Introduction

There is no real need for me to bore the readers with a lengthy introduction about the minutia of the theory nor about the process involved in reaching my conclusions. The theory is itself easy enough to follow as you work through the points. As regards ‘theory of everything’ postulations, one must remain tentative in making overly bold claims, for the entire edifice of good rationale depends on our knowing what we can know, what we might come to know, and also what we cannot know; and thus, mixed in variable proportions, all sound analysis depends. I do not see myself in competition with other thinkers and writers; I appreciate and greatly admire the good work of those who are equipped to help us laymen piece together parts of the ontological jigsaw. I do not think it is a good idea for a man to put all his eggs in one basket and discard other baskets; for if their basket turns out to be unable to support the weight of the eggs, they will have no other basket in which to put them. 

 

Elitist and insular networks can often hinder those men and women who are part of them; they can end up missing the real errors of thinking that pervade their domain. Hopefully a theory such as the one you are now going to read can be shot into any network and come out the other end unscathed. Of course, there will always be individual predicates that can be challenged (such as the deep nature of time and space), but no theory is above predicate challenges. What it must do if it is to be successful is to send back predicate challenges with a governing explanation as to why individual predicate challenges do not affect the theory as a whole - only then will you have your theory of everything. In this sense it is a bit like a tyre that mends its own punctures, the puncture must occur before the tyre can do its own mending, otherwise the theory would have to be millions of pages long. 

 

As to the question of what kind of impact this theory will have on the world, I have no idea. But any theory of this kind must be able to withstand any objections thrown at it; therefore as I sit here ready to send it out, I am confident that it will withstand any objections you wish to throw at it. Whatever else happens hereinafter, this is the best I have come up with thus far, and probably ever, for if this breaks down I see nowhere else to go. If however an objection is put forward that offers a valid objection to my own position, I will be the first to put forward a hand of acknowledgement and celebration - for whatever else science and philosophy demands of us, it certainly demands that of us, at the very least.

 

The general meaning of words within the theory is largely self-explanatory, but there are, however, three word usages that I ought to bring to your attention.

 

Aseity: Existence originating from and having no other source other than itself.

Naturalism: Here I mean the philosophical position that discounts supernatural explanations of the interlocking system of nature and attributing it to natural properties and causes.

 

God: In the initial stages of such a theory, the term Supreme Being would be more appropriate. However, taking the theory as a whole, the points lead me to a position where I can confidently assert that ‘God’^a is an appropriate attribution.

 

^a By God I mean something infinitely intelligent with the properties of omnipotence and omniscience.

 

 

1) ASEITY: There must exist a Being with the necessary capabilities to exist without the need for an antecedent explanation; a Being which is a self-sustaining independent entity needing no interdependence in order to exist and, thus, no cause outside of Himself - the Aseity of God. Denial of this leaves us with the otherwise insurmountable problem of an infinite regress of questioning - ‘why is that so?’. Under these premises, anything that is not God is an entity existent in one of two other realms, either a realm in which ultimate laws exist as an outside concept (probably a Divinely inspired Supreme Conceptualism) or else it is a realm which has its nature as a simulacrum of the self-sustaining divinity, not Him but not wholly detached from Him either. 

 

Annotation: There is an ontological difficulty with Supreme Conceptualism in that it is almost certainly not a real reification, in the sense that the simulacrum (S) is real (and to us, non-abstract) - certainly its intelligibility differs from simulacrum intelligibility. Therefore its essence is probably a set of Divinely filtrated affairs, best explained to us in our reified world as ideas (governing laws) from the Divine mind. The relationship between SC and S is comparable to the relationship between, say, mathematical laws and mathematical figures (numbers, symbols, etc), but SC~S is aggregational; that is, an aggregation of many singular laws and figures.

 

Annotation: Part of the necessity for this grand theory is based on the fact that naturalism is bound by its own limitations, not just because every explanation requires a meta-explanation, but because one can never get beyond the interlocking system unless we find something in the system which is related to the primary cause. This is the chain of validity that I call the Absoluteness of Reason (see number 3) - reason itself is the chain which links us to the Aseity of God. Whatever we find out about things within the interlocking system we will always be faced with a residual mystery, not least the enigma of reason itself. Every part of the cosmos needs to be fed and maintained by the thing that caused it to come into existence¹ - nothing inside is independent or self-sufficient - although of course to other things in the simulacrum such as ourselves, things within the interlocking system can give the illusion of independence. Aseity is the only satisfactory explanation as to why reason exists and, for that matter, Aseity is the only explanation for anything else existing whose non-existence leaves no contradiction.

 

¹ Although the methods used to feed and sustain the interlocking system would be very different to human conceptions of sustenance.

2) THE DIVINE SIMULACRUM: Our whole existence is, despite its appearance, a simulacrum of the Divine realm. Aseity solves the apparent problems that are left when descriptive roles in science leave us with as many further questions as satisfactory descriptions. There is nothing in the simulacrum that is self-evident, thus nothing in the simulacrum that can be extricable from the ‘cause’. 

 

Annotation: Under these premises, to take the position that atheists takes involves being ‘caught up’ in the simulacrum to the extent that its essence becomes opaque. In this sense, the absent-mindedness in postulating ‘no God’ is a little like a character in a novel denying or failing to see or acknowledge the author of that novel. The simulacrum, which is largely made up of matter and has interrelational activity with laws (the Supreme Conceptualism) and outside spiritual activity filtrated in through the Divine hand, consists of Divinely encoded properties that make up the vastly complex universal activity that we observe in nature.

 

3) THE ABSOLUTENESS OF REASON.

This is the truth on which the whole theory rests. Unless Reason is seen as an Absolute, all thoughts about ultimate existence are self-discrediting. If Reason came about from purposeless forces in a naturalistic universe then we cannot know anything. If Reason is to mean anything, it must be seen as an original thing, imparted into the simulacrum from God. We have no laws in the universe unless they are operated through a medium complex enough on which, and because of which, they can function. The same must be true of Reason - it must have a primacy, a self-existent primacy from which Reason itself is filtrated into the simulacrum. The Absoluteness of Reason is our biggest reflection of the Aseity of God. The whole universal system could cease to exist and there would be no contradiction (therefore the universe should not exist at all) - the same cannot be said of the Aseity of God or of Reason itself. Reason is the central factor in the interrelation between Creator and creature; that is, if Reason is not underwritten by the primary truth of existence, then we cannot know anything. It is true that the Aseity of God requires that His existence is necessary, but that fact depends on underwritten logic and certainty that our perception of necessity is correct. That is why I think the Absoluteness of Reason is a leap and our perception of necessity only a step (the former provides more certainty than the latter). That is to say one can always claim Anselm’s contention to be one link in the chain, whereas one must always claim that Reason itself ‘is’ the chain - a necessary attachment between Creator and creature. If Reason is valid then it must come from a source of equal validity, a self-evident source of Aseity, which could never be described as ‘non-reason’. To make a claim to the contrary is to invalidate Reason, including the claims of the self². The truest statement one can make about existence is to say that we exist because God exists. The Absoluteness of Reason is, on its own, strong enough to provide an insurmountable problem for naturalism. See here for a more detailed explanation. 

 

² Because rationality is something attributable to the self.

 

Annotation: To deny the Absoluteness of Reason is to leave yourself in a self-referential hamster’s wheel of analysis - for all claims to the truth (however small or large) contain within them an attempt to attach themselves to a foundational truth. Any objection to the Absoluteness of Reason leaves the objector with no place to go. To deny the Absoluteness of Reason is to make claims that its origin lies in a past configurational entropy. Whatever form this entropy took and whatever its properties, it was at some stage ‘non-reason’ according to the objectors. This claim by itself ultimately invalidates every form of human reasoning including the claims of the objector himself, as Reason ceases to have any necessary attachment to truth at all. Having seen this, if ontological investigation is to mean anything, Reason must be seen as an Absolute; this being the case, Reason cannot be Absolute unless it is part of an Absolute Source - an echo that belongs to the melody found in Aseity.

Yes, for me this is the beginning of wisdom as regards any supposed ‘theory of everything’ - firstly, The Aseity of God, secondly, The Simulacrum of the Divine Realm in which we reside (our universe - or ‘sub-universe’ if there are many others) which is the recipient of what is a vastly complex filtration system from Creator to creation; that is, the impartation of Divine Reason to human minds, and thirdly, The Absoluteness of Reason*. 

 

* As the whole theory is ultimately contingent upon Reason being an Absolute, I have included a comprehensive appendix on this subject towards the end.

 

Annotation: One idea I like which I didn’t invent is the idea of a scale-free network; that there are many secondary ideas represented by small nodes in the network, but the small nodes depend upon the existence of a few large nodes (in this case the large nodes would be the aforementioned ‘three contingent principles’). 

4) FIRST PRINCIPLES: Our universe is amenable to explanatory structures, and its essence defined in totality as a simulacrum of the Divine realm, as we have seen; therefore if the Absoluteness of Reason underpins the dialectical relationship between mind and universe, our theory of everything (or ultimate explanation of existence) is a theory principally about the nature of the mind, not the universe (that, by the way, is where I think physicists have been going wrong in their search for a ‘theory of everything’ - there probably will never be an ‘everything’ explanation regarding the laws themselves - as there will always be a meta-question of ‘why is that so?’). But if Reason is an Absolute then it will outlive nature, in which case - the ultimate explanation of existence is bound up in our own minds, and the whole cumulative mass of human perceptions could be aptly characterised as channels in the simulacrum (properties of the cosmic consciousness). Reason was never something that should have been thought of in terms of ‘a property of the universe or universal system’ - rather Reason is the primary entity, the primacy around which universal properties are constituencies.

 

Annotation: All talk of Theism being irrational because of Occam’s razor is nonsense, because it overlooks the a priori infinite complexity of a self-evident Being. Attempts to swerve round a theistic position involve taking a less-rational position, such as the attempt to deny the ‘first cause’ problem and also the attempt to postulate an infinity of ‘something’.

5) ULTIMATE POSITIVE CIRCULARITY: Tautological arguments usually show the apparent negative circularity attached to a proposition (as do many positive circularities as they can almost always bring in something from the outside) - but any sound theory of everything should be circumferential - by an Ultimate Positive Circularity³; that is, the force of its validity should provide a circular re-affirmation at every step - one part should continue to validate the other parts on rotation; thus we should observe the formula: if A then B if B then C if C then A if A then B and so on - and ABC must represent axioms which relate to universal principles both of the simulacrum and of reason (we find that this is the case).

 

³ That is, a self-evident, all-encapsulating truth that constantly reaffirms itself through a filtrated ‘recognising’ principle of self-sustaining Absoluteness. 

6) MULTIVERSE POSSIBILITY: Even if our universe is one of many, they probably will not be wholly isolated, although their space-time manifolds almost certainly cannot overlap and will thus remain imperceptible to us. Each universe would be seen as a constituent part of a mathematical whole with no apparent informational overlap (save for the interconnections run by the Divine hand). 

 

Annotation: The fact that our universe seems ‘just right’ for life has very often been a strong foundation upon which theists base their claims. But an alternative proposition has been proffered by some scientists - the multiverse theory. This theory says that our universe is but one small bubble in a very large piece of foam and that each universe comes with its own set of properties and laws - one of which (ours in this case) was bound to have the right properties for stars, planets, and eventually, habitable life. There seems to me to be no difficulty with this contention (although some eminent physicists find the proposition difficult), but the multiverse theory itself still leaves unexplained how the total system began, what was behind each universe’s acquisition of such properties and laws, and, further back, why anything like this large foam substance exists at all⁴. The federal laws or meta-laws behind the laws themselves would still require an explanation; and it is highly probable that such an explanation will remain beyond human capacity. 

 

⁴ I am, of course, denying the assumption that given an infinite amount of space and time, anything that is possible will happen, as it corresponds to nothing scientifically valid and, as we have seen earlier, still presents us with the ‘why is that so?’ question.

 

7) THE FALSIFICATION PRINCIPLE: Because nature is a simulacrum of the Divine realm, and because of our enforced admission regarding our own limitations, the falsification principle, in the Popperian sense, should have been redressed long ago; that is, the boundaries must be reconstituted to make way for infinite complexity within the simulacrum. Therefore if we are to understand our present (finite) limitations, we must also concede that within this theory there will be some things that are axiomatically true yet non-falsifiable⁵, and that the efficacy of a contention is not predicated on its falsifiability. What Popper meant by falsifiability should not be misunderstood as an accusation levelled at reason itself, merely to construct parameters and reconstitute boundaries within the edifice of reasoning and rationale. Furthermore it is difficult, often impossible, to apply falsifiability to psychological, historical, sociological, and emotional aspects of life, as they are rarely amenable to falsifiability and are individual and unique events or facts. Our perceptive qualities and, more importantly, our ability to assess the validity of a theory based upon its appearance in front of our perceptive tools is what we can use.

 

⁵ Non-contextually - in the Absolute sense.

 

Annotation: The Popperian demarcation of ‘probability’ and ‘degree of corroboration’ is reasonable providing the deductive weight is not too heavy for its logical necessity to be denied. Verifiability and falsifiability are rendered less important (a potential breakdown in Logical Positivism) if and only if the explanatory weight of an assertion is heavy enough to hold down any nonsensical antithesis. The statement ‘It is going to rain somewhere in the world in the next hundred years’ has a much less burden of verifiability than the statement ‘It is going to rain on Buckingham Palace at 1:23pm on Thursday 23 April 2010’. In the sense of our assumptions about the Divine simulacrum, logical improbability, of course, does not take its place in the predicative inner-context of the sentence alone (as is the case with the second prediction about the rain on Buckingham Palace), for it will have to be admitted that any thoughts of falsification and non-verification add no weight to an argument which envelops principles higher than those in the purview of ‘logical probability’ and ‘logical improbability’. The falsification principle also falls down with the realisation that no individual theory is anything other than a constituent part of the proposed ‘chain of validity’ (see annotation 1) and thus can even be positively affirmed in a partially-isolated context yet at the same time amount to a discordant cell on one link of the ‘chain of validity’. In other words falsifying it (singularly) might not upset the link in the chain. This a slight reworking of the ‘verisimilitude’ of a theory -that is, its appearance of truth; this is the extent to which a theory corresponds to the totality of reality, rather than just those in the immediate propinquity (I would say that any providential being with a priori complexity would need to furnish us with the perceptive qualities necessary for such an understanding, if we are to have a relationship with Him).  It is doubtful whether the use of the notion of a theory’s ‘propinquity’ in relation to each link in the chain involves a commitment to inductive inferences, although a general law must be inferred from the chain as a whole⁶. 

 

⁶ This is the same as a mathematical demonstration of the validity of a law concerning all the positive integers, by proving that if it holds for all integers preceding a given integer, it must hold for the given integer. The law of reason is the same in the sense that the chain itself must display a validity of law even if there are complex factors involved in the filtration system which are themselves in a vastly complex nexus of variable value and proportion (as in human errors, cognitive vacancies and incompetencies). 

 

8) LIMITS TO THE UNIVERSAL LAW: All purported explanations within the interlocking framework of nature will simply rebound synonymous explanations that are bound by limitations. Knowledge of what is outside the contingency frame can only begin when there is an established realisation that the Absoluteness of Reason must be a filtration of the self-sustaining first cause. Any purported theory of everything or ultimate explanation will always leave residual imprecision and equivocation without this established realisation - an unanswered meta-question will forever prolong the ambiguity. 

 

9) THE NEO-COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: Physicists tell us that our universe is computational in nature; that is, amenable to calculations. Just as the interlocking system cannot be computationally reduced to a nonentity, nor can we deny the need for an explanation. Any explanation that leaves no room for further examination must involve a self-sustaining first cause, something for which any suggestion of an antecedent origin would involve a contradiction. The cosmological argument had, in fact, been correct all along. It has met with one principal objection, which I will cover below.

 

Objection - Who designed the designer? This sort of talk is philosophically incoherent. By deigned we really mean causation, a regularity between two separate things (in this case, God and something that preceded Him). The difficulty is, of course, in an a priori subjective category, casual agency cannot be applied to a Being outside of the interlocking system of cause and effect⁷. Of course the fiercest critics say this explanation is not good enough, but so it must be. We cannot alter an intractable position to a different type of thinking simply because the proposition demands of us an intractable proposition, for we are left with nowhere to go. In our system of cognition, objects in this limited type of thinking are always conjoined with similar objects. All thoughts of causes always convey in our cognition by a customary transition some form of effect, therefore it is not surprising that our insistence upon a cause for every effect leaves us with the question ‘who made the designer?’. But it is not a valid objection; that is, its difficulty is not strong enough to sustain durable objection, only by those who wish to have an easy cop-out. 

 

⁷ Normal cause and effect precepts cannot, of course, be applied to something outside of those precepts.

 

Annotation: It should noted that the cosmological argument and the teleological argument (the argument from design which has been rendered superfluous by, among others, Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker) are both held with the presupposition that the ontological argument makes the correct assumption about human concepts of the highest reality. The strength of any analysis at all regarding ultimate realities has to logically entail the assumption that our perception of necessity is correct (in one sense it is substantiated by the view that it is necessary to exist in order to postulate the view, therefore one might justifiably say that it is necessary that Reason is trustworthy in order that we can hold any contention as trustworthy).

 

Annotation: It ought to be pointed out that arguments such as Aquinas ‘five proofs’ and even Anselm’s argument are not really proofs in the sense that one might think. They are demonstrative, investigative ideas based on the assumption of God’s existence and that this belief is substantiated by logical sense. These arguments are not so much a priori proofs of faith, rather a posteriori demonstrations of the harmonious link between faith and its logical entailment. 

 

10) DETACHMENT AND ATTACHMENT: Contained within this theory of everything is a re-evaluation of the interlocking system of creation itself. Our universe is amenable to computational explanations (because of the Absoluteness of Reason) but each pattern of explanation is filtered through from the Sustainer. Because the Sustainer is of a priori complexity, His activity in our universe could be (and probably is) continual yet imperceptible to creatures like us (although Romans 1:20 seems to suggest that it should be obvious). Therefore even simple sub-atomic activity probably involves Divine activity which has all the time seemed to humans (particularly atheists) to be part of nature herself. The mysterious nature of the interlocking system itself forces us to admit that any given thing in the system is essentially unknowable and unperceivable, unless the filtration system from Creator to creature is of a vastly complex nature which itself conflates both natural and supernatural substances, some of which are of a priori complexity. The whole essence of the interlocking system itself is really an essence perceived through the filtration of the Divine mind, in which His creatures are involved.

 

Annotation: The necessity for our involvement; that is, the reason we were created at all must involve a level of personal individual advantage that could only occur from being created (a Divine strategy for distribution and assignment). Free will for example gives us what Pascal called ‘the dignity of causality’ - it elicits a duty and a pleasure which are conferred upon us through the creational process. 

 

11) HUMAN COGNITION: The process of human reasoning is itself part of the interlocking system, therefore any attempt to explain its real essence by using explanatory methods within the system (this is unavoidable) results in a circularity in which the mind is trying to find explanation in something with which it is itself inextricably interrelated, namely information in the simulacrum itself. In other words reason itself can only be defined in terms of its own ‘reasoning’ properties, thus the explanation for reason must be a self-sustaining explanation which finds its origins in the Aseity of God. 

 

12) DIVINE COGNITION: This is manifested in the simulacrum with some sort of a priori cosmological data-intelligence which is perceived by us as the interlocking system. If the interlocking system is a simulacrum of the Divine realm, it can be thought of as a cosmic act of Divine cognition (a vastly large and complex thought occurring in the Divine mind, a bit like that which was postulated by Berkeley). Something that is created by God can only really have its essence as some form of Divine simulacrum (even a seemingly detached creation must have some form of Divine dialectic). Whatever form of the Divine that this simulacrum represents, it represents to us, of course, the universal realty in which we live. 

 

13) SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY: Because of the observation in point 12, this can change our attitudes and perceptions of things that cause so much debate in the world (like evolution/creationism etc) - for we see that the patterns of activity at a quantum level can easily filter down into atomic and cellular activity to seem uncreated, if it is not realised that the simulacrum itself is the whole embodiment of the necessary laws to represent for us a Divine mind perceived in a created reality. Anything that can be perceived as universally random is probably of infinite complexity; thus its ultimate laws are so far beyond human cognition that they will remain random in ‘simulacrum mode’. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle almost certainly has something behind it that is as uniform as gravitational law; it simply remains imperceptible to our limited minds⁸. 

 

⁸ Unlike ‘chaos theory’ we are admitting a governing principle from which ultimate truths come.

 

Annotation: There are things within the simulacrum that are infinitely complex reflections of the Divine, in which we are bound up by the limitations of our own perceptions. This means that even an evolutionary process that appears to us to be completely random and unguided (as it often does) is really an a posteriori fact about the inductive principles applied by humans to this a priori infinite complexity that makes up much of the simulacrum. Moreover it should be pointed out that the vast majority of atheism in this world is not a result of anything scientific, their grounds normally lie elsewhere - the assumptions are brought into an atheistic edifice.

 

14) ONTOLOGY: In the vast nexus of data-intelligence that makes up our universe, there are echoes of Aseity - echoes which, without the existence of Aseity would be internally contradictory. In other words, the ontological argument has some truth in it; such a Divine entity cannot exist in the realm of understanding if the entity itself were non-existent. My postulation must, if true, refute the false accusations which make claims for the mind greater than its capabilities, paradoxically by overestimating its capabilities. 

 

Annotation: Kant’s analytic/synthetic argument is valid in the sense that if the postulation is analytic, then any assertion that it exists is bound up in the assertion itself⁹. A synthetic justification (which ultimate ontology must be) seemingly cannot escape the fact that the analytic postulation is itself part of a contradiction, and when stated adds no new predicate to the concept at all. A humorous person might say, ‘There is no difference between an imaginary male God and an imaginary female God’. However this retort does not allow for its obvious flaw. Let us alter it a little to ‘There is no difference between an imaginary existent God and an imaginary non-existent God’. Well, there is if the imaginary existent God is not imaginary at all. If I imagine a hundred pound coins and am then given a hundred real pound coins it certainly makes a difference to my finances whether they are real or not. Similarly if God is existent not just in my mind but in reality I should expect to see the difference, that is, His reality is instantiated BECAUSE He is real (see 1 Corinthians 1:18)*. If, by chance, this argument is wrong, we have probably under-exaggerated the human intellect to the extent that it is relatively meaningless - due to its procedural complexity in what would have to be a non-procedural and thus non-rational cosmos. That being the case we must give up on ontology, as our cognition is out of sync with ultimate truth itself. 

 

⁹ This is why naturalism is an unsatisfactory ontological explanation.

* 1 Corinthians 1:18 - For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

 

15) FAITH: Not, as some think, an irrational stab in the dark, rather a position taken from the basis of reason to operate where reason fears to tread. It should be said that the man living under faith though reason is in an entirely different (and more glorious) position than either the man who is blindly holding on to faith and the man who has none. In the sense that the motion put before us is vastly complex and transcendent, faith is, initially, the method by which we understand rather than understanding the method by which we have faith; that is to say, any relationship with God must involve belief before the full understanding process begins. 

 

16) THE MIND / BRAIN PROBLEM: Whether the brain is wholly explicable in terms of physical (atomic) and informational structures does not matter that much, as we have agreed that the properties of the simulacrum contain enough quantum complexity to make all Divine activity unperceivable - apart from, that is, miracles (see 17)

 

Annotation: To explain thinking or reason by thinking and reasoning is to become embroiled in a negative circularity, thus we need the Absoluteness of Reason to turn it into an Ultimate Positive Circularity (stated in 5); that is, the Absoluteness of Reason constantly reaffirms our thinking and our assumption about the origin and validity of our thinking. If reason is part of the Divine mind, it is thus self-sustaining, therefore our own thinking, itself a filtrated part of the self-sustaining whole, can be explained by reasoning itself, and does not fall victim to accusations that the conceptual properties of human reasoning cannot explain human reasoning. 

 

17) MIRACLES: Miracles are strictly outside of the universe’s natural laws; that is, if something is professing from the outset to be miraculous, it involves an occurrence which has its origin in God, beyond the order of the universe and breaking its regularity. Of course claims for the miraculous depend largely on the validity of many of the above points, for we do not argue in favour of them without recourse to the whole picture. 

 

18) THE UNIQUE NATURE OF THE SELF: Humans have intrinsic intentionality which although manifested in terms such as ‘commonality’ among other minds, is in itself wholly extricable from them. The self is as ontologically detached from other creatures as it is from atoms and neurons. Of course those that speak the same language have the linguistic interrelation with which they can communicate ideas, perceptions, thoughts and (to some extent) feelings. But the irreducibility of the self; that is, the nature of the self which is not amenable to any kind of kindred or analogous uniformity of facts is itself more easily in harmony with ideas of unique creation than it is uncreated results of naturalistic evolution. 

 

Annotation: Because of this we cannot, in this sense, offer any proof for God’s existence; God is not amenable to demonstrable creaturely empiricism - He is a vastly complex active personality, therefore evidence for His existence will not be found by those who make terse elementary demands to ‘see some kind of proof’. However, because of the inner-self’s irreducibility and discontinuity regarding external things it should (and does) follow that if those that claim to have experienced God really have experienced Him, then the same revelatory and explanatory process should (and is) available to all those who wish to know Him - this truth is encapsulated in Christ’s claim that those who seek will find, and that those who ask will have the door opened (Matthew 7:7). See here for my ’proof by experience’ link, and here for ‘Can anyone really prove that God exists?

 

19) EPISTEMOLOGY: As regards the cumulative mass of each individual’s knowledge, the question of which are justified and which are unjustified is largely soluble when the informational whole is divided into segments of receipt. In other words, knowledge obtained within the simulacrum, knowledge passed on between groups of people is, through a vastly complex psychological process, compartmentalised, very often under the thumb of experience and emotions. Just as knowledge is sound when it comes from good authority and evidential substantiation, it must also run unscathed through the gamut of emotions ad experiences which is likely to condition our perception of it. Therefore when analysing anything we must be sure that uncontrollable partisans, wishful thinking, prejudices, unhelpful hindrances, comfort zones, and self-imposed limitations are not impairing lucid judgement. 

 

20) INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD: The vast array of human experience and communication suggest that wherever people have been raised in the world, however remotely, there has always been some factor of worshipful inclination in the cognitive system. This has, of course, led to equal assumptions that we were made for somewhere else, somewhere outside of our spatial/temporal cosmos (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). It is also suggested that to deny this a priori reality is to be guilty of departing from the true nature of the self in a spectrum of cognitive absent-mindedness (for example, The fool says there is no God - Psalm 14:1). 

 

21) LOVE: The tie that binds humanity together, summed up thus ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 19:19, Galatians 5:14)’. Many atheist critics have taken objection to the Divine command to love, but this objection is really a misunderstanding of necessity. It is only when love is given under such commands that there can be any hope that it will stretch beyond our immediate interest, to everyone. Furthermore, such a command removes the problem of loving those whose characteristics and traits we do not like and would not ordinarily love. See here and here for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. for a much more detailed account of love. and for a much more detailed account of love.

 

22) THE PERSONALITY OF GOD: Having come this far, we must it seems admit to a self-sustaining Creator who gave us something Absolute in the shape of Reason (through which all other evaluations are related). But having reached this position there is much more that we can learn. Having ruled out the possibility that God is malevolent because a) I see no reason why a malevolent God would create a universe with any goodness in it, and b) if God were malevolent our future would be hopeless and largely irrelevant in cognitive terms¹⁰. I also see agnosticism as an irresponsible position (it almost always leads to apathy and indifference) for no theological doctrine if any of them are true really favours agnosticism¹¹ - besides, to live your life without ever exploring with great scrutiny the ultimate realities of existence seems to me so wasteful and slovenly. 

Because it seems certain that any God that created us must be good, it seems equally certain that our search for Him should be fruitful, and agnosticism is a form of self-denial; that is, denying yourself the glorious knowledge of such a being. Moreover if God has no desire for us to know Him, we reach a stage of theological neuter, in which case we might as well seek out a harmonious balance of human solidarity and solipsistic existentialism. But if God wants to know His creatures it would seem logical that He had made some attempt to show Himself to us. Christianity is the only religion which claims that this has happened. If Christianity is true, you would expect all of the following. You would expect its truth to be affirmed and reaffirmed at every step of analysis, you would expect a comprehensive case that all other belief systems are false, see here and here for my columns on this subject. Moreover, you would expect that the information and analysis covered in my 25 points would on a continual moment-by-moment basis reaffirm the truths and provide supplementary illumination and enlightenment as we seek to understand our own existence.

¹⁰ I refer here specifically to apathetic agnosticism.

¹¹ That is, claimed with even a tincture of demonstrable evidence to support it.

 

Annotation: If Christianity is true, the inner-revelatory experience that is Divinely imparted from Creator to creature must be powerful enough to invoke supplementary cognition. The negative corollary, as we see in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. 1 Corinthians 1:18) is that sound Christian apologetics underwritten by Divinely inspired truth can appear to be flawed to those who are not apprised of its nature/essence/power.

 

23) HOLY BOOKS: If God were to communicate with His creation, He would need to use a specific written medium which was given to us by individual personal impartations. Because of the vast difference between God and His creation, a method of exchange was necessary, analogical methods - methods which Aquinas called the Analogy of Proportionality and the Analogy of Attribution - the first is about the ways in which the qualities of the self are related to its position in the created whole; the second is about how God Himself is related to nature. Thus we can only know what God is like by a transference occurring in our own epistemological domain, such as biblical stories. Whatever levels of impartation occur directly from God to the individual they remain abstract in the sense that they can only be conveyed through other media. This has to be some form of discontinuity between God and His creation, otherwise we would be forced to say that God was (in a virtual sense) like things in creation - hot, cold, prickly, smooth, etc - which of course need not be the case. We must also be careful with analogy of proportionality as we cannot be sure if our perception is adequate in assessing the alleged proportionalities between characteristics in the Divine realm and our own. At one end of the extreme we are left with anthropomorphism¹² at the other hazy conjecture that is probably misjudged. 

 

¹² The ascribing of human characteristics, behaviour, form, etc, to God.

 

Annotation: I strongly dislike William James’ approach to religion - the ’pragmatic approach’ which states that the positive content of religious experience lies in the feelings and experiences that such beliefs elicit. Well no, it doesn’t for those that believe in false gods. A hypothesis in science is only qualitatively prolific if it has merit outside of the immediate explanation. The same is true of theism, in the sense that the theist really should have a claim to know why theism is a justified position. Christians claim that that justification can be found in the person of Christ, who made Himself known as God in human flesh so that all who wish to know God could be given absolute confidence and peace in knowledge through Him. One thing is certain - with something as large and significant as religious faith, a man must take full cognitive responsibility for his beliefs; that is, he must be able to display full philosophical justification for claims of certitude in relation to the power of a proposition, and his assent to such a proposition. 

 

24) PROBABILITY: If we take the human perception of probability as H ~ P and the Divine impartation as D > P then its real essence will be a complexity only wholly explicable in the realm of D > P, and will thus appear in the realm of H ~ P to be (in many cases) merely a subjective thing. Therefore however complex probability is, it is a feature of the simulacrum presumably imparted from the Divine provenance to serve a purpose in creation (ditto every other constituent part of its essence). NB: this really describes all types of knowledge, filtrated into the system for a specific purpose. The two principally objective factors in probability are a) its laws, and b) its nature in expressing the measure of understanding regarding specific facts in the simulacrum.

 

Annotation: My own idea is that ‘probability’ is itself under an objective law which trickles down into an overlapping¹³ ‘mind-correlative’. 

 

¹³ If it is overlapping, it is overlapping in that it can only overlap this way D >>> H, not the other way H >>> D.

 

25) LAWS, AND ‘EVERYTHING’ STIPULATIONS: From all this our ideas draw us to laws themselves, at least to the apparent limitations they impose on our minds. We can, for example, see the gravitational law in action every time we observe something falling to the ground. We can observe the laws of arithmetic every time we add up numbers. We can experience the inner a priori sensation of morality; that is, the force of the moral law through or own conscience, every time we contemplate an action that requires moral consideration. Now each one of these laws is different in nature, and each one needs, to some extent, an action (or thought of an action) riveted on so that we can observe the nature of the law itself. If the law of probability is most synonymous with the law of arithmetic, as is often claimed by mathematicians, then presumably it is an inherent feature of the Supreme Conceptualism (see number 1) - the Supreme Conceptualism is probably an inherent part of the filtration system, and belongs in the sphere of Reason itself. 

 

Annotation: It should be noted that when we speak of something numerical, we have to, in some cases, speak of some form of numerical fact contained within the Divine realm (as in the case of the tripartite nature of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) - in which case, it is erroneous for anyone to suggest that there is no such law or meta-law contained in, or applicable to, the Divine realm. Similarly, God Himself is the embodiment of ‘good’ but none of us think that the law itself applies to God; it must be in some way a reflection or distillation of God. 

What we are admitting to here is a set of laws, all of which involve a form of interrelation between Creator and creation. Therefore as the laws differ slightly from one another and as we are unsure whether there are any other created realms outside of the Divine realm (aside from our own), any all-unifying theory must somehow envelop all the laws as well as account for some kind of grand unified all-inclusive accountability process, itself underpinned by the Absoluteness of Reason (otherwise the theory is pretty meaningless). 

As we have seen with the Supreme Conceptualism idea, it seems certain that there are three realms - the Divine realm, the realm in which created things exist, and the Supreme Conceptualism - a kind of intermediary realm which would consist of things that are not God but not creation either - such as laws (this intermediary realm is some form of providential conceptualisation¹⁴). 

 

¹⁴ It might be possible that there are only two realms - the Divine realm and the created realm, and all the laws are interconnected through a mediation system; a complex filtration that is largely beyond the design of man.

Annotation: Whichever is true (probably there are three realms), it does not prevent, or militate against, a theory of everything; for it seems that any theory must be entailed by a conditional stipulation; that is, any theory that encompasses these things must be a theory postulated with the understanding that the only explanations embodied are explanations contained within the same sphere of filtration. Admittedly it is a condition which stipulates that ‘everything’ only includes that which can be known, but we were already under that provision anyway - just as we are under a similar provision every time we make a statement and claim it is true - a provision which says that one can claim something to be true (ultimately true) if, and only if, reason itself is from a trustworthy (and Absolute) source.

 

 

Annotation: Perhaps a more subjective probability would be when we are analysing logical relations between propositions, when we are using rational belief to ascertain probability. It might simply be the case that a lack of knowledge about facts or information limits our understanding of an ‘objective’ probability by circumscribing our efforts to a subjective edifice. If the probability of a proposition A given a proposition B is the degree to which B logically entails A then our knowledge of a B~A entailment must be knowledge within the availability confines of the interlocking system. Also it seems likely that the degree to which we are happy to rivet on further evaluations to our present information must be significant if we are to have an all-inclusive philosophy, for it seems likely that if one is to remain objective in his analysis, he must be prepared to disregard an entire system if it shows itself to be false or contradictory. But it is only in the sense of logical probability (that is, belief systems, rationality, and revision of convictions) that any view of ‘subjectivity’ can be asserted without difficulty. 

It is natural to explicate the ‘logical-probabilistic’ idea of the probability of A given B as a degree to which a sensible person would believe A having come to learn B, therefore it is also true that there are some degree of beliefs which are underpinned by a necessary subjectivity. But it is only subjective by virtue of its ‘interpretation of probability’; in other words, it is really the inductive revision, itself characterising (in this case) rational learning from experience that is causing it to be subjective. It is a subjective interpretation of probability inasmuch as it is a measure of one’s conviction regarding the belief itself, and that itself must vary from individual to individual. Of course this by no means entails a logical assumption that the undefeatable law of probability is also of a subjective nature, in fact, it must surely be the case that any subjectivity regarding interpretations, beliefs, and revisions, is such because all three of these nouns concomitantly gravitate towards or recede from the ‘objective’ fixity in the law itself.

Whatever the generating system is, from God to the simulacrum, it seems almost certain that this magisteria must be seen as non-overlapping in the sense that, presumably, there can be no mention of eternal generating systems without recourse to Divine properties. If it is overlapping, it is overlapping in that it can only overlap this way D >>> H, not the other way H >>> D¹⁶.

¹⁶ I mean human things such as ‘finiteness’ overlapping into Divine things such as ‘infiniteness’.

 

Annotation: It may even be true that the Absolute transcendent definitiveness of the probability law is a ‘sister-Absoluteness’ to the other laws in the realm of outside concepts - the Divinely Inspired Supreme Conceptualism which holds all the laws outside of creation (mentioned in number 1)

 

Annotation: Reason and probability have an asymmetrical relationship, a bit like the relationship between good will and the moral law. 

 

As the Theory of Everything is contingent on the Absoluteness of Reason, I have covered some possible objections for further clarification. 

 

It is important not to confuse Absolute Reason (the system of God’s Reason) with our own reasoning (the same goes for knowledge, intelligence, understanding, memory, foresight, rationale - they are all subdivisions of the Absolute Reason). Knowledge is the state of knowing, it is a body of known facts; information and understanding obtained. This misunderstanding occurs when people mistakenly think of Reason as a faculty of the mind, by which evidence is weighed, truth and falsity ascertained, inferences made, etc - but this description is itself contained within the sub-division; that is, it is one of the sub-divisions. 

This Absolute Reason that is filtrated into our system has its origins in God Himself; it is what pieces together all types of knowledge, intelligence, etc, it is an impartation from the Divine mind and is not to be confused with ‘human reasoning’. 

 

Reason, it seems to me, still remains the most miraculous part of the simulacrum. We know a lot about our universe, we have comprehended the very large and the very small. We know lots about sub-atomic activity, and we know that hiding behind all the mysterious parts, the universe itself as a contextual whole makes rather a lot of sense. But Reason itself is something else - something more miraculous than the whole interlocking system of nature; Reason, the whole system will never be explained or quantified in quite the same way as things within nature. Reason is an Absolute - yes - it is its Absoluteness that explains its mysterious nature, for Absolute things will, for now, remain rather mysterious to creatures in the simulacrum. Everything else in the interlocking system need not exist, in fact, at cosmological levels, if the non-existence of something saw no contradiction it probably shouldn’t exist. The whole cosmos was at one point, as far as we know, contained within the smallest singularity until the big bang. Whatever else was in there - perhaps it contained a blueprint for the cosmos - you won’t find the origin of Reason you’ll only find a link in the chain or the strands of a lengthy rope of filtration which finds its origins in God.

If our perceived knowledge is merely an explanation about our physiology and psychology then we can know nothing but our physiology and psychology. Therefore we must admit straight away some kind of interrelation between the self and the outside. Unless human cognisance, understanding, and reasoning is valid, no science or philosophy can be admitted as true, nor can any thoughts about the miraculous. If our mental processes are predetermined solely by the motions of atoms in our brains, then we are made up of nothing but matter; thus we can have no grounds for stating anything as ‘true’ unless we admit an interrelation. Now it is this interrelation which needs explaining, for if we live in a purely materialistic world - if there is nothing coming in from the outside of our universe - we are forced to explain the interrelation as a law or series of events within nature. But this leaves us with a fundamental difficulty; under such premises no explanation of our existence can be established as sound. Any attempt at an explanation would inevitably discredit our process of reasoning or at least militate against a credible explanation of reasoning to such a humble level that it could no longer support reason itself. Furthermore, every attempt to refute this claim would, itself, be part of the same problem that we are discussing; the refutations themselves are bound to be caught up in the problem - that is, there are no conditions under which such premises can be accepted as sound or reliable in the realm of ultimate explanations. 

If we follow our ancestry back far enough down the evolutionary path, we might come to a point where an adaptive process was occurring in living organisms that could not be characterised as thought, but that could be seen as something which could (eventually) give rise to thought. In fact, that, it seems to me, is what atheist evolutionists believe must have happened - that crude responses to stimuli went on to produce logic and reasoning of the level that we currently experience. But it ought to be noticed that this explanation does nothing to eradicate the ‘problem of interrelation’ between material things. Under such conditions there is no sound reason why any crude phenotypic improvements during the process of natural selection should give rise to anything that could be called ‘reason’. The interrelation between response and stimulus in any living thing is remarkably different between reasoning and knowledge; in fact, knowledge of something is never the same as the thing itself. 

There are creatures with very crude observational abilities (the Nautilus for example) - but any analysis of the development from, say, light-sensitive spots through to something as complex as the human eye will only tell us about response and refinement. Similarly, no analysis of material activity in the brain will tell us how this materialistic explanation turned into ‘thinking’ - for every time we begin to explore our thinking we are forced to admit that there is an interrelation between thought and matter which cannot be reconciled with matter alone.

But the theist has no such problem. He has rejected the atheist’s view that reason itself is explained by a vast nexus of non-rational causality; that is, he has ascribed to reason a purposeful foundation originating from something outside of nature. Under these premises reason is a little like water, saturating objects while not being the objects themselves. The theist believes that the preliminary process within nature which led up to this elucidation and liberation was part of the Divine plan. In other words, reason itself is not distilled from absurd and purposeless events but, in fact, imparted from the Designer of the universe from whence our reason came. 

Now this claim is not a satisfactory solution to all our Divine knowing; that is, having established this, our work would still be ahead of us in figuring out if this Creator has any interest in us, and, if He has, which particular religion or belief system is in accordance with His will. Any claim to understand the mind of this God must be an act of insight or perception transcendent of non-rational causality which itself could be determined only by what is known inside an absurd and non-reliable parameter.  In other words, the only reality upon which the attribution of supernaturalism and, in fact, reason itself, can rest is a reality which treats reason, not as a purposeless entity, but as an Absolute - explicable by its Absoluteness. Atheists can attempt to take supernature out of the equation; but in doing so they invalidate the rationale with which they came to such a conclusion. And any attempt to defend the position further will, itself, be lost with the insuperability of the atheists’ claim that reason itself is a by-product of purposelessness yet reliable because they have inductively concluded that theirs is purposeful and capable of being accurate.

Of course, atheists have a different view regarding the origin of reason. They say that there is no externally rational causation - they ascribe reason to a long evolving process, beginning with abiogenesis right through to our present reasoning. There is no difficulty here if we admit a synthesis of the first idea and the second; that is, we can accept the second proposition only if we still insist that reason is older than nature (by nature I mean the entire interlocking system - everything in our universe and beyond that requires an explanation). But if you treat reason as a relatively late development in nature you discredit the efficacy of reason itself, for you cannot call reason trustworthy if it resulted from non-reason. It is true that there is such a thing as ‘developed reason’ - an example of which would be putting your hand in the fire when you were a child, realising that it hurts and reasoning not to do it again. But this is not an example of reason from non-reason - it is merely a development from a foolish position to a sensible one. In other words, reason is present at every stage; it is simply in the process of being crystallised in a young mind which is not yet ready for anything more developed. The foolishness of putting your hand in the fire was still a solecism against what is known as reason; but reason had to exist first in order for non-reason to be called ‘non-reason’. When we talk of a period when there was no such thing as reason, we deny in the process the real nature of the reasoning that we experience. 

Let me put it another way. Even if we suppose for a second that the precise configuration of atoms did at one point come together to form some sort of wave that could impart to a creature something tantamount to reason, and that that reason developed into all the reason that humankind now has - it would not be reliable and we would never know if we were right to think anything. In other words, if the material nature of our thinking was once dependent upon biochemical laws which were themselves a result of some kind of random and meaningless atomic event in the universe’s history, then our present thoughts should have no more significance than an activity in which the wind blows though an alleyway sweeping up litter and dust along the way. But if God (or another type of Supreme Being) was the creator of that primal reason, and that reason was imparted to finite minds, then it is easily explainable how the world in which we live is replete with examples of reasoning, from the crude development of trees and plants to their environment, up to great thinkers such as Newton, Shakespeare and Einstein. 

It is even admitted by physicists that that there is a limit on the precision of simultaneous measurements at a quantum level; that the precision of a sub-atomic particle’s position means there will be uncertainty in its momentum.  Therefore under such premises, it seems insensible to suppose that reason could be given the special position that it rightly holds yet at the same time attribute it to such uncertain activity to begin with. In other words, if our thinking was explicable in terms of a ‘detached cosmic consciousness’ it would be self-evident, or, at least, an entity with properties unable to explain anything outside of itself. But that is nothing like reason as we know it; we do not ‘reason’ by mindlessness outside of the existent thing. 

The cosmic consciousness will help us only if we admit that it must be something outside of other existent things; that is, if we suppose it to be, not the product of the total universal system, but the ultimate ‘fact’ that exists in its own right and is transcendent of nature itself. You can, by all means, claim that this is untrue. You can claim that reason is not of this nature. But if you do you must give up thinking about ultimate realities; for you will have denied the validity of the very thing which would be necessary to explain them - the Absoluteness of Reason.

Why don’t we know everything? Every human thought, every wish, every cognitive feeling, every recognition of the moral standard, every part of our conscience, every empathetic feeling, every part of love, and every part of grace bear witness to Divine impartations; we are conductors - colonies of all these things. And of course being flawed creatures we are bound to sully and retard what are, in the realm of the Divine, perfect entities. In other words, due to our limitations the Reason imparted to us from God has to be unsymmetrical; that is, the interrelation between what is put into nature by God and what is received by us has to be classified as an unsymmetrical relation. If I have two pennies, one in each hand, the value of each is a symmetrical relation - if L is equal to R then R must be equal to L. If however I have a pound coin in one hand and a penny in the other, there would be an unsymmetrical relation - one is greater than the other. Admittedly the interrelation between coins is of a different kind to that of the interrelation between creature and Creator, but the relation between Creator-to-creature impartations is of the second kind; that which is given is greater than that which is received. God can’t give us everything at once; we have to grow and become ready for better Divine impartations.

 

Those who are happy to see reason as a sound entity yet at the same time dismiss the very foundations of reason as an unsound entity are guilty of not understanding what reason really is. If an act of reasoning or an operation in action with reason contained no recognition of the causes behind that operation then whatever was being perceived or reasoned about could bear no relation to reason itself, and, thus, would have to be a nonentity. As I have said earlier, we are really distinguishing between the process called ‘reasoning’ and ‘reasons’ in the sense that one causes the other. Any regularity contained in the latter must be a result (or cause) of the former, but the cause would not be the regularity itself, nor would the regularity be the cause. The connection between the regularity and the cause must itself be something that we can hereby refer to as valid, otherwise the effect of the cause would itself be a nonentity; or at least an entity wholly detached from the cause. In other words, subtract either the cause from the effect or the effect from the cause and you end up with a process of self-negation. To put it in the simplest of terms - a cause is so described because it brought about an effect and an effect is so named because it resulted from a cause. If you find an attempt to propose a ‘chain of validity’ without admitting a cause greater than the effect, you end up with groundless nonsense - itself unable to offer any explanation regarding any truth whatsoever. 

 

Even the term ‘chain of validity’ implies something in which the term ‘valid’ can be recognised. You cannot have a valid ‘nothing’ any more than you can have an immoral hiccup or an evil birthmark. We must be sure in recognising the principal reason why the naturalists’ claims have fallen flat. To see causes within uncaused things is only an example of a self-contained fact. But self-contained facts tell us nothing about causes. If I drop a penny I might say that the cause of its fall is because a penny is heavier than air; when the real (or principal) cause is the earth’s gravitational pull. But that dos not change the self-evident fact that the penny is heavier than air. The same is true when our minds appear to be reasoning. The fact that when you try to visualise, say, a camel and one pops into your head or the fact that when you try to think of something intuitively its nature is revealed as an a priori certainty, does not tell us the first thing about the validity of reason any more than witnessing a car crash tells us anything about the ultimate laws of physics. Once again, to put it in the simplest terms, because the penny fell is not the same as C (cause) equals E (effect) alone because the law (in this case the gravitational law) is entailed by V (validity) - whereas for the naturalist, the law of C and E entails everything except V. In other words, no occurrences of thinking or reasoning amount to anything sound unless they are entailed by or inextricably linked to V - a proposition that naturalists deny. Naturalism is thus self-refuting. This is a little part of my ‘positive circularity’ to which I referred earlier, the position which treats reason as an Absolute is self-affirming. If reason is to be trusted the facts must be related to the premises as C and E is related to V - i.e. the conclusion is there because V makes them part of a law; for as regards reason itself, C and E will never, by themselves, produce anything that is not immediately self-refuting. If the ‘chain of validity’ is seen merely as a self-evident fact within the accidental randomness then V itself becomes a nonsense and in the process makes C and E a nonsense too. 

 

It would seem, therefore, that we never think (or never should think) that any cause or effect is as it is because a certain series of ‘unreasoned’ events have occurred, otherwise it does not seem that there should be any reason why we think one thought right and another one wrong. No, it seems sure that when we use words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ or ‘true’ and ‘false’ - we are really ascribing them to something which is a condition of a bigger thing than mere self-existent causes and effects themselves. To continue any further with naturalism is to continue to trip yourself up at every step. But if we ascribe ‘right’ and ‘correct’ and ‘true’ as parts of something bigger than the system itself, it is easy to see how reason herself is being channelled through from a Being which can be so aptly described as the foundation of all reasoning. As soon as we start to realise what reasoning really is, and how its nature is dependent upon reliable foundations, we shall begin to realise that when claims are made that reason cannot be the result of purposeless beginning, we are really pushing on a door that is already partially open.

 

This is another difficulty with the naturalistic position, in that it seems to insist upon no ultimate truths - everything is, according to them, a ‘chain of conventional truths’. The chain of truths linkage is problematic because it cannot survive the condemnation of the ‘truth’ as a whole. Moreover, where does any naturalistic statement belong in the chain of truths? If it is one of the links in a long chain brought about by mere ‘convention’ it is supported by nothing at all - it doesn’t even come near to the external ‘truth’ that condemns their chain of truths, even if its origin is found in a naturalistic provenance. I find it peculiar that the naturalist who claims that there are no ultimate truths is happy to support his own theory by using his own ‘ultimate truth’ as a supporting crutch. It is not so different to the man who claims that morality is no fixed thing; that there is no such thing as right and wrong, only human convention. Immediately after he has made that statement it won’t be long before you find him decreeing that some particular action is definitely ‘right’ and its opposite would be ‘wrong’^17.

¹⁷ Something worth considering. The whole discussion doesn’t of course rest on what I am now going to say, but it is worth thinking about. Have you never found it strange that we have a universe that is amoral and non-rational, and yet there are creatures in it (relatively small and insignificant it would seem, in the grand scheme of things) that do have moral virtue and rationality? We can see matter working at a quantum level, but there is nothing moral or immoral about it. The wind can cause fences to blow down but there is nothing immoral about it. If you go to near a jellyfish the chances are you’ll get stung, you might even die if you have a weak heart, but there’s nothing immoral about it. Yet here we are, you and I part of the human race, each with the faculty of reason, able to think morally and rationally. Like I said, the whole argument is not contingent on this fact, but it doesn’t sit well in an amoral, non-rational universe, does it?   That is why I say in my theory that Reason is the primacy not nature. Whatever else human reasoning is, it can’t be explained by nature alone - the universe is not a blind watchmaker, not when it comes to human reason. If the universe can’t explain reason, it must follow that Reason explains the universe. It is explicable if Reason itself is an Absolute; that is, part of an Absolute thing - part of Aseity.

 

Regarding questions about inference, we are talking here about ‘intentionality’ - and yes, there’s something deep here. The phenomenon of intentionality does it seems cause great difficulty for those that claim reason has its origin in naturalistic (thus materialistic) things. If thinking can be rational it must transcend any materialistic account of thinking. We are admitting a dialectic between our reasoning and everything else in nature - a relationship called ‘truth’. That is, ‘truth’ itself cannot hold if we say that both factors in the relationship are matter, unless there is something in the universe which, although showing its appearance in matter is, in fact, a part of the Divine filtration process from God’s realm into the simulacrum. Otherwise we are forced to talk about one bit of a naturalistic universe being true about another, which must be nonsense, for it cannot fit in anything called ‘truth’ at all. The link between corporeal processes and thought itself remains unsatisfactory if naturalism is insisted upon. The chain of validity to which we referred earlier is much more satisfactory because it can bring in this ‘truth’, that is, it references something other than corporeality. The phenomenon of intentionality has no business in a purely naturalistic reality, at least in the sense that sound mental states cannot arise in a universe whose fundamental constituents are non-intentional. You cannot reduce intentionality to anything merely ‘internally functional’ -even computational interactions can have no ascriptions of ‘intentionality’ unless they are properties in the simulacrum, and of the Divine. Anything that generates intentionality must come originally from the transcorporeal realm. 

 

It is true that the premises of a sound induction may have given good reason for the conclusion (logical induction says it’s going rain sometime in Norwich in the next year) but do not logically entail the conclusion, in the same way they do in a valid deduction. Now here’s the rub; even valid deductions (John and Peter are males therefore John is a male) are only facts about the interlocking system of nature unless valid descriptions are made from a source higher than themselves. But it becomes even more complicated if we deny any Absolute truth. Take the law of non-contradiction which says that no two contradictory beliefs can both be true. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God. Now if it is true that He is the incarnation of God, all claims that He is not must be false. Now of course one could claim that Christ’s claims had been misinterpreted by those that followed Him or that the Bible had been mistranslated, but these are claims about things outside of the law of contradiction - for the brute residual fact remains the same, irrespective of human perception and interpretation, either He is God or He is not. Now, of course, there are in my view a great many reasons why a man can believe that Christ is God, but that is not the point we are trying to outline here. The law of non-contradiction is more of a primacy than the conventional truths about which we spoke earlier.

 

Having admitted this we are now saying that all of these conventional truths are contingent. If a statement made by a naturalist is only taken to be true on the basic ‘conventional’ level of reality, then that statement could have been ultimately false; therefore the law of non-contradiction is not accommodated in the naturalists view. The naturalist is borrowing parts of the Absoluteness of Reason and distorting them for his own ends. Of course the naturalist can passionately decree, ‘of course one conventional truth can contradict its opposite’ but immediately in stating this he is going beyond conventional truths; thus you will find him admitting that there are more than just conventional truths. Under the naturalist’s premises even a truth about the law of non-contradiction will be dependent on conventional realities; thus if any of these conventional realities are contingent then so is anything that depends on them - including the truth about the law of non-contradiction. 

 

Even if we accept the impossible, that conventional truths can generate laws such as non-contradiction and apply them to universal patterns, there is nothing in the conventional truths framework that can logically imply the necessity of such laws. For any such implication is itself a modal notion. The modal cannot be explicable in non-modal terms; that would be like trying to explain the moral law without invoking anything ‘moral’. As naturalism is committed to thinking of modal in non-modal terms it cannot accommodate the notion that any logical laws exist. 

 

Naturalists attempt to create an idea based on allusions to ideas and concepts, suggesting that such modality can arise from them. This seems to be blatantly false, and it isn’t difficult to see why. You can start by bringing in an established conventional truth, such as the human concept that ‘octogenarian’ means a person in his or her eighties, therefore that is sufficient to generate the necessity, ‘all octogenarians are in their eighties’, and something similar naturally explains all other conventional truths. However once one begins to ask how concepts generate such necessity we see the problems arising. If rational laws emerge from the relationship between our conventional concepts we must rightly ask what is the naturalist thinking of when he speaks of ‘relations’? If he is thinking of relations from logical laws it is clear that he cannot have any naturalistic explanation for the laws of logic. Perhaps he could claim that our perception of necessity is wrong, but in doing so he will have contradicted his own argument of how he reached such a conclusion. This is, in effect, the opposite position to my position which says that reason cannot emerge from non-reason, it must be an Absolute. 

 

Moreover, a further difficulty arises here. If naturalism is true and my argument that reason is an Absolute is false, you would expect that naturalism would be capable of explaining more things about existence than the Absoluteness of Reason (AoR) position. Therefore the corollary of that position should be that if an explanation occurs under naturalists’ provincial domain it ought to be preferred over the AoR position providing it is not an obvious solecism against the ‘conventional truths’ laws. You probably have figured out already that I don’t think this position valid. But if one were to accept the premises he could only accept the conclusion if it is impossible that the premises are true and the conclusion false. But that is manifestly not the case, for if he does he must discard necessity. Necessary truths governed by laws are the only thing that support such arguments - and as we have just seen, necessary truths do not fit into the naturalists sphere of reasoning. Furthermore AoR does not challenge the contextual validity inside conventional truths, such as my statement about octogenarians, it simply insists that their laws are governed and generated by something Absolute. 

 

We now move to consider the implication of the statement about our apprehending these logical laws, which of course involves our ability to rationally infer. And it goes without saying that if one is to rationally infer anything he must be able to apprehend the laws of logic with reference to which that particular inference is coterminous in the ring of rationality. In other words the inference itself must be rational to be rationally inferred. To rationally infer X from the conjunction of Y with “if Y then X”, he must be aware of the law of logic according to which this position is reached from these premises. The difficulty seems to me to be the following. Whatever the naturalist’s position regarding the logical laws, it cannot bring into the ring (on naturalistic presuppositions) that which is behind the mystery of our knowing the law. Moreover there must be some justification as to how this is known. The laws themselves are not reinforced or authenticated by experience or by empirical investigation; therefore our knowledge of them must come from elsewhere. This leaves the naturalist with a difficulty, he must admit that only if they are dependent solely on our own cognition can they be explained, but that is manifestly not the case (we have seen already that there are several laws that are not mind-dependent laws). If the naturalist is right, he would immediately be forced to admit that these laws could have no real role to play in our assessment of external things after all. Unless the scales are separated from that which we are trying to weigh, we can do no weighing. Unless the standard by which our inferences are measured is something extricable from those inferences, any attempt to formulate a judgement of inferences will fall to the ground immediately.

 

In case anyone isn’t following my argument as closely as I would wish, I should say, I do not mean that there are not many instances when various irrational thoughts do lead someone to the truth via circuitous and meandering methods of reasoning. Man A who thinks that his wife is being unfaithful because he has seen her out in a car with another man when she says she was somewhere else has better reasons for thinking as he does than man B who thinks his wife is being unfaithful because when he was a boy his father left his mother for another woman, but it could turn out that A’s wife has remained faithful and was organising a surprise birthday party for her husband and that B’s wife was indeed being unfaithful. It is true that to discover the cause of someone thinking as he does often discredits it, but we know equally well that irrational thoughts can be reinforced by demonstrable evidence - but we do not say that because the evidence proved him right that his thinking was rational. The point is, there is a difference between claiming that no thought is valid if it can’t be explained by rational inferences and saying that reason itself (as a whole) is valueless if it comes from non-reasoning sources. However much you try to circumvent this problem you will only be talking about conventional inferences within the large but inconsequential set of conventional truths. Furthermore having agreed that physical causes are not rational themselves, if the vast compilation of thinking that goes on in the interlocking system is really a collection of physical events, how can any of them be ultimately rational unless they are filtrated into the system from something that is Absolute and ‘truthful’? The naturalist can by all means celebrate the distances we have travelled with these conventional truths - they have got us to mobile phones, psychotherapy, even to nanotechnology¹⁸ - but under the premises he attempts to invoke, they are only facts about a system, a relatively small system in a relatively vast interlocking system. 

 

¹⁸ The conventional truths are good in themselves; they are facts and events which aid our daily living. But any attempt to distil a truth about ultimate existence outside of the conventional facts and events leaves us in trouble. The man who is happy with mere conventional facts and events must wave goodbye to ontological questions. Here he is faced with the biggest problem, for in doing so he must wave goodbye to his own naturalistic assumptions, for they are themselves parts of the conventional system. 

 

The crunch here is really that because matter is neither rational nor irrational the causes by which naturalists explain their own reasoning are not therefore irrational and the argument against naturalism breaks down. I should like to say I think this a problematic position, particularly as you will find many naturalists claiming, in fact, a monopoly on rationality - a position which contradicts their initial premise of material non-rationality. This presents us with the question about whether we only really acquire concepts of rational and irrational through our experiences of what we perceive to be one or the other. What this really amounts to is an attempt to smuggle in the assumption that we must have experienced some form of irrationality in thought to know what rationality is; in which case the claim will be made that all reasoning can’t be invalid - thus hoping that my argument breaks down. But it won’t work. However far the naturalist progresses on these premises, he will not be able to sneak in any counter-explanation against my claim that naturalism does entail that we cannot have the concept of validity without recourse to conventional systems alone. He might have been better arguing that if naturalists do not have the concept of validity how would they know what the statement meant? But all this depends on interpretation of validity; for conceptual validity in the conventional sense has no weight, in fact the only validity that is being accounted for is the validity that the naturalists are borrowing from the Theists. In summary what it really boils down to is this; the truth of naturalism cannot be meaningfully insisted upon - for all naturalists’ claims would be based on something that was equally unreasonable. We have already established that under the naturalists presumptions there is no rational or irrational nature to matter, therefore if the reason he thinks that his cognitive processes are determined by neuronal movements is itself down to neuronal movements, his opinion has no room in any chain of validity at all; that is, there is no reason to link the facts of neuronal movement to facts about truth. 

 

We think of cause and effect (CE) as verific because we have seen CE in action everywhere we look. But the platforms for CE and our grounds for assertion on this relationship (X) provide us with no explanation why this should be so (the same is true, as we have seen, with the law of non-contradiction). CE runs on a different system to X, therefore the naturalist’s position seems to involve the difficulty of explaining why as a matter of fact two very different systems CE and X run together in our cognition. The naturalist might just about get away with the emergence of CE in cognitive system (although he would still be struck with explaining the verity of a system from the self-imposed limited position of being contained within the system he was trying to explain) - but trying to bring in X as an interrelating sister to CE involves a miracle all by itself. The naturalist seems to be stuck in a ‘best we can do’ standpoint. Furthermore, an even bigger difficulty occurs, because there is no logical reason, and thus no logical explanation, why laws outside of the conventional truths would become part of our cognition and penetrate our belief systems unless there was some interrelational process from outside. If the naturalist is right, that we developed CE over a long period of naturalistic evolution, it might be trickier to explain how X filtrated into our cognitive systems in the way that it has. This isn’t a deal-clincher either way; that is, it doesn’t cast an insurmountable cloud over naturalism nor does it affirm theism.

But the argument need not rest on this treehouse analysis - that is to say, we can bring in experience to help us understand which of our many hypotheses accord with our experiential knowledge. As regards the relations between CE and X - however far back the process was taken you would be left with the beginning of what was to be a causal chain, on the naturalist viewpoint, a chain from something non-rational. How the non-rational nature of the first link could promote a logical relation between CE and X is a big problem for the naturalists. If we say that naturalistic evolution caused minds that related C and E to the principle of X using the foundational and ‘conventional’ premises on which C and E relations are based, we are only really explaining how it is that naturalists came to such a belief - we are still treating every belief as non-valid as it is merely a contextual fact within the conventional system - a system which is itself still burdened by the ‘causation’ problem and will thus leave us with the meta-question ‘why is that so?’. 

 

And notice the difficulty in forcing oneself to take the position I just stated. A thought can only be a logical thought over another if laws of logic exist, therefore human beings must be able to apprehend laws of logic. The naturalist can only accept this if he says that a) there are such things are logical laws, and b) that we are capable of apprehending them. In which case how can the naturalist explain this ‘a and b’ coterminous existence? Is naturalism really bound up in an explanation linking to an ‘irreducible act of stellar serendipity’? Do not misunderstand me, I am not saying that from the existence of causes there is no naturalistic capacity to deduce reasons, but that the overlapping dialectic between causes and reason is, under the naturalists’ premises, unexplainable without recourse to the most irrational and absurd coincidence. If everything we believe is a mere coincidence, it also follows that casual connection between thinking and laws are also coincidental and in fact, the reason that our thinking corresponds to this naturalistic view of coincidence has itself the same difficulty imputed. Are we really to believe that a coincidental event or series of events (with only the flimsiest of dialectics) in the realms of neuronal movements are able to explain ultimate realities of existence? That must be stretching it too far. 

 

Of course the naturalist has tried in the past to link conceptions of truth to evolutionary biology and say that pragmatic reasoning is merely a fact about our long evolutionary chain of adapting for survival. In other words the contingent connection between beliefs is simply a fact that it is advantageous to have such a contingency. But that still begs the question - how did our cognitive faculties become competent enough to understand things which are themselves not part of the system. Furthermore we still haven’t escaped the difficulty of making assertions outside of our purview of rationality. Some evolutionists claim that this won’t explain why a person who has sound inferential abilities is more likely to survive than a person who does not¹⁹, but I’ll come to that later. 

 

¹⁹ Assumptions about our inferential abilities emanating from the evolutionary system do not provide me with any difficulties, as the simulacrum contains within itself all the necessary systems for such an outcome (including macroevolution). It should be remembered that the entire universe consists of matter, which cannot be created nor destroyed; in which case, the make-up of personhood is ultimately the same make-up as the rest of the universe (aside from Spiritual activity - “in God’s image”). Therefore any explanations of this kind, regarding survival, and in fact any piece of information about the system from within the system is only really a fact about the simulacrum. As my theory involves the simulacrum notion anyway, this provides me with no difficulty - in fact, I would go so far as to say that any interrelational explanations or any theories about cognition, cause, reasoning, foundational principles, and our perception of laws outside of the simulacrum, are all easily explained because the simulacrum is as it is - a reflection of the Divine realm with a Divine filtration system. 

 

If the naturalist’s claims amount to the proposal that any person able to adduce good reason for believing what he does - that his belief escapes the tough gamut of scrutiny needed to ascertain its trajectory in casual history - then I think the naturalists are mistaken. The reason I think they are mistaken is because such an account of rational belief allows no distinctions between reason for having such a belief and a rationalisation of that belief. The reasons for belief must be merely part of what brings it about that they happen to believe such things, it makes no allowances for the insistence that our apprehension of the laws of logic play an explanatory role in our ability to fit in the premise as true; moreover this also affects the propositional content of all interrelational belief systems in the ‘conventional’ domain of reasoning. 

 

There are two types of laws in this sense, there are fundamental laws, of which the laws of morality and non-contradiction are two, and there are derived laws which fit in with the conventional truths that we mentioned earlier. Now naturalism can only explain derived laws like, say, the way light works in the context of a inwardly contained universal proposition, and the physical laws which operate in systems such as physiology and other such physical entities. Now Christians believe that within the simulacrum God is operating at a spiritual level as well. Naturalists deny this, so naturalists are therefore left with only physical propositions. Let us say that we can concede that one physical mental event can exist, we must have to agree that the naturalistic assumption is therefore a postulation that one physical mental state can cause another. Suppose that the first physical mental (PM) event causes a second PM event, we are saying that the first mental state has caused the second, yet the reason that the first PM causes the second has nothing to do with the state of either PM; that is, their content is irrelevant in the sense of causation. We would have to admit that PM1 and PM2 and indeed the cause linking the two are only examples and explanations of the physical properties of both. In which case we are left with the unenviable position of trying to identify a conventional ‘derived’ law from the physical properties of that which is subject to the law. That would be a bit like saying that the ball being heavier than air is the cause of gravity. The casual nature of one thing can, I suppose, tell us about the characteristics and events which are determined by its casual nature, but this casual law is only a derived law, it has nothing on a fundamental law, therefore its physical description is subsumed under a derived law. The same is true of our analysis of the brain. If laws that are derived laws of physicality are not governed by fundamental laws then what happens in our brains is largely irrelevant - our thoughts are a set of irrelevancies which happen to be governed by laws of derivation within the physical system. 

 

I said I would show how I think this links in with evolution. If the laws of logic appear as true, nature, you may have noticed, always agrees. Nature never disagrees with any of the fundamental laws. Naturalistic evolution says that this is because the mind is the result of naturalistic evolutionary processes. Yet if nature knows no rationality or non-rationality herself, this cannot really be so. If thinking is a result of mindless events then the best we can say is that every thought is a casual law within the conventional system. But to say that nature herself is the overarching system whereby the laws themselves brought about thinking is something even more irrational. In other words, if the casual laws that bring about our reasoning are really the result of non-rational nature then nature has no linkage to the truth. The laws that bring about the casual laws in conventional truths turn out to be the same laws that cause every physical event in the interlocking system. In truth the evolutionary story is only directly concerned with organisms in the sense that they are a constituent part of the evolutionary tree as a whole. A fit organism can adapt and survive and reproduce, thus the value of truth regarding biological activity is quite instrumental, but useful only in the context of evolutionary domain, not in the running system of the simulacrum itself. 

 

What is evidently true is that the position of the naturalist and the position of myself (that I think reason is an Absolute) are almost opposite positions; therefore I see no great difficulty in showing the infelicity of one of the two. If the felicity of our conventional truths underwritten by casual laws are not to be attributed by the most outrageous naturalistic fortune, we must agree that there is an unbreakable affinity between our sense of logic and the nature of reality which is itself underwritten by fundamental laws. Can naturalism underwrite a solid foundational affinity between our sense of logic and reality itself? It seems to me that the answer is always an emphatic NO! Suppose naturalism could get in all the explanations for our reasoning; it could at best only explain why our cognitive faculties are apt to bring about steady conclusions on subjects closely interrelated with our everyday events and actions at a casual level. But if reason is an Absolute from a self-sustaining and ‘perfect’ source, it is easy to see how fundamental laws work asymmetrically with derived laws, and how through the Divine filtration system we are able to postulate theories of reality that are backed up by concrete truths and how in the process we lift from ourselves the huge burden of trying to proffer explanations about reality that are straight away contradicted by the erratic and volatile nature of a non-caused and non-governed existence.

 

Theism will not, by itself, necessarily lead a man to Christianity, nor will miracles. Once we have established a Theist position, we must then find out how we can come to know God (if indeed we can). Now we come on to what Christians believe. Christ is the living God - He bridged the gap between God and humankind. That is why the Christian assertion that ‘Only he who does the will of the Father will ever know the true doctrine’ is both accurate and necessary - for the will of the Father is that we should be reconciled with Him through His Son. Imagination may assist people in creating their own concepts of God; but right through the vast array of false religions and belief systems (from Islam and Hinduism, right through to Mormonism and Scientology) you will see a vast multiplicity of delusion, misinformation, mendacity, credulity, insularity and falsehood. But through Christ we can at once begin to correct and reconstitute the developing emptiness of any idea of God without His Son. 

It is understandable that one might say, as many have, ‘Yes but surely adherents of other belief systems could say the same thing?’. Fair enough. I feel I can say this without equivocation. I am certain than the more someone explores all the religions and belief systems, the deeper he or she goes into exploration, the stronger the resounding roar will be that Christ is, indeed, the way, the truth and the life. 

But one won’t find this out by reason alone, for as well as at an intellectual level, Christ tells us that we need Him on an emotional level and, most significantly, on a spiritual level; thus if He is right you will expect to find that all your hopes and desires, all those unfulfilled vacancies which are present in every human heart will be satisfied through Him. It is reason itself that teaches us not to be solely dependent on reason only in this matter, for reason knows that it cannot work without other things too. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether you went out and left the oven on, it is reason herself who whispers, ‘Go home and look’. Reason states unequivocally that it is a matter for the senses. When it becomes clear that reason cannot tell you whether you love someone or not - it tells you to look elsewhere into your deep self; the part of the self in which love finds its provenance. Similarly the materials for correcting and reconstituting the abstraction we make of God cannot be supplied by reason; as it will be reason itself that will be the first to tell you to go and try experience. It will be reason itself which says that if Christ is right we can have a full life only though Him, and that our wholehearted search for Him will result in the aforementioned ‘full life’ - we should have no trouble finding out if this claim is reliable or not. That is why I say to anyone that if you are prepared to accept the claims of Christ - if they are, indeed, true, then you will answer in the process almost all of your objections in one moment of personal Divine revelation.

 

As complex as this theory of everything is - it does in fact lead us to a relatively clear and simple understanding of our own existence and our real purpose of being - the truth of Jesus Christ. As my very brilliant friend Timothy V Reeves once stated when, upon questioning whether a man wishes to move away from the Christian faith, we can only really ask “Lord to whom shall I go?…if you don’t have the words of everlasting life then no one else has”. 

 

Aside from all the complexities of the universe and human psychology, there lies a truth that can humble even the best men. I do receive some very generous comments of praise in response to my work - and, of course, I can’t really live up to them, I am only a layman with a keen mind and an even keener heart. Passion for the truth can lead a man into all sorts of special places, providing he makes no attempt to compromise that which appears to him as a resounding truth. Tim is right, if Jesus Christ does not offer us the truth then no one does - all of our philosophies are just fancy footwork in an ultimately inauspicious ball game. If you want to make the best of life you cannot do it by sacrificing the truth. I spent much of my early twenties attempting to tweak the truth a bit in order to have the best of both worlds - but it cannot be done, for as our Lord says, where your treasure lies there your heart will be also. You cannot serve two masters; thankfully Christ offers us certainly so we do not have to. Whenever anyone asks me the meaning of life, I tell them I have been fortunate enough to find out from the one who IS life. The answer is summed up beautifully by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians:

 

 

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