THE GLORY AND MUNIFICENCE OF THE LORD'S CREATION AND THE NATURE OF BEING IN HIS IMAGE

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Chapter 10

The Glory of the Grandeur, Wisdom and Intricacy of the Lord's Creation and the Nature of Being in His Image

When you actually look at it, regarding it in the light of the nature God has given to each of us, you begin to see. It is so easy to look into oneself, to consult a philosophy, penchant or spiritual lust, and then to look at creation, and see only the framework of an alienated invention, not the facts.

Let us consider this. Take a swallow, flitting with a flight flicker of immense aeronautical skill, skimming the ground, mounting, dashing, swooping, distilling genius in its flight path and acrobatics in its motions. Do not start to try to make of it something to be explained away. Remember always that if you saw a laboriously constructed, ugly, non-aerodynamic, clattering, computer-driven flying object, moving about with 1/1000 of this skill, on a similar task, you would not need to ask if it had been manufactured. You would know.

You could see the technical effort, almost comical by comparison with that of the swallow, and wonder at the way one of these travailing objects could beep another, so that the auditory impact made it swerve slightly, depending on the amplitude of the sound. Impressed, you might casually enquire which firm was trying to make its comparatively naive, but actually relatively advanced motions into this field. That it would HAVE to have those versed in computer analysis, programming and engineering skill would not be an option for thought. Babes might wonder; adults would know.

Now we turn to the swallow. Suppose the lumbering non-artistic and technically advanced piece of flying oddity we have just imagined, were not to be good enough. Then perhaps for decades, up to hundreds would work on the design, the electronic marvels, the sophistication in generations of upgrading, until there was a movement, admittedly not to anything so mobile, intuitive and wise as the ways of the swallow, but at least perhaps 1% of it. You would be impressed at the perseverance of the inter-active skills of the team or competing firms which made it, or if interested, survey their various copyrights on the way, and see how it was moved from vantage point to new conception, until it was scarcely recognisable in terms of the original, although likewise, without life, still not in the realm of the swallow (concerning which, see Red Alert Ch. 9). .

The adroitly stupefied mind might sound the alarm at the thought of having to meet with God, and so lazily intone the word 'evolved' for the transformation, decade by decade, wrought by intelligence, learning, knowledge, skill and team work, with minds made apt for the environment, and environment made apt for the minds as an initial correlation for which man has no responsibility: it is merely one of the achievements of that co-ordinated and inordinate complementarity and mutual adjustability of design into which his design fits.

However nothing could be further from objectivity in this case, than the use of this code word, 'evolution'. Actually, this more advanced piece of technology was in the case just outlined so far from being 'evolved', that it was precisely and utterly and entirely the product of everything which 'evolution' in its barren wasteland of irrelevancy, is not. Intelligence plus imagination plus knowledge plus team work plus inventive imagination, plus correlation of capacities with materials, and of logic with the transmissive features of those materials: all this is involved.

Mute and imagined forces are not involved. Unseen and mythologically created powers of matter to do things it never is found to do, and to invent information it is never seen to invent, in manners that are never found to operate in principle or in practice, continually discounted by the urbane ordinariness of all endeavours to this end: these are as obvious as elves in the garden at night, during a tempest.

What is seen is what is required; and the result comes because there have duly passed years of patient labour, in which the equipment of man, and of the rest of creation, being mated, and imagination and desire being added, purposive action has occurred in thrusts of mind, efforts of will and apprehensive qualities of supervision. This is simply the way it is, in practice. That is WHY you would not wonder for one moment, if you saw a sandal on the beach, if the waves or other materials managed to make it. That is not the way things, principles, laws or causation operates; and if one wants another world in which they might be programmed to a degree, or in some measure to operate in that way, then it merely remains to note that this is not that one.

That is not the way it is in this one. The discipline of information science is no more aware of information-creating, developing oddities that automate themselves and produce, outside intelligence, than is anyone else. Such things exist only in the philosophies of man, not in nature.

The term 'evolution', then, for our projected neo-swallow object, lumbering along light years away from the current capacity to imitate them, would be simply irrelevant, and also outrageous. All the assumptions in that naturalistic and imagination-induced idea are in this instance, wholly contradicted by the observable reality, causatively correlated by input, with output. The fact that some (as in 'evolution crash repairs') deliberately use the phrasing, for something the very service of which denies it, attests the paralysis of mind (or else perhaps the intention to capitalise on the confusion of the public, perhaps, or other psychological gambit) that has become so typical of the increasingly farcical realm of philosophy in 21st century man.

We turn now to the swallow. In considering the fact that it is already here, it is quite irrelevant to imagine that the laws of causation can be replaced now by those of casuistry, because the thing is already done. A fortune made in the last century is no more outside means than one in this century. Cause requires effect, and effect implies cause as much now as ever (cf. Causes).

We look then at this object, far greater than our envisaged computer drive case, produced by scientists and engineers. We consider now, away from the model, what is really there. To wit, we see the swallow.

First it has a structural wonder that requires vast amounts of knowledge and learning, investigative skill and unravelling to understand; and even that is likely to be a limited thing, since we are nowhere near that level; and even if we were, it is living, with various advantages in stored knowledge, instinctive programmatics aligned with the ectotype^*1character of the whole.

On the various facets involved in life and this pre-cybernetic combination of its powers with those of simple material things, see Life, what is it ? (cf. Stepping out for Christ ... Ch. 9).

They are most numerous and instructive, and constitute something sui generis, which is one reason why man has not made it, but merely clips and moves about some of its components (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Ch 9, *2). When we return then to the observable realities, we find that the swallow has a structural set of devices, and integral ectype at the lively level, correlated with systems most numerous, integrated in manners so sophisticated that mathematics can marvel, and miniaturised to the point of astonishment (cf.SMR pp. 114ff., 128ff., 210ff.).

Moving past these intricacies, we turn to the professionalism in aeronautics displayed to a most eminent degree, by the swallow. Its grace, artistry, economy and art mixed in flight, its fluency, adaptability, manoeuverability and marvels of wing angle, rigidity degree, air current involvement, as if it were all worked out by computers on board, but actually wrought by a more expansive and intuitive alignment of art with method. These are so great as to evoke a delicious combination of amazement and glee at the sheer exuberance of wit displayed and the glorious symphony of motion, dance, elegance and dash.

Nor is it possible even if we had the skill to begin to match, to conceive as the birds as mere programmatic units, on a basis that we and all and they were such, that life was such. In Little Things Ch. 5, part of the reason for this is made apparent.

One has read from your little preliminary sketch about bird movements. They are interesting, aren't they, and I have often watched birds and various creatures, with their vitalities in mind (cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 141ff.), unpredictable suddenness of action, staggeringly fine clearances at speed, amazing wind adjustments to enable seemingly effortless loitering on the wing, when the breeze is strong. More on this topic of such creatures will be noted later.

It was interesting to follow your thought processes. However, if these processes are programmed, not personal, and there is software back of each of them, why ask for other thought processes to comment, since this is merely, on that view, a relay of some program or other to the first one, presented by you. You would not relate; your program would move inside your casing, and your thought of response would all be, in some wholly inscrutable way, the work of a program. If that were the case, the presentation, the idea would not, because it could not, have anything to do with the truth. It would merely inter-relate a couple of programs, a series of orders, a compilation of codes. Orders require action, do not donate truth, for the programmee: allowed merely to execute. The orderer is the criterion, and even if he were himself, the truth, his mere orders do not in programming, reveal himself, but his desire.

You see that is why there is always self-contradiction in such postulates; and in various generations the reductionist concept appeals, culturally, according to the new insights. Thus when mechanism was the big plus, and industrial revolution gear was all the rage, the mechanical man was rather a hit with some. Of course, psychosomatic medicine indicates that there is much more to the operation of the body than the body. There is the mind. It can have intense, immense and exotic aspects, as far from mechanical, or even order at times, as you could wish. Its plays and interplays are personal.

In life, indeed, not only in man, there is always that elusive, but in the case of dog and horse love, very obvious ectypal or pseudo-personal basis of affection, understanding, devotion and trust which, like wisdom and truth, form the very highest level of operation, since all means are subjected to these ends. Programmed things cannot err :they can only fail to meet the specifications of their inventors, and hence baulk their purposes for them; but this is not error. Its place is merely on that basis, the mere execution of what WAS done, instead of what was INTENDED to be done, by the inventor.

Thus we return to the aeronautical skills of the bird which, just like ambulatory skills incorporated in the hard wiring of the babe, and requiring development, attest an individuality as well as a programmatic scope for the usage to move on. Even a bird can err in its margins, failing to apprehend, and human beings can err, and later acknowledge that anger, or pride or cupidity or inattention led to the error. Not only mathematics but personalities can err, and that even in their own terms, on their own understanding, and on purpose. In the last case, there is a determinate desire to misdirect an activity, so that the correct point or answer at any phase, is avoided.

In other words, spiritual aspects control the programmatic in man, and to a lesser but still relevant degree, ectypal matters tend to control merely programmatic features in birds. It is precisely because of such imponderables and responsive realities in some creatures that the mystery and sweetness of relationships occurs.

Vitality, scope for errors of nature, the rumbustious, the rambunctious, the rebellious, the inert and the inane, and the intervention of these into mere programmatical bases: it is such things which make of much of life a thing both attractive and mysterious. This mystery is not systematic, for the Maker of aeronautical power, the systematic structure behind it, the programmatic enacted to enable the operations, and the ectypal integrities for and in which these things work has been so deeded in His wisdom, just such things, that their background being granted, their function occurs. It is not magic but labour which is in view. Naturalistic religion merely aborts the very causation codes on which both words and thought are based, and so negates the conditions of its own discourse.

Similarly, our own creative actions have in their invisible and ideational integrity, the allied impacts on the field, depending on the degree of control and type of artistic or enablement we may desire.

The underlying principle of course is this, that the spiritual requires not some non-erring material basis, but a spiritual basis at the least, to understand its compilation, creation and working responsibilities; and the mental needs, not some logic chip, emanating from thin air, but the intelligence behind it, and the whole rests in the inter-relating systematics of the environment and the invention, adorned with a knowledge of both; and since man, the highest visible organism, has nothing to do with the invention of these, we look beyond him for his Mentor.

Not merely however is there the structural felicity of the bird, the aeronautical genius of its movement, the almost unimaginable speed of its reflexes in 'bird-like' movements, but the power to impart to both arenas, their own mode of being and operation; and the more intelligence, as in man, becomes relevant, the more the supra-intelligence is needed which not only can think intelligently, but construct an intelligent thinker. Obviously, this involves far greater degree of originality than merely operating in the result as the unit once it is composed; and to ignore this is simply ignoratio elenchi, the ignoring of the question.

While, then, man leaves the birds behind in his understanding feature, the Creator leaves man behind in His! Operating AS man is far beneath inventing a system in which, and one through which man can meaningfully operate. Neither is peace, nor worry, nor trouble, nor imagination nor courage nor vanity measurable by material codes; nor do these matters have material size and quality; yet they order the material by means of the partly programmatic means provided for the implementation of the invisible.

Imagining that the invisible is for that reason unreal is merely to illustrate in action the complete opposite; for if imagination which is highly variable and a function of personality and understanding is to be used in the presentation of this view, then this in itself is not something chained to matter or even within its purvey at all.

To deny it, you implicate it; and whatever you acknowledge, your very knowledge is the excision of your theory. It is all invisible and subject to error, while all discussion of the truth of the matter requires both the existence of truth (as distinct from a variable reaction of a programmatic whole to programmatic standard), and access to it. Absolute truth not being the same as absolute existence, since it involves information and conception, while the latter requires no more than designability in program or shape or size; and this very truth being able to exist only because God beyond mere nature exists, all else being incapable of being exalted beyond the reaction box: there is an automatic excision of all that denies it, from relevance in discussion.

Thus the structure of the bird, and the myriad formats of all created things; the aeronautical genius in terms of formidable flying functions, and the multitude of parallels in other creatures, to which is to be added the migratory stability feature by which many birds show means of observation and interpretation of data such that they can return to their original location, after travelling hundreds or even thousands of miles away: these things are the beginning of the interlocking, multi-functional and integrated thing called a bird.

Add the system in which its systems can operate, and you begin to find the functional, structural, inter-connected, rationally construable, causatively consequential status of what ? of this world, then. Who then operated the causation but God; and what is this but creation!

Nor is this all, even with the bird.

You watch galahs, strange creatures, seemingly submissive at times, happily pecking away in little swarms, on the green soil, wrinkling their pretty little crests, and one hears of others soaring into a willy-willy, that circular little torrent of air so common in Australia, perhaps related to the tornado, but a relatively gentle thing here, perhaps only a few feet or 60 feet high, swirling away like a dancer. The report is that the galah can move into it and up with it and then dart back to try it again, with a seeming sense of fun and adventure, hilarity and gusto, vivacity and disregard of danger which is as significant as the faithfulness of a dog, with its interpretation of its master's mind and meaning, desire and significance.

The ectypes have far more than mechanical or procedural programmatic aspects, and this not only in BEING integral beings, an amazing and prodigious creation in itself, with interpretations of a singular or group mode within that ectype, depending on the case, but in being able to sense and participate in such invisible realities as courage or virtually abandoned but ecstatic lunacy, as in understanding and certain levels of it. Levels of beauty of nature, adroitness, slim-line fashioning, elegance, curiosity, capacity to relate, penchants for individual procedures, all such things belong to that invisible but containing ectype, mould, format, fashion or kind which while making the entity what it is, yet does not in all things contain it, but rather enables it. It is that entrancing combination of type and typicality with the individual and individuality which like some scherzo or fugue, startles one into wonderment.

Capacity to relate to man becomes one of the leading features of some lower creations (that is, ones equipped with less advanced capacities of understanding and creativity, and without direct provision for the knowledge of their Creator, not being in His image). Some of these are such that one wonders what might have become of man, at the purely natural level, without them. It is an ensemble which need cannot create, any more than the need of a pauper creates a bank account; and the sheer naive obstruction of thought that in striking form has now for 250 years beggared the fertility of so many minds is a testimony to the power of evil, that entrenched enemy of freedom, and come-uppance for vanity of thought. There is scope for it, so it happens. There is scope for mining, so the ore comes out ? or the engines arrive ? or the manual labourers happen ?

But let us return from the stark and relentless myth of evolutionism, to reality, and some of its wonders.

You see this sense of loyalty, obligation and sociality in the lyre-bird instance, where a lady in Victoria had one perform before her on a special mound, on a routine basis, with some sense of mutuality and belonging together. Things programmatic can become things more personal, and do so the more readily when man is involved with certain creatures, and this simply because, as with man, while the programmatic enables, the ideational directs and the ectype gives significance, it is no more mere constraint than it is utter liberty. There is no need for false dilemmas. Reality possesses variety, and when fraudulent reductionism, that enemy of reality, invents them, it is to be disdained with the same rigour as one would direct to those who hating the 'rich', decide that all who are not so to be depicted, are economic gutter-wash. It is not so. There is variety.

To be sure, the crucial abstract, self-criticisable thought of man is missing, in some of these startling examples of companionship and direct, meaningful companionship in lower creations, and the directly spiritual movement to God; but this is not to say that there is no series of spirited aspects, which appear in the overall entity concerned at even the bird level.

God has been most munificent in meanings, assemblages, methods, programs and personalities. Diversity of individuality within kind of creation is one of the trade-marks of His creation, that ebullience of methods, whether of gaining oxygen for the blood stream, submarine suckling or that in open air, flinging flight in flowing cape mode for small animals, or soaring loftiness for marine wonders of endurance, which at amazing speed, conquer distance and inhabit vastly different portions of the earth at their season, and in their time. In man, you have the mathematical genius, the literary one, the dramatic one, or the scientific variety, the exponent of the gregarious, with facility in social graces and the boor.

Whether then it be in the more physical emblems of imagination and vast capacity to invent, or in the spiritual qualities such as love or faithfulness or tenderness or kindness, commitment or treachery, there is the same emblem of brilliance, the same unlimited devisings, and this whether in the realm of the ectypal liberty within kind, or the abortion of kind, as in man, where liberty is so great that someone can jump over a cliff to express hatred, or stab to seek to ensure that some idea gains acceptance.

Trying to reduce the primary data is usual in this field, since a failure to do so leaves people open to God; but it is merely unscientific, and preoccupation with the material or the programmatic aspect^*2is merely an example of the significance of it, for of a certainty, a disbelief in the non-material is no material thing. Materialism depends on the immaterial at its source, and resembles the disbeliever in gambling, using card games to show it.

Being in the image of God, on the contrary, requires a conscious awareness of principles, laws and methods, susceptibilities to investigation and capacity to think in terms of such things as causation and creation. Hence when this phase of creation, man, is in view, the marvels of program mixed with capacity to err, of personality allied to capacity to ruin its criteria by drugs or disease, become matters incomparably more demanding than merely making robots operative in, but not cognisant of rationality. These can neither think constructively and creatively, nor analyse their own beings, since the inventing man has organised their capacities about an extension of his self in his invention, which can therefore have none of the variable capacities of life.

A derivative of a derivative, man's thought can have systematic cause and consequence only when it knows its place as such. It is not the incapacity to think of such things to which man is liable, but the intense lack of desire to inspect their status.

To become either a god without limit, or a robot without truth is not in the code for man, or the condition of the creative capacities imparted in creation. It is merely that without the knowledge of his own Creator, man is necessarily systematically deprived, asserting without the access to what absolute truth is, the truth that is being claimed; and constantly faces endless antilogies^*3, antinomies and clashes, as is normal even in mathematics, when you refuse, or are unable to recognise the nature of the matters in hand, through ignorance, rebelliousness or laziness.

The vastness of the divine knowledge is thus the milieu for man, that knowing the truth, he might honour it and be honoured by it, and in knowing it, according as God has spoken (cf. Swift Witness Ch. 6), perceive and appreciate both the illimitable and incomparable greatness of God and the relationship of all things to Him, and the specific directions, not only in such arenas as DNA, but direct to the enabled mind, found in the only verified and rigorously verifiable communication of God to man, the Bible^*4. When this is followed, all becomes valid, coherent, rationally construable and profound past imagination, but in ways appreciated both by reason and realism.

Without this, he cannot even validly argue, a relativistic unknowable without basis even for that designation, or else one confronting a God whose word and will he merely assumes, call it faith or anything else. God has not left us without a witness, and to act in a self-invented vacuum leads only to vacuity, as does invention without knowledge.

With it, he can read, for God has spoken with words of testable accuracy, relevance and power to man; and hence man may verify his desire for truth, as having found its master.

NOTE

See Life, what is it ? *3.

Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk), Marvels of Predestination Ch. 7, including *1; ,
SMR Ch. 4, incl. 349Aff., 374ff., 400ff.;
Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Extension 1 ;
The True God has Go, Gives Grace and Glory Ch. 2
Barbs ... 6 -7.

If someone were ruthlessly submitted to a programmatic personality, then by definition this is not his or her own; and it is not selected by knowledge or integrity, merely thrust, and in the atheistic mode, this is thrust without meaning, since there is none: a fact always disastrous for atheism, that, to know what you cannot know since there is no basis for knowledge, as you seek to dismantle all things by nothing.

While such imaginations, self-contradictory, impel to the brick wall of destruction, the capacity to reason as in SMR leads to God, which is verified in the Biblical verifiability and cohesive rationality of conspectus (cf. in different arenas, SMR Chs. 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10). Diverting from the rational for the antinomies of folly, and from the coherent for the incoherence of self-contradiction may be modish; it is however boundlessly groundless, and irrelevant to reasonable discourse.