I'm in Korea! It's so good to be nearby Chowon again after the long trips I've recently taken. I'm preparing for my sister-in-law's wedding now, and for the next week I'm in-between jobs. Exciting times.

I'm blogging on my phone, so please excuse typos for now. I'll come back through and make corrections later.

Also, I had an opportunity to employ the epistemological argument in a conversation recently with someone whose philosophy stagnated after apprehending the thought that it's impossible to know anything about God, but that at least God's existence enables us to know about other things. So his issue was not that he couldn't see a way to know truth, but rather that he couldn't see a way to know truth about God.

Unfortunately, he was convinced enough that there was no possibility for a solution that he had a hard time hearing me attempt to propose a solution. It's an attitude that I should carefully avoid in myself when I talk to other worldviews. I'll be sure to listen next time an atheist attempts to give a cogent response to solipsism.

On one hand he said that he completely agreed with me, and even repeated back to me the part about God's initial revelation being independent from our perceptive or interpretive faculties. On the other hand he asked, "how can we know that the self revelation of God isn't a hallucination", which made me think that we weren't understanding one another. The question regrettably added an emotional charge to my thoughts, because earlier in the conversation we were talking in an unrelated fashion about hallucinations and I revealed my own history with (something similar to, but not definitely diagnosed as) hypnogogia. As a result, I totally forgot the potential answers to that question in the moment, and simply turned the conversation to an earlier, unresolved point.

In any case, I think it's worthwhile to address the specific issue here from the two most obvious angles that come to me:

First, the hallucination hypothesis is nullified by our earlier point that the revelation depends not on our interpretive faculties.

Second, the rules for truth apply to hallucinators in the same way that they apply to mentally healthy individuals. That is, the truth is perfectly internally consistent and includes in it the full set of information about all things comprising reality, and it is the only set of information with that quality. Therefore, a thorough enough investigation of any idea or argument which is untrue will eventually find an internal inconsistency in the way that it operates as a full system or worldview. All that to say, it is possible to distinguish between hallucinations and reality.

The conversation ended with both of us relatively unchanged in opinion, but expressing a desire to continue again later. I think it was a successful conversation, though, because during it he expressed that he thought Christianity was just the same as Islam only it lacked the Quran, which gave me the opportunity to explain how Christians have a different view of justice than Muslims, especially in terms of the means of our salvation. So I got to share the gospel briefly, and in the end that's more important and powerful than any argument I could produce, because now he has enough information for his salvation, and so the Holy Spirit can work on his heart.

Sometime later I'd like to explain my understanding of the arguments against Islam. Maybe in my next blog......

Also, I've spent a lot of time with Chowon's dad during this trip. I have to watch my Ps and Qs a bit, because he's a very traditional guy, but I think things are going well. It's easiest if Chowon translates.

Well, that's it for tonight's update. I'll post again later, after the wedding, maybe.

"People who love dogs are generally very nice."