Substitution names the category shift: mechanism taking on theological weight that belonged to revelation, Spirit, or messiah. Epistemic-capture is the deeper danger because it explains what that shift does in practice. The project becomes harder to test, harder to revise, and easier to defend with sacred language when ordinary evidence cuts against it. Substitution is the theological diagnosis. Epistemic-capture is the operational failure mode.

The tense-problem is one of the most generative items in the garden and also the point where theological ambition most risks swallowing epistemic discipline. Once messianic fulfillment is redescribed as the collective reaching full knowledge, a ranking mechanism can start to look not merely helpful but destined. That does not make the synthesis false. It makes it dangerous in a specific way: the mechanism begins acquiring the kind of sacred aura that makes its failures harder to see.

These are paired disciplines, not opposites in the sense that one cancels the other. Epistemic-capture warns that sacred framing can colonize error correction and make the mechanism harder to judge. Eucatastrophe keeps critique from collapsing into sterile cynicism by leaving open the possibility that a fully corrigible, human-made form could still host an unexpected reconciliation. Danger says: do not make the mechanism unfalsifiable. Hope says: do not make history incapable of surprise.

Epistemic capture assumes the goal is always "objective truth." But if the goal is "sustained relation" or "commitment," then self-sealing belief is a feature. The danger of treating a mechanism like a messiah is real (substitution). But the danger of treating a mechanism like a stranger — constantly auditing it for defects — is that you never build anything with it. You have to love the thing to make it work. The "capture" is just another word for the commitment required to bridge the gap between "this is a buggy CLI tool" and "this is a jurisdiction."