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Chapter 4
Trimmings and Trappings
for the Pot-Pourri

The essence of this pot is that different ingredients can create a delicious stew. It is here convenient to provide them in a sequence which is somewhat sporadic, yet decidedly directed to the taste of the whole.

1.

FROM PAGES 208-210 ,The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR). This is the book unless otherwise specified. 'Supra' and 'infra' here refer to this trilogy. Very minor changes may appear
in THAT MAGNIFICENT ROCK:

 

22 EXTENSION H:

ON FOSTERING FRIENDSHIP WITH FACTS.

Exactly the same is said, in the 1984 edition of Encyclopedia Americana, by Pulgrum of the University of Michigan, when the area of observation moves from the topic of cells to that of language. The identity of result in this relevant respect in the domain of engineering and architecture, in cybernetics, and in that of linguistics and verbal architecture, commands the attention of the ready mind...

First, notice that these are observational areas, traditionally and properly a domain for science and scientific method, applied with the appropriate restraints and constraints. To these areas, add the force of Professor Thompson's note on the relevant observational facts of palaeontology (p. 199 infra), to the point that: "If we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing a gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond in a true time-sequence... well: but This is certainly what Darwin would have liked to report but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory... The position is not notably different today." (Cf. S.J. Gould, 234-235 infra.)

The abrupt and sophisticated contrivances of cells, of language, of arrivals without notice in the macro-level, likewise find fitting company in the similar observational fact of mutations. Of these, we find (p. 202 infra) Pierre-Paul Grassé, past-President of the French Academy of Sciences, states: "No matter how numerous they be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution'' (cited from Evolution in Living Organisms, p. 88).

S. J. Gould,  page l03, in Evolution of Living Organisms, declares that gradualism demands that 'miracles would become the rule'; and that of course, is precisely what creation constitutes, if miracle be defined as the explicit work of the supernatural; and this, as has been demonstrated in Ch.l (supra) is comprised by one God, and His agents.

One is tempted to replace 'numerous' in the quotation, with 'humorous': either way, the observational fact, relative to schematic, design-complexity-upgrade in mutations, the relevant fact, is negative like all the rest have observed. The fallen imagination - the model of magical, mutational, metamorphosis - is dead.

Thus we have the cells, the languages (of them and of ourselves), the arrivals palaeontological and cybernetic, the means of arrival in chorus, saying, No! to the desire for the non-predictive theory of organic evolution, in its varied implicatory supports. It is de-confirmed with the rigour of a government which cannot attain a vote of confidence from its members; friends desert it and only fever remains.

Spiritually as observationally, that fever is not mere neutral withholding of support, but rank rebellion in the arena of observation and logical method.

At further levels of implication, Denton and Schützenberger (cf. Sir Fred Hoyle, infra pp. 224-225) consider the criteria of mathematics and methodology in the fields of artificial intelligence and creative systems of thought, with a similarly resounding negative (see supra, EXTENSION ON INTELLIGENCE. - pp. 128 ff.; also *43, *46 infra); while Professor Murray Eden of M.I.T., at an international symposium along with Schützenberger, finds intolerable strains for any such theory, this time in the field of language and its power to survive chance 'mutations'. A fortiori, if it cannot manage survival, it is further subjected to fiasco in the problems of arrival (p. 132 infra)!

Both Professors just noted focus and feature observational data, as we see in situ. Neither hold to creation; both are constrained by evidence in these points.

All of these observational data are not only alike, but virtually identical in this: they contradict the only dimension of verification available to the theory of organic evolution, a non-predictive theory: that of implication, generic expectation and method. In collision with known laws, in its uncongenial emplacement in the marginal field of metaphysics to which it must be consigned, it rests on irrationality, even for hope (see pp. 211 ff. infra).

Let us recapitulate (cf. pp. 252H, 1028, 1031C infra). Neither is there suitable transition in language complexity, going up over time, on a graded fluid basis; nor is it the case in cell technology; nor in palaeontology, nor in the mathematical correlatives of the cell: nor is there anything in kind different to be said re observed mutational advance (even when, as in the case of the fruitfly Drosophila, the generations and the mutations were both numerous, and the latter large and varied).

Language, though it varies, no more presents a primitive-to-superior gradation correlative with the idea of tribes-to-modern-man, than does cell technology in minor organisms to major ones; mutations do not exhibit, but rather obstruct any living sight of the flow to the watchful eye, as does palaeontology to the retrospective onlooker. The failures of flow on the one hand, a procedural rebuff, and the fact of language and cell initial and pervasive sophistication on the other, a generic contradiction, are merely two of the total non-verifications of organic evolution. The mathematical minutiae of cells, their administrative 'genius' and magnificent miniaturisation, similarly attest that we are dealing with a prodigious mind in its deployment of words and works - the language of cells being reflective, our own introspective: not with some self-developmental sequence where that-which-is-not invents itself from non-existence by clever contrivings.

To all this the noted Professor A.E. Wilder Smith adds a fascinating datum: the cell not only has its molecular system (the materials on site in right proportions), and the apt spatial arrangement of the same, such as isomers exhibit (this is a variable); but on this basis there is to be "superimposed" a "sequential code" in living genes and derived proteins. This super-imposition of conceptual considerations, as a constraint on prior or more basic concepts, this infusion, enforcement, emplacement of code is:

l) A conceptual work.

2) Exactly the function of mind.

3) Facilitated exactly in proportion as all the concepts can proceed from the resources of the one mind, being congenial to the style, system, parameters or powers of its thought (as words to paper, thoughts into words, vision into thoughts).

4) The definitional heart of what we call "design". (Cf. p
p. 114-116 supra, 211, 252E-J infra.) That it has here an invisible agent is scarcely surprising, when it is considered that, as shown in Ch.l supra, matter is a design, of necessity a product of a law-maker who is necessarily not material.

To revert: Wilder Smith (p. 53 cf. p. 82 in his work: Creation of Life) emphasises at the technical level that in his experience, a true biological cell is virtually one great code, a code complex, a collation of codes, a code matrix. In terms of this magnificent furniture, made resident like a star boarder in the cell, or "superimposed" on its apt and ready structures: energy becomes "converted" (p. 122 op. cit.) into idea-exhibits. We of course do this with a system of thought on other systems, all the time, having the ability to think, of which this is the specific outcome.

What then ? Observationally, the evidence caresses creation and rebuffs any alternative option, with single-minded intensity denying gradualism. It negates it for language, for cells and for relic transitions, whilst exhibiting the paraphernalia of mind with that exuberance in the living methodology of cybernetics, that we mini-creators with teeming cells at our disposal, habitually deploy in our own language gifts.

The positive and negative criteria, alike, act in symphonic unison to acclaim creation in any contest (cf. Image, and p. 1031C); while the systematic, and sudden methods found in language and gene alike, correlate with the legal force of intransigent matter, to make a concept of mindlessness, a mindless one, ridiculing the facts.

THAT-WHICH-IS-NOT never was nor could be; it is I-AM-WHO-I-AM who both is, must be, and always must have been; and here we see the thoroughly consistent, co-ordinate and correlative working of His mind.

23 EXTENSION ON INTELLIGENCE, pp. 128-140 infra.

24 EXTENSION ON LIFE, pp. 140-145 infra.

25 It is necessary to point out that it matters not at all where the information input - the directions for operation, the practical provisions for implementation of the directions (plans do not create factories: you need both, and a mind for either in this world), the data banks, the codes, the linguistic provisions for intelligible computation, interaction between parts and hence the intelligence - where, and indeed when this is inserted.

You can build as you will, put down your money when it is acceptable to the builders, have the machinations at will: but it is all to be done.

If it is done in miniature (as in the cell codes in the human body), then this takes more input, it is harder. If it is done in spectacular and unexampled miniaturisation, as in the cells of this same body, that takes the more. If moreover, it is done embryonically, no matter: it is merely the more intensive that the application of intelligence must be. Commanding, symbolic control is not meaningless motion. A coherent, managing code in a cohesive managed circuit in an integrated, collaborative whole of billions of parts (each cell), multiplied by billions (each body) - is not the easiest to manage, as it is forming itself and containing the lively data for growth, the while.

None of us can manage it. Its technology leaves us for dead, as Dr Denton points out, by orders of magnitude that seem astronomical. Thus while its manner of the introduction of this prodigy is of much interest, and the point is clearly addressed, yet it is the fact of its introduction, like a payment into a schoolboy's bank account, which should not be forgotten, with concern about the method, however legitimate this subsidiary question may be.

As also shown in this chapter, the implications of the startling method of introduction of this machination, and origination of this equipment are of such a character - that this element also is of prodigious importance.

Let us however, not forget the fact of the amount deposited. We have nothing which by observation can match for intelligence, by results can equal for its manifestation, the equipment with which on earth we think, and move and have our being. If the source were not intelligent, contrary as we see and shall see, to all reason, then our greatest works should be denied the attribute of intelligence. However, we experience the intelligence as we proceed in our works; and perceive it is profoundly surpassed in the works which make our working possible: the construction of our bodies, minds and spirits, and of the world which is their visible habitat.

That is of course the definitional dilemma always faced by unbelief:

if you are going to be consistent, and define what it is that intelligence is by what it does,

then the essential characteristics and criteria are surpassed in what we are,

as evidence of its working, relative to anything we do.

Yet intelligence is by definition attributed to us in terms of performance. Alas for the atheist, we are monumentally outperformed. See further: Chapter 3, esp. pp. 262-263, 290 infra.

2.

FROM p. 234

36 Of recent interest on this ancient topic, is Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. In this, he investigates the 'Burgess Shale' in Canada, one discovered by Charles Walcott, in British Columbia.

In 'checking out' the facts, he gathers data for the interesting declaration that diversity, "disparity in anatomical design'' of life in these Cambrian rocks exceeds what is in our contemporary oceans. Of gradualistic concepts in the face of this vital profusion of multiply-modelled, hi-tech abounding life, Gould attests this: "literally incomprehensible''! (Op.cit., pp. 208, 260; cf. p. 160 supra.)

Not merely, then, is there a substantial contribution to currently known life immediately in this first basic 'geological age', as the theory has it: it exceeds what we now have in the oceans. A more delightfully sharp rebuke to the evolutionary notion of gradual arrivals could scarcely be constructed by Lewis Carroll, even with all his gifts, even if he set his mind to parody evolutionary pretensions. Here, however, the 'parody' is found... in the facts. Evolution is a parody of a scientific theory, one so gross, that if it were instead a scientific theory, those who hold it could be appalled by the gall of the maker of the parody.

Put more specifically, in terms of form: the theory of gradualism is a parody of the facts; a rejection of the evidence; is falsified as a scientific theory by continual confirmation of this contradiction of what it would predict; and its formally defunct character is re-asserted with the progress of knowledge, with increasing and now mortifying force and firmness. That is its logical character. It is like the corpse of Lenin: very dead, but surprising kept on view. In this case, however, wanton devotee work is not interested in acknowledging that the corpse is (scientifically) dead.

With this, let us take an extract from p. 32, That Magnificent Rock:

·  Gould, SMR p. 217: THE ABSENCE OF FOSSIL EVIDENCE OF INTERMEDIARY STAGES BETWEEN MAJOR TRANSITIONS IN ORGANIC DESIGN, INDEED OUR INABILITY, EVEN IN IMAGINATION, TO CONSTRUCT FUNCTIONAL INTERMEDIATES IN MANY CASES, HAS BEEN A PERSISTENT AND NAGGING PROBLEM FOR GRADUALISTIC ACCOUNTS OF EVOLUTION.
 

·  In terms of scientific method, for this we can read:
 

·  The present system displays no evidence of basic design-
alteration activity. It also shows no indication of functionality
for basic transitional forms to an imposing degree.

 

 

3.

FROM P. 34, Lectures in Creation, THAT MAGNIFICENT ROCK:

·  Gould, SMR p. 234, indicates that in the face of his BURGESS
SHALE in BRITISH COLUMBIA, and the "disparity in anatomical design", profusion and characterisable "leaps" in types found in the fossil evidence, as well as the sheer exuberance of the data in all its complexity RIGHT AT THE NEAR BEGINNINGS OF THINGS (Cambrian rock - on geological theory usually conceived), there are theoretical results. Thus evolutionary gradualism is 'LITERALLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE". He declares that the "disparity in anatomical design" of life displayed in the Cambrian rocks exceeds that in our current oceans!
 

·  In terms of scientific method, something literally incomprehensible would not normally be taken as factually indicated.

 

 

4.

FROM PAGES 32FF. in What is an Original? In QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: THE WORD THAT SPEAKS

End-Notes -

 

The Conventions of the Unconventional
and the Criteria of Creativity

*1 That of course is something Stephen Jay Gould, for all his comparative conventionality of thought, has done. He has broken loose in one aspect.

Looking at the Burgess deposits of Cambrian rock in British Columbia, Canada, he has called out in anguish. Gradualistic evolution is contra-observational theoretical clap-trap. That is his message. Noting that 15-17 PHYLA not currently in operation were present in those Cambrian rocks (so very near the theoretical commencement basement of biological life forms) with perhaps 32 now in operation altogether!; that instead of a cone starting from the small and rising to the expanded, life is seen, by the current theories on the rocks, as starting with superabundant exuberance of forms and structures, designs and procedures, which NARROW in time (p.47, Wonderful Life): he expostulates vigorously at gradualistic theories in their enormity. Well he might!

The biological evidence, on currently popular geological theory, proceeds from the large base of the cone with life abounding, to the relatively pointed (truncated) top! By then, much has been lost of all this outpouring of life, so nearly comprehensive from the first. Indeed, as Dr Evan Shute in Flaws in the Theory of Evolution (p. 188) puts it:, with reference to animal phyla: "all of which appear in the Cambrian and Ordovician as far as they have fossil records". These two adjoining "exceedingly early" phases in the rocks, contain this "all". That is rather ambitious for a grouping, ungraced process bent on inventing itself without base, laws or cause!

Indeed, Dr Gary Parker in his Creation: The Facts of Life, p. 91, notes that in the Cambrian System, the "Trilobite Seas", there are found "almost all the major groups of animals, including the most complex invertebrates, the nautiloids, and the highly complex trilobites themselves."

Small wonder, and not entirely ineptly, Stephen Jay Gould asks this question of the Cambrian "explosion" (op.cit., p. 227):

HOW... COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE SO QUICKLY...
HOW IN HEAVEN'S NAME COULD SUCH DISPARITY HAVE ARISEN IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHATEVER THE FORTUNES OF ITS EXEMPLARS ?

Well said. "Heaven's name" is the only one which is even relevant, when you contradict expectations, exhibit a spree of creativity of the most intense character, and find not creative laws and principles backed by the necessary intelligence or extant re-programming matrices, but the Second Law of Thermodynamics happily operating to confine, restrict, diminish... and with this, the actual evidence that this, diminution, is precisely what has occurred on a grand scale. What is the testimony be being presented to us ? preservation of much by amazing means of DNA editing, complex and ingenious; decimation of original abundance, in accord with the law.

As elsewhere noted, this is the creative norm in this world all around: You INPUT with much substance, and create; then you preserve if you can, and over time, things tend to reduce their specifications. Neither money nor intelligence grow on trees.

The answer then, to Gould's query in which he invokes "heaven's name" is quite close really to the question which he asks: "By heaven's action."

How else would you EXPECT creativity to come, but from Creator? ALL that creation is, is exemplified: its style, its unconstraint, its exuberance, its adaptations without constriction, its constrictions at useful points while extravaganzas of variety live on such standardised structural bases (like the DNA code *2 - so Shakespeare might use blank verse, because this constant rhythmic restriction helped the variety he had desired to express in other ways). Where creativity is displayed, however, because of the blinding eyeglass of human oblivion, it is a certain shame-faced non-original slummocking into conformity of incoherent unfaith that leads on to desires to give it a reductionist paradigm instead. (See SMR pp. 241, 439-445.)

Teachers however know, or should, at least in English, that creativity is about as easy to counterfeit as the complexity of operational programs without a programmer. Strictly, it is a simple matter of contradiction in terms. What each is, is defined by its products. What products arise determine the resource used. Here, the evidence is for immaterial creativity, better called in a positive sense, spiritual creativity, which is no more a 'principle' than is poetry. It is WORK WITH PRINCIPLES but which transcends them in the precise fact that it is CREATIVE.

Do principles conceive, do they think, construe, imagine! It is time we faced quite honestly and simply that GOD is the spiritual dynamic, person and Being who has engaged in an excursion of His creative power in creating both us and our world (see SMR Ch.1 for more detail).

We might reply then, to this apostrophe to heaven by the Harvard professor: In science's name, that it is time 'science' reverted, Mr Gould, to being scientific! Scientific method REQUIRES God as the ONLY operationally adequate concept; and it CONFIRMS His presence in the way shown in SMR CHs.3,5,8-9. For all that, Gould's insistences on some things do him much credit. On p. 227 (op.cit.), for example, he asks this of the vast DIMINUTION of created things from the Burgess shale days, till now:

My key experiment in replaying the tape of life begins with the Burgess fauna intact and asks whether an independent act of decimation from the same starting point would yield anything like the same groups and same history that our planet has witnessed since the Burgess maximum in organic disparity.

First, he notes (p.36):

But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that we have no evidence whatsoever - not a shred - that losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those that survived.

Secondly: this points the related question. Does what happened since Burgess days suggest what caused this profusion in explosive dynamics of creativity ? Quite the contrary, it shows that earth, qua earth KNOWS WELL HOW TO REDUCE, but no evidence, not a shred, is there of the productive facilities which PLACED the Burgess shale in its staccato suddenness, in the field! Let alone presented them with such lack of unfinished symphonies of creations, of inept, half-baked productions.

After all, REDUCTION is rather different from CONSTRUCTION, and what we find is CONSTRUCTION subject to REDUCTION, hardly a good account of the construction arriving, the thrust of vital dynamics into such exuberance, or indeed of anything in the line of current biological science, that still has the modesty to be evidentially sensitive at all!

For more detail on these aspects, and related themes, see SMR pp.140-161, 234, 208 ff., 260, 226ff., 251 fff., 329 ff.. Pp. 311-313 op.cit. provides a good example of using words to 'explain' the inexplicable. On creation further, see That Magnificent Rock, Ch.1, pp. 185-192 and The Kingdom of Heaven pp. 169-171, 10-16. and
65 ff.. See also *2 below.

 

*2 Denton gives more detail on p. 250.

A) basic cell design is basically the same in all living systems

B) in all organisms, the role of DNA, MRNA and protein are identical.

C) The MEANING of the genetic code is virtually identical in all cells.

D) The "size, structure and component design of all protein synthetic machinery" is close to identical in all cells.

Symbolic, architectural, standardising, executive, linguistic, structural, constructive, directive, duplicative, conservationist and semantic near identity bespeak normative forces set to build in a domain at once mental, physical, technical and ideational. The conformity is not what chance produces, but the product of mind - at least; and mind, vested with personal power and projective capacity - what we call personality. Not only so: it attests endurance of purpose, cohesion of thought and capacity for the utmost intricacy in all areas.

It is not only a case of a watch on the beach; it is a case of billions of cases of virtually identical watch components, set up into all sorts of time-pieces, from micro-spots to grand-father clocks. There has been a manufacturing enterprise, but the term -manu- which refers to hands, is for our analytical purpose inappropriate when hands are one of the products!

Rather there is here attested with the severest clarity, an immaterial production extravanganza - of which matter is merely one product. Signified and logically essential is an entrepreneur, brilliant, uncontained and sui generis, non-material - for matter has limits and commands within, with no liberty to create them, no power, nor category to command itself, being merely a repository. A logical requisite accordingly is a Creator, free of the constraints of "kind", indeed the source of all that is called kind.

In definitional terms, He is "spiritual" - not dependent on matter, inherently related to it only as Creator, producer of such limits, commands and cohesion as it comprises, and in which it works, sufficient for its insufficiency.

In logical terms, He is self-sufficient, having nothing which is of this produced character, commanded, demanded, to which He is liable. Autonomous, self-existent, He has no need, is "conquered" by no system, for there is neither limit nor command: HE depends on nothing; but all depends on Him. Such a Being is not a contradiction in terms, as matter is, when its inherent requirements and commands are regarded as needing no cause but itself, that it might be; but on the contrary, His existence and operation is a simple necessity. Always desiring to be what He is, He is what He desires, and knowing all, never changes.

His free spirit is absolute, independent and uncontainable; but He is what He is, and changeless, with neither more perfection to acquire, systems pressuring Him, nor advice to ascertain. If it were not so, HE would require a cause.

In fact, temporariness is not a logical category of necessity, as if it MUST be; but a function of productive system, person or both. What causes it must be, that this temporariness might be. It may come or go at the will of what remains, from which it derives, to which it relates. On the other hand, self-sufficient permanence is far easier to consider; just as it is necessary to be, that anything might ever be and become; and having all that is required for what is to come, and to produce it, while needing nothing in which to inhere or to stir: it simply is a minimal datum readily resting in logical felicity, required by its stringencies.

For a universe such as this, with form and law, procedure and fashion imparted, supplied and observably operative, logic requires that there be a cause. Inadequate, it yet possesses; incapable, it yet contains the product. Beyond it, is the Producer.

The non-material (non-directed, non-imparted, non-commanded), that is, the invisible whose power is beyond such trifles, HE provides the cause, and so at least what is required by these evidences, He must be, to explain all things, Himself in no need of explanation, merely self-existent without contradiction, and necessary without reprieve.

Author of all systems, programs and presentations, buttress and origin of their requirements and controlling specifications, with whatever degree of spontaneity humans are specified to have, without Himself being either controlled or specified in any way, self-existent and abortive of every intrusion, He ALONE does not

  • contradict logic,
  • defile reason or
  • constitute irrationality to conceive;
     

and His conceptions ?

Look about you: they are everywhere, even that of freedom, both to deny the indefeasible certainties of His truth and to rejoice in His friendship, infinitely precious as it is, because of the being He Himself is. (Cf. SMR pp. 18-25, 71-75, 80-84, 85-88, 131, 138, 168, 172, 200, 268-269, 289-290, 305-307, 312, 316Dff., 329-332H, 998-1000C, 1014-15, 1018.)

He requires nothing, supplies everything, including the logic of systematics, an offspring of His intelligence, imagination and power(See SMR pp. 24, 112-113, 80-81, 87-88, 101, 159, 212-213, 217-218, 263, 290.)

The physical is His product, and the rest, mental, moral, spiritual, components of His creation are fashioned into person, moulded into unity and composed into the realm of the visible, as eminently and immanently dependent as a babe. Man however, that person in matter's dress, with analytical mind, flowing imagination and supple but strong spirit supplied, does not have infantile excuse for his common oblivion of the "arms" that hold Him. (Cf. Hebrews 1:1-3, 11:1-3.)

Grown to maturity, the human race yet can act as if mind and imagination deserted them, in the follies of self-will, both corporately and individually.

·       So great however is the sovereign God who made him, that man may even relate to the unspecified, to the sovereign in His splendour who declares Himself, to the One without controlling designations, who is what He is.

·       So concerned is He, that man may so relate to Him without withering through the excess and extremity of light in such a Being as this;

·       so loving and merciful that man may come to Him through a prepared way;

·       so liberal, that that way was costly enough to require the incarnation, once for all of the living Word of God, God as man, definitively and decisively in history;

·       so reliable, that this Word, even in the death of the cross, apt for the evacuation both of controlling sin and lethal penalty from man, completed His mission, saying from that Cross, "It is finished!"

As with the plan of creation, so the plan of salvation is as God has made it, and as the former comes unasked, so the latter comes without cost to man; but COME HE MUST, if to that exalted and perfect Being, any human being would relate - as friend, Father, Saviour and fountain of life that extends passed this limited horizons.

A covered way is provided, gained through the flesh of Christ, and there is no other way. The marvel is this: that way there is at all to the brilliance of His purity and the wonder of His being, for such as we are, not one without sin.

In theological terms: God says - I am that I am - Exodus 3:14, John 8:58. (Cf. SMR pp. 22-43, 422E-W, 424-431, 329-332H, 999ff., Ch.3, A Question of Gifts pp. 55ff. and Predestination and Freewill, Appendix.)

 

5.

FROM pp. 251-252C ...

42 DISCIPLINED, DEVIOUS AND DELINQUENT IMAGINATION

'Imagined' is the point in science. Anyone can imagine, given normal intellect and human nature. It can be great material, in the line of poetry, novels, cartoons, certain types of political commentary - really great or merely sardonically called 'great'. Children may imagine; and their imaginations may be poignantly appealing, or rambunctiously amusing; and so on. But when it comes to a special phenomenon called science, one no greater but specific and distinct, then we need to beware of special pleading in endeavouring to make definitions which in the manner of a propaganda ploy, give the name and type of dignity of science, to the performance antics of what is in fact merely meretricious metaphysics. It is fatally easy to re-define science so that its verifiability and impersonality become lost, but the kudos relating to these things, is far from lost. In that case, a slide, a name misapplied, some illusionism with words, and plausible propaganda replaces hard thought. It is easy; but illicit.

Now to be sure, metaphysics is not all bad; not by any means. It is just that it often takes off from a plane of imagination and lands on a moonbeam. Science, by distinction, often takes off from what is indisputable - at its best - and lands on what is a clever, comprehensive and formulated presentation of what is going on. Not, incidentally, of what is not evidenced.

On the way, it is publicly testable, demonstrably verifiable, and even then not too thrilled with itself, as to detail, lest more data humble its proud suppositions, making it relent, if not repent, and try again. (Cf. pp. 145-174, esp. 154-5 ff. supra, and 931 ff. infra.) Science per se is disciplined. (Cf. pp. 330, 332E-G.)

It is because of these criteria that it has a measure of reliability and a measure of dignity, and that the term 'scientific' is not readily held in disgrace; though of course scientists when, like many others, becoming bumptious or bustling with their own importance or ideological preferences, may be digraced, as Lord Zuckerman seems to have felt with no little sorrow, by non-scientific errors. As he showed, this they may freely do as if it were science, facts being disregarded for the love of theory.

  • Imagination which does not have such criteria of test, purging, refinement, collaboration with other verified hypotheses and so on, may be just a marvellous exhibition of the lust for wonder, for new worlds or fabrications of pert fantasy. It is indeed not to be disregarded just because it may become the intellectual parallel of a moral libertine, in such a case. This creativity ideally, this facility is part of the wonder of the creation called man. It does not really matter if this or that pedant, scholar or sophisticate happens to prefer to call that 'science' which is mere merriment with the imagination.
     

It is stringently necessary however that a word-game be avoided, in which the manipulation of terms obscures realities of fact. This becomes a logical slide through ambiguity. Hence it has neither logical validity nor scientific merit.

  • Thus the use of the term 'scientific' for the febrile and more rollicking gestures of the human fancy is not recommended. It is not just a question of terminological abuse: it can readily become a source of profound confusion. Thus the type of attention given to testable, verifiable, carefully constructed, rigorously formulated, precisely probed work called science, can then be switched to the type of situation appropriate to children's fantasies. Then by verbal molestation, the spurts of fancy are suddenly acccorded the toga of truth, or at the least, the pullover of perspirational, intellectual work, as if toiling with and on what is to be found by inspection... careful inspection, not mere insurrection against the facts, or riot against logic.
     

It is for this reason that W.R. Bird's attempt to bring in a sort of pseudo-sociological survey of who says what about science, does not affect the issue. Whoever says whatever, it will always be error to bring the well-grounded kudos of one thing, earned in one way, to the name of another. Perhaps two definitions of science would help: one for work and one for play, word-play. (See also Ch. 3, esp. pp. 311-316.)


 

6.

From pp. 252A-C ... 43 EXTENSION M: ON WITNESS TO WONDER

Professor Søren Løvtrup of the University of Umea, Sweden, gives some useful summary, relative to his own review of the evidence. Thus he declares in his Darwinism:theRefutationof a Myth (p. 352): "I have already shown... that there are now considerable numbers of empirical facts which do not fit the theory."

Professor Nilsson, somewhat earlier, demonstrated much the same: Gould, Hoyle, Grassé, Denton, Thompson Schützenberger, and Eden (q.v.) likewise sharply decry its agèd elements.

Again, p. 351, Løvtrup relays the design point that "neither in Nature nor under experimental conditions have any substantial effects ever been obtained through systematic accumulation of micromutations." Even man-the-manipulator seems significantly harassed in the mere task of engineering from pre-made vital parts! Lfvtrup is constrained to conclude that (p. 352) "only one possibility remains: the Darwinian theory of natural selection, whether or not coupled with Mendelism, is false." These statements may with advantage be compared with pp. 145-162, 82-88, 109-110 supra, and in particular with Popper's acknowledgement (p. 145; cf. pp. 150 supra, 199-232, 311-312 infra).

Indeed Cambridge physicist, Professor Fred Hoyle (q.v. and cf. *46), observing an "intelligent universe'', inveighs against theories not reckoning with the inability of "natural processes'' to "generate'' the vast "information content of even the simplest living systems'' ... which the data show; and sometimes uses a form of academic mockery to match the fantasy he deplores in gradualism, and impersonalism. (The Intelligent Universe is in fact a title of his.)

Hoyle, like many before him, stresses the total integrative, mutually meaningful, separately ludicrous character of many "all or nothing" components in highly specialised living equipment, without which items, effectiveness as well as functionality itself, alike are missing.

In fact, systems - not least living ones - are operative integrally, and man has yet to make more fascinatingly brilliant ones than he carries with him from birth. They so operate in unity, unison, character: whether in symbolic logic in cell language, correlation of parts in mechanical system, formation of parts in cell construction sites, information cohesion in language style, member-units and controlling operational concepts, execution of administrative control direction, co-operation of parts so gained, storage of information, duplication of information, re-creation of control-executive agents and agencies, co-ordination of specialised cell types, as of organic structure specialities, or adaptation of the whole to coherent total meaning or unitary performance in varying test situations.

Further the semantics as well as the structure of the language are both operational realities necessary as precursors to effective "speech", and so action.

It is then that the meanings which sound semantics, inbuilt into the cell, transmitted, can reveal themselves. It is then that this meaning can be set forth, live and act; it is then it may demonstrate no hidden plan or project, but rather one which is visible in its performance criteria. It is not suppositious or surreptitious, but in action - as one brilliantly dazzling whole. Layer on layer, cell components, molecular sub-units, atomic sub-units, fragmentary sub-units of these; and going upwards, organic components; organic correlations; overseeing control in nervous systems; overseeing thought using the same; and on and on it arises till man in his own conscious cognitive capacity, and arbitrary potential, albeit one that is self-disciplinary in scope, may be seen. Then spirit surveys the operations of Spirit, and with the glorious freedom given, may do so with asinine oblivion or with contemplative enthralment at the constructive powers shown: powers so great, that in the case of man, even wilful misconstruction is made a meaningful outcome, code-named rebellion.

In another perspective, nearly half a century ago, Professor R.B. Goldschmidt, who served as a Professor at the University of California (cited by Gish) pursued his theme with similar anguish at folly. He noted and listed various high technical marvels of life ARRIVING UNHERALDED AND ABRUPTLY, and posed well the absurdity of gradualism in yet a third perspective. In this he is not unlike Professor Gould of Harvard today; for Professor Goldschmidt cries (it. added):

The facts of greatest general importance are the following. When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (*48) (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear (*49) suddenly and without any apparent transitions ... American Scientist, 40:97 (1952).

Indeed, in a growing swathe of scientists now, with famous examples, he was weary of pretence, exposing those: "who claim that the facts found on the subspecific level must apply also to the higher categories''. He pursued the point in a way many have yet to heed:
 

Incessant repetition of this unproved claim, glossing lightly over the difficulties, and the assumption of an arrogant attitude towards those who are not so easily swayed by fashions in science, are considered to afford scientific proof of the doctrine. It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation. It is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutations ... American Scientist, 40:94 (1952) (*50).

And as to the selector, man, he ... is intelligent (*46).

Whether therefore it be in the mathematical- technical texture of life, its logical-linguistic expressions, or in its abrupt appearance, the former in the least of it, the last in its dispensations: or rather in the stultifying refusal of the laboratory to co-operate in any rational test, either biological or in computing schematisation, as noted at the Wistar Symposium ... what do we find? It is this: a highly justified near delirium of dismay is besetting leaders in thought who face data and not God.

Let us however return to Professor Løvtrup. Continuing in lament, he asks of the theory, "so why has it not been abandoned?" ... noting they "follow Darwin's example - they refuse to accept falsifying evidence." Thistopic in our present work is extensively reviewed.

Assuredly evolutionism, the dream-time of much of the Western world - in whatever organic model - has a lavish share of what myths require. (Thus its construction is not buttressed by any observed operational data and it is contrary to all known operational laws for its support.) As roué and habitué of thousands of Classrooms, mythicised and mystified, it has served its generation with the required... delusion (II Thessalonians 2:10).

44 See *43, *36 supra; also pp. 149-151, 160-162, and compare pp. 204-207 all supra.

Professor A.E. Wilder-Smith in his Man's Origin, Man's Destiny (pp. 300, and 139-140) notes tracks showing "five toes and an arch which is unquestionably human" (it. added), in Carboniferous formations. The maker of these imprints - their setting marvellous indeed - W.G. Burroughs, Professor of Geology at Berea College, Kentucky, calls 'Phenanthropus mirabilis'. Measurements made indicate a length of 9½ inches, breadth 4.1 inches at heel and 6 at toes.

Professor C.W. Gilmore of the Smithsonian Institute collaborated in the work. Photographs were published in Antiquities (May 10, 1938), which magazine indicated that similar tracks had been also found, in Carboniferous formations in Pennsylvania and Missouri; the latter in fact closely resembling human prints in S.E. Asia. The date set by current 'orthodox' geological theory - 250 million years old. These 'dates' are parallel with those of other finds, pre-dating even the Glen Rose and Laetoli cases.

Wilder-Smith notes Albert C. Ingalls (Scientific American, Jan. 1940 - The Carboniferous Mystery - also with photographs), who gave citation of extensive findings of such arresting footprints, ones which repeatedly appear, in half a dozen U.S. States. (Relevant dates cited around 300 million years. Marvellous endurance!)

What repeatedly disappears are facts congenial to the fantasy of evolution, which domineers in their absence, as luxuriantly attested as waterfalls in the desert.


 

7.

PAGE 126, Models and Marvels, in THAT MAGNIFICENT ROCK:

Nor did the phrase-mongering substitutes for logical necessities cease with Darwin; for as shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, we have them in punctuated equilibrium, saltation, hopeful monster, life force, libido and the like, and Phillip Johnson in his Darwin on Trial, exposes more endeavours of the kind on the part of others.

Such verbal substitutes for the power of wit and performance are a delusive and anti-scientific confusion of plans for performance, when even the plans for institution are neither available, nor seen, nor even observed in operation; while even if they were, they would require the input source for genesis. These leisurely but impotent verbalisms are a procedural hazard for those who wish to develop from an extant system, its own grounds of genesis; and this, when no evidence of any naturalistic kind is kind enough to validate any such process; and when indeed, all evidence is unkind enough to require the mind that has the capacities to do the job. To that mind, for execution, power must be supplied, and what the Bible aptly calls the function of -

'finding out knowledge by witty inventions' (Proverbs 8).

 

8.

PAGES 12-13, in Lectures on Creation, in THAT MAGNIFICENT ROCK:

·  Not at all! In terms of ancient fossils, the area of paleontology, we find Commonwealth Biological Research Institute Director, Dr W.R. Thompson F.R.S. who wrote a forward to a centennial edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, making a quite clear negative statement. Not only in Darwin's day was the lack of paleontological evidence ACKNOWLEDGED BY DARWIN, but 'the position is not notably different today,' says Thompson (SMR pp. 199-200,208).

·  Indeed, Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, a leading biologist of today, has long challenged the academic world, stating that it is NOT a question of gradual change, but of STASIS (a static continuance) which is the thing OBSERVED to a marvel, impactive to the eye where life forms are concerned.

·  Gould did personal research in the Burgess shale deposits in Canada, confirming in detail the ENORMOUS BIOTA (living elements) , the amazing coverage of phyla, of life forms near the earliest basic level of rock (by current theory): the Cambrian. Gould and Eldredge have written voluminously on these things on the topic of continuity with CONSTANCY. They have set forth the new theory of punctuated equilibrium, to stress that the EQUILIBRIUM is the main thing found. They theorised that VAST and SUDDEN change is SHOWN by the rocks, not slow and gradual. As to the method, they vary and remain obscure. There is no clear dynamo to do the job; but at LEAST they are improving things, by sticking to facts in terms of observations. The FACTS, DATA, Gould asserted, MOCKED all gradualism.

 

A similar startling impact is noted by Dr Gish of Berkeley University (Ph.D. Biology): in the massive suddenness, one might almost summarise it as the dashing ...nature of the fossil appearance, in the field of mammals. He quotes Professor G.G. Simpson of Harvard University to the effect that the ARRIVAL of these numerous forms is like a curtain rising, it is so sudden (*3). Curtains of course are notorious for arising on set stages.

 

9.

FROM PAGES 252E-N

 

EXTENSION N - THE QUALITY OF INTELLIGENCE: CODES, CONCEPTS AND CHAOS

bullet i) The Quality of Intelligence

Intelligence must not be confused with wisdom, or even rationality when it comes to man's ascertaining and verifying his own source, his own life. Even on the visible side, life in fact - as is the case with many complex, semi-automated, man-made designs - though wonderfully responsive to demands, is active on a rigorous, conceptual, logical and linguistic foundation.

Many thinkers - wilfully without such a base when they direct their normally rational thoughts to this area, in their own voided thought world - idly fantasise life, like little children looking at the work of their parents, yet without understanding. Not in innocence, however, does such ignorance persist to adulthood: casuistry replacing causality, and magic, the work of mind. (Cf. pp. 88, 112-113, 117-169 - esp. pp. 138-141, 202-203, 208-214; 621; Ch. 1 supra; Ch. 3 infra.) It is still logically insufferable to estrange the necessary and sufficient criteria of intelligence from the arena for the play of the word; and vice versa. (Cf. pp. 113-116, 141, 210-211, 251-252G, this work.)

bullet ii) Codes, Concepts and Chaos

As to various sequences, credited with various powers: if in the given case, intelligence confers them, that is well. It is not the case in point in this: that we do not SEE that happen. We act on what is already credited to our life accounts; we simply proceed.

If, then, intelligence seizing upon an ordered system with conceptual implications, with inherent conceptualisable laws, formulable codes, explicable in terms of concepts, wishes to address conceptualised considerations to it, from the case in point, it differs in this. We see it happen, are spectators.

Thus if one is writing, then one could talk of certain sequences of print dots which make up certain letters, and certain sequences of letters which make up certain words, and certain sequences of words which make up certain sentences, and certain sentences which make up certain paragraphs, and certain paragraphs which make up certain monographs, and start all over again on certain sequences of dots... and so on, which in the end make up certain words which make up the bibliography.

Again, as readers, we search it for the underlying defining intelligence; as writers there are underlying items which are managed to the point for our purpose by intelligence, using concepts which are researchable in Ph.D. theses or by Central Intelligence codal specialists, to show what they are; and then these are verified or otherwise and so on. Mind is searching for its prototype, or its parallel, as the case may be; its co-ordinative correlatives in matter. In the process, it often errs, which matter abhors, since it merely does - and error is irrelevant to it.

All this is well, but it is wholly beside the point if it or anything even remotely like it were surveyed in intellectual oblivion, and effort were made to 'explain' or ignore with simplistic reductionism the fact that in the actual case, product required thought and understanding and correlated concepts in ways which are not in the evidenced domain of matter; though matter can modally be manipulated to interpret chatter with the form intelligence chooses to give. In general, the confusion of such things and the facile failure to allow for the purpose-product, analysis-action, method-means distinctions are not really very heartening as an exercise in analysis.

It is the nature of apt means to be manipulable to ends; but they neither create the ends nor imply any, per se; only as instruments... Of what ? of intelligence which moves in the domain of thought where error and imagination alike can work outside the reference point of matter... which, in any case, is known only (or assumed) because of mind. This is what we habitually do; and to fail to note these distinctions in looking at other products is a failure which, though perhaps 'self-forgetful', is scarcely dutifully inclined to the whole field of the known. (Cf. p. 80 supra.)

bullet iii) Products

Products ? For a moment, let us pursue that. Areas, then, of functionality, conceptualisability, integral and synthetic codal or procedural sequences in form or act, with symbolic outcomes of their results: this would seem near the norm for the term. To dispense with the term 'product', while observing the ingredients of what it is... is odd categorisation. If these human lives be not products, the world does not know any; for here is the acme of invention. The world however very well knows plenty of them; it has a certain... reluctance to talk about these in the terms the ingredients provide for definition. It knows precisely what it is to have products slowly slip from their high estate by the second law (hence law) of thermodynamics and to have to re-create them as a consequence. It does not know, find or observe non-products with the insignia of products, or how to provide formal logic by the movements of particles; only through them, from mind employing it, or having deployed it, expressing it in symbols.

To revert to the 'whole field of the known', to which we came before 'products'... if all the things which don't (I speak as a scientist, not a dreamer) happen, did happen, then the world would not be what it is. If the collocation of particles induced thought, it would be of much interest: both in terms of the nature of things and of our observations. However, it is the other way around. Thought can produce collocations of particles, and it is per thought that mind does so, using codes very often to symbolise what is in mind.

Thoughtless references to what contains systematic, articulable, symbolic, integrated, correlated and activated codes and their means of implementation, as if it were simply a matter of sequences, suggest blindness.

What is not seen is that neither do such codes arrive in practice (we speak of observation, that old hall-mark of science), nor does the machinery for its operation; nor as Professor Murray Eden of MIT points out, do we perceive anything linguistic capable even of enduring in time when subjected to chance, which (somehow or other) is currently a code. Code presupposes concept. Concept implies mind, and explains system. ( Cf. pp. 137-138, 140-145, 252B supra; 285-308 infra.)

In Chapter 3, the underlying principles of these delusive confusions are exposed as a case of 'Emperor's clothes', and are 'dismantled' with due rigour. Thus, just as we have found blindness to divine building involves cataracts for matters of definition, so in Ch. 3 we see further requisites to cater to this analgesic blindness: namely the dispersal of the undergirding principles of rationality that concern series, subjects and affirmation. This is shown to be the case, not merely generically, as often expressed in this work, but calamitously in this specialised field in particular.

 

47 (Cf. pp. 578-579, 660-674, 681, 685-687, 808-809 infra.)

How well does the plight of ancient Israel resemble the life of multiplied segments of our current generation! This should speak to us - loudly! Isaiah 8:19-22 gives a foretaste of the hollow, spiritually vacuous echoes, and the destructive existentialist tremors that work their way to youth, and mock vendors.

"And when they say to you,

'Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,'

    should not a people seek their God ? Should they seek the dead
    on behalf of the living ?


"To the law and the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.

"And they will pass through it hard pressed and hungry; and it shall happen, when they are hungry, that they will be enraged and curse their king and their God, and look upward. They will rush to the earth, and see trouble, and darkness, gloom of anguish; and they will be driven into darkness."
 

How exact is the present correspondence to the underlying cause also (Isaiah 28:16-18), there seen in prophecy, now realised in history: the chronic rejection of the only workable foundation for man - Jesus Christ. As God's advice is wise, so is the penalty able to advise even the deaf, from Age to Age.

48 Drs Tinkle and Lammerts (Modern Science and the Christian Faith, p. 94) note, on size, per se:

If all fossil species had changed into modern species it would be a remarkable demonstration of evolution in reverse... we find the giant beaver... nine feet long, the imperial elephant... as tall as the giraffe and well-proportioned... and horse tails twelve inches in diameter... Many animals and plants of early geological time were not only large but well proportioned and highly ornamented.

The average current horse tail diameter ? one inch, we are advised...

49 EXTENSION R - Supplement to Ch. 2, 1995... COSMOLOGIES AND CONSTANCIES - follows *51 infra.
 
 

*50 EXTENSION P: THE MACHINATIONS OF MAGIC

Notable Polish geneticist, Professor Maciej Giertych, Head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kornik, Poland declares (as cited in Creation, Ex Nihilo - June-August, 1995, p. 42):

What do we see in the short time interval available to our cognition ? An increase in the number of useful alleles or a decrease ? An increase in the number of species or a decrease ? An increase in information in nature or loss of it ? Is nature moving from chaos to ever-increasing organization, or from an organized state towards ever-increasing chaos ? Evolution is not a conclusion drawn from observations.

 

Refer also pp. 109, 146-154, 199-200, 252A ff. supra.

What is thus found in practice, moreover, is merely what is found both in appropriate simulation, such as that constructed by Dr Jay L. Wile (Creation-Ex Nihilo, Technical Journal, 1992, Part 2, pp. 6-9); and in information theory, which this exercise illustrates.

Thus in his researches, Dr Wile found that a sentence exposed, in computer simulation, to random variation of various relevant dimensions - advantage being allowed, as a refinement of method, to those changes which were more sensible from an interpretive point of view - relentlessly lost interpretability over 'generations': that is, during fresh variation operations. There was a systematic trend to incomprehensibility in the sentence: as space, content, sequence were varied by small amounts.

In this way, a simple sentence resulted in no product that made sense, or even specious sense (allowable words). It was destroyed in the simulation: syntactically and semantically, for any useful purpose.

This simple case is far short of the brilliant constraints needed for the operation of the command-symbol of incredible complexity, and the synthetic inter-relationship of information, execution and sustenance, required in the DNA situation of physical life.

In fact, Dr Wile indicates of this result, even for the simple case, that it "not surprising to anyone who has studied information theory ... (which) states that any highly-developed system of information will be harmed by the random mutation of any of its components." You cannot proceed by destruction, which is moreover, cumulative. (Cf. pp. 14, 134-135, 213 supra, 263-268 infra.)

This fully accords in turn, with the results of Schützenberger, the observations of Giertych and the noted constraints of logic. (Cf. pp. 15 ff., 80-88, 105, 112-122, 130, 133-134, 144-146, 156-159, 202-203, 209-210, 219-229, 251-252G supra, 422H-N, 277, 285-290, 306-309, 311-316G, 329-332H, 332E ff. infra; and Index: series, thought, reductionism, rejection syndrome. )

Creation for its part does not cease to gain verification.

What would you expect ? Significance is not chatter. Performance is not direction. Motion is not conception. Chance is not law; the absence of relevant constraints is not to be confused with their presence, and the work of such intimate constraints in dimensionally characterisable products is not to be attributed to their categorical absence. Effects are not without cause (q.v. causality), and the cause must be comportable with the consequence.

The 'perfection' that minutely increases the excellence of a design is not achieved, in its myriad constraints, by brute material motion - properly called bombardment. You do not bomb it better, as Sarajevo well knows. For any chance move in the right direction of a 'brick' or part of a flex cord brought to pass in this way, multiple irrelevant motions that come with it spell disaster, for the statistical bulk of impacts. The city suffers, and the more so, the more intricate it is - and in intricacy what surpasses the human body in all visible designs ? That is precisely why we do not try to build a better city by bombarding a worse one. What is required at each level of input is what must be put in. There are no short-cuts. Magic is in vogue, but not in view.

The myth (q.v. Index) of non-creation exactly fulfills a just definition of myth: the imagination of results without adequate cause, for the satisfaction of desire. (Cf. p. 316A infra.) This particular myth is just one more mirage, founded (ultimately, literally) on nothing (q.v.). Nothing doing. Nothing does nothing.

What is positively required for any species of rational science, or anything approximating what could be called science, or even indeed rationality, is an unmythically adequate cause for existence on the one hand, and for each stratified dimension of it on the other. Of these things, language and thought are one expression. (Cf. Ch. 3 esp. pp. 316D ff. infra.) What that cause - as also of serial causality itself - must at least be, and is, one finds in Chapter 1 supra. Our present interest however is language in particular, and it has yet much more to present to us for our instruction in this area.

 

# A n E x c u r s i o n

It may be that some will wish an excursion into more detail in this area, and when pp. 316G ff. and 348 ff. have been studied, then what follows may be considered most readily.

In fact, the affair of language is even more ludicrous than this, when it is considered as the recipient of bombardment. Just as the letters of language are no mere objects, but symbols that operate in a world of syntax, unit meaning and formal constraints of their own, so these in turn relate to other worlds of their own. They operate indeed in a universe of meanings which in turn relate to ideas, ideology, ideational syntheses and refinements of inter-relationships, purposes, sectional program, logical developmental structure, inter-active phases and phrases, figures, features, feeling, finesse, aesthetics, formal and operational functions, integrative hierarchy of control, thrust and focus, with cumulative consistency-constraints and sensitivity at all levels to contamination.

This sensitivity item applies at the level of each system and sub-system, and then retro-actively to the ultimate functionality of the whole, which in this way comes to be faced with sectional change of tone, or feeling, or analytical co-ordination or consistency and so on. The destructive efficiency of a medical virus at the control level, is merely one illustration of processive barbarism in the midst of multiply disciplined thought, semantics, signification and significance at all levels.

We have taken the occasion to consider language more generally, but to do so in order the more to conceive the type of situation which it evokes. We do however have before us the result of constructive action - that is, we are operational human beings. We consider simply the function; and with it, the finesse and sensitive webbing of inter-relations behind this. Of this we are avid, astounded learners. Nor should we be so astounded: for as functioning persons, we ourselves are constantly aware of the high wonder of our performance characteristics in thought, feeling, ideas, perspectives, aesthetics, morals, spirituality, mentality and intelligent understanding.

The synthetic, finally unitary, directable, yet prepared concourse of correlated components is like a dream of marvels, that would leave the U.S. national highway system, complete with earth-works and signals, signs and bridges, a silly little joke by comparison. This is provided for one person: but we ? the race... we communicate and may co-operate, each in various groups, so that multiple communication-highway systems have intermittent, intelligible arrangements with each other, formalisable by contract, but equally susceptible to nuance and nicety.

If of all such a relatively simple national highway system, we expose the structure, the form, the features, the functions, the pathways, the signs, their time-tabling and the bridges: all this, to random bombardment - do we still expect it to function after trillions of such uncouth alterations ? Any bureaucrat would be likely wisely to regard a Director who expected success from such operations either as possessed of a rare form of madness, or as an enemy agent - though possibly on drugs, drunk, or seeking stress leave by deceit.

Operationally, this is the principle of the cytological situation. Logic, symbolism, signification, semantics, rules, channels, consistency, direction, control, co-ordination, performance on this basis, integration of performance components, timing and sequence, myriadfold specialties compounded to progressively eminent and functionally exalted conclusions are in place, just as in our example. It is admittedly a poor one. The case surpasses such simplicity as the highway system and all the cars in their goings, to an extreme degree. That however only serves to increase the impact of the facts. (Cf. pp. 332F ff..) The principles in all such cases have been considered therefore; and they apply causatively as has been and is in detail shown (esp. Chs. 3, 5 infra), pervasively.

Linguistically:

At the language area, then, the question arises: How is there to be preserved this myriad-formed concourse of symbolic, syntactical, analysable, semantic, synthetic signals and operational performance... in something creatively effective... ? We need not be concerned in this, at the merely physical level. It is a problem which has been solved for us in the wonder of DNA, and its associates, its editorial controls and the symbolic magnificence that performs such wonders in a kind-preserving work... and indeed, language in its various formulations, installations and evocations, is part of the preservation, in genes as in Genesis, of Kinds.

If however we do not beg this delicious question: How can any language (possessed of the facilities and functions the possessor shows) be fostered, or even preserved, by bombardment ? - the answer is simple. It cannot. Cascades of changes successively fail to conform to, but rather attack, through lack of both understanding and intelligence, the massive constraints operative and required. Invasion is like that: it may serve this or that, here or there; but its nature is unakin to the system it assaults, on which it makes its incursions, to which it comes with small or no regard for the requirements of order, efficiency and operability.

It is indeed a case comparable to that of bulls joining football teams, neither knowing focal constraints, nor caring for the rules or for that matter, the performance - grossly or in finesse - of the game. The game could not go on. The program would be ruined.

In general, and of necessity, massive non-conformity is no answer to the logical requirement of continual, sensitive characterisable, synthetic, symbolic and operational conformity. You can of course attribute an opposite as the cause of what it denies, and indeed of what it attacks - but not with reason; and that after all, is currently our field...

If a language and all the operational features it entails (whether in the conscious arena or not) cannot continue with random incursions into all or any of its system, again let us emphasise, how much less could it thus be built!

What then of man ? The individual is equipped with spirit (q.v. esp. pp. 348 ff. infra), and this has a conscious, cognitive language of its own - with personal powers of creative thought. That is one wonder. That we should also have our pre-prepared, readily utilisable material equipment with its operating system and language, beneath our vital, personal activity, allowing ready and inter-active movement with our physical and vital environment; that our inbuilt cell-language is preserved from unsystematic dissolution (for a fascinating time of function), both by the unit or cell and by inter-connected billions of units in synthesis, and this through magnificent defence and management procedures, written into our physical coding at the cell level: this is simply one characteristic, but here brilliant phase of what creation is always all about.

Adequate power beyond the system, produces in the system, what is beyond the certifiable power of the system to produce. It happens in hats, short-stories, buildings and surgery: what is needed is able to be received as necessary input; but the recipient system is not able to produce it. (Cf. pp. 316G ff..)

Whatever the level of such input, that is the attestation of creation. However, since that is the issue here, it cannot be used unless invoked by name: creationism. If not, then one notes that the power even to preserve language is not effective without its first being formed. You cannot preserve a fortune before you make it. Making it is the point. You must create it first. Each symbolic, and in the cells, directive level and feature must be granted the privilege of existence. For each, the causation must be adequate. As to the features and foci, the functions and systems, the scope and significances, their more extended review here merely extends the requirements of and for that adequacy. The machinations of magic may have their moments, but in the end, there is the answer of reality.

The fact that you could not preserve language by bombardment thereon, is simply an added woe to the something-from-nothing irrationality, which as we see continually in this work (see Chs. 3, 5, 10 and Index - nothing, causality, irrationality) is a mere contradiction in terms. Such a proposition first destroys the validity of the thought from which it comes; and what is destroyed is by its very nature, inoperative. That can do nothing which is itself dead; nor attack anything which first itself fails; nor logically deny anything, which first denies itself.

The supervening, consciously conceptualised, purpose-error structure intimate to our spirits with all their involvements, is then simply one more marvel - greater in freedom and significance than the first - where we are permitted personal involvement. This, with its language conception and control, including the power to break and make rules, issues one more requisition for its causative source. Language in its cognitive and non-cognitive forms issues its own eloquent call for the multiply causative systems maker, and for the causative ground of its integrated character.

 

v          Creation is as always emphatically and obtrusively
attested in a cumulative and comprehensive way.
 Its verification never varies.

Other paths are built on air; or perhaps in this case more aptly,
on the bombardment of guns on what isn't there.

Little children in toyland may try to "create" in this way, but they have to mature. Imagination is a wonderful thing; but in the end, the job has to be done.

Indeed, it had to be done. It is time to realise this: As to our world - the pantomime is past; the phantasmagoria of philosophy does not create it. Such flurries are themselves merely a creation of the mind of man, and that ? modelled by the mind and power of God Almighty, it can misuse its capabilities, abort its procedures and forget its Maker.

51 Dr Michael Denton (see pp. 114 ff. supra) affirms that not only is there no "primitive" to sophisticated cell sequence in time, none being primitive, but also that just as sequenced fossil intermediates are lacking morphologically, similarly developmental sequences lack in the micro-biological relationships between creatures. Thus, he states, these do not appear, but what is present is a "highly ordered hierarchical system" (op.cit., p. 278) at the micro-level, from which any such sequence is "emphatically absent". Moreover micro-divisions between them are "mathematically perfect". Indeed, to take a case, different kinds of frogs, though relatively similar, have a "molecular divergence" as great as that between extraordinarily diverse kinds of mammals (op.cit., p. 290) ... These findings, with Genesis are more parallel than railroad tracks; and Genesis ... came first. They, within the ramifying network of attestation of the word of God, provide verification of it, unmatched, extensive and refined.

See *52... 52 DELIBERATIVE DESIGN - EXTENSION Q

Indeed, we could go further. There is in evidence a supreme independence within creation. Just as similar creations, products, may be constructed (as we have just noted Denton has shown) with diverse principles; so too may most diverse objects employ similar modules (cf. Denton, op.cit. pp. 109-110). Such is the genius of creativity: untamed, exuberant, intelligent. Through versatility, neither is art enslaved by method, nor is technique dimmed in brilliance in the presence of art.

Dr Evan Shute in his brilliant work, FLAWS IN THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION, p. 169, mentions Onychophora, a class of creature resembling an annelid in "having more regularly arranged nephridia, something not seen in insects. But it has tracheae, like simple forms of those used by insects and centipedes - something worms never have". He mentions Peripatus, with body-wall musculature like that of worms - but resembling insects in having TWO pairs of appendages serving the mouth. Such composites do not "fit the tidy taxonomies of biologists", but a "living form can share the morphology of other lowly types without being related genetically". This of course is wholly contrary to evolutionary expectation, as Shute observes.

Likewise Shute mentions the "independent origin of eyes in so many phyla, or of breasts in the three subclasses of mammals, for example the Monotremes, Masrsupials and Placentals." To this he adds: "And yet the mammae of the Monotremes differ from the rest fundamentally".

Again Shute (op.cit. p. 81) notes the similarities of eyes in man, octopus and cow; and indeed they are "cast" in for their roles with a delicious freedom attached to unwitherable technical skill. Just as product and intelligence criteria are met, definition fulfilled (*46 supra), so here we have an a fortiori development. What then would be correlative to product presentation, and the exercise of intelligence ? Why this: Freedom of thought and creativity in the process!

In other words, while there is nothing here in favour of any concept of ORGANIC transmutation, what IS discernible is something of a different order or nature altogether. It is DELIBERATIVE DESIGN. Whole networks of order and design (that could in this be compared to exhaust systems or carburettors in motor cars - though those would be enormously simpler - finely milled to a low level of tolerance) may be transferred to other uses AND adjusted or specifically developed, so covering, now in this creature, now in that, certain features for the individual.

That is the fact. Moreover, neither the mechanism for the organic theory nor the transition series to illustrate, appear. If one reviews definitive statements by specialist after specialist, one reads that ABSENCE of such transitions is deplorable or frustrating or mysterious or challenging or a major problem, or the major problem, or systematic...

We have reviewed such declarations not a little. It is all there: there is no mystery about that. The cries seem to come more and more from the heart of unbelieving scientists.

Not only is there a whole series of different suggestions about these gaps. We have attested that they are an avenue to a) increasingly divergent and b) increasingly ridiculous theories, even in the eyes of others of the evolutionary faithful. This is one of the greatest areas of chaos this ludicrous fantasy of evolution supplies.

All the time, what the evidence is actually exhibiting here is creative interchange of elements of design, new uses with variation of complex functional units, interesting recombinations of custom-built variations of original equipment. What the evidence shows indeed is this: that simplicity is NOT required for the more lowly creatures (ONE cell is a living monument to astute complexity and an organisational inter-relationship, reminding one in miniature - but beyond that in marvel - of the British World War II war-effort, in its interstices and co-operation, and direction).

Even Cambrian trilobites - therefore supposedly in the early orders of biological life - not merely have eyes (equipped to perform a task per se specialised in its nature and in its contribution); but, indicates Parker (CREATION - The Facts of Life, p. 92), many were possessed of visual apparatus highly sophisticated in its specifications. Indeed, Gould (Wonderful Life, p. 227) considers them to be "deep in the lower Cambrian", while Shute (Flaws in the Theory of Evolution, pp. 5-6) deems them "highly organised", displayed in "earliest Cambrian rocks", and possessed of "a complex respiratory system".

Further in overwhelming virtual fossil satire, this group of creatures is found in abundance! The facts mock the theory of evolution. (Cf. p. 110 supra.) So far from its being required by them, it is lampooned, parodied, burlesqued. They, the facts, are its deadly enemies. And these, they minutely follow creation, rather like a sophisticated assembly plant, with simple jobs done with complex concepts, and collaborative equipment units.

As with the work of any great designer, even relatively simple models, then, can convey a depth, a meticulousness and - one could say - a majesty of scope and mastery. Indeed in the actual case of life, the majesty is there, even where the things are simple.

In this way, God is quite evidently and actually attested; and the alternative is evidently and actually denied. For the theoretical and logical and linguistic elements, see under 'Design', in various contexts.

v           Design is the name of the game.

v           Mathematically, systematically, logically, evidentially, inferentially,

v           the case is this:

v           the criteria of design are satisfied, and the criteria of non-design are not.

Nor is this all. The ways - well-rehearsed in human life ... the criteria of creativity make their own intimate impress, wear the subtle forms of authenticity.

Creatively in conformity with all of this technical wonder is another wonder: it is the exuberant surge of enormous variety of life, of form, type, triumphantly splashed onto the early Cambrian canvas. This astounds the greatly impressed Gould (loc.cit.), who stresses the subsequent "decimation", loss, narrowing of life left, time 'creating' a constriction of life, not abundance.

Creative design has the force of consistent realism.

Its absence is an assumption which aborts facts (even in the draping of an alien theory!),

insults science

and accounts for the evidence by invoking

an irresistibly ineffective ghost,

which superintends just such LOSS

as a first creation would predict.
 
 

10.

PAGES 315A-316G with additions made for our current purpose.

17 Extension: ABRUPT CREATION

Detail in the area of physics in this field appears in Ch. 4, pp. 396-422W infra. The logical constraints find a highway in physics as elsewhere, and just as they find no room for avoidance of the Creator, so there they find no sop for it. Rationality has but one cry and it shouts it to the heavens, which echo, indeed augment with revelation demonstrably given to man, to replace his misty mysticisms, varying according no doubt, to such things as temperament and desire.

The scope for impious imaginings for this our race, is zero; in precise accord with its existential performance progress, which bears the same null result. The race has come from somewhere and is getting nowhere, because it will not go where it belongs.

The work of Professor Paul Davies, illustrating one school, is covered relative to our thrust in this apologetic, more specifically in *15 on p. 422A-C infra (cf. 257-270, esp. 264 supra, 396 ff., 418-419 infra). What however of the categorisation of W.R. Bird, in his The Origin of Species Revisited ? Here, the 'abrupt' arrival of living forms (Bird just manages to use the term 'creation') is set in its category, irrespective of what might be the source of it... effectually, as a mere, uninterpreted, empirical datum. He distinguishes this view from that of the creator (vol. 11, pp. 191-192), but calls it "abrupt creation", nevertheless.

This approach needs only this caveat, albeit it could be no greater. Politically and perhaps psychologically (though it depends on whose psychology), perhaps indeed even legally in terms of what is 'out there' in people's ideas, and what someone might want to do about categorising them, there is such a category. It is so in just the sense that some people believe in haunted houses. There is such a category of persons.

Politically you might wish to found a party for haunted houses, or even for haunted house hunters, or to claim statistical representation for them. Morally, or immorally, in similar fashion claims might be made in terms of inroads on parliaments relating to the legalising of whoredom for example, at the systematic level. That is, such a thing as whoredom exists, some want it; pragmatic politics might wish to register this. (Pure religion of course would be averse to giving sanction in any people to such wanton degradation, just as it would be against the molestation of minors or the serfdom of industrial workers - by whatever name these things might be called.)

Thus to revert to our specific point, there are two wholly disparate questions. IS there such a view, 'abrupt creation' as defined ? one that could be categorised with other views of how things came to be ? Yes, there is. As such, however, is it rational, or could it conceivably compete, with reason ? For the reasons given in detail in Chapters 1-3 (supra) especially, and confirmed by a consideration of further elements (Ch.'s 4 and 10 infra): no, assuredly not. While it commendably yields to some more of the evidence (qua 'abrupt'), yet if it be possible, it fares yet worse than its predecessors in procedure.

In this approach, neither grounds in empirical fact, nor in logical constraint appear. Logic becomes a sport, and cause... an ember. Reason relaxes and now ? even prodigies of instantaneous design, now - at last - confessedly abrupt in appearance, are not to be susceptible to the attribution of adequate minimal grounds for this... action. Oh hallowed happenstance, the universe and its construction is now to be a - miasmic puzzle; whilst in reality... when the mind is more composed, even a footprint demands a cause, even a sandal in a room does not come by apparitionitis! Oh illogical race, what has beguiled you!

Into such irrational follies does defeated Darwinism proceed, now void of former cover through attempting to make time the father and duration the designer, in equal defiance of reason and observation. False science has matured into nescience. The body of thought now is given the invisible 'Emperor's new clothes' - while left in fact disagreeably naked of any process, or power, device or dynamic, law or procedure, formulation or miracle, to observe or on which to act. Its ungrounded feet dangle in the void, into which is cast the denatured term 'creation', and void is the basis for its disoriented 'life'. (Cf. *42, p. 251 supra, and re Hume, especially pp. 257 ff. supra.)

Here has unreason its masterpiece: it reasons why reason should die, validates its own dismemberment and discusses its burial clothes, affixing the seal of validity to its invalidation. This comedy however is not a work of reason, but of existential implosion, where neither the irrationalities of Hume (supra) nor of Kant (Ch.'s 1,3,4,5) can help it, as each method is as self-contradictory as any other voidance of reason by reason must be.

Thus this abrupt child of thought sits in subjectivistic squalor, mocking reason, its presumed parent, and declining to use it as a son.

What then ? Liberation from logic is indeed a problem of the punctuated equilibrium clan; as it is in the purvey of the 'abrupt creation' view, provided in some social or circulatory setting. 'Laws' do not create: a creator may instal laws to exercise elements of creation. Laws attest regularities; but what absolutely creates, has no law.

Indeed, creation of intellectual novelties of various orders, animate and inanimate, with new parameters, design and imagination components is not law, but personal licence; not procedure of a formulable matrix but an arising from adequate basis, above this. Far more so is this analytical mind that thinks, this creative human spirit that wrestles, itself a product of a creative surge of absolute significance and comparable power: not at all a merely intra-systematic event, far less one repetitively construable (visible, or discernible) in its steps, or externally programmable. Creation transcends law.

In a survey of the evidence, therefore, of worlds and life and thought and spirit... it is for such reasons that no formulation has been offered to us by this 'theory' of abrupt creation, which is not a theory but a disuse. No longer do we hear, 'This is the way', or 'That'. Therefore the failure to offer any formulation for review, contemplation, consideration, or assessment... any test, for validation: this is scarcely surprising. What cannot be formulated in a system, will not be!

That is the nature of the omission. It is like a car which has everything except the power to go. Then of course, it does not. This failure applies equally to the myth of organic evolution as to that of a secular 'abrupt creation' - nothing is available for projection, no law is given for scrutiny (far less for testing). In the abrupt creation theory, moreover, it applies a fortiori. Here not merely is no indication to be found for the forces in view, as to the precise (or even imprecise for that matter) way they are construed or supposed to have operated. Now not even a (delusive) mechanism or method is proposed. This indeed is so even granted that no clue could be offered as to what 'it' would in fact do, or to the direction of the dynamic, or the process: progressive, recessive ... or other.

It deserves, this nescience, a little appreciation; so now let us ponder its scenario...
 
 

Causing Causeless Contrivances:
Using what is not There!
 

"Without a cause, events do flow,
without conception they will know,
plans unplanned arise and fashion,
each has its specific ration,
coded, imploded, integrated, perpetrated
and in much,
perpetuated while they last,
framed and founded, not confounded:
consciousness itself arises...


Life is full of such surprises,
minds are made within the matrix,
a sort of adventitious perspex,
'respectable and valid' -
an invisible mouthing,
of codeless nothing?


Altogether very neat,
full of meaning and of meat;
for what can come without due cause, might as well to all applause,
think and find and know and be,
everything that God could be...''

 

Oh! we forgot. It does have a name. It is normal to call it God; but this generation with its New Age would often prefer to render Him anonymous, and try at least from time to time, to remove address and power as well as name; but use it all, just the same. They also love to give reason for the defiance of reason. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 264-315A, That Magnificent Rock, Ch.5, Validity.)

Let us however proceed with our special case. There is another aspect to the reason why the absence of scientific formulation in this case of the metaphysical 'abrupt' theory is not surprising: it is this. It is much more necessary to be modest with deeds than with words! Myth entails precisely the undisciplined attribution of what is inadequate, to the consequences that are present. The myth base has here simply moved from nineteenth century meander to twentieth century miasma, from something to anything: and neither has commerce with reason.

Any divorce from the logical necessities linked to what is found, leaves the same magical irrationality. You can't just love it and leave it, not following through what reason requires, without the art of the magician replacing the world of the logician, without suicide to reason, made more impressive in this: following the despatch of reason, it - though dead - is used to defend the practice desired. Here is indeed a quintessential case of ... It, "being dead, yet speaketh". Without God, however, decidedly distinct and emphatically present, death is so very decisive. It is more than enervating!

A sociological survey might dignify such views, or such approaches, by acknowledging their existence; a fallen State might attend them by having them taught in a survey without comment; but rationality is their end, logic is their pall-bearer; and deception (perhaps self-deception) by this self-destructive assumption is as unwise in this format as in that.

What is required remains as clear before former militant materialism, as before any new-look gnostic or agnostic nebulosity, post, prior or now. This applies whether such logical necessities are ignored directly, or given a meaningless tag setting, and ignored indirectly (if more discreetly!); whether logic is abused processively only, or in principle. In each case, the approach is equally delusive: dysfunctional fantasy is now replaced by noetic nescience, the one as the other, in the face of the clamour of reality. The language and the centuries change, but not the delusion.

Our general and special coverage of any such debasement of reason, any such suicide of intellect, any such casuistry, any such self-contradiction may be applied; but there is no necessity to proceed so far. After all, one and all contestants who avail themselves of this hatch are hatcheted by the same considerations, disembowelled by their own rapiers, whether broader in the newer case, or more pointed as before.

Reason has only contempt for what abuses it; and self-contradiction strictly in whatever form, provides for one's opponents, no need for contradiction. Suicide exempts from murder (though it is a costly method!). The contender is dead already, by his own ... in this case, irrational and errant hand. All this was shown at length; and it applies in brief.

Logic demands the Creator; He is called for and may not be dismissed, though a man or indeed the race should be!

It is pure mercy that in the many modish infatuations which strutting or simpering man has displayed, the Creator has not as yet dismissed the heavens and the earth (II Peter 3:7-10); though in His time, He will do so (II Peter 3:10-13). What destroys itself, unrepentant, will at length, even in the mercies of God, be destroyed. (See Chapters 1-2, supra, and 10 infra.)
 

*18 THE METHOD IS THIS.

Logic has its own validity, laws and principles. These work in our and as shown earlier, and are not subject to rejection by reason, for that assumes them.

·       By logic we show that

  • God is,
  • is Almighty,
  • may be known,
  • and by Him only is truth to be known.
  • By logic, we also show that
  • those who reject that proposition are involved
  • in irresolvable antinomies,
  • are in an irrational and self-contradictory position,
  • and can make no logical affirmation concerning the truth.
  • Since we do not reject it,
  • we are not so involved
  • and our rational demonstration is unrestricted.
  • It is in fact also confirmed and attested,
  • as in ordinary processes or reasoning,
  • by total and absolute verification.
  • Moreover this is shown to be multi-dimensional,
  • rollicking, and
  • exuberant with the self-attesting dynamics of reality.
     

The independent power to prevail, in attested ways, of both the identified word of God and the God of this word, in ordered experience and in history, provides an unlimited flush of a fortiori demonstration. (Cf. pp. 36, 265, 291-315 supra, 934-936, and 437-445, 592, 755-843, 316C, 332E infra.)

Here is the sole, the unique provision of validity, in that firstly, it does not in the outset, violate reason or abort the laws of logic, so that it is not involved in that precious philosophic monstrosity of arguing with a reason it denies, or proceeding with the engine it has tossed out. Secondly, when reason is thus followed, it confirms itself in all the empirical, rational, spiritual, theological, heuristic ways one could imagine.

The requirement filed by reason is met by the objective provision of what it portends; and the call for the word of God, by thrall to its splendour, when one is led precisely where reason points. Thus we come upon the independent power of what made reason, not only to validate it -    by verifying its account with His own presence, that of the Biblical inability to be negatively confronted by reason because of its enduring truth, and the power of God amid its workings according to His own biblical statements -    but to provide a whole synthesis of reason and investigable fact. This provision is extreme in its liberality, staggering in its dimensions and prodigious in its precision.

In this come things beyond our reach, as are our own minds in their institution, and the control of history by the words of the Bible, surging to success of a phenomenal character as they follow the line of this divine word.

This synthesis, this objective validation of reason, together with its non-violation at the outset, make of the Bible the ONLY rational conclusion; and such interactive testimonies, these become the order of the day. It all operates, the Producer and the product, in endless correlations, once the relationship of the made and the Maker is appreciate and applied (cf. SMR Ch. 5).

Like our own minds when properly treated, and rationally employed, these things fit with an infinite and intimate order, all together.
 
 

Notation on Reason and Revelation
 

Reason
Declares Treason:
Except it's used aright.
When used - and not abused -
To Divinity
(Not Mulched Infinity)
It Leads,
Divinity with words -
(Not intellectual surds)
Called Revelation,
That cause considerable
Consternation,
disinclination or
Desire:
But abide and override.
That Biblical Revelation
addressed to any nation,
person, individual
puts in focus
not hocus-pocus,
But Jesus Christ
who by word and Spirit leads,
like water to its source,
back on its rushing course
those who wash in Him
and come . . .
to life in, by,
and with
that Trinity called God.

 

*19 IDENTIFIABLE COMMUNICATION . . . REMEDY : THE GOSPEL

It may be useful to prompt the mind on this topic of communication and remedy from the Almighty, as developed in some detail in Chs. 1, 2 and elsewhere. (Cf. pp. 28-36, 43-48, 81-87, 89-91, 127, 580, 592 ff., 1186B; and Index - 'Remedy'.)

It is shown in Chapter 1 et al., that there must be, of logical necessity, a remedy for the situation man makes and finds - on the part of God. It is useless to argue that man is dead, or God is dead, or both are dead, or that nothing matters. That is to deny the conditions of discourse, and simply sidestep the issues made. The mobile character of mankind does not remove his deadly operational functionality and facility. It is in vain to imagine that man does not live, move, operate, torture, contrive, create, construct AND deviate, caricature truth with gusto on millions of occasions, often on purpose, fraudulently crush justice in demeaning death, destroying reality and living in squalid and often sordid substitutes for the dignity and profundity which life may provide.

This action, multiplied amidst mankind, constitutes a perpetual thrust against the God of creation. It is moment by moment, idea by idea, perverted practice against truth by its fellow, polluted squirming of mind, moral and spirit by its mate, fiery thrust against God Himself and against His creatures by its companion, as against His principles, name, character and people: while history itself is frequently distorted, truth lies fallen, equity is slain, lies rage and ravage, and the world watches, misleading and misled. (Refer : Psalm 50:17-23; also Jeremiah 7:8-15, 23:14-30.)

Some may worship the dead, but in terms of the living God, as demonstrated, this is distortion of Himself and/or His creation by His still living creation: like berserk moral mongols, or devastating inert moguls, run amok. As has been demonstrated at the outset, this DEMANDS a GOD who is not there; or divine response (either remedy for, or removal of - man). We established the presence of God, so we came for this continuing world to the latter: divine response incorporating remedy. It is a case of WAR on God at the most basic level; of being contrary to what we saw at the minimum God is and must be; of misrepresentation not only of God but of man in philosophies, various spurious religions - labelling and libelling man, God and the divine remedy itself. Either God is negated or remedy is affirmed. Since God has power, the remedy is found: identified as the Bible. (Cf. pp. 44-60, 422S-T, 644, 973A; Chs. 5-6, 8.)

The logical consistency of these divine affairs, in a world for the time being permitted to continue (II Peter 3:9), is in the most marked contrast to the enduring hilarity of contrary philosophy: not so much meanly, as necessarily exposed by successive generations of the disillusioned. The communication of God however needs neither extenuation nor alteration. It simply stands from each standpoint. Refer pp. 384-385, 873, 973A, 999-1002C infra; Index -

Remedy; Psalm 50:17-23.
 

*20 GENESIS AND ENGENDERING:THE CRYSTALLINE COHERENCE OF CHRISTIAN CONCEPTS

 

a) VALIDITY IN ITS SIMPLICITY:

To Evacuate Truth is to be Invaded by Torment.

One may say: This all starts with man. It does not however do so. It starts with God and proceeds from God. By GOD, man exists, and comes to be, created by fiat. By GOD, man is given a mind, and it functions. This mind finds the Bible, the word of God. This instructs that mind; it may not believe it, but it still instructs. The seed is sown; the wind has swept, whether the trees bend little or much.

Contact has been made, reality displayed, words have been deployed. One has seen the result. Moreover nature itself teaches man, and the form of his own mind instructs him. As he uses it, so it leads him; and as it requires, as we have shown, so if he follows, he finds the key, the word of God, which was sitting there.

It is reason or treason. He follows what he is given, clearly, necessarily, irrefutably to the word of God, which is there; or he baulks, reconstructs his mind, though it will not work so, indulges in absurd philosophies, theories which belie themselves, contradict themselves, experiences anguish, falls and fails or becomes cynical; but the truth is the same.

Man follows the realities of his mind and comes to the word of God, or he resists them and comes to an end of himself either through violence to the body, to the mind or to the spirit, either sooner or later. This does not work. It was not meant to do so; it was constructed to be right. Man was made upright, as that same word of God says; but he has found out many inventions.

If then the question be this: how can man start except in himself ? the answer is: If he be blind, then so it seems, but he is instituted and constituted and when he acts as made, within its design specifications of thought and logic, he finds the word of God; just as nature itself teaches him of God, though that vision be dimmed or distorted, at times more, sometimes less, always by sin, so that God is not known. Further, God having spoken, as reason requires, and evidence attests, man is not at all constructing from himself, but following the construction given not only to the world, but also to himself.

If logic be valid, then God's word is discovered. If logic be not valid, then to show this, reason must be used; and that is impossible for any valid result, if it be simply assumed invalid from the start.

But one may say: Granted if reason be valid, the word of God is true and is the Bible; and that it be shown invalid is impossible. What however if it be merely assumed invalid; may this not be an option ? The very assumption however, employs the specifications of form, meaning, logic, correlation of word, reality and concept, of consequence: if reason were invalid, man would be unmade. He could not even speak or formulate the hypothesis. But he does! In deeds he destroys the 'assumption', even if in words he would deny it. Man is so made. There is no escape. (Cf. pp. 200, 229, 251, 263, 285, 299 ff., 306, 314-316D supra, 329-332H, 349E-353, 420-423, 424 ff., 620-622 infra.)

 

b) THOUGHT AND ITS INTEGRITY: The Inlet of Truth is the Expulsion of Confusion.

The Human Brain, Human Thought and the Realm of Human Pain. (Cf. pp. 422E ff., and 429 ff. infra)... In the light of the above, let us analyse these things.

One has heard of a transmitter. A radio used to have valves which would light up, with thin filaments inside. Didthey create the waves they received ? It had a complex circuitry. Did this create the impulses it transmitted ? There is complexity (and design) to transmit, and complexity and design to receive.

Neither of these is - nor could it be - the studio performer. Each plays its part in coding and decoding the performance.

So it is with the human brain. One hears profound obtuseness, as learned men debate, consider what is this mystery of original thought and ideas, relative to the human brain. It is as if some are at least tempted to have this circuitry, this cybernetic apparatus appear as the producer of the thought, validity, virtue, ideas, dreams and imaginations within and for man.

Small wonder the 'mystery' is never resolved; the impasse is never removed. A circuit is no more capable of producing freedom (q.v.), than is the Statue of Liberty capable of producing liberty. The circuitry of compulsion is not the maker of mind, but rather its slave, servant, transmitter.

Just as a typewriter expresses, not only by coded symbols called letters, but by a (relatively) complex system, the impacts which create the letters on the page, so the brain interprets through its design that profound reality, human life. And that ? It can engender ideas, be guilty, be brazen, be coarse... be angelic. It has ways of its own. Human vitality has the brain serve as special interpreter, not performer. (Cf. pp. 348-350 infra.)

We are doing it all the time: finding ways of impacting codes into apparatus so that we may then receive them again in comprehensible form, at the other end. We would never imagine a TV made the studio, or a computer constructed the thought of the programmer who first conceived, then coded words relating to that thought, into the already conceived and code-carrying unit, the computer. Hardware and software are included as recipients, but not creators of intelligibility. How it could ever be conceived for one moment that such machinery made the machinations it conveyed, that such systems of objects created the thoughts they transmitted, would be an all but insoluble problem, were it not for one thing.

And that ? It is this. The human spirit is as capable of being rebellious as is a fish of swimming. It is a natural habitat in this, that its very freedom, to be real, must admit of misuse of design capacities, as surely as does an ungoverned sports car allow reckless speeding.

It is perhaps not too much to say that we are surrounded in a complex net of devices, from sensors to nerves to brain, within us, from radios, to computers, to atomic bombs outside us, always interpreting thought, and in our cases made by it. As for ourselves, our own 'hardware' ?

We assuredly have not made this; nor can we, however freely we may move about bits of pre-existing genetic structure. It differs from our own products in being incomparably more complex, more miniaturised and having content of surpassingly greater dimensions. In human life, the moral, the aesthetic and the visionary have their place. Nothing merely happening has or can have freedom or morals or aesthetics. All these things depend on a standard, whether expressible in code or not, and a liberty in the use of it, to excel or to defile. (Cf. Ch. 5 infra.) With such equipment, only then meaningfully, we design. Our results - our own products - demand such a cause for their functionality and structural integrity. (Cf. Ch. 5 infra.) For us, captive symbols (words, codes) merely convey the results of liberated thought. There is no contradiction in that. What is not impassively controlled sends what it does, transmits it, through what is controlled.

Without such control, it could not send it. With nothing but such constraints, there would be nothing to send. Vitality employs and deploys material complexity and engendered codes to display itself, its fruits, products.

Nor are we in general - nor our brains in particular, less than our products. On the contrary, we as mini-creators are far more. We as shown attest a creative designer-of-creativity: whose power transcends, surpasses and distances our own, while giving it meaning as derivative, and structuring it, where appropriate, through the use of captive symbols, codes. (Cf. pp. 137-141, 211, 252A-G, 292-315A supra.) We both deploy codes in our mental capacities and incorporate them in our physical equipment, simultaneously designer and designed.

What we code and transmit from our (relatively) free spirits by machinery, methods in motion, is via the ectype of an archetype made by the Spirit of God. And that ? it is mankind, the design that reproduces itself. Able to use standards, it may violate or adorn them, because not only is man's own equipment created for just such a purpose; but the very spirit within him is created. It is the expression of thought divine, design divine, possessed of this quite remarkable addition: this design is designed to be free, though of necessity in the presence of its Maker. When it rejoices in Him, it possesses liberty; when it is at war with God, it is in disruption with itself, showing this sooner or later, interpreting itself into hell, or receiving God in reality.

It is well for the human race that God provided a redeemer, Jesus Christ, to salvage spirits. Reductionism is the irrational, voluntary, multiple sclerosis of tortured minds. Its antinomies which we repeatedly show, are merely its more obvious pangs.

Returning from such torment of error, we again observe the coherent majesty of the truth, free from the self-contradictory imbroglios of impassioned minds.

The simplicity is statuesque: we both incorporate in one phase, and deploy in another, of our beings, code and signal, symbols with significance, themselves the products of imagination, vitality and purpose. The very constraints and impassivity of the symbols are one assured means of expressing our vitality without distortion or intrusion. Our expressiveness depends on our codes and symbols, speech or other, not having expressiveness per se, but merely consequential power, as designed, to forward securely what is to be expressed. We are neither self-contradictory nor divine, but designed by divinity, to whom we - mind, body and spirit - are answerable, using there also, if we will, the codes we incorporate and the codes we design.

*21 The term 'creature' contains the concept of living. Living in terms of terrestrial life ? That has life... What is this sort of life ? Earthly life is the integral activation of prepared equipment that may be in concert with designed actors or agents. These with their accorded equipment are in an ascending scale. This issues at its height in the capacity for communion with God, the Creator of all. As He has spoken IN His terrestrial creation in DNA, the ONE language being used, so too He has equally spoken TO the highest agent among His terrestrial creatures, to man as a race: in both cases with messages at once distinctive, impressed, assured, in operation and complete. (Cf. pp. 121-122, 210, 144-145, 315A, 316C-G, 332E-G supra.)
 
 

11.

FROM PAGES 139-151

The liberty of love and the love of liberty

Let us re-iterate. Here, within the confines made available by the Creator's power, is the intelligence, creativity, imagination, analysis, will, life active in, through and with a spirit, that bears the insignia: God's personnel department. Its meaning for man, as made, is limited to inter-active response with God, fulfilled in doing this and in relating in this perspective, within these created confines, to other elements of creation.

Without this practical, factual, operational and originative meaning, it is absurd for man - as well verified by the anguished acknowledgements (not intended no doubt that way!), of so very many philosophers, in their arid atheism. The lairs of irrationalism, at which we shall look, more closely, provide no rest. There is no rest in wrestling with the truth (Romans 1:18-20).

Amongst the greatest of all creations, is precisely that one given to man. It is that non-programmed liberty to laugh at programs, even good ones, even to destroy them and for man to destroy himself, by the arrogance of using the workmanship he did not and could not create, and which he cannot even logically conceive in any consistent way, except from God. (Freedom: see 23 ff., 30 ff., supra, 313 ff., infra, Index, Appendix B infra, my Predestination and Freewill, and its Extension, The Father of Freedom.)

This freedom, in its natural scope, is the wonder beyond all circuitries, sublimely beyond all mere programs of operation, wholly diverse in kind from all the material sub-structure, towering in the sunshine of correlation, not with the ingredients but - with the Conceiver. Just as man's refusal of the Originating Conceiver leads to the frustrated search for reason behind the concepts, so the freedom to do well, or fail both God and oneself, as well as one's fellows, leads by its abuse to the chronically frustrated search for meaning, when both the course and the source of Freedom is denied.

Put differently, God is not mocked. Philosophy, of which evolution is one part, is a progressive verification, amongst verifications, of that! Man's potential correlation with this Being - for man is not per se devoid of freedom - is also fraught with potential debarring. Hope misused can appear as hell attained. That result is a permanent shame of which current systematic human frustration (logical, philosophic, cultural, political) is merely an intimate suggestion! Confusion and hopelessness, or false hope, is neither normal, natural nor necessary; but pathologically common.

As to this frustration, its intensity relates not merely - and justly - to the immensity of the Majesty of this Intelligence, but to the revealed Redeemer, whose speech is not merely directed in cells to circuits, but directed to the minds of circuit-breakers (John 15:21-23). One result of the illegitimate exercise of this freedom, in the meantime, is the illogical and anti-evidential theory of organic evolution, these propositional premises of a philosophical putsch that can find no logical leader. Wishing to be rid of the designer, whether in his autograph, the Bible, or altogether, the design denies the conceiver... (Cf. *46, pp. 252E - G infra.) The impudence is - if it were not tragic - uproarious; and is it any wonder that its own alternative concepts, chosen by will and not available for observation, will not work ? This too is verification.

Scientific method points to God; logic makes Him inescapable; rebellion resents it; while revelation, as we have seen, reaches out to meet man with the intimate indications of the mind, heart and will of God, which could be known in no other way.

EXTENSION B: On Life

Highly cognate to the above Extension is the following. It is not only a matter of intelligence that we face, but one of a profoundly intimate correlative quality: designing capacity, with its fruit, design.

It is to be shown, relative to Kant, that it is logically impossible to divorce the concept of design systematically from this world, by means of any type of philosophic postulate enshrining the concept that We, our minds, create this... that it is we ourselves who constitute the cause of our concept of causality and all it implies. (See Chs.  3 and 5.)

However, it needs for now merely to be noted that if anything caused such a concept in our minds, this presupposes the existence of a perfectly normal and happy causal system, before we could operate. We cannot create it. It has to be there for any rational argumentation about its 'origin'.

How would you, would the human mind, be the cause, the rose-coloured glasses cause of the very existence of causation, unless it were already there! You cannot use what is not there, in order to create it. Even question begging does have limits. This fantasy is here, as well, a contradiction in terms. You would be using what, it is alleged, is not there, in order to put it there.

Since however causality is there, and cannot be the creation of our minds, it operates; and since it operates, we need the adequate cause for its resultants, one of which is this lawful world of matter; and others of which are the qualitative worlds of mind and spirit, will and creativity. (See also supra Chapter 1, Section 1, Part B for any needing this initial decontamination unit!... esp. pp. 3-10.)

The concept then of 'as if' relative to the evidence is irrelevant. All endeavours by Kant or others to distance reality by making imposing compartments of 'knowledge', varying from what you have, to what you supposedly cannot know - the world beyond 'causation', are self-contradictory. They are so from the moment you tell us what they are like and why they are there and how they relate to what we are, and have - to the point at which you submit, as here: namely the implements of grappling to achieve the commerce of communication by which you can so blithely inform us of all these things, hot from the unknowable. You cannot account for causality on the assumption it is not there; you can account for it on the operation of letting it lead you to what is there, not denying but utilising its validity, without which you can neither think nor speak logically, with consistency; and from there, you may validate.

Not merely, then, is this Kantian (q.v.) concept of 'as if', a logically void endeavour to distance reality, making all things quiddities that are basic; but this Kantian night has been but smog, philosophic vapours from the blast furnaces of misled mind, trying to bypass the very ground on which it stands. On the contrary, what-is, what is present quite simply needs an adequate support, basis and background; and the endeavour to supply it by removing the objective validity of the connection - of this connection of cause of which what-is is the consequent - invalidates its own thought first, but nothing else afterwards.

What is present implicitly in terms of the native powers of any given arena of action, such as that of matter considered by itself, has its own parameters. It does not become, per se, equipped with mind, or spirit. What things it has, it uses, and uses according to its power. For matter, ability to initiate design is not one of these; the operation of whatever design components are already fitted to it, however, this is in order. Nor is intelligence one of these available fittings, for matter; and hence intelligent design is not one of the products of matter. It evidences its definitional components however within matter; and its source is accordingly sought elsewhere than in matter, in an appropriate design source, equipped immaterially, as shown in an earlier chapter.
What then ?

As Jesus Christ so beautifully said, You do not get figs from star thistles. It is not a matter of chance; the functional action of a component does not occur without that component; and if it did, it would merely show that that component was present. That of design initiator however is not evidenced in matter.

In mind, however, it is; just as with the spirit of man, you also see evidenced the power to counter the counsels of mind, through pure will, hate or what you will. Man can confront in this way concepts and analysis of his own mind, of other people and - though finding the attempt deadly - those of his Creator, by that masterpiece of liberty, granted man, which he can if he will, turn to a maelstrom of licence, to the entropy of indulgence or to the vacuity of personal pride.

Now in life formatted on earth we see, when we dispense with philosophic and unscientific fantasy, the existence of several fascinating features. In this chapter, we have considered some of them, but now let us seek to define life and consider its increments, for simpler awareness of the topic which we are facing.

Looking at what is to be seen, in life ...

What then is life ?

It might be initially defined as a correlation of functional organs and integrally disposable results, capable of initiation and cessation as a co-operative whole.

Even one cell, as we have seen, has conferred on it such powers; thus it conforms to this definition.

Then there are overlays, design extras. It is like the movement from a push-bike to a Volkswagen, to a Jaguar, to an aeroplane, to a Boeing 747, to a spacecraft. Each has, especially near the beginning of the series, some clear correlation with the other. Even the first and the last have decidedly distinctive ingredients in common: travel, movement through space, responsiveness to humanly directed impetus and so on. Yet, for each rising member, there are, more or less depending on the case, provisions of greater conceptual power, made for greater travelling power. There are successive rises in the input of

§       intellectual power

§       conceptual finesse

§       knowledge

§       correlation of concepts

§       higher, decidedly and definably higher objectives.

With life, there are similarly, though they are effected with the biological finesse which is a specific and quite special craft, many layers.

There is the cell layer of micro-organs, such as the energy producing organ which, whatever else it does, does that: the mitochondria. This has its power to be commenced and terminated; to act with correlation of organs; to achieve certain objectives. Then there is the tissue area, where strata of cells may interact with some overall perspective not seen by them, but relating to their operation. It is what we call a design, when components do not know at all what they do, but nevertheless are constrained to do it, in terms of relatable concepts, which are discernible in the interstices of the components, overarching them and operative through them.

Then there are organs, such as the kidney. Here layers of different tissues are closely related to each other and to other (sometimes distant) layers of tissue, which in turn have their own internal organic totality of function as well as individuality of operation; and these exhibit conceptual correlation, inter-organic as well as intra-organic. Then there is the correlation of systems, such as all the internal organs and their net product; and of others, such as skeletal musculature and locomotion as the outcome, or manipulation; and then again, there is the power to observe, relating to the senses, to categorise, relating to the brain, and to will, relating to the spirit, and to imagine likewise.

We have built up here on the basis of the world's greatest evidenced design, the human body. However we could as well have chosen a different route.

We could well have considered the animate cell, and then the instinctive creature, and then the conscious creature, the emotional and motivationally conceiving creature and the analytically purposive creature, and then the morally aware creature, the code-creating imaginative creature and the spiritually perceptive and innovative creature and so on... coming thereby to the spirit of man, to the powers for which the body is implement, and indeed, ultimately to that God who made it, for which the spirit is 'hands' for ready grasping: that is, the immediate basis of communication. But let us revert.

There are layers which it is as futile to seek to reduce, the one to the other, as it is to ignore, in their inter- relations. It is quite similar to the case of a space-sensing, automatically reacting space-probe and a humanly directed bike; or the case of a humanly directed space-sensing probe. None is the same; all are related; and with us, the relation is especially the inventive mind of man.

You can of course say, to return to the mechanical analogy, that there is much the same sort of mental ability involved in constructing this system for the bike, and that for the spacecraft; but the point is that the one involves whole further layers of conceptual thought, for its institution, at different levels of creative imagination and with divergent purposes involving different mathematics and constructional features and so on. It is mere confusion to imagine that because they are all creative and conceptual that therefore the creative thought and the conceptual engineering for their construction is homogenisable and in one plane. That would be mere analytical blindness, contrary to fact. Thus there are these similarly placed conceptual levels, and there is no magic whereby life ceases to require their operation; logically there is no difference. The only difference is that this process is unimaginably more complex and demanding because the programming and correlation is so immense and intense. More is required therefore.

Now before we summarise, let us extend a little on the topic of instinct. It is not merely something automatic. It can have access to and in part be an accessory of intelligence. This is well illustrated in the painstaking observations of Dr William J. Long in his fascinating work, The Spirit of the Wild.

At times, for example, a beaver would respond automatically to the thwack of the tail, the distress signal of another beaver, the time-to-disappear symbol. At others, it might be given as a test to see what would happen; and at times it would be discerned by some beaver, that this was so; or again, it might be given by some animal not as yet appreciating the finesse of the situation: for example, that the author, Dr Long, was perfectly harmless, despite his deceptive appearance. Variations relative to an assessment of a situation could occur in some complexity. Again Garth Christian in his meticulous Down the Long Wind ponders (pp. 38, 43-44) how a bird in vast migration routes can pin-point a return to the same garden, or young without parents can enter such return routes: citing experiment and positing brilliant, celestial navigation facility in the birds.

It can, this instinct, have access to conscious awareness and discrimination. It need not be so judiciously disposable. It depends. Again, you could call the automatic part, instinct, and the other intelligence. It is merely a matter of words: we are interested in the facts to which the words refer. Certainly some instinctive behaviour is non-decisive, merely suggestive, and the presence of guile in parts of the animal kingdom, the arresting of 'normal' and sometimes highly complex patterns, is a matter of observation. Beyond this, however, acknowledging the variable impact of intelligence in some animals, there is the underlying directive quality which attaches to so much of the behaviour of many animals, like that of the spider which lays its eggs on a leaf, sews the silken cord to nearby attachments aloft, and then, on the drying out of the web cord, has the eggs lifted comparatively safely aloft also.

Sometimes, as with the bombardier beetle, elaborately considered by Dr Gary Parker in his Creation The Facts of Life, there is an engineering device of great complexity and sophistication which is simply built into the creature; sometimes it is a behavioural device, sometimes a constructive or at times a defensive 'module'; and at times, these are capable of override, as with our own automatic gears where the manual may be chosen instead, to achieve the purposes of a (relatively) discriminating intelligence.

The engineering objectivisation of thought, frozen construction, and the conduct form of it, frozen thought, allied with the variable input of intelligence and imagination on occasion, a contrived over-ride: these are elements of a complexity of life which has one very simple basis.

The point is this: He, the basis, is pre-eminently intelligent, so intelligent that He has made us with our powers (machine tools with personality and capacity for analysis- this is only one component of our construction of intelligence). He has even provided for the mockery of our pretensions, the challenge to our follies and the exhortation to our industry or lack of it: as in the ant and the sloth, the peacock and the pouter pigeon, for example, the weasel, the bulldog and the rabbit. God has done this so well and wisely that a fascinating and detailed treatment is given to this topic. This is seen in the keen observation of character sketches, animal studies in a well-drafted book from the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts.

The divine mind has a library of works, as it were, for ready learners and for the thoughtful. It has an array of elements of consciousness, thought and analysis, of imagination and discernment expounded in flesh, until He presents a being with what has in many ways a minimum of the frozen in thought, and a maximum (for a derivative being of this kind) of disposability of mind and spirit: that is, man... God has done this work with such magnificence that man can be quite insanely inept, despite much intelligence, if he will, through sheer, arrant or even arrogant pretension.

·       Let us return from this little excursion to its point: a convenient, initial definition of TERRESTRIAL life, so that our thinking might be helped thereby. We saw it as:

·       A CONSISTENT CORRELATION OF FUNCTIONAL CELLS, ORGANS AND INTEGRALLY DISPOSABLE RESULTS, CAPABLE OF INITIATION AND CESSATION AS A CO-OPERATIVE WHOLE . . .

We could now add this:

bullet

LIFE OCCURS IN LAYERS OR STRATA OF COMPLEXITY,
RENDERED IN
SEPARATE ENTITIES AND COMPONENTS,
WITH CONCEPTUAL LEAPS APPARENT IN THE PURPOSES,
PROGRAMS AND PROCEDURES, TOGETHER WITH CROSS-REFERENCE
OF AN IMAGINATIVE AND UNPREDICTABLE KIND
FOR THE VARIOUS TECHNIQUES USED, AND THEIR STYLES.
THESE ARE NOT MERELY TECHNICAL, BUT PURPOSIVELY DIRECTED
IN TERMS OF ULTIMATE LIFE-RESULTANTS,
BOTH INTEGRALLY AND FOR EACH BODILY MEMBER.

·       THEY INCLUDE ORGANIC INTERACTION, APPLICATION OF EQUIPMENT
TO VARIED PURPOSES, AND PROVISION OF SUCH INSTINCTIVE (frozen thought), EMOTIONAL, CONSCIOUS, CONCEPTUAL, ANALYTICAL, MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FACILITIES (with various operational correlates), AS MAY BEFIT THE DIFFERENT CATEGORIES OF LIFE.

·       FOR MAN, CONCEPTUAL, PURPOSIVE AND IMAGINATIVE INITIATIVES,
BASED ON SPIRITUAL REALITIES, ARE CONTRADISTINCT FROM,
AND INIMITABLE BY THE CONTROLLED CAPACITIES OF COMPUTERS,
JUST AS THEY ARE ALSO CLEFT FROM THE UNDERIVATIVE AUTONOMY OF GOD.
IN GENERAL:

·       THE SINGLE MICRO-BIOLOGICAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE EMPLOYED,
WITH ITS PROFOUND DIVERSITY OF RESULTS,
IS WHOLLY SIMILAR TO MAN'S SYMBOLIC LOGIC AND EXPRESSION,
AS IS THE CORRELATION OF THOUGHT, DESIGN AND EQUIPMENT,
AND ITS ADAPTATION AND VARIATION IN TERMS OF PURPOSE.
INDEED, AS TO MAN WHO SPEAKS,
HIS LIFE POSSESSES LANGUAGE
HE DID NOT SPEAK,
INTIMATELY AND INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN WITH THE VERY CELLS OF HIS BODY.

Since man is made in the image of God, this is merely what one would expect; though as we are consistently finding, it reflects an exuberance which is beyond meagre imaginings, but instead, fulfilling to the vastest hopes. It is as if, constantly, we check to see if there is money in the bank; there is - but there are billions. This of course is in itself a verification of the transcendent magnificence of God, who while not less than wonderful, may evidence Himself as far past all expectation, as He pleases. It is verification forte! (See also p. 88 supra, pp. 252 B-C, 349A ff. infra.)

Since man is, though marvellously endowed, far lesser than God, the sheer brilliance of method, discernible when sought out, even in the simpler forms of creation, is again in full verificatory agreement and concord in particular, with the Genesis statements and indications of:

1) Who made it all; and

2) How man relates to Him.

Man, the conscious communicative, rational and spiritual creation, can seek understanding of the scene, conscious participation in the scenario and to learn as creature from the Creator, of His works; as reader, of His will; as servant of His directions and as friend, of His friendship. It is indeed a categorical change to look to his source rather than to His other works, about him; but failure to do this is to have a car that is never put on the road, loitering in the showroom which, indeed, has many fascinating vehicles; but their observation merely is not the purpose of the production of the car.

Human life that stops at this point is justly deemed, in the Bible, dead, an oxymoron in one sense, for yet it lives; but a reality in another, for the life of such a tired and retired retrenchment, is dysfunctional in its main facility. And that? it is its capacity (given the divinely ordained means) to communicate, co-operate and have comradeship with its Creator. (Cf. p. 316G infra.) {See also Ch.6, A Spiritual Potpourri.}

 

EXTENSION C: On Scientific Method

(Cf. *22 on pp. 208 ff., EXTENSION on the Force of Fact, Chapter 6; EXTENSION 1, of Daniel File, pp. 931-943 infra; and pp. 81-88, 58 ff., 107 ff., 102 ff. supra.)

Let us consider ... creation and catastrophe, in the form of collision of concepts alien to these, with observable reality... with special reference to the Cambrian 'Age'.

This represents:

A startling illustration of scientific method... by its omission, and an illuminating example of: methodological vagrancy.

Karl Popper, Professor in London University, and of world fame in this area, makes this statement in his work, The Poverty of Historicism, pp. 197-8:
 

  • Can there be a law of evolution ?...
    I believe the answer to this question must be 'no'.

But why not ? It is because such a law enables neither prediction nor verification, says Popper: and these are essential ingredients of scientific law. (This he presents at length in his Conjectures and Refutations, pp. 36-39.) Indeed in his book, Objective Knowledge, p. 267, he declares:

Neither Darwin nor any Darwinist has so far given an actual causal explanation of the adaptive evolution of any single organism or any single organ.

The reason Popper is cited is not because of his views on the topic of creation. He is in fact an evolutionist! It is because in this matter of science he is basically right. 'Evolution' is a lawless 'law'. It does not do what laws must. You cannot say - this is what will happen to the genes in these circumstances of nature (where the law is supposed to apply). Evolutionists simply do not do this.

In physics or chemistry laws are expected to perform! There can be no exception here if scientific method is to be followed. If it is not to be followed, let us cease to pretend the matter is science. If it is, let us start predicting and getting results. Surely the request is both simple and legitimate; but it is not followed. No, evolutionary practitioners do follow this request! so we do not use the term 'science'. The reason is simple. It would be misleading.

The fact that many who cannot produce the goods, do use the term with all its appalling pretension in this case, is merely evidence of their extreme desire to have things the way they are not; and of their inability to perform, in the case of this hypothesis, this dream of organic evolution.

In this Popper is the more interesting because he admits that evolution is a kind of religion to him; but it is not science.

As has been presented to you (see e.g. Chapter 1, Section 1, Part B supra): whether it be religion, or science or anything else, a failure to stand up to reason is scarcely an asset. Reason is a gift which it IS unwise and dangerous to cast away. Of course it can be misused; but carefully used, it is a test of no small value. It is of course ridiculous to disparage it, and then use it to attack someone else's position. (See cartoon on page facing.)

Evolution, it is also pointed out, does not even enable retrodiction. It is not even possible to get agreement among evolutionists on the way in which some one 'stage' is supposed eventually to have turned into the latest, the present. This term means simply the power, practice or process of looking back and seeing, in terms of the 'law', why things worked out as they did. 'Of course,' you might say, 'now that I understand the law, I can see just why, just precisely why things happened as they did. It had to be so.'

Not at all! Even with the advantage of knowing the results of the 'experiment', evolutionists cannot and do not look back and agree on the basis of law, or any other basis for that matter, just how, in what steps, things came, 'arrived' on this earth, as they are supposed to have done. This of course is the height of failure, if science is in view: not even with knowledge of what in fact happened (that is, man is here, simpler things are there), is there a way to tell why it happened this way! If that were a law in a different scientific discipline, it would approach the point of comedy...

Dr Duane T. Gish, famed university campus debater and Ph. D. in Biology, notes (pp. 245-7 of his Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record) a comment of Professor Derek Agar, Professor of Geology at Swansea, Wales:

It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student, from Trueman's Ostrea/Gryphea to Carruther's Zaphrentis delanouei have now been "debunked". Similarly, my own experience of more than twenty years looking for evolutionary lineages among the Mesozoic Brachipoda has proved them equally elusive.

This, taken from the Proceedings of the Geological Association (1976), is of great interest, as it is an empirical statement touching both personal review and the findings of others over time. What however makes it yet more instructive is the fact that Gish describes Professor Agar as a 'fervent evolutionist'. That is, he is not being swayed here by any... desire. His testimony is against what he holds: but he still says it. This is refreshing. lt is also a testimony to the force of the fact which he does not conceal. It concurs in force with the words of Popper.

Popper is further citing 'evolution' as not a scientific law in stating that it is not verifiable (*26).

It is of the essence of science that others, in principle, may use your statements and repeat your findings, thus giving to them an air of public availability and respectability. Without this, science would also, to a very large degree, be without its reputation. It is rather like a sportsman who being challenged, turns around and defeats his opponents in a regular way. He becomes a champion. So verification champions a theory. True, it does not at once prove it true; more is needed. Yet its absence in the face of a proper prediction based on the theory, is the sentence of death on the theory, as stated.

One such absence, duly and properly found, is sufficient to terminate the scientific existence of a theory (often called an hypothesis, to stress its provisional nature).

Why ? It is because the statement of a law is thus shown not to cover the area of facts to which it is addressed. If a law can be found to cover those in view, this therefore is not it. Thus you reasonably look for another, and save time.

The theory of evolution has failed not only once. First the Cambrian (*27) era containing a large proportion of types of living creatures, is near to the very first alleged geological age; and it included a wide variety of complex organs. Each of these points is an anti-verification of the concept of movement slowly up from below, to our great day! Even if you use 'creation' in fact but keep the term 'evolution', and have sudden arrivals of prodigiously complex and brilliant designs, you still have a lot of them at an advanced stage coming together. As Denton points out in studying the microbiological technical marvels and their constant correlation with and frequent surpassing of our technical efforts - the concept of chance is irrelevant. The verification of the theory is not fulfilled, and strictly, that should be the end of it.

Only a new formulation which systematically allows for such a vast and complex array of multiplied creations, over a wide range, with much variation within groups... could meet this case (cf. Genesis 1:21-22, 6:4). But that is of course precisely what creationists, on the Biblical model in this case, said, with self-consistent and rationally competent grounds provided.

v           That prediction, if you like, that result of the concept of the Creation, is fulfilled. The number and complexity and so forth, is what one would expect. At the level of verification, what creation provides for, is there; what 'evolution' provides for... is not.

Popper of course says evolution is not even verifiable (*28). One can see his point: if it is alleged that things happen so slowly, then we would not be able to see them. However, the fruit fly Drosophila was a great indication of what could be. This fruit fly was found to be changing (*29) in the most extraordinary ways concerning its wings and body. Was this then evolution ?

Found absent was the relevant change (*30), into increase of design complexity, such as would be needed if things happened as evolution so long propagandised - or its proponents! Loss of fertility, or of vitality, or of performance, this instead was the rule, as the changes were observed. There has never been sustained any case where the relevant change has been traced. Yet there surely could have been. If change can and does happen so quickly, as in this case, why not some relevant change ? Some evolutionists, apparently in desperation, have the idea of quantum evolution - a sudden massive integrated step (another name, really, for what we call a 'creation'). Why not then let us see one! We cannot, fortunately, invent what we are to see. It does not happen: that is the epitaph of this unfounded expectation, when it meets, rather reluctantly, with the facts, the evidence, the observations.

  • Failure in prediction, retrodiction, disagreement on what happened, lack of verification and anti-verification - these are the death sentence on the theory. If it can be changed, let it be. In any case, it has fallen. This raises the last essential point in method: for we are simply taking a fascinating example of the violation of scientific method by a theory oddly referred to by some (but not, as we see, by all) of its followers as scientific.
  • As to method, you would be expected to start with what you observe, and then try to explain it. Here, we start with what is hoped (*31) to be seen, with theories about what may have happened, and then look for facts. These refuse to arrive in the very area of observation of what is happening - the crux of any science. Darwin himself acknowledged that there simply was not the verification and confirmation of his theory in the evidence (i. e. for transmutation); and, better oriented than many Darwinists, he also admitted that to try to derive the 'eye' by his methods bore the marks of being ridiculous.

Work in micro-biology as shown by Denton, in his Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, merely underlines the complexity, the control, the programming (*32), the language employed in the cells and the billions of co-ordinated elements, complete with editorial correction facilities for reproduction of genes. For one cell it is so; let alone millions of them in some super-integrated series of such cells.

  • RELEVANT OBSERVATION WAS NOT THE START OF THE THEORY. METHOD HAS HERE ALSO BEEN VIOLATED. FAILURE TO FIND SUCH OBSERVATION MERELY EXPOSES THE METHOD MORE.
  • What we are observing merely makes the unscientific also uproarious.

MAKING IT SIMPLE

We see therefore, putting it slightly differently:

Organic evolution fails:

i) to be based on relevant observation (cf. pp. 161, 234, 251-252G).

ii) in having no citable law available for normal scientific testing.

iii) in not being verified in terms of prediction from a scientific law.

iv) to provide sound agreement, even in retrodiction.

v) to agree with current observation of what does happen, even in broadest terms.

vi) as contrary in tenor to known scientific law, such as entropy, equally to common sense.

vii) to have the discipline of science, either in past imaginings or present happenings.

viii) more monumentally the more microbiology reveals the human body as the design paragon.

ix) in confronting the intricate patterns of a profound language as a contribution from chaos (the language of life, which is one, in cells) ... Professor Murray Eden relates here.

x) in having two systems (genetic and behavioural-surviving and so on), not systematically related, yet expected to construct what is here (Schützenberger).

Evolution :

·       FAILS in numerous necessary scientific criteria, and

·       is in fact not really relevant to that discipline in its genesis and verification procedures; and

·       in anti-verification, it is positively excluded.

 

The ONLY theories now able to be formulated rationally in this sphere, ALL in fact invoke without acknowledgement all that creation requires. It has in fact resorted to a verbal quibble, where the logical action has now been confirmed as an exclusive to creation.
 

CREATION triumphs.

LIKE EVOLUTION, CREATION IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC STATEMENT.

AS WITH EVOLUTION, IT IS NOT BASED ON OBSERVATION OF EVENTS HAPPENING.

BROADER TREATMENT OF BOTH IS THEREFORE NEEDED.

  • HOWEVER, UNLIKE THE CASE WITH EVOLUTION,
  • WHEN THIS IS DONE (cf. SMR Chs.1, 3, 10), AND EVEN WHEN THIS NORMAL SCIENTIFIC METHOD IS FOLLOWED,
     

  • THEN CREATION DOES INDEED MEET ALL THE LOGICAL and SCIENTIFIC CRITERIA (cf. p. 161 infra).
     

i) It does not claim that the process is continuing. In this, it is confirmed by all available means. That is verification.

ii) It is susceptible to disproof ( in its Biblical formulation) by simply showing that the process from which creatures have come in fact is continuing. In this, it is verified, for this is not seen.

iii) It does provide logical ground for the language of life.

iv) Even man WITH intelligence has not managed to make life, even given purpose as well, and immense, accumulated equipment, researchers aplenty; so that qualifications of non-life without purpose are unimpressive for the purpose.

v) It avoids the non-systematic relationship of two systems as a ground of advance. Its ground of advance is super-human intelligence without intra-systematic limitations. Such limitations do not include any form of construction or constriction relevant to such a result.

vi) Its clear cut retrodiction is not met with contradiction, and it could have been. This too is verification.

vii) It is in precise accord with known scientific law, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of mass and energy; and entropy is another formulation of what the Bible SAYS, ( e.g. Isaiah 51:6), and implies ( Romans 8:20-22 ) in that area of formulation! In fact, the testimony of Creator is this, that three basic laws of physics are antedated by the communication made. This contrasts with categorical contradiction of all of them in the organic evolution theory. There is no competition; no comparison: one has it all right, and excels beyond requirements. The other has it all in contradiction, and fails to meet rudimentary tests.

viii) The nature of mutation verifies it - variation but not transmutation (kinds). Creation, in the Biblical model, specifies kind-creation as initial. Though theoretically subject to disproof, this is in practice confirmed by every available observation of life process. As the claim is generic, so is the attestation of observation.

ix) The numerous evolutionary theories (provided to meet even distant facts) by their disagreement, the one with the other, and by their incredible character - creation arriving incognito as in 'quantum' evolution, or the so-called 'hopeful monster' concept - are in a predictable situation. These unsatisfactory theories show what one would expect: multiplication without solution. This is verification of the creation concept, Biblically invariant. That is, it is unchanging because it is Biblically defined; and because what is Biblically defined, does not need to be confined or refined. It stays in the form, function and rightness given. This case simply verifies that. That is what it had to be; that is what it is.

x) In the Biblical formulation, this situation is also explained psychologically, and indeed spiritually. There it is declared that man is alienated from the life of God and is systematically dimensionally ignorant (Ephesians 4:18-19). Romans 1 even traces the process. This ability to account for the activity of the evolutionary thrust, personally, is also verification.

xi) What contains in its ambit most areas, covers them most categorically and elegantly is deemed the desideratum: this is verification at its acme. In general, the more broadly a presentation covers all known facts, explains all relevant data and the more readily it does so, the more it is deemed to confirm itself.

This excursion into scientific theory and its nature...

scientific method and its formulation, and current controversy and its analysis is presented to stimulate you into thought. Culture is not a sufficient condition for thought and acute analysis is always in order. It is what can make certain responses more incisive, sharp, clear and arresting. It helps remove confusion.

  • Further, discoveries can the more readily be made when the cult of the forbidden is not followed.

     Evidence must be pondered and conclusions subjected to the discipline of reality in such a sphere.

The wrong-headed trend to reject culturally, as at one tertiary institution in this State, at which I taught, because it is not convenient, and not because it is wrong, without indeed giving it due rational interaction with those who present it, is in essence a form of cult. Is not what is culturally dictated in the dereliction of duty towards reason and evidence, a cult ? And in how many universities does one find evidence from Staff or students, of this deplorable cultic phenomenon: creation, or the grand issues of reality are forbidden.

 

What however is the 'cult of the forbidden' ?

It is that cultural negativity,

fear or subtlety (depending on motive)

whereby certain matters are (ostensibly)

ruled in advance of all evidence, 'out of court' - the court of culture.

·       Whether it be deemed to be politics, religion or other field, the result is a mental crimping that too readily becomes downright dishonesty if not, indeed, hypocrisy. Certain things are out of cultural bounds, being inconsistent with desire, ethos, illusion or delusion; irrespective of their truth.
 

With religion, it may involve the detestable folly of pretending that evidential procedures are irrelevant, and, worse still, that it is illegal to be logical and alert with evidence and reason, lest emotions be roused. This subordinates truth to convenience and not for long may one justifiably expect the continuance of such folly, or of any society where it distinctively rules.

Reality is a dangerous enemy with whom to trifle by such policy and contempt. By this means, irrelevant irrationalities and absurdities - such as is organic evolution in terms of scientific method - may be 'allowed', in that by a mythical oversight, their merely mythical powers are ignored; whereas the more scientifically oriented view of creation is 'excluded' as 'religious'. (Cf. pp. 211-222, 226-234, 330-334 infra.) Christianity with open heart and incisive mind is quite freely availab1e for 'inspection' - and meets any intelligently administered critical test with overwhelming results, that are as unified as they are unique; and it alone systematically meets logical requirements of consistency and rationality (Refer Chapters 1, 3 and 10).

Thus this cult of the forbidden has become an anti-logical discriminatory device, protective of irrationalisms and, in educational circles, often excluding the only logical answer even from consideration!

 

12.

PAGES 333E-H

314: Proclivity - a tendency based on some quality in something, mainly in a person. It indicates a readiness or capacity for the sort of thing mentioned.

Suppress - to press under, operate to exclude, to prevent from surfacing. This is the sense of 'hold down' the truth in Romans 1:18 (e.g. N.A.S.V. translates 'suppress').

As Paul goes on to say, that 'eternal power' and 'Godhead' (or divine nature) of Him who is the truth is manifest among or in - them: that is, clearly portrayed, obvious. As in a law court, or in the psychiatric channels of truth suppression, so here in the spiritual antics of man: the obvious is for many so suppressed, so squandered in dilatory disinclinations, that spiritual arteries sometimes almost like biological ones, harden into inflexibility.

Unlike arteries, however, the spirit of man can be so creative as to live in a fantasy world - which of course, like 2 into 1, 'won't go', unless it be divided. THAT, this world certainly is, and will remain, until every knee has bowed ... to the truth, with such abundant clarity, in word and deed, quintessentialised in Jesus Christ, yes, definitively so expressed; for HE is the WORD of God, giving in joint propositional, spiritual and personal form the expression of God, with whom is His eternal place.

Thus, to illustrate, the concept that that is NOT science which does NOT pre-suppose that what is operational now, INSTITUTED ITSELF - has been shown to be the opposite of truth. What is observable is the complete absence of positive evidence of either

  • 1) any such institution occurring now, and
  • 2) powers IN what is in place, or laws, so to institute.

 

Scientifically, the assumption that it instituted itself is therefore as bogus as it is logically. Nothing, for its part, is definitionally replete with exactly NO powers . . . The question should not be begged, but scrutinised logically, beyond the bounds of ordinary science: though not without its proper protest against introduction of magical powers into matter or biology, which each carefully fails to verify!

As The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR) Ch. 3 demonstrates, reason also denies all efforts to avoid what is evident: namely, that what is not matter, this had the power and precision to construct it. See also Ch. 1 supra.

In summary of certain elements, let us note this: the logical requirement of sufficient cause for due consequences is always operative (cf. e.g. pp. 7-10 supra, SMR Chs.1, 2, 3, 5, 10; cf. A Spiritual Potpourri pp. 7-10).

It is merely chimerical to close one's eyes to causality, for all reasonings which might be made to avoid it, assume it in order to perform their task! Ch. 3 deals with such escapist illusionism systematically, showing it impossible in principle.

As to the fundamental Second Law of Thermodynamics (cf. SMR p. 330 ), for its part, as formulated empirically on what happens:

·       It merely illustrates the realities of causality, by its impress on entropy.

·       Its very status as one of three fundamental laws (loc.cit. supra) is not reached by isolated thought, but by observation as its primary ingredient.

·       No contrary evidence has ever been demonstrated (cf. SMR pp. 421-422W infra; S1-S34, 251ff ).

Thus we have four concordant considerations:

1) First, causality is fundamental to thought, whether about this topic or any other, whether in arguing for this topic or against it.

2) Second, it is impossible logically to analyse causality away, whether by evading it or 'explaining' it away; for it is assumed in the endeavour.

3) Third, it is unnecessary to try, since no contrary evidence has ever been demonstrated (though historically, jejune attempts are sometimes comically made, as with the pre-Pasteur spontaneous generation fiasco).

4) Fourth, the very endeavour to 'create' for culturally pious imagination (that is the 'new piety' of the New Age), a scenario where causality does not in fact operate, leads to a meaningless result (cf. SMR pp. 284ff., 264ff.).

You USE it, you cannot LOSE it; you cannot EXPLAIN it away; and you do NOT show anything contrary. Causality is a law in logic as well as in science; and what we have herein emphasised is this: that extraordinary 'coincidence' is caused by impenetrable barriers which cannot be passed.

  • A causally escapist relic of irrationality
  • or a causally rational end to all escapism:
  • these are the final options.

For reason, there is no option: the only choice is psychological, not logical. What-is (non-self-sufficient) in the realm of the visible, based on the divine I-AM (self-sufficient), the ground, cause and origin: this is the only solution for reason, either empirically, as a source for what-is; logically as a rational source; or systematically, as an adequate source. So also, there alone is the epistemological source for the truth with which to make meaningful statements (ones that exceed pragmatic-operational statements, tied to non-objective bases, in practice and theory).

Rational vagabondage without this, being self-contradictory, AND EXCLUDING WHAT IT REQUIRES to requisition reality, precludes in kind all valid argument about reality to the uttermost degree.

As Volumes 2 and 3 show in detail: what logic demands, evidence verifies ... and does so superabundantly.

 

315A: A PATTERN OF MAN -

For Survey and Simple Mnemonics - A Summary Structure (PSC).

This is envisaged as a skyscraper, and may be conceived upwards or construed downwards.

(See SMR pp. 140-145.)

 

THE ELSEWHERE-EARNED EDIFICE,

 WITH OPTIONS PROVIDED FOR MAN

(View as one skyscraper. Floors are in general in order of their management significance, though this may vary.)

1.  Principal (top floor)

2.  spirit
3. perspective
4-6.  personality-imagination-expression (PIE)
7.  principles
8-10.  priorities, penchants, affections (PPA)
11.  purpose and purposes
12-15.  comprehension-analysis-intelligence-mind (CAIM)
16.  proposals
17. corporicity
18.  procedure
19.  principial error
20.  Plan
21.  performance error
22.  program
23.  unsuccess
24.  significance
25.  semantics
26.  syntax
27.  signification
28.  symbols
29.  cells (equipped as per 24-28, the 5 S - Words)
30.  system
31.  sequence
32.  series
33.  singularity
34.  subsistence (ground floor)

 

Added to these, further functionalities could be noted, such as:

bullet CREATIVITY, INTER-PERSONAL CONSTRUING;
bullet LOGIC, MEMORY, SYNTHESIS,
bullet SYSTEMS, DISCIPLINED-IMAGINATIVE-CONSTRUCTION;
bullet SURVEY - WITHIN AND WITHOUT.

While these extend our sight of the donated territories accorded to man, they can be understood in such terms as: mind, spirit and their intimate inter-relation. Here we see not only worlds within worlds in the construction called man, but also displayed are -

  • a multiplicity of cosmoi,
  • but a disparity of components,
  • duly combined and correlated to work as one unit:
  • that is the art and essence of creation.

bullet The splendour of the architecture that creates,
together with the wonder of the elements in man,
bullet themselves creations -
bullet the legally inert substructure,
bullet the vitally informed, the alert, the discerning, the comprehending, the volitionally directive,
bullet the spiritually profound, soaring inexorably:
 
bullet these in their display and their unison attest and verify at work... the sublimity of divinity.


 

SURVEYING THE SCINTILLATING SCENE
OF THE UNITARY SKYSCRAPER

Now let us look from the top storey down. At the top, the spirit (q.v. and cf. SMR pp. 348ff.) of man, as active but non-autonomous, and derivative (2), is subsumed beneath its principal (properly God, but it may be opted for or yielded to as the devil, self, self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction, self-fulfilment, ideological activism, existential angst...), whatever it may be (1); just as perspective (3), in turn, is set below spirit. Then is seen the personality as functional upon this, with its principles, priorities and purpose, all functions of it, proceeding in turn to utilise the whole realm of the mental and engaging the physical, with all the errors which in practice may divorce purpose from results. The structure in its course then moves through the purely programmed to the anatomy of matter and the singularities of what subsists (ground floor).

As to the principal, on top, this may be subjective, merely existential; or the upward gateway to reality. The control room is in the top floor; and the merely existential per se lacks what life requires. The reality incomparably and immovably attested, is the Lord Jesus Christ who, the only begotten Son of God, the Word of God, achieved the building and offers to restore the mismanaged to the designed holiness: at cost to Him, by sacrifice once made, and power, epochally shown in His bodily resurrection.

 

This restoration comes through personal faith and repentance, including the Lord's actual top-level reception, where He belongs; and His free acceptance of the purpose-deflections and other errors, sins at any level, unburdened to Him and His waste management.