All we can say about God …

#deac glossary … closed world terms

God: Ultimate reality and ultimate authority … not a creature, not a part of the universe.

Creature: Anything not God … finite, limited, local.

Thinking: For God, an analogy meaning perfect knowing and perfect willing … not brain-processing.

Coherence: Internal consistency plus correct fit to reality across time, scale, and consequence.

Dimensions: The major ways God is not limited like us … truth, context, moral clarity, justice, mercy, love, temporal integrity, adequacy to the real.

Parameterisation: The set of state variables a coherent governor of reality must account for.

Quantisation: Clear bins for a concept, used for clarity, not because reality is literally chopped into bins.

Governance: Ordering reality toward the good under constraints … including permitting, restraining, revealing, pacing, restoring, judging.

Justice: Right account of responsibility and right consequences aligned to truth and harm.

Mercy: Redemptive handling of wrongdoing and suffering without denial of truth.

Love: Willing the true good of the beloved with full knowledge and right pacing.

Revelation: God communicating truth to creatures in a form they can bear.

Creature-limits: The boundary that our knowledge is partial and our words are analogical.

The dimensions … what we can name without shrinking God

1. God knows truth without blind spots.
2. God knows truth with full context and dependencies.
3. God is perfectly coherent … no contradiction, no hypocrisy, no fractured will.
4. God holds the whole story without loss … temporal integrity.
5. God has perfect moral clarity.
6. God’s justice sees the whole ledger.
7. God’s mercy does not lie.
8. God’s love is governance, not mood.
9. God is adequate to the real … no approximation needed.
10. God exceeds our categories … reverence is accuracy at the edge.

The parameterisation … what governance must hold (quantised)

Ontology

• Entity-kind {field, organism, mind, institution, ecosystem, artefact, covenant, unknown}
• Existence-mode {actual, potential, conditional, counterfactual, impossible}
• Identity-persistence {momentary, episodic, stable, enduring, eternal}

Causality and constraint

• Causal-reach {local, regional, global, cosmic, total}
• Intervention-mode {none, permissive, nudging, directive, overriding}
• Constraint-slack {tight, moderate, loose, very-loose, open}

Truth and access

• Truth-status {true, false, mixed, unknown-to-creature, ineffable-to-creature}
• Evidence-access {public, private, hidden, latent, future-revealed}
• Epistemic-hazard {benign, confusing, manipulative, corrosive, lethal}

Moral reality

• Harm-magnitude {none, minor, serious, severe, catastrophic}
• Intent-type {accidental, negligent, reckless, knowing, malicious}
• Responsibility-share {none, low, shared, high, primary}
• Vulnerability {low, medium, high, dependent, sacred-duty-of-care}

Justice and mercy operations

• Justice-response {no-action, warning, restitution, restraint, judgment}
• Mercy-response {withhold, delay, mitigate, transform, forgive}
• Repentance-state {none, performative, partial, genuine, enduring}
• Restoration-feasibility {impossible, low, moderate, high, already-in-motion}

Agency and freedom

• Autonomy {none, constrained, ordinary, high, covenant-agent}
• Coercion {none, mild, moderate, heavy, total}
• Choice-branching {1, 2–4, 5–20, 21–100, 100+}

Relationship and revelation

• Relational-distance {hostile, estranged, neutral, bonded, union}
• Care-duty {none, general, specific, guardian, root-steward}
• Growth-pacing {pause, slow, steady, rapid, crisis-accelerated}
• Message-mode {silence, sign, whisper, speech, self-disclosure}
• Comprehension-match {overwhelming, challenging, matched, easy, trivial}
• Timing-fit {too-early, early, right-time, late, too-late}

System arc

• Stability {stable, strained, unstable, collapsing, rebuilding}
• Evil-containment {contained, leaking, spreading, dominant, being-overturned}
• Second-order-risk {low, medium, high, systemic, unknowable-to-creature}
• Telos-alignment {opposed, off-course, mixed, aligned, consummating}

Catechism … the maximum we can say responsibly

1. What do we mean by God?

God is ultimate reality and ultimate authority, not a creature and not a part of the universe.

2. Can creatures comprehend God?

Not fully. We can speak truly, but only analogically and partially. Creature-limits are real.

3. Does God “think” like we do?

No. The word points to perfect knowing and perfect willing, not internal processing or guesswork.

4. What must be true if God is God?

God’s knowing is coherent, complete, and adequate to reality. Nothing is lost, hidden, or misread.

5. What is God’s governance made of?

Truth, justice, mercy, and love … held together without contradiction.

6. What goes wrong when we talk about God?

We collapse the state space to one variable … then mistake a partial view for the whole.

7. Can God be hidden without being absent?

Yes. “Hidden” often describes creature access, not God’s reality.

8. What about suffering?

It matters. Harm counts. Victims count. Vulnerable beings count. Any God-talk that erases this is incoherent here.

9. What is the deepest human claim we can make?

That persons are not unseen … and that love can be real without lying about truth.

10. Where do we end?

At reverence … because the final honesty is that God exceeds our categories.

Warm landing

If you can’t hold the whole map, you’re not failing … you’re human.

And if God is God, the mercy is not that you must first comprehend God to be loved.

The mercy is that you are known without being crushed.