But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.
Hi, neighbor! Did you know that I'm special? Well, that's right—I'm special, uh-huh. And did you know what? You're probably not. Yep, that's right. At any rate, you're probably not as special as I am. You're special, all right, neighbor, but unless you were born a Mormon, then you're not nearly as special as I am. Uh-huh.
Now why don't you go ahead and put down that hammer, neighbor, so I can tell you why it is that being born into God's One True Church makes me so much more special than you. It's not that I'm the most special I could possibly be. Why, there are people a lot more special than I am, people like the prophets who talk with God face to face, or like Saul of Tarsus or Alma the Younger—guys who were so special that when they were bad God Himself came down and told them to stop it because they were special and shouldn't oughta act that way (see Acts 9:1-22 and Mosiah 27:8-37).
Still, I'm pretty darn special. How do I know? Well, the prophets have assured us that these are the Last Days before the Millennium, and only the most valiant of our Father in Heaven's spirit children were saved until the Last Days to come to earth and get bodies and be born into His One True Church. And what did I do to prove I was so valiant? Well, I fought bravely on God's side in the War in Heaven, that's what. (If you need a refresher on the War in Heaven, see "The Great Sacrifice.") That means I'm a great hero! See how special that makes me?
Not convinced? Let's put some numbers with that, then, shall we, neighbor? Population experts tell us that there are about six billion people living on this little earth of ours. That's 6,000,000,000 in numerical form, or 6 x 109 in scientific notation. Mormon statisticians tell us that there are about ten million members of the Church, or 10,000,000—that's 107. Dividing the latter number by the former, we discover that only one out of every 600 (or 6 x 102) living human beings is a Mormon. That right there is enough to tell you I'm pretty darn special, eh?
But wait—not all of those ten million Mormons were actually born into the Church, like I was, and everyone knows that people valiant enough to be born into the Church are more special than converts. The Church has grown explosively in the past 50 years—there are almost ten times as many Mormons now than there were in 1950. Back then, 87% of all Mormons lived in North America; now only about 56% do. What this means, neighbor, is that convert baptisms have increased at a phenomenal rate, particularly outside the United States and Canada. (Source: Historical Atlas of Mormonism, edited by S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson, Simon and Schuster [New York, NY], 1994.) Let's be conservative then, and estimate that about half of all living Mormons are converts. This means that the chances of your have being born into the Mormon Church like I was are now about one in 1,200 (1.2 x 103). I'm getting more special by the moment.
I could keep going in this vein, calculating the likelihood that I would be born not only Mormon but also American, white, and male, but what's the point? You can already see how special I am, and we have bigger fish to fry. Let's go get 'em, neighbor.
Those wacky population specialists tell us, at their best estimate, that currently living humans account for between ten and twenty percent of all the humans that have ever lived on the earth since the dawn of man. (Granted, this goes back farther than Adam and Eve, but hey, let's pretend we're scientists for a minute. It can be fun sometimes—I mean, otherwise we couldn't believe in dinosaurs, and then we'd have to start believing that Jurassic Park is evil!) If we go with the conservative figure, twenty percent, then we see that there's only a one in five chance that we would be alive in these Last Days, and only one chance in 6,000 (6 x 103) that we would be a born Mormon living in the Last Days.
Those are pretty slim odds, neighbor, but not nearly as slim as your odds of say, being killed by lightning (one in 2,000,000) or winning the New York Lottery (one in maybe 60,000,000). You may look at these figures and be tempted to start thinking that I'm really not that special at all. But au contraire, how wrong you would be!
Let's go back to that quote at the top of the page, the one from the Book of Moses. (If you've never heard of the Book of Moses, that's because it's part of The Pearl of Great Price, one of the four holy books of the Mormon Church.) In that verse, God said the following to Moses:
"For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man . . ." (Moses 1:35).
What does that mean? Well, neighbor, this and other verses from Mormon scripture make it clear that God made more planets than just this one, and that numberless planets out of all those numberless planets have people on them, too.
On the surface, that's neither here nor there, because if we assume that all those other countless inhabited planets have about the same proportion of Mormons to non-Mormons, it still doesn't change the overall odds that you'd be born Mormon. There's one more crucial bit of information, however, which changes everything. Wanna hear it?
I knew you would. The crucial detail is something that one of our modern Mormon prophets (I don't remember which one, but maybe someone out there can help me) told us, and it's a real doozy. He told us that Jesus Christ is not just the Savior of our earth, but he's also the Savior of every world that God has ever created! And do you know what else? His one single solitary sacrifice on this earth was enough to save everybody on every planet everywhere!
But wait, neighbor—there's more! Do you know why it is that Jesus was sacrificed on this earth instead of on some other earth? We are assured by our prophets that this earth is the only earth in all of God's creation that was wicked enough to kill its own Creator. Can you imagine that? This is the most wicked world in the entire universe, and little ol' me was one of the few children of God valiant enough to be sent there in the Last Days to battle the forces of darkness and evil. Can you even imagine how special that makes me?
(Wait, maybe a better question at this point would be whether or not you can imagine a world more wicked than this one at all. I mean, this world can be pretty wicked, but I don't have much trouble imagining one that's worse. But that's probably only because I'm a science-fiction writer, and trained in the exercise of my imagination. I'm quite certain that a wickeder world could not possibly exist, yup, uh-huh. Believing anything else would be blasphemy.)
Let's do some calculations, shall we? First of all, we have to figure out about how many worlds add up to "innumerable." Well, innumberable is pretty big, but let's be conservative again and say that innumerable means 10100, which is a one with a hundred zeroes after it. (Mathematicians have a special affection for 10100, so much so that they've given it a special name: they call it a "googol." Which only goes to show how silly mathematicians can be, right, neighbor?)
Hmm, on second thought, maybe a googol is way too small, because any number I can actually write down can't really be innumerable. But what the heck—I'm getting a headache trying to think of a bigger one, so let's just go with that for now.
Okay, are you ready for some really big math? Here we go. If there are 6 x 109 people living on the earth today, and that's only twenty percent of the people who have ever lived on the earth, then 5 x 6 x 109 have lived and possibly died since the beginning of time. That comes out to 3 x 1010, or 30,000,000,000, or 30 billion.
That means God had at least 30 billion spirit children earmarked for life on this earth alone—and probably a lot more, because there's still a Millennium that has to go by before this world comes to an utter end. (An interesting implication of this calculation becomes clear when you realize that fully one third of the host of Heaven were cast out with Lucifer after the War in Heaven, which means at least 15 billion evil spirits have been assigned to this planet—and on average that's 2.5 for every human now living. At least. Scary, huh, neighbor?)
But we decided a little while ago that God made about 10100 other worlds. If there were 3 x 1010 spirit children created for each one of them, then that's a grand total of 3 x 10110 spirit children in God's universe. And if you count the evil spirits back in, you get 4.5 x 10110. Whoa, Nellie! God and his wives have been awfully dang busy!
Now let's get back to the chances of having been valiant enough to be born Mormon in the Last Days on the only world in God's creation wicked enough to crucify its own Creator. That's no more than 5 x 106 folks who fit the bill (half of the current Church membership), out of a possible 4.5 x 10110. In other words, my chances of being as special as I am are one in 9 x 10103—which are staggeringly longer odds than my chances of winning any puny earthly lottery. I am so dang special I can hardly stand myself!
But are you ready for this, neighbor? It gets even better! Check out the following paragraph from a recent issue of Time magazine:
"Mormons reject the label polytheistic pinned on them by other Christians; they believe that humans deal with only one God. Yet they allow for other deities presiding over other worlds. [Joseph] Smith stated that God was once a humanlike being who had a wife and in fact still has a body of 'flesh and bones.' Mormons also believe that men, in a process known as deification, may become God-like. Lorenzo Snow, an early President and Prophet [of the Mormon Church], famously aphorized, 'As man is now, God once was; as God now is, man may become'" (David Van Biema, "Kingdom Come," Time, August 4, 1997, p. 56).
You see, neighbor, Mormons believe that God was once a human like you or I, and that He had a God of His own, and that He was good and faithful and endured to the end and eventually become a God in His own right, and that this process has been going on forever, and will continue forever and ever, amen. We can become Gods ourselves, if only we're nice and play by the rules.
But then again, maybe our God wasn't quite like you or I. You see, one of our more recent modern-day prophets—I think it was Joseph Fielding Smith, but I could be wrong—has given us more information about the nature of God than Lorenzo Snow did. It hinges on a particular scripture in the fifth chapter of John, in which Jesus heals an invalid on the Sabbath, in violation of Jewish custom. When the Jews attacked him, Jesus responded:
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise" (John 5:19).
Joseph Fielding Smith (or whoever it was) told us that the proper interpretation of this verse is that Jesus followed his father's example in everything, up to and including his death and sacrifice and resurrection and atonement. In other words, Smith assures us, our God was also the Savior of His Father's entire Creation!
Can you dig it, my neighbor?! That makes me, and everyone else on this rock, about a zillion times more special than we previously calculated. Let's be fairly generous this time and figure that one out of every thousand of a particular God's spirit children will go the distance and eventually become a God himself. A thousandth of 4.5 x 10110 (what we previously calculated as the lower bound on the number of God's offspring) is still a whopping 4.5 x 10107. And since there's only one Savior for every Creation, that means the chances that our God would also have been a Savior are one in 4.5 x 10107.
And now for the grand capper, let's combine that with our previous calculation so that we can learn approximately how much chance I had of being born a Mormon in the Last Days of the most wicked world in the entire Creation of a God who was also the Savior for His Father's Creation. And the answer is . . .
One chance in 4.05 x 10211.
Neighbor, I'm not sure that you can rightly appreciate just what mind-blowingly long odds those are, and exactly how dang special that makes me. For perspective, let's consider some other fairly big numbers. Rock music, for example, has been around for only about 1.25 x 109 seconds (about forty years), agriculture for 3 x 1011 seconds (about ten thousand years), and modern Homo sapiens for 1013 seconds (about a third of a million years). But those numbers don't come anywhere close to 4.05 x 10211. Let's try something bigger, shall we?
Consider the number of protons—tiny, tiny things only 10-12 (.000000000001) centimeters across—that it would take to fill the entire universe, which is estimated to be about 40 billion (4 x 1010) light-years across. Are you ready? A cube as big across as our universe would hold only about 10122 protons. (Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, by John Allen Paulos, Hill and Wang [New York, NY], 1988.) But that's still no more than a speck beside the incomprehensible hugeness of 4.05 x 10211.
Do you begin to see, neighbor? Do you? Do you begin to see how amazingly, splendiferously, unbelievably special I am?
I thought you would, neighbor. Yep.
Try not to get struck by lightning on your way home.