The God of the System: Why I Think the Logic Points Where It Points
I’ve just published a paper I’ve been working on for a while. It’s called The God of the System: A Logical Derivation of the Transcendent Agent, and you can read the full thing here.
But before you click away or dive in, let me tell you what it is and what it isn’t.
What It Is
It’s an argument that starts from uncertainty and ends at identification.
We don’t know what matter is. We don’t know what energy is. Physics describes behavior brilliantly, but it doesn’t tell us the ontology. That’s not a criticism of physics; it’s just an honest acknowledgment of what the equations do and don’t deliver.
But here’s what we do know: nothing in physical reality violates the laws of logic. Identity holds. Non-contradiction holds. The universe is rationally ordered. It operates within a structure it didn’t generate.
From there, the argument builds:
Matter and energy are passive. They don’t explain themselves.
Logic constrains but doesn’t act. Rules don’t play the game.
A system of passive constraints plus passive substance equals static. But the universe isn’t static.
Therefore, something external to the system provides the dynamism.
That something must be necessary (or the regress continues), simple (or it needs assembly), and capable of selection among contingent possibilities (or fine-tuning has no explanation). Selection capacity is will. Will plus causal power is agency.
That’s not faith. That’s logic.
The Historical Question
But logic only gets you to a necessary agent. It doesn’t tell you whether that agent has interacted with the system or what its character is.
That’s an empirical question. And I argue we have better epistemic access to first-century testimony than to deep-time geological reconstructions. The Resurrection isn’t the weak link in the argument. It may be the strongest evidence we have.
The paper works through the evidence cluster: the death, the empty tomb, the appearances, the hostile witness conversions, the culturally unexpected theology. Naturalistic explanations handle one fact at a time but fail the cluster. Stack them and the probability collapses.
The Problem of Evil
If God is good, why does the system produce suffering?
My answer: it wasn’t supposed to. Natural evil isn’t a design feature or an unavoidable byproduct of stable physics. It’s systemic corruption downstream of free will’s misuse. The fossil record isn’t a history of life; it’s a record of death. And death entered through the Fall.
This isn’t young-earth creationism. The framework permits an old universe. But it questions the certainty claimed for deep-time narratives and the uniformitarian assumptions underlying conventional age calculations.
Why I Wrote It
I wrote this paper for five reasons, and I state them plainly in the Author’s Note:
Academic: It’s a rigorous framework meant to be evaluated on its merits. The falsification criteria are real.
Apologetic: It gives believers an intellectually defensible structure for what they hold.
Evangelistic: It invites skeptics to engage the logic, not dismiss it.
Personal: It documents where my own reasoning led.
Methodological: It shows that theism can be evaluated as a research programme under the same standards as naturalism.
The Lakatosian audit in Section X compares the two frameworks head-to-head. Theism explains diverse data from a single core hypothesis. Naturalism requires separate, unconnected patches: brute fact for existence, multiverse for fine-tuning, evolutionary byproduct for morality, mass delusion for the Resurrection. One is consilient. The other is ad hoc.
The Bottom Line
The God of the System isn’t a god of the gaps. It’s the God of the logic, derived from the structure of reality and confirmed by historical evidence.
The argument is falsifiable. Find Jesus’ body. Demonstrate something from nothing. Show that contingent selection doesn’t require a selector. If any of these happen, the framework falls.
But the multiverse? It absorbs any evidence. It predicts everything by predicting nothing. Which framework is actually taking epistemic risks?
Read the full paper and decide for yourself: The God of the System (PDF)
I’m genuinely interested in critique. If the argument fails, I want to know where. That’s not rhetoric; it’s the only way to get closer to truth.
Soli Deo Gloria