Darkness

Darkness, in the spiritual sense, is the condition of a mind or a people from whom light and truth have been withdrawn through sin, deception, and false tradition. Restoration scripture teaches that this darkness yields only to light that is received and lived; thus, Latter-day Saints judge technologies of information by whether they edify or put darkness for light.

The Hebrew choshek and the Greek skotos both name literal darkness, and scripture repeatedly uses them for the condition of a soul that cannot see the things of God. A quick reading equates spiritual darkness with ignorance alone, a lack of information that education and better tools will eventually supply. Modern accounts of progress often assume as much, and some transhumanist writing does as well. Scripture locates the darkness in the will as well as the mind. Jesus taught that "light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). On that account darkness can persist in the presence of light, because people prefer it.

Walking in Darkness

Scripture describes spiritual darkness both as a condition people choose and as a bondage from which God delivers them. Isaiah pronounced woe on those "that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20). The prophet's concern was the inversion of moral judgment, in which a people loses the ability to tell one from the other. The same prophet promised that "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" (Isaiah 9:2), a passage Matthew applied to the ministry of Jesus in Galilee. Scripture thus treats darkness as a real captivity and the coming of light as an act of deliverance.

Light and Truth in Restoration Scripture

Mormon theology explains spiritual darkness as the loss of light and truth, and it names both the causes of that loss and its remedy. A revelation to Joseph Smith states that "the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth," and that "that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers" (D&C 93:36-39). Disobedience and inherited error are the two causes the revelation names. Another revelation supplies a practical measure: "that which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness," while "he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day" (D&C 50:23-24). Joseph Smith's account of his first vision shows the same pattern in a single experience. As he prayed, "thick darkness gathered around" him under the power of an unseen enemy, until he saw "a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun" and found himself delivered (Joseph Smith⁠—History 1:15-16). Mormon transhumanists read the promise of growing light as including the growth of human knowledge through science. The same revelations make clear that knowledge dispels darkness only when it is received with obedience.

Edification, Deception, and the Darkened Mind

Information technology has multiplied access to knowledge, and it has also produced new means of putting darkness for light. A revelation of 1837 warned that "darkness covereth the earth, and gross darkness the minds of the people" (D&C 112:23). Abundant information has not removed that condition. A 2018 study of Twitter found that false news spread farther, faster, and more broadly than true news. Generative AI can now produce convincing images, voices, and documents of events that never occurred, and recommendation systems often reward whatever holds attention, whether or not it edifies. Many websites use "dark patterns," interface designs that steer users into choices they did not intend. Each of these makes falsehood appear as truth or hides the workings of a system from the people it affects.

The same technologies can serve light. Search, translation, and open archives have placed scripture, scholarship, and medical knowledge within reach of billions, and AI-safety researchers now treat interpretability, the effort to make the reasoning of AI systems legible, as a central problem. The revelation's standard of edification applies to each. The test for any technology of information is whether it edifies, increasing light and truth that people can receive, verify, and act upon, or whether it puts darkness for light by deceiving its users and concealing its own workings.