley, pg. 275).
In the book Mormon Doctrine, pg. 516, Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie writes:
Implicit in the Christian verity that all men are the spirit children of an Eternal Father is the usually unspoken truth that they are also the offspring of an Eternal Mother.
The Bible never even suggests that God was once a man and evolved into deity or that God married a “Heavenly Mother.” Malachi 3:6 says, “I am the Lord, I change not.”