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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Don't bother me ... ?

See also Ch. 1 above for useful correlation,
with a different application..

Introduction

WHY, asks Hawking, does the universe go to all the bother of existing ?

These words are cited from A Brief History of Time.

"Even," he declares, "if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equation and makes a universe for them to describe ?"

What indeed ? That takes thought out of the confining circle of naturalistic fantasy (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).

He is baffled. Well he might be. His whole approach is theory-based, the theory based on self-contradiction, without the ways of empirical constriction or constraint. This might well leave out practical questions, because it is a wholly impractical theory. ASSUMING equations and rules as the basis (or else nothing in unsublime indifference),  obviously leaves out the question of their origin, ground, cause and enablement apart from this. That applies moreover, not only at the institutional level, but at the effectual level. It is not only a logical twitch, but a power switch, to off.

As to the referent (actually the universe, not just words), this array of impotent ideas also, and its workability, not only has to be given a ground, its own causal ground, but the ground has to be magnificently able. Indeed, in one sense it is not a ground at all, but as cause, what makes ground, that is needed, not a verbal flurry in isolation! In other words, it is only when a theory is properly founded that you can look for practical consequences such as the earth, otherwise a mere ungrounded foundling.

Nothing cannot do it. Its spawn cannot, for it cannot have anything, without becoming not itself at all, but SOMETHING which spawns. Self-contradiction mounts like a tsunami, and destroys as mere antithesis turns into antilogy, the very denial of reason in principle, as considerations in logic clash, so that the castle of ideas cannot stand. Being blasé about bases does not remove their necessity.

His very question, cited in paragraph 1 above,  begs the question of origin, of ground, cause, explanation, to which science needs to direct itself for its part in the affair. We see something bothering to exist or not. How COULD the universe bother unless the following data were present:

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1) its own cause of existence were operative so that it existed

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2) its own nature of existence was personal

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3) its capacities included thought, evaluation,
decision, the ability to be bothered, rationality,
beyond ideational activism, and

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4) power to enable what is thought.

Thus the ground, cause, basis of this legislated massif of laws and conformity amid freedoms,  could not be material, since this has shown no ability to self-create, and unless fairy stories are being told for children (these may have a place, but should be kept to that place), and must be both personal and prolific in power, analysis and a profusion of creativity.

Of course man can create and be bothered, but an exercise in subjectivity enlarged to divine proportions is not an apt answer. It must be reasoned to be found, confirmed and validated as has been done repeatedly on this site. You cannot rationally merely imagine the things made have a common basis in nothing, without rejecting reason. Man was not even THERE to put himself or any universe anywhere. It is as if Hawking were a shadowy god invisibly and without identification, lurking in the shadows of his illogical morass left floating in a space which is not there, able by using some words disjoined from reason, to implement what his absence did not enable. It is almost as if he were, like the Principal in some schools, Chairman in absentia on all Committees. But this principle for Principals does not actually PUT them there. It is simply pro forma.

Looking instead, to reality, we recall that this Being is normally called God*1, and since this place logically has to be fulfilled, on pain of a jumble of nonsense masquerading as a theory, it is well to use so well-known a name. Metaphysical and irrational nightmares, like something being described, before it exists, as bothering to do so, have place only in whimsy. If you saw a baby, and wondered why it bothered to exist, you might be regarded as drunk or bemused past thought.

You would, if rationally interested, or scientifically so, look for the marks of its entrance, the abilities and their minimal dower, and see if there were anything to be found which demarcates the origin.

So laws indicate conformed modes of action: what makes such conformity at that level ?

Integrated laws indicate mental comprehension, that institutes the same with the necessary powers to legislate and make it happen, which indicates a pervasively operative cause, able to marshal, direct, discipline, endue what is made with such conformism. If these are mathematically expressed and expressible, then the One who made it all has to have these powers not only present for things to follow them, but able to be formulable rationally, to recognise them formally when found. That means there has to have been conferred on that part of creation (mankind in particular), a power of reason able to gain more than conformity. It is one which enables conformity to be subject to information procedures, and discernible in its mathematical and logical formats, and so assigned place.

Not surprisingly, such items of creation as mankind are even given enough creativity to pass on to theories about some of the created entities, in one case USING these powers to deny what their use demands, thus outlining the power of will as well, for another of the creations of the Sovereign Source, which is required for constriction (to a given plan), construction (of a given logically formulated body not only of ideas, but actualities) and persistence of methods (enabling the universe not only to be made, but viable). Far beyond the mere capacity for the creation of all of these things,  causatively indeed is the will to act.

God in Romans 1:17ff. charges man without straining against the truth in this field, and traces the behavioural consequences, precisely as we have them.

To the point, then, one COULD formulate that the desire to be bothered! or more directly, to create, needed to be exercised not least in the whole program, set of procedures, induced events. This is simply added as a prerequisite for him who in man makes beings gifted with such powers in thought, so able to follow the script on which it all works. We could and perhaps should add a negative: this is not to be confused with the power to make the entities made, whether moon or mooning man, any more than a child can make cars, because he begins to see some of the ways what is already made, does its motoring.
 

MEETING THE CASE

After an Introduction, we may continue to get to know the person introduced, and so here, the contours and contrivances of the case somewhat further.
We 'meet' the case.

Hawking again, in interviews with Gregory Benford, 'Leaping the Abyss: Stephen Hawking on Black Holes, Unified Field Theory and Marilyn Monroe' (2002), is cited thus.

"The more we discover about the universe,
the more we find that it is governed by rational laws..."

What then does he have to say about this ? It is cited as adding:

"You still have the question: why does the universe bother to exist ?
If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question."

This idea has the same fallacy inbuilt to its perspective FOR asking questions, and so is irrelevant to science, logic and rationality. His cited desire for fire, energy, physical action and not just mental notes on what is happening, which says nothing adequate about WHY it could happen, did happen and why its results continue to happen, is psychologically relevant however. He appears to miss in all his very thought module, in which he appears to live, move and have his being, what produces what is. He feels, it seems that the fire is not there, only the configurations. Where is the blatant energy, the power to throb or assail the senses, at this level ?

That is one of the troubles with atheism: if you omit the cause, you cannot explain the consequence, and the difference is not inconsequential! You cannot help in the end, noticing that it is not there. It may be felt at many levels, like the atmosphere in a room in which you over the hours been closed, as the oxygen in its liveliness is used up.

Again, there is, as in a marriage, a certificate, perhaps a wedding ring, a home, but without the wife it is difficult in any ordinary coupling. You may think of her, desire her, think about her, but until you look for her, you may find she has left you. There is a certain hole ...

Now to define God to be the answer to the question of why the universe, before it existed

(useful in order to be ABLE to act in ANY way, in desire, or thought, or awareness of the criteria of actions and grounds of preference, all of which would be involved in any putative 'bothering',)

and so before it could put its mind to existing, has another fallacy. The environment of the question is illusory, self-contradictory, question begging. It acts as if the thing in view is explained in terms of its being there in order to consider being there or put itself there. It is like being in a hedge maze, and finding no way out and not remembering how you got in. It is a closed circuit, though it is not really there at all, for in the case to hand, it is founded on imagination only, and this, on less than nothing, or even in one case, nothing exactly. How even less than nothing ? If nothing is inadequate, then a breach of logical rules is a fault, not just impotence. To start in debt to logic is worse than starting with nothing in the planned performance!

If you ASSUME the universe is all, you simply ABANDON explanation, and necessarily so, for you are electing to live, intellectually, where explanation is excluded. In this model, universe is all, so it does amazing acrobatics like swim from delusion into thin air, and then into some sort of chimerical state, so that its sheer intellectual solitary confinement in a set of inadequate ideas, leaves the victim of this passion, a lostling in an imaginary creation. What is this ? It is a theory. But what has a theory about what caused the universe to do with a presuppositional presumption that nothing did it, either citing it as the cause, or ignoring cause altogether in a kind of intellectual paralysis!

Let us be reasonable. After you have FINISHED your surveys of the particular idiosyncrasies of the universe, as far as you can go, you have a good supply of data of WHAT it is that was caused. It was obvious enough from the first that it is orderly and has many laws and these are integrated into a mobile system with numerous static features and some dynamic, such as the second law of thermodynamics, which makes it clear of a closed system that it declines in specialisation and increases in entropy. This is clear to kids aged fourteen, if they are active, or can readily be so.

Thus the greater knowledge of its characteristics reinforces the legal and mathematical character of things, and our own abilities sing with sweetness in correlation with the mathematics inherent in the universe, for we DISCERN LAWS, find them out, rote them off, ponder their conjunction and so on. What animates our thoughtful minds not least,  is just the rationality which is exhibited in the material universe.

As SMR and TMR inter alia, show*1, the One who performed this synthetic work is the explanation. This Being is not the explanation to a universe bothering to exist. He is the answer to why it DOES exist, for nothing bothers the slave procedures, the creaturely confinements, the various constraints which are operative. Acting and creating are not the same thing, nor is the personal and the impersonal. Ignoring things is not the best procedure, even for politicians, who also often seem to omit the careful sourcing for their programs.

The components of the universe which show governance by law, ago on being so governed. They are found not creating their laws or themselves or their world, as if children, dreaming of another world, thereby had it!

These components do what they are  made for, showing no power, any more than an automobile, no capacity to create just because they are created, no flair to make themselves to exisst, to be, just because they are there. It is one thing to be what you are, and act in it, and to account for it; and more to the point, to find from this what you are for. It is another to make what is there its own source, in collation with nothing.

Trying to account for a self-made universe, causally defunct, contrary to reason, in the realm of magic, acting before it is there to act, is like trying to account for the square root of minus one. The answer is simple: there is no such thing, nor could there be. That is the nature of the case. Talking in that way just shows a lack of understanding.

So here. It is not that you have to account for why the universe (there to do so) bothered to exist (though already there anyway to ponder the point), so making a clash in concept in the very nature of the question. Rather you have to account for the universe. The difference ? one universe.

The omission in turn is this:  one explanation. The talk about the universe and its source simply lacks in that model, the explanation. It is rather like a billionaire of fame and notoriety, who lacks just one thing (in practice), namely money. It is not a good start in 'explaining' or accounting for his floating fortunes.

What is present ? One subversion of the question. Small wonder then that as stated by Hawking, by record, there is a lack of fire and eager realistic energy, or something of this kind, in the universe as he sees it. How could there not be, since he is wanting a universe to make a universe, because it seems, he cannot stand having it come from anywhere, anything, any cause. It is as if it has to be a little like staring at its own navel, when pondering life, which while having something to do with coming to be, as where the placenta attached, yet being denied connection with what went before, leaves a certain gap.

 

DOWNFALL OF CASUISTRY

It is intensely simple. You can have multi-universes if you feel like it (in your own small mind), and you could even speak of the universe of thought, of will, and of matter, and cut things up ad infinitum, merely lacking explanation of their conjunction, unification and correlation. You can instead, on the contrary, imagine lots of universes, little misfits which are not really universes at all, but members of the group of universes by the nature of the conception, all tied up together in one large system with which the thought game can be played.

But then it is only to expand the question, not delimit the answer. If there is one universe, what was its cause ?

If there are a hundred, billion or any number

(the case is entirely indifferent as to the necessity of cause for one,
or all, or their capacity to be jointly conceived and operative in one overall system for accounting purposes),

the question arises, What is its cause ? If you have a melanoma, it may be small, but there is the question, What caused it ? If you have muscles the size of those of elephants, there is still the same question, the same principles being operative.

If you are fastidious about things, and do not like the ponder their cause, even though you might see plainly before you, the older elephants, then that is the privilege of having a private mind; but it does not solve anything, and shortly becomes wilful ignorance.

If you smile at causation*2, then you do so at language also, for the citation of the nature of a thing, its very definition, involves features which cause this and that, and so allow the word to fit the object. Without causation, logic is finished, its evidence abolished by imagination, so that anyone in this condition is outlawed as a debater: for of what does he/she debate, but of reasons, causes, grounds! If grounds are groundless, what grounding can you give for anything ? you simply rationally disqualify yourself from participation in debate. Your model models you out of debate, self-invalidated, you languish irrelevant, self-hoisted.

On all sides, the initial error has its extensions, like mould in bread.

Proliferation of possibilities, moreover, is not the same as description of what is found. If science is of some interest to Hawking and other atheists, or at such times as it is, then it is important to keep the nature of the difference clear: they are logically forced to have an eternal cause (any time without it would mean nowhere for it ever to come), sufficient for all, or nothing, either fit for anything that is.

The first is called God, since this Being is necessary as well as confirmed on every side (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! Deity and Design ...,  SMR 3, 8-9), and the other is called what it is, nothing. To have something professedly sufficient for all things is of course not identical with something in fact sufficient for anything found. Nullity does not contribute even at the outset, any answer, for if it did, it would HAVE to be something able to contribute an answer, able to explain, or something with potential, or some such self-contradiction. Nothing and something are decidedly not the same as anyone starving could readily explain.

To live by self-contradiction as the ground of life is merely evasion, logically untenable, not a position at all, merely a sequence of very unfiery thought, in a very dilapidated realm, where logic is excluded, reason is shed and truth is of no consequence. After all, if you INSIST on what does not work, how is this bowing to truth!

It is high time for our race to abandon what abandons God, for otherwise it is giving very good grounds for its own elimination. Survival of the fittest is not the real question, for the underlying question, Fit for what ? remains, and survival WHERE ? continues. What denies truth becomes unfit for it, wilfully misaligned in the end (cf. Ephesians 4:17-18). In Australia there is a bibulous seeming trend now to have people shout  out defilements of morals as if the only morality is to BE immoral, to harass and harangue against those who want even to follow nature, as in sexuality, and to deem it bad, wrong, incorrect, unethical (you can continue such adjectives for some time to meet the case) to have a caveat for such behaviour, and to diverge from it.

Some may without criminality even choose to LISTEN to the BILLIONS of coded voices in any one person, in the DNA, showing THIS is the way for male, this for female, and so constructing. To ignore

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(1) billions of natural voices

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(2), as to ignore the visible result in the built babes

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(3), and the procreative facts,

these three initial violations for the 'progressive' model, is scarcely a ground for asserting that those responsible for such triple breaches are virtuous to the point of condemning those who differ, ethereal judges based on ... nothing.

It is not just that, to take the gender fluidity fulminations, those who disagree are labelled undiscriminatingly and with marked discrimination in the prejudicial sense, but those bent on protection of the human race from losing its place by aborting what is provided may actually be deemed race-haters, or homophobes.

That is the meaning of the term as put together. It is deemed BAD not to licence this apparent licentiousness, and so BAD to follow biblical morals and physiologically observed realities, even to the natural equipment for continuance of the race that it is virtually being dubbed abnormal or deviational in a moral back flip. Now normally, one who seeks to avoid sun-caused cataracts might be blessed, to avoid lung cancer might be respected; but one who here seeks to avoid the abuse of the  racial equipment, is to be deemed not a lover but a hater, in a topsy-turvy  maelstrom of misuse of terminology.

Even more important still, however is this feature. As people of principles for which no logical ground can be found, except in the contribution of wilfulness and excited talk, increasingly become so prolific in speech, so agile in unwarranted and obnoxious condemnation of those who do not want baselessness but the divine  basis honoured, emotive blasts tend to replace conclusive evidence. Whether it be confusion or pro-active denunciation, to get in first, or theo-phobia, or some other cause, or array of causes, the result is the same. What is there is violated.

It is like a blur of scenery past at 120 k, as the nation flitting by this and that, falls. It becomes socially incensed against biblical morals, teachings and often the very idea of God, of authority beyond the people, whose own coming into existence, as above, is simply bypassed. Talk abounds of changing the (admittedly) godly sounding Constitution (the Preamble DOES have a sound and a very EMPHATIC one in terms of the Almighty), and actual action long since taken hs moved already to legislate against any continuance in some of the great basics*1 of the Bible (such as divine creation) in terms of teaching authority, which is then used to molest the minds of those who deem God pure, not man, multiplies.

This, whatever the intention produces the inclination to violence and viciousness (preserve yourself, that is the way, you know: preserving what matters does not matter). Hence many become addicts of drugs (preserves contentment for a little while), violence (preserves your self-preservation for a little while), militant religions in frustration and lust,  seeking to control others in terms of something or other, brandishing a sword or scimitar or atomic weaponry, where only truth matters. When you act to PRODUCE deadness of heart, why be surprised when your best efforts, succeed. The marvel is there is not more, but of this, you do not need very much, as buildings are destroyed and morality becomes a great pillar named immorality, as if prefixes meant nothing.


THE MOVING LAND AND THE COUNTER-MOTION

In this land, alas, but not at all only here, there is not only a forward movement into an unknown and unsupported abyss (while our first non-nuclear submarine is set to begin being built in some 7 years time), but one REGRESSIVE FROM GOD.

There is an increasing intolerance, dismissal, at first wrought more carefully (as in the 1988 Circular to Principals in S.A.), but now openly. Gods who speak of living by overcoming and subordinating some on the part of others, become all one with the God of love, sacrifice and salvation. What makes problems for man amid torture and mass killings becomes one with what delivers from such erratic passions. It merges. Only the State can tell you what the permissible religion is, though in our Australian case, the Constitution strictly forbids any such thing. Lawless, it makes laws, and baseless it makes hay.

Then to take the 1988 case, religion was treated as wonderful in name, but not terribly relevant to anything other than the psyche, as the Trojan horse entered. Courtesy allowed its significance for man, so that visits to places of this or that 'faith' were encouraged. But reality was far off, as is the education of youth accordingly. Such was the way for ... it was called education, but in fact flimsily conceived indoctrination, minus education, producing slant not knowledge, except in exceptional cases.

Part of the plan at first was this: books on creation were to be kept in the Principal's Office. It was surely as unscientific an attitude, as shamelessly an authoritarian procedure, as might readily be imagined anywhere, short of rifle butts. The psyche is not so readily wounded as the body, but the harm may be deeper; and  to ensure the mind of an ignoramus results, is not the true work of education. This is not noted as being in this regard, like a Nazi style training camp in which conformity to State norms is ALL! including zeal to obliterate what is contrary to  its penchants and desires, in word, and in the minds affected, quite possibly in deed.

Consider some who want to implant creative powers in parts of the creation not obviously so endowed, pseudo-divine powers of absolute kind, here and there. But where is the evidence ? who is the co-ordinator of the bits ? Does he or it have a Doctorate of Bits, degree or Diploma ? Why try to break up and make up God where intensive research does not show Him! His word in DNA WAS WRITTEN in great volume; but it is not so now where intelligence does not dwell. In its very nature, in its testimonial evidence, in its causative kind, the Eternal made up and ceased doing so, precisely what was willed; and the Creative Eternal finished, as does the evidence of this kind of work, making what is as a receptacle, in much by law, in much by DNA, in the Bible*1, by explicit word, addressed to what was created.

What then ? Such looking as some are, for the concept of mini-godlets here and there within the material creation, occasionally operative and so on, is merely a displacement of the originating power which saw DNA written in vast enabling volumes in intense miniaturisation, to enable existence other than that of the Almighty, and it is too late to ask what is now there to HAVE MADE ITSELF, whether bits or whatever. What was, made what was not; what is eternal made what is not. Simplicity is not confusion but like E=MC2, a product of comprehension of a kind.

Such imaginary and obstinately undiscoverable parts could not operate before made, and the question is the explanation, here null.

How hard is the way for the irrationality quest, or the refusal of the logical necessity. It reminds one of a child who insists that he will not be subject to the laws of mathematics, and for him, 2 and 2 are just GOING to equal 4 and one quarter, and so he defines. But yet, he does not make it so!

It is useless to enjoin anything to do this, before anything of what was put into temporary existence, arrived. We find the evidence of its being so placed in the case of life, with the utmost ease: it comes, it stops. We do not find bits and pieces of whatever, harbouring such powers now. Just have a look and see DNA writing itself and making the writing happen, in new features and kinds now. The empirical is not cursed; the evidential attestation is not vile. It used to be deemed important, even required.

There is, as indicated by the Cambridge Professor, not much energy of fiery realism about the words and ideas, which fit neither the evidence nor the logical necessities. It is reality which can be magnificent in vigour and has displayed the wonders of creativity which appeal, appalling one when they are denied, avoided or in some cases, almost vomited.

Whenever man stops for thought, the case does not quiver. You need the start, just as with the aid of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you get anyway the course to the end, as so well indicated by Professor J.C. Sanford in his work and book, "Genetic Entropy ..."

It is well to realise where you are going as a nation, and this reverse from God, deliberate and dynamic breach of His commandments to the point of making it distinctively GOOD to depart from what specifically, if unrepented of, removes for many the path to heaven (as does adultery for that matter - I Corinthians 5:9-13, 6:9, I Timothy 1:10), needs to be realised. It is not necessary and it never has been to shunt from a forward position, as if to be to the rear were essential, or being thankless were the height of morals, or repentance were indecent. There is a way of mercy (Titus 3), and it is actuated by love (John 3).

Because the Bible is old and continually verified does not make it old hat, any more than hats are old hat, despite the continuing sunshine and the danger of skin cancer. It is the moonshine which is dangerous, and social acceptability is no more a ground for hope than was any other anti-biblical social craze of the past, such as various cults which from time to time insist on permeating curricula, as if theirs was right because it lacked reason, and what was past was wrong because it was supported by every kind of ground.

There is need to secede from the supposition that kills, and to avoid seduction by its ways.

 

NOTES

*1

See Hebrews 11:3, Colossians 1:15, Revelation 4:11, Isaiah 45:11-12,18, 41:21ff. and Jeremiah 2:12-13, 21-22,27,31-32. The thing is not seen so much in any one race as in that ultimate racism, human racism, fascinated with its features, set for voiding wisdom as if it were radioactive, hard to differentiate from racial self-idolatry.

Indeed, the Bible in SMR, TMR and the rest on this site is demonstrated to be the word of God, showing verification on all sides

as in the large work, entitled
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,


WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

and sub-titled

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God.

Its unique validation is especially dealt with in Design or Deity ... and further on verification and validation in this model of Apologetics, see Ch. 9 above.

Yet  the breach of reason in the atheist tangle in general and the Hawking wrangle, though sufficiently sad,  is in one way less menacing to man than first showing much of the Lord, then by decadence, overreaching God Himself, not in reality, but in behaviour and in purpose at last, in a kind of cultural crumble. This may go on till a people once given much liberty because of its Maker, becomes merely a cultural offshoot of a convoy of unreason, departing the shores once so fruitful, with scarcely a wave.

 

*2

See SMR Ch. 5 on this fallacy, and also Predestination and Freewill, Section 4.