PART VI: GOD AND THE LOGOS
6.1 God is the ground of Truth
The truth is the path toward the Truth. This is verascendance restated in the register vocabulary, and the connection to the objective already named in the treatise should be explicit.
6.2 The Logos is not required by the tools
The system functions without theism. Its correct use reliably points toward it. The tools must remain entirely usable by an atheist or other non-believer.
The precise position: the tools function without the Logos; the explanation of why they function does not. An atheist can run the Triveritas successfully and cannot account for why reality is the sort of thing it works on.
6.3 Epistemology is a subset of theology
Not two views of one doctrine. A containment relation, with 6.1 supplying its content.
6.4 God is outside time
Time is a dimension. He sees it all at once. The completed-archive analogy rather than the live-server analogy: the run is recorded, any moment can be inspected, and the completeness of the record does not reach back and remove the players’ agency at the time of play.
Guard the authorship variant. Designer of the world and its rules, not author of the players’ lines.
6.5 Voliscience is the system’s sharpest departure
God knows what He chooses to know. He is not limited; He can look ahead or not, as He pleases.
Distinguished from open theism first, before the term is defined. Open theism holds that God cannot know future free acts. This holds that He can look and sometimes declines. Self-limitation, not limitation. The kenosis structure is the precedent.
It presupposes the complete timeline. Choosing to look ahead requires an ahead to look at. Voliscience commits to 1.5 more firmly than a view on which God knows everything by nature.
Scriptural material runs this way: “now I know that you fear God,” the repeated language of the LORD repenting, Nineveh, “nor did it enter my mind.” Prophecy is direct evidence of the other half.
Guard against voluntarism. God’s will determines what He attends to, not what is true or good. This is 1.1 applied upward.
6.6 Omniderigence rejected
No divine puppet master. Direction is discretionary and local. Two independences must be kept distinct, because critics conflate them: seeing is not determining (knowledge), and being able to direct is not directing (will).
6.7 Two costs collected
Divine simplicity. A knowledge state that varies by choice is not identical with an unchanging essence. Voliscience is incompatible with simplicity as Aquinas holds it. The departure is stated directly rather than implied. Simplicity is a philosophical construction, not a scriptural datum, and the scriptural evidence runs against it.
Empirical opacity. Whether a given event was directed is undetectable from inside the timeline. The category can be established; membership in it cannot. Stated plainly, in keeping with the project’s practice of naming limitations first.
6.8 The symmetry
Revelation is God willing that something be known to us. Voliscience is God willing that something be known to Him. Under aletheian realism, where disclosure is the fundamental relation, these are two directions of one act rather than two doctrines that rhyme. Voliscience is therefore a consequence of the metaphysics rather than an addition to it.
A word of warning to the commentators: do not cite your various theological dogmas as any sort of evidence or critique because a) I am already aware of them and b) they are not relevant here. In this singular context of assembling a new construct, I am a greater authority than any other individual you cite; if you have understood the outline then you will know that I am directly and specifically challenging elements of the metaphysics articulated by Thomas Aquinas and others.
Aristotle would appreciate the attempt.
Considering how hard he worked to build his ideas and demonstrate them, people treat them as the only answer. He would know most people are unable to do dialectic.
Rounding the circle of Gods power, free will, and primary/secondary cause is noble. It is a huge undertaking.
Humans are a small container trying to contain parts of the infinite. Insisting one can hold the whole infinite in mind or it is not true is a real Enlightenment trip.
This is a solid set of conditions and here are some thoughts. My perspective is reasoned inductively in my Ontological Hierarchy and recognizes the necessity of a trans-temporal Ultimate Reality bound to the Apprehensible by a constinctive Logos. This isn’t the place to recap; the point is 6.1, 6.2, and 6.4 are not just defensible, they’re necessary given the nature of reality as we can know it. Regarding 6.4, the sequential nature of time accommodates the essential differences between its material, lives experience and its abstract mathematical properties and the grounding non-sequential nature of God. Our own temporal existence is a constraint on us, not on ontology in its fullness - Kant had it backwards when he posited the created determining the creator.
I deliberately avoided the explicitly theological other than to acknowledge the necessity of semiotic filtration in communication - representation - and that Truth is the measure of representational fidelity and not the inverse. Faith being a distinct but related epistemological mode from logic or observation. However, Christianity as articulated in the Bible is the only coherent faith that conforms to the logical necessities of reality as we can apprehend it. 6.3 follows if theology is taken literally as understanding of God qua God and not one groups dogmatic assumptions. As a subset, if logic or observation are valid then non-contradiction across the parametric hierarchy follows.
6.5 is consistent with what we can apprehend and infer of God, although I’m less certain that we can establish binding constraints from our epistemological vantage point. I’m also not sure that matters, since our temporalized, fallen, representationally filtered perspective isn’t transcendable. I can’t conceptualize what unsequenced reality would “be”, but I can apprehend conditions on God’s operations within the limits of His Creation.
6.6 seeing isn’t determining is absolutely correct. The existence of evil and the Fall both require free will in some capacity. Dolts who hold this to absurd absolutes misrepresent the nature of constrained or parameterized choice.
6.7 Divine simplicity as a question is a reflection of our limits of our apprehension and representationally filtered nature. God as we can know Him does not appear simple. What He is as an uncreated ur-ground is beyond definition since “definition” as a concept is ontologically downstream from its necessary precondition. Empirical opacity is consistent with this downstream position.
6.8 is elegantly chiastic but as stated defines God in our terms. The relationship seems reciprocal but asymmetric to me. It’s a short point that doesn’t accommodate the fundamental ontological differences that the other points do.
That’s sufficient here. FWIW, building in the theological is a fundamentally important step.