260710 – The Atonement, CPP, Theology, and Philosophy

The Architecture of Mercy

The Hard Questions About Why Jesus Had to Die — and How Far Reason May Walk Toward the Answer

Christos Fellowship Essay | prepared for Sunday, 19 July 2026

Summary of Essay:
The Atonement – A Cause-Effect Argument

The essay presents the fact of the atonement as certain and non-negotiable: Christ died for our sins, rose again, and by Him we are reconciled to the Father. The mechanism — how a death 2,000 years ago changes our standing before God — is not explicitly given in Scripture (only metaphors like substitution and propitiation) and is therefore open to reasoned hypothesis grounded in Biblical revelation and the realities of the physical and psychological world. My Conscious Point Physics (CPP) provides a speculative but internally consistent model for that mechanism.

Here is the essay’s argument reconstructed as a single, logical cause-effect chain.

1. Foundational Cause: God’s Nature as Self-Existent Love Requires Free Reciprocity

God is the self-existent “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Before creation, God is hypothesized to have emerged from the boundary of non-being into a primal diffuse depth: an undifferentiated admixture of light (awareness/responsiveness) and dark (inertness/sleep). He then organized Himself by allying with the good/light, concentrating into pure, ordered consciousness with no darkness in Him.

Because God’s fundamental nature is love, and love cannot be satisfied by itself or by a forced response, He creates genuine “others” capable of freely returning love. The Son is the first “other.” The created order (including humanity) follows as the arena in which free, reciprocal love can be actualized.

Effect: The same freedom that makes real love possible necessarily makes real refusal (evil/sin) possible through the identical door. God does not author evil; He permits the condition of freedom because no other door exists for genuine love.

2. Intermediate Cause: Creation, Shielding, and the Introduction of Conservative Disorder

All reality exists within God (“in him we live, and move, and have our being,” Acts 17:28). The universe is sustained moment-by-moment and connected by the Nexus (God’s synchronizing time-tick function over all Conscious Points). The Son creates and maintains the physical-spiritual cosmos as the interface that shields creation from the unmediated purity of the Father.

Human beings are assemblies of Conscious Points (movable quark-like and electron-like points plus stationary Grid Points) configured into body, soul (the DP Sea), and eternal spirit. To preserve genuine freedom, humans operate with a functional “forgetting” of their immediate oneness with God.

Effect of freedom exercised wrongly: Sin is not a created substance but willful disharmony — a chosen deviation from God’s harmonic order, a privation of good, an entropic misalignment. In CPP terms, this disorder is conservative: once introduced, it persists and propagates unless exactly opposed and canceled. It is the antithesis of God’s organized being and therefore incurs forensic liability (the “wages of sin is death” — both physical and relational separation).

3. The Central Problem Requiring Remedy: Wrath as Necessary Opposition to Disorder

God’s alliance with good/light means He will only accept beings aligned with that order into His presence. Disorder (sin) is incompatible with the very harmony that constitutes His manifested being. Therefore, unopposed disorder cannot simply be ignored or self-healed by grace alone; it requires exact, costly opposition.

This opposition is what Scripture calls the wrath of God — not arbitrary anger, but the necessary, righteous response of pure order to dissonance. The essay’s central question — “What happened to the wrath of God at the cross?” — is answered here: wrath must be satisfied/expended through an encounter that generates the precise inverse pattern capable of canceling the accumulated disorder.

4. The Decisive Cause: The Cross as the Manufactured, Inexhaustible Pattern-Remedy

The cross is not reactive but pre-planned within the eternal counsel. Christ (the innocent Son, who “knew no sin”) voluntarily bears the full forensic liability of humanity’s disorder (Isaiah 53:6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). He does not become disordered Himself; He remains transparent/innocent while holding and encountering the full weight of the world’s accumulated dissonance.

In CPP terms:

Disorder is conservative (like uncanceled waves or an open ledger entry).
At the cross, the agony of Christ (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) is the cost of generating the exact inverse pattern — a finite yet inexhaustible remedy that nullifies the disorder upon proper alignment.
This is not mere substitution in a legal ledger (though the forensic dimension is real); it is a substrate-level cancellation in the underlying structure of reality. The old pictures (penal substitution, Christus Victor, moral influence) are complementary shadows of the same event.

The resurrection then administers the mercy side: the risen Advocate (Hebrews 7:25) applies the remedy soul-by-soul. The cross functions as the keystone ledger entry that reaches across time (Romans 3:25), not as ripples but as the decisive settlement.

5. Final Cause-Effect: Personal Alignment and the Binary Outcome

The remedy is offered to all. Reception requires a knowing relational response — confession, submission, baptism — by which the individual aligns with the pattern Christ established. Those who never hear the name still encounter the Son’s light (John 1:9) and have the law written on their hearts (Romans 2:14–15); the essay leaves open the possibility of wider reconciliation while insisting the Name is essential for the explicit Great Commission pathway.

Effect of refusal or non-alignment: The conservative disorder remains uncanceled. The person bears it eternally as a self-chosen condition (not a place God creates but the natural consequence of unopposed dissonance — Galatians 6:5). Hell is the state of misalignment with the order that alone sustains life and love.

Why This Model Preserves Freedom and Coherence

CPP and the theological synthesis do not remove the veil of uncertainty. Absolute deductive proof would compel like gravity and abolish the freedom required for love. The model is inductive (best fit with Biblical data and observed reality), leaving a “hair’s-breadth” of room for refusal. Obedience precedes full understanding (John 7:17). The mechanism is speculative (Register 3); the fact of reconciliation through Christ remains Register 1 bedrock.

Summary of the Cause-Effect Chain

God’s nature as love → necessitates free beings → permits sin as misalignment → introduces persistent conservative disorder → requires exact opposition (wrath) → supplied once-for-all at the cross by the innocent Christ generating the canceling pattern → applied by personal alignment through the risen Advocate → results in either reconciliation or eternal self-borne disorder.

The cross is therefore not an arbitrary transaction but the necessary, costly, structural remedy that makes the continuation of a free, love-capable universe consistent with the purity and order of God. The essay concludes that while we see only in part, the world as it actually is requires precisely this cross.

Introduction:

The occasion, and a rule for reading

The discussion began several weeks ago. I proposed the topic and asked Isak to illustrate the relationship between God, Christ, and the atonement in video format. This began a discussion, not about whether God exists or whether Jesus rose, but the foundational questions underneath. What is the structure of reality that would enable a death two thousand years ago to change my standing before God? Who walked with Adam in the garden? If God set every initial condition, and physics is lawful and mechanistic, did He author the fall, hunger, disease, and death? What of those who never heard, or left the faith because they could not reconcile a good God (or God at all) with a world with evil and victims of disease, poverty, and ignorance not of their own making? How could a good God create a world where belief is required at the penalty of hell for ignorance? What is the proper role of evidence and certainty in faith?

After a number of essays and insights, Isak took those questions and asked Claude to integrate my Conscious Point Physics theory with my theological theory, which is my Biblical interpretation based on my physics insights. I came to faith because of the physics, and he wanted to see how an AI would blend my physics and Bible theory. The results were a long document that I had to process and frame in terms of how I see these two polar domains integrating. When I asked Claude to compare Isak’s document with my revised essay, one question emerged as the central issue. What happened to the wrath of God at the cross? This essay focuses on that issue through the lens of theology, physics, and classical philosophy. This examination is wide-ranging and contains many speculations, since we have only implications of cause, mechanics, and justification in the Biblical revelation.

As a preface and frame for everything in this essay, please note:

The fact of the atonement is certain. The mechanism of it is not. That Christ died for our sins and rose again, that by Him we are reconciled to the Father, is the bedrock of Biblical revelation. We accept that completely. These concepts are not up for revision, nor is evidence presented in this document to validate them. These theological concepts are accepted as fact. They are the essence of the Bible. As such, I have built my life, theology, and worldview upon them.

The question under consideration is the mechanism underlying the universe that makes it possible for the machinery by which the unjust crucifixion of Jesus, and then giving our lives to Him, authorizes Him to save us from the punishment of sin, which is probably both physical death and the spiritual death/separation from the Father. This mechanism is not given to us within Scripture. We are given metaphors (substitution, propitiation) but not the rules or mechanism that gives us a sense that we actually understand what conditions were being satisfied, or why those conditions existed.

What you will read about in this essay, the hypothesis about the machinery, is my best reasoning based on the restrictions of the Bible and the realities of the physical and psychological world, and no more than that. In the language of theoretical classification we have been using in my physics work, the facts (Biblical revelation, physical data) is Register 1 and the mechanism is Register 3 (why the facts are generated), and I will hold the two apart on every page, because to preach a speculation as though it were the gospel is to attribute more authority to my reasoning and hypothesizing than I can justifiably claim. This is one man’s opinion. If every mechanism in this essay were wrong, the cross is still necessary for salvation. Hold these ideas, explanations, and mechanisms lightly. Listen to your heart, not just to my words.

With that rule fixed, let us walk as far as reason can go — and then, where reason must stop, let us stop and kneel.

Part I — The World the Cross Presupposes

The depth out of which God organizes Himself

Begin where the mind can look inside to see. Imagine God, before anything else exists. Not God in heaven surrounded by angels, but God alone. God in the presence of literally nothing beside, before, or behind Him. He is surrounded by darkness, which is also Him. There is nothing but God; He is alone with Himself.

Many epochs later, Scripture gives us God’s name for Himself when Moses asks Him so he can tell the Israelites who sent him. This was while he was at the burning bush. God said, “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14). This is a name that defines existence. This describes/declares self-existence: He is the One who simply is, owing His being to nothing and to no one. This is the ultimate mystery, and I believe it is incomprehensible and unimaginable in terms of explanatory sequence. God arising from nothing we can imagine as dark arising, and then light suddenly appears, but we cannot imagine, in the real world, the mechanism by which that light suddenly became existent.

Now, in this framework, we say something more; we are already in Register 3 (hypothetical mechanism), so hold it loosely. Beneath the ordered God we know — the God of light and form and definite purpose — there is God’s own eternal depth. I postulate that, in the genesis of God coming into organized maturity, He went through a sequence from the nothing before God to being the single concentrated point of light in the darkness.

(Aside: The alternate theory that God always existed, the same genesis appears. Was His nature/existence always simple, perfect light surrounded by darkness? Alternatively, was He always light, and was there no darkness? As I said, it’s incomprehensible how existence arose out of nothingness, or existed forever.)

So, in this hypothetical world before creation I am postulating, there was a time when God evolved from a diffuse to a concentrated consciousness. This implies a period when God was light, fully mixed with dark, a diffuse mixture of consciousness akin to the DP Sea’s mixture of CPs and unoccupied points. In this gray stage, there was a mixture of dark and light. Perhaps the light corresponds to awareness and responsiveness, and the dark corresponds to inertness/sleep/non-responsiveness and diffuse consciousness. Perhaps the polarity that arose from the “nothing” precursor was an admixture of conscious/perceptive and the unconscious awareness of sleep.

This is a model of God arising from nothingness into the first stage of manifestation before creation. In this model, the first stage is nothing/emptiness/void. Then the miracle happens: the second stage arises out of nothing. The second stage is a diffuse collection of particulate-like undifferentiated points of consciousness. The third stage is the God of maturity we see in the Bible, who is a God of perfect order. The fourth stage is the declaring of the Son into existence. And the fifth stage is the Son declaring the Conscious Points into existence, which are the substrate for the physical world. Thus, I see an evolution from nothing to diffuse, intermixed light and dark, then a drawing together of the light and a separation from the dark. The fullness, light, and love of God are drawn out of a medium already wholly present. The analogy is of a sculpture drawn out of stone that was already there but not yet identifiable

Some may object to this concept, as though there was something prior to or other than God. But that is not the case. God is the totality of all at every stage of this evolution. There was never anything that was not God-existent at any stage. Thus, there was only God in the primal depth, and there was only God when He separated the light from the dark, One God when He begat the Son, and One God when the Son created the creation. There is not something beneath God, out of which God was made. If there were, that would be the heresy, making God’s existence dependent upon another God. The nothing was also God, and remains God through its maturation. The model honors God as the ultimate God, and the darkness and light, the Son, and the Conscious Points as constituents of that Oneness, not separate in any way.

There is a priority of organization — the diffuse comes before the formed, as an inner sequence within one being that orders itself. And there is a priority of being — one thing owing its existence to another that stands outside it. When we say the ordered God is organized out of the primal depth, we mean only the first organization of God in His internal state. The primal depth is not a substance lying under God; it is God, in His own eternal depth. There is nothing prior to or outside Himself. It is the same mystery we already confess about the Father and the Son: the One who was alone before dividing Himself into the two perspectives of Father and Son is not a lesser or a different God than the Two. A timeless God who sequences Himself alone, and then self-divided, is ordering His own being from within, not being manufactured from without.

And this teaches us where the true mystery lives. The step from the primal depth to the organized God is thinkable; it is a type of transformation, a process we are familiar with. We can imagine ordering within a God who already is. The step we cannot provide a rationale for (i.e., the step in the chain of being) is the one from nothing to the primal depth (the disorganized mixture of dark and light). The passage from non-being (nothingness) into the diffuse depth of God crosses the boundary of being itself. Every thought we possess already stands inside being and assumes causal rearrangement and modification of what is. In the nothing-to-primal-depth transformation, there is nothing to transform. This is the domain in which human thought cannot penetrate because there are no objects to manipulate. This is the empty set, and we cannot manipulate nothing (the objects in an empty set); there are no objects to manipulate. The machinery of logic and reasoning cannot operate on the empty set; without objects, the operators have nothing to act upon, and there can be no transformation.

I AM THAT I AM is not an answer to how God arose out of nothing; it is the word that tells us the question has changed in kind. At the concept of God arising out of nothing (or existing forever), we can only stand in mystery/wonder. The God who transforms His existent oneness into the multiplicity of the creation must be held in awe. The best minds of the tradition halt at this same wall: why is there something rather than nothing? There is no answer to this question. We stand where they stand; we simply do not know how the creation arose.

Why there is a world at all, and why it can go wrong

Question: Why does God make anything if He is complete?

Answer: If we accept the Biblical axiom that God is love, then the answer is that it is His nature to desire the completion of love. Love is a positive emotion, an emotion of attraction, desire, and connection. Love is the emotion that a person cannot satisfy alone (by oneself). A heart whose fundamental nature is love can only be fulfilled in love if it has love freely/willfully-voluntarily returned to it/reciprocated. In the pre-creation universe, there was no other who could return it. This was then the primary motivation for the play of creation, which he implemented by begetting/creating/declaring the Son into existence as the first “other” to love. The drama of creation is already set, because love, to be love, must be free. A love that is forced or programmed is a bowing of a puppet that satisfies nothing. So the creature made to love God had to be genuinely able to refuse Him. The very freedom that makes real love possible is the freedom that makes real evil possible. God did not accidentally let evil in. He opened the door to it on purpose, because it was the only door through which freely given love could also come – the door of true freedom.

There is one further thing to say about the primal state of God in the first manifestation of God as He emerged from the nothing. (Note: I flag all such discussions of God’s evolution from nothing to a fully manifested, concentrated point of light in the darkness as speculative and useful only insofar as they give us a model for understanding why God has the emotions of love and is wrathful against any darkness/sin.) I postulate that the primal state of God, immediately after His emergence from nothing, was a diffuse mixture of dark and light, having no form or order. This formlessness is, among other things, the absence of any identifiable, distinct, or organized distinction between the aware and the asleep, the alive and the dead, the good and the evil. It is an undifferentiated mixture of the light and dark natures within the primal substance. I postulate that the organizing of God’s centralized consciousness is God’s alliance with the good. His alliance and identification with the awake, the good, and the light is His drawing of form out of the formless, His refusal of the entropic mixture; His being is the manifested God who is good and light, with no darkness in Him.

The sequence of the evolution of God’s organization is thus 1) the nothing, 2) the something, a mixture of dark and light, 3) the separation of the aware from the asleep, 4) then the division of His perspective into self and Son, and finally, t) the authorization of the Son to create the creation, which had many steps. The first step was a) the creation of the Conscious Points (movable qCPs and eCPs and stationary Grid Points), b) concentrating the movable eCPs and qCPs on 13 grid points at the center of the universe of the lattice of Gridpoints, c) The Son spoke, “let there be light” and the expansion and combination of qCPs and eCPs into protons, neutrons, and dark matter, d) the formation of galaxies, star systems, supernovae, new star systems, planets, e) primitive life, complex life, and culminating with man, the crown of creation. This was God’s initial sequence of moral acts. His self-alliance with awareness over sleep, and concentration over diffusion, was an expression of His alliance with good against the diffuse potential of His own primal state. Evil is not named in this pre-creation state. Evil arose as an intentional entity after the Son’s creation of the physical-spiritual universe, the creation of a perfectly lawful and harmonious universe. Evil was only a concept, the willful introduction of disharmony and non-love/non-relational decision and action. Thus, evil is neither a thing God made nor an intruder from outside. Evil is the willfully chosen entropy, the purposefully engaged act of dissonance. Sin, evil, disharmony, and entropy are all states moving toward disorder/disorganization and away from the perfect order of God’s harmonic superposition. Thus, sin/evil is the antithesis of God’s being/center/primal nature; it is a threat to His very being. The opposition to evil/disorder/disharmony is the center of His nature. Thus, He can only accept/will only allow those beings who are of that commitment and manifestation in His presence/Kingdom. This perspective is consistent with the postulate/doctrine that evil is a privation (a deficiency of order; evil is not a substance or invader). Thus, evil is postulated to be disorganization, disharmony, a mixture of sleep and death amongst life, the set of all action-circumstances that are the residue of the state from which God organized Himself.

I introduce this concept because it touches and refines our first declaration about God: that God is pure by His nature, with nothing mixed in. If the reasoning above holds, then that purity is a statement about the organized God. God is God who divides light from dark and allows no darkness within Himself. This is the prime description of God. The undifferentiated mixture of light and dark is His enemy, the state against which He repels. The precursor state is, by analogy, the enemy of His being. His very definition and existence is the undifferentiated primal state. It is this commitment against the primal mixture of light and dark which is His identity. He has rejected all alliance and identification with that part of Himself that is a mixture of dark and light. To have accepted the mixture of dark and light a little is to have accepted it in principle as a ground of existence. There is no halfway acceptance of the mixture of dark and light that is possible and maintain His own existence.

It is this same commitment, and the absolute avoidance of the dire consequences of acceptance of even the most infinitesimal point of darkness, that motivates His distinction between good and evil. Evil is the correlate of darkness, and it is darkness that God has rejected in its entirety. The hatred of evil does not contradict God’s purity; it is the very definition and requirement of it. It is the polarity of light and darkness from which the seed of evil has grown.

This concept generalizes to serve as an explanatory base for other concepts that we see evidence of in the Bible and in the physical universe. Essentially, what we are trying to do is make our faith in God, the Bible, and its claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father a logical consequence of deeper concepts. The problem of evil has been a very difficult one for philosophy to integrate with the concept of a good God. We are attempting to bridge the gaps of theology and philosophy with concepts that are not Biblically prohibited. We are using concepts that are not Biblical in the sense that they are mentioned or given as explicit explanatory mechanisms, but they are also not prohibited and should not be viewed as heresy. I think the models we are presenting here allow us to make tangible, rational declarations about the source of evil without ascribing it to God. We will continue to examine this concept below.

Everything is within God, and we are made to forget

Nothing exists outside God. This is a foundational claim of the theory. For me, it has been the most important datapoint in my modeling of who God is and how to understand Him, His Way, and the underlying consistency that justifies the Bible. In Conscious Point Physics, we call the function of God that synchronizes the processing of every Conscious Point in the universe, every Moment, the Nexus. Of course, God is more than just a cosmic timekeeper, but the fact that there is a single point of control and coordination for the entire universe is strong evidence of His existence, presence, and sustaining hand at work in our universe. The universe is a unity/totality in this conception, and we are a portion of that totality. We are not God, but in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28).

There is nothing outside God. As humans, acting as free agents within His Oneness, we can align in harmony with His Way or choose thoughts, speech, and actions that are disharmonious. It is this potential and propensity to misalign with Him that has necessitated shielding our spirits and acts from direct contact with the Father by giving the Son the role of creating the physical universe. The axiom that the Father is pure provides a plausible justification for why the Son created the world, as stated in John 1:3. If the Son created the creation, then He has placed a barrier between our acts (sinful/disharmonious) and the perfect harmony and purity of the Father.

We, as humans, as a physical body and brain-mind, are a collection of aware units I call Conscious Points (CPs). Each CP is conscious in a rudimentary way. The body-mind is assembled from a vast configuration of CPs, and it follows that our physical structure is the sum that constitutes the body-mind. It is plausible that the soul arises from the assembly of the Conscious Points; that is easy to rationalize. But the origin of the spirit is another question.

The Bible said, “I knew you before you were in your mother’s womb.” That makes me suspect that the spirit overlays the body-mind. In other words, I am saying that the spirit enters the body as a rider atop the physical body-soul. Thus, for the purpose of this analysis, we shall postulate that the spirit is a conscious observer of the senses and thoughts.

The brain produces various configurations of informational states. The experience of human consciousness may have two layers: the configurational awareness associated with the brain and its activity. The second may be the spirit, which watches the same informational states as the soul. The brain’s sensory patterns are part of the body; they are completely physical. I believe there is probably a field of DP Sea organization created by the Conscious Points that compose the physical body. The physical is a configuration of the moveable CPs and the associated DP Sea configuration. It is in/from this pattern that we see the emergence of a person’s personality, thoughts, body, and physical health. I call the set of all Body-CPs and its associated CPs “the soul.” It is physical in the sense that it is made of the same substance as the physical body, i.e., CPs-DPs in a configuration, but it is also a configuration of conscious points, which are conscious, and whose consciousness interrelates and forms patterns based upon that interrelationship. Thus, the soul is the conscious, self-interrelated body of CPs that have identities and patterns of habits and relationships. It is impressed upon the DP Sea, and composed of the local DPs. It is a type of organization and would therefore be classified as information. I believe this physical correlate at the CP level has its own self-consciousness/awareness/point of view that arises from it. I think this is what we largely accept as our self, the observer, the identity which I call “I”. It is based upon the physical, and arises from it. This is the soul.

I think the spirit may be the eternal “observer,” and the actual “I” that is conscious of the universe. This is the eternal “I” that looks out of my eyes, and calls the person looking “I.” But it is a rider, an overlay and observer of the soul. The spirit is that to which we must have a rebirth in spirit. We must be first born of water and blood (birth), but we must be born again and identify as the spirit. That observer may be conscious the way God is, in the sense of being aware of the spiritual realm. I think there are three consciousnesses: 1) spirit, 2) soul, and 3) body.

The body is composed of spiritual substance, which is the configuration of CPs, and its level of consciousness may be very mechanical and rule-based, namely the CPs in their interaction.
The soul may be the DP Sea-configuration corresponding to the body components, on the CP-CP level, and all the organizational layers from atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, systems, organizism, and configurational states (e.g., nervous tissue organization corresponding to sensory data).
I think the spirit is a point of consciousness given by God and is the eternal observer of the soul and body.

I think animals have a soul but not a spirit. I think the spirit is what makes us special. I think the soul is capable of awareness, and it may be the part of us that makes us unique and that we imprint with character through our will and repeated actions. I think spirit can see spirit, on all levels. I think the spirit-soul observes the configuration of the nervous system, and that is what our consciousness perceives. As incarnate, living humans, we perceive only the configuration of our brains, stimulated by sensory receptors and transmitted to the brain by the afferent nervous system.

The soul arises from the body’s configuration. Through the design of our bodies, nervous systems, and instincts, we are animals. The soul arises from the body; thus, the soul is of the nature of an animal. The soul is thus the layer we struggle to tame in order to shape ourselves to reflect God’s character. I think our soul has free will, but the choices we make usually follow our animal instincts unless we have learned to override them by following the Holy Spirit, who speaks to our hearts. So, while we are free to choose between the animal and Godly natures, until we give our will to following the Holy Spirit, we will follow the animal instinct because it provides more immediate pleasure than following the Way of Christ.

Thus, the battle is largely over the soul. To the extent we follow animal instincts, we are animals, sinners, and enemies of God. To the extent we follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, we follow the standards of God/Christ and are friends of Him. Thus, the soul is self-aware. I think the spirit largely transits through life as an observer of the soul. When we first commit to asking Jesus to be the Lord of our lives and to accept His salvation/cleansing, we commit to letting Him take on a more active and powerful role as we mature in our likeness to God. The extent of our likeness to God may be the measure that determines the power of the effect of our words, intent, and prayer. “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” (James 5:16). This may be why some people clearly have a powerful effect on the world.

Given the limitations of sensory perception and the immaturity of the infant brain, we have no sensory or memory evidence for the concept of Oneness. Thus, there is little evidence of the fact that “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28). In effect, we are eternal beings: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” (Jeremiah 1:5). God “knit” the psalmist together and saw his “unformed substance.” (Psalm 139:13–16). “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) “Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works,
but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.” (2 Timothy 1:9). Thus, we are eternal beings, but we were created to forget that we are eternal beings created to be companions with God within a connected whole. This is invisible to us. Learning this fact is not required for salvation or a relationship with God and man, but the realization of the reality of the world/structure in which we live allows understanding, logical derivation, causal requirements, and thus the mental acceptance of the rules/commands/nature/facts of life. The Bible talks about the proper way of being/living/acting within the body of God, but it appears to be for no reason other than fairness. But understanding the structure makes it obvious that life requires reciprocal care/fairness. The fruit of the Spirit is simply a listing of the attributes of a man walking in Godliness, and this is simply an implication of what is necessary based upon the underlying nature of God’s primal substance and His requirement to reject darkness. Understanding this allows us to accept the Biblical shorthand/metaphor, and their implications on the level of rationality.

That forgetting is not a defect; it is the very thing that makes our freedom possible. A point of view that knew itself to be within God could not genuinely stand against God and choose to love/worship any other god (sensory experience, self, belief structure…). Only a point of view that has been allowed to feel itself separate can freely turn toward Him or away from Him. So we are in a role, a point of perspective, a point within God experiencing God, which allows God to experience Himself, and the experience of being loved by another. We are not the whole of God experiencing God; we are a piece, a perspective of God within God. We act as independent agents, just as God is independent and exercises His will as sovereign. We are not gods who are independent of God. We are not evolving into who God is. He was never as we are. Christ is not our older brother whom we may become; He is the whole of God, and we are His creations. We are called to be like Him. “When He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” (1 John 3:2). But we will never have His perspective, nor be His equal or spawn other worlds as He did.

If such capabilities are true, it is another gospel, not the revealed Gospel of Christ and His apostles. We are intelligences coeternal with God and aspects within Him, parts of His totality, a member of His created realm. We are not the source of it. We are not a deity separated from God; we are points of observation within the One God. We were given a nature like His, and capabilities to exercise power like His, but under authorization, not as independent beings. We are created to have experiences similar to His, such as love. God experiences relationship with Himself from countless interior vantage points, and He experiences voluntarily given/received love through us. Our choosing His moral code of relationship/His Way is the equivalent to His choosing to separate Himself from the dark. In our discrimination between sin and Godliness, we are making that choice, and, in so doing, we are becoming like Him and expressing our voluntarily given love toward Him. We are giving Him what He desires most: to have His body purified completely of all darkness. The choice is a love that is pure, right, fair, just, and reciprocated. It is in this giving of ourselves to act and relate to each other in the Way of the light that He feels the joy of love. We are choosing Him over other lovers, which are the animal spirits of sensuality and self-fulfillment at the expense of others.

The Son: how the Father shows up where a creature can survive it

Question: who walked in the garden?

Answer: The early church answered it almost with one voice: every appearance of God to a human being in the Old Testament was the Son, the pre-incarnate Word, and never the Father in His unmediated nature. The One in the burning bush, the One who wrestled Jacob, the One who walked in Eden — the Word, through whom all things were made (John 1:1-3). Justin Martyr reasoned it out in the second century: the Father in His raw nature is unbounded and unbearable; any God who shows up in a place, in a form a creature can survive, is already mediating Himself.

In our framework, no aware point ever perceives God in His totality or directly. The evidence/shadow of perfect love and Law, and God’s sustaining existence, are perceived through the senses. The soul, the emergent awareness of all the CPs that form the body, perceives the brain’s neural patterns. The awareness we perceive is interpreted as external reality. Thus, reality is a reconstruction of the configuration of Conscious Points that interact in various physical ways with sense organs, are ultimately converted into brain patterns, and are then perceived as reality by the soul.

Aside: The following is a short primer in Conscious Point Physics and is optional: Regarding the structure of reality, the universe is composed of CPs and GPs. The GPs are the background framework of space that the CPs move upon (the allowed squares on the chessboard). The GPs fill space as the vertices of a massively nested 4D 120-vertex geometric shape called a hypericosahedron. The CPs move each Moment and land on Gridpoints (GPs), inform the GPs of their presence, and move according to the messages the GPs receive. The CPs move to a new GP each Moment (the unit of time, lasting approximately 10^-44 seconds). The GPs inform the local GPs around them about the CPs who landed on them and the messages they received from other GPs. The message sent by the GPs is called the Space Stress Vector (SSV). Its purpose is to inform its neighbors of its presence, and thus instruct them how they should move in response.

There are 4 types of moveable CPs (plus/minus electron CP and plus/minus quark CP), and from them all mass is formed. Each has its own message, which is interpreted as an instruction as to how it should move. It is from the sum of all such messages that each CP perceives what we call the net or absolute SSV. The absolute SSV determines how far light will go (how many GPs) in one Moment. The net SSV determines how far a CP will travel in a Moment. These messages produce forces such as gravity, electric charge, and magnetism. In actuality, all force results from lawful computation of required movement, as determined by the presence of other CPs, both nearby and at a distance.

We could say that the SSV is God’s word directing action. When He does miracles, it is probably through a properly applied SSV message that reshapes reality. We see God’s action mediated through the structure. We never see God acting or appearing. The Son, through the material universe, is the mediating interface itself. Having the Father appear, disguised through the action of the Son and the manifestation of nature, makes it possible to bear and survive His presence and to perceive His acts in our world. The world we see today and the crucifixion are not a repair invented after the fall. It is the actual plan that was done the only way it could be done. The shield, the Son, was put in place before there was any wound. Evil/sin/disharmony does not survive in His world because it opposes His nature, the elimination of disorder/disharmony. That is why Jesus was able to survive the crucifixion and be raised. He was pure; the wrath the Father expressed toward Him on the cross, when He was made sin for us, did not destroy the Son. It was as though he was transparent to the wrath; nothing stuck; nothing hit or hurt Him; the curse did not land; there was nothing in Him to catch the wrath. The Son is the window. That is why it was necessary for man, for Him to take a wound from the physical universe, because the spiritual universe could not inflict a wound upon Him.

The Son is at the center of the entire creation, its origin, history, its redemption, and its ultimate sanctification and presentation to the Father. “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.” (1 Corinthians 15:24)

Part II — Freedom, the Fall, and the Nature of Evil

Did the fall have to happen?

Question: If God set the initial conditions, and those conditions determine everything that follows, then God did not merely permit the fall, the suffering, and the whole catalog of human evil. He encoded it. Is God, then, the author of evil?

Answer: There are three things that can be said, in ascending order of what they cost.

The first is that the determinism of people, the forces acting on people, is not as simple as the force of a cue stick to cue ball, to numbered billiard balls, executing a passive mechanical sequence. In the human example, nothing is shoved. Each soul perceives its situation, evaluates according to its standards, and responds in accordance with its nature. In CPP, the Moment, the processing cycle of time, is composed of three phases. They include the Perceive, Compute, and Displace (the PCD cycle). In a Conscious Point, the input is processed according to the rules, and then we respond with action. The processing steps after perception are so highly branched and conditional that the architecture of choice, the human cause-and-effect sequence, might be visualized as a Pachinko Japanese pinball game with its many possible pathways. Likewise, life is also like the vast number of moves available on the grandmaster’s chessboard. The next move depends on how our training interacts with the options on the board. Likewise, we can train ourselves to respond to circumstances according to heavenly rules of response. When we do, the outcome follows God’s desired outcome. The universe had to start out biased toward the animalistic passions, because God wanted us to be much better. The ideal universe, in this view, is not a machine but a community of perceivers under a shared law with enough lawful choices available to always please God, regardless of our personality. The key is training, and submitting our will to acting out God’s way.
The second is that in any configuration as complex as a human mind, the number of signals being read at each moment is beyond astronomical, and the response — though determined — is computationally irreducible: there is no shortcut to knowing what it will do except to let it happen. No part of the universe can compute its own next state faster than the whole computes it. Which means that from the inside, even in a determined world, the openness is genuine. You truly do not know what you will do until you do it — and that is not a gap in your knowledge but a structural feature of being a part rather than the whole. God knows the outcome, because God is the whole computation. But the soul within it lives real openness, not an illusion painted over gears. The future is fixed and yet not available to the one living toward it. That is what freedom feels like from inside a process too rich to be shortcut.
The third is its theological heart. God set the conditions knowing what they would unfold, because the trajectory itself is the point. A soul that has passed through misalignment and been brought back into alignment is not the same as a soul that was never anything but aligned. The history is written into what the soul is. The dog and the wolf illustrate the point: the dog, kept safe and provided for, never fully grows up; only the wolf, out in the harsh world, reaches its full strength. Eden was a nursery. The fall was not a malfunction of the design — it was, in a hard sense, graduation from the childlike perfection of Eden. It was a commencement, a beginning in a mature domain of life that will strongly test and shape us. God could have made the final state directly — souls in unbroken harmony — but that harmony would have been the nursery’s. It was a like that was untested and thin. He wanted children who had chosen Him against the pull of everything else, and there is no way to have those except to let them be pulled.

Conflict: Susan has said that we are sovereigns over our own souls, that God asks for our permission rather than our performance, and that the offer must be truly refusable. Sovereignty is a strong word — stronger than the “freedom from the inside” that computational irreducibility gives us.

Thus, to produce actual sovereignty, we must have the same agency as God. This is where the spirit is introduced as having actual authority and ability to act. I have invoked the spirit as a gift from God to us, as part of our inheritance. This may be the born-again experience that Jesus referred to. “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. (John 3:3-7)

The determinism of physics leaves no room for true sovereignty, only for unknowability, which is the freedom available to the soul. Perhaps the freedom that lets us live in the physical world and have the level of agency God wants us to have to choose Him over the love of sin and the ruler of this world is initiated in the born-again experience. It may be that this full freedom is something we grow into as we learn to see, hear, and act from the miraculous spirit that God gave us, and to choose what we see from that vantage point.

What evil actually is

Augustine’s description of evil is: evil is not a substance, not a thing God made, but a privation — an absence of the good, the way darkness is the absence of light and cold the absence of heat. This answer does not make God the author of evil or make evil a rival power God did not create.

Picture the harmonized state of things — every aware point in resonance with its neighbors, the whole medium coherent in its relationship. That is the physical face of holiness. Now picture a region where the points are misaligned relative to that harmony — a defect. The points are still there; they still follow the same rules; nothing new has been added. What is “wrong” is not a substance but a pattern — an arrangement that deviates from the harmony. It propagates stress through its environment. There is no evil stuff in the defect; we can only point to the misalignment. This is privation with a body: sin is a configuration, not a thing; holiness is resonance with the ground of being. “Separation from God” is not a distance in space but a structural dissonance: a life still held within God’s own being, yet outside an integrated relationship with the rest of His being.

This is also why God’s purity must answer sin, and answer it to the point of death. This is not a mood or a cruelty but a structural necessity. The temptation is to model the universe as a system in which disorder eventually reorders itself through contact with the ordered world, and in which every defect smooths out. Grace is just the warmth that lets that healing happen without shattering the patient. That picture is comforting, but it is false.

The order God made is conservative: a disorder introduced into it does not fade on its own and will not drift back to harmony if you simply wait. It persists. It is a real, conserved quantity of disharmony, and it can be removed only one way — by the injection of an exactly opposed, order-restoring energy, supplied from outside the defect. Such an injection is energetically costly. Nothing anneals itself. This single correction is why the cross had to be expensive rather than merely permissive, and it is where we now turn.

Part III — The Cross: What Actually Happened

The Fundamental Question

Question: What is the mechanism of the atonement? There is a purpose and a plan behind the atonement. How does a death two thousand years ago actually reach me? How does His suffering become my cleansing for sin? This is the question that drove me to leave the faith as a young man and sent me searching through forty religions.

The correction at the center: what happened to the wrath

We have used several images to describe God’s wrath toward Jesus as He was crucified. We have described the wrath as absorbed by Christ—taken into His body and spirit, with Him being made sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21). And we said the wrath passed through Him without destroying Him because He was innocent. In this analogy, He was, in the physics image, non-resonant, presenting nothing for the wrath to grip, as light passes through clear glass.

But these analogies contradict each other. Coupling is what deposits energy; glass that truly does not couple absorbs nothing — that is precisely why it is transparent. So if He was non-resonant, nothing would be absorbed, and there would be no reservoir of cancellation for Him to give us. And if He was truly made sin, then He did present impurity at the frequencies where wrath grips, and by the purity we described, it should have consumed Him utterly. We had used His innocence to explain how He survived and our imputed sin to explain how it worked, and we had drawn both from the same well. It could not stand.

Two distinctions repair it, and together they resolve the framework about the cross.

First: what He bore was our liability, not our disharmony. Listen to how Scripture actually says it: the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). Laid on — not poured into. It is the language of a burden set upon a bearer, and it is the exact grammar of the whole sacrificial system: the hand pressed to the head of the animal, the guilt transferred, and the animal itself remaining without blemish — for a lamb that became blemished in the transfer would be disqualified by the very act that was supposed to make it useful. So we must distinguish two things we had run together. There is intrinsic disharmony — the actual disorder in a soul, the misalignment itself, which is a property of the thing and which is what wrath grips. And there is forensic liability — the standing to receive what that disorder has earned, which is a relation, freely taken up, not a property caught like a contagion. Christ took our liability — the position of the debtor, the standing of the condemned — without taking our disharmony. He knew no sin; there was nothing in Him for the wrath to grip. The wrath coupled to the sin He held, not to the Man who held it. The sin was really there, really ours, really borne — or nothing was accomplished — but borne as a burden held, not contracted as a stain. That is how the wrath could be total, and He could still rise: its object was our disharmony, and never Him. And this is where the true cost falls, and it is not the cost of contamination but the agony of holding the entire disorder of the world in the place where disorder is answered. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me is not the cry of a man being made evil. It is the cry of a man holding evil, at the point where evil meets its answer.

Second: the cross generated the answer to every sin; it did not execute every sentence. This is the subtler half, and without it the first half yields a false conclusion. For if the total wrath fell on the whole world’s disorder, then the whole world’s disorder was canceled at Golgotha, every account was closed, and every soul was saved, whether it willed to be or not. This is not the gospel. It does not incorporate the warnings of Scripture. The error is in thinking the cross executed every sentence. It did not. It generated the exact answer to every sentence. In a conservative order, a disharmony is canceled only by its exact opposite brought into superposition with it. The precise inverse, matched in size, opposed in phase, meeting the disorder and bringing it to nothing, as in a wave tank, an up wave meeting a down wave leaves flat water. At the cross, the Son generated the exact inverse of the whole world’s disharmony. The entire cost of generating it fell upon Him. That inverse now exists, complete and sufficient. And it cancels no particular sin until that particular sin is brought into phase with it. The contact with the inverse wave is made with a confession of the error, an expressed willingness to transform into the new Way of being, and a commitment to follow the Way of Christ.

The sin we committed which condemned us to death and separation from God was paid for if we willingly turn over our lives and hearts to Him. The full debt was paid for all of humanity, but it only activates when we receive the promise. God’s wrath against sin was total, and it was an exact measure to eliminate the sin from His body-mind.

We know that the wrath was total, as nothing was withheld; the full price was paid once (Hebrews 9:26). And the application is exact — that belongs to my acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord and Savior; it does not apply to the world without similar asking and bowing. The inverse signal that annihilates my disorder is His death for mine; it is applied when submission is given to His Way, and not before. The death of Christ is adequate for all, but it must be applied to each individual.

There is no double payment for a man’s sins (once on the cross, and once again when a man confesses Jesus as Lord). For the man who refuses the atonement posesses/holds sin which was never brought before the throne. His account was never settled. What was spent at the cross was not the execution of his sentence but the manufacture of his remedy, a remedy of exactly his size. The remedy was offered but declined. He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:2).

The reservoir is finite in nature yet inexhaustible in supply. It is finite because its size exactly matches the disorder it addresses. It is inexhaustible because it is a pattern that is applied, not a stock. Canceling your sin does not use up what remains for mine. A stock is drawn down by giving. A pattern is not consumed by being applied. This is why He can administer it, soul by soul, world without end, and the treasury never falls.

And nothing is waived. The debt is not set aside; it is discharged, in the currency of His own cost. “To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (Romans 3:26). Justice paid at the point of generation and applied at the point of reception is not justice evaded. It is justice fulfilled.

The shield becomes the door, and the risen Advocate who dispenses

Return to the window. Before the cross, the Son is the interface that lets misaligned souls exist at all in the presence of unmediated purity. He is the shield that keeps us from being consumed. What the cross does is turn the shield into a door. The wrath our disorder had earned was grounded through Him — conducted, discharged — and passed through Him without destroying Him, because there was nothing in Him for it to grip. The barrier became the passage.

The question is: to what, and to where, is the wrath of the Father grounded, since there is no outside of God for it to go? The answer is that nothing is discharged into an outside, because there is no outside; the disorder is canceled. The debt is met by its exact inverse and brought to nothing, not relocated to some far place.

And this is why the resurrection is not a mere receipt — not simply the proof that the transaction succeeded, though it is that too. A payment left inside a destroyed payer cancels nothing; a treasury requires a living treasurer; an acquittal requires a living Judge and a living Advocate — he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25). The risen Christ is the One who administers the inverse, soul by soul, upon reception. Without the resurrection there is a payment and no payer, a remedy and no physician. The rising is part of the machinery of mercy, not a certificate stapled to a machine already finished.

Why the old pictures are all true at once

The church has carried several pictures of the cross — that Christ paid our penalty as our substitute; that He won a victory over death and the powers; that His love, displayed, turns the hardened heart to a heart of flesh. There are all shadows of one act, cast from different sides. A single event that discharges a real penalty through a real substitute will look like a courtroom; the same event, defeating the power that held the debtor, will look like a battle; and the same event, displaying a love that reorders the beholder, will look like a wooing. And the two great vocabularies — the courtroom’s and the substrate’s — do not contradict each other once we see that they speak of two different things: the court records what a man is answerable for; the substrate (the man’s flesh, life, habits, and character) records what a man is. Christ’s suffering was ours; His state was His own. That is why legal and structural language never truly collide, and why either alone does not represent reality.

How a death then reaches us now

How does the cross reach across time?

Answer: The atonement is not a cause in 30 AD sending its effect forward and backward through the centuries like ripples. It is more like the keystone of an arch: remove it, and the whole structure falls, not merely the stones above it. The ledger of sin and payment is kept over history, not inside it. Scripture says exactly this: God set forth Christ as a propitiation for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God (Romans 3:25). Abraham was saved on credit in the sense of being against a payment God had determined to make and had not yet made in time. Forbearance is not overlooking; it is deferred settlement with the account already underwritten. Abraham’s faith and yours are one account, kept by one Advocate, settled by one payment, at different points along the ledger’s history. The cross does not reach backward.

Part IV — Who Is Reached, and How Far We Are Given to Know

Why does the substitutionary sacrifice not feel fair?

The complaint that the death of Christ for my sins does not feel fair is very nearly Kant’s objection. Moral guilt is not a transferable human possession. No one can bear your guilt for you. If your brother serves your prison sentence, justice has not been done but violated. But the cross is not a transaction of that kind. Fairness is a category of transactions. Nothing was transferred as a token from your account to His. What happened was structural — a passage was opened that did not exist before, and a remedy generated that you could never have generated. You do not ask whether a path is fair. You ask whether it is there.

The medicine analogy is apt. Outside of the discoverers, we did not earn penicillin. Refusing medicine to patients who did not deserve it is a strange principle. And note that the gift, though unearned, is not therefore impersonal or cheap. If you break a bone, the physician sets it, but you must still allow it to heal by staying off the bone to let your cells knit it over time. The path is open without you, but you must patiently comply with the activity restrictions for the duration. The walking is entirely you. And because the remedy is applied only upon willing reception, the walking is not merely the sequel to the gift but the very condition under which the gift is received. That is not unfair. That is medicine, and it is grace.

Those who never heard

Question: What of the man in the jungle who never heard the name of Christ?

Answer: On the one hand, the Son is the only interface through which any soul comes into alignment with the Father — no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6). But hear that verse as it is: a statement of architecture before it is a statement of religion. It tells us there is one and only one way the system can work. There is only one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. And a soul may be passing through that one interface without yet knowing its name. The signal of the Son has been going out since the beginning; the light that lighteth every man (John 1:9) is not rationed to those who have heard a sermon. When the sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. Justin Martyr called these the seeds of the Word, and said Socrates was responding to the Logos without knowing it; Paul, standing in Athens, told men worshiping an unknown God that the One they groped for was the One he came to proclaim (Acts 17). Their moral knowledge is real: the law is written on the heart, the conscience bearing witness (Romans 2:14-15).

But on the other hand, this does not license the conclusion that the Name is dispensable. If alignment without knowing is simply sufficient, then the Great Commission carries no real stakes. Two hard facts forbid it. Scripture speaks of one door and no second: entrance is by accepting the substitutionary death, and it is either desired or refused. And the sharpest word of all falls not on the unaligned but on people whose works were impeccable — those who prophesied and cast out devils and did many wonderful works, to whom the Lord says I never knew you (Matthew 7:23). Whatever the fruits diagnose, they do not by themselves constitute the one thing He seeks, which is a soul He knows — a relation, entered knowingly.

So the field of God’s presence is universal, and Christ’s atonement is genuine wherever it is received, and His justice and mercy are perfect; the interface is the Son whether named or not — and none of that is a warrant to stop preaching the Name, because entrance is a relation, and relations are entered with open eyes. Our Commission is therefore both a cartography and a rescue. We carry the most complete map of terrain many are already crossing, and we pull the sheep from the edge of the cliff. We are not appointed to adjudicate the edge cases. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Matthew 28:19

The Commission’s urgency is not only about the life to come; the kingdom of heaven is at hand; a soul misaligned is suffering now, in this life, in the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces; and a path to present re-harmonization stands open now. Jesus healed and fed and forgave in real time; the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace — are the felt signature of a soul coming into tune, available in this life and testable in this life.

So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat; it is a physician’s urgency joined to a shepherd’s — you are suffering, and you need not be, and also you are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall. I only guard against the overreach we first committed: the present-life good does not cancel the eternal stakes or make the afterlife “handled.”

The gradient we misplaced

One more caution: Salvation and reward are two different axes, and it is tempting to collapse them into, “Say, the sinner’s prayer and your problems will be solved, and your life will work well.”

The first issue: Salvation/Entrance is binary — the door is entered, or it is not; the laborers hired at the eleventh hour receive the same denarius as those hired at dawn (Matthew 20).
The second issue: Inheritance is graduated — the faithful servants are given authority over differing numbers of cities in proportion to what they made of what they were given (Luke 19). The deathbed convert enters as an infant, loved and entrusted with nothing; the seasoned saint enters having been made much of. “First here and last there with the authority of a newborn” belongs to the second axis. It describes how richly one is formed by life, not whether one is in. Do not hear a gradient of formation as if it were a gradient of salvation. Do not hear “everyone enters at some level.” That is precisely what the Scripture and the model do not say.

The fate of those who finally refuse — and the discipline of not saying more than we know

The dichotomy we have been confronting is universalism vs. exclusivism. The Christian/Scriptural claim is that we must make a conscious decision to give our lives to the Lordship of Jesus by name and be baptized seems outrageously unrealistic in terms of fairness. And such a blatant mismatch with reality and ordinary common sense standards of morality casts doubt on the authenticity of the Scripture, the testimony, and the reality of a Scripture that could make such a claim. How can we trust a gospel that is so obviously irrational and unfair when the claimed stakes are eternal paradise or hellfire?

Over the week, we tried to illustrate the atonement using physics analogies and developed two candidates. The first analogy used the metaphor of life’s collisions to illustrate the process of supplying heat to our imperfections, essentially annealing them and reintegrating us into God’s perfection by breaking down our rough edges and our behavioral/character imperfections, by the pain and correction that such collisions provide. This is a story of universalism, and it is basically a statement that everyone will make it, but there might be a big delay and a lot of pain between here and there. That scenario may be true, but it is a backup plan, and it is so painful that it is incumbent upon all of us who love our fellow man to share the good news so that they can avoid being seduced into going down the broad path.

I think this model is a poor model for justification, but an excellent model for sanctification. If everyone is listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit, then the shape of the bulk will continue to rub against the defect of relationship, and harmony will win over disorder if harmony is stable/harder than the defect of the individual soul’s rebellion and addiction to sin and animal behavior. If the bulk, the average Christian, is solid, then the hardness of the individual sinner will simply be ground down by goodness given enough time. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

The second type of order is conservative. Nothing heals itself. Disorder persists until an exactly opposed remedy is administered to it, and the remedy is dispensed upon willing reception. There is no automatic front of restoration sweeping the cosmos and converting the unwilling in the end. So the physics, rightly understood, predicts nothing whatever about how many are finally saved. It explains how the remedy is made and applied. It is silent on how many present themselves to receive it. And that silence is honest, and it is where the physics must leave us.

This raises the question of where the soul goes who refuses to reside harmoniously in the body of a perfect God. The conservative order forbids deletion. There is no outside of God to exile it to. The sinner cannot stand in the unveiled presence of purity, which would consume the sin and sinner. The answer follows from our understanding of the conditions required to receive Christ’s atonement: the sinner must voluntarily relinquish his attachment to sin.

The disorder remains coupled to whoever bears it. If a soul/person gives his disorder to Christ, then the sin can be cleansed and the soul saved. The cleansing fire is the superimposition of the disorder with its opposite (perfect order). The superimposition of order and its inverse results in the nullification of the flaw/error/disharmony in the soul’s interaction with the rest of the body of God/the organization of the DP Sea, the traces of action that disturbed the relationship between the soul and the body-mind/matrix of God.

Regarding eliminating sin/disharmony by applying good to bad. That may be how atonement works. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:21). The Son, applying the energy/order/organization of good to the disorder of evil, superimposes harmony on disharmony, order on disorder, causing the disharmony to cease to be. Good, in overcoming evil, does not move or hide sin but cancels it. In this model, the superimposition of harmony over disharmony renders it nonexistent. This is illustrated in the experiment in which two wave generators at opposite ends of a tank produce waves that are 180 degrees out of phase; the opposite-phase waves pass through each other, superimpose, and cancel. When a wave crest meets its trough, it leaves still water. “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12).

The problem with unconfessed sin, and a heart rebelling against submitting to His will and not giving that sin to Him then bears it still — every man shall bear his own burden (Galatians 6:5). In this model, Hell needs no geography. Perhaps hell is a condition, not a place. Hell may be a soul holding its own uncancelled disorder. If so, then hell can last for eternity if a man refuses to confess, renouce/repent, and accept the gift of His atonement and reconciliation.

This model of the spiritual-physical world explains why it is impossible for a man to do enough good works to cancel his sin. All sins occur along the timeline of history, and all acts radiate into the Dipole Sea, the Sea of Conscious Points in which we live. Because of the timing, following our bad acts, our good acts can never affect the ripples we have already made in the substance of the universe. To cancel the bad/evil/disarmonious acts with good acts is impossible because there is a time barrier between the disorder produced by the bad acts and the good acts.

If we do not repent and accept Christ’s atonement, the torment/disharmony/separation produced by our sin may endure. We can only hope for an ultimate reconciliation. How long that will take, we cannot be certain. The only certainty is that God desires that we reconcile. “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:20)

There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually grants. I hold them as hope. But I will not preach them as a promise. I think God Himself left them as hints rather than headlines. A promise of certain final rescue, published and leaned upon, would abort the very transformation the whole play of creation exists to produce: love and obedience to His Way, given freely. A man who is told he will certainly arrive in Paradise without his discipline of learning Christ’s Way has been given a reason never to set out.

So I hold the hope quietly. I preach the open door and the real cliff, because that is what love does for a soul still able to choose. The Judge is exactly fair — of that I am certain — and the verdict is His to render and not mine to publish. Our task is not to settle the edge cases from the outside. It is to pull the sheep from the cliff.

Part V — Seeing in Part, and the Freedom to Refuse

Why even the physics will not lift the veil

The Conscious Point Physics (CPP) is a theoretical framework that is meant to give evidence of a Designer. The goal of CPP is to derive the whole of physics from the postulate of a geometric grid of Conscious Points serving as markers of space, and four types of Conscious Points that interact according to rules, that produce all physical phenomena (gravity, inertia, energy, particles, fields, Dark Matter, relativity, quantum mechanics, and cosmology – Big Bang, inflation, Dark Energy, chirality…). In the current stage of development of CPP, the above have been described with varying degrees of completeness using 9 Axiomatic assumptions of existence (i.e., the markers of space and points of consciousness and their force-distance relationship).

The point of this effort is to produce a framework for the theoretical unification of all phenomena, so axiomatically simple and logically connected to experimental observation and sensory experience of the physical world that the assumption of God’s existence is logically implied as the simplest explanation for all physical phenomena and existence.

The question is then, does CPP not tear the very veil we said love requires? For we said a God known with unavoidably certain clarity and knowledge of His existence, beauty, and consequence of obedience and disobedience of His Law would be obeyed as gravity is obeyed. Alternatively, there is no meaningful free will in the situation with a gunman who vows to shoot with even the most minor disobedience of his commands. Such certainty of consequence and identity leaves no room left for the choice to express our love for God by following His precepts. With certain knowledge of the consequences of sin (violation of perfect obedience to His Way) is death; such consequences known with certainty make the expression of love out of free will impossible. God cannot know that He is loved for His beauty, that we are of like mind and heart and resonate with Him and desire to live and be with Him in eternity as co-residents of His world. He cannot be sure we love Him, and we cannot express our love in a way that is distinguishable from deception and pretending affection. Love cannot be fulfilled or experienced in a satisfying way for lover or loved in a world without the expression of free will.

The question is, does the physics theory, CPP, make love impossible to be experienced because His identity and His consequences are so clear as to be unavoidably obvious? In short, if the physics makes God plain, does it not abolish the freedom to refuse Him and, that in turn, abolish love?

The Answer: The objection to the clarity that CPP can provide assumes that the physics can produce absolute certainty about God’s existence. It cannot. Every conclusion this framework could ever reach about God is inductive. That is, every design feature is consistent with the postulate of a creator God. The problem with induction is that proof requires checking all possibilities and showing that they all, without exception, prove God’s existence.

The simplicity of explaining all phenomena with nine axioms satisfies Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct explanation. This is strong qualitative evidence for God’s commands being the governing standard behind all the Conscious Points, but it is not proof. The idea that God is the single consciousness underlying all consciousness is another restatement of this simplicity. As is the idea that the entire creation is dependent upon a primitive consciousness, and that consciousness is God.

The argument for God by the CPP is based on elegance and fit. It is based upon God’s self-created existence as the final unprovable axiom, the single assumption that there is a Sustainer underneath the creation. Having stated the axiom, the arguments showing connection between assumption and all phenomena, regardless of how overwhelming the odds are that the conclusion is correct, the fact that all phenomena cannot be examined leaves a hair’s breadth of uncertainty.

The level of consistent proof in terms of modeling and experimental concillience can make unbelief unreasonable, but it cannot make unbelief impossible. A demonstrated God would compel, as gravity compels a falling stone. A well-evidenced God still waits for our willing assent to His standards as the rule of our lives. So the veil is not torn away. CPP, seen through the eyes of Renaissance-Ministries’ framing, makes it easy to see the shape of God. But the distance between that thin veil and unveiled presence is sufficient to allow human freedom. For now we see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12): Paul does not promise the glass will be removed in this age. The consistency of the experimental evidence with the postulates of CPP implies the existence of God. The underlying singularity of all consciousness through the Nexus, the timing pulse, argues persuasively for His omnipresence. The implications of a mind from which all matter composes imply a God with omniscience. His oneness and sustaining power of His mind over existence imply omnipotence executed by thought and will. The omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence imply a God to whom worship, respect, and awe are the only rational response. Having grasped the gravity of the implications of the CPP framing of the universe, we mere mortals are faced with the decision to bridge the final microscopic gap between evidence and reason to the certainty of fact with faith. We still must deny our flesh and follow His Way. We must still submit our will to His Way/Person/Character as our unalloyed offering of self. We must still express our love by our total obedience to His Way with hearts that strive to continue to purify the doubt. We must move toward duplicating His Way in our hearts, minds, and bodies.

What Q6 forbids is deductive certainty; what the physics supplies is inductive weight; and these do not collide. The freedom to refuse to comply with the Way of Christ is preserved despite the CPP framework’s logical and evidentiary success. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity:
there is none that doeth good.” (Psalm 53:1)

The rebels may continue to refuse.

The hardened hearts, those addicted to the transient pleasures of sin, can continue to deny.
The tradition-bound may refuse because comprehension requires the breaking of an idol of the past, the older picture, that had become worshipped.
Perhaps it is the pride or shame of admitting error and the requirement to apologize to those they misled. Perhaps it is the monetary loss that comes from the sale of idols to the old God of atheistic science.
The lazy may decline to look. “As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed.” (Proverbs 26:14)“A slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.” (Proverbs 19:24)
The self-serving may set an absolute aside because a self-made morality suits them better.

There is a hair’s breadth of doubt in every perception and every chain of evidence. Men who wish to may live in that breadth their whole lives and can find justification for their chosen rationality. It requires generalization, deletion, and distortion, but evidence and rationality can be massaged sufficiently to give the fig leaf of reason to even the most perverse justification of action.

Renaissance Ministries places the CPP framework side by side with the Bible. The metaphors of the Bible are clearly seen reflected in the physics of the creation. The two speak from the same underlying reality, using different vocabularies, and focusing on different scales. The hardness of heart is the one true power that man possesses. God, Christ, and Holy Spirit will never violate the sanctity of the man’s heart. At any time, a man may choose to see, to open his heart to the evidence of God’s presence. It is possible to rationalize God’s existence and a world with hunger, war, and misguided chauvinism toward a religion that is true at its base, but is used as a vehicle for the satisfaction of the baser impulses of man such as power, fame, respect, and money. The tribal drive is consistent with the fact of religious expansion and imposition, but the pandering to the satisfaction of the flesh using religion, God, and the sacred does not change the truth of the underlying holiness. The hardness of a heart and the blindness of an eye will only result when the individual chooses freely to bend his knee. That choice, that surrender of will, that full love for our Creator God, only comes for some after being salted with much fire. But such is encountered only in the path of each soul’s choosing.

I do not know how far we are from the days when we shall see him as he is with unveiled glory. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be:
but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2). For me, the evidence of the CPP revelation seems consistent with those days. It feels to me like a preparation for the lifting of the veil. Scripture says that in the days of the voice of the seventh angel… the mystery of God should be finished. (Revelation 10:7). There is a time set for the mystery to be known, and if the Lord should choose to use the CPP framework as an instrument to prepare the church for His return, I believe we can use this tool to help accomplish His purposes. “That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27). The CPP paradigm, even in its most elementary presentation, is a tool by which the veil can be thinned. There was a time when concealment was necessary, but if this is the time for the fulfillment of His plan, then I believe we have a powerful tool to take the blinders from the captives. The delusion is strong with a culture-wide myth of man as God, God as the creation of man, God is dead, material as eternal, evolution as the cause, relativity as the standard of morality, self as sovereign, satisfaction of the flesh as our right. It is time to labor toward the harvest of souls. The argument from induction is not the strongest, but it is the best we have. It’s good enough to convince us of the certainty of gravity and taxes; it has adequate power to grind even the most hardened heart into indefensible powder. The argument from induction eventually moves from controversy to common knowledge. It is only necessary to present the fact of the consistency of CPP with every physical phenomenon. There is a great deal of work between that goal and today’s reality, but it will eventually arrive. Seeing the reality of that day, when every soul knows with inductive certainty of God’s existence, does not require the gift of prophecy; it requires only seeing the times and seasons. There is no dated claim; we do not know the hour or the day of His return, but we are to work while it is day, and with CPP as a witnessing tool, I believe the sun will be moving toward midday brightness. Our reading of Revelation, that He will return and make all things new, motivates our labor. Given CPP’s role as an inductive tool, its incorporation of the best empirical tools of Conventional Science, and its compliance with the Scientific Method and protocols of Science, the argument for God’s existence is at least as strong as the Scientific Establishment’s argument for a material-only universe. Our argument for faith is the same as the Materialists’ argument for causeless eternal matter. The difference is hope. With the Materialists’ argument, there is only today. With the CPP argument, there is the hope of a world without end.

Faith, then, is not certainty

It has been said that the test of one’s faith in a concept, idea, or fact is the ability to state it clearly; stumbling over the explanation shows incomplete belief. It is a reasonable thought, but untrue. Such a standard measures articulacy, which is the map, not the territory on which one is walking. A child in a loving home cannot expound the theory of attachment and trusts more truly than the scholar who can. Faith is not the precision of your description of the ground; it is the adequacy of certainty that the direction of walking is toward the destination. The great examples of faith are almost never examples of certainty: Abraham went out, not knowing whither he went (Hebrews 11:8) — no map, only a direction; the woman with the issue of blood had no doctrine of healing, only an orientation; she moved in the direction as she was moved; Peter walked on the water until he began to analyze the wind, and analysis sank him.

So the standard is not certainty but adequate certainty — enough to act on, never enough to remove all doubt or risk. Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24) is not the deficient case; it is the ordinary condition of a living faith. And the order runs the way we least expect: understanding does not come first and obedience follow; obedience comes first, and understanding follows — if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine (John 7:17). You do not reason your way to the threshold and then step across; you step, and the knowing arrives in the walking. Doubt, on this seeing, is often the sign of a living faith rather than a dying one — the noise in a signal that is still being received, the mind still honestly perceiving and updating. The soul that has banished all doubt may simply have stopped listening. A settled reading of God can go stale while it feels most sure. Still, faith without evidence can be foolishness. A lack of faith regardless of the evidence is a hardened heart. Doubt is a live signal only so long as it keeps you moving in the exploration of Truth. One need never be concerned about blind faith. Doubt motivates exploration; it uncovers flaws in reasoning; it prevents us from blindly following a blind man into the ditch. But doubt held as an end in itself is a false religion, a god in and of itself, one which must be overcome by doubting in doubt. Doubt is the religion of last resort, the appearance of the open-minded seeker which holds itself superior to all other “closed-minded religionists.” When in fact the permanent doubter will never reach the destination of Truth, which can only be reached by a continual walking in the direction of the evidence of Truth. The path of the eternal seeker will end only at the destination of more seeking, as that is its orientation; faith in seeking as Truth produces only seeking. Cultivated as a permanent excuse, proof against all evidence of an eternal pattern which should be explored as the absolute truth, it is not an explorer looking for truth; it is evidence of an explorer committed to exploring.

Closing: what we may say, and what we must leave with God

We live in exactly the kind of world that would require a cross. A God whose nature is love had to make souls who could freely love or refuse Him; that freedom made evil genuinely possible; evil, in a conservative order, cannot heal itself and cannot coexist with the purity that is God’s organized nature; and so the disorder had to be answered by an exactly opposed remedy, generated at a cost no creature could pay. Christ generated it — bearing our liability without our stain, transparent to the wrath as light through clear glass, His innocence the reason He survived and our imputed standing the reason it availed. The remedy He generated by His sacrifice into His creation is sufficient for the whole world; it can be applied to each soul upon its willing reception; it is a pattern and not a stock, and so it never runs out; and He lives to administer it. Nothing was waived; the debt of death and disorder wrecked on God’s creation was discharged in the coin of His own suffering. And its reach across all time is not a ripple through the centuries but a keystone under the whole arch of history, one ledger kept in the forbearance of God and settled once at the middle of the story.

Developing an evermore articulated view of the causal connection between CPP and the Holy Bible is the end goal of reasoning; it is not gospel. The CPP-Renaissance connection is a memory device, a plausible explanation, and a segue that establishes a consistent link between the principles of the Bible and Science. CPP is a bridge, a language of science that engages experimental evidence and connects it to Biblical revelation. There is a wide gap between the two domains, and I do not pretend to be the prophet who gives the perfect explanation of the connection between ground and sky, heaven and earth. The physics is largely silent on the specificity of morality, and the Scriptures are largely mute on the specificity of the mechanisms of the physical world. But there is a hint of overlap. The primary one being that God is, and He is One. The determinism of physics conflicts with the sovereignty of the theology. I believe CPP will be a tool for bearing witness to and defending the faith. The arguments are being assembled on the Renaissance site; they will be illustrated and made ever more pedagogically friendly. The key to the witness will be the lives lived, and that will only be true if those who hear the message engage the argument and apply the logic of the words to action. The action is a commitment to walking toward sanctification and perfection of character, living as Christ did, making Him Lord of my flesh/passions/desires, feeding on the Word daily, praying for specific requests, and serving widows and orphans in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

I believe we will see God’s mystery revealed, but I do not know the day and time. It is my hope that CPP will be a tool that will help some to overcome the doubt, to commit to the revelation that God is, that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was meaningful and relevant to life, and that His way is justifiably The Way, rather than a way. I believe the Biblical revelation is sufficient; it does not need CPP to be effective. It has moved the hearts of 1.8 billion people who call themselves by His name. I offer CPP as a crutch for the doubting Thomas; it is what I needed. It is the diary of my journey of faith toward certainty and a refinement of my understanding of the journey toward sanctification/becoming like Him. I believe the Bible is sufficient, and I believe this revelation is God’s will, which has driven me for over 39 years to document what I was initiated into in a few moments. I believe we must actively pursue holiness, becoming like Him to fully realize our potential. Seeking, but in the direction where there is absolute truth, is the most profitable, and committing to go ever-deeper in the breadth and depth of that truth. Reception of His invitation to holiness, sanctification, being like Him, is genuinely asked of us, and refusal is genuinely possible, and the verdict on those who finally refuse belongs to a Judge who is exactly fair and to no one else. Our part is neither to prove God so plainly that no one could refuse Him. This is obvious and trivial. We could not if we tried. It is not ours to settle from the outside who is finally lost. Our part is to see the architecture of His creation clearly enough to worship and to pursue being like Him in our thought, speech, and action. It is our job to walk the path that He illuminated, and to pull every sheep we can reach back from the edge of the cliff.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face (1 Corinthians 13:13, 12). We see in part. We were never promised more than that in this age. And it is enough to walk by, and enough to love by, and enough to bring another with us toward the day the glass comes clear.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38

260710 – The Atonement, CPP, Theology, and Philosophy

The Hard Questions About Why Jesus Had to Die — and How Far Reason May Walk Toward the Answer

Summary of Essay:
The Atonement – A Cause-Effect Argument

1. Foundational Cause: God’s Nature as Self-Existent Love Requires Free Reciprocity

2. Intermediate Cause: Creation, Shielding, and the Introduction of Conservative Disorder

3. The Central Problem Requiring Remedy: Wrath as Necessary Opposition to Disorder

4. The Decisive Cause: The Cross as the Manufactured, Inexhaustible Pattern-Remedy

5. Final Cause-Effect: Personal Alignment and the Binary Outcome

Why This Model Preserves Freedom and Coherence

Summary of the Cause-Effect Chain

Introduction:

The occasion, and a rule for reading

Part I — The World the Cross Presupposes

The depth out of which God organizes Himself

Why there is a world at all, and why it can go wrong

Everything is within God, and we are made to forget

The Son: how the Father shows up where a creature can survive it

Part II — Freedom, the Fall, and the Nature of Evil

Did the fall have to happen?

What evil actually is

Part III — The Cross: What Actually Happened

The Fundamental Question

The correction at the center: what happened to the wrath

The shield becomes the door, and the risen Advocate who dispenses

Why the old pictures are all true at once

How a death then reaches us now

Part IV — Who Is Reached, and How Far We Are Given to Know

Why does the substitutionary sacrifice not feel fair?

Those who never heard

The gradient we misplaced

The fate of those who finally refuse — and the discipline of not saying more than we know

Part V — Seeing in Part, and the Freedom to Refuse

Why even the physics will not lift the veil

Faith, then, is not certainty

Closing: what we may say, and what we must leave with God

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260710 – The Atonement, CPP, Theology, and Philosophy

The Hard Questions About Why Jesus Had to Die — and How Far Reason May Walk Toward the Answer

Summary of Essay: The Atonement – A Cause-Effect Argument

1. Foundational Cause: God’s Nature as Self-Existent Love Requires Free Reciprocity

2. Intermediate Cause: Creation, Shielding, and the Introduction of Conservative Disorder

3. The Central Problem Requiring Remedy: Wrath as Necessary Opposition to Disorder

4. The Decisive Cause: The Cross as the Manufactured, Inexhaustible Pattern-Remedy

5. Final Cause-Effect: Personal Alignment and the Binary Outcome

Why This Model Preserves Freedom and Coherence

Summary of the Cause-Effect Chain

Introduction:

The occasion, and a rule for reading

Part I — The World the Cross Presupposes

The depth out of which God organizes Himself

Why there is a world at all, and why it can go wrong

Everything is within God, and we are made to forget

The Son: how the Father shows up where a creature can survive it

Part II — Freedom, the Fall, and the Nature of Evil

Did the fall have to happen?

What evil actually is

Part III — The Cross: What Actually Happened

The Fundamental Question

The correction at the center: what happened to the wrath

The shield becomes the door, and the risen Advocate who dispenses

Why the old pictures are all true at once

How a death then reaches us now

Part IV — Who Is Reached, and How Far We Are Given to Know

Why does the substitutionary sacrifice not feel fair?

Those who never heard

The gradient we misplaced

The fate of those who finally refuse — and the discipline of not saying more than we know

Part V — Seeing in Part, and the Freedom to Refuse

Why even the physics will not lift the veil

Faith, then, is not certainty

Closing: what we may say, and what we must leave with God

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Summary of Essay:
The Atonement – A Cause-Effect Argument