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."