When I saw this, I thought you might have Mormon theology. There is, of course, a logical inconsistency with the above and what the Bible says of God: John 4:24: God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth
Regardless of what the truth about God is, one can’t hold both to Doctrine and Covenants description of God and to the Biblical description of God at the same time. They are logically inconsistent. One or the other is untrue.
This isn’t the only place that the Bible speaks of God’s spirit. Rom 8:9 the Spirit of God dwell in you If God is matter, he can’t dwell inside me. Another logical contradiction-two pieces of matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Thus to be intellectually consistent one must say either the Bible or Doctrines and Covenants is false or you must show that the laws of matter and physics are not as we understand them, allowing two material objects to occupy the same space at the same time.
This raises another physics problem. The only way current physics allows objects to occupy the same space is if they totally don’t interact with each other–like neutrinos which don’t easily interact with the matter of our bodies. If they don’t interact, then they can’t influence each other so a pure material spirit occupying my body that didn’t interact with my body is relatively useless. Religion shouldn’t require us to accept contradictions and thus tie ourselves into logical pretzel knots
1 Cor 2:12: But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit
I think there is another contradiction. 1 Cor 15:45 says:
The first man Adam was made a living soul
The word translated as ‘soul’ was a word the Greek’s understood as an immaterial object. Thus the use of this word in a Greek language document like the New Testament means that the writers of the NT didn’t believe that the soul was material. The word is ψυχή. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says:
“While the Platonists with few exceptions, e.g., Ptolemaeus in Stob. Ecl., I, 378, 1 ff., cling to the immortality of the soul as a part of intelligible being, and accept the difficult process of its temporary union with a material body, for the Peripatetics the immaterial soul is the principle of the form, life, and activity of the total organism, since there is no separate intelligible being in Aristotelian ontology”
Schweizer, E., Bertram, G., Dihle, A., Tröger, K.-W., Lohse, E., & Jacob, E. (1964–). ψυχή, ψυχικός, ἀνάψυξις, ἀναψύχω, δίψυχος, ὀλιγόψυχος. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 9, p. 613). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
They could have used other words than ψυχή to convey a material soul. Again a logical conflict between the Doctrines and covenants and the Bible.
I guess one question I would have is: If everything, including our minds and God are material, does this mean that materialism is the correct philosophy of life? Afterall, if God is material, then as far as I can see, he is just a powerful being we must deal with but is not really different from us in any way and He too would be subject to the laws of matter and could conceivably die. All material things eventually wear out–that is a law of physics and engineering.
Further, if the soul is actually material would we not be able to detect it in experiments?
edited to add: Isa 42:1 is a statement by God which is translated in Matt 12:18 using the word ψυχή for soul. It is an interested choice of translation by Matthew because it is a word that the society would have understood as the immaterial soul. Matt 12:18 says:
Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased
This would imply God’s soul is not material.