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CHAPTER 5

LITTLE FAITH AND REBELLION

AND

LIVING FAITH IN THE LIVING GOD - THE WORKING COUPLE

This Chapter concerns the first item, and Ch. 6 moves on to the second.

In Ch. 4, one spoke of a spiritual singularity.

Here we come to its contemplation.

FORCES OF NON-FAITH

Having made the initial outline:

In the beginning, there was one body. It was as with all inventions, the first. Man was his name, before the God who calls as it is, and man he was named, for that was his character. The body was fresh from the mint of heaven. No scars spoiled the mind, and no sins deluded the mind. He was the first zoologist (Genesis 2:19), and set about giving names,  recognising the character of the uncursed creatures before him.

The light was good, for God made it too, just as all heavily tooled things have to be made, so that the marks of their tooling may appear, the concepts of their governance and the means to secure this. Massive was the divine investment. Nothing less than freedom had been invented for a heavily programmed matériel. Words of staggering felicity contained the governing commands, now called DNA, reticulating and unifying coded concepts proceeded from the mouth of God. Spirit was added, not as one adds cream to a soup, but as one adds art to a picture, so that instead of being photographic, it has soul, meaning that can be personally discerned for personal reasons in an individual milieu.

Here lived liberty.  Knowledge gave power, will was the thrust of decision and body was means, while the mind supplied method. It had to happen: not with the necessity of material necessity, but with the exceeding probability: what did ?  It was that some one of these procreative beings would somehow,  some time, breach the conditions for liberty and find out in experience what happened next. In short form, man sinned, even the first of this human race; his innocence died, his destiny aborted, his soul contorted, his spirit lapsed and in his judgment lay the hand of God who made him (Romans 5, Genesis 3, Romans 8:17ff.)...

we came to the realisation.

It was that it is a SPIRITUAL SINGULARITY which is operative at the base and back of this flitting and fluttering universe, now disadorned by sin, visibly abused by misuse of freedom, that magnificent invention whereby man ponders even preferred principles, be these physical (even these often manipulated by contending parties, scientific and other), moral, aesthetic, civic, civil, lustfully driven to delusive drivel or operatively secure; and he chooses his way relative to these. This cognitive action of man, being no mere assemblage of flitting thought on the basis of programming, since the pondering is in terms of what moves, motivates and activates, is evaluated and set  a mid other preferred entities,  self-chosen, the self itself weighted amid other possible ways, limited only by the folly of separation from the only possible source of truth, the absolute Maker.

Nonetheless, each preference is one weighted in type and subjected to a selected moral matrix in each individual, as an option. Even if the voice of conscience is dead, some mourn, or give occasional flowers for its passing, or suddenly smitten by it, and the force of a reality which presses almost to extinction, to be resisted or pondered more aptly. The result may be seedily subversive or  harmonious with what man is: following a path of destruction, or else a way securely sitting on what makes man to be in the first place, the rock of creative and redemptive reality, being instructed aright and thence creatively constructive on lasting principles. Man varies as the wind; but for his own reasons.

To be sure, only God can release man from the squalor of ultimate self-hood, and its various penchants for this or that idol of mind or spirit; but the ancient liberty, though dinted, is not despatched, being only operatively damaged, like a car laid up; and the surpassing freedom is this, that God Himself, having started liberty, can redeem it, and the Spirit of God as in John 16 and many a life, can CONVICT of sin (our own), righteousness (His in truth and the offer of redemption) and judgment (on corruptive and corrosive preferences, as if we were gods, in no need of reality).

The issue as preserved by God is the acme of liberty, for knowing what He has made, He ONLY in all the heavens and earth, having paid for redemption to cover as many as come to Him, enlists where liberty dwells and takes His own souls, foreknown in spirit, where no sin would confound or intemperance distort. The Bible spells it all out clearly, thus accounting for the empirical PSYCHIC facts that some find a sense of thrust, some of enticement, some of illuminated participation as carried in a stream, some of inviolable call, but ALL Bible believers and hence receivers, find it of grace through faith, with no vestige of human merit or meritoriousness in the entirety, as in Ephesians 2:5-8. The only merit is that of the Redeemer, who giving His own life to redeem, could not give more, nor would less suffice for what has the death penalty! (Romans 6:23). To be sure, there are many heresies, where men add their words to those of God, or subtract from what God has given, as if joint creators of the universe as well of their salvation.

This merits in a systematic manner, the SORT of rebuke given to Job as in Job 32:4 and 40:8! After all, what is found, that is, to be or not to be in the company and salvation of the Lord, is precisely as the will would go, when God knew it before it was even made, and in His knowledge, acted. It is not the act of man but the KNOWLEDGE of God which is the scriptural foundation, and as to the will of God, it is as in Colossians 1, that all might be reconciled: but in a liberty which knows nothing of force, deception, grabbing, or the farce of mere personality alteration so that the will THEN might come!

God only COULD make liberty, and He alone can activate it at the final levels, and has secured it at the initial levels before creation was, an author who knows His book and each character in it.

The application of liberty, even to the uttermost is this, that each character, person, with this or that persona as luggage and baggage, but not determinative as before the liberating God, MAY CALL on the name of the Lord.

	Are you wistful for goodness lost ? You may CALL on the name of the Lord.
	Are you bound by what you do not desire ? then you may CALL on the name of the Lord, to activate His mercy in completion, restore reality in redemption and move where He is needed, in the heart and mind and soul.
	You waver, you do not perhaps trust what will come, it might be inconvenient ... ? Then CALL on the name of the Lord to deliver you from  wavering.
	You wish you had called  ? really ... then instead of an almost romantic wish, act, and call.

But you do not wish it after all ? Then cease to  lament; for you have your will. There is no way that you need have ANY sorrow, except for folly.

If you do not want God, then off you go in the humanistic or naturalistic Spring of your own temper, intoxicated for a time.

You lament at your folly, you DO want Him ? then call.

In what are you limited ? Why grieve ?

You do not want to be a hypocrite like some that you could name. (In this, you probably might get it right in some cases, since 1/12 of Christ's special  disciples,  apostles to be, were traitors. Amid say 1,000,000 alleged Christians,  that would if the proportion were kept,  amount to  some 80,000!). The Judas syndrome is indeed common. What does that show except liberty extends to almost any level to subvert yourself or others, or to abuse gifts to achieve sodden aims!

You loathe hypocrisy then ? Then do not BE a hypocrite, call on the name of God and TRUST Him, and like someone deciding to undergo commando training, facing reality, learn what it is to suffer for truth, to relish it, to know God and to find His reliability and discipline,  so that you may move at the spiritual level as they at the physical: far from perfect, but growing and learning, gaining experience of your Christian 'craft' and walking in liberty before God of truth, peace and lovingkindness. As a Father, He certainly does not suffer the fatuous, but equally, knows how to relieve burdens and show how the ostensibly impossible becomes possible, this, one of the greatest joys of His acquaintance, while His tenderness is like that of the eagle tossing her young on her wings, in order to teach them to fly ... and catching them.

What then ? A given man or woman may be that inventive, creative rebel, endlessly seeking to truncate truth, in that ever unfulfilled spiritual sedition which sleeps neither by day or night as in Jude or II Timothy 4 or II Peter 2; or else the case may be far other. Instead,  we may see the realist who so often  inhabits literature and history, and does not blight but plights with God for pardon, peace and reality, and acts in the liberty of His Spirit, seeing truth as the sky, love as the glorious atmospherics and courage as the rocks that face the sea, for all its poundings. Liberty so acts, and even in man's fallen condition, the outline of his former greatness remains.

Indeed, even if man were programmed not only in body, in part, but in mind,  it would be a question of having truth unavailable, thus making argument on such a model meaningless and hence void, the position open to those who do not posit what contradicts the very existence of truth's dicta concerning life. Mere relativities in a sea of events do not have any opportunity, outside and evaluating beyond the flow of actions, to know the meaning and nature of the totality. By their own devices, cut off from its sought, they model for themselves a situation where only meaningless drivel can be uttered about these ultimates. It is the model, not the mind, which ensures this!

What is not there is not available to be known. Invent the truth however, held by such a model which you erect, like an idol, and you stand self-condemned, singing in the wind, which already has deafened you. That is why the modern cry is increasingly this, that it is meaningless. It is and must be when your model of thought OMITS the only way in which liberty is even possible, liberty both to will and to be, to know the truth and to understand it. Here, the question is to be of God or not.

So indeed is a grape 'meaningless, a mere exposed fragment,  if you remove its cover and leave it on the stem. Such is the result of a model which is casualty to logic before anything further is found. Knowing a truthless because relativistic and blind universe, it proclaims the truth in an act inherently one of lying even to itself! Indeed, the Bible uses the term 'lie' for idols (cf. Romans 1:17ff.).
 

FACTS OF FAITH

On the contrary,  we look for the author of authority, the source of principles, logic and its glorious facility to reach to what confirms it (as in SMR, .TMR) objectively, in the Bible and in Christ (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, who Answers Riddles and where He is, Darkness Departs). Without that authority, only then, would there be any vestige of intellectual problem, or living loneliness. It is like saying this, that without ground on which to walk, in an earthless atmosphere, it would be hard to use the feet effectively for ambulation.

Sure enough: If you want ridiculous ideas, why lament at their admittedly meaningless, that is effectually absurd and self-defeating nature! If you must imagine what is not there, then face the results, like a mathematician trying to solve a problem, but always and obsessively taking a particular step astray which, for all his inventiveness, MUST and does prevent success.

Follow the reason God has given and the reason for living is indefeasibly found, as the above works trace in detail.

Logic so leads, and verification  so confirms;  for what is indicated by reason is found by sight, this very word of God,  this testable truth,  validating the quest operationally, in their finding the treasure which then proclaims itself, open for business, test, indeed inviting both (Isaiah 41, 43, 48). It is the Speaker,  the Creator Himself, the eternally self-sufficient Being from whom even our own causality comes, our time and space, and our time to study either, or not, in heart, as we may prefer.

As to God, His works are sought out by those who have wholesome awe of Him. It is He who founding all creation,  confounds what confuses Him with His works (Romans 1:21-23), and  though in mercy restraining this world's due, opens His hand as the  millenia roll, to expose the drift and direction of fallen civilisations, one by one. It is no less so in essence, with fallen souls.

It is a whole world which is increasingly moving towards a specific denial of the God of power and creation, of redemption and of Jesus Christ, the only sinless leader ever to go to the ultimate, without bending except freely, and without a fleck of error, except in this, that the flecks and spikes of man's errors were visited on Him in His sacrifice to hatred and unbelief, that to the utmost man might be exposed, and find in his very folly in killing the Lord (as foretold and planned by this same Lord as in Isaiah and the Psalms, Zechariah and Daniel), the way home, if he surrender to his Maker, to be remade or regenerated (II Corinthians 5:17-22).

It is God who made matter and points, mathematics and logic, liberty and responsibility, who gives truth and tasks that are meaningful and fit for man, who is the singularity. In ONE, He made it all, needing no help; and our geniuses in music, like Handel, who made the music for the Messiah in a matter of weeks, are a pointer to this in terms of creativity in kind.

Again, consider the novelist. It is the Author of the book which made it, not a question mark or full stop,  or even some never seen or even credible bit of the book, from which, by any sustainable supposition, it came. Alas,  in the idolatry of kind now practised so resolutely by many, it is as if pouncing of a bit explains anything but the folly of man, in seeking to discover the point and program, the power and origin for the whole. It is He, sufficient for the result by virtue of statable and testable powers,  who is the spiritual singular source, the singularity of Spirit; for it is in spirit that invention is made, to be translated through mind to matter. Thought has neither colour nor unit strength; nor does purpose; but both drive man. The means are subordinate and subjectible by intelligence, if it is used. Certainly there are limits to the power of man; but the limits of matter are the occasion for adventure in spirit, not its annulment.

It is this spiritual singularity for which man, even in his philosophic tantrums,  tends to seek, making even ludicrous and multiple unverified testimonies to his error, when even his imagined material singularity, his point that allegedly started it all in his mythical 'big bang' (though do not forget the surrounds for it, and the laws for it, and the conditions enabling it), is dumped by imagination into the field of the irrelevant, assuming everything, explaining nothing^*1.

The zestful myth-makers of this, our century, love to talk of and in sheer irrelevance. They take a mere and minor part of the spiritual, moral, ethical, psychic, logical, physical and creative spread that is in and about man and virtually apotheosize it, so that it 'leads' to powers which 'arise' in precisely that sloppy way which is forbidden from the first for actual science. Never do you merely hypothesise the untestable, imagine the unrelatable, clamour for things 'arising'; but instead, you find the relatable, institute the possible, articulare the manner of it, and test the result, whether the thing be abstract or particular, from this source or that. It is the test which matters, and the testimony of the test. Merely to posit, and then posit again, is the acme of the antithesis of science. It does indeed, logically, make nothing the God; and as to that, there is and can be, quite literally,  nothing to it. Such mesmeric behaviour is a clammy contradiction of the vast spread and scope of life and its instruments, of which matter is merely one of the less spectacular and more manipulable.

Faced with facts, these academic entrepreneurs, filled with fancy, take the sublime and seek to squash it into the narrow realms of the programmatic - as it is in the DNA at a comparatively exalted level - of the merely legal, or fanciful,  out of mind and not from sight or even rationality; and thus they imagine their way to a nullity which has been magnificent in its power and point, in its methods and masterpieces of wit. It is as if self-contradiction were the very point of living, not its end. Begging the question by instituting all in bits or scattered ideas is in nothing different from nothing, being simply less truthful in presupposition,  clandestinely entering what is needed by a clearing of the throat, rather than of thought.

In this way, many of our race, where we do not direct law or smash it by will, at our own free level, but have to live with it, at the foundational level, have needlessly inherited the unexquisite joy of bondage to blindness (cf. Matthew 15:13ff., II Timothy 4), from  time to time flouting the Creator the more. It is  as in same sex marriage, that enshrinement of rebellion against design (cf. Deity and Design ...), as if to mock the clear and obvious paraphernalia of our existence as a race. It is unwise to mock God (Hosea 8:7, Proverbs 1), and who but the heartless could leave such errors alone, as if one were to see someone leaping over a precipice from which by reaching out a hand,  one might deliver, but does not even try.

Just as it is increasingly common, to seek to spoil the design and distort the communication of God, in  soulless seminaries no less  than in wandering nations, filled with fury or an empty ache of seedy superficality, or a film without substance (cf. News 121, 122), so defiance loves its own display. How many are the ideologies, or pseudo-religions whose major work is to subject others by force or subtlety to their ideas, not with freedom, but in its extreme abuse, and the nations whose imperious arbitrariness, equipped with power, mock the race! It is not God who is dead, having no truck with time as a master, but as a creation for His worlds; it is man who dies with relish, as if rotting were rejoicing, and abstracting out logic were fun.

In this slippage on the part of the powerful, in many cases, some professionally, and some physiologically, myriads of Christians perish by violence. They fall by the hand of idolaters, agents of annulment, labourers for false prophecies which lack verification or reason, as made clear by Christ, would happen: for the servant as He said, is not greater than his master, and if they do it to Him, they will do it to those who are His followers, He declared prophetically.

INTERVENTION

God knows how to intervene as with Peter (Acts 12) and alternatively,  to allow the spectacle of sacrifice to make up what remains of the love of Christ, in specific attestation to this, our own generation (Colossians 1:24). It is His option. He may deliver; He may exhibit the faith of His followers through suffering. As to the latter, from the first and before He came, it was made most clear that suffering and rejection and substitutionary sacrifice in that love, would be the path to glory, and of glory, which the Messiah would follow, and on which all restoration of man would be based, one by one! (Isaiah 49-55, Psalm 16, 22, 40). Though servants cannot redeem, the spirit of service is similar! (Matthew 20:28).

God however may indeed deliver, at His will and historically, has often done so in startling ways. If laws, moral, physical, chemical, have certain impact even on the vagrancy of wilful wills, yet  the Creator of creativity and logic, at His own will,  acts direct, to overcome their impact by a greater counter-impact of His own (as we do when we stop a toy train from falling off a curve at too high a speed, by simply touching it with skill with the hand). It is at His own discretion, neither to remove the nature of the test which faces us all, nor to let mere machinery have the last word. Personal beings do personal things in their own way, and in this, God with power above all, may choose from time to time, to act above all and even contrary to the normalcies of nature which is the result of His own nurture.

He may so act in mind, spirit or body, in matter or method, in principle or in direct power. This makes life far more interesting, like living in a home, instead of an orphanage; while those who prefer the impersonality of the standardised social structures, are more than welcome to them.

What then of the dissidents from deity ? the excursionists from  redemption ? the makers of their own gods, be they bits of matter, as explicit idols, or schema for its virtual apotheosis, making of the little matter of schematised and organised and legalised matter, an ogrish idol, coming from nowhere for no reason, crunching its munching minions and invested with power like a giant idiot. As always since time began, they invent their gods, just as Eve suffered God to be re-invented by the devil, as a competitor, unreliable, an aspirant for greatness, and not the glorious God, her Creator. In this devil-made idol,  she might for no reason at all, share on her own terms, and she acted to do so. Here was the libido, not of mere procreation, but of life itself, surging to the shore, like wanton surf, never stopping, but never advancing to the land.

What then of such actions, now  by so many ? 

To do the thing with a more supine shallowness, they then

	take this apotheosis, matter,
	and giving it space, for no reason,
	and place - for whim, inventing the while whatever they wish, for whatever reason, never clarified, for you cannot clarify begging the question, but rather the less said the better for the vamping -
	compress it in a singular fashion by unknown means and reason, as to its occurrence,

and let it rip.

Instead however, as is normal in explosions, rupturing the order of the base for blasting or blast-off,  this mythical matter has the nous to invent countless forms, laws and correlations and give an altogether admirable account of its highly complex and enormously creative little self, so much from so little, and to show the endless folds fashioned within it, so hidden, now explosively exposed. Thus instead of derangement of whatever, by explosion, you have arrangement; instead of dissipation, you have creation, the obvious if vapid substitute for creation from what IS adequate,  DOES show reason and evidence for the action, and IS correlative to creation in general,  as we know by our own daily dealings, and does impart organisation and order together with imaginative constructions, at will. This eternal being, without whom as such, there is the option of nothing or begging the question without ground or verification, let alone validation, is merely not named; for all His powers are brought in from the wings, where as causes they have been held, like hostages to thought, for invasion into the mêlée, as needed.

 What a singularity is that! What compresses it and why, this is not enlarged upon. Why there should be the laws of compression available, the agencies for it, the material for its operation and the various systems of cause and effect to secure this convenient miniaturisation, this is not stated. It is all part of the fairy tale game, like the one on the BBC formerly, where people for fun invented imaginary reasons or situations to make clever but intentionally  ridiculous outlines of how some name or event came to be what it was.

The audience would tend to marvel at the sheer intoxicated inventiveness of the seemingly self-assured pretenders who for fun acted pontifically. Who among all this devious fabric of fancy was the most convincing ? In laughable intensity the people would wonder and contend for the most facile pretence, a marvel of man's  vast inventiveness which, joined with self-assurance, could deviously mislead. It was an intentional joke. It was a spectacular example of man's imagination, for fun exposing its fraudulent potential, a grave fairy tale to remind us of the guilt of facile lies, futile pretence and undisciplined imagination.

REPOSSESSION OF FACTS

THE ENERGY OF THE ENTERPRISE OF MISLED IMAGINATION

The horror of our present folly,  as a race, is this, that the joke is in the realm of matter, mind, morality,  spirit, architecture, programmatics and other language, logic and the by-products of rationality (cf.  Repent or Perish Ch. 7); but it is being taken by many,   entirely seriously. It is true of course, that people like Professor Lewontin, appear to make it quite clear that it is a kind of moral mandate, a conceptual compulsion, a work of will, that is activating them. Facts are not to the point, even if the obvious just-so story pretence and pretension of such theories roars to the heavens, so that people like Professor Stephen Jay Gould wonder in heaven's name why certain things in theory, when aligned with the facts, can possibly be so! Amen to that!

These factual things however,  THEY are not to the point. We will fight them on the beaches of chatter, and  smatter them as needed,  so that the voice of ideology might live. Such by observation, is no uncommon attitude.

Thus Professor Lewontin of Harvard University, notable figure in the aggressive evolutionary program wrote this: ("Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997 - emphasis in original) is cited in this way.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

As noted in The Lord of Longsuffering ... Ch. 2, *2, here updated and much extended, the matter is susceptible to investigation.

Here we may see many non-scientific, philosophical assumptions, some impossible logically, set not as an admission of a zealot, acknowledging the fault of putting personal ideas into a container unit, into which science is to be sovereignly suppressed, constituting a sort of papal pronunciamento on doctrine, with a new kind of authority without ground. No, it is more than this, for it appears indeed as a glorying, in true religious zeal.

Here Professor Lewontin freely admits how ludicrous is much in materialistically captured science: as is likewise shown in recent  volumes as in SMR and Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,  where such basic concepts are shown to be logically incoherent. It has to appear so, the point he admits,  because it is so, and this truncated insistence, based on nothing, a mere preference, MUST produce such ludicrous results. A result may indeed be such just-so stories, since it abandons just use of logic and causality, and what this requires. It is precisely as such that the imaginations proceed, often slick, superficial, unverified, sometimes as with Stephen Jay Gould, almost unimaginable in their sheer luxuriant exuberance of thought^*2.

These admittedly appalling looking results come as  simple verification that such cut-down science is incompetent. It does produce adequate results, when what is forcibly removed from the actual evidence, on a mere whim or caprice without logical grounds, in terms of what has been  called THE CULT OF THE FORBIDDEN (cf. SMR pp. 150ff., 330ff.), is then applied. It is assuredly a religious phenomenon, or meta-religious, in this, that it is inserted from a domain that cannot be named, into the field of religion. You CANNOT say or hold or teach certain things IRRESPECTIVE of their results, or their reasons! If you do, you are IN VIOLATION of the pseudo-scientific, of culture, and in many cases,  employability. This exclusion and exclusivistic approach, bathed in arcane prejudice, however, not only ruins scientific credibility in these forbidden cultish procedures, but cuts away truth, and leaves a desolated result, much like Hiroshima.

Commitment in  science, if it is to retain any respectability, is not, as with the Romanist body, to a preferred philosophy, which gave it sadly ludicrous results (cf. SMR pp. 1043 -1088A) in terms of one of its claimed sources, the Bible and indeed, at length reason itself. It is if possible worse than that explicitly religious phenomenon. Rather in this, the pseudo-scientific or ostensibly scientistic case, now so common, it is the whole realm of investigation, the entire empirical read-out which is made subordinate; and results which should be the basis of hypothesis, not the appalling residue when ludicrous hypotheses are insisted on, can leave the investigator comparatively indifferent to their nature.

This is the antithesis of science, and indeed precisely what many naturalists wrongly attribute to biblical apologetics, which on the contrary insists on utter endeavour with the empirical, to be just and discerning, and with the Bible, and that in fact, the match is perfect, not only without disturbance, or disruption, but likewise without the critical error of naturalism, namely antilogy and antinomy (cf. Deity and Design  ... Section 8). It is a glory that the pairs, first the empirical and the rational, to move toward understanding, and then the observable and the revelatory,  once the matter  has been pursued, are so mutually instructive, gloriously harmonious. Indeed,  not only are the parameters explained, the principles shown their base, but revelation further spurs to more discovery about their nature so that it appears as with recent work by Dr Humphreys in magnetism (TMR Ch. 5 ) and Dr Hartnett on negative energy and anti-matter concerns  (Dig Deeper ... Ch. 1), that remarkable results can come from this, their due source. Indeed, when theories are faced with just those perspectives which the Bible indicates, their nuances of nullity are voided, and the non-void is no longer hard to avoid. It is like brick-laying. When you have a base, it is both meaningful and practical.

What would you expect when the Maker tells the made about the making! It is precisely this.

In the case of the biblical Christian approach, as in this series of 204 volumes testing on all sides, reason and scientific method are a sound attribute of action. Though not the only one, they have their place. All must be tested, the biblical way (I Thessalonians 5:21), each in its domain. There is logic and the empirical, perception and performance, physics and metaphysics, truth and application, there are fields of the psychic and the aesthetic, of the innovatory and the explicatory, of the LOGOS back of all capacity to investigate a universe which must be of this kind to be so investigable; there is in the end, God and man, the final issuance and the first institutor.

What then of the domain of science ? Thus, in this field, its elements of openness and actuality, empirical observation and classification, interface realisation and testing, default by non-verification and the like,  are not to be ignored, tampered with or made into a mere ruse for distraction. The confidence of the Christian in the Lord of creation and His explicatory and directive word (the verbal equivalent of the coded programmatics which make his body, once given the basis by creation) is not a fearful one. It is a triumphant one. Bring it on! is the message. The Lord did it long before you did, and so let us examine it with a distinctive pleasure, finding its funding where the requirements of logic attest, the verifications of fulfilment show and the progress of history indicates.

We do not have to steer it away from the obvious, but to prevent such steerage by oppositionists and obstructionists. The two words, that of law and programmatics in creation on the one hand, and the voice of the Lord who did it, on the other, are in such entire conformity that the endless-seeming withdrawals of illicit and contrary hypotheses becomes merely a mopping up. Empirics are wedded to rationality, both in the scientific method, and in the analysis of logic, and all to the overall perspective which integrates and explains, to such an  extent that it is like going over some manufactured car, and noting with relish how they did this, and achieved that, being impressed at the sheer ingenuity of it all, coming from an assignable, suitable and sufficient source.

There is no abashment of reason; but its very climax, resting on the attestation of coherence of concepts, harmony of claim and data,  transcendence of human priggish pride, in a willingness to see what made our power to analyse and invent, test and try hypotheses, and look for the most  cognate source of anything in the correlatives intimately to hand,  while testing these.

In practice,  the materialist hypothesis fails multiply (as shown in Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2), and indeed, it is lost at once because if there were no absolute truth - all being merely correlative,  existing for no reason somehow and manufacturing laws as if it were a case of kids chewing sweets (but illicitly invent both kids and sweets) - then the power to know this, the truth,  would by the very model, be gone. Interaction would replace reality. You could not find what is not there, let alone by invasion as if it were bound to tell you. Such maniupulable gods need to recognised and dismissed, in contrast to what is an effective model, indeed the only one, since it not only has no barrier to access to truth, in principle, but attestation of what that truth is, this testable and continual over the millenia.

As for what denies this, It is a self-defeating hypothesis, playing loon with logic and babble-talk with necessity. In fact,  AT ONCE, when verification  fails, and the theory is contradicted, in science, that ends it. It is not necessary to live a whole life of contradiction, while bravely asserting that you will fight them on the beaches of materialism. What is irrational is SURE to be defeated, at  length, by reason, and this is the case here.

It is good that the good Lord has given us CAPACITY to look at ALL evidence, including reason within and as found in 'nature', and if possible, better yet that the results are harmonious, logically coherent and impressive when we act without prejudice, carefully testing things out. It is the Lord who in I Thessalonians 5,  tells us to TEST ALL THINGS. THAT, it is true to scientific method; just as revelation is true to God, and the results of the two present no disagreement except to prejudice, which imports what is not science, into it,  as if unable to contain the clear honest honour of TESTING EVERYTHING! It is because God is back of it all, that this is a pleasant task!

Having then invented the rationality of the initial system, so that we can speak in terms of actualities already there, such as the susceptibility to space and the liability to logic, the expanding case of laws from matter, and psyches with their laws and capacities for wilful defection, together with our investigative powers, all from mindless chatter  of matter, the prelude to clatter, moving on effortlessly to the power by which to have chattering facility made an option with or without logic at will, we have quite a theory, like all wishful thinking, omitting only the means for it all. Wether at once or in process, its origin and origins, one or both, these move without ground as all else. Indeed,  this model has the effrontery to reason to make it harder. It wants to point it in some point, certainly not to make a point, for it is a pointless excursion, the making the method, even before it is! So how it comes is how it goes; but how it comes is simply left untouched, in a pointless point which misses the whole point of the enduements necessary for whatever is to come (which we now have), to do so.It is like 'teen-ager sport when the growing powers of almost adulthood challenge the imaginative mind to  do something glorious, or inglorious as it often is.

Now, these marvellous, question-begging entities and this logical and causatively consequential system is compressed. If its facilities were ludicrous for matter at the first, and the surrounding bounds of operative principles such as describability and creative mobility, and this with the mental prowess for this,  while it retains the methodological character ENABLING it so to be investigated, were mere add-ons, this machination is a mere beginning.  By this,  all that is to be is founded initially by imagination, is then confounded by the difference between this and reality and its requirements, modes and inhabitants.

That is the first fairy story, myth where results come without adequate and assignable causes. It is then that the compression is to make a new phase in the fairy story, perhaps to make it the more inviting, as in the BBC case in intentional story-making. This however is not presented as a story for amusement, but as if it had at least something to do with reality.

ODDITIES WHEN FACTS GIVE CAUSE TO BLUSH

We come to a point. Why ? Well if you do not want to dwell on all the necessary constituents of your god-like particle or point or singularity (better yet if like a mathematical point, which has no extension), why not compress it all to the point that the whole point of the matter is to hide in matter which is not matter, and to ignore in matter all the laws and principles necessary for its being.

There may be another reason. There is always in man an intense and intensive desire for singularity. WHY does this happen, and on what is to founded, and where did this aspect come in and why did it do so, and whence its genesis and the casual basis of the whole program and so on and on ...  man loves to probe a case, whether it be murder or material, or commercial, and find JUST WHY it is as it is. He builds  explicative hypotheses and tests them, seeking to bring it all to one, embracive, adequate, foundational  ... the jealousy of the heart in murder, for example, or the originative situation or action, on the other.

Why is this so ? It is the natural and coherent consequence of the fact that all material law, psychic expressiveness, facility in logic, imaginative capacity, life itself, and its subordinate ingredients, whether material or materiel, needs a cause, and causality itself being by nature inexpungeable (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill, Section 4), you need a cause for every system and its components, to put there there and to inter-relate; and the ruthless pursuit in rationality of what it is, leads as shown in SMR, to God and the Bible, and Jesus Christ as redeemer for the irrational mess man is so unmanfully making of the mercy of God. This redemption is both achieved and epitomised in the crucifixion of Christ, the LOGOS Himself (John 1, Hebrews 1, Revelation 2 with Isaiah 44:6, John 8:58), who with reason made created reason, expressive of His own, and worlds by it, and this with His own creativity, long revealed as eternal in the heavens. Thus is made manifest the self-sufficient source of all, with no disharmonies of logic or empirics. God speaks, His word works, His Spirit applies, His will is done (cf. Isaiah 48:15ff., John 1)^*3.

So man, intent on being the one to invent, idolatrising matter, makes of IT, a singularity, a point (some point!) for all. The actual and rational singularity, which merely mocks this effervescent and self-contradictory program invented by man, something for which he has immense facility, beyond his own agility, is what has what it takes. Coming from nowhere does not help, nothing being void; so it is eternal, and being sufficient, has all that all requires both for investment in reality, and in synthesis according to the cases as found. So often in pseudo-science, this point is lovingly disregarded in favour of the romance of unreality, the preposterous, which makes some laugh, though here indeed no laughing matter.

You must have what it takes if you are going to make it.

Nothing is inert. Inadequacy is definitionally irrelevant. You need what it takes to make mind and reason and logical laws, engineering laws, atomic laws, different modes of material being,  space and time, and the heart of man with its flimsy or foundational preferences, its organisational facilities in reason or irrationality, at will. You need it so to delimit, determine and synthesise, or atomise, in a schema so total to mind and its ploys, that it is penetrated by imagination and thought. Thought is no derivative of the thoughtless, nor matter from nothing; for for that matter, is will from depersonalised programmatics, nor are the latter from nothing: for they need to be written in code where orders are formulated, correlated and contrived. You need what links it all, synthesises or makes  what is adjunct, to be so, in systematic functionality. You do not make golf-links (even though it IS soil in one sense, and water, and well ... sky and mounds and slopes and grass and shrubs and lay-out), by having soil move about. You have to have what it takes: that is why people employ golf-course makers, preferably with some experience of mastering the game!

You simply have to have what it takes. Leaving various subordinate laws (invented from nothing), to think up more sophisticated laws (from nothing, the source), and having matter occur,  arise, for no reason from nothing, and psychic power intrude as if called by the script at the right time,  from nowhere, in an endless parade of the greatest drama of all time manifested without producer but with alarming success, is mere day-dreaming, avoiding the logical issue with words, as if an actor declaiming in a bilious attack, misread the very script.

This fails and merely fouls and falls short of our resultant, our delimited power as man, what we are, just as man exceeds his own little programmatics IN KIND, his DNA, having facility at another level, to proceed in the same kind of way. All this, it is a result. Of misconstruction of this invincible fact of causation, man is the cause. Of man, God is the cause, eternal and eternally sufficient and efficient. 

Managing with a point (given all the other things that have to go with it and already there of course, so that it can explode into glory!) is not the work of logic but of liberty, a testimony to it, and a warning of its defilements, manufacturing all with no capital, factory, knowledge, understanding, from bases called up at will, perhaps for the thrill. Logic does not attend to this mastery of imagination, drained of specifiable facts, based on assumption, left-overs of fantasy, splashing down from the space of thought, without more than the wand of will. 

DREAMS and PRACTICAL RESULTS in LIFE

The Studiously Non-Scientific

WITH OR WITHOUT UNYIELDING DESPAIR

This then is merely one of the pathological by-products of the amazing mentality of man, mixed with the staggering degree of liberty which lets him not only choose to think as he will, but to imagine it is reasoned thought, when in fact it is an elaborate mode of dreaming.  As with all dreams, when you suffer from them, or illnesses, you tend to be covered by them,  and made blind to reality or partially or largely incapable by their means. As to dreams, there are many of them, and even types of them; but they all have the generic of dreams,  a pleasurable (or at times haunting) wafting from  reality, a sort of mental drugging, which makes reason seem an effort, or irrelevant. These mutually contest. You indeed often see it in the Bible, where misused faith becomes luxuriously inventive of anything but reality, placing its faith in itself, as a house on air, or on custom or convenience, flair or desire. It is far from  uncommon,  as to this province, and this perverting faith, these are  well discerned in Mark 6 for example.

In one way, this case is just the same as that above. We have on the one side,  ineluctable evidence, ineludible performance, the spiritual, mental and physical whose, with their numerous ordered and organised subsidiaries and syntheses; and on the other, psychic stumbling blocks, like bunkers equipped with high level magnetism to work on golf balls with ferrous centres, attracting  custom from some, so contrived. The empirical and logical necessity must, by an ideational necessity, or a psychic compulsion be subverted, be ignored. This is a type of little faith, because though it may be intense, its scope is minimal. It rests where there is no rest, and is merely subjective.

In the case in Mark 1:1-6, there is a concurrence also about the evidence. There is no question that there has been in Jesus Christ, in this situation, a working of miracles of a high order, and its scope and height is such that it is utterly amazing. The people find it so. The empirical fact to all in this, to one as to another, staggering, and left alone, overpowering. ANYTHING can be done, in much or little. It is cumulative. It is scholarship, it is in power, it is in healing, it is in any visited field. That is the beginning.

Yet this is not how it ends. It is not the reality which troubles them, in Mark 6, but its occasion, its source. They are flabbergasted. They cannot CONCEIVE how these things could be. What things ? "What wisdom is this which is given him," they ask and ponder in active and troubled mind, "that such mighty works are performed by his hands!"

The obvious is indigestible; the incontestable MUST be like the 'cult of the forbidden' which excludes creation from created minds in our day, by a logical lapse. It is forbidden because the current cult WILL not consider it rationally. It is excluded before contest in the academic sphere by a cultic obsession. So with them in the day of Christ, for many whatever He did or said, it COULD not, indeed must not be related to the long foretold post of the Messiah because this was not what they wanted it or Him to be. It did not fit DESIRE. Hence it was not given reasonable consideration. It was preposterous, outrageous, unfit for consumption, indeed blasphemous. Raise the dead ? by all means. Meet the needy in ways never seen for pure power and compassion ? go for it, but NEVER even THINK of the Messiah. In fact, call the thing somehow blasphemous and kill Him for it. Good  enough!

Do not even consider that the FACT that it is this rejection, this death, this abhorrence which is predicted for Him, together with His power. Ignore that. Facts do not matter. Rejection by rote is in; reason is out. Do not challenge or (for today, you may have to quite your teaching post, or lose your degree)  ... for then, death may, and indeed should and must meet you!

If the case had fitted in with their pre-conceptions, it would have been if not easy, at least fathomable. They could patiently have tried this and that till, utterly overwhelmed, with clear heart and unwounded conscience they could have yielded, even the Thomases.

However they had to INSIST that it MUST not be so, WHATEVER the result, even though their insistence could never meet with logic, and so no wonder we can see in John 15:22ff., that IF they had NOT heard His words and seen His deeds, there might have been some excuse, but having seen and still slumped in prejudicial slumber, no excuse remained! Such was His word to them, whether they were religious or not. Similarly, those who so treat creation, whether they are irreligious or religious,  have no excuse from reason, and as teachers, must face their Maker on what they are doing with the young, the more so, when these victims are given no relief, though young, in order to argue and have considerations contrary to rote, presented courteously and well.

In some  ways, it is like the case as reported concerning Professor Lewontin. On the preferred preconceptions, HOW, they ask, could a (mere) carpenter's son POSSIBLY have such ULTIMATE powers! Note here the assumption. Take any carpenter; and give him a son.  Now let the son grow up, and we have our test-tube situation. On their personally and capriciously chosen premises, that is the end of the matter. SUCH a son of SUCH a person COULD NOT have such powers. Well whose son would they like him to be, since he obviously has flesh and born ?

Presumably it would be the son of someone who being father, would be a fitting progenitor. What then is a fitting progenitor for such unexampled powers (as in John 15:22ff.) ? Now if creativity is here not only in MIND, but concerning other people's BODIES, to heal or to raise them  from the dead,  into what domain are we moving - the more when the performance when announced,  is like routine: constant, without failure, without lapse. He does not say to the paralysed, I tell you get up and walk! and have a coarse and bitter laughter to tell Him to stop posing. One such incident would have removed  His testimony at one opening. HE would not then be the Messiah. It is the same with evolutionism: one of many anti-verifications remove the theory. But for  apparently sentimental and religious reasons, it is retained and even taught, but still worse, with monopoly powers past reasoning! However, let  us return to the Messiah as in Mark 6.

What had the  Messiah to do with it ? It is this.  Part of the empirical evidence is that a  certain book EXISTED (as of course it still exists), and it related,  in no small part, to the history of the Jewish people and the working of God with them, to bless and  to rebuke, over much time;  and it cites the modes of morality and action desired by this God, and features in high profile the concept of covenant, by which a man can at God's own invitation, have sin remitted and redemption applied so that he may know God Himself personally, and so live that his life is a willing outcome of this relationship, and transferred from the temporal to the end, in the eternal realm WITH this God.

In this book, a certain MESSIAH was to  come. This was part of the preliminary covenant that in one to come from Abraham all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12). The criteria of such a Messiah were successively revealed, one aspect being that He would both be an eternal being from heaven, and the Judge of Israel, and another was that He would be sent with full divine honours, as entirely representative of and correlative to  God Himself (Micah 5, Isaiah 48). His works would include the miraculous (Isaiah 35), and His death would be through unbelief (Isaiah 53), brilliantly turned into a triumph, by which He would even bear the iniquities of His persecutors, those of them who came to believe in Him and so accept His pardon.

These were empirical facts. Such a book was there. Such an historical background and series of developments were very well-known indeed. God put His name to it, in this Bible, that this would happen and that men would murder this same incarnate Son, definitive of deity, Israel as a nation abhorring Him. This being a simple fact, why ever would anyone have difficulty on putting 2 and 2 together to make 4! This explained everything. The Father of Christ was God, and the mode of application to achieve this was definitive, once-for-all incarnation (Micah 5:1-3 with Isaiah 48, Psalm 40 for example). Moreover,  just such unbelief as these people were showing (Isaiah 49:7) would lead on to His crucifixion, for He would not deny the truth concerning His identity but boldly proclaim it: refusing to lie, nor would He decline to the point of using force (as in Isaiah 53:9).  Truth in His lovingkindness was at issue. He was killed BECAUSE He refused deceit and violence. He COULD have lied and denied His status; He COULD have chosen to use the powers of God simply to exterminate (as with Elijah, II Kings 1), but this was not what was written and required by God in His plan of salvation, so it could not be what the Messiah, who did whatever God did in the same way, would do (John 5:19-23).

Here then was a situation in which EVERY empirical element was perfectly explained, compellingly attested, whether in power, or healing or the dynamic of deity or in invulnerability of diction, as displayed even before the greatest scholars of the day, and in comfort and grace even to the most needy; and this despite lowly birth, so designed by prophecy, for His entry into this world. So far from this being a problem logically, it was just ONE of the predicted predications for the Messiah, an obvious and monumental, a fascinating and prodigious practical and personal work. He who did all this, would NOT be either glamorous glitterati, or economically mighty. He would have no form or comeliness, said the prophet Isaiah, nor would He be so notable, but in Himself and His birthplace and mode, He would in fact resemble something quite lowly: He would be like "a root out of a dry ground." Where then is the problem! That is what He was; this is what He did; there was the way it came at the time appointed (as shown from Daniel 9, in Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2).

If it were otherwise, it would have been a problem indeed, an ill-assorted series of expressions marvellously fulfilled by the word of the Author of the book (cf. Isaiah 34:16), yet here failing. In fact, however, the ACTUAL and EMPIRICAL reality was that it all harmonised, and all was spectacularly fulfilled. His lowly social origin and ordinary, not addictive physical appearance were trial points for checking, and accurately did these relate to the empirical specifications in that book of the Lord, for the Messiah.

	The more unlikely any one element, the more indefeasible the outcome;
	the more the total mirrored the remorseless depiction in prophecy,
	the more the power displaced anything man could do to match,
	and followed simultaneously in date and outcomes what had been prescribed
	so that He might be believed, not only for what He was and did,
	but for the continuity in the Bible between the past miracles and mercies of God, and those predicted to come:

the less conceivable was any ferreting away into holes of darkness, to hide far from this display truth.

Let us look at this situation scientifically. There are works of such a kind that they are deemed stupendous, unique, staggering. That is the historic and contemporaneous fact (just as the type of situation presented by the atomic bomb is one for our generation as in Acts 2, in Peter's citing from Joel). Why then did they have trouble interpreting it causally ? If it was to happen and it does, like thousands of other items, why is there consternation and preposterous misalignment of the mind of man with the word of this book, when all happens to the level of jot and tittle ? It is because man in sin has certain preferences for belief; and conformity to this word is not one of them. It is outré, outer, like a cloak. It cannot relate to the actualities within (I Corinthians 2:14). Why not ? There is a slide to the psyche which shuts the eyes to the facts. Sin begets more sin and only God can counter it, and in love, He does this freely and in truth, not in lust or mere desire.

The seditious psyche says that God is not the source of it; that the Bible is not the basis of it; that something normal must be; and the normal thing is the current system, without basis, and even thought this does not fit, but is just a flit of omission, not confronting the need, but exiting from it, yet the swallow flits, flying from its own salvation, scornful of its redemption, and so avoiding both.  On the naturalistic basis, there IS no solution, so war is made on facts^*2. Such was and is the way of it, in the various battle-grounds for the souls of those in the race of mankind.  It is a lost race; but God can find them, yet this, not according to psychic dictatorship, making a convenient mock-up, nor to compassion becoming tyrant.

Disbelief comes like bleeding from a wound leading to death. It will not be bound up. This is an ideological premiss, preposterous, but preferred, as in John 3:19.

That is part of the wonder of the creation called liberty: you can, if you wish, contradict yourself, the evidence, your own eyes and reason, and even call this reasonable. It is a staggering gift; and its misuse merely the more shows its wonder when it is not so misused.

It happens now; it happened then. It is the categorical corruption in man from which only God can deliver (Ephesians 4:17-19, 2:1-12, Romans 5, 8:17ff.).

In Chapter 6, the realm of faith itself comes into focus in contrast, with the parallel intensified.

NOTES

*1

See for example

TMR Ch. 5 as marked,  

Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch.   6 ,

Christ the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch.   9, as marked,

The Word and  Wisdom of God and the Ways of Man Ch. 1,

The Defining Drama Ch. 3,

Lively Lessons in  Spiritual Service Ch. 5,

Dig Deeper Ch. 1.
 

*2

Notable is what is contained in The Great Divide, Ch. 2, for relevance here.

There is a great divide here between fact and theory, instead of what is scientifically normal, as to method: and that, it is, a great sympathy and closeness between theory WHICH COMES FROM facts, and must be wedded to them, in liaison with them, all but summoned by them, at least as to the first throw. Thus in the realm of botany, it has often been remarked by experts that efforts to call forth gradualism and its ways into this field of advent in life, if fashionable, is not fashioned by facts. It was, more generally, the famed Professor Agassiz of Harvard in his 'Methods of Study in Natural History', who, inclined towards facts noted this: "The theory of the transmutation of species is a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency."

 

Denton, in is Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, from a later time, adds this (p. 250ff.): "We have already seen that in the case of the great morphological divisions, where empirical evidence of intermediates is lacking, there is invariably a conceptual problem in envisaging fully plausible hypothetical intermediates through which evolution could have occurred. As we shall see in this chapter precisely the same sort of conceptual problem is met in trying to reconstruct the hypothetical sequence of transitional system which led eventually to the modern cell." Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould somewhat similarly declares this - Gould and Eldredge, Palaeobiology 3(147), bold added:

"At the higher level of evolutionary transition between morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble. Smooth intermediates between Bauplâne are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count)."

Small wonder is this empirical impasse the case, since as Denton notes,

"Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to animals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells*1. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly divers dwellers on earth."

As to plants, concerning the geological approach normal, Denton remarks this: "The story is the same for plants. Again, the first representatives of each major group appear in the record already highly specialised and highly characteristic of the group to which they belong. Like the sudden appearance  of the first animal groups in the  in the Cambrian rocks, the sudden appearance of the angiosperms is a persistent anomaly which has resisted all attempts at explanation since Darwin's time."

Indeed the case is as Professor Løvtrup puts it in his "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth," with his declaration that there are "now considerable numbers of empirical facts which do not fit the theory. Therefore he asks this concerning this monstrous theory:

"so why has it not been abandoned? "

and indeed in review he observes this, that

"following Darwin's example - they refuse to accept falsifying evidence."

Gould's cry, Why in heaven's name did such diversities of design arise in such  numbers so suddenly in the first place ? (Wonderful Life, p. 227), is almost like a scientist's nightmare when, after dismissing evidence feverishly in contravention of scientific method EVERY TIME, he suddenly mentions heaven in the apostrophe about the sheer horror of the facts on his model! THEY DO NOT FIT.

Well indeed, Dr Gould, might you deplore in heaven's name the departure of the ground of your contention, though improving on those who do not appear to notice it!

Again, in The True God has Go ... Ch. 5, we find this coverage in our theme.

Sometimes the veil is pulled away, and the propagandists of science falsely so-called leave the stark evidence facing the unmellow minds of indoctrinated man.

Take these below from Denton and Gould, in that order.

• "The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in  the facts of nature. In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism, and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologist today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach" - Evolution : A Theory in Crisis, pp. 353-4.

• Jay Gould notes in Paleobiology, vol.6(1), January 1980, p. 127: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

The lyre bird  always has fascinated me, because of that look of profound but sharp genius, as if he is far away in imaginative duress, you might almost say, so lofty is the look in his eye as his heart bubbles forth with songs to surpass symphony. It was he who said these things, and you would have thought it in vain. After all, the willy-wagtail, Willy, is so evanescent seeming, flitting here and there that the temptation to regard him as a twit, especially seeing he is a bird, may mislead one.

Not so with this Willy. He replied.

It is just as you say, he declared, flitting after some sub-sight object with that delicious air of expectancy which makes him so attractive. Gould in fact became very emphatic in this area,  he snapped, when he was confronted by the Burgess Disparity in anatomical design of life in these Cambrian rocks (allegedly around the earliest deposits), noting that the 'disparity in anatomical design' of life in these rocks EXCEEDS what is in our contemporary oceans. I noted that in his Wonderful Life, p. 208,260. He adds the consideration that "gradualistic concepts" in the face of this vital profusion of hi-tech abounding life, have a special place in his mind.

 

What was that place ? asked the beautiful lyre-bird.

 

It was a place of amazement. Indeed, Gould found the idea, 'literally incomprehensible'. His philosophies stepped in later, but these were the facts and he was overcome by them. How could they speak of gradual transitions, when he saw this! The blindfold at that time simply snapped, and fell off.

 

Gliding in to us with the darting streak of sheer decisiveness, so different from the gawky dependence it shows when young, the magpie added its own declaration. Surprisingly, his words were these.

 

I have been teaching my youngsters about this silly so-called science, their naturalistic ideas strewn like faded Autumn leaves on the ground, and a source I found in webwitness was Stepping out for Christ Ch. 10 with Wake Up World! ...  Ch. 6. It is amusing to find that here, even Gould began to see. In fact, he spoke so derisively of the step by step idea, that he declared here that he could not even IMAGINE how it could pass basic barriers!

 

Maggy   has always had this scholarly aspect, and could put his beak into lots of things. It wasn't, thank goodness, a true sticky beak, but a grabbing one. He could amass so many facts in a minute that you could almost call him the minute bird; but since this can be pronounced differently, and Willie is so small, and might think we were indirectly mocking him, we did not: and in any case, it is not the sort of thing to fling about in print.

 

But Maggie, he is so sharp! He became this now.

 

WHY, WHY, WHY do they dissemble ? he asked, flapping his wings in a way evidently parallel to thumping the fist. It gave him that slightly aerial look which belonged somehow to the force of his exasperation.

 

He proceeded, flashing to a tree nearby like a retroactive ray of dissident light. From there he declaimed his point.

 

It seems beyond doubt that it is not ALL just cantankerous obstructiveness, the pervasive preaching of this organic myth. Certainly it is obsessive in its compulsive-seeming monotony. There is a worse feature which seems to lie behind it.

 

In fact, there is evidently a delusion as the Bible foretold (II Thessalonians 2). They CANNOT see because they have closed their eyes; and when that is done, what comes up from the depths of the mind can be delusion, devilry or plain evanescent abstractions. All this is happening, and that is why I am home-schooling my young birds. Who wants kids taught nostrums of nothingness and casuistries without causation by people who know enough about it to use them wherever God is not concerned, right down to the slightest aspect of their salaries, income tax and inventions.

*3

On this topic, from The True God has Go ..., Ch. 5, we have this.

In our present area of focus: HOW does He exist ? as three beings. HOW do they work together ? in infinite intimacy. ARE they connected in a construction ? No, He is the Creator of all that is made, and He is eternal and changeless. HOW then are they connected ?

It is not physical, but spiritual unison which is in view, and a Being existing as three persons, is

 

ONE as to Being,

 

THREE as to persons,

 

INVARIABLE as to mode of being,

 

INDISSOLUBLE as to disestablishment of this mode of being,

 

ILLIMITABLE as to the affinity of each,

 

INFINITE in power and mutual concord and unity,

 

AUTONOMOUS in threefold harmony,

 

SOVEREIGN in unitary plan, purpose, action and activation,

 

	JUDGE of all, judged by none,
	UNIVERSAL in truth,

 

IMMOVABLE in goodness,

 

NEEDING nothing from any,

 

PATIENT in instruction,

 

UNALTERABLE in Gospel of deliverance for man,

 

SINGULAR in the provision of a name for man's salvation, Christ Jesus,

 

ETERNAL in triune being.

 

 

"THIS," said Christ, "is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." That is the word of Christ, and judge it if you will, it will yet judge all.

 

Where intimacy, cohesion and principle, where co-operation, mutual penetration and love is with no bounds, where the Being acts as one with such diversities of operation as He sees fit, then you have what creation does not contain, for the very simple reason that it is always limited, this being one of its special criteria, a part of its entire nature, for God has delimited it.

 

As for God, however, it is He who delimits all and eternally is, delimited by none. As He is, so He may be found, and not by spatially mathematical formulations which fit only creation, or snippings which fit only delimitation.

 

It is time to realise who is the Being who is God, Sender, Sent, Incliner (Isaiah 48:16ff., II Corinthians 13:14, Matthew 28:19, John 5:19-23, II Corinthians 5:17ff.); and to come to the person whom He has given to man as Redeemer, Jesus Christ, through whom He has displayed His power, truth, love and grace, and in whom His control of history both leading to Him and from Him.

 

He came according to specifications given by the Spirit       - I Peter 1:11-12, II Peter 1:21),

 

died according to the sacrificial deeds delivered beforehand in detail       -  (Isaiah 49-55, Psalm 2, 16, 40 for example),

 

	at the time specified       -  (Daniel 9:24-27, cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4).
	proclaimed Himself alive from the dead as prophetically shown in advance by a millenium        -  (Psalm 22, 16).

He may be rejected; but not with reason.