This appendix specifies the tests used by the argument. A connection earns explanatory weight when its premises, relation, evidence, and possible failure can be inspected. Similar vocabulary is a question to investigate.
The governing movement
The Father gives created being through the personal Son in the Spirit's undivided divine action. Creatures receive real powers and goods; embodied persons acquire ways of knowing, willing, and living through a history they also change. Corruption bends those powers and makes damage transmissible. In the incarnate, crucified, and risen Son, restoration enters the same history: forgiveness answers guilt, healing answers damage, communion answers alienation, and resurrection concerns the actual bearer. The Spirit gives participation that can begin before maturity. Judgment brings acts and losses to truth; consummation must answer what the created history could not repair. These are dependencies within DDF's Christian account, not interchangeable stages of one mechanism. Their separate warrants and disputed boundaries remain part of the movement.
What a source establishes
Authority belongs to a source's competence for a particular claim. Scripture and the apostolic rule govern Christian confession; measurement and experiment govern empirical descriptions; primary records and historical criticism govern historical reconstruction; logic tests consequence; philosophy examines categories and ultimate explanations. Clinical evidence concerns conditions and interventions. First-person and harmed-witness testimony supplies evidence that an institutional account may omit. None of these sources acquires another's competence by being placed beside it.
A source's role is narrower than its authority: it may establish wording, report an observation, test a mechanism, preserve testimony, propose an interpretation, exemplify reception, or offer an analogy. A manuscript proves that a wording was transmitted. A witness report establishes testimony whose event claim still needs assessment. A successful model can predict an outcome without identifying its ultimate ground.
Relations and inferential status
Vocabulary resonance notices shared terms. Structural consonance identifies comparable relations while retaining differences. Empirical instantiation establishes a pattern inside a field. Structural convergence identifies a nontrivial recurrence across independently investigated fields, with transfer direction and limits stated. Abductive alignment compares the explanation of a shared field. Doctrinal warrant derives from canonical and received Christian sources. Obediential warrant examines the truthfulness and consequences of an interpretation enacted in life. These relations can cooperate; they do not promote themselves into one another.
Inferential status records what premises support: entailed, excluded, abductively preferred, compatible, underdetermined, in tension, or contradicted. Confidence records how strongly those premises and judgments are warranted. Maturity records how developed and tested an account is. These are separate judgments. A well-tested observation can leave its metaphysical interpretation underdetermined.
Source-established identifies what a competent source directly supports; DDF inference marks an additional bridge; authorial judgment marks a reasoned preference; unknown preserves an unanswered question. Compression must preserve these roles. Replacing “compatible” with “established” changes the claim.
Eight premises that carry connections
- Participatory attribution. Responsibility concerns an act proceeding through the person's powers of perception, judgment, intention, consent, and refusal under actual knowledge, capacity, coercion, and role. Causal influence, causal sufficiency, and bypass are distinct. This proposal does not independently settle the metaphysics of freedom.
- Asymmetric concurrence. The creature and every positive power depend on God; the defect in their ordering is not a second substance or automatically a shared intention. Identifying the defect leaves the question of divine permission open.
- Typed directive force. Inspired speech must be read through wording, genre, context, canonical stage, and fulfillment. Description, permission, restraint, ritual instruction, unique judgment, and continuing moral command have different force. A moral difficulty alone does not establish false narrator attribution.
- Same subject and faithful predicates. Resurrection concerns the subject who lived. A benefit to another cannot answer that subject's loss. A predicate about a person cannot silently become a predicate about an acquired habit. Identity establishes neither universal glorification nor endless duration.
- Nonfungible good. A sentient creature's own good matters alongside ecological and historical function. Aggregate benefit cannot receive relief on the sufferer's behalf. Individual restoration additionally requires a defended consummation premise.
- Unequal light. Sustaining dependence, evidence available, explicit recognition, saving participation, and responsible refusal differ. Judgment concerns received history. Fair attribution alone does not entail a new postmortem opportunity.
- Healed participation. Grace may initiate, restore, and perfect willing without replacing its subject. The giver's agency and the recipient's participation both require preservation. The precise causal account remains disputed.
- Corrigibility by competent evidence. Every empirical or historical entailment remains answerable to the relevant evidence, including when embedded in theology. An analogy, model, local application, or confidence judgment can fail without automatically falsifying every governing doctrine.
Three separate assessments
Confessional adequacy asks whether a claim fits the canonical and apostolic sources: adequate, disputed, or inadequate. Public explanatory fit compares shared evidence and strong rivals: superior fit, competitive, underdetermined, or contradicted. Embodied fruit examines enacted truthfulness, protection, repentance, justice, and repair: faithful, mixed, corrupt, or untested. These assessments are not averaged. Beneficial effects cannot make false doctrine true; harmful implementation can expose an application that must be abandoned.
An extension to a new domain must name its subject, discipline and scale; goods and dependencies; established mechanisms; mediation; embodied reception; agents and attributable actions; damage; competent warrants; fitting protection and repair; and remaining questions under the final horizon. An unanswered item remains open rather than being filled by a slogan.
Eight inspectable paths
- Mathematical contact. Proof establishes formal consequence; measurement tests physical application; a further argument concerns the rational ground. Failed elegant theories pressure the second relation; rival explanations pressure the third.
- Living repair. Material turnover, regulation, and intervention establish organizational continuity. Transfer to personal resurrection requires additional identity and theological premises; a biological pattern cannot raise the dead.
- Machine formation. Tests distinguish temporary context from durable learning. Transfer concerns differentiated formation, not an identity between a person and model. Grace and guilt require independent predicates.
- Duty to the neighbor. Real injury identifies a good at stake. Standing, entrusted relations, and the normative premise give that good a claim on the agent. Persistence or efficiency alone supplies no obligation.
- Resurrection testimony. Transmission establishes a received report; historical comparison assesses its event claim; canonical argument identifies the event's saving significance. Counting dependent reports as independent distorts the middle step.
- Animal loss. Evidence supports pain attribution with taxon-specific confidence. The animal's own good constrains treatment; eschatological repair additionally depends on the contested demand that consummation answer individual loss.
- Hiddenness. Unequal access limits attribution of knowing refusal. A healing encounter follows only with a further opportunity premise. Omniscience alone needs no new choice to obtain a verdict.
- Final redress. Distinct texts establish resurrection, account, and lasting consequence. Their terminal synthesis must also meet the sufferer's claim to adequate redress. Naming a sequence does not establish that it can fulfill this demand.
Continue through the library
Use this chapter as a starting point, then open related source browsing or passage study without leaving the wider library.
Chapter comments