Chapter 25: Presuppositionalism — All Reasoning Is Circular

I used to think I could argue someone into the kingdom.

I was good at it, too. Or at least I thought I was. I could dismantle an Arminian’s position in fifteen minutes. I could corner a materialist with the problem of consciousness. I could cite chapter and verse until the other person ran out of answers, and I would walk away from those conversations thinking I had won something. That the truth had advanced. That I had done my part.

And then I would watch the person go right back to believing exactly what they believed before the conversation started. Every time. Without exception. I could win the argument and lose the person, and the score never changed. Not once.

It took me a long time to understand why.

The reason nobody changed their mind is that the argument was never operating at the level where minds get changed. I was working at the surface. The real architecture was underneath, in a layer neither of us could see during the conversation, and no amount of logic applied to the surface was going to touch what lived beneath it.

That layer has a name. The theologians call it presuppositions. The philosophers call it first principles. In the framework of this book, I call them boot parameters. And understanding what they are, where they live, and who has the authority to change them is the difference between apologetics that clears the ground and apologetics that pretends it can plant the seed.

Boot Parameters

Every computer, when you turn it on, runs a set of instructions before you ever see the screen. The BIOS loads. The firmware initializes. The operating system boots. And by the time the user sees the desktop and starts clicking around, a thousand decisions have already been made underneath — which hardware to use, which drivers to load, which services to start. The user doesn’t choose any of it. The user isn’t even aware most of it happened. But everything the user does from that point forward is constrained by and dependent on those invisible decisions that were made before the screen lit up.

Your mind works the same way.

Before you ever reason about God, before you ever evaluate an argument, before you form your first conscious opinion about anything, a set of presuppositions has already loaded. These are the deepest assumptions your mind operates from — assumptions about what counts as evidence, what counts as logic, what counts as real, what counts as true. You didn’t choose them. You’re mostly not aware of them. But every thought you think, every argument you evaluate, every conclusion you reach is running on top of those presuppositions. They are the firmware underneath your reasoning. And your reasoning cannot inspect its own firmware any more than a program can rewrite the BIOS while it’s running on it.

This is not a metaphor I invented to make a theological point. This is how the mind actually works, and it maps perfectly to what Scripture has been saying for two thousand years.

“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7)

The heart thinks before the head reasons. The presuppositions live in the heart — not the physical organ, but the seat of a person’s deepest commitments, the place beneath the conscious mind where the boot parameters are installed. And as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Not as he reasons. Not as he concludes. As he thinketh in his heart. The heart sets the parameters. The head runs the applications. And the applications can never override the parameters they’re running on.

No Neutral Ground

Here is where this gets uncomfortable for the person who thinks they’re being reasonable and objective.

There is no neutral ground.

Every human being who has ever lived reasons from presuppositions, not toward them. The atheist does not arrive at materialism by following the evidence wherever it leads. The atheist starts with the presupposition that the material world is all there is, and then interprets every piece of evidence through that lens. The evidence doesn’t produce the conclusion. The presupposition filters the evidence so that the conclusion is the only one visible.

And the Christian does the same thing. The Christian starts with the presupposition that God exists, that He is sovereign, that He authored reality, and that His Word is true. And the Christian interprets every piece of evidence through that lens. The evidence is the same evidence. The world is the same world. The difference is in the firmware, not in the data.

This is the single most important insight in all of apologetics, and most Christians have never heard it. They’ve been told that Christianity is the conclusion of a neutral investigation. That if you just look at the evidence honestly, you’ll arrive at God. That the resurrection can be proved by historical argument. That the existence of God can be demonstrated by philosophical reasoning. And there’s a sense in which all of that is true — but not the sense most people mean it in.

The evidence is there. The arguments are valid. But they are valid within the Christian presuppositional framework. To the person operating from materialist boot parameters, the same evidence produces a different conclusion. The materialist looks at the resurrection and sees a legend that grew over time. The materialist looks at the fine-tuning of the universe and sees a multiverse. The materialist looks at consciousness and sees an emergent property of chemistry. The data didn’t change. The firmware changed.

And here is the devastating part: the materialist thinks he’s being neutral. He thinks his framework is the default. He thinks that materialism isn’t a presupposition at all — it’s just how things are. He calls his starting point “science” or “reason” or “evidence,” and he calls the Christian’s starting point “faith” — as if faith were the departure from neutrality and his position were the baseline.

But it’s not. Materialism is a presupposition. The belief that the physical world is all there is, that only empirically verifiable claims count as knowledge, that consciousness is reducible to chemistry — these are starting assumptions, not conclusions. They cannot be proved from within the materialist system without using the materialist system to validate itself. That’s circular reasoning. And the materialist is guilty of the same circularity he accuses the Christian of.

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1)

In his heart. Not in his head. The denial of God is a heart commitment, a boot parameter, a presupposition installed at the firmware level. It’s not the conclusion of careful reasoning. It’s the starting point that makes the reasoning look careful.

The Honest Question

So if both worldviews are circular — if the Christian presupposes God and reasons from that, and the materialist presupposes matter and reasons from that — then neither can be proved from outside its own system. And that sounds like a stalemate. That sounds like nobody can know anything. That sounds like we’re stuck in competing narratives with no way to adjudicate between them.

But that’s not what it means at all.

The question was never “which can be proved?” The question is: which presupposition accounts for more of reality?

And this is where the materialist’s system collapses.

The materialist has to account for consciousness. He can’t. If the brain is nothing more than chemistry — atoms and molecules following the laws of physics — then every thought you have is just a chemical reaction. Including the thought “materialism is true.” And if that thought is just a chemical reaction, then it wasn’t arrived at by reasoning. It was produced by chemistry. And chemistry doesn’t reason. Chemistry doesn’t arrive at truth. Chemistry just reacts. There is no mechanism in a materialist universe by which undirected chemical processes can produce reliable thoughts about the nature of reality. The materialist uses his mind to argue that the mind is nothing more than chemistry — and in doing so, he saws off the branch he’s sitting on.

The Christian presupposition accounts for consciousness. If reality is information in the mind of God, as Chapter 1 established, then consciousness is not emergent — it’s fundamental. Mind precedes matter. The ability to think, to reason, to grasp truth, is a gift from the Mind that authored reality. Reason works because it was designed to work. Logic is reliable because it was authored by a logical God. The intelligibility of the universe is not an accident — it’s a feature of a universe that was thought into existence.

The materialist has to account for morality. He can’t. If there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. There are only chemical preferences. And you can call those preferences “morality” if you want, but they have no binding authority. They’re just feelings produced by neurons that don’t know they’re neurons. The materialist lives as though some things are genuinely right and genuinely wrong, but his system provides no foundation for that conviction. He borrowed it from the Christian framework and forgot where it came from.

The materialist has to account for the intelligibility of the universe. He can’t. Why does mathematics work? Why do the laws of physics hold from one moment to the next? Why is the universe comprehensible to the human mind at all? If the universe is the product of random, undirected processes, there is no reason to expect it to be orderly, predictable, or understandable. The materialist assumes order and then investigates it — but his system cannot explain why there is order to investigate.

The materialist has to account for information. He can’t. DNA is authored code. Functional, specified information does not arise from random processes. A programmer since age ten knows what authored information looks like. And the genetic code looks authored. Not because I need it to for my theology. Because it does.

The Christian presupposition accounts for all of this. Consciousness, reason, morality, order, information, beauty, love, the intelligibility of the universe — all of it is explained by a sovereign Mind that authored reality with purpose. The system is coherent. The system is complete. And the system predicts its own rejection.

The System Predicts Its Own Rejection

This is where most people accuse presuppositionalism of being unfalsifiable. And I want to address that head-on, because it’s the sharpest version of the objection.

The accusation goes like this: “Your system says that anyone who disagrees with you is just operating from wrong presuppositions. So there’s no possible evidence that could disprove your system. It’s unfalsifiable. It’s not a real argument — it’s a tautology.”

And here is my answer.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:14)

The natural man — the person operating from unregenerate boot parameters — does not receive the things of the Spirit. They are foolishness to him. Not just unpersuasive. Not just unlikely. Foolishness. And the reason is not that the evidence is bad. The reason is that the evidence is spiritually discerned, and the natural man does not have the spiritual capacity to discern it.

The Reformed tradition has a name for this. Total Inability. Not moral unwillingness, not stubbornness, not lack of effort, not a soul that would believe if only the argument were sharper or the preacher more winsome. The capacity itself is absent. And nothing at the application layer can install a capability that isn’t in the firmware. I did not learn the term “Total Inability” from a Reformed textbook. I learned the reality from watching every sharp argument I ever made land on ground that could not receive it, and then I looked up one day and noticed the Reformers had already been here, had already named it, and had built an entire theology of grace around the fact that the natural man cannot.

This is not an ad hoc defense. This is not something Christians made up after the fact to explain why people don’t believe. This was written two thousand years ago, before presuppositional apologetics had a name. Paul predicted exactly what happens when you present the gospel to a natural mind: the natural mind calls it foolishness. And the prediction has been confirmed in every generation since.

Now, is that unfalsifiable? In one sense, yes — from within the materialist system, you can’t falsify it, because the materialist system doesn’t have the categories to evaluate it. But that’s not a weakness. That’s the point. The materialist’s demand for falsifiability is itself a presupposition — the presupposition that only empirically testable claims count as knowledge. But that claim isn’t empirically testable. It’s a philosophical commitment. A boot parameter. And the materialist is using his own circular system to demand that the Christian’s system submit to his criteria — criteria the materialist’s own system can’t justify.

The system doesn’t claim to be falsifiable by materialist criteria. It claims to be self-authenticating by its own criteria. And so does materialism. The difference is that the Christian system accounts for why the materialist rejects it. The materialist system cannot account for why the Christian accepts it — except by calling the Christian irrational, which is itself a presupposition about what counts as rational.

The Firmware and the Application Layer

And here is where everything connects back to the framework of this book.

If faith is a gift of the Spirit, as Galatians 5:22 says, and if regeneration precedes faith, as Chapter 16 established, then no argument can produce faith. Arguments operate at the application layer. They deal with evidence, logic, propositions, counterarguments — all surface-level operations. But faith is a firmware event. It happens beneath the application layer, in the boot parameters, where the Spirit operates and the conscious mind cannot reach.

“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13)

“To will” — that’s the firmware. The willing is changed before the doing. God works in the subconscious before the conscious mind acts. The Spirit flashes the firmware — installs new boot parameters, new presuppositions, a new heart orientation — and then the application layer starts producing different output. The believer doesn’t reason his way to God. The believer’s boot parameters get changed, and then the reasoning follows.

This means apologetics has a real but limited role. Apologetics cannot change anyone’s boot parameters. Only the Spirit can do that. But apologetics can do two things that matter.

First, apologetics can expose the other person’s presuppositions. Most people have never examined their own boot parameters. They think their assumptions are just “how things are.” The presuppositionalist can show them that their system is circular too, that their starting points are assumptions, not conclusions, and that their system can’t account for the very tools it uses to argue — reason, morality, consciousness, order. That exposure is valuable. It doesn’t save anyone. But it strips away the illusion of neutrality. It removes the comfortable fiction that the materialist is standing on solid ground while the Christian is standing on faith. Both are standing on faith. Only one admits it.

Second, apologetics can present the truth. The Spirit uses means. He uses the preaching of the gospel, the presentation of truth, the proclamation of Christ crucified and risen. The Spirit doesn’t operate in a vacuum. He works through the Word, through testimony, through argument. The apologist provides the material that the Spirit uses. We can’t flash the firmware. But we can provide the data that the Spirit loads when He does.

“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17)

Faith comes by hearing. The hearing is the means. The Spirit is the cause. The apologist provides the hearing. The Spirit produces the faith. We clear the ground. He plants the seed.

Not Invented in a Library

I should tell you how I came to this position, because it wasn’t through reading Van Til or Bahnsen. I didn’t learn presuppositionalism from a textbook. I learned it from decades of arguing with people and watching every argument fail to change a single mind.

I came to it the same way I came to everything else in this book — through Scripture and lived experience. I watched intelligent people reject overwhelming evidence. I watched brilliant minds dismiss arguments they couldn’t answer. I watched people who were clearly losing the debate walk away more entrenched than before. And the pattern was so consistent, so universal, that I eventually had to ask: why? Why does evidence not work? Why does logic not work? Why can I win every point and change no one?

And Paul already had the answer. The natural man receiveth not. Not “has not yet been shown enough evidence.” Not “needs a better argument.” Receiveth not. The capacity is absent. The firmware doesn’t support the application. And no upgrade to the application layer is going to fix a firmware problem.

After I arrived at this position from Scripture and experience, I discovered that Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen had built an entire apologetic method on the same foundation. They called it presuppositionalism. They articulated it with far more philosophical rigor than I ever will. And I am grateful for their work, because it gave me vocabulary for what I already knew.

And once I had the firmware model in hand, something else fell into place that I had not expected. Four of the five doctrines the Reformers called TULIP were sitting inside the metaphor, and I had not put them there. Total Inability is why the application layer cannot reason its way to God — the capacity is absent, the firmware does not support it. Unconditional Election is the answer to the question of whose firmware gets flashed in the first place — not the soul that earned it, not the soul that prayed the right prayer, but the ones the Father gave to the Son before the foundation of the world. Irresistible Grace is the flash itself, the fact that the Spirit’s work at firmware level always succeeds at application level. Perseverance of the Saints is the persistence of the flash, the reason the elect cannot finally fall away. The Reformers arrived at those four doctrines by careful dogmatic work over centuries, wrestling with Scripture against every objection the Arminian mind could throw at them. I arrived at the same four doctrines by way of Scripture and frustrated apologetics. We met in the middle because there is only one middle.

The fifth petal, Limited Atonement, is the one this chapter does not touch, because it belongs to the gospel chapters and not to the chapter on how a mind receives the gospel. But it is the same architecture. The Author does the work, the work is efficacious, and the efficacy is not conditioned on the creature’s response. I address it where it lives.

But I want to be clear: I didn’t arrive here because Van Til convinced me. I arrived here because 1 Corinthians 2:14 is true, and I watched it play out in every conversation for as long as I’ve been a believer. And I didn’t arrive at TULIP because Calvin or Dort convinced me. I arrived at TULIP because the same Scripture that wrote presuppositionalism into my bones wrote the doctrines of grace right beside them. You cannot pull one without the other coming with it.

The Implications

If all reasoning is circular, then the honest person admits it. He doesn’t pretend his starting point is neutral. He doesn’t call his presuppositions “science” and the other person’s presuppositions “faith.” He names his boot parameters and takes responsibility for them.

If only the Spirit can change boot parameters, then humility is the only posture for the apologist. You are not the hero of the conversation. You are not going to save anyone with your clever arguments. You present truth. You expose false assumptions. You clear the ground. And you wait on the Lord. Because the Lord is the only one with root access, and root access is what this problem requires.

If the system predicts its own rejection, then the Christian is not surprised or threatened when people call the gospel foolishness. Paul told you they would. The rejection is not evidence against the system. The rejection is predicted by the system. And a system that accurately predicts the behavior of those who reject it is a system that accounts for reality better than the alternative.

And if the Christian presupposition accounts for consciousness, reason, morality, order, information, beauty, and the intelligibility of the universe — while the materialist presupposition cannot account for any of them without borrowing from the Christian framework — then the honest mind knows which boot parameters produce a coherent rendering of the world.

The honest mind. That’s the key phrase. Because honesty itself is a presupposition. The willingness to examine your own starting points, to admit your reasoning is circular, to hold your system accountable to the world it claims to describe — that willingness is not produced by argument. It’s produced by the Spirit. Which means the whole system loops back to the beginning, back to the sovereignty of God, back to the Author who writes both the questions and the answers, both the seekers and the scoffers, both the firmware and the flash.

“No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” (John 6:44)

The drawing is the firmware flash. The coming is the application layer responding. And between the two, there is nothing you or I or the cleverest argument in the world can provide.

The Reformers had a name for the drawing, too. Irresistible Grace. And the name has been misunderstood for centuries by people who imagined it meant God coercing an unwilling soul into heaven against its protest, like a bouncer dragging a patron into a club he wanted to leave. That is not what the Reformers meant, and it is not what the firmware model shows. The Spirit does not overpower the will. He changes what the will wants. He flashes the boot parameters, and the new firmware runs a new application, and the new application loves what it used to hate. Nobody the Spirit flashes at firmware level walks away at application level. The drawing always arrives at its destination, because the drawing and the destination are the same work.

And because firmware, once rewritten by the Spirit, stays rewritten, the flash is permanent. The Reformers called that Perseverance of the Saints. The elect do not get regenerated and then lose it, because the work happens beneath awareness and beneath the reach of human undoing. You cannot argue yourself out of boot parameters any more than you can argue yourself into them. The hand that writes the firmware is the hand that keeps it written.

We clear the ground. The Spirit plants the seed. And every argument we’ve ever won was just the ground being cleared for something we couldn’t do ourselves.

Objections and Answers

“If all reasoning is circular, you can’t prove Christianity is true.”

Correct. No worldview can be proved from outside its own system. Every system validates itself by its own criteria. The question, as I argued above, is which presupposition accounts for more of reality. And I already walked through the list — consciousness, reason, morality, order, information. The Christian system accounts for all of it. The materialist system borrows from the one it rejects.

“Presuppositionalism is intellectual arrogance — you won’t even engage with evidence.”

We engage with all the evidence. Every scrap of it. We just interpret it through presuppositions — which is exactly what every other person on the planet does. The presuppositionalist is not the one who refuses to engage with evidence. The presuppositionalist is the one who is honest about the fact that evidence is always interpreted through a framework. The classical apologist who claims to follow “the evidence wherever it leads” is the one being dishonest — because the evidence doesn’t lead anywhere by itself. Evidence is inert. Interpretation does the leading. And interpretation runs on presuppositions.

“If only the Spirit can change boot parameters, apologetics is useless.”

Apologetics is not useless. Apologetics is limited. As I said above, the Spirit uses means — the preaching of the Word, the presentation of truth. We provide the occasion. He flashes the firmware. The farmer isn’t useless. He’s just not God.

“This makes Christianity unfalsifiable.”

I addressed this in the body of the chapter. The charge of “unfalsifiable” is itself a presupposition — and I already showed why the materialist’s demand that Christian claims submit to empirical falsifiability is a criterion his own system can’t justify. The honest response is not to submit to a rigged standard. It’s to point out that the standard is rigged.

“You’re just saying ‘you have to believe to understand,’ which is circular.”

Yes. And the materialist is saying “you have to accept empiricism to evaluate claims,” which is also circular. Every epistemology is circular at the foundation. The question is whether the circle accounts for reality. Ours does. Theirs doesn’t. The difference is not in the circularity — it’s in the comprehensiveness.

TULIP in the Framework

The Reformed world will be looking for the five points. And I want them to know I have not abandoned a single one. I affirm all five petals of TULIP. What I reject is the framework they have been planted in — the realist ontology that treats them as independent doctrines to be defended rather than derived positions that flow from a single source. The five points are not wrong. They are incomplete without the ontology that explains why they are true.

This is not an exhaustive treatment. There are better places for that, including my own TULIP Scriptural References series published on pristinegrace.org, where the full weight of Old and New Testament evidence is laid out petal by petal. What follows is how each petal maps to the framework of this book, so the reader who holds the five points can see that the sentence generates them naturally, and the reader who doesn’t hold them can see why the sentence demands them.

Total Inability. In the framework, this is the application layer’s inability to override the firmware. The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:14) because the boot parameters don’t support it. The capacity is absent, not merely the willingness. No argument at the application layer can change firmware-level settings. Only the Spirit has root access. The presuppositions that determine how a person processes truth are installed beneath the reach of reason, and reason cannot rewrite its own operating system. This is why apologetics clears the ground but cannot plant the seed (see the body of this chapter). Key passages: Gen. 6:5; Jer. 13:23; Jer. 17:9; John 3:19; John 6:44; John 6:65; John 8:34; Rom. 3:10-12; Rom. 8:7-8; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 4:3-4; Eph. 2:1-3.

Unconditional Election. In the framework, this is the Author thinking different thoughts for different purposes. Each person is a specific thought in the mind of God (Chapter 11). The elect were authored for glory. The reprobate were authored for wrath (Chapter 12). The distinction is ontological, not merely decretal. It is not that God looked at a common mass and chose some — it is that God thought different kinds of thoughts from eternity. Election is unconditional because the thought cannot negotiate with the Mind that thinks it. The clay has no standing to accuse the potter (Romans 9:20). Key passages: Deut. 7:6-8; John 6:37; John 6:39; John 10:26-29; John 15:16; John 17:6; Acts 13:48; Rom. 8:28-30; Rom. 9:11-16; Eph. 1:4-6; 2 Tim. 1:9; Rev. 13:8; Rev. 17:8.

Limited Atonement. In the framework, this is Christ dying for thoughts the Father authored for glory, not for thoughts authored for destruction. The atonement is particular because the covenant is personal (Chapter 7). God does not make generic promises to generic people. He makes specific promises to specific thoughts. Christ is the Bridegroom. The church is the Bride. The blood was poured out for the Bride, not for the world indiscriminately. And because the atonement is particular, it is effectual — every soul Christ died for is actually saved, not merely given an opportunity. “It is finished” means finished (Chapter 15). Key passages: Matt. 1:21; John 10:11; John 10:14-15; John 10:26-28; John 15:13; John 17:9; Acts 20:28; Eph. 5:25; Heb. 9:12; Heb. 9:28; Rev. 5:9.

Irresistible Grace. In the framework, this is the firmware flash. The Spirit changes the boot parameters, and the application layer always follows. Nobody the Spirit flashes at firmware level walks away at application level. The drawing always arrives at its destination, because the drawing and the destination are the same work. The Spirit does not overpower the will — He changes what the will wants (Chapter 16). The new firmware runs a new application, and the new application loves what it used to hate. This is not coercion. It is transformation at a layer the creature cannot resist because the creature cannot reach that layer. Key passages: Ps. 110:3; Isa. 55:11; Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 36:26-27; John 6:37; John 6:44-45; Acts 16:14; Rom. 8:30; 1 Cor. 1:23-24; 2 Cor. 4:6; Eph. 2:4-5; Phil. 2:13; Tit. 3:4-7.

Perseverance of the Saints. In the framework, this is the permanence of the firmware flash. Firmware, once rewritten by the Spirit, stays rewritten. The elect do not get regenerated and then lose it, because the work happens beneath the reach of human undoing. You cannot argue yourself out of boot parameters any more than you can argue yourself into them. The hand that writes the firmware is the hand that keeps it written. God the Father guards (1 Pet. 1:3-5), God the Son intercedes (Heb. 7:25; John 17:6-24), and God the Spirit seals (Eph. 1:13-14; 4:30). The preserving work of all three persons of the Trinity ensures that not one of the elect will be lost. Key passages: Jer. 32:40; John 6:39-40; John 10:27-29; Rom. 8:28-39; Phil. 1:6; 1 Thess. 5:23-24; 2 Tim. 1:12; 1 Pet. 1:3-5; Jude 1:24-25.

I affirm all five. Without reservation. But the five points were never meant to stand on their own as a system. They are symptoms of a deeper architecture — an architecture the Reformers intuited but never named because they didn’t have the ontology to ground it. The sentence provides that ground. And on that ground, the five points are not just defended from proof texts. They are derived from a single proposition about the nature of reality. That is a different framework. Not a different set of conclusions. The conclusions are the same. The foundation is new. And the foundation is what this book provides.

For Further Study

The following passages speak to the themes of this chapter and are commended to the reader for independent study.

The heart as the seat of presuppositions — boot parameters: Prov. 4:23; Prov. 23:7; Jer. 17:9-10; Mark 7:21-23; Matt. 15:18-19; Luke 6:45; Heb. 4:12; 1 Sam. 16:7; Ps. 139:23-24.

No neutral ground — the natural man’s inability to reason to God: Ps. 14:1; Rom. 1:18-22; Rom. 1:28; Rom. 3:11; 1 Cor. 1:18-25; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 4:3-4; John 3:19-20; John 8:43-47; John 14:17; Eph. 4:17-19; 2 Tim. 3:7.

God as the source and ground of all knowledge and reason: Prov. 1:7; Prov. 2:6; Prov. 9:10; Job 28:28; Ps. 111:10; Col. 2:3; Dan. 2:20-22; Isa. 28:29; James 1:5; James 3:17.

Only the Spirit changes presuppositions — root access: John 3:3-8; John 6:44; John 6:63; John 6:65; Phil. 2:13; 1 Cor. 12:3; 2 Cor. 3:5; Eph. 2:1-5; Col. 2:13; Ezek. 37:1-14; Deut. 29:4; Matt. 16:17.

The system predicting its own rejection: Matt. 11:25-27; Matt. 13:10-17; John 10:26; John 12:37-40; Acts 28:25-27; 2 Cor. 2:15-16; 2 Tim. 4:3-4; 2 Pet. 3:3-5.

Faith coming by hearing, through means ordained by God: Rom. 10:14-17; 1 Cor. 1:21; 1 Cor. 3:5-7; 2 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 1:23-25; Isa. 55:10-11; James 1:18; John 17:20.

Total Inability — the natural man’s lack of capacity, not just willingness: Gen. 6:5; Jer. 13:23; Jer. 17:9; John 3:19; John 6:44; John 6:65; John 8:34; Rom. 3:10-12; Rom. 8:7-8; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 4:3-4; Eph. 2:1-3; Col. 2:13; Tit. 3:3.

Unconditional Election — whose firmware gets flashed: Deut. 7:6-8; Ps. 65:4; Matt. 11:27; John 6:37; John 6:39; John 10:26-29; John 15:16; John 17:6; John 17:9; Acts 13:48; Rom. 8:28-30; Rom. 9:11-16; Rom. 9:21-24; Rom. 11:5-7; Eph. 1:4-6; Eph. 1:11; 1 Thess. 1:4; 2 Thess. 2:13; 2 Tim. 1:9; 2 Tim. 2:10; 1 Pet. 1:1-2; 1 Pet. 2:9; Rev. 13:8; Rev. 17:8.

Irresistible Grace — the flash always succeeds: Ps. 110:3; Isa. 55:11; Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 11:19-20; Ezek. 36:26-27; Matt. 11:27; John 6:37; John 6:44-45; John 6:63; John 10:27-28; Acts 16:14; Rom. 8:30; 1 Cor. 1:23-24; 1 Cor. 2:10-12; 2 Cor. 4:6; Gal. 1:15-16; Eph. 2:4-5; Phil. 2:13; Col. 2:13; 1 Thess. 1:5; Tit. 3:4-7.

Perseverance of the Saints — the flash is permanent: Jer. 32:40; Matt. 24:24; John 6:39-40; John 10:27-29; John 17:11-12; John 17:15; Rom. 8:28-39; Rom. 11:29; 1 Cor. 1:8-9; 1 Cor. 10:13; 2 Cor. 4:14; Phil. 1:6; 1 Thess. 5:23-24; 2 Thess. 3:3; 2 Tim. 1:12; 2 Tim. 4:18; Heb. 7:25; Heb. 13:5; 1 Pet. 1:3-5; 1 John 2:19; 1 John 5:4; Jude 1; Jude 24-25.