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IT IS NOT NATTER
ABOUT MATTER AND ENERGY

WITH ALL THEIR CAUSELESS CONTRIVANCES
MAGICALLY 'ARISING'
THAT IS NEEDED BY MAN:
BUT THE WORD OF GOD

News 378

Creation, June-August 2006, in conjunction with

Alex Williams and John Hartnett, Dismantling the Big Bang (2005) and
TJ, Vol. 16 (1), 2002

Only the idea that our galaxy is near the centre of the universe,  says Dr Jonathan Sarfati, in Creation Vol. 28, No 3, fits all the evidence.

 

HAVING BABIES WITHOUT MOTHERS

This "makes sense of the quantized redshifts", he indicates, citing in particular Journal of Creation16(2), 95-104. Dr Harold Slusher long ago pointed out evidence for the same as noted in SMR pp. 76ff. and in particular p. 78). In Dismantling the Big Bang, Hartnett and Williams point out (p. 135), with reference to the work of Russell Humphreys, that quantized redshifts, visible for man in every direction, "at the same discrete intervals", imply the galaxies lying on the surface of a series of concentric shells, each corresponding to a given "peak abundance in redshift distribution." Humphreys is noted as presenting the point that the only way this pattern could be seen in this manner would occur if we in our galaxy were at or near the centre. Thus we could perceive the pattern where its perception has this orientative fact: similar in all directions, from near the centre.

It is not a cosmological principle of evenness, as in the Big Bang; anything but. It is a shell situation, merely to name one orderly facet. As to that, in or near the centre, you see the expansive domains with that orientation, as we do.

In fact, structure in space has been one of the momentous exhibits of recent years (cf. TMR, *3, in The Antics of Dating); and long evidenced in much, it becomes more and more compelling. Structure and stricture abound, with remarkable results as seen in TMR (loc. cit.) and the references cited above.

Efforts to make things simple in terms of mutual begettings (really most complex, as it has to work, and empirically it does not) quickly run into difficulties both in principle and in practice. Thus in TJ 16(1), pp. 29ff., Dr John Hartnett in a technical article points out a fundamental flaw in the Hoyle type QSSC model ('quasi-steady-state creation'), an hypothesis in violent and long contradiction of the Big Bang scenario, and one that although it covers much evidence that contradicts the Big Bang, yet merely assumes what is deemed a 'common sense' approach.

In this (op. cit. p. 33), energy is to appear in the universe in compensating positive and negative forms. This is evidently intended to preserve a certain constancy or conservation of matter and energy. However, as to this scenario of something from nothing in balancing phases: it is not really much of a ground for non-nothing, being anything but that, and having a certain orphan look and magical nature as normal in naturalism's hosts. "I might add," Hartnett notes, that "negative energy has never been observed." A grand idea when one of the two balancing components in a balancing act is not to be seen around.

On the other hand, the Big Bang scenario itself  incorporates its own illusory begettings, and wishing to reach mass from energy, it postulates a 'beginning' of great heat, helping the formation according to empirical observation, of matter in positron and electron varieties, positive and negative clinches, matter and anti-matter pairs. Let these opposites meet, and they annihilate each other, reverting to energy, Hartnett notes in his Dismantling the Big Bang, p. 88. However "since our universe consists only of matter" (op.cit. p. 14), in this regard, apart from minor productions, "it is a reasonable conclusion that our universe could not have been produced" in this way, by what is called quantum pair production (op. cit. p. 126). That is, his point is that from energy into matter experiments, in the laboratory, it is found that you get equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, electron and anti-electron, and so forth, you get what appears as a non sequitur. IF  this was  the way, then the  result is far  away from it. The point that you almost totally have ONLY the positive variety, the negative being swallowed up with the theory into the abyss, as it were, thus such a concept of origin is not attractive, not verified. It is massively undercut.

Indeed, to have things arrive in this way, even if it happened, you need the  structure, basis, background principles of operation, functional dynamics and formative constraints to MAKE it happen, which is to say, you need the realities you seek to explain, before you begin. It is always so when you try to get something from nothing in general; and in particular, when you try to get form, order, reliable modes of operation, structure and controlled modes of formatting and interchange, from its absence. It is even in theory, therefore, quite absurd to try to have energy (the capacity to do work) PRODUCING all these things. It is a basic ingredient, and its dirigibility and operational consistency is an additional fact  the basics of which reduce the theory to the same pitiful fact-void, information omitting mess that any such action must imply. It is just that here, you see HOW it applies.

Trying to get babies from other babies instead of from mothers, and trying to get the constitutive reality of a design from its parts is always in vain, and the least common of sense. Trying to get the bits from nowhere is similarly unproductive, since nowhere has nothing to offer. Imagination as the source of whatever it is that is to be made to make, is quite illusory. You need what it takes to get what you want, in any creation conversation, and assuming what might, but doesn't so demonstrate itself, to bring about this or that from the other, is always begging the question, first, and meeting negative results, second. This is quite predictable and an illustration of the vanity of philosophy, when it masquerades as science. (Cf. Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation.)

Indeed, as one reads the works cited at the initial level in this Chapter, one must be struck with what is there revealed, namely the enormity of the variability of the nursed theories, often defiant in their unevidenced realms, ditched by details, oblivious of difficulties, expanding and contracting like some pulsating mental mass, dealing with the undiscovered, impenitent before the uncontrite contradictories, contradicting one another, inducing speculative hypotheses with a desperation worthy of an escapee in training from the days of Alcatraz. We encounter fanciful, unfounded, works of fiction, straining like a toddler trying to run in an adult 400 metre race, and so close to the absolute zero in ridiculous fantasy, as to induce almost a sort of wonder that the grown among mankind could become so flippant in fancy.

Descartes had a sort of similarity, though with a divine base, in which everything had a knack of doing the right thing and singing in song on the way, with all but hand clappings to harmonise as it did so, in one of the most ludicrous pieces of petulant philosophy, where to think is to perform, that one could ever wish. He set a fashion, which others have found immensely attractive, from Darwin to Lamarck, from Big Bang to Punctuated Equilibrium where the equilibrium lacks the get up and go,  to QSSC (a lot of little bangs, as if the repetitious would remove the necessity of possessing something to repeat and the means for it)*1A.

Insistence on the irrational at the outset has this result; and when reason is adduced where it is simultaneously dismissed (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5, 10, TMR Secular Myths ... Earth Spasm ..., and SMR p. 312), this is precisely the predictable result, a verification in itself. Turgidity of thought 'arises' with very elegantly sufficient cause in such a confused and ambivalent situation, of misplaced purposes, prejudice and probing mixed, until you find the hilarities of Secular Myths ... and Calibrating Myths... , of Wake Up World! ...(esp. Chs. 4-6),  in conjunction with the SMR Ch. 3 exposures of philosophic ruin. If this is fun: to examine folly, yet folly unchained is no more fun than a blind and raging Alsatian in a public square. Creative thought is not effective in this illusory manner.

In fact, imagination does not beget; it is begotten. WE think it. The other point is this, that the thing we think has to happen, and for that it needs more than our imagination! It needs adequate cause or else the spurious realm of witches' brooms, the arrest of logic, the deletion of causation and the abortion of scientific method*1 .

We shall examine the backdrop to any such scenario next. By the way, in terms of 'having babies without mothers', don't dote on test-tubes, for you need eggs, and these, constructed so as to constrain, train or constrict the creation of the child in every direction, with orders, commands, utilities, programs and assembly plants of the uttermost complexity and sequential felicity, in some ways they surpass in marvel the product which they direct to come!

 

NEGATING NEGATIVITY

So there is no evidence for negative energy, yet this is used by the Hoyle brand of steady state adventure. There is no evidence of balances of positrons and electrons, as found in efforts to turn energy into matter, but this is a Big Bang assumption. How much more is needed to show such people that you simply CANNOT make anything from nothing. You can try as you will, pour out talent and brandish equations, but it is impossible. It is not next to impossible: unless you yourself have no limits, you cannot surpass all limits by bringing something out of nothing.

If even you had no limits, and did so, it would only be because YOU had everything and nothing did not need to have anything in order to be filled with what you in ENTIRE CAUSAL SUFFICIENCY brought INTO nothing's conceptual area (since it could not have an actual one, without ceasing to be nothing). That however would not be to make something OUT OF nothing, but to create something where nothing was before.

Playing about with an energy-matter consignability, to mutate from one to the other under certain circumstances, which always exist when there is not nothing, this can do nothing any more than playing about with cards can make them. You do not MAKE cards by re-assigning, re-aligning them. You may make all sorts - correction, some sorts of patterns out of them, or designate them as symbols to act in a system, so that if this symbol does that thing, then certain other designed and designated components in your system will interpret them, by sensors, to mean this or that and so do the other. It is all a very simple matter of making a system of things so that YOU assign meaning and inscribe means, leading to results as specified in your mind, and asserting in your system.

There is nothing very marvellous about such conceptions and considerations: you imagine, you designate, you design, and you enable.

Of course when the design is as with the human body, in itself of a complexity of considerations and conceptualisations, symbols and servants, orders and directive segments, many things organised to make themselves again, and it is equipped likewise with provisions for select variations in response to varied stimuli, then the productive cause has enormous requirements.

Back of this, there is no escape from considering

bullet the amount and perspicuity,
 
bullet the integral capacities of conception and of articulation
by systematic means,

and this requisition leads to what is marvellous,

not because of the KIND of thing it is,

but in view of

bullet the depth of the imagination
and the intricacy of the segmentalisation of function,
 
bullet hierarchically conveyed,
 
bullet and implemented by ever receding means as time moves on,
 
bullet with commands and receptors attuned to co-operate in only one  language,
like a factory's identification imprint,

that is here on display. Dr Gitt, one may note in update, in his  work, Without  Excuse, gives a scientific approach, empirically based,  to a rigorously defined  concept of information in particular, such as abounds in our bodies, and its requirement of intelligence.

There is however nothing but causation, in all its personally chosen ways, on display. It is the sort of imagination and the sort of things imagined which strikes the heart with awe; the means by which all is attained impress the more engineering, architectural persons, perhaps, but the very magnitude of the conceptions, this hits the artist and the creative envisager, the entrepreneur.

You need from imagination and conception down to implementation and executive means, programmatically imposed, to find the sort of result which an unimaginative sort of base is assigned in entire futility and irrelevance, to convey. Sufficiency of cause is always a pre-requisite of science; and it is this of course which in our case is God, for the components, these are not so gifted or indeed, gifted at all in this realm and region of functionality. You merely have to try to make them so, USING YOUR OWN INTELLIGENCE, to find that out!

Moreover, freedom itself is not even touched by programmatics, since it is a directive derivative in such a field, and hence lacks its essence. Nor is love: for while many things can seek to imitate it, in lust or affection for kindred or opposite persons, or the sense of the intriguing or the charming, the youthful or the mature, yet it is not the same, any more than is knowledge the same as wisdom, or cunning the same as capacity to create. It is far less broad.

Love, the elective capacity to relate to another with tender regard, keen perception, a sense of the admirable and the worthwhile, whether actual or envisaged, an intense desire to bring forth the best out of the thing so conceived, and to do it with due regard to the integrity of that one, to have fellowship and so on: this is like freedom, not something to be programmed. To the exact extent that something is programmed, it ceases to have the elective quality; and so the conceptions involved are not perceived, but conceived and that by another.

This is then HIS love, virtual love, and even then, vicarious love, which not being personal  - which after all, is the integral reality involved FOR love, is another matter altogether. You cannot IMITATE love, or program it at all.

Yet all this is not to befog the issue, but unfog the minimal and irrelevant parameters which people so readily impose as they conceive of people being created, in some ways so unlike themselves as frogs are from flies, or worse still, robots are from reality.

Yet with small or great, there is the need for something other  than nothing, if anything is EVER going to come to anything, unless the 'anything' is what is adequate for ALL. If for example, you conceive of nothing sitting there one day (there is no day), typically inert (there IS no inertia), and then being moved (there IS no movement, it is something) to think a little (there IS no thought) about doing something USEFUL (there IS no use) ...then of course you realise the idiocy of the daydream.

Now it must be said for daydreams, that if they have charm, at all, then part of that charm is their very failure to be realistic; for they rove in the imagination's heart. Yet when you turn from the teeming realms of unprodded thought to those of realising realities, there is a certain chasm between the one thing and the other! We need to cross this, in order to have ordered thought, or any operably relevant concept of things coming to be.

So we start once more with nothing, but this time there is a REAL question, Can anything be made of it ?

Of course not, since it has no basis or provision of any kind in space or time or thought or conception or ideation or dream: it IS not. Very well, so for the third time we start with nothing. However in this case, we are careful, to avoid needless repetition, which may fill out a Lecturer's term but not the well-ordered minds of his students, to have some entity there along with it, as well.

Now to be literal, there is no REAL question of having some entity there with it, since 'it' does not exist. However, it is a conception, so we will have the conception there, even though that of which it is a conception cannot be anywhere, for it cannot be, since it IS not, in present, past or future, in potential or actuality; nor could it be - without ceasing at once to BE nothing!

Then the ENTITY (which you may recall now, is NOT nothing, nothing being conceived apart), acts. Nothing ceases at once to be the only conceived thing apart from the unmoving entity, since the entity just acted. Thus we have entity plus movement of entity. Now if the entity is ENERGY, as some like to imagine, then we need to know what we are talking about. This may seem both unusual and unnecessary, and that is  how atheism and  agnosticism manage to exist, even as conceptions. It is however necessary, when thinking, to think.

 

WHAT IS ENERGY ?

Hence what is energy ? becomes the question. The usual definition is this: CAPACITY TO DO WORK. This means that we need to define WORK. It may be thought of as power in action,  and under direction, since otherwise it is mere action. What is this energy going to WORK  AT ? That is the question.

If it merely does ANY kind of work in ANY kind of way, then there needs to be something there on which it may work. Otherwise it can only work on itself. If energy, the capacity to do work, works on itself, then it must change. It must then cease to be capacity to do work, to a greater or lesser degree, since this is what it altogether IS. That leads nowhere, for if the capacity is greatly reduced, we merely lumber up the conceptual realm with non-starters, and if it is only very slight, we still make things more adverse than when we began, for anything to operate, and so are again moving negatively relative to our envisaged means of having something come to be.

Accordingly, the energy acts on something ELSE. However this means it has to be there. That is at once simple, provided only that the energy is creative energy, and that requires systematising facility and will, coherent and cohesive thought and capacity to invent and implement in the visible, since energy is not visible, but a power or potency.

You will recall that so far we had only the entity,  and that the entity had nothing else. To enable this, the energy will have to create, then,  something from itself. What would the capacity to do work create from itself, for example ?

It could create a system on which it could play havoc or institute progress ? A system ? But this means that the capacity to do work must involve NO LESS, a capacity to do designated work, to achieve results in a systematic manner. Hence it must be more than energy: it must be DIRECTABLE energy, energy susceptible to purpose and rationality. It must be energy ABLE to make systems. For systems you need the components, so it must be energy gifted not only with the power to purpose, but to be purposive in arenas of integrable thought and imagination.

If the system is not to be made one in which energy plays havoc, but one in which complex and notable complexities and integralities of inter-relationships of parts and programs occur, then the energy must not only be intelligent, purposive, rational and creative, as well as imaginative, but must also have the power to integrate past and present, present and future actions, in the arena not itself, and so of course to CREATE.

Thus we have come by strict and stringent logical necessity to find that an intelligent, purposive, imaginative, coherently rational, foreseeing and implementative interface and director for energy is needed if we are to proceed at all from nothing as a concept. We need the energy and its creations not itself, in the field not of thought alone, doing mental work, but of matter which exists. It can have the capacity to do work in making matter provided it is itself not material, and so has the special and specifiable features necessary for the designation of such work, rather than the delimitations which control in a ramp of relationships already construed, as if were itself subjected to the crimping of its existence into the forms, formulae and constraints which characterise matter, the energy channels which enable it, and the diversifications which illustrate it.

Further the energy, now seen to be personal and powerful in purpose, sufficient for every diversification of mini-entities and ratification of their sustained parameters, is required to sustain coherent conceptions in executive skill, in the field of something other than itself to work on, so that its capacity, being sustained, can become a ground for what is, since it is here,  in its own Being, and that is there where placed. That is precisely creation.

As timeless, it sustains the carved creativities of time, and as space-free, it directs the energies of the components and compositions of space; as infinite in imagination, it proceeds to create by imagination; as profound in resource, it makes the resourceful; as brilliant in reason, it provides the raw material for reason, and as sublime in liberty, having none to constrain it, it fashions the spirits of man, that they may be free.

We have seen the reality of creation, if we are to get somewhere (and we have got somewhere, for we are HERE NOW).

 

LET'S GET BACK TO LOGIC

Thus there has to be the creator and the creation. Without that, you do not really understand anything of reality, which is precisely what the Bible states in Romans 1:17ff.; for it declares that seeking to be wise, those who turned from the worship of the Creator to the creature or the creation, became foolish, and were afflicted with that dead-beatness which the Bible calls vanity, a sort of animated dead-beatness!

Some, to take another loved starting point of the naturalist, like to start not with energy but with matter: it takes all types ...

However, we need to have this matter able to act. It is simply no good sitting there and being itself and hoping that somehow what is purposive and imaginative, rational and executive in power to change the structure of things, like matter, will come, no matter what! It does not: that is easily found by finding out what matter does and does not do, as has been found for interesting centuries, without consultation with any available inherent mind, far less one imaginative of original conception for matter.

So we really need something which is not matter to invest into matter whatever of creativity and imagination, purposive conceptualisation and construction may be desired. To do this, you need all the additives we found when we were looking at the absurdly abstract concept of energy, and trying to see if there could be smuggled in all the realities of God without admitting it; but we for our part, like to prevent contraband, it is so misleading.

Accordingly,  we acknowledged it; and we have to do just the same here.

As before, it is no use having matter try to do things to itself, since it never tries, but merely acts as it is made. To try you have to have purpose in conjunction with structurally difficult things which require you to understand at least some of it, and to move into the region, realm or conceptual area with the necessary spanners, implements, cranial or purposive, required. You have to have what is not matter to make matter into anything, just as does the car manufacturer, the poet or the maker of paper requires the conceptual capacity to invest with the correlatives of conception, the creations in view.

Thus when people try to have a Big Bang, with matter maybe coming happily from energy, they have the problems of a technical kind that the sort of matter which could come in this way is not the sort of matter, arranged in nicely balanced positrons and electrons, which would in fact empirically be found in such a envisagement. It does not verify itself.

When they try to have energy as the determinant; it for its part as we have shown, requires God, and thus they do not find the negative energy postulated in the universe, as in the Steady State theorems, where things are to be making nice little sorties.

Matter or energy are merely two items, the latter an abstraction, in fact always found in a setting, and the other a mouldable deposit, found with its laws and mechanics.

To make anything out of them, or with them, you need further matters to be energised, such as intelligence and purpose, wit and invention, creativity and creation. To get them in the first place, with their specifications and requisitions, you need no less.

That is so logically and empirically; and our point here is this, that the empirical merely mimics thought; for it reveals simply and clearly that neither of these terrible twins of misconception being pressed into illicit service as creators, has what it takes. If you are taken with the idea of getting what we have got, not only do they not come from nothing, and need sufficient causation for their designated and delimited, their conceptualised congeries of considerations at work to make them what they are; when you have them, they do not go. It is like a wheel: it is good to have it on your way to creating a car. It is not really very adequate, being merely a designable part of an operational design, to make other parts from; for it is to have other parts assembled with it, that it exists as the car 'arises' under the tender eye of engineer, worker and thinker.

Thus, in addition to the desired versatility of matter, or energy, to be able to do all kinds of serviceable things in other domains by imagination (it has none for its own part), there is another little fact. We envisaged energy plus nothing. It did not work. That is merely stage one. Where however does it find its own causal energy in order to sit there useless, as it was until we found the ENTITY secretly in view, and brought the eyes to behold Him ? Does energy, the capacity to do work, just sit around and occasionally eat an apple out of sheer boredom ? Does it arise from nothing when nothing got sick and tired of the total lack of anything about it; even if it could, which of course it couldn't!

That is just the reductio ad absurdum aspect of the thing. Day dreams don't work, and it is a shocking waste of time to forget that they ARE day dreams. It also costs billions of dollars in space research, that is quite unnecessary. Things do not arise; they need what it takes to put them there, and to imagine that because there are a billion backs of books in a library that there MUST be words within them is mere folly. Every word needs what it takes in terms of understandable symbolism, actual realities to which they refer, ordered synthesis of grammatical and syntactical systems and power to interpret these, linked to power to implement the work resultant.

Principles and possibilities are mere descriptive terms for realities which must precede them.

This whole absurd and super-unscientific concept of 'arising', just arising, which our old (probably non-Christian) chemistry master used to so detest and that with such a contemptuous scorn, as the ultimate of non-science: it is indeed rationally abandoned, the ultimate in the field of the non-rational and the nubilous day-dream. At least during working hours, let us leave the dreams to the night. They belong there better, when you want to have anything happen wisely.

Energy itself needs the source, even though it is merely an abstraction. The abstracted thing, even if in notional form, taken from context: it still needs its source. It still needs, no less, its field. Capacity to do work is implicit power, and it is implicit purposiveness, since the work in view is not the same as mere action, but involves a certain directedness of system, signatures of concepts, assignations of executive prowess, codification of complexes of commands, whether operational as in life, or stratifying, as in matter.

Where did this capacity to do material work come from ? There is power in matter and that has certain capacities to work, but they are very limited in KIND. There is power in mind, and that has certain capacities to work, and this is of a much less limited KIND. There is power in the human spirit to work, and this is of a still less limited KIND. There are various kinds of work in various systematised and co-ordinated entities, of which man has all three, in an integrated consistency of unitary operability which is the sub-structure of  man.

Yet man is more even than this. He is not merely a series of mutually responsive systems: he is the person in whom these work, so that he can to a large and most significant extent direct to what END, purpose and objective, work and creation, he wants these energies bent. It is PERSONAL, in a way, entrepreneurial, purposive and cohesive, comprehending in kind and rational in manner, but imaginative in matter. As he has been enabled by such transcendent utilities, so he can enable for his part, though derivative, with lateral utilities, yet these derivative from his own derivative mind, thought, feeling, decisions and determinations of will.

Where did the energy, the matter and the man come from ? It is required, as with the ENTITY, that these have a basis. For the Entity, it is itself, a mere logical necessity that for ANYTHING EVER to happen you need the ENTITY always, for otherwise there would be no basis, source or beginning, and nothing would stare itself out, until it realised if it could realise, which of course it can't, that it cannot stare or have a self to stare at, or start to stare; for that is not nothing, but very much something.

It is therefore an ETERNAL ENTITY, and indeed THE ETERNAL ENTITY. 'Energy' was merely a fund required and its nature being found and logically founded, its source in this created field was traced. Thus have we found the Entity.

If there were more than one, you would need the constitutive Creator of the system in which they had co-existence and where they could relate numerically as one and one. In passing we might note that as a TRINITY, the Eternal Entity does not, in creation of man in His image, learn that basic ingredient of what it is to have society, for it has it eternally and already!

Since the trinity is a unity, which is triune, moreover, with infinite mutual interpenetration in wisdom and understanding, and a unitary nature, the question of a system does not enter; for there are neither parts nor programs to compel or impel, nor is there anything necessary of an imposed, bipartite or tripartite character to provide for. It is what it is, or as the Lord declared to Moses, I am who I am! Time sequence is His creation, not His constituent compulsion or delimitation!

Threefold in persons in social cohesion, He is unitary in being, this being the good pleasure of God, to be in this manner, assigning within Himself without limit, what He is; and being eternal and past all time which is a limiting invention for creation, as we have and know it, this is the eternal case, without beginning or alteration, transmutation or change.

The ENTITY itself, "I am whom I am",  then has created these other entities, which unlike itself, being created, not only began, but are delimited, designated, defined and dependent. These creations themselves, they are not needed in order to prevent the notion of nothing continuing, a fraudulent concept, since we are not nothing and not only continue, but very definitely came to be. These are products of what is needed!

The incredibly and most marvellously complex provisions for energy to have phases and kinds and to relate to all manner of vehicles, from subjected matter to subjective man, and for matter to bear forms not merely of thought, but of being: these can be tittivated this way and that, but in the end it is quite vain. These bits will no more make the Entity than a book the author, or cow dung a cow.

You need not only the ineffaceable conceptualisation, the modes of codification, the elaborations of execution, the facilities of timing as in protein folding, and spacing, the principles enshrined in operations which illustrate them, the rationality to impart the rational and the spirituality to impart it, but the mind to mould to your designations, the designs you export. It is not a mere arrangement; it is a logical analytical essence which appears. It is not mere motion; it is constructive creativity which appears. It is not merely the phases and features of matter  that are found; it is the configurations of complexity with the integralities of simplicity (like the intricate features of man's exquisite construction and the relative simplicity of being a person who simply pushes the buttons of desire, after conceiving with the engines of rationality and willing with the provisions of desire).

Rationality does not come, clean-cut from nothing; nor does a 'principle' make matter and then turn itself into  an engine for making rational beings. Disney was good at that sort of thing; but he did it for fun.

Energy is needed to make a delimited form of time-space energy; but the energy in view is unlimited, being eternal and unconstrained by anything or anyone, the author of all system, as we have seen. That energy is conceptual, codifying, correlating, conceiving, imagining, willing, working and creating. Then we realised, it was not a 'capacity to do work', a mere abstraction  that was acting where nothing could not, but an Entity who HAS the capacity to make the delimited in time and space and to create the capacity to do work in such environs, issuing command to form and formulate alike, inserting into space and place, design and depiction, the power to depict and to analyse, to will and to thrill at nonsense, as when the ENTITY is avoided as if not there by such a construction, as that triad of mind, matter and spirit, mankind.

The procedures of avoidance: they are rather like being present at a jet take-off and affecting that the aeroplane is not there, as you see it lift off.

Imagination is so convenient when rightly used; but its abuse is folly.

Thus you need always what it takes for ANY procedure. To 'happen' means to have a just causal basis to do so (cf. Causes, SMR Chs. 5, Ch. 3). It is just that in that case of mere 'happening',  one's own purposive thoughts are not being implemented, and the structures other than nothing, which one oneself does not happen to be, are doing whatever comes naturally, so that one finds their products either happily or otherwise, in one's way. They 'happen'.

If the action is that of other people, these their products are what comes either naturally or unnaturally, depending on the case, since these cases have as we have been conceiving, freedom. This allows deviation from truth, whether involuntarily or deliberately, indeed with deliberation; for lies are not uncommon.

If they misuse this liberty and derivative codifies set of powers set in unity of nature; if they deploy it not for love or creation, but to mess about with things made and programmed, then of course they may lose it to ever increasing degrees. The misuse of implements has that facility, as if a scalpel were used to cut diamonds; and that it spoils them.

They have limits; disregard that, and you at last find that you are not a god, but nearer to a sod, in such diversification from the criteria of vitality:  you court death, disuse and fractious frictions (cf.  Ezekiel 28:9).

 

THE NATURE OF THE ENTITY

The next question ? it is this. One must now look for the nature of the ENTITY, for without that, one is like a book lost without its author, wondering why so much is written, and being caught in the present time, trying to work out the earlier parts, and finding it dangerous not to know the latter parts, and feeling positively meaningless, because in oneself there is so much significance and symbol, all playing away quite regardless of one's own thoughts. In such a situation, yet one in which man is naturally placed, he does not at once know the One who instituted the linguistic-ratiocinative-physical-organisational whole, the cerebral-spiritually-synthetic masterpiece which one seems to view as well as be, since one has been so constructed that this PERSONAL power is but part of the whole.

Where is the writer ? This is the imperative question: not where are some other things to fuss about and move this way and that, like some ignorant pretender to being a doctor, who wiggles the patient's ears this way and that, wishing he could only know how on earth the man can HEAR! It is understanding, not mere spatial displacement which is necessary. You have to use the intelligence to understand first of all the person, and then the relationship of his equipment for enabling various functions of thought to occur, and then to find what is wrong with it.

The powers of the Writer are most obvious. The systems become increasingly so with time, given the intelligence in His products, mankind. The point of it all is not known in itself, since the end is not revealed to mere intelligence, this affair being personal to the Author.

The sanctity of the Author is obvious, upon thought, for if HE were a product, we simply have to go through all our earlier work again, until it is realised that SOMEONE has to be THERE always for anything ever, and it is quite a circuitous vanity or inanity to keep on trying to distance the aweful hour when we press to the point: where is He ?

Some think He simply has a residence in them, but this by itself seems rather presumptuous. What power does this convey ? what wisdom, what knowledge, what results ?

Some like to think of Him as much less than they are, for reasons never articulable, since the Author of such a book as this has to be as far beyond it as a father's mind beyond a child's, but much more, since our very power to criticise depends on so much of what is cogitative, researching, memorising, with evaluation and rational penetration assiduously at work, perception and orientation. It depends no less on the bases for these very things, to distinguish them from mere arrancy and arrogance in various mixtures, which are data for us.

They did not just 'arise' but required like everything else, a sufficient cause.

Try making them do so without it... just try!

Since then the intelligence of the Author must be enormous, we consider how enormous ? It must have no limits, since then there would be one who set them or a system which did so, and this like all else and for precisely the same reason, would require its cause, which would have to have been there always. We move directly there instead of being circuitous. It must be infinite, since barriers - to what is always there, can ONLY be if there is something else to comprise, compose and/or impose them.

Where then is the evidence for this infinite being ? The 'infinity' is not, as in day-dreaming occupations, a sort of hazy set of receding mountains moving sublimely or lazily (as the case may be) into the distance. It is merely what has no limits to be what it is, and this being God, it is described as omnipotent. Where however is the signature of the Omnipotent Entity, the Purposive Author to be found ?

Man is the book, or one of the volumes, but where is it signed. How often one must look in some famous painting, asking, Where is the signature ? It is hard to sell without it.

That it is a great painter requires only one glance, or perhaps a little study, since the works of non-great artists are not, and cannot be produced with the conceptions, perceptions and cohesive rationalities and intimations, without there being the powers and functions correlative for such results. WHO he is, that is an entirely new question. Is it the Art Gallery Director, or University ? Try them out for making men. They were even born! How ridiculous that is for entrants!

We look then for words, such as make our bodies go, and give them power to pro-create more of them till the earth has billions of us, and groans, not unreasonably in terms of what we as as race have done to it, and do to it and to one another! My computer fan groans a little too,  at times; but I do not blame it. It has had to do quite a lot, and its design is limited, and so it finds its time.

Words ? We have intelligence, so let's use it. Where are words which COULD not come from a Being of limited intelligence ? TEST, test and test again. It is so extraordinarily simple. NO 'religion' or way of dealing with 'ultimate questions' whether at the pure or applied level, exists - but one - which is even relevantly testable. We have matter and mind and spirit so let's see the triad in operational format, in terms of one of these religions, having tested it.

 

THE FUNCTIONALITY OF THE BIBLE
AND THE VALIDATION OF THE SALVATION OF GOD

None is testable but that of the Bible, and this as we have seen in vast detail already, has no errors and a scope which makes only the wisdom of infinity possible as the author.

If you are, just to take one case, going to predict  millenia  ahead, and do so with arithmetic precision, in terms of forecast entities, engaging in interaction in ways both nakedly and subtly exact in their depiction, whether with individuals, or nations, or many nations, or trends, or actions, or people doing this or that to one another; and if you do this in terms of patterns of developing behaviour which you specify, while analysing what is wrong with man, and presenting with prediction what the cure is, adducing the pathology which sways man into it, and then wheel all this detail onto the dramatic stage, as if from an observer of events in their own time: what then ?

Why then this is the work which only God could do. ONE error of conception at any ONE point would lead to MULTIPLIED errors in a vast abyss of arenas, as all the developing facets of the entities created, interacted.

It would be impossible without total knowledge. WITH total knowledge, an adequate cause for this result would of course require intelligence of disposing of such knowledge, imagination in applying it, conceptual potency for comprehending it and will for resolving to do any such things with steadfast and invariant purpose and power alike. One possessed of all this, causing it to be written for the instruction of others, COULD do so; and the way to test it is to consider the product so described.

The Bible does this. It gives thus the signature of God. Only God has it; only God shows it. There is nowhere else for it to be found. Challenge it, it will subdue you. Try to make it false, and it exposes you. This is the message for millenia, and the best efforts of man nowadays to disengage it, are merely themselves predicted (as in II Peter 3:1-5, for example, or Luke 21, or Matthew 24). Such things can be seen in SMR Chs. 8   -   9, SMR pp. 377ff., in The Pitter... Ch. 4 and in the many index items bearing on this prophetic phase.

You do not need to fiddle-faddle with matter and energy to try to make them the ENTITY, since they are limited, delimited and defined in their systems, and with no power to invent themselves, let alone before they are there, or to cogitate, imagine or determine purposively. Imagining them there does not put them there. You need to find the Author, the Engineer, the Thinker, the Creator in short, and to do so, it is so very simple.

You go to the self-verifying Bible, and investigate. You find it has two parts, Old and New Testaments. In the former, we find the creation and the desecration of man. As to the latter, it is wrought by himself, since he is amazingly free, being bound largely by the misuse of freedom and its results as in any design, where however someone else has normally to foul it up, since designs cannot always think or  have freedom, and so must often depend on others to be foolish with them if they are to be ruined. Man however has achieved this with his liberty, all by himself, with some counsel, it is true, but not with any compulsion.

Man is very good at ruining things, including himself, and this is called sin. God who created man is naturally not fond of this, and having nothing to gain from man, since being unlimited, He needs nothing, and much to give him, sets bounds to this design-mutilation program of liberal man.

Judgment enters in, but mercy also. We find this in the Bible in detail, and that the way of God, which He knew from before p. 1 of the Book of Life, is mercy. It is not indiscriminate and is very discriminating, but not at all discriminatory.

Thus this mercy divine is FREELY offered to all with great heart (John 3, I Timothy 2, II Corinthians 5, Ezekiel 33:11 cf. SMR Appendix B, In Gratitude ... Ch. 2), but it is not available for spiritual play-boys or play-girls for that matter (as noted in Hebrews 6 and 10). It is offered in just terms and awesome ones. God having made man able to be free, and having displayed the way for him to go from the first, and having faced the follies of man to the last, has come to this earth, the Author as a character, and died for man, for any and all who receive His transformative thrust, called salvation. This is very trying, since you have to be re-made, naturally enough, nature being spoiled within you, which is the whole problem for man.

However, this too God is willing to do, when a man receives

bullet redemption, which is God's own personal payment for the sin foul-up, and
 
bullet personal offer of life's restoration, this time for eternity with Himself.

This involves love since to be with anyone for ever certainly requires that, all the more if He is LORD and GOD!

Those who receive Him always love Him, since the change is such and the cost was such, vicarious death for sinners, and the grace is so good, and the state of the art foul-up was so shocking, that it is a thing of wonder and acclaim; and to HAVE IT is a stupendous acquisition. Indeed, in the restored image of God within them, love is natural because it is the love of the supernatural God who is love, so that this is like blood in the veins, part of the design, though it is never merely automatic.

The sore part, of course, is this, that you cease to have the illusion of being your own lord. That however has two answers. Firstly what is the good of an illusion! Truth any day: illusion is merely misleading and there is only one end to that, collision with reality.

Secondly, to have the life of God as one's in-living dynamic is thrilling. It means that you have to face morals and purpose. Surely, these are not your own, but this is part of the refreshing amplitude of such living, and when it is God (and then alone), this is delightful, for He is far better than oneself, and yet intensely and intensively personal.

Moreover,  if you love truth and He is the truth, that is fine! It is in fact quite splendid, a privilege, and a costly but illimitably enriching delight. In the process, of course, since living in this world of fallen creation is like being in a foreign country, on diplomatic assignment with rules and promises provided from the host nation (here God Himself according to the promises to faith, which are numerous as in Matthew 6:33, Luke 21:15, II Peter 1:1ff.).

Seeing these work with the power of the land into which one has migrated by the grace of God, it is like a daily visit to Niagara Falls, or a wander in the majesty of some vast forest. As to the promises of God,  it is necessary that these work not less, but more than diplomatic backing to a diplomat abroad! This world loves not God and finds no passion for His ways, but to violate them, often with a hideous pomposity of self-commendation.

Thus the promises of God need to work for His ambassadors, His children, in such a milieu as this world has now become.

They do. That too is empirical. Likewise, the whole course of world history conforms to prediction (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5), and has done so in magnificent precision in the day of Christ similarly, when He was on earth, as since then through His lips, as to what was to be from then to the End of the Age (cf. SMR Ch. 8, Joyful Jottings 22-25, Repent or Perish Ch. 2). This is that which now we inhabit, though like children in the night, many fail to realise their extraordinary placement in the history of things!

His words now contain history and direct it, just as He Himself met with transcendent but humble majesty, the uniquely divine provisions of His charter from the prophets, when on earth, and even nature obeyed Him. The focus for faith is testable, was invested in flesh, performed in word and deed at the level of God, invincible, loving, compassionate, powerful, precise, fulfilling what was written of Him as identification, and identifying what was to come as verification. It was and is all there*2.

Christ said that the one who loses his life for His sake, will keep it, and the one who keeps it, will lose it (Matthew 16:24-25). That is surely so. When the CREATOR is working within, in friendly harmony and happy holiness, which is His way, then this makes life without Him seem boring and ludicrous, like being a branch lying next to a tree, instead of trying the business of having the tree's sap running in you. Also, that way, you wither, a detestable process.

Saved, pardoned, empowered with peace, enabled with joy, strengthened with discipline, awakened with light which illumines all things, the Christian finds another way.  The other signature then comes onto one's own life: that of the power and presence personally of God in one's spirit, and this makes one want to sing, if not with voice, then in heart. To be a signed document of life (Ephesians 1:13), in the hands of the Designer of Destiny, who loves to give and needs nothing, anointed with everlasting life as an inheritance assured (Ephesians 1:11): this is better than any dream.

In fact, dreams of the drab sort we noted, these come when masses if not myriads within mankind, avoiding God as if it were life's highest purpose, think seedy, irrational thoughts (cf. Jeremiah 23:21-29, Jude 8-19), and try to look serious as they do it.

Man loves to dream, and some varieties*3 are like toadstools mistaken for the healthy mushroom. I personify ? Of course, but only persons! Yes, it is individual men and women and children who do this.

Yet vast is the array of humans in this twenty first century who refuse to live toward one another as Christ has enjoined, to know the key to kinship found in the Creator alone, or to recognise the heavenly task-force of one, the truth, who died but being resurrected, still rules; and in the toils and turmoils of this betrayal, breaking the everlasting covenant (Isaiah 24:5), like men voiding the virtue of the covenant (Hosea 6:7), they proceed rampant in tongue, irked and irksome in the tiresome tedium of trouble, invented, thrust as a abysmal imperative through delusion into a dying world. Such is the trend of culture, of the vultures of obsession preying upon man.

So are they impelled, so making war instead of peace, since there is no peace for those enslaved in subjectivity, saturated with the sodden acid of human unkindness. They enslave barbarically in mind or body, they invade by cultural clichés and make ecclesiastical clutches of the Demas club, like fungi cluttering trees.

They mar children for life in violence, becoming bombs in which flesh is scattered with iron, and vile villainy is bespattered; and then look for unholy harems in heaven. They seek the extradition of Israel which made the desert to bloom, fulfilling prophecy (Isaiah 35), and call it deliverance of the oppressed; they scan the heavens and neglect the earth (Psalm 115 cf. Chs. 1-3, A Spiritual Potpourri), they shamble into hell and ignore the gateway to heaven as they press for the hate-way to hell! The beauties of holiness are the subject of wry smiles to active scorn, money is made in mad haste and spent in reckless waste, a new puritanism in mockery of the old is made where women are made the butt and clutched symbols of male vanity, and to this is added the opposite, where they must be preferred for professional posts, in an odd misuse of statistics, while liberty is abused as if her very face were covered with acne, and her beauty were for lust.

Children are made into godlets, when they are not abused, and suggestions primed with perversities of spirit and mind become the manner of it, while infestations invade them as lice the flesh of their victims, unscoured in perversity. So in senatorial wisdom do many enable little lives and souls to become the undisciplined butt of corruption, till the next generation is mortgaged before it begins, participating now where licensed immaturity rules, while maturity defiles with the filth of philosophies unspeakable. In such ways and in vast numbers, the young  are kept for the privilege of incapacity, which eventually comes, inability to restore from ruin when it is too late.

If some escape, it is only by the grace of God, whose truth remains a rock even for the culturally abused, and the ludicrously misused. Blessed are they who rescue these; but many use the name of Jesus Christ for their own ideas, and make of Him a figure in their wax-works of the great, His commandments a thing of wonder, to shun, while a hideous blasphemy calls that a 'church' which re-educates, if it were possible, God Himself! 

All of this is precisely what was predicted (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8). It is moreover just what would be expected when designs were deliberately, and at times indeed with deliberation, made to oscillate about some pivot of philosophy which being imaginary in nature, sends reality into riot, where it is not speedily realigned. What is, therefore, is not only what was foretold to be, but in the domain of the expectation from the model divinely exhibited and now humanly verified.

While this glorifies God, it is highly damaging to man who, for all the call to return to the Lord for millenia, plays the donkey with diligence, the hee-haw even an acrid intonation to his own ears.

It is time to call a halt. Remember Hitler's 'invincible' armies, which came near to Moscow just when they needed it, for the cold is not nice there in Winter in the fields! Churchill sent the necessary tanks as we saw earlier, in time to make this happen, strengthening Russia's will with works. Hitler however there ended with a fixed will messing about with Stalingrad, until reportedly 300,000 of his men were needlessly captured. He did not realise it was time to call a halt; and though in due course some tried to restrain him, even with a bomb, the cultural climate did not alter till all Berlin was defiled with the ravagements of an active ruin.

Mighty man can be such a mouse when he plays with life. It is not only in politics and culture, in the spreading Genetically Modified Religions, in society: it is in the very spirit of man, and in the soul.

It is better to halt, and to return - it is called repentance (Luke 13:1-3) - to one's place of origin, to God! It is better to use the door, since the windows jam (John 10). The door is Jesus Christ (John 10:9) and the entry is into the kingdom of heaven, where the Sermon on the Mount is the snow for the glissade of wonder in the brilliance of life.

 

NOTES

 

*1A

On the death of Darwin or more correctly, the darwinesque (a variant of logically grotesque), see     Delusive Drift or DIvine Dynamic Ch.    4 , History, Review and Overview Ch. 5.

On punctuated equilibrium see SMR pp. 315Aff..

On Lamarck, see SMR pp. 222-226.  Excursions into the ludicrous, like many tourist offers, seem to have a sort of romantic charm, which would do little harm if it were only realised that this is not a real tour, far less a tour de force, but a tourist attraction for the merry hearts that seek diversion.

On the species of irrational effrontery, see Aviary of Idolatry and Highway to Hell: it ramifies like the root system of a gum tree, but tends, like many of those roots, as seen in fallen trees, to be shallow. See also SMR pp. 867ff..

On 'principles' doing the job of inventing themselves and acting as powers rather than descriptions of them, see Sparkling Life ... Ch.    8, News 57, 59, Wake Up World ... Ch.   6 Delusive Drift or DIvine Dynamic Ch.   2.  In fact, a principle is a description of the way a power, voluntarily or by program, works. It requires the power to do it; and whatever is the principle, whether rationality, creativity, surreality or intelligence,  you need what it specifies so that the principle may be seen to operate. The word refers to it, but the actuality has to be there. The functionality is not the same as the specification. Specifications do not build bridges; they merely indicate what would be a good way of doing it if only someone or something did the actual job!

On the death of naturalism and the definitions and designations of design, see The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2, including *1

On life and intelligence, see History, Overview and Review Ch. 5 from which the following excerpt, as bearing palpably on the treatment in this chapter in several respects, is taken. It is slightly adapted for our present purpose.

Life is not neo-matter nor is micro-biology uningenious

Just as every avenue is closed, and that emphatically, as endeavour is made to force matter to declare its mentality and its ingenuity in origination, and just as logic denies success to what lacks the means, or access to myth or magic as the ground; and just as in the functionality, the equipment and the record, in terms of the grosser kind, a pall of smoke attests the devastation of mere imagining, that lazy option, so in microbiology it is no different.

As Denton remarked (see Ch. 4 above):

"molecules, like fossils have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology.”

Moreover of the molecular level, one recalls, he declared this,  

"their arrangements and character show mathematical precision, definitive design unlike gradational concepts".

Would you expect a Swiss watch to be an affair of plasticity ? It is child's play compared with this. Plasticity is not in the stars, but in the framework invented and deposited, each area and avenue, each arena indeed exposing what is its own intrinsic capability, as when many modifications of ride and tempo can be achieved in a car, but not the exposition of the vehicle into verse.

There are things rational, and things irrational. The diversification procedures are many, varied, and continually being better realised; but they are just that, not creation! That requires the understanding and the facility of symbolic, sustained, preserved, coherent, practical, energised executive and coded constructions beyond the best human minds.

The barriers are immense, intense, in complexity and in structure; and they count as we have seen,

bullet

not only in the vast concourse of top biological pronouncement
about the empirical lack of any evidence at the grosser level of advance,
 

bullet

not merely in the information theory denial of the very concept,
 

bullet

not alone in the logical exclusion of effects dwarfing the causes categorically,
 

bullet

not singly in the molecular divisions in their acuteness
and non-alignment with gradational theory,
 

bullet

not just in the exquisite and all but unending
mathematical, structural, ingenious and compressed data storage,
application and movement through stored command
to new equipment of the kind preceding.

No, they count also in this,

bullet

that the very endeavour to make life, not merely pair its finger nails,
or move about its organs, inserting genes or removing,
even when deploying intelligence of a rarefied kind,
through the work and thoughts of many of the great in science,
with persistence that spans the scores of years,
with desire that naturalism naturally inculcates into the hearts of its devotees:

this too is an utter failure.

If it were under these highly controlled circumstances
and with this input of intelligence to succeed, it would show nothing to the point,
since this uses the very things which some seem to seek to circumvent.

Yet does it succeed ? Not at all. Does it have the slightest resemblance to success ?
It is not even a laughable approximation.
Even if a child had done it, and one wanted to spare the feelings of the poor duffer,
yet one could not in all honesty even pretend to anything to the point at all.

In this regard, Dr Jerry Bergman, one of the most degree adorned of academics, in the Technical Journal, Volume 18(2), 2004 reviews three things in connection with this non-connection, this endeavour to falsify the law of biogenesis, which declares that life comes from life.

The first is this: that all efforts have failed, and that the Miller-Urey experiment, when analysed, sketches out the profundity and grounds of failure in a monumental way.

Secondly, there is growing despondency, at least at the practical level, where efforts in this field are becoming increasingly disregarded and de-glamorised.

Thirdly, in effect, the point is made that slight as was the Miller experiments' attainment for anything to be called life, this being merely a marginal contribution  at a component level whereas the crux is far higher: yet even this minimal modicum has been made by intervention and control, purification and removal of byproduct, assumption and exclusion, so that it might appear a testimony to desire more than to performance.  That in turn is a testimony to the truth of the word of God which describes in the heart of natural man just such a desire, a deficiency and a passion, in whatever form it may manifest itself (Romans 1:17ff., Ephesians 4:17ff.),

Let us however return to the Miller experiment and the assessment of Dr Bergman. For these things, the first, second and the third, , he supplies abundantly detailed attestation. On p. 31, he summarises:  that Miller produced and used pure compounds that are not normally found in life. Otherwise, his apparatus would have produced many destructive cross-reactions.


"Therefore, Miller had to remove many contaminants and impurities to obtain pure compounds." After all, if you mix petrol vapour and air, and do not bother to produce the right container, you get explosive destruction, not propulsion. Everything in its designate place is the procedure of intelligence, the essence of design and the outflow of vision. This is the name of what has this result, the criterion of what exhibits such integrality of feature and the requisite for what moves in this order of correlative consensus in the way of disposability as one unit.

Bio-chemistry, he points out, at this level has sensitive reactivities which are not charmed into existence by indifference. Again, "Miller stopped his experiment after just a few days, but if it had been allowed to go on, would the compounds he produced be destroyed or would they produce more complex amino acids ? Research on Murchison meteorites found that natural conditions produce compounds much like Miller's, and the result is stable."

This, he indicates, shows that further time would not produce any new products. Further, these experiments produced many products aside from amino acids, resulting "in a sticky mass that was actually further from the building blocks of life than were the postulated original precursor chemicals. "

After all, omit the traps and the exclusions, include what is not artificially given chemical purity, and you get the products that come from a system without intervention, interference, direction or control. You get the reverse chemical reactions, the destructive environment, the contaminating tars and the drive of entropy. Further you have to restrict combining opportunities, since the desired result is otherwise apt to be derailed, combinations being made freely in more than the desired direction. In short, purity, direction, collection, removal, oxygen-free environment, all this is needed, and even then you get a TOTAL failure for life's left-handed variety of orientation (cf. SMR p. 214).

The oxygen itself, however, is as Bergman points out, increasingly attested in early environments through the presence of oxidised materials in the pre-Cambrian geological strata; and volcanic emissions suggest carbon dioxide, monoxide environment in great abundance, whereas Miller's imagined gases, methane, hydrogen and ammonia are losing ground as abundant constituents of that atmosphere. Given, however, the intelligent intrusion and the abstraction of thought, rather than the control of actualities, Miller of course did not even begin to produce life, merely biochemically making a simple constituent, one without direction, collation, programming information, DNA, RNA, or any of the ingredients of cell life.

Let us reconsider further,  this return to childhood, when this crucial and typical feature of singularity and selection in actual life, is ignored, from Dayspring.

CHILDHOOD IS LOVELY, BUT DREAMS ARE NOT THE STUFF OF SCIENCE:
AS FOR REALISM, IT RELATES TO REALITY

Simply as an illustration of this principle of discontinuity so stressed by Dr Michael Denton as the empirical fact for life, let us consider the famous Miller experiment concerning its production. The work of Stanley Miller is given very due attention by John Mackay*1A, international lecturer with Creation Research, Queensland. In his fascinating video series, much used in schools in American schools, and filmed in a Canadian High School, he shows the relevant matters with an excellent questing method. One of his points of course is that there is a left-handed orientation (L-H), spatially, of living molecules of protein, whereas those not associated with life tend to be statistically neutral, L-H, and R-H, and to move to that condition, when the tissues concerned have died.  Such is the almost universal nature of protein. Accordingly, almost all enzymes are geared to such a situation. Leave an unguided production schedule, and you get half of the right, half of the left.

The Miller experiment is of interest as an analogy to life, by contrast, and thus a useful teaching device for highlighting some of its features. Thus Miller sought by using electric discharges, and various inorganic chemicals with methane ("marsh gas"), to form "life", in order to show, presumably, that it is a NATURAL derivative from NATURAL products which lack life.

As with Pasteur's work when it was thought germs would arise as NATURAL products of NATURAL forces, given rain and air and the like, however, this was not scientific. Only life produces life, and Pasteur dealt a death-blow to the fly-by-night excursions in imagination by showing this to be what was happening in the case in point. Spontaneous generation of life is not the observable case, any more than the theoretical, verified case in experimental situations; for things do not work that way, and you do not reap what you have not sown.

All chemicals have natural propensities to do this and that under various conditions, in various combinations, because they have laws and characteristics such that given A, in condition B, you get C. Cause and effect work with simple ease, although the equations can be exceedingly complex. Give some electric discharge in a suitable mixture, hence adding energy in a forceful mode, remove certain chemicals which result  (see SMR 41, 120ff., 129ff., 171, 209ff.,222, 251-252A, 252Kff., 326-327, 422Eff., and That Magnificent Rock, pp. 227-230, 256-257), in a chemical ‘trap’, and you can forward the movement of certain reactions, no longer ‘damped’, retarded, inhibited by reverse action which tends to destroy the product.

That means this: that given intelligence, its application, certain chemicals and energy, with a special abstractive feature, a trap, you can produce new chemicals. There is nothing entirely amazing about that; it is routine. The chemicals formed in this manner, in this case were amino-acids, which are used in the replicative, organised and sequential series of actions governed by DNA in the case of life. It is like saying, Plastic is like skin, skin is associated with life, and we can make plastic; so life is really accounted for in this way.

It is not so much that it is illogical; it is irrational. Plastic is not skin; it is not living; it does not replicate itself when damaged; it is not a part of a totality with programs attached. As a case of reductionism it would serve admirably for a lecturer in the black arts of false logic, and is commended for this purpose, and for this alone!

EVEN IF plastic could successfully masquerade as skin, it is not in our illustration, formed by chance; EVEN IF it could be suggested that certain products might assemble by chance, to revert to our Miller case, the scientific abstraction of products to enable the continuation of the forward production of the amino-acid is not chance, but intelligence.

Even if this were disregarded, the amino-acid does not ‘live’. It does not have ONLY left-handed, spatial orientation in its amino-acids as is the case with life. As Mackay points out, the 50% averaging of the right and left-handed varieties of amino acids is characteristic of death. Time does not alter it. It merely constrains it. It is something towards which  dead tissue moves; and it is that which plain non-living, non-residual material exhibits.

This universal criterion of life is thus absent in the Miller product. His is a different product; it is formed by intelligence, it lacks programming, it does not replicate, it is not integrated in a organised matrix which supplies its own energy, form, cell-casement for survival, and replicative means or directive DNA. In every one of these respects, it is non-life, characterised by non-life. It is dead: not a very vital contribution to life.

That apart, it is not EVEN shown that what is NOT LIFE by MULTIPLIED and ALL essential criteria, forms when left without the artful intervention in the productive process by the organic chemist, who however dull, is scarcely to be compared with the unformulated processes of chemical nature! If to form a hammer is to make a computer, well; but it is not even the hammer, the tool which is here shown formed, but merely the metal, as it were, on which intelligence could work. If it did, then a tool is made by intelligence. The experiment shows that if it does, and often enough, and with enough understanding, then … you still do not get life. Surely unsensational
 

The dreams of man. They are so varied and so interesting; and as Jung empirically showed, they often indicate the desire for a 'lift' into some form of resolution, and here they do just that. Without God, they want His products, do not get them in space, or in the laboratory, or in theory or in practice. But they still dream, and sometimes do it in space probes to Mars, in life probes in laboratories, seeking for seeds without seeds, life without directions, assemblages without assembler, vitality without foundation, as though imagination were back to child-hood stages.

In this sense, it is as if ONE form of evolution really did occur, backwards, the reversion to childhood; but since even that is part of a formed, organised whole, even this is not in the field at all, even in reverse! What we have here is simple regression along the line of life, in undisciplined imagination of children, grafted onto the learning of man, to misuse the former and to debase the latter.

 

*1

Cf. Causes, SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill Section IV, and 
Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation,
along with
Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host).

 

*2

Highway of Holiness Ch. 4,

Barbs  ... Appendix 1V ,  Appendix  1, esp. pp. 279ff.,

Repent or Perish Ch.  2, pp. 41ff., 5,  7,  4,

Red Heart ... Chs.   5,   4,   9,

Trust God ... Ch.   9,

Lord of Life Ch.   9

It Bubbles ... Ch.   8,

Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch.   8,

Of the Earth, Earthy Ch.   6;

The Majestic Might of the Merciful Messiah: Jesus
Ch.  5;  

The True God has Go ... Ch.    5;  

Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch.   2;

Calibrating Myths ... Ch.   5.

 

*3

See Aviary of Idolatry, TMR Ch. 8 in places  noted.