It's been a big long time since I last blogged here. I've learned quite a lot, and especially realized how much more there is to learn.

Personal life update: Chowon is lovely, and she has a job, and she's doing great at it :) Also, my job is really stressful these days, but it's because we're working on a super awesome project with a stupidly tight deadline..... And that's pretty much all there is to report in the physical world, I guess..... but I have quite a bit to report from my desultory void of rambling cognizance, and my (unrelated) room full of monkeys and typewriters has produced strings as long as 140 characters identical to segments found dispersed in the works of Shakespeare.

I have recently been especially bothered by the lengthy time since my conversation with that atheist, Logan. I never responded to him after that conversation, even though he reached out to me. I have been burdened with the idea that I will never be comfortable with an argument until I've finally contacted him again to attempt it on him. I even couldn't blog here because of how much I loathed my cowardice. I re-read my recent posts on the matter, and I think that the way that I presented my arguments there was pretty-well terminal. My apologetic at that point wasn't an argument as much as a defense. Since that argument, I've had several conversations with atheists of lesser mental power than Logan, and rather drudgingly sharpened my apologetic by means of some really shameless trifling in YouTube comments.

Here's the latest (very short) summary of my epistemology:

My current epistemological argument is that any person making any assertion at all, if they expect anyone else to take them seriously, must have justified that assertion by means of some non-arbitrary foundation. That is, any claim to fact, truth, or even confidence, must be rooted in a worldview providing the preconditions necessary for intelligibility (to borrow the phrase form Bahnsen). So, when a person says, "can't you see, it's obvious that X", if X is rooted in an arbitrary assertion, then there is literally no reason for me to even listen to X.

I include claims to "confidence" because confidence values depend on assumptions about how much confidence can be gained from a piece of evidence. For example, if I drop a pencil once, and I see it fall, what tells me that it will fall next time? The answer is usually, "well, I try many times, and if it falls every time then I feel ok with assuming that it will always fall". OK, well, how did you know how much confidence to gain from one trial? Does dropping the pencil once imbue an observer with "+5%" confidence (where 100% is absolute knowledge)? and why that much confidence? How much confidence can be gained from 100 trials? 10000 trials? And why? Basically, what standard tells us how much weight a piece of evidence carries?

This argument depends heavily on a, yet incomplete, list of firmly identified "necessary qualities" which any ultimate foundation must have. Now, keep in mind, we do not "deduce" that an ultimate foundation exists, and then decide that it must exists on the grounds that we deduced it. We must utilize the ultimate foundation in order to deduce anything, so we may learn about the nature of the ultimate foundation by examining the epistemological roots of the deduction process which the ultimate foundation has enabled us to utilize. Further, we do not "simply presuppose" an ultimate foundation in order to justify ourselves, because if the presupposition itself is arbitrary, then the foundation represented therein is arbitrary, and thus the foundation does not satisfy the first and foremost quality of an ultimate foundation: objectivity.

Now, this means that we must not only believe that there is an external world, but that part of it is known to us. At least, enough of it must be known to us in order to know that the ultimate foundation exists. Indeed, the fact of it is self-evident: we are able to know things, even it if is only that we ourselves exist, we know it.

So, the next quality of the ultimate foundation is that it has revealed to everyone certain qualities about itself and about us, (in particular some information about the extent to which we can trust our faculties, which are sensory data and reason). So, all people have equal access to what is hereafter known as the "first revelation" from the ultimate foundation (who is God). Since this revelation is used to justify our otherwise untrustworthy senses and faculties, it must be revealed to us in a way that bypasses our reliance on our senses and faculties. It is the most deeply known and irrevocable truth that all people know, though some people may actively or passively choose to deny it.

All the above has been said before in my blog, only now I think I'm saying it better. I've done quite a bit more interacting with people and refining these ideas. So, in near-future posts I want to offer a few "logical proofs" I've been working on for the idea that an external world exists and we can know about it. I also want to present the current revision of my rebuttal to the idea, presented by atheists, that they may simply "presuppose logic" as we "presuppose God", (the summary of this argument is that logic leads us to the necessary conclusion that their choice to presuppose logic was arbitrary: they are using their faculties to justify their faculties). And, finally, I want to present my latest, much worked-on detailing of the necessary qualities of God, and why every aspect of God's character as described in the Bible is 100% necessary for the existence of an intelligible reality at all.

I've also wanted to get back into writing poetry, but gotPoetry is down... and I don't know if there is a database anywhere where I can go get my old poems. I checked the wayback machine, but it only had two of my works recorded, and they were by chance my least favorite of the bunch. For that reason, I hope to start using this blog for all my poems from now on, and if I find my old ones I'll post them here, too.

"Come home"