I might legitimately be unhinging myself with the study I've been doing of God's personhood. I generally want to parameterize everything I learn -- discover it's rules, etc., ("This is how it works... if A then X"). But it seems all existence is a divine conversation between characters who are so far above my intellect that I can't even begin to expect them to take anything I say seriously. I've got so much material to dump here about what I've been studying, but I really can't seem to articulate any of it. It's all so complicated, and there are so many holes in my knowledge that I'm not sure whether it'll ever be possible for me to organize these thoughts. And yet, having an organized thought life has been a high priority for me ever since middleschool! How can a person live without knowing his own mind? It might be decades before I get enough free time to meditate and get anything particularly lucid out of it.

Lately I'm discouraged a little in the campaign for theonomy. I find myself feeling exhausted at the thought of rebutting articles about it, which is something I used to really enjoy... so I'm gonna rant about it. Here we go!

I think, overall, theonomy is not a complicated sell. The objections are many, but generally it seems like people come into agreement with theonomy as soon as they're able to accurately represent it. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an argument against theonomy which had both (a) a clear dependence on some obviously scriptural teaching, and (b) a lack of dependence on some misunderstanding about what theonomy entails or requires. But then, even after people become theonomists, they still carry with them all these reservations and wild ideas about God's law -- eliminating these, you might think, should be as simple as a read through the book, but that is not quite the case. 

What's really getting me is...Why is it so hard to convince Christians that they should obey God's commands? It feels like (and, if we're gonna be nuanced, it probably isn't like) the excuses from theonomists and non-theonomists alike are basically the same. It goes like this: 

Eventually you can convince just about every Christian that the Bible teaches us that God is concerned about our behavior, and that justice is morally relevant, and that politics are consequently relevant to Christians. So, after concerns about soteriological implications are resolved, the discussion begins about which of God's commands He actually intended us to follow.

Initially, the proceeding conversation revolves around covenants, and, since no participant is able to yield any clear passages linking the whole law to either covenant, except insofar as both covenants describe means of forgiveness for our breaking the whole law, the conversation may turn toward the uniqueness of Israel's particular circumstance. We all agree that the law is given as case law, where the case law illustrates principles and establishes a scope of general equity that the judges are expected to understand well enough to rule against them in broader contexts than what is literally described. And, nobody denies that the case laws are tailored to Israel's circumstances (e.g. Exodus 22:1). Finding, as before, that there are zero passages in scripture indicating that the aforementioned "tailoring" should be taken to mean that changes in location or technological advancement would obsolete the principles or general equity of the law, it usually takes quite a bit of effort to make someone realize that, consequently, the actual quality of that tailoring doesn't in any way imply that modern judges aren't expected to execute Mosaic civil law. 

Included in the above discussion is usually a long list of questions about particular laws, where a certain mode of thinking has to be established so that the person involved will know how to reach their own conclusions about other laws. For example, a common stream of objections comes from the notion that "land is an important theme in the OT". That's true, but let's get into the particulars. They ask how we apply the command for Israel to take Canaan from the Canaanites -- the answer: we distinguish between commands of the form, "you, go accomplish X task right now", and commands of the form, "whenever you are in Y circumstance, you should perform Z task". The command to take Canaan was of the former sort, and was actually already accomplished by Israel, such that even if someone were to argue that it is still obligatory for us (because all commands from God reflect moral imperatives of some sort), we would be left saying that the task has already been done (there are a few other good ways to approach it; in just giving quick examples here). So they move on to ask about the general equity of the allotment of the land to the tribes, the jubilee laws, and the mode by which we expect the theonomic state to grow on the earth; each having a different sort of answer, but all following from the same hermeneutic approach and so dictated by the contents of the text. (I'll reiterate that the theonomic state expands peacefully, without initiating war).

There might also be some conversation about what is meant by Jesus in Matt 5 (where he clarifies and affirms the law), or in Matt 19:8 (where he clarifies a proper understanding of adultery as it pertains to reasons for divorce by citing and affirming Mosaic law), etc. etc... Those are generally not hard to get through with a bit of discussion (making a non-theonomist into a theonomist doesn't happen overnight).

Then, when the person has finally accepted that God expects them to do justice as God defined it, and that God didn't redefine it without telling us the new definition in the NT, the conversation turns to fulfillment. I suppose that most theonomists have a poorly worked-out understanding of the actual means by which Jesus fulfills parts of the law, making those parts unactionable for us. This deficiency is the root of all kinds of disagreements among theonomists, and I think that it should be the focus of argumentation before praxis.

But then, even after all of that is basically agreed upon, one last hurdle remains, and crops up over and over and over. There are always several laws for which the theonomist knows no clear reason why it should not be followed today, but which the theonomist believes should not be followed, and these can be identified easily by their failure to conform to that Theonomist's understanding of the mode of fulfillment mentioned in the immediately prior paragraph. The reasons given for why those laws are abrogated or inapplicable to us boil down to terribly arbitrary divisions in the law -- excuses, really, to squeeze in their own notions about what kind of government would or wouldn't work in reality. Some of my favorite examples of this (which I've encountered) include:

• That law can be seen as symbolic of a particular act Jesus did, and so it was a shadow of the work Jesus did, therefore it doesn't apply to us after Jesus's death.
• Israel did it this or that way, therefore that's what the law meant, regardless of what the law actually said.
• The law was given on two tablets, and the second table of the law is abrogated in a different way from the first, because if you look at them separately, you can construe them in such a way that there is a thematic difference between them.
• This law was intended to protect the seed of Israel from genetic impurity, (as if Jesus's body was a divine eugenics project), and so is not relevant to us.
• This or that law was needed for Israel's cultural/sociopolitical atmosphere, but it isn't needed for ours.
• Moses was speaking as a chieftain, not as a prophet, when he issued this or that law (e.g. the judicial structure). Therefore that law is not necessary for us to follow. 
• The NT says that Jesus performed X act in obedience to that law, and so it was a shadow of the work Jesus did, therefore it doesn't apply to us after Jesus's death.

Some of these sound reasonable on their surface, but they get really "fun" to sort out when their proponents try to justify them using any scripture at all. The irony here is, most of the above bullets come from conversations I've had with people who I suspect are the most well-read about theonomy and legal theory among all of my theonomist friends.

I feel like the formula I most often encounter from theonomists goes something like this:

The Biblical Law does contain a prescription on X topic, but that prescription is not relevant to us because [reason from above bullets], and yet we do evidently need an answer for X topic today, and the Biblical one might work if not for [extra-Biblical argument for favored secular political theory], and so the real answer must be derived from [feel-good-general-principle drawn from broad slashes at some Psalm or random quote from the NT or something], and therefore we should do [proposal for some random secular policy, but willingness to budge toward literally anything else except what the Bible prescribes, given a regular, secular-style political argument].

Political legitimacy, for example, was an issue recently discussed in the theonomy forum. Several options for political legitimacy were examined and found epistemically difficult -- from my perspective, it was nearly impossible to qualify the political and physical boundaries of an entity fitting any of the proposed definitions. I offered the idea that, basically, a government was legitimate if it was elected according to Biblical procedure, conforms to the Biblical model, and carries out Biblical law. This makes legitimate governments more-or-less easy to identify, given some basic terms of agreement on what makes for a reasonable attempt at obedience to scripture. The objection to this was that it was unconscionable that all secular governments were illegitimate, and so any group hoping to follow Biblical law could erect a legitimate political authority at any time simply by obeying God's command to set up a government, and that they would be morally justified in defending that authority from violence in accordance with Biblical laws concerning just (defensive) warfare. Basically, it would be shocking if anyone obeyed God!

But suppose we agree on a theory for how, precisely, Jesus fulfills the law (we don't, and that is a problem, but I don't think it affects my aim here, because I have a hard time imagining even a hypothetical theory which would preserve laws dictating judicial activity without preserving the laws dictating that we should have judges who carry out those activities). After that, the first step toward obedience should be pretty simple. We have some positive commands in scripture requiring that God's people have judges who carry out certain activities. We should be able to agree that the first step in obedience is to simply elect some judges to carry out those activities! And, if we have disagreements about what precisely those activities are, we can at least all agree that "trying to obey some interpretation of scripture" is better than "avoiding scripture altogether". Different denominations all are accepted as "saved", and so I see no reason why different interpretations of scriptural law can't all be seen as "attempts to be obedient" (or maybe "faithful"), and therefore carrying some form of Biblical legitimacy.

But then again, building on the confusion about legitimacy, I keep seeing the existing governments mentioned in people's plans to move forward. It's almost as if people are getting hung up on the idea that we already have judges, and they just aren't acting right, so we need to change the judges or the laws to match scripture. There are a ton of problems with that idea -- first of all, that there's no legislative structure in God's law, and God's law actually includes commands saying that we shouldn't add or remove from it (so no making or changing laws). But second, and more relevant, the judges in scripture are defined in no terms other than that they perform the duties which scripture describes -- if a judge isn't performing those duties, then he isn't a "judge" as scripture defines "judge". We have no judges even attempting to comply with scriptural law over and above secular national laws. That is to say, we don't have judges at all; we have something else with the same name, and so we are simply disobeying God's command to select judges.

Call me obtuse, but I can't help thinking that the Bible isn't all that unclear on this topic. In fact, I have a hard time understanding how we've reached a place where we can look at plain scripture and interpret it to mean something other than what it plainly says -- God gave some commands, and didn't tell us to stop obeying them. This should be pretty simple, I think. It's as plain as Deut 30:11-16. We're just disobedient.

"Note then the kindness and severity of God"

These days I've made a diversion of watching E-Sports, particularly Sybert's C&C cast. It has a very nostalgic appeal to me; I used to enjoy C&C a lot, and he reminds me of the Solaris announcer. It makes me want to fund a tournament of my own!

I'm making slow and steady progress on Isaac's Enchiridion. I've mostly completed the section on practical hermeneutics, and I'm enjoying the difficult task of categorically separating that presentation from the section on epistemics. The plan is to set up the study of hermeneutics as fundamental to all other fields of knowledge, including epistemics. We justify our epistemic theories by reference to scripture, and our epistemic theories all establish scripture as the sole ruling and elucidating affirmation of that most fundamental sense of the divine.

I have been really worried about how effective I can be as a father, given my work circumstances. I have a relatively relaxed work-life balance, but even working a simply 9-5 job sometimes leaves me feeling like I lose consciousness as soon as I see my family, and recover only in time to leave home again. I worry that this daily feeling is a summary of the pattern which will characterize my whole life. Every moment is so precious that I neglect upkeep to hang onto it, but then those things un-kept are harmful on their own, and the result is worse than if I had spent less time on what's really important. How can I fight the enemy when I'm so busy fighting the war? 

Chowon and Isaac have been in Korea for a couple of weeks, though, so I've been taking advantage of this time to get the house in order. I've been fixing several little things here and there. My list has kept me so busy that I've spent most of my after-hours each day on it, giving myself about one hour of break-time each day right before I sleep. Consequently, I haven't actually had much time to sleep, but I can't give up the break time -- if I don't wind down any other way, I'll sit in bed for quite a while trying to wind down with only my thoughts, a less effective mode of relaxation. So I've been barely getting to bed on time this week; and the last two days I really didn't want to get up.

My wife told me to just relax and not worry about the chores, but my anxious desire to maximize the small time I have with my son borders on frantic. If I don't get every single thing done this week, then I will sacrifice too much by doing it later. I want so badly to be a dad who benefits my son and angles him toward his only Savior, that the desire alone would surely incapacitate me if it had not first driven me to my knees in effectual appeals to God for strength. How can I impress the holiness of God upon this innocent boy's mind? 

I've done a lot of thinking about why why adults seem to enjoy quiet much more than children. I enjoy sitting in quiet and just looking at a cloud, but the endeavor bores my son almost to barbarity. I'm inclined to think that it's because I've been exposed to much more content that I struggle to reconcile with the goodness of creation, and in those quiet moments my subconscious finds liberty to till its soil which has been hardened and salted by all the awful turmoil made discretely apparent to me by so many mundane activities outside. Every homeless person I see is potentially me and my family, every broken or burned house mine, every police officer protecting us from us, every cloud of pollutants a cancer cell in our bellies. But my son sees these things and his thoughts on them seem dictated solely by my reactions, so what can I do but project confidence in his security and safety, and give generously to all who are in need, so that the world will seem to have some kindness in it? Why should he be stressed about reality now, when that stress is a certainty for all adults, and the innocence he now has, once lost, can never be regained? And yet, if I fail to prepare him, he will surely be harmed.

One of the men at church comforted me, though. He said to me that there are all kinds of men; some who exchange financial security for time at home, and others who exchange time at home for financial security. Some who are fun and adventurous, some who are stoic and wise. He said to me that not all fathers have to be the same in order to be good dads, and maybe my skills have limited my options; maybe I'm just not built to be X kind of dad, but I should rather capitalize on my strengths by being Y kind of dad in the most consistent way possible. It was hurtful, but also extremely comforting to hear him say that. But I actually don't know what kind of dad I am, or how to be that dad in a good way. All I can do is keep trying my best, right? But what is burnout? Is that something I need to watch out for, or will my concern for my son well up into endless reserves of nervous energy, compelling me to more and more acts of fatherishness? And how can I take care of myself without sacrificing too much time? What is the most efficient way for me to rejuvenate myself?

All this and more I don't understand. Maybe it's ok to not understand, and it's best to be frustrated with my lack of understanding, so that the pursuit of perfection will yield constant improvement and sanctification. Maybe this frustrated and confused mode of feverish desire for goodness is truly the ideal state for a person in my circumstances, with my limitations...

"But what do I know?"

 Domi & JD Beck finally released their album. Listening to that today. Here's a cool one:

In this post, however, I intend to talk about this song:

Some of my friends might excommunicate me when they find out I like Tame Impala -- look, they have maybe 3 or 4 songs that I'm really fond of, and I don't listen to anything else they've made.

Anyway, when this song was suggested to me, at first I loved it, and listened a few times. I am pretty happy about being male, and I really appreciate media that defends or celebrates the nobility of distinctively masculine traits. And, for the record, I believe that women can and should, to the exact same degree, be proud of their femininity -- all God's creation is good. Let's all be happy about what we are.

Well, at a glance, this song seemed to be doing something like that -- "I'm a man; I answer to a higher force". After a couple of listens, I realized that the subtext here is that the narrator is cheating on his wife and has substance abuse problems (the music video appears to contain a wedding scene and some substance abuse; the song implies the rest) and is blaming his actions on his masculinity. The "higher force" is the collection of physical urges to which he has allowed himself to become enslaved. The lines "I'm as pathetic as the reason why" and "I'll never be as strong as you" make me think that the author recognizes the narrator's depravity, but there's no redeeming element in the song to indicate that the author disagrees with the narrator's rationale. It remains a plausible interpretation of the song that the author intends to present masculinity in a strictly negative light in contrast to an apparently more fragile presentation of femininity.

I'd love to walk through Romans 8 and explain how the song is actually spot-on with respect to atheistic materialism, and how Christianity ennobles masculinity, but I haven't the time.

In any case, the song is a major bummer, and I'm left wondering whether there are any actually good songs about being a man, other than those which seem to have been written by John Deere. 

And that's all I have time for today. I just wanted to get a blog out there. There's not much to update on anyway -- all the projects I mentioned in prior posts are still basically in progress.

"You don't have to rob me. It's not really worth it. I only have credit cards, and I can just cancel them."

My back opens up like a book filled with autumn leaves. My head is an asteroid full of broken glass, and if I don't keep shifting it will pour out and ruin everything. The room is thick, and I can barely move in it. The floor tilts this way and that; every step takes me to a new and unexpected altitude. My mind is a leaking boat; my chest a choking tangle of vines. The room shrinks and my body stretches long and thin. I have things to do, like brush my son's teeth, but can I walk to the toothbrush safely? How can I read this book when my environment consists of a series of inexplicable disasters? What would a bedtime song sound like if it came out of my mouth? How much longer until I can lay down in bed?

Yesterday I either experienced several related episodes of hallucination over the course of the night, or one exceptionally long episode. I can't tell. There was an interval where I thought that the hallucination stopped, but then much later in the night, around the time the first birds in the morning began to chirp, I realized that a certain detail which I believed to be true about my immediate environment, and over which I was very distressed, was actually imagined, and I wasn't able to be sure how long that night I had believed it (the thing was truly absurd, and I'm a bit shocked by how much time last night I sustained belief in it). I hardly got any sleep. 

What a nightmare.

I don't think the scenario presents a significant epistemic problem for me, because it was temporary, and the methods I cling to for determining true and false grant that falsehood may be believed for a period of time pending analysis, and so find themselves valuable in light of my fallibility rather than in spite of it.

The events occasioning this stress, however, continue to proceed apace, and I worry very much about how long they will last, and how well we will recover. Nonetheless, time is passing and the future seems to unfold without much regard for my plans. Everything has always worked out for the best; everything will work out for the best this time as well.

I've been praying all day for peace... but I know that God's plan is better than my temporal peace, and so I pray, most of all, that whatever the case, God is glorified by my family and our handling of our circumstances.

"It's not just that. It's more outrageous than that."

 Listening a lot to Domi and JD Beck these days:

I recently realized that I, all the time, catch myself saying "God give me peace"; whether mumbling it absent mindedly to myself, or praying it consciously whenever I feel unrest. All the time I'm longing for the great peace of God's presence, and I do believe that God can give us a peace which surpasses all understanding, and which comes from having a mind sanctified and conformed to the mind of Christ, totally committed and self-entrusted to God. However, it seemed to me that I'd made that peace a sort of idol, and pursued it instead of the source of it. To correct the situation, I've made a point recently of, every time I catch myself praying or longing for that peace, to instead pray for God to be glorified in my life. I believe that this shift in mindset will be beneficial for me -- not that I expect to achieve peace by means of this prayer, but that I will teach myself to pursue the better thing in all circumstances. God's glory is our ultimate purpose, and whatever is going on, whatever I feel, it seems to me that the pursuit of that end is always right.

Truthfully, I'm not sure how to develop a personal friendship with God. He doesn't "talk back", and it isn't like I can go hang out with Him at the arcade. I doubt He'd be interested in playing fortnite with me even given the opportunity, and I'm quite certain I'd lose every game of chess against him (or any other board game for that matter, Proverbs 16:33). But I do know that work builds relationships. In fact, lots of marriage advice outlets recommend working on something with your spouse -- whether that's the gym, or some chores you can do at the same time together; working together builds affection. So, it seems to me that evangelism will prove to be both spiritually and emotionally rewarding in that sense.

I began the work of transliterating my steno notebook with Isaac's enchiridion in it today. As it stands, it's just a bunch of odds and ends about practical hermeneutics that I jotted down randomly during company meetings, but I've run out of personal rules on the topic to articulate, and so I want to put them down, organize them, and apply some scholarship to fill in the gaps before I proceed to the other topics on the agenda. It's extremely slow going, but I'm motivated to proceed apace.

I have had hallucination episodes more times this year than last year. It's been a long time (months? years?) since I last sat down for an extended period of meditation, and I've recently noticed that I can't go very deep into myself without getting mixed up. I perceive that I've been putting up walls around parts of myself and shutting down certain minor faculties, but I think that I need to open myself up again in order to properly acknowledge my wife's emotions and keep up with her growth in a way that's helpful and encouraging. She's making a lot of personal progress lately, and I'm struggling to adapt. I seem to have developed a reactionary and defensive pattern of thinking which is counterproductive.

Marital love is wonderful, and God really picks out the perfect people to complement one another in marriage. Chowon's weaknesses are as if they were hand-picked to grate against my own weaknesses, (and v.v.), and together we are forced to pursue God for sanctification. It's awesome and frightening and difficult and wonderful and sorrowful and joyous and precious; it's all the great things about life, packed into one relationship! 

I also found my old steno notebook with all the poetry in it, and was horrified. I don't know if I copied all the poems from it into my blog, but I threw it away anyway. I don't think I have the guts to work through that. Anyway, it had a bunch of mistakes in it (backwards "p"s, unnecessary extensions, and misuses of sounds like connecting "ee-n-g" instead of using the single character for "ing"), so transliterating that would be terribly arduous.

I want to spend more time in this blog, too... but every moment I spend doing something for myself is a moment that I could have spent doing something more important. I feel like I'm taking food off my child's plate with every keystroke here. The Theonomy forum has been a major outlet for me recently, but even that freaks me out -- if it weren't for the perceived social obligation I have to that forum (my moderatorship there) I might not have done anything at all for myself during the past several months, (except to play an odd phone game while waiting for my card to register in the apartment complex's community laundry machines, or to lose touch and escape in every odd moment at home). Realizing this, I have decided to make more time for myself on the family schedule. I just.... don't know what that will look like yet. In any case, I've made time to write this blog, so this is the first of my intentional mental-hygiene steps for the immediate future.

"Everyone capitulates"

I finished the first five books in the Barsoom series on Librivox over the past several weeks during my drive to work. It was very entertaining, but now I'm having dreams about complicated Martian political scenarios, and it's off-putting, so I don't think I'll be listening to any more of Mr. Burroughs' work for a while (they only had the first five books completed anyway). I was going to hear the Moon Maid next, but I think I need a break. On the way to work this morning I picked up where I left off in the Bondage of the Will and found it to be engaging and relaxing.

I just listened to this video a few days ago...

One of the early questions prompts Dr. Penrose to describe Godel's theorem in a way which I thought was validating. It was that the understanding (or belief) that the formulas or rules of reason do produce true results, is itself unprovable by means of those rules. That's a pretty fine summary of what I wrote in my argument for God long ago, and it's an important point, relevant to my whole epistemic system.

Obviously that's just a tiny segment of the video; hardly worth mentioning below an embed of the whole thing.

Speaking of epistemic systems, however, I think I'm becoming more inclined toward the conclusion that the demarcation problem, "what is or isn't science", is wholely a semantic issue, and worthless to pursue. If I continue to lean this way, I shall soon adopt the following definition and philosophy of science: science is a method, not a set of information. There's no such thing as a scientific hypothesis except those for which scientific tests are constructed; there's no such thing as a scientific test except those which are direct, repeatable, and contemporary applications of the scientific method; there's no such thing as a scientific theory except those which should better, for uniformity and clarity's sake, be called scientific hypotheses. Calling evolution, "scientific", is like calling the Covid shot a "vaccine"; it co-opts the good reputation of vaccines, which was gained by actual vaccines creating immunity to, and eradicating diseases, while not actually creating immunity to any disease, and actually requiring us to change the whole definition of vaccine to accommodate it. 

And then, what is the value of a thing being called "scientific"? Only that someone has written down a means to repeatably test and confirm the information, which is to say that it can be confirmed empirically by a known procedure. Since I maintain that empirical observation is only one of many methods for arriving at true information (or of gaining epistemic confidence about a thing), my limiting science this way has no bearing on the hereby "unscientific" body of otherwise reasonably true data which most people do call "science". So, the question is, why do I stubbornly resist adopting a more common or popular definition for "science", for the sake of convention? It's because I hate the practice of fighting over what is and isn't science, and I think that the popular definition of science is so vague that it makes the demarcation problem impossible to grasp at. By adopting an unpopular, less generally useful, but nonetheless more clear and conversationally practical, definition for "science", I hope to force conversations into a place where the discussion about what "is" and "isn't" science becomes plainly a problem of semantics-only, so that hopefully we can agree to stop wasting time arguing about what is "science" (as if there were some magic truth-making power in the designation), and instead argue only about what is "true". I suspect that by doing this, I will cause some to simply dismiss me as one who knows nothing about what science really "is" or "should be", and I suppose that I don't want to talk with those people about science anyway, because they treat science like it's an entity on its own, a boogey man of sorts, whose name has power to delineate ideas with and without epistemic certainty, and I don't have any reason to agree with them about that. There are definitely scientific theories with more epistemic certainty than other scientific theories, and they vary so much that some of them are said to "have been legitimately scientific until they were disproved", meaning that science is allowed to asymptotically approach zero certainty while retaining its name.

In other news, this has actually been an outrageously crazy two weeks. Whereas two weeks ago we said we didn't want to move at all, this week we've visited at least seven apartments on different days, all on short notice. We've now picked out the place with the most unresponsive and difficult landlord, but we're committed enough to push them like fools in text messages and drive the place into our hands. All the while, I've had a bout with food poisoning, and both Chowon and I have had some pretty severe cold symptoms. I honestly thought mine were just related to the food poisoning and seasonal allergies, (and so I kept going to work), until Chowon seemed to catch it, too. I've joked with a few of my friends that I'm going to work sick, but I didn't know that I am actually sick. In any case, I'm feeling much better now, except for my lingering cough (I generally retain lingering coughs for several weeks after any sickness).

I've been all-business with my son lately, and I think it's bad for him. I'm under a lot of stress, though, and it really feels like I don't have the capacity to be fun like I should be. I want to wrestle and fight with him -- to toughen him up and build his confidence. (He's always telling me, "Dad, I want to wrestle and fight with you".) But I just haven't been doing it. Aaaaagh, I'm terrible. I really hate it. I'll pray, "God give me energy please.", but then I worry I'll just use the energy to pack my house, because that's what I have to do next! Can I make time for Isaac? God please help me do it.

God, give me energy please!

It's raining outside. I started typing this at about 10pm, and now it's about 11pm. I've been typing in the dark, with the porch light on, so I could see the raindrops hit the window while I type. Isaac and Chowon are asleep upstairs. The world is such a wonderful place.

Every time I post one of these videos, I see all my uploads listed, and I'm terribly embarrassed by all of them -- I hate the pictures I chose for the songs I mashed up. I hate all my speaking videos. Oooooh I hate it all so much. I keep it all up, though, because I feel like I wouldn't be true to myself if I deleted the old things that embarrass me, even if they're heretical and wrong; they're reflections of the ignoramus who I really was when I posted them. God is so good to me. I'm still an ignoramus, but God sustains me and gives me new life every day. God is good, and I'm happy to be on God's good earth.

"In America, you don't usually take responsibility by saying 'I'm sorry', right?"

 OK, I'm officially putting a ban on mask-complaining in my blog. Not gonna complain about it anymore (unless the rules at my work change in some new and more crazy way). I've purchased a breathable mask and I'm figuring out ways to fold it so that it gives me some fresh air and doesn't mess up the shape of my beard, while still hanging in front of my face-holes, so I think nobody will complain. (I might just cut the bottom half of the mask off later...). More, I'm not really concerned about giving a bad message to operators about how I feel on the matter, because I've got a big red badge hanging from my person all the time, which says that my company requires me to wear the mask. Nobody is gonna be confused about my position. I found out that some other people in my workplace, worse off than me, are not even allowed to remove their masks while sitting at their desk, because they're in a cube-farm; I'll still, for both our sakes, be working on a way to help them out, and I might update if any big breakthroughs occur on the stupid-policy front. 

Also, I recently read someone else's blog who complains in an even more melodramatic way than me. It was no comfort to me, but rather made me entirely more self-conscious about the kind of complaining I do here. I enjoy being a little melodramatic sometimes, because I enjoy a mild bit of prose, and prose is sometimes at its best when dramatic and hyperbolic. 

Speaking of prose, I've been letting myself wax a little more poetic in conversation with my wife recently, and she seems to really enjoy it. I suppose if I did it all the time, she wouldn't like it, but recently she's seemed to like it, and I am actually really glad that someone enjoys my prose.

...

TBH I don't have anything particular on my mind that I want to blog about this time.... I guess I'm just here to ramble because I'm stressed today.

Recently, someone I like has told me that my philosophy of science is "patchy, incomplete, and stultifying". I didn't engage in a thorough discussion to get them to explain the point to me, because, while I do want an explanation, my brain is tired these days, and I don't want the extended debate. So, in the short term, what I'm going to do is try to elucidate my philosophy of science for myself.

As usual for any given criticism, I guess, there are two possible ways for me to interpret the criticism:(a) they understand my philosophy of science, and so make a  warranted criticism; (b) they don't understand my philosophy of science, and so make an unwarranted criticism.

I'm not convinced of (a), because I don't think I've really explained my philosophy of science fully to them, and I also think that our usages of the word, "science" are so different that we quite talk past one another when attempting to compare systems.

However, I also agree with the criticism. I said that I want to try to elucidate my philosophy of science, because I do believe that my philosophy of science is incomplete and requires development. If I were to simply assert my understanding of empirical epistemics as I currently hold it, I would stultify myself.

But there's one major hurdle involved with the term "philosophy of science", which I so dislike that I'm tempted to abandon usage of the word "science" altogether, and demand that it is not used in future discussion with me about empirical epistemic warrants. That is, I seem often to hear people make a big deal about the notion that a particular view is or isn't science, when the designation actually would not change anything about the so-far-stated epistemic grounds for the view. It's as if calling an idea "science" gives it extra epistemic warrant, regardless of what actually prompted the idea, and calling something "not science" or "pseudoscience" is a great insult to the thing. This would make sense if all scientific ideas shared equal epistemic warrant, but they don't, and in fact, as far as I can tell, there exist within the set of things undisputedly called "science" several areas where pools of nominally scientific ideas exist with the expectation that all but one of them will eventually fail. So, the designation, "scientific", really only seems to denote that an idea has sufficient empirical weight to be worthy of critical attention -- this bar seems to me much lower than the way most people treat the word, "science", and I'm not sure that this bar is even high enough to make the term "science" useful in a debate about any given idea. If the idea were not scientific on these terms, then it seems the debate is a waste of time for the negative.

I know that the issue is more complicated than what I've presented above. I've recently read a few articles, and listened to a few lectures, from (afaict) reputable secular resources on what makes a theory "scientific". I'll here proceed to comment on the presentation by Forbes, because it seems concise enough. Here's my summary (including paraphrases and additional notes, per my understanding) of the list:

Forbes says a scientific idea is/has...

• Plausible (Consistent with other things we know to be true)
• Unique (Why is this on the list? If it's the same as another idea, then it is the other idea, and the other idea and this one should be evaluated together on all of the other terms.)
• Power (The idea not only describes something which can coexist in a consistent manner with what we know to be true, but it causes or explains some of the things which we observe.)
• Simplicity (The idea isn't too Rube-Goldberg to be more plausible than other simpler ideas. I don't think this is a realistic epistemic criteria, except inasmuch as several simultaneous unrelated specific causes are generally less likely than a single specific cause happening without the others, or than several related simultaneous specific causes. What I'm saying is that I think this is subjective and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis; I don't think it's worth its own bullet point, unless we want to change the bullet to "probable" instead of "simple", but then I think that plausibility occurs on a gradient which includes assessments of probability, making "simplicity/probability" a redundant criterion at best.)
• Testability (or falsifiability, by means of a test which can potentially be executed with existing technologies. This one I agree with, on a somewhat qualified understanding of the clause, "can be potentially executed with existing technologies")

A scientific idea graduates to being a "framework", when its consequences have been worked out to the extent that several conceivable tests can be conducted to falsify it. A scientific framework graduates to being a "theory" when several such tests have been performed and it has withstood them unfalsified.

I think my ideas about testability and falsifiability might make the average science enjoyers uncomfortable -- less so, perhaps, if they took the time to understand the aim of my Feb 16, 2022 post, but even after that -- they might argue that I've broadened the scope of falsifiability outside the boundaries of practical usefulness, but I don't agree, because I think that the qualifier "executed with existing technologies" ignores several valid avenues for falsification, e.g. a rational proof. (To boot, I don't think that the criteria of falsifiability, without my qualifiers, is applied consistently to the established scientific theories.) And I don't think that rationalizations should be given lower epistemic warrant simply by virtue of their being abstracted from empirical observation, so if we limit "science" to empirical matters, then I don't believe that the designator, ("science"), has any bearing at all on the actual epistemic warrant associated with an idea, except where ideas which involve zero rationalization are concerned (of which there are none). So, when I read someone calling an idea (X) "non-scientific" because its potential for immediate empirical falsification is lower than the popular scientific threshold, with intent to devalue the epistemic warrant for X, I can't help but think they're ignoring the bulk of available faculties by which epistemic warrant can be garnered, and they're simultaneously invalidating all of science, because science ultimately has its roots in rational calculations which are needed to justify the potential for empirical assessments before empirical observation can even be conducted.

But the issue which appears to come up most often with respect to my philosophy of science is not that it lacks conformity with the requirement for falsification, power, plausibility, &c.. It's more like I reject the epistemic weights assigned to certain kinds of (so called) empirical tests. In particular, what keeps coming up is my disagreement with the notion that we can view a piece of evidence, devise an explanation for what processes caused that evidence to become its current condition, and then treat the evidence itself as the result of a past unobserved experiment consisting of the processes thus explained (i.e. my take on much of the OE and evolutionary evidence). 

Now, I allow for inferences concerning unobserved or unobservable objects/processes where tests can be performed to (indirectly) demonstrate the existence of said objects/processes. However, given two explanations for how a piece of evidence can acquire some property, (e.g. a rock charring black by smoke or heat from two possible sources), all other things being basically the same, I don't think that we can say that the evidence suggests one or the other of them. And, given only one available explanation (X) for a given phenomena, we still cannot say that the evidence is making a positive assertion for X, but only that the evidence positively asserts the phenomena itself, or else, supposing another source of information (P) asserts, "it wasn't X", or generally contradicts X by its own properties; if the information from P has sufficiently greater epistemic warrant than the explanation X, then I believe it is ok to say, "I don't know what the explanation is, but I am confident that it wasn't X".

So, briefly applying this to the discussion which I believe prompted this criticism.... The other said that the fossil record (in particular the arrangement of complexities in the geological layers) entails or asserts evolution. I am no expert, but I am willing to grant that a progression can be seen in the complexity of organisms in the layers of earth, or even that said progression involves particular qualities being gained and lost in an orderly fashion from bottom to top. I do not believe that the evidence makes any assertions about the reason for this progression, its cause or origins, but only that the fossils are thus and thus. I am not aware of any observable or repeatable tests actually performed to demonstrate the evolutionary hypothesis concerning the fossils as they are, (evolution from kind to kind, I mean), and I'm under the impression that such a demonstration would take longer than my lifetime. The other party said that the evidence can be seen as a series of unobserved past tests confirming the hypothesis -- without meaning to be uncharitable (I don't mean to attack my interlocutor, since I admitted at the beginning of this post that we haven't worked out an understanding of one another's ideas at length), I am not sure how this isn't question-begging. 

I simply don't see the epistemic warrant for the evolutionary hypothesis; maybe one could say it's because I'm uninformed about the evidence, but I literally have the evidence shoved in my face from all angles all the time -- assertions concerning the age of the earth and the evidence for those assertions are on TV, at the zoo, at the aquarium, in every movie, in books, on YouTube, in my discussions with people online, in debates that I watch on the topic, in articles in science magazines or journals, in lectures (I do actively search out lectures on the topic to help myself better understand the opposing position), I get it from Christians and atheists alike, and I haven't seen anything warranting the degree of confidence espoused by the advocates of this position. It seems like everyone just assumes the idea and builds on it, saying that every stone placed on that foundation is additional support for the foundation itself. I feel like there has been a lot of opportunity to show me the evidence, and I'm genuinely seeking it out, but it's just not there. I'd suggest me getting a PhD on the topic so that I could become informed and gain the epistemic certainty that those around me have, but those who so strongly espouse evolution are not PhDs themselves -- where did they get all this certainty?

What I do have available to me, however, is a source with such high epistemic warrant that it easily overrules all of the above hypotheses or explanations of the evidence resulting in evolution with common origin -- a P who asserts, "it wasn't X" -- and that is the Bible. I recognize that there are several allegorical options for interpretation of the Genesis, but it seems to me that these require very unnatural readings of the text, and their weirdness evidences their dependence on motivated reasoning. I really don't see a way around it. People say, "chiasm evidences allegory", but there's chiasm in the whole Bible -- the Mosaic sacrifices to the Messianic sacrifice -- and nobody serious argues for an allegorical Moses and an allegorical Jesus. People say, "if you accept YEC then you must also accept a literal dome over the earth", but the Bible elsewhere rather plainly contradicts a literal dome over the earth (by describing the firmament/heavens in terms which don't permit firmness), whereas it doesn't do that to a historical Adam, so, just based on usage and references from other places in scripture, if we allow that the whole of scripture has a single-author with unanimous intent, there's a clear categorical difference in the way that the single word "firmament" should be interpreted over against the entire first 9 chapters of Genesis.

"But I live out in the Styx so I have to worry about coyotes."