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.

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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.

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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."