Time for more bullets. Today I'm going to give points related to the means of delivery for the special revelation.

Really enjoying this song right now:

14.

Q. Special revelation must have been communicated in a way which is exempt from potential for human fabrication.

E. People are not perfectly trustworthy. The testimony can't be entirely dependent on a few dudes in the woods who say they saw God and wrote a book about it. The method has to be more broad than just revealing it to one small group of invested individuals.

15.

Q. Special revelation must have been confirmed by a supernatural sign.

E. I hesitate to use the word "supernatural" because the source has its own nature, so since nothing is really above the nature of the source, nothing truly fits the face-value definition of the word "supernatural". What I mean by this is that the revelation should be confirmed by some proof that the source is above our nature, to demonstrate that it is capable of doing things which we are not able to do. The goal, then, of this point is that the source first communicate to us that it satisfies the prior points, and then demonstrate that to us by exercising its prescriptive governance on the universe.

16.

Q. The method for delivering special revelation must have included direct, verbal communication from the source.

E. We've already established that special revelation must be delivered externally in addition to its derivation from necessity. Vision and dream-type prophetic encounters are useful without words, but they are too abstract to deliver concrete, qualitative information about the source's character which can be retransmitted from person to person without deviation from the initially intended meaning. Special revelation is important, so we need it to be spelled out for us, and words have the unique quality of being limited to their lexical domain, enabling communication with objectively similar interpretations. (If I didn't firmly believe that this was the case, I wouldn't bother communicating with words.) 

17.

Q. The primary contents of the verbal communication, and the record of the signs, must be available today in a form which inherently demonstrates the supernatural origin of the information while satisfying #14.

E. It's not necessary that the source continually deliver new, direct communication, as long as the record of prior delivery satisfies the points for validity above.

18.

Q. The contents of special revelation must be accessible for anyone who desires to know the source.

E. The revelation doesn't have to be known by everyone, but it has to be available to everyone. Anyone who desires to learn it must be able to acquire access to it, and everyone who seeks it must succeed in finding it. However, it is not necessary that everyone aware of the information accepts it, because (in the context of this discussion) it only serves the purpose of relatably validating the qualities and existence of the ultimate source whose qualities and existence can otherwise be derived in theory (i.e. utilization of the general revelation does not depend on acceptance of the special revelation). Furthermore, it does not have to be the case that every person has immediate means to access the information, but the source may (and must) by prescription enable each person who genuinely seeks the information to find it.

-----------

I think these points really drive home the personal nature of the source. With that, I think we're down to basically just a few options, and to the best of my knowledge we are left only with the mainstream sects of the Abrahamic "Book" religions. (Maybe soon, in another post, I'll describe how these religions are presently able to satisfy #14, #15, and #17. That information I think isn't directly relevant to the study, so I won't include it in this series.) I am content with the way that #18 rules out the possibility of some unknown tribal religion out there being the true religion, and it highlights the question for Christians about people groups unreached by the gospel.

To touch that in one paragraph, it is the case that God decrees every aspect of everything, and God is honest, and so when God said "you will find me when you seek me with your whole heart", and "I will call them my people who are not my people", and "the foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord...these I will bring to my holy mountain", he did not exclude anyone from the promise. Furthermore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that there may be very large people groups with no inclination to seek after God, as it was written, "the Lord looks down...and finds no one who seeks after God" (Psalm 14:2-3).

The I don't know enough about Islam to identify why the differences between the God of Judaism and the God of Islam are representative of essential qualities necessary for intelligibility; I have never done a careful comparison of those two religions with one another, because I believe them both to be misguided on account of the comparisons I've done between them and Christianity. The trinity is useful as an explanation for how God fulfills parts of His own revealed plan, it fits the Biblical evidence, and it works well as a demonstration of God's relatability, but I do not yet know how to present it as a self-justifying fact, without presenting it as a comparison against the failures of nontrinitarian religions. Likewise, the Son of God appeared too late in history to act as "the" relatable revelation for the first humans, but the prophesies about him make him a good means to satisfy conditions for self-evidence in modern records of the prior revelations without needing continued, direct, verbal interaction from God. However, I have not yet reached the point where I can derive why it is an absolutely necessary condition for intelligibility.

I can see that there is a road which will take me to that place, but it is going to take a lot of time meditating to derive information from our current points before I can articulate it well; and that's time I haven't spent yet. It could be months or years before I've completed this last step... So unless God blesses me with insight in the very near future, I'll suspend the series with this post, and return to my normal pattern of blogging until I have made substantial progress.

As it stands, though, I think we've done a good job ruling out other religions so far: the source can't just be a component internal to humans (humanism); it can't just be nature (Darwinism); it can't be "logic itself" (rationalism); it can't be polytheistic (Hinduism, some paganism); it can't be capricious (Greek-Roman and Egyptian gods); its revelation can't depend on modern prophets who disagree with one another (Mormonism); its revelation can't have been essentially lost for any period of time, only to be restored by some jerk in a suit (Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses); the source can't be impersonal (Deism); it must be omniscient, unable to be tricked, and omnipotent, #8 (many tribal religions); and it can't be illogical (Hinduism again). The source definitely fits into the category of religious thought, and I can't think of any other religions satisfying all these except the Abrahamic ones.

Briefly, I'll give the reason that I believe Christianity is the superior Abrahamic religion. First, the Jewish prophesies say that the Jews will be blind to their messiah, and in spite of texts such as Daniel 9, which defined that the messiah would arrive within 100 years of the destruction of their temple (which happened in 70 AD), they are still waiting for the messiah. Second, Muhammad said to measure his teachings for validity against the teachings of Jesus, because he taught that Jesus was a true prophet and no true prophet may issue even one single false word from God. Well, Jesus disagrees with Muhammad on some pretty important points, so without getting into the textual criticism and the history of the books, Muhammad summarily invalidates himself.

I've talked about parts of my epistemology with my brothers in Christ, but I've never articulated it this fully. As far as I know, this work of thought is original to myself... When I finish the posts on Abrahamic religions, I'm going to rewrite my points in a shorter, presentation format (with a slideshow maybe). I'll present this to my pastor and ask him to help me by correcting my mistakes and sharpening or challenging my points. Then, if he blesses my argument, I'll also ask for his blessing on a plan to schedule a meeting with the ASU Atheist Club and present the argument to them for feedback. If my pastor blesses it, and if the Areopagites will hear me, then I'll definitely post their best criticisms/derisions here.

"Then what advantage has the Jew?"

It's a boy! My wife is pregnant with a boy! We just had the anatomy ultrasound and found out! Woo!!!

I've got to work hard and iron out my epistemology so I can teach it to my kids...

Listening to this song at the moment:

So I've spent some time thinking about how to progress the list, and where to go next. We've got a lot of options, because at this point we've at least partially opened up the world of sense perceptions. I've been tired lately, and the options are a little overwhelming to me, so I want to use this post to make a roadmap for where I expect things to go in the next couple of posts. I intend to spend some time focusing on how we learn about the special revelation, in hopes that it will teach us more about the source of the revelation. Here are the angles of approach I'm considering:

a. Start looking at the way this revelation must have been revealed to mankind initially, and to what extent or by what means it must be available to us today.

b. Derive more points by diving deeper into the qualities we've already examined which the source must have. (For example: look at what we can derive about the means of acquiring special revelation, given that the source prescribes every detail of our lives.)

c. Examine the minimum set of information required under the term "relatable" with respect to the special revelation. Articulate what it means for revelation to be relatable, specifically.


Now, I want to add something small but important to our thought process. There's an axiom which I've been applying implicitly in this process, and I think it deserves to be stated and explained before we continue.

"Everything which is true is necessarily true."

Stating it like that, it's just a tautology, but the meaning I intend to communicate by it will actually affect our interpretive processes when we're deriving future points.

By it, I mean that if a statement about reality is true, then all intelligibility depends on it being true. So, a couple of examples of how this affects practice. First an easy one, "It is true that 1+1=2". If that weren't true, then nothing would make sense. Now a more difficult example, "It is true that I own a dog". In order for that to be untrue, we would have to change something about the universe as it exists, and while the impact of that change seems at a glance to be small, it is essentially equivalent to taking something which is A and making it NOT A; a breach of logical rules as we know them. In spite of that violation of the essential nature of reality, complicated examples such as that one allow us to make limited, partial comparisons between the fictional world and the existing world, in order to suppose how the hypothetical case would affect events which are relatively, temporally immediate. Whereas I could say, "if I didn't have a dog, then my apartment would be cleaner, I would have slightly more money, and my life would have one less source of joy.", the reality of the case is that in order for me to not have a dog, the entire sequence of events leading up to me getting the dog would have to be altered. I would have to like dogs less, and so I would probably have not had a dog growing up, so my parents would have to like dogs less, and so their parents raised them differently,  maybe because my grandfather never went to war, etc, etc, etc., or perhaps dogs never existed (there're lots of ways to build this hypothetical world).

In order for those alterations to take place we would effectively have to change a chain of events spanning from the beginning of time until now, and make a change in the character of the ultimate source. The impact of even a small change to current events becomes very large when extrapolated backwards in time. Such changes result in a universe which is entirely unpredictable to us, and on close examination the hypothetical universes all amount to nonsense universes, because they started under conditions which were different from ours, and the conditions under which our universe formed were essentially logical in all respects, so the hypothetical universe formed under conditions which were not essentially logical.

But to bring this into application for us, we will be utilizing the axiom when we examine statements such as, "It is true that not all people are aware of the special revelation by which the ultimate source of knowledge makes itself relatable to us.". The question we will be asking ourselves when we consider this in order to derive further points is, "why is it completely necessary that this statement is true?" And I predict that the answer will prove beneficial to our study.

As a side note, it's for this reason I do not like to use the phrase, "in all possible universes", when I speculate about what's possible or impossible. There are no other possible universes.

"You're the God who stays the same."

I'm dissatisfied with the explanation on point 12 from my prior post, so I want to use this post to organize my thoughts on the topic, restate the problem, and rethink whether that point is necessary as I delivered it, or if it needs some adjustment.

The reason we're generating this list at all is: there is a certain set of information operating in the mind of every individual, upon which every thought depends. That information includes, and enables such assumptions as, the uniformity in nature, induction (knowing tha the future will be like the past, from moment to moment), laws of logic (and their universality), etc..

The problem is: we don't know where that information came from, and if we credit the wrong source then we undermine the credibility of the information, or we contradict the information itself. If the information is not reliable, then we are unable to ascertain truth. Therefore, in any worldview which claims to be true, there must be a proper source for that information, and worldviews may be defeated on the grounds that they do not include a source capable of providing the information.

So, in working out a solution to the problem, we've established a set of criteria which a source must meet in order to function as a source. Having thus determined, we suppose, that a singular creator god must exist, we now have two sets of information at hand. We have the information which is intrinsic to our thinking process, which we are attempting to justify, and then we have the justification itself, which is not required for thought, but is required for justification of the thought process. (We called them "general revelation" and "special revelation" respectively. Please note, if you're already Christian, that I'm using these terms in a way different from their common use in theological conversation).

While general revelation is held by everyone, the content of special revelation is hereby derived as a set of necessities, and so special revelation must be something which we can learn by means of our faculties with the support of general revelation. The question which must be answered for #12, though, is this: Are our internal (reasoning) faculties able to produce sufficient grounds for the full acceptance of the proposed criteria as contents of general revelation, or should that information be corroborated with data collected by means of our extrinsic (sensing) faculties?

Certainly, I hold that it is not sufficient for us to derive the information blindly. Rather, information about the source must be made available to us by the source. So, in order to answer that question, we have to first determine if the special revelation is, in fact, contained within the general revelation. If it is, then everyone already has the special revelation, and we should probably come up with another name for it. Given that the general revelation is unique in that it is given to us without the use of our faculties, we can say that if the special revelation is not contained in the general revelation, then it is not issued to us without the use of our faculties, and therefore must be delivered to us from an external source by means of our sense perceptions, specifically the source to which it pertains. It is fortunate, then, that the general revelation enables us to rely on our faculties to some extent, so that we can examine the external source.

Here's the reason for my dissatisfaction: if what I have called "special revelation" is not contained in the general revelation, then my intentions have not been aligned with a proper method of executing my proposed means for deriving the information contained in special revelation, and so that proposition needs to be clarified in a way which broadens the scope of things considered by this study. Where I proposed to derive the information by simple examination of the human condition, I meant internally to derive the information by means of reason alone, but examination of the human condition must include consideration of sensory input, meaning that external sources of evidence used in conjunction with reason are allowable, given that the prior points in my list are true.

However, if the special revelation is contained in the general revelation, then it may be the case that I am very nearly done with my list, and that I should remove the word "verifiably" from point 12. This would seem to be the path of least resistance, but it doesn't make sense for that to be the case since I derived the information by means of my reasoning faculty. Information obtained by reason alone is theoretical, and a theoretical particle is quite a different thing from an observed particle. If reason alone were sufficient to discover the truth of the universe, then we would have no need of sensory data. After much deliberation, I am forced to conclude that a theoretical source is not sufficient grounds for a worldview. At the very minimum, the source or some relatable communication from it must be have been observed by at least one person who lived to tell about it, and that person must have been the same as, or able to communicate with, the first human being to ever live, and the story which that person told must have been passed down so that it is available to mankind today, for anyone desirous to learn about it. (With some refining, these will likely be points 13+)

This means a shift in the way that I am accustomed to thinking. In order to argue with atheists, I spend so much time attempting to reduce the validity of our internally facilitated information in order to demonstrate to them that sensory data and reasoning itself is not sufficient grounds on which to build a functional worldview. Now it is time to take a cue from the humanists; the sensory data is, indeed, valid, because the worldview we're building supports it by means of the ultimate source and its special revelation.

So, future bullets might (or might not, I'm not sure yet) make use of physical phenomena for support.

"They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them."

Alright, so following up on my last post, I have some comments, and then I hope to make progress on that list somehow.

To start, I think that #8 deserves more explanation to avoid confusion or objections. It's an important point, so I want to make sure I've nailed this one down.

So, here's the conundrum: The ultimate source has to be above the law without being exempt from the law. The laws I'm talking about are the physical and logical laws which govern everything. It has to be above them because it must be able to perform an action which is totally impossible for any other part of creation to perform. It can't be exempt from them, because that would undermine the points specifying that the rules governing intelligibility are universally applicable, making the source itself potentially unintelligible, internally contradictory, or untrustworthy. 

I cannot think of any way to solve this problem except by relinquishing creative and prescriptive control over every part of the universe to that source. In that case, the source is able to prescribe a universe which is more limited than the source, but which does not violate the laws which characterize the source. For my sake, I offer it as a request to anyone reading, "Please come up with an alternative explanation which doesn't undermine intelligibility". But that has been the challenge for philosophers all along, hasn't it? And to this day the ancient Biblical wisdom still holds true, "The fool says in his heart, 'there is no god'"; I am not aware of any viable alternative ever presented.

So per the above and the points in my previous blog, about which I feel confident, for lack of a viable alternative, the source of the information which comprises our ultimate foundation for all knowledge is a singular, all powerful, creator of everything, exercising full and complete control over every minutia of the entire universe by its prescriptive decree. Furthermore, everything in existence is a self-expression of that source's own character, and we say that the source has a personal character from which our personalities are derived, but that character is so far beyond us that it also derives from itself all of the universe. 

So, to some small extent it is valid to attribute human characteristics to this entity, but only inasmuch as it reveals itself as such. That's the next bullet in the list from my previous blog:

11.
Q. The source itself must be apprehensible to the human mind, to an extent which would enable us to know that it fulfills all of the above characteristics without deviating from them. (Note: not "comprehensible").

E. Obviously, we have to be able to know all of the prior points about the source somehow, and although they are necessary preconditions for an intelligible universe (afaict), we are not always consciously aware of those points, necessarily. The involuntary revelation itself was just the groundwork enabling us to know the extent to which our senses were trustworthy, and at this time I'm not sure about how to articulate the specific contents of that involuntary revelation. In this discourse, I'm not trying to explore the contents of the revelation, as much as to develop a philosophical framework which justifies the existence of that information in our minds.

12.
Q. The knowledge comprising that apprehension of the source must be verifiably available to humanity in some form.

E. We can derive the information directly by means of this kind of philosophizing, but due to the limitations on my imagination, I acknowledge that I'm depending heavily on everyone else's inability to explain things better than me. Thus, the physical substance of this information must exist somewhere in the world, or else the foundations of our worldviews are left to the most imaginative bidder. (This is not to say that the form of this substantive revelation must be such that everyone would instantly accept it as truth upon seeing it; the truth of our ability to use logic is not dependent on our acknowledgement of the source of our reasoning faculties, but the information must at least be available.)

To rephrase the points 11 and 12 for common application, (this is allowed because we've established that the source has a duck-typed personality), we can say that the source has to be predictable and relatable to some extent. No wise person trusts their neighbor before they know something firsthand about their neighbor, and that knowledge is used as a reference point for making predictions about the behaviors of that neighbor. As it happens, the human mind functions in this manner, and so in order for us to be able to say that we live in a world revealed to us by a trustworthy ultimate revelator, it is necessary that the revelator accommodate us in the area of trust by providing a relatable point of reference within itself.

The source must have revealed itself to us in human-relatable terms. Given that the above points are derived without direct reference to such a revelation, it is not necessary that every person alive be aware of the relatable revelation. However, it is necessary that the relatable revelation be available to the very first humans who ever lived, and it is necessary that the revelation be available on earth today, in some form. Development of personal trust is a voluntary process; and although the revelator is plainly deserving of our implicit trust, we are evidently not forced to invest in it.

So, for future posts, let's make a distinction in terms. We will call the revelation by which the source enables us to live intelligibly, "General Revelation", because everyone knows it involuntarily. And, the revelation by which the source makes itself relatable and available for personal apprehension, in order for us to build trust, we will call "Special Revelation", because it comes to those who put effort toward a desire to know the revelator.

To ground all this in personal anecdote, the only reason I'm able to do this kind of thinking, and the only way that I've come to these conclusions, is by spending a lot of time meditating on the Holy Bible, (which I hold to be the sufficient source for all wisdom pertaining to life and Godliness), engaging with my Christian brothers in meaningful dialog about it, and watching the debates wherein atheists repeatedly fail to address it.

"How good and pleasant it is
    when God’s people live together in unity!
It is like precious oil poured on the head,
    running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
    down on the collar of his robe.
It is as if the dew of Hermon
    were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
    even life forevermore." - Psalm 133

Today I'm going to cover two topics, touched on in my previous post. The first one is easy enough, so I'll knock it out quickly at first, then spend a lot of time on the second.

I. "Why can't it be 'evolution' or 'nature driving evolution' which reveals the pathologies to us"?

Nature, being impersonal, does not reveal to us that our faculties are accurate to any degree; it only reveals to us that we have faculties. Attempting to utilize nature/evolution as the external source for the information which acts as ultimate foundation for intelligibility leaves us right where we started. It doesn't progress us toward having an intelligible universe. Nature/Evolution doesn't work here.

II. "What are the characteristics which an ultimate foundation must have in order to fulfill the preconditions for intelligibility?"

So, I looked back at my post in April 15, 2017 and saw that it was centered around examining the characteristics of God to see how they satisfy the preconditions for intelligibility. Also, it had a lot of ugly typos. I spent some time considering how best to approach the question in this post, and I figure I'll try to examine the situation I'm in, existentially, and just work from there to figure out what qualities an ultimate foundation must have to satisfy intelligibility. I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased, but I do intend to consider the grounds as they are first, and then compare them with God at the end, rather than the other way around.

That methodology, to start elsewhere from God and then conclude with God, may seem at first to be a deviation from the requirement elsewhere stated that all correct reason must start from the ultimate foundation. It's tolerable here, however, because I'll be starting with the a assumption that there is an ultimate foundation at all, and that we have received information from it which is necessary for intelligibility. If that ultimate foundation is God, and if the information we received from it was a qualitative self-revelation, as the Bible may lead us to believe, then I shall make no error by concluding as much. This will be a thought experiment to either demonstrate or disprove the methodology which I advocate.

I'm using Q and E to stand for "Quality" and "Explanation", (where explanation goes into more detail about why a thing is necessary), so that a bored reader can skip the explanations and just read the qualities.

As you read, remember this driving principle: If a worldview is to be called "true", it must allow for its adherents to have sure knowledge of truth.

----------------------------

1.
Q. Source is able to reveal things to us in a way which bypasses, supersedes, and justifies our reliance on our internal faculties to observe all things other than said revelation.

E. This was the most obvious starting point for me, since it is the very point by which I so often say atheism fails.

2.
Q. Active revelation, rather than passive. The ultimate standard acts on us and changes us to deliver its revelation; it doesn't passively exhibit information.

E. This follows from 1, and is important because the revelation must not depend on us acting to receive it. Or else, lacking the revelation in the first place, we would be unable to know when we had surely received it in full.

3.
Q. Involuntary universal revelation; nobody is excluded.

E. This is important, because either everyone has it, or nobody can be sure that they have it. We're talking about the preconditions for an intelligible world, so environments where nobody is sure about the revelation are not permissible.

4.
Q. Trustworthy revelation. The source of the revelation is incapable of delivering false information.

E. This one is pretty straight forward. If we can't trust the source, then the information is unreliable. We're aiming for a world where our senses can be called reliable to some knowable degree.

5.
Q. Internally consistent revelation.

E. I'm talking about the laws of identity and noncontradiction here. Anything contradictory is false, and everything is itself. These are descriptions of reality, and so the information we received which describes reality must conform to this model.

6.
Q. Universally applicable revelation

E. There must be no place or time in existence where the revelation ceases to be true, or ceases to provide for intelligibility. If there were, then we would have no way of knowing whether or not we were in that place or time.

7.
Q. Universally identical revelation; we all get the same information

E. The nature of this revelation is that it's necessary for an intelligible universe; if any part of it is lacking, then there's no way of knowing whether or not we got the whole thing.

8.
Q. Ultimately and universally prescribing source (or "source which prescribes everything", as opposed to "describing source", or partially prescribing source)

E. #1, #2, and #3 are not achievable by any natural means (or else the ability to reveal is a matter of technological advancement, and thus is open to the advantage of potentially untrustworthy revelators who stumble upon the capability). That is to say, the source of the revelation is capable of performing actions which surpass the boundaries set for us by the physical laws which otherwise govern the universe. We can't say that the ultimate source is above the universal laws of intelligibility, or else we undercut #6. That leaves us with only one option capable of providing for an intelligible universe: the ultimate source governs the intelligible universe, and so the intelligibility of the universe (if not the existence of the universe as one which is intelligible) is dependent on the prescription of the ultimate source.

9.
Q. The ultimate source is the only source capable of providing revelations by these means and of this type

E. This follows from #8. If anyone else may ever discover a means by which they can produce an equivalent revelation including information of their own design, then we undercut #4, #5, and #6.

10.
Q. The source is limited in its behaviors by certain qualities which characterize it

E. This is implied by #4, but deserves restating in broader terms. Suppose, for example, that the source prescribed the existence of multiple universes, some intelligible and some not; we would not know if we were in an intelligible universe or an unintelligible one. It is therefore necessary for the source to have a nature of its own, distinct from ours, yet (because of #8) which in itself fully qualifies our experience. In that sense, and given #2 and #3, we may conclude that the revelation is a self-expression of the source (because the revelation itself is limited by the nature of the source, and the prescriptions from the source are defined by its limiting characteristics). #8 doesn't stop there, though. Since the entire universe and all its details exist only as a contingent on the prescriptions of the source, and since the source's prescriptions define the universe without deviating from the boundaries of the source's defining characteristics, we conclude that the universe itself is a self-expression of the source.

----------------------------

This is by no means a comprehensive list! I'm stopping here for lack of time, and because I want to make one more point before I actually run out of time for this post.

So, for some time I've been contemplating the definition of a "person" or a "personal" being. Mostly, because I'm not satisfied with my previous discussions on the necessity that God be personal, and although I recognize the importance of it from a Christian perspective, I recognize that I have a very limited understanding of the meaning of the word anyway. After spending a significant amount of time trying to figure this out, I concluded that the word "person", in all common uses, is synonymous with "human". (This means I'm going to have to pick a new word when I talk about the trinity, but I already have some issues with the way people talk about the trinity in general, so I think it's better to avoid ambiguity. To touch the topic, in case anyone is curious, I don't think that we understand the nature of the trinity half as well as we act like we do during debates about it, and that's granting that during those debates we say plainly that it's incomprehensible.)

However, the word "personal", is not always used with reference to "persons". My dog is not a person, but he has a personality, and my dog has personal preferences which differ from other dogs in its breed. As to having real emotions which are at minimum analogous to my own, I think that any person would be hard pressed to convince me that my dog doesn't love me. So, the word "personal" seems to be made with reference to anything whose behaviors are limited by preferential and emotional considerations. Given that, for lack of appropriate evidence, I can't be sure my dog's behaviors actually represent actual emotions (like a human's), I'm going to call my dog's personality a "duck typed personality". He quacks like he has a personality, and he swims like he has a personality, so I say, "he has a personality".

Now then, emotion and preference represent generally predictable responses to environmental conditions, but which vary from personality to personality. These variances are necessary distinctions for personalities; if there is one robot with a very human-like set of behavioral traits then one might be persuaded to attribute a duck-typed personality to it. If there are multiple robots with identical human-like sets of behavioral traits, then they're just a bunch of machines. So every personality must be unique, but for each individual personality the behaviors must be predictable to a certain degree with respect to itself.

There is one last component to the word "personal", which I think finalizes the definition I've been working on. That is, a personal thing preferentially chooses to be known to other personal things in order to interact with them "on a personal level". The ultimate goal thereof is to share mutual emotional experiences regarded by at least the one as positive. This knowledge and interaction does not have to be vocal. For example, when my dog wants to go out, he stands in front of me and jumps up and down until I tell him I'll take him out. In order to avoid expending too much imaginative effort on this point, I'm going to concede any type of communication at all as valid for this purpose.

That said, since we've already established that preferences and emotions represent predictable responses to environmental conditions, and that these responses are predicated on traits unique to the individual personality, and that the method of communication is irrelevant... I think that a combination of the above #2, #8, #9, and #10 (see 10.E) allow for me to, at minimum, ascribe to the source of that revelation a duck-typed personality. And, as a very important note on that point, full compliance with #8 and #10 requires that calling said personality "duck-typed" is not to imply that it is derivative from our own personality. Rather, it is necessarily the case that our personalities are components of the ultimate source's own self-revelation.

If I had more time, I'd have continued writing bullets, but I thought this last point was most easily explained in paragraph form. Again, this blog only gets you part of the way there. I'll continue the topic more later. I hope you guys can see the road ahead of us. There is only one fully consistent set of facts comprising reality, and so there is only one destination for the truth-seeker. You guys can do it! God bless.

"You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart."

Alright, so finally to talk about the debate I've been wanting to talk about. Here's the debate:

If you skim through the comments, you'll see my knee-jerk reactions in them. I'm almost embarassed to point it out, because I commented mid-video and then commented again on my own comments, and because nobody took the bait; maybe because I wrote too much. I'll restate those comments here in this blog, so please don't read them as I would be embarrassed if you knew that they were made by the same Zac who writes this blog. And even moreso, don't check my youtube profile, where you may find me admitting defeat in a debate about tithing. I leave that video on YouTube as everlasting proof that I'm don't think too highly of my own opinions to occasionally admit being wrong.

So this debate was between Himes, a member of an atheist club in CT, and Alex, a Christian family man with an appetite for presuppositional apologetics. (I use Himes' last name and Alex's first name for brevity).

So, Alex did a great job presenting the presuppositional apologetic as it is taught and issued by apologists Durbin, Sye, and others. More importantly, he did an excellent job presenting the straight-forward message of the gospel in his opening and closing statements. I might not have put as much of an emphasis on the prospect of avoiding eternal hellfire, but Jonathon Edwards was effective as such, and so I know that God uses all types for the expansion of His Kingdom. Alex, if you ever read this, I applaud your effort for the Kingdom. I loved the contrast between your introductions, too. Look at all the pomp atheists ascribe to themselves these days! A Christian spends just a few years studying the Bible diligently every day, and he goes toe to toe with "The Director of Something Something Atheism".  Good job, and God bless you.

However, from a strictly technical standpoint, and in order to emphasize the points I will make, I'm going to side with the atheists in their critique of this debate by saying that Alex lost the debate.

Why do I say that he lost the debate?

Every single debate I've seen between a presuppositional apologist and an atheist has included the same exact questions from the atheist. It's always something like: "If not Atheism, then why Christianity and not Islam?". The question is especially troublesome to answer, as issued by the atheist, because even if the Christian somehow gave an excellent one-minute answer to "why not Islam", the atheist would just propose another religion; "why not Hinduism?", and the question would still be equally valid. The unanswered status of that question itself is not enough to say that the Christian lost the debate, since as Alex points out, the debate is between an Atheist and a Christian, so to rebut every single other religion at once is both out-of-scope and something for which there may not be enough time in the world if they took a conventional approach. However, I do believe that the question is answerable in a reasonable ammount of time, and with respect to all other religions simultaneously; the method I take is to examine the characteristics which an ultimate foundation must have in order to satisfy the preconditions for intelligible experience (more on this later).

I say that Alex lost the debate because, in addition to the above, Himes did something which I have not seen an atheist do in formal debate yet, and it is something which undercuts a typical application of the presuppositional argument. Himes gave an answer for the question, "how do you know that?". Himes proposed an ultimate standard which he said was consistent with atheism -- logic. Specifically, he grounded his assertions on Peano's Axioms.

I'd never heard of Peano prior to watching that debate. I read his wikipedia article, and it seems like the stuff he proposed is not too different from the axioms of thought, or the fundamental principles of boolean arithmetic I learned in school. Nothing new here, but boy Himes sure did sound smart when he named "The Axioms of Peano Arithmetic". I think that it's counterproductive in a debate to use references to things which your opponent does not know as a way to beat their argument. What if Alex had a great rebuttal to Himes' dependence on Peano's Axioms, but just didn't know those axioms by the name "Peano"? Indeed, I think that a knowledge of Peano's Axioms as such is not really necessary for a rebuttal, and I'll explain why.

The general form of the presuppositional argument is an attack; the Sye/Durbin application first attempts to destroy the atheist worldview by pointing out its lack of a foundation, and then to build up the Christian worldview in its place. (I hope my readers don't need me to explain what I mean by "foundation". If so, I recommend my post on March 18, 2018, which makes reference to a bunch of other blogs where I talk about it a lot.) If you watch presuppositional debates, you'll see that typically a short verbal bludgeoning leaves the atheist saying something to the effect of, "I'm content not knowing anything with absolute certainty", and perhaps, "we don't need absolute certainty of anything", which is bread and butter for the experienced presuppositional apologist. I think I differ from common presuppositionalists here, in that I think it's not productive to argue in favor of absolute certainty in such broad terms the way they do, since first of all I've often seen Christians fall into the trap of attempting to extrapolate absolute certainty to the rest of their physical experience, and second I maintain that if an atheist can prove to me "by scripture and plain reason" that I am wrong about God or the existence of God, then perhaps I'm wrong. I prefer to argue in favor of the strict necessity of an absolute foundation which must be capable of providing preconditions for intelligibility, and then to examine what can be readily assessed about the preconditions for intelligibility in order to demonstrate their distinct likeness with the description of God in scripture. I leave open the possibility that I may be proved wrong about the nature of that foundation, but I insist, like Himes in this case, that the foundation itself is discernible by means of our reason and faculties, although the utilization of it is not entirely dependent on our conscious acknowledgement of it. I disagree with Himes in that I assert that our reason and faculties themselves are incapable of functioning as that foundation. This insistence is not incompatible with Christianity, as indeed Romans 1 says, "...what can be known about God is known to them, since God has made it plain to them.", and after God makes himself known, Psalm 19 says, "Day to day pours forth speech.".

I think that, as far as descriptions of reality go, Peano's rules seem efficacious to say the least. However, it is precisely because they are descriptions that they are not eligible candidates for epistemological ultimacy. A description of something may be true despite our knowledge of it, but it must be learned and verified before it can serve us as an antecedent for any knowable conclusion. Anything which is learned is itself a conclusion, and the means by which it is learned is the antecedent. As it happens, we depend on our internal faculties to provide us with antecedent for knowledge about everything learned. So, the question for Himes was, from what source do we learn that our internal faculties are reliable? Indeed, if we suppose that they are generally reliable, then we can readily ascertain instances where they have been unreliable, or where other people have used their own faculties unreliably. (I'm not just talking about our sense perceptions, but the entire use of them in conjunction with our capacity for reasonable interpretation). Given that our internal faculties are unreliable, it follows that the information they provide is unreliable. Furthermore, since we have no reference point to measure them against other than themselves, they are unreliable to an unpredictable degree.  It is for this reason that when Alex asks, "what if 2+2 does not equal 4, relative to the simulation?", Himes is at fault for utilizing Peano's Axioms to say that it is impossible for Alex's hypothetical scenario to be the case; he learned Paeno's axioms by means of the same unreliable faculties with which he utilizes Paeno's axioms.

Here's where absolute certainty comes into play, and only here. We all must, and do, have absolute certainty about the information by which the ultimate foundation makes the world intelligible to us. That information is unique, because we may not even be able to easily quantify what that information is by means of ordinary words. These are the axioms; the "pathologies" that Himes mentioned.

We have absolute certainty of them; Himes is right. But we cannot say that we have absolute certainty of them if we learned about them by means of, (and if our knowledge of them is dependent on), our unreliable internal faculties; Himes is wrong.

Since our internal faculties are not sufficient to provide us with the information which we so self-evidently have, we are left with only one option: the information came to us from an external source.

Talking about the specific characteristics necessary for an ultimate foundation takes a lot of space, and this blog is pretty long already. I'll update/restate those characteristics as I now understand them in a future blog, but for the time being you can check out my post on April 15, 2017, which is my most recent attempt at qualifying them.

Last thing, as to the specific "contradiction" in scripture to which Himes kept referring, I'm honestly a bit curious if he ever Googled it... because I did after the debate, and I was quite satisfied with the answers I found after some studying. He says he's very interested in an answer, but I'm not sure that he is, or he might have done more research on that point prior to the debate. In any case, I'm surprised he would expect any Christian debate opponent to have, off the top of their head, an answer to such an obscure detail about Scripture. Himes, if you ever read this, that was silly of you.

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."