Publication note. This is the controlled English edition of «Эволюционно-фазовый теизм (ЭФТ)»; in English, the position is referred to as Evolutionary-Phase Theism (EPT). The companion texts linked below are currently available in Russian; controlled English editions are in preparation. Browser translation may be useful for orientation, but it should not be treated as equivalent to the terminology and editorial standard of this edition.

Manifesto

Evolutionary-Phase Theism brings together two claims: the world is created, and the world has a real natural history. Natural causation does not render the Creator redundant, and belief in the Creator does not require us to picture His action as an external suspension of natural causes. The entire position of EPT is built on this conjunction.

Cosmic evolution, the formation of stars and elements, planetary development, and the origin and evolution of life belong to the unfolding of Creation itself. Natural causes operate with the full causal force afforded by the possibilities already belonging to the world. Within this history, EPT identifies seven special Acts: in them, the Creator establishes or expands what is genuinely attainable—establishing the order of history, setting necessary conditions, opening a new class of transitions, imparting a new mode of organization, or making possible a new relation that the preceding level did not yet have at its disposal.

An Act and a natural process belong to different levels of causal description. Natural processes prepare the conditions for transitions and unfold their consequences; they have causal efficacy of their own and are not a screen for the Creator’s action. An Act of Creation expresses a theological-philosophical interpretation of root-level novelty; it does not add another physical cause alongside the others. A specific correspondence therefore requires positive grounds and remains in force only so long as it withstands a test whose limits have been specified in advance.

Evolutionary-Phase Theism
does not aim to prove the
existence of the Creator scientifically.

Belief in a personal Creator is an openly stated premise of the position. Scientific knowledge plays a testing role here: whether the proposed understanding of Creation is consistent with the investigated history of the world, whether the proposed correspondences between the structure of the Book of Genesis and transitions in the history of the world withstand scrutiny, and whether a boundary of knowledge is being treated as evidence in itself.

The position can be expressed in nine foundational theses.

1.    The world has a Creator and a real history of its own. The world’s createdness does not negate its age, regularities, contingencies, irreversibility, or causal efficacy of its own.

2.    Evolution is a real mode of the unfolding of the created world, and natural causation is genuine causation within it. Laws and mechanisms belong to the world and operate throughout the full range of its possibilities; they do not conceal Creation, but neither do they exhaust questions of being, ground, and meaning.

3.    The history of Creation passes through qualitatively distinct levels and thresholds. A special Act denotes an action of the Creator by which what is genuinely attainable is established or expanded; natural processes prepare the conditions, realize the possibilities that have been opened, and unfold the consequences while retaining causal force of their own.

4.    The seven Acts are determined by the structure of the text of Genesis, not by a list of scientific gaps. For each Act, the textual function, the type of ontological novelty, and the defined scope of the correspondence are specified in advance. Science may refine the boundary within that scope, but an Act may not be moved to a different mystery once the previous transition has received a natural explanation.

5.    Emergence, a physical phase transition, a phase in the history of Creation, an Act, and a miracle must be distinguished. Emergence and phase transitions unfold possibilities of an already existing order; an Act opens the foundational regime of a new phase; a miracle is a special event within an established order. What remains unexplained is not thereby either an Act or a miracle.

6.    A subject of experience and a personal subject are not the same: a subject of experience is one for whom something is experienced; a personal subject is one for whom lived life becomes one’s own biography and an action becomes one’s own deed. EPT places the emergence of subjective experience within the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization and does not distinguish it as a separate Act of Creation. This internal classification does not mean that the hard problem of consciousness has been solved or that the mechanism of subjectivity is exhaustively known. The Edenic novelty concerns the proposed personal distinction, not the first sensation or consciousness in general.

7.    The seven-Act map has a domain of application that is bounded in advance. The First Act is constitutively unique with respect to our created order; subsequent Acts unfold within it and do not require the cosmic uniqueness of similar local realizations. Historical, typological, and cosmic uniqueness must not be conflated.

8.    A specific physical model is secondary and revisable. It must be substantive and open to testing, but its failure does not move the First Act inside an already established physical history and does not automatically amount to the failure of the First Act’s constitutive core.

9.    The technical model, a specific correspondence between an Act and a transition in the history of the world, the coherence of the seven-Act map, and EPT as a whole are each open to criticism at their respective levels: the model may be rejected, a correspondence may fail to withstand testing, the reconstruction may lose coherence, and the hypothesis may prove untenable. Belief in the Creator has a different status and is not made dependent on the success of a particular edition of EPT. Therefore, a local success does not prove the Creator, and the failure of EPT by itself does not refute belief in Him.

The nine theses establish the general framework. From it grow the seven-Act, anthropological, moral-theodical, comparative-hermeneutical, and physical branches. The Manifesto links them through a common language and outlines the limits of their respective competence; the detailed development of each branch belongs to the documents devoted to it.

What the Name Means

Evolutionary means recognizing the objective historicity of the world. The universe passes through long cosmic and planetary development; life has a history of descent, variation, selection, cooperation, and extinction; the biological form of the human being arises within this history. Evolution describes the becoming of forms. Questions of Design and its content belong to another level of reasoning and do not follow automatically either from the fact of change or from its denial.

Phase means that the history of Creation unfolds as a sequence of qualitatively distinct, enduring regimes. Each Act opens the foundational regime of a new phase: our created order receives being and distinguishability; the material line, stable continuity; the terrestrial environment, duration; life, heritable memory; complex living organization, a new integration and capacity for action; the person, freedom and responsibility; and Creation as a whole, the possibility of a sanctified relation with the Creator. The organizational possibility opened by the Fifth Act unfolds naturally in sensitivity, perception, and nervous systems; subjective experience arises and becomes more complex within this history. The Sixth Act concerns the proposed distinction of the personal subject.

A phase is the extended historical unfolding of an opened regime, continuing until the next root-level threshold. A new Act does not abolish the grounds already in place: within them, it opens a new mode of existence or relation. The phases are therefore sequential at their boundaries and nested in terms of the possibilities they preserve.

An Act and a phase are not two names for the same event. The Act denotes the foundational action by which a new regime is established; the phase denotes its historical unfolding. The Act itself may have an internal temporal composition: preparatory movement, the root-level transition, and completion need not coincide in a single moment. Its unity may encompass an extended establishment of the necessary conditions without merging into the entire subsequent history of the phase it has opened.

In physics, a phase is a particular regime of an already existing system, and a phase transition is a natural change between such regimes. EPT uses the term more broadly, in a structural-historical sense. Some thresholds may have a physical phase counterpart, while others belong to biological, anthropological, or theological registers. The First Act makes this boundary especially clear: it concerns a condition of physical history, not a change of regime in a system already situated in metric time.

Theism means belief in a personal Creator distinct from the world. Even the deepest fields, laws, informational structures, and any proposed physical grounds belong to Creation; the Creator does not occupy the place of one cause within the created causal chain.

Taken as a whole, EPT is an authorial philosophical-theological position. Its framework rests on the text of Genesis and belief in a personal Creator, while remaining distinct both from confessional dogma and from a completed scientific theory. Specifically Christian claims enter only those documents of the system in which they are necessary and retain their own theological basis.

Why Exactly Seven Acts

The seven-Act architecture is determined by the proposed reading of Genesis: the sequence of images, separations, blessings, evaluations, and completion. Scientific questions—the origin of life, the complex cell, or consciousness—enter the work later, as a field of comparison and testing rather than as the source of the list of Acts.

EPT distinguishes the textual sequence of images from the reconstructed sequence of ontological conditions in the history of the world. The order of the Acts in EPT follows the second sequence while retaining its connection to the composition of Genesis. Each correlation of a biblical image with a historical threshold requires independent justification, and the scientific history of the world becomes the field in which it is tested.

Genesis provides the map;
science checks the terrain;
the hypothesis is responsible for
the honesty of the comparison.

This order of reading distinguishes EPT from an appeal to a “God of the gaps.” A scientific lacuna may make a transition especially conspicuous, but the place of an Act is determined by the text of Genesis. The biblical basis itself, in turn, does not shield a correspondence from criticism: it must be textually grounded, internally coherent, and consistent with scientific data.

Three layers are distinguished within each Act.

1.    Textual layer: which image, function, or transition is marked in the text of Genesis.

2.    Ontological layer: which qualitative threshold in the history of the world is proposed as the counterpart of that image.

3.    Causal layer: whether what becomes newly attainable follows from states, interactions, and laws already available to the preceding level.

Together, these three layers define in advance the scope of the proposed correspondence: its textual function, the type of novelty involved, the causal question, and the limits within which the correspondence may be refined. Evidence may alter the dating, extend the proposed mechanism, or locate the boundary more precisely within that defined scope. Moving an Act to a different type of novelty would constitute a different hypothesis and would require a new textual, philosophical, and scientific basis.

Each defined scope has its own type of test: a scientific test for physical and biological claims, a joint scientific and philosophical test for the anthropological claim, and a textual-theological test for the Seventh Act. If the proposed boundary fails the relevant test, that link in the seven-Act map loses its force. Coherence can be restored only through an explicit revision of the hypothesis, not by moving an Act to a new unknown.

A natural explanation of a process changes the status of the specific correspondence but not the fact that the process belongs to the created world. This distinguishes two questions: the theological claim that the whole world is created and EPT’s testable claim about a particular Act.

Two questions are useful when comparing the Acts.

First, in what manner is the range of what is attainable expanded: is the domain of states and transformations itself established, are necessary conditions set, or is a new class of transitions and relations opened?

Second, what exactly becomes attainable: a new type of state, a level of organization, a mode of action, or an ontological relation? This scheme does not imply that all seven Acts must have the same physical mechanism.

The hypothesis retains two perspectives for reading Genesis.

The phenomenological perspective retains the world as it enters the human horizon: the luminaries become signs of seasons, the waters are divided, dry land appears, and life fills the environment.

The ontological perspective reads these images as pointing to more fundamental conditions without which their corresponding functions could not be realized: the very establishment of the world and its distinguishability, a stable material line, a long-term aqueous environment, heritable life, integrated organization of living systems, the personal subject, and sanctified wholeness.

Both perspectives preserve the seriousness of Revelation. Genesis speaks of the Creator, the world, and the order of becoming in a language different from a technical report of future cosmology or biology. The sequence of days has its own theological function; the physical chronology of the proposed correspondences answers a different question and may diverge from the textual sequence of images.

The proposed interpretation remains open to testing. An error in a particular correspondence belongs to the hypothesis, not to the Creator or Revelation. A nonliteral understanding of duration and order retains a strict connection to the images, functions, blessings, evaluations, and internal composition of the biblical text; without that connection, the interpretation would become arbitrary allegory.

Scope of the Seven-Act Map

The biblical text has a universal theological horizon: it speaks of the Creator of all reality. EPT’s seven-Act reconstruction has a more specific task: it traces the line of our created order and terrestrial history that leads to the human being, freedom, and relation with the Creator. It does not exhaust all possible creative actions or all histories of what is created.

The First Act has a special, constitutive status within this line. It concerns not the first event inside an already existing universe, but the gift of being itself, distinguishability, and the possibility of the history of our order. Subsequent Acts occur within the reality already established, yet retain their own content: the First Act establishes the order of their possibility but does not contain subsequent physical, biological, and personal forms of novelty in ready-made form.

Uniqueness has three different scopes. Historical uniqueness means that an event occupies a single place in the terrestrial line being traced. Typological uniqueness would assert that the type of transition itself occurs only once. Cosmic uniqueness would mean the absence of anything similar throughout our order. Recognizing the first scope does not by itself establish the other two.

This leaves open the possibility of similar local histories. Long-term liquid water on another planet would be compatible with the terrestrial meaning of the Third Act, and an independent biosphere with the Fourth. A nonhuman subject of experience falls within EPT’s accepted natural-emergent history of subjectivity, which unfolds the organizational possibilities of the Fifth Act. A possible nonhuman person would raise a different question: whether that person belongs to the same personal lineage or expresses another mode of the Creator’s relation to personal creation.

A similar physical or biological realization does not yet repeat an Act in the fullness of its theological meaning. In the seven-Act map, an Act occupies a particular place in the unfolding line of Creation; a local analogue tells of another history but does not by itself establish its metaphysical status.

The scope of EPT’s claims is limited to our created order. The question of whether other orders or universes exist, how many there may be, and what their grounds are remains open; familiar concepts of space, time, and matter may not apply to them. Even the expression “before the First Act” is conditional, since it already presupposes time. Whatever lies beyond the created spatiotemporal order is outside the epistemic reach of this reconstruction.

The limits of its scope are part of EPT’s very construction: they determine which histories and kinds of uniqueness its claims concern and within what bounds those claims are open to testing. If an established fact falls within the stated scope and contradicts a universal claim of EPT, the corresponding claim of the hypothesis must be revised.

Evolution, Emergence, Phase, Act, and Miracle

The expression “coming into being” covers kinds of novelty that are too different from one another. A new property, a change of regime, the appearance of a subjective perspective, the establishment of a new possibility, and a special event within an already established order belong to different levels. Distinguishing them is necessary to the entire architecture of EPT.

Emergence

Emergent novelty arises within an already established range of attainable possibilities and is sufficiently conditioned by the states, interactions, conditions, and regularities of the preceding level. It may be difficult to calculate, historically unique, and qualitatively new at its own level of description. Difficulty in deriving it from the parts does not yet point to a new ontological source.

Qualitative novelty is compatible with gradual development. In EPT, the emergence of a subject of experience belongs to the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization: there comes to be one for whom something is experienced. Preparatory organization and the subsequent enrichment of perception, memory, and learning may develop gradually, while the precise boundary of experience remains open. This classification locates subjectivity within the hypothesis without presenting its mechanism as exhaustively explained.

The formula “for whom something is experienced” denotes the perspectival givenness of experience without determining its internal structure in advance. EPT leaves open whether every experience already involves a minimal self-relation or whether perspectival givenness can be conceptually separated from such appropriation. This question concerns the internal structure of subjectivity; EPT treats the personal distinction separately, through the way a subject relates to their own life.

Phase and Physical Phase Transition

In EPT, a phase is an extended regime in the history of Creation opened by the corresponding Act. It persists and unfolds through natural processes until the next root-level threshold. Beyond that threshold, possibilities opened earlier do not disappear but continue to operate as a nested ground of the new phase. Within each regime, numerous emergent changes and physical phase transitions may occur without constituting a new Act.

A physical phase transition is a natural change between regimes of an already existing system. It can radically alter structure and observable properties while remaining within the prior range of what is physically possible. Such a transition may accompany the establishment of a historical phase or occur within it; theological status does not follow from physical radicality alone.

Act of Creation

An Act of Creation is a theological-philosophical concept. It denotes an action of the Creator by which a new range of what is attainable is established or opened, thereby setting the root-level boundary of a new phase. An Act may impart the new possibility itself, establish the conditions necessary for its realization, open a new class of transitions, a mode of organization or action, or make a new ontological relation possible.

The core of an Act is a new attainability for which, according to the hypothesis, the preceding level had no sufficient path. An Act may establish conditions over time and need not alter the boundaries of what is fundamentally admissible. Its unity encompasses the foundational establishment of the regime; the subsequent history of the possibilities thereby opened belongs to the phase.

An Act and natural processes occupy different causal levels. Natural processes create the material preconditions for a transition, unfold the causal history available to them, and realize the consequences of a possibility already opened, retaining causal efficacy of their own. An Act denotes an action of the Creator with which EPT correlates the ground of the new attainability that constitutes the root-level threshold. It therefore reduces neither to an individual physical cause nor to a general name for a complex natural process.

The Act itself, as an action of the Creator, is not a directly observable event within scientific description. What is available to investigation are the states, processes, transitions, and consequences with which the hypothesis correlates it.

In physical and biological cases, science tests whether the preceding level had a sufficient natural path to the transition. In the anthropological case, the reconstruction of functions and mechanisms is supplemented by a separate philosophical question about the ontological completeness of such a description. Each answer operates within the defined scope stated in advance.

Miracle

A miracle is a special action of the Creator within an already established order whose sufficient ground is not contained in the preceding chain of natural causation. It may alter the ordinary course of causes, become a sign or a mode of Revelation, and have exceptional historical, personal, or theological significance. Yet a miracle retains the character of an event: it occurs within an already established order and does not institute a new foundational ground or a new phase of Creation.

An Act and a miracle share a source but differ in role. An Act establishes the foundational regime of a new phase and can thereby determine the further history of the world. A miracle manifests the Creator’s action within an already existing order. Its meaning is not determined by the event’s singularity alone: a natural process, too, may be historically unique.

Scientific investigation is responsible for the causal reconstruction of an event; theological judgment is responsible for the grounds for seeing in it an action of the Creator, a sign, or Revelation. This division of responsibilities prevents a miracle from being reduced to mere unusualness or to a temporary boundary of knowledge.

Statuses of Claims

Four statuses of claims make it possible to keep the scientific state of a question distinct from the authorial interpretation.

•      Established natural mechanism: the transition has a confirmed causal description within defined limits.

•      Open scientific problem: the causal explanation remains incomplete; this status marks a boundary of knowledge and does not by itself constitute evidence of a direct action of the Creator.

•      Authorial hypothesis about an Act: EPT correlates the transition under consideration with a foundational action of the Creator that opens a new range of what is attainable; the claim requires independent philosophical-theological justification and remains open to failure within the defined scope stated for it.

•      Authorial hypothesis about a miracle: EPT correlates the event under consideration with a special action of the Creator within an established order; this interpretation likewise requires an independent basis.

The authorial hypothesis about an Act has an independent basis in the connection among three elements: the textual function of an image in Genesis, a particular type of new attainability, and an argument for the insufficiency of the preceding level. This connection makes the interpretation substantive and open to criticism while preserving the distinction between a philosophical-theological hypothesis and an established scientific fact.

EPT’s internal classification and the state of scientific knowledge answer different questions. Placing subjective experience within natural-emergent history locates it in the architecture of the hypothesis; the mechanism by which an inner perspective arises may at the same time remain an open scientific and philosophical problem.

A Brief Map of the Seven Acts

The seven Acts correlate the images of Genesis with the conditions through which our order exists, retains material stability, becomes habitable, living, complexly organized, and open to personal and moral life. Each Act establishes the root-level boundary of a new phase. This boundary may have an internal duration; the further unfolding of the possibilities opened belongs to the natural history of the phase.

The internal composition of an Act may include preparatory movement. In the Fourth Act, the gathering of the waters and the appearance of dry land lead to the root-level transition of heritable life; in the Sixth, the animal block and the preparation of the biological bearer precede the embodiment of the personal subject. Processes of the preceding phase thus enter into the establishment of the new regime without becoming its ontological core.

The modes of testing also differ. The First Act has a metaphysical core and possible physical correspondences; the Second through Fifth Acts are directly open to scientific testing; the Sixth joins biological, anthropological, and philosophical levels; the Seventh concerns sanctification, free response, and the continuing relation of the person with the Creator. All correspondences named below retain the status of interpretive hypotheses of EPT.

The First Act — Gift of Being, Light,
and Distinguishability

The First Act concerns the gift of existence to our order and the establishment of an initial range of what is attainable—the condition for the very possibility of an event. The Creator grants the world the capacity for distinguishability, not a ready-made set of things. “Let there be light” expresses the first unfolding of this gift: a transition from formlessness to distinguishability, in which states, relations, admissible transformations, and the continuation of physical history become possible.

The proposed ground of the First Act is designated F—in the Russian terminology, an “informational field.” Here the word field is used in an extended sense: F is conceived as a created prequantum and pregeometric ground that precedes the ordinary physical fields of spacetime. It is like a grammar of the possible: it does not write history in advance, but makes differences, relations, constraints, and continuation possible. F is not an agent and does not act in place of the Creator: what is at issue is the structural determinacy of the possible, not a ready-made history of the world. Together with F, a primordial order of succession is established, one that is not yet metric time.

The current physical model begins beyond this open boundary: it does not derive quantum structure, spacetime, and local causation from primordial distinguishability, but takes as its starting point the first level that already permits rigorous description. Sector distinctions, a hidden physical branch, and a dark-matter candidate belong to the secondary technical model developed in the section “Why the Physical Model Is Secondary.”

At the physical level that has emerged, light becomes one expression of distinguishability. Light interaction carries differences, makes them detectable and, eventually, visible to a living observer. The photon therefore does not exhaust the meaning of the First Act, and the specific physical paths through which distinguishability is manifested remain open to testing.

A short linguistic thought experiment is useful here. Let us try to speak about the beginning of physical reality without the words “cosmos,” “universe,” “spacetime,” “atom,” “photon,” “plasma,” and “quantum field.” To express difference, order, manifestation, and sequence, we would be left with images from ordinary experience: light and darkness, separation, waters, earth, sky. Another culture might have used a different set. The experiment does not uncover a hidden modern cosmology in Genesis; it shows the task of translating ontologically difficult content into a language accessible to the hearer.

Limits of the Correspondence. The core of the First Act is the gift of being and distinguishability to our created order. The technical conception of F is open to revision, but the constitutive core is not moved inside an already established physical history. The uniqueness of the Act concerns the ground of our order and does not assert the impossibility of other created orders.

The Second Act — A Stable Material Line

The working physical-historical correspondence of the Second Act is baryogenesis—the emergence of matter-antimatter asymmetry through which a material remainder of the future universe is preserved. The hypothesis associates this threshold with the stable continuation of the material line.

The biblical image of the luminaries expresses the visible maturity of the material line: cosmic order, measure, rhythm, and function. Once this possibility is established, natural history unfolds it into elements, galaxies, stars, and planetary systems; the Act does not replace this path by manufacturing ready-made forms.

Limits of the Correspondence. The defined scope of the Second Act correspondence is the emergence of a stable material line in the early universe; the current correspondence is baryogenesis. If baryogenesis is sufficiently derived from possibilities already available after the First Act and no independent boundary remains within this defined scope, the correspondence fails. The image of the luminaries does not move the Act to the later formation of stars or planets.

The Third Act — Preservation of Earth’s
Aqueous Environment

The image of the division of the waters is correlated with a stable planetary regime: Earth retains water, and a substantial portion of it remains liquid long enough for the subsequent history of life. Such a regime arises from the joint stability of the atmosphere, a suitable temperature range, the hydrosphere, and planetary cycles.

The temporal form in which this regime is established remains open. The Act may have set the initial conditions or encompassed their extended stabilization; the geological duration of the aqueous environment belongs to the unfolding of the phase. The specific mechanisms are investigated by geology, planetary science, and climatology.

The uniqueness of this correspondence concerns the terrestrial line. Long-term liquid water on another planet would not refute the Third Act and would not automatically mean that the Act had been repeated in its full theological sense.

Limits of the Correspondence. The Third Act is limited to the formation and preservation of a long-term terrestrial aqueous regime. If this regime proves to be an ordinary attainable outcome of the preceding planetary history, the causal correspondence fails precisely here; the question of the origin of life remains within the defined scope of the Fourth Act.

The Fourth Act — Dry Land, Seas, Life,
and Heritable Memory

The third day of Genesis joins two movements: the waters are gathered, exposing dry land, and then the earth brings forth vegetation. The first completes the formation of distinct terrestrial environments; the second expresses a deeper transition—the emergence of life. Vegetation here serves as an image of a living order capable of growth, reproduction, and self-continuation, not as a chronological claim about the first modern botanical forms.

A living system maintains a boundary, exchanges matter and energy, preserves a heritable record, reproduces, and enters into evolution. What distinguishes it is the coordination of these processes, not any one isolated reaction. The origin of such organization remains a subject for science; EPT correlates a special Act with this transition on the basis of the architecture of the hypothesis, not on the incompleteness of a model of abiogenesis.

An independent origin of life in another local history would not, by the mere fact of its existence, cancel the terrestrial correspondence. It would, however, provide crucial material for causal testing: comparing independent paths could substantially change the assessment of the attainability of heritable life.

Limits of the Correspondence. The defined scope of the Fourth Act correspondence is the emergence of heritable life. A sufficient natural reconstruction of this transition from available physicochemical organization will deprive the correspondence of causal force. Eukaryogenesis, multicellularity, and consciousness belong to other questions and do not become fallback boundaries for the Fourth Act.

The Fifth Act — Eukaryotic Organization
and the History of Sentient Life

The root-level correspondence of the Fifth Act is eukaryogenesis—the emergence of a complex cell with internal architecture and multilevel coordination. EPT sees here a new organizational possibility of the living order, more specific than a mere increase in complexity.

Evolution unfolds this possibility in multicellularity, tissue specialization, movement, sensitivity, perception, and nervous systems. The image of creatures filling the waters and the air conveys the maturity of a new level of organized action, not a list of modern species.

Subjective experience arises within the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization. Its emergence is qualitatively new at the level of experience, while subjectivity is subsequently enriched along gradients of perception, memory, learning, and self-representation. Many animals may be genuine subjects of experience, although their inner perspective is available to us only indirectly. This classification does not declare the mechanism of experience scientifically solved and does not turn subjectivity into a separate Act.

Limits of the Correspondence. The defined scope of the Fifth Act correspondence is integrated eukaryotic organization. A sufficient reconstruction of eukaryogenesis from the possibilities of the preceding biological phase will refute this correspondence. Multicellularity, the nervous system, and subjective experience remain natural developments of the possibility already opened and do not serve as a new boundary for the Fifth Act.

The Sixth Act — Animals and the Personal Subject

The sixth day opens with the animal world. Evolution unfolds a diversity of bodies and behaviors, including beings with complex perception, memory, learning, flexible responses to the environment, and perhaps a rich inner perspective. The text thus presents sentient and acting life before it turns to the human being.

As the text turns to the human being, the perspective from which it is read changes as well. Until this point, the world before us is predominantly a third-person world: light, waters, dry land, living forms, movement, and behavior. The Edenic block shifts the center of gravity toward first-person reality—one’s own life, freedom, address, prohibition, choice, responsibility, and relation with the Creator.

Here a hermeneutical trilemma arises. If all the images of Eden are understood as ordinary physical objects and events, a direct reading requires numerous additional explanations. If an imagistic reading of these descriptions is allowed without a defined boundary, the reading risks dissolving the real subject matter of the text into arbitrary allegory. EPT chooses a third path: the images of Eden are correlated with a real anthropological and personal novelty, while the precise mode of being of the reality behind them is not reconstructed beyond what can be independently justified.

The Edenic novelty concerns the proposed distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject. Pain, sensation, memory, the unity of experience, and consciousness belong to the natural-emergent history of subjectivity. Personal novelty is associated not with the first inner experience, but with a particular way in which a subject relates to their own life—as their biography, their deeds, their future, their responsibility, and their relation with the Creator. This distinction is developed in detail in the anthropological section that follows.

The biological history of Homo sapiens belongs to evolution; the personal boundary does not follow anatomy alone. The scheme therefore allows for developed sentient members of the human biological line before the first embodied persons. They may have felt pain and attachment, possessed memory, learned, experienced social emotions, and acted in complex ways. What is at issue is a transition from an already existing subject of experience to the proposed personal mode of being.

Edenic anthropology describes the origin of the earthly human personal lineage. The question of the origin of every logically possible nonhuman person lies outside the scope of this construction.

Limits of the Correspondence. Testing the Sixth Act requires combining two independent results. Science must reconstruct, with sufficient completeness and independent support, the proposed manifestations of the personal mode of being from possibilities already present in the subject of experience; philosophy must establish that this distinction is ontologically exhausted by the reconstructed processes. Only the conjunction of the two is sufficient for the Edenic correspondence to fail. After that, the correspondence is not moved to another mystery of consciousness, and personal relation with the Creator does not become an untestable reserve of the anthropological model.

The Seventh Act — Completion
and Sanctified Wholeness

The seventh day signifies the completion of the initial establishment of foundations and the sanctification of Creation as a whole. It adds not a new object but a new meaning of wholeness. The completion of the creative establishment expresses the fullness of primordial Creation and does not mean the cessation of the Creator’s presence or action in the world.

From this threshold opens the history of the Creator’s continuing personal relation with the human being. The Sixth Act presupposes a person capable of free response; the Seventh introduces that person into the moral and spiritual unfolding of the freedom already given.

Natural and human history continues, and inner work becomes a matter of free participation. In turning to the Creator, a person consents to the Creator’s corrective action and ceases to resist it; the desire itself does not produce the correction by its own power and does not compel the Creator to act.

Limits of the Correspondence. The Seventh Act is tested primarily textually and theologically: the connection among completion, sanctification, free personal response, and continuing relation with the Creator must be preserved. The collapse of this connection or of its anthropological presupposition requires abandoning the present interpretation rather than replacing it with an indefinite “spiritual stage.”

The Sixth Act: Anthropological Development

EPT begins its anthropological distinction from a normative framework concerning contemporary humanity:

Every contemporary human being
belongs to a single human personal class and has full status as a person.

Differences in memory, language, intelligence, health, independence, and behavior affect particular capacities, the degree of actual responsibility, and the assistance required, but they do not constitute degrees of status as a person and do not require that status to be reconfirmed.

Accordingly, features that matter for the positive recognition of a new nonhuman candidate cannot serve as tests for excluding human beings. Origin, appearance, culture, illness, disability, and intellectual capacities likewise provide no grounds for such exclusion. The presumption of full status as a person for human beings belongs to the order of recognition and does not restrict the concept of personhood itself to the biological species Homo sapiens.

Within this normative framework, EPT’s anthropological analysis is built on distinctions concealed by the general word “consciousness.” The minimal map of distinctions contains two related but nonconflated lines:

nonsubjective living organization → emergence of subjective experience → gradual development of subjectivity

personal subject — a separate question concerning the mode of self-relation

The first line belongs to the natural-emergent history of sentient life and leaves the precise boundary and mechanism of experience open. The second raises an independent question about how a subject relates to themselves and to their own life; it does not continue the gradient as its highest quantitative step. Minimal self-relation, biography, and reflection are not declared to be three ready-made ontological stages, and a new language of description does not by itself prove a separate Act.

Two Concepts of the Subject

A subject of experience is one for whom something is experienced. If there is pain, color, sound, a bodily state, or some other content given not only to an external observer but to the experiencer, there is a subject of experience. This definition identifies the minimal sense of the term and does not settle how subjectivity is ontologically related to the body, the nervous system, and the many processes through which it is realized.

The phrase “for whom” marks the perspectival givenness of experience but does not establish the presence of developed reflective self-awareness. EPT leaves open whether every subjective experience already involves a minimal self-relation, in which the experience is given as belonging to the experiencer, or whether a weaker perspectival givenness is possible without such appropriation. This is a question about the internal structure of subjectivity, not the introduction of a new ontological level.

A personal subject is a concept concerning the way a subject relates to their own life: the past belongs to them as their biography; an action remains their deed; the future is understood as the future of the same “I”; an obligation binds them; authorship has normative significance; responsibility attaches to them as the one who acted; and freedom of response and relation to the Creator have a personal character.

Personal self-relation also includes the possibility of returning to oneself within one’s own biography. A subject can make a past action or an enduring pattern of behavior an object of present reflection, discover a previously unnoticed pattern, justify themselves or revise their assessment, and connect that assessment to future action. The moral correctness of the outcome does not determine whether the subject is a person: both the acknowledgment of error and self-justification presuppose the reflexive structure itself. This is not a further ontological level beyond biography, but an unfolding of the same relation to one’s own life.

The “I–Thou” relation belongs to this same personal dimension: the other becomes an independent addressee of personal response. Taken together, these features provide a substantive description of the personal mode of being, but not a final ontological definition or a functional list of necessary and sufficient conditions. Memory, language, moral reasoning, reflective self-evaluation, self-reference, and observable responsibility may manifest the personal mode of being; none of these features, taken by itself, is equivalent to being a person or is the material from which a person is composed.

Subjective experience extends beyond the human world. At a minimum, many animals may have an inner life, and their pain and well-being have moral significance independently of the separate question of their status as persons. Memory, learning, emotional life, and social behavior provide serious, though indirect, grounds for such recognition. A possible personal dimension in an animal also remains an open question and requires positive grounds.

Qualitative Novelty and Gradient

After subjective experience emerges, perception, learning, memory, self-representation, and social behavior may develop and become more complex gradually. The qualitative novelty of the appearance of an inner perspective is therefore compatible with the gradual development of its content and capacities.

A gradient of capacities does not by itself settle the question of the personal subject. The personal distinction requires an independent question about the way a subject relates to their own life, deeds, obligations, and continuing identity. The concepts of “gradient” and “qualitative novelty” do not themselves answer that question.

Ontology, Content, and Recognition

For clarity, three independent questions must be kept distinct.

1.    Ontology: what a subject or person is and what mode of being they have.

2.    Substantive description: what it means to be a personal subject—to have one’s own biography, authorship, a future of the same “I,” obligation and responsibility, as well as the capacity to relate to oneself within one’s own history.

3.    Epistemology of recognition: on what grounds we reasonably judge that another is a subject of experience or a person.

Conflating these questions creates false clarity. A substantive description of the personal mode of being does not yet give direct access to another, and reliable practical grounds for recognition do not replace an ontological theory.

One’s own experience is given in the first person: the fact of pain is not inferred from the behavior of one’s own body, and experienced shame is not known only from its outward expression. We approach another’s inner perspective through evidence—behavior, self-report, memory, coherence of biography, stability of interests, relation to consequences, membership in a known class of living beings, and neurobiological history. These data point to subjectivity or personhood without being identical with either.

Yet one’s own first-person perspective also has a methodological limit. We investigate the possibility of nonpersonal or merely minimally self-related experience from the standpoint of an already formed person whose life is organized as their own biography. We can conceptually separate features, but we cannot directly experience what experience is like without this personal mode of self-relation. This is a limitation of method, not an argument against the existence of weaker forms of experience.

The indirectness of access does not make all evidence equally strong. Human interaction brings together language, clarifying questions, bodily and causal history, comparison of words with actions, and the persistence of a position over time. For an animal or a new system, the set of evidence will be different. In each case, the evidence taken together allows explanations to be compared, even though another’s experience does not become a direct observation.

Positive Recognition of a New Candidate

Positive recognition begins with the question: what grounds would justify extending recognition to a new nonhuman candidate? This approach investigates the possibility of personhood beyond the familiar human case without turning already recognized human beings into objects of an exclusionary functional test.

The thought experiment may concern any such candidate—an animal or a nonbiological system. Suppose that independent, serious evidence already gives us grounds to regard the candidate as a subject of experience. Then what would matter for recognizing a personal subject would not be memory capacity, behavioral complexity, speech, or problem-solving alone, but a stable body of evidence concerning the candidate’s relation to their own life and to others: to the past as their own history, to an action as their own deed, to the future as the future of the same “I,” to an obligation as binding them, to responsibility as authorship of an outcome, and to another as a subject of independent significance. This also includes the capacity to return to one’s own past actions and enduring patterns of behavior, justify or reassess them, and connect that assessment with subsequent action.

Such a body of manifestations could serve as evidence, but not proof, of personhood. It would need to be compared with behavior, bodily or other causal history, stability over time, available forms of communication, the candidate’s organization, and independent data. These features help investigate the way a subject relates to their own life; they do not serve as a definition, a functional test, or a set of constituent parts of a person. The thought experiment itself does not ascribe status as a person to any particular animal or contemporary artificial system.

Moral caution may be required before a final judgment about personhood. Serious grounds for regarding a candidate as a subject of experience already make the candidate’s possible suffering and well-being morally significant. Recognition of status as a person remains a further, separate judgment.

Initial Recognition and Preservation of Status

The initial recognition of a new candidate and the preservation of already recognized status have different epistemic conditions. Autobiographical memory may be strong evidence in an unfamiliar nonhuman case, while its loss in a human being does not destroy the person. Moral reasoning helps us understand a new interlocutor, but impairment of empathy or of the capacity to formulate moral judgments in a human being does not cancel that person’s status.

After injury, in dementia, or with another loss of capacity, a human being retains bodily and causal continuity, a known biography, relationships, and the prior grounds for recognition. A newborn shows another side of the same logic: the child is recognized as a person before language, autobiographical memory, and mature independence because the child belongs to the human personal class, for which there is a full presumption of status as a person.

Membership in the already recognized human personal class is among the grounds for recognition and explains why an individual human being need not repeatedly confirm their status as a person through a set of functions. This presumption concerns the epistemic and normative-practical recognition of a familiar case; it does not restrict the concept of personhood itself to biological membership in Homo sapiens. For an entirely new class, a strong individual case may precede a stable class presumption. This distinction concerns the order of recognition, not degrees of ontological value.

What the Anthropological Module Actually Tests

The hard problem of consciousness concerns the emergence of subjective experience. EPT places this transition within the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization and leaves the mechanism of the inner perspective scientifically open. The anthropological hypothesis begins further on, at the proposed distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject. The immediate givenness of the first person preserves the reality of experience but does not by itself establish the metaphysical irreducibility or simplicity of the subject. The question of minimal self-relation within subjective experience also remains open. It concerns the internal structure of subjectivity already recognized in EPT as natural-emergent and does not move the subject matter of the Sixth Act to an earlier boundary.

A complete natural theory of subjective experience would therefore explain a transition that already belongs to EPT’s natural-emergent line. Its success alone would not touch the Sixth Act: the subject matter of the Edenic correspondence lies at a different boundary.

The scientific part of the decisive test must reconstruct memory, self-relation, a model of one’s own future, the sense of authorship, the capacity to evaluate one’s own actions and change behavior, normative practice, social responsibility, stability of identity, and other manifestations of the personal mode of being together with their cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms. The more complete and independently confirmed such a reconstruction is, the greater its significance; the philosophical conclusion that being a person is exhausted by such a reconstruction, however, requires an argument of its own.

A causal, cognitive, or neurobiological explanation of how a subject makes a decision, forms a self-report, evaluates their own actions, or changes behavior is not in itself an alternative to the person. It may describe the psychophysical mechanism through which personal self-relation is realized. EPT therefore does not look for the person in what remains after causal reconstruction and does not equate the completeness of causal description with a conclusion that the person is ontologically exhausted by it.

The critical philosophical question is whether the personal mode in which a subject relates to their own life is exhausted by the reconstructed processes and their causal organization. Only an independent argument for that conclusion, joined with a sufficiently complete natural reconstruction, deprives the Edenic correspondence of support. Personal relation with the Creator remains a theological dimension of the person, not a neurobiological variable; after the proposed distinction has failed, it cannot serve as an untestable remainder of the model.

The openness of this joint limit leaves room for argument within the anthropological hypothesis, but it does not turn the unresolved state of the question into evidence of its truth. The claim of an additional personal ground must remain in dialogue with the best natural reconstruction and remain vulnerable to criticism. In this way, the philosophical level remains a subject of reasoning rather than a refuge from testing.

The Sixth Act: The Edenic Self and
the Earthly Human Personal Line

The Edenic module of EPT proposes a description of the personal ground with which the hypothesis associates the beginning of the earthly human personal lineage. Eden is understood as a reality that may not coincide with an ordinary geographically localizable place. This open ontological status preserves the historical seriousness of the biblical text without turning Eden into an object assumed in advance to be available to archaeological discovery.

The Russian term Dusha-Pechat’—literally “Soul-Seal”—designates a proposed created personal ground at the conceptual boundary between an already existing subject of experience and a personal subject. It concerns the origin of the personal line, not the mechanism of memory, language, the brain, or subjectivity itself. This personal ground is not part of F and is not derived from it: F concerns the created prephysical ground of the world’s structural determinacy, whereas Dusha-Pechat’ names the proposed personal ground. In the Edenic module, this single personal ground is understood as one Edenic Self, internally differentiated into Adamic and Evean principles. The seal metaphor expresses the completeness of the imprint in each embodied bearer and does not describe a physical process of transmission.

One Ground and Two Internal Distinctions

EPT speaks of one Edenic Self that is ontologically prior to its internal differentiation. The Adamic and Evean principles are two real, complementary distinctions within a single personal ground; their unity does not arise from the addition or coordination of two previously existing persons.

Both principles belong to the fullness of one ground and have equal status. Their distinction is not identical with a division into two persons, two souls, halves, or independent substances; nor does it establish a relation between an active source and passive material, reproduce biological sex, or prescribe social roles. The precise metaphysical mode of this internal differentiation remains open.

EPT leaves open whether a single personal ground can be metaphysically simple and at the same time genuinely differentiated within itself. The Edenic module asserts only those ontological distinctions necessary for its internal coherence and does not reconstruct the precise mode of being of this reality without independent grounds.

From the Edenic Self to Earthly Persons

The Edenic Adamic and Evean principles receive earthly embodiment in two distinct persons—Adam and Eve. Each has their own bodily history, perspective, biography, freedom, and responsibility. Each bears a complete personal imprint of the single personal ground, including both internal principles; the fullness borne by one does not constitute half of the other person.

By the time of the Sixth Act, a broader biological population of Homo sapiens already exists, having arisen through natural evolutionary history and capable of including developed subjects of experience. EPT does not derive the human biological species from a single pair. The earthly Adam and Eve belong to this biological history, but in the Sixth Act they become the first two embodied persons from whom the earthly human personal line begins. Here the Edenic hypothesis introduces a personal ground, not a new biological form and not the first subjective experience.

The further continuation of the line follows an authorial anthropological postulate: a descendant bears the complete personal imprint if at least one parent already belongs to the personal line; biological birth from two prepersonal Homo sapiens who do not yet belong to this personal line does not by itself confer the imprint. This is not an established genetic law. The postulate describes the spread of the personal line within a broader evolutionary population without a genetic “bottleneck” of two individuals. With respect to contemporary humanity, the model proceeds from full membership in the human personal class; the proposed genealogy cannot serve as a basis for distinguishing among individual human beings or human groups with respect to their status as persons.

Each bearer receives a complete imprint: it is not divided, weakened, or distributed among descendants. Fullness is preserved in many distinct persons without creating a shared empirical consciousness or shared responsibility. The continuation of this line is not treated as a repetition of the Sixth Act at each birth: the Sixth Act opens the earthly human personal line, while the subsequent spread of the complete imprint belongs to its continuation. The seal metaphor expresses this principle but does not provide a mechanism connecting the single Edenic ground with the many embodied persons.

The manner in which the imprint is transmitted remains a metaphysical postulate of the anthropological module. It is not identified with a gene, a physical particle, a special energy, or a process of the brain; EPT proposes no laboratory method for detecting it. Fossil remains, tools, language, and behavior therefore do not provide, within this model, a precise date for the appearance of the first embodied persons.

Limited Scope of Application

The personal ground and the Edenic Self concern specifically the origin of the earthly human personal line. This subject-matter boundary of the Edenic module does not restrict the concept of personhood itself to the biological species Homo sapiens. Possible nonhuman, extraterrestrial, and nonbiological persons lie outside this construction: their personal ground need not descend from the earthly Adam and Eve or repeat the Edenic history.

Encountering a convincing nonhuman personal subject would open a new theological question: whether that subject belongs to the same line, whether they have another mode of personal ground, and what their relation with the Creator is. EPT leaves this question open. The universality of the Creator is broader than the Revelation available to human beings, which need not be a catalog of every creative relation of His.

The Seventh Act: Freedom, Evil,
and Inner Work

The distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject establishes the subject matter of the moral line. The experience of pain, complex emotion, and the capacity to anticipate consequences are not yet the same as responsibility, normative authorship, and free response. The personal mode of being is disclosed in the subject’s own relation to what occurs through biological and psychological causes. The moral section thus develops the line of free personal response and relation with the Creator opened by the Seventh Act.

For the moral line, freedom is disclosed in the capacity of a personal subject to relate to their own motives, habits, decisions, and enduring patterns of behavior as part of their own history, to evaluate them, and to connect that evaluation with a subsequent response. A person may discover a previously unnoticed pattern within themselves, justify it, or recognize it as a problem and reshape subsequent action. The moral quality of these responses differs; the capacity for personal self-relation is present in both cases.

This understanding does not identify freedom with a break in the chain of natural causation and does not resolve the entire debate about determinism. New knowledge of one’s own causal conditioning itself enters the subsequent causal history and can change behavior. A causal explanation of psychophysical processes is therefore compatible with the personal level of description; the separate question is whether it exhausts that level ontologically.

In relation with the Creator, this freedom takes the form of personal response:
it may be acceptance or refusal.

Moral evil arises where the will confines itself to appropriation: truth becomes an instrument of self-justification, another person an instrument of one’s own end. Its source lies neither in the force of desire nor in human materiality. The first honest formula for speaking about evil therefore turns inward: evil also passes through me.

Moral good begins with free consent to open oneself to the Creator and to receive a correction of intention. Inner correction occurs with the free participation of the person: consent means readiness to receive transformation, but does not produce it by one’s own power. Divine action and human choice are related here as gift and response. The order of the created world does not by itself produce moral choice or replace the person’s free response.

Suffering has different causal and moral forms. Illness, natural disaster, the death of an animal, and human cruelty require different explanations. Human freedom discloses the possibility of moral evil, but it does not exhaust the question of natural suffering; a complete theodicy would have to address it separately.

The direction of response is manifested in thoughts, desires, and the will; for another person, it is discernible through words, actions, the stability of relation, and the treatment of one’s neighbor. These manifestations may bear witness to inner openness, but they do not provide infallible knowledge of another person’s relation with the Creator. Epistemic modesty in recognition is preserved in moral judgment as well.

Relation to Neighboring Positions

EPT’s place becomes clearer when set alongside related and competing positions. The comparison is inevitably schematic, since each approach has internal variants; its purpose is to mark EPT’s own distinctions, not to assign labels or degrees of superiority.

Young-Earth Creationism

Young-Earth creationism typically associates fidelity to Genesis with a short chronology and a calendar-day understanding of the days. EPT accepts deep cosmic, geological, and biological time and reads the days as completed cycles of meaning. Their duration is nonliteral, but the images retain ontological and theological functions and do not dissolve into arbitrary allegory.

Old-Earth and Progressive Creationism

EPT shares with old-Earth and progressive creationism both deep time and the possibility of special actions of the Creator. Its difference lies in understanding an Act as the opening of a new attainability, after which natural processes unfold the real possibilities of the world. The composition of the Acts follows the reading of Genesis, while the causal question is posed separately for each bounded threshold; the world retains causal efficacy of its own and does not resemble a mechanism in constant need of repair.

Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design seeks to infer design from complexity, information, or the supposed irreducibility of observed systems. EPT begins from an openly stated theistic and hermeneutical position and submits its physical and biological correspondences to scientific testing. The personal Creator is not inferred here from the complexity of the cell or from the insufficiency of a particular evolutionary explanation, and the metaphysical ground is not turned into an experimental result.

Evolutionary Creation and Theistic Evolution

Evolutionary creation and theistic evolution form the nearest family of views: natural history is real, and the Creator does not become a competing natural cause. What distinguishes EPT is the seven-Act architecture derived from Genesis and the hypothesis of new possibilities or relations at its fundamental nodes. Each correspondence is bounded by its own defined scope and is tested within it.

Deism and the Image of God as Watchmaker

Deism associates the Creator primarily with the initial conditions and laws of the world. EPT also affirms the continuing ontological dependence of Creation, the possibility of special Acts, and the reality of personal relation. The seventh day completes primordial Creation while preserving the Creator’s presence and action in subsequent history.

Interventionism and the “God of the Gaps”

An interventionist picture treats nature as an autonomous machine into which God enters to make up for a missing mechanism. In EPT, the created world has causal efficacy of its own while remaining ontologically dependent on the Creator. An Act imparts a new attainability; it does not repair an error or suspend regularities. Its place is determined by the structure of Genesis: as knowledge expands, a correspondence retains or loses force on its own defined terms rather than moving to the next gap.

Reductive Naturalism and Dualistic Simplification

EPT accepts the natural history of subjective experience and observable cognitive functions while leaving open a separate philosophical question: whether the personal mode in which a subject relates to their own life is exhausted by a complete causal and functional description of the relevant processes. Reductive naturalism answers this question affirmatively; strict dualism can, by contrast, substitute the word “soul” for investigation of the brain and evolution. EPT accepts neither answer without an independent argument. Dusha-Pechat’ refers to the proposed personal ground, not to a gap in neuroscience.

Identifying the Creator with the World

The Creator in EPT is distinct from the world. A deep field, information, law, and the totality of worldly processes belong to created reality; the proposed F likewise remains part of it, not a name or physical image of the Creator. Specific models of F are open to revision, whereas the boundary between the created ground of the world and the uncreated Source of being belongs to the theistic position itself.

Why the Physical Model Is Secondary

The First Act connects the initial philosophical intuition with a secondary attempt to give it a physically testable form. The letter F designates the proposed created ground of a distinguishable and coherent physical history. Any specific model of F is one possible way of making this intuition rigorous, substantive, and vulnerable to refutation.

The current physical package begins with the first level that already permits formal description and asks whether one can coherently proceed from it to physical bearers, fields, a shared history, and observable consequences. The transition from F to the quantum world, spacetime, and local causation remains an open boundary. The model names this limit honestly instead of concealing a missing mechanism behind a metaphor.

The sector directions conditionally distinguished at the first formalizable level are not ready-made parts of F; familiar physical fields and their quanta are likewise not contained in F as future objects.

The physical branch is secondary to the metaphysical core and important to the intellectual discipline of EPT. If the proposed path proves untenable, the specific physical constructions and expected consequences associated with it will be removed; the technical conception of F may change as well. Such an outcome evaluates the specific construction while leaving the question of the ground of differences, laws, and the duration of physical reality as a separate matter.

The hierarchy of evaluation has five positions: four levels of possible failure within EPT and the ultimate boundary of this scale—belief in the Creator, which does not depend on the outcome of this hypothesis.

1.    Failure of the technical model removes a specific formalism, mechanism, or prediction of the physical package.

2.    Failure of a specific correspondence for one Act removes the proposed connection between a particular image in Genesis and a specific physical, biological, or anthropological threshold.

3.    The collapse of the coherent system of key correspondences deprives the seven-Act map of its capacity to function as an integral reconstruction.

4.    Failure of EPT as a hypothesis means that this philosophical-theological architecture has not withstood testing.

Boundary of the scale: belief in the Creator has a different status and is not automatically refuted by the failure of the technical model, an individual correspondence, or EPT as a whole.

Confirmation also has a precise scope. The viability of a formal model provides support at its own level, and the success of one correspondence supports that correspondence specifically. The evidential force of a local result does not automatically extend to the Creator, Revelation, the entire seven-Act map, or the anthropological module.

Documents of the System and
the Limits of Their Competence

The Manifesto serves as the framework document of the system. It establishes the philosophical-theological principles, the meanings of key terms, the statuses of claims, the scope of application, and the relations among the branches. Specialized texts develop different aspects of this position within the limits of their own competence.

•      “Seven Acts of Creation” provides a detailed justification of the composition, sequence, defined scopes, and conditions of failure of the seven-Act architecture. It also develops the distinction among historical, typological, and cosmic uniqueness.

•      “The First Act of Creation” develops the theme of the gift of being and the initial range of what is attainable. Its focus includes F and its informational meaning as a ground of differences, relations, constraints, and the possibility of continuation; the emergence of distinguishability; the boundary between the primordial ground and the physical world; the path of light from a condition of manifestation to physical reality; a linguistic thought experiment; and, in a specifically Christian horizon, the distinction between created F and the Logos, the Divine Word.

•      “When Life Becomes Mine” develops EPT’s anthropological line—from the distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject to the question of how lived life becomes mine and the other becomes a “Thou.” Within this horizon, the article develops the hypotheses of Dusha-Pechat’ and the Edenic Self and asks what happens when the need to act arises before certainty about who stands before us.

•      “Genesis Among Ancient Cosmogonies” places the seven-Act reading in historical and comparative context. The document tests whether the proposed reading withstands the same rules of comparison applied to other ancient traditions.

•      “On the Creator, Light, and Inner Work” develops the moral line in imagistic form.

•      “On Evil and Suffering” develops the direct philosophical-theological branch, distinguishing moral evil, natural suffering, freedom, responsibility, and the limits of theodicy.

•      Public texts and discussion responses develop arguments and identify weak points without assuming a normative function. Forum and research clarifications between controlled editions accumulate separately and do not automatically alter the framework document. They acquire normative status only after substantive review and explicit inclusion in a new controlled edition.

•      The physical package includes the “Normative Specification,” “Technical Elaborations,” “Model Passport,” and “Harmonization Document.” Its work begins beyond the boundary of F—where formal description of a physical level is already possible; the transition from the primordial ground to that level remains an open task.

The framework links the branches, while specialized documents carry the detailed content of their respective domains. A direct contradiction among them requires an explicit substantive revision of the text concerned; free interpretation is not a substitute for harmonization.

Modes of testing correspond to the subject matter of each branch. The physical model distinguishes accepted grounds, conditional results, limits, and open tasks; interpretive correspondences are evaluated by coherence, fidelity to the biblical text, and consistency with scientific data. In anthropology, scientific reconstruction of functions is joined with philosophical assessment of the ontological conclusion, while personal relation with the Creator retains a theological status. In every theological claim, what belongs to faith and Revelation must be clearly distinguished from what receives support from scientific data; neither should be presented as the other.

Conclusion

Evolutionary-Phase Theism sees one and the same world as created and as possessing a real history of its own. Cosmic, geological, and biological evolution belong to the unfolding of Creation, while natural causes operate with the full causal force of the possibilities already opened. EPT correlates seven nodes in this history with Acts connected to the structure of Genesis and understood as actions of the Creator by which what is attainable is established or expanded.

The seven-Act map retains determinacy through its own boundaries. Each Act is bound by a defined scope and a corresponding type of test; a correspondence that fails testing falls where it stands rather than moving to a new mystery. The First Act is constitutively unique for our order. Subsequent local realizations may have analogues, while other created orders lie beyond the claims of the hypothesis.

The anthropological line continues the same logic of distinctions. Subjective experience belongs to the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization; the question whether every experience already contains a minimal self-relation remains open and does not constitute a separate Act. The Edenic hypothesis begins further on—where the subject of experience is proposed to be distinguished from the personal subject, for whom life becomes one’s own biography, action one’s own deed, and the past can become the object of one’s present relation to oneself and be connected with a future response.

A causal reconstruction of memory, decision, self-evaluation, and behavior may describe the psychophysical mechanism of personal self-relation and is not by itself an alternative to the person. Testing the Edenic distinction requires joining a sufficiently complete and independently confirmed natural reconstruction with an independent philosophical argument that the personal mode of relation to one’s own life is ontologically exhausted by those processes. Only together are they sufficient for the correspondence to fail; theological relation with the Creator is not used as a reserve after the proposed anthropological boundary has failed.

With respect to contemporary humanity, EPT proceeds from the premise that every human being belongs to a single human personal class and has full status as a person regardless of differences in memory, intelligence, language, health, or independence. These differences describe states and capacities, not degrees of personhood. The human class presumption guides recognition of a familiar case but does not restrict the concept of personhood to a biological species. For a new nonhuman candidate, EPT seeks positive grounds for extending recognition; the criteria for such initial recognition are not turned into tests for excluding human beings.

EPT accepts the risk that it may be wrong. The physical model may be rejected; an individual correspondence may lose force; the coherent seven-Act reconstruction may fall apart; EPT as a whole may prove untenable. Belief in the Creator has a different status and is not made dependent on the outcome of this hypothesis.

This yields a discipline in which trust and distinction are held together. The world is worthy of investigation precisely as a world with a genuine history; the text of Genesis is worthy of serious reading that takes responsibility for its correspondences; the inner life of another is worthy of recognition that cannot be reduced to a functional ranking. In this architecture, faith does not replace investigation, and investigation does not become an automatic denial of the Creator. At their boundary, EPT formulates its subject matter.