I don't know shit about shit

I don't know shit about shit.

If you've read anything else on this site, that shouldn't surprise you.

I am not a credentialed anything. I don't have a PhD in patristics, I don't read Greek well enough to argue with a real scholar, and I am working out the deepest questions a human being can ask from the kitchen table of a fifth wheel parked somewhere off I-40 with a three-year-old asking me to please stop typing and look at the dinosaur she drew.

So when I post something that says the Logos is the rational ground of all things or consciousness is not produced by matter, and I post it with what reads like confidence, I want to be very specific about what the confidence is and is not doing.

Here is what it is doing.

Things I will defend hard

• Hidden in the Hebrew scriptures and in early Christianity is something cosmic and beautiful — and most of contemporary Christianity has lost the thread of it. The Christos of the New Testament is the Logos of the kosmos: "through whom are all things" (1 Cor 8:6), "from him and through him and to him are all things" (Rom 11:36), "all things came into being through him" (John 1:3), "that God may be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). Not a Palestinian transaction. The structure of reality itself, named.
• The same Christos is indwelling. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). What the Greek fathers called theosis. Cosmic outside and inside. Same Christos. Same Logos. The Roman administrative version of Christianity buried both.
• Non-dual idealism is the cleanest metaphysics on offer right now. The hard problem of consciousness does not close from the materialist side, and people who say it does are bluffing.
• Quantum field theory says there are no particles, only fields, and this is a real convergence with what the Logos tradition has been saying about the structure of reality. Not a vibes overlap. A structural one.
• The Resurrection question is more open than evangelicals admit. Paul's own language — sōma pneumatikon, spiritual body — is not the language of a resuscitated corpse, and pretending it is requires you to not read him.
• The historical case for who wrote what in the New Testament, when, in which order, is more settled than the average pew sitter has been told, and the settlement is not on the side of inerrancy.

I have done enough reading and enough thinking to say all of that out loud and stand on it. The evidence converges. That is what the confidence on this site is.

Things I genuinely don't know

• Whether Jesus rose bodily. Something happened. The witnesses are real. The mode is not clear from the texts themselves, let alone from where I'm sitting two thousand years later.
• Whether apokatastasis is right. Origen's logic on it is gorgeous and I find it the most coherent eschatology I've encountered. I also notice that I want it to be true, which is not the same thing as it being true.
• Whether my read of John is what the author of John meant. I'm reading the Prologue as cosmology. He may have been writing something I am dressing up in philosophical clothes it doesn't fit.
• Whether consciousness as substrate is the actual frame or just the best frame I've got. Kastrup is the most rigorous person working on this and I find him persuasive. That is not a proof. That is a vote.
• What Origen would say to me if he walked into the trailer. Probably that I have him about a third right and the other two-thirds are me projecting twenty-first century concerns back onto a third-century Alexandrian who would find my whole frame baffling.
• Whether any of this is useful to anyone besides me.

That list is not an apology. It is a calibration.

The first list I hold because the evidence pulls in one direction hard enough that pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The second list I hold loose, because the evidence doesn't, and pretending otherwise would also be dishonest.

If that reads as inconsistent — confident over here, agnostic over there — I think it actually reads as the only honest way to do this. The people who are confident about everything are selling something. The people who are agnostic about everything aren't doing the work. Somewhere in between is where you actually live, if you're paying attention.

So when a post on this site sounds sure, take it as: David has read the room on this one and is willing to take a position. Not: David has received this from on high and is delivering it.

And when a post says I don't know — believe that too. Especially that.

If you find a better reading of any of it, send it. I will update. The work isn't to defend a position I've already committed to. It's to keep moving toward what's actually the case, given the best evidence I can get my hands on, in real time.

That's the disclaimer. Read everything else through it.