Constructing the Metaphysics VII

The truth is the path toward the Truth. This is verascendance restated in the register vocabulary, and the connection to the objective already named in the treatise should be explicit.

The system functions without theism. Its correct use reliably points toward it. The tools must remain entirely usable by an atheist or other non-believer.

The precise position: the tools function without the Logos; the explanation of why they function does not. An atheist can run the Triveritas successfully and cannot account for why reality is the sort of thing it works on.

Not two views of one doctrine. A containment relation, with 6.1 supplying its content.

Time is a dimension. He sees it all at once. The completed-archive analogy rather than the live-server analogy: the run is recorded, any moment can be inspected, and the completeness of the record does not reach back and remove the players’ agency at the time of play.

Guard the authorship variant. Designer of the world and its rules, not author of the players’ lines.

God knows what He chooses to know. He is not limited; He can look ahead or not, as He pleases.

• Distinguished from open theism first, before the term is defined. Open theism holds that God cannot know future free acts. This holds that He can look and sometimes declines. Self-limitation, not limitation. The kenosis structure is the precedent.

• It presupposes the complete timeline. Choosing to look ahead requires an ahead to look at. Voliscience commits to 1.5 more firmly than a view on which God knows everything by nature.

• Scriptural material runs this way: “now I know that you fear God,” the repeated language of the LORD repenting, Nineveh, “nor did it enter my mind.” Prophecy is direct evidence of the other half.

• Guard against voluntarism. God’s will determines what He attends to, not what is true or good. This is 1.1 applied upward.

No divine puppet master. Direction is discretionary and local. Two independences must be kept distinct, because critics conflate them: seeing is not determining (knowledge), and being able to direct is not directing (will).

• Divine simplicity. A knowledge state that varies by choice is not identical with an unchanging essence. Voliscience is incompatible with simplicity as Aquinas holds it. The departure is stated directly rather than implied. Simplicity is a philosophical construction, not a scriptural datum, and the scriptural evidence runs against it.

• Empirical opacity. Whether a given event was directed is undetectable from inside the timeline. The category can be established; membership in it cannot. Stated plainly, in keeping with the project’s practice of naming limitations first.

Revelation is God willing that something be known to us. Voliscience is God willing that something be known to Him. Under aletheian realism, where disclosure is the fundamental relation, these are two directions of one act rather than two doctrines that rhyme. Voliscience is therefore a consequence of the metaphysics rather than an addition to it.

A word of warning to the commentators: do not cite your various theological dogmas as any sort of evidence or critique because a) I am already aware of them and b) they are not relevant here. In this singular context of assembling a new construct, I am a greater authority than any other individual you cite; if you have understood the outline then you will know that I am directly and specifically challenging elements of the metaphysics articulated by Thomas Aquinas and others.