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Chapter 1

Consciousness, Spirit, Reality and the
Rhythmic Thump of Ridiculous Ruses being Smashed

Consciousness ? A Spiritual Work from the Face of God
 

Consciousness is a matter of vast concern to the unruly. HOW does it arise as something different from directed mail, from directed ingredients, directing all things ? WHY does it work as it does, in acute correlation with that of which man is conscious, such as stars, and cars, communication and concept, physical and chemical law, aesthetic conceptualisation and artistry ? If it has to be, why is it such an indubitable component in conceptual parallel to many things, all with their own systems, significance and significations, and what leads it from what is, to what ought to be!

Seeking to find from materialism - that naive insistence on the material component as if it were all, when in fact in consciousness it is necessary to have validity for thought before you can have any theory about anything at all with warrant, what it is all about - is like seeking to find from a nib, the purpose of a pen. You really need to consider the whole pen. Then you look for this: by what it is being used.

If it cannot be seen, heard, quantified, it is not real ? But is that theory quantifiable ? This is mere antilogy, the antics of angry fluff, the hubris around bluff, making man sneeze unwarranted words.

You move from consciousness as a conveyor, the thing at work, to what it works. What does it work ? It is an enablement for thought, personality projection, communication, symbolisation, reading of symbols, resistance to force, or to breach of law, deliberate false assessment to further illicit motives, deceit, greed, connivance with corruption (that is, what removes the functionality of man by trickery, deception or force, on the basis of desire).

WHY is it such an enablement ? and what is its relationship to the component called conscience ? and what does it so work ?

It is because consciousness is not only a link, as an overseeing part of a multiplicity of systems, all attuned and co-ordinated with the brilliance of a military compaigner, a scientific genius, a mathematical star and an industrial giant (except far more so, the sophistication surpassing man's ability even after thousands of years to get going with his gifts). It is an also interpretive part, formulable in command, functional in creativity, fathoming in address. It can embark on the assessive, whether physically or morally.

Thus we need to pass beyond mere consciousness, an aspect of the human capacity, to the powers which it enshrines, the personalities which it enables and the laws and rules which it admits. We come then to spirit, the name not for a mere graphic, verbal or conceptual awareness, but for the willing, purposing, conceiving, imagining, imaging, surveying, sympathising, hating, loving, corrupt or virtuous producer, according to taste, waste and basting. The products require a producer; the functionalities require what functions and the multi-purpose deployments require what deploys. It is neither a vacuum nor a nullity. It is what has what it takes.

If we are going to consider one part, we must in all order, conceive all of which the element is that part. Consciousness in this broader setting of integral functionality of the type noted above, is merely the screen, the awareness of the powers, of their use, of their usability, including the power to propose, to purpose and to fight. The self-awareness of spirit is a necessary correlative of its capacity to be personal, to be functional as a unit of thought, thrust, plan and assessment.

It is part of what spirit is, and without spirit it would be a mere phantasm, a figment, a thing hanging in the air, with neither physical nor logical roots. That is precisely why secular 'science', that is, the sort of thought which assumes the irrationality of materialism as a preliminary to thought, fails to 'solve' what consciousness is, and talks all around and about it with the daring non-composure of a child walking on the keys of a grand piano.

We hear so much about the 'god of gaps' that there is a strong tendency to forget the gaping gap between what is and what is not. What is ordered and systematic and conceptualisable and subject to command by symbols, but only within its own scope, and constructed in logical terms, some implicit, some written, is not a matter of gaps. It is a matter of a chasm between this and the empty naturalistic chatter which assumes everything, from substance to law, from order to logic, from force to fashioning: and provides nothing.

ALL that is required is missing; all that is needed for what is, is not present in the secular world view. The gaps between types of things, always vast in units of information input required, and the conforming ability of each kind that lives, towards various pressures, alike are simple empirical facts. The gaps between each realm of order and of operation and the basis, origin and power to make them, and nothing, the other option, are rather like a choice between a chasm as the source of a mountain peak, and earth with power and propulsion upward in its system.

We have then not a god of gaps, but a gap in place of God, a logical gap, of which all the smaller gaps are mere applications. It is rather like finding a house and four garages, one with a boat, one with another car, one with a space vehicle and one with a robot, and then entering the climate controlled house, and asking how the underlying matter really managed to move from the floor to the walls, from these to the ceiling, from there to the roof, from there to the air, from there back to the basement, from there to the vehicles in the garages, and before there, to the garages, and finding the one questioned becoming slightly impatient with those who do not SEE that OF COURSE it was all like that. Like Topsy, it just was: why worry about how or why! Such science...

The very IDEA of creation is naturally ludicrous, since this is the ONLY way anything of this systematically original and integrated, overall purpose-oriented kind ever comes to be in all empirical reality and systematic thought that does not forsake causality. It is naturally ludicrous for common SENSE is a forbidden word, logic being uprooted while surreptitiously used, and so creation is anathema. Since you can't use it, then it cannot have happened, even if the sheer majesty of the maverick substitute for thought resembles an atomic creator.

Yes, there is a gap, the creation on the one hand and the correlative and vast arenas of integrated and multi-functioning powers and wisdom needed to put it there.

There is another: the design^*1. Creation, the propulsion into existence, it is one thing. Then, creation involves design, to some extent, and sometimes magnificently. Of course you can doodle on a pad while you talk on the telephone, and that can be fun and in a way, creation. I remember a medical specialist doing that, perhaps frustrated. However this is not the scope of what we actually have. It is rather more than doodling that enables us to converse right now: it involves, logic, symbolic communication, systematic thought, personalities with consciousness, spirits with survey properties, patience, interchange of underlying thought modes without static or at least without tune out, ethical and moral principles duly applied; and this is merely the beginning. Yes, it is more than doodling.

Such a complex, purpose-driven, system-enabled, personally related totality does not create itself, the only other alternative, since matter does not have these qualities, and wanting it to evolve, is not the same as finding it is able to do so! Nor does nothing secure matter in the first place. On this, let us look at an excerpt, below, slightly adjusted for this purpose, considering the obfuscatory art-work of the diligent anti-creationist in the drugs and stimuli of reason-forsaking misalliance with chaotic thought and disenfranchised life.

With such things in mind, we turn now to a series of excerpts from other works on this site, which consecutively explore arenas, worlds, dimensions and perspectives found in such a diversity in such integrality as is ours, before making a final assessment.

THE SERIES OF CONSECUTIVE EXCERPTS

THE GENERATION OF THE DISPOSSESSED (Barbs ... Appendix 1)

The Gap in place of God is the emptiness for the fulness, the imagination for the reality, the despair for the triumph, the woe for the wonder. The generation of ashes finds itself fancy for a time; and then the disrepair of the heartless sets in, or the disruption of the dispersed, or the shadows of the illusions, the once gleaming aluminium foil of the pretences and pretensions, the false ideals, the imagined hopes fall twisted, making crazy patterns, some gleaming for the time in the dirt, some "successfully professional", some already visible relics.

And where are those patterns? In the dust. Man disdains his dust and imagines his life is self-productive in the generation of the dispossessed; but the dust is the material and God is the Creator both of dust and of destiny, of soul, and mind, and spirit and emotion, of feeling and of the whole architecture which is the basis of the product called man. Ignoring reality is the stuff of dreams and the site of irrationality.

What is it like? It is like a pen that thinks, but disdains to write, for it conceives there is no author, and it was produced in a fit of abstraction by what is not there. So it is used to dig the fields, and it leaks and it breaks and the maker of pens is disdained, or despised but in any case not considered. Ink-blots are then the least of the troubles, for the 'advanced' case where paper is still considered 'relevant'. The philosophy of the relevant replaces the spirit of service; but relevant to what?

"Just keeping fit, Uncle!" says the young man in Punch, as he goes off to tennis in the days of mere gadding about. "Fit for what!" returns his senior. Fit to be considered, in that case, recklessly irresponsible as his glamour world of self-entertainment misuses the joy of sport by substituting the life of self-satisfying balms, which turn sour. Survival of what? of ashes, of twisted metal, of dirty houses, of broken staircases to the loft, to the skies, so that the light is not seen in the sunken basements, carved out, hewn from below for the purpose?

 

THE FOLLY OF THE MOCKERY

The architecture of the house is ignored.

The schema of the life^*2 is disregarded.

• Its physics in leverage and mechanics,
• its inorganic chemistry in interactions and reactions,
• its organic chemistry in manufacture of life materials,
• its circuitries for transmission and reception,
• its sensors for assessment,
• its nuclei for information storage,
• its engineering capacities for continuation of the scenario,
• its feelings for response,
• its analytical thought world for mental review,
• its moral grounds for integral understanding of purpose,
• its spiritual dynamics for assessment of proposals, construction of response, disposition of personality, response at group level, guidance of direction, return to the Maker, deliverance of understanding:
• its worlds of function, all inter-related by the integral design, the overall co-ordinating triumph which is man, the person whose mind and feelings and body and heart and soul and life in the vision and vigour of multitudes of planes and facets:

it is ignored like dust, returns to dust; but not only to dust.
 
 

THE VISIONARY VICES

The mental wreckage is a destructive act; the visionary vices are a warping distortion, the wild sprees are a frustrated dysfunction, the blindness to fact is a toxic violation of the power to imagine, the assurance of godlike powers is the denial of God, and the denial of God, even when a false god who has no power, no creation and no judgment is imagined, is the assertion of delusion.

Deluged with delusion, what do you expect? Will not even mentally active professional people of discipline in the mental world, show their barrenness in the moral and the spiritual, because they do not understand that it is there.

Immersing themselves in 'Nature', which is somehow made into something real, rather than a series of products inter-related by plan in the multitudes of inter-meshing worlds, with which they live, they look to the visible, as if a pen worshipped paper when its maker would use it, and the two went off on a spree of finding out what "life is like". It is then like absconding with equipment, with madness for vision and recklessness for reason.

The feelings that go with the exultant trip are those of ruin, when the fling is past, and of ashes, when the fire is burnt. Some fires burn more slowly, and the bitterness of facing death without reason becomes a lust for life that will pay thousands for drugs to extend it just a little. Some rejoice like Solomon in their works (though in Ecclesiastes he saw through its vanity to the truth); but the worker is ignored, and his destiny is like that of any thief. To the productive worker in Song of Solomon, comes this word: "Your own vineyard you have neglected!"

To use the words given: "I have not taken care of my own vineyard" (Song of Solomon 1:6). What if it is not remedied? When judgment is delayed, it is not dismissed.

The dispossessed are repossessed, if not by demons, as we see more and more frequently, in higher and higher profile, then by lurid dynamics, broken systems out of control surging and charging, like an aircraft on one engine, inadequate and only partial; or a power aircraft acting as a glider which looks to the drafts which cannot lift, because it is constructed for power; and because the engines are not there - but only things that happen with a roar, so that no oil or service is provided as the pilotless craft crazes through the skies of life into the oblivion of dramas ending in death.

Perhaps it crashes into other craft before it hits the ground.
 
 

THE STARK HULKS OF MISEDUCATED MISSIONARIES

Stark hulks without life, they are often taught by miseducated missionaries to believe in their sacred selves, their internal fulfilment, their hold on life; so that? so that they may look to their survival as relics, spiritual outcasts, demented meddlers with mind without the knowledge of its place in the hierarchy of the soul, and the place of the soul in the agile vigours of the spirit, and the placement of the spirit in the hands of God who made it: for the realities of fellowship with the One who having given it meaning, means nothing else! (Cf. Ecclesiastes 11:9-12:13).

The escalations of matter, mind, imagination, feeling, personality, spirit with their multitudinous equipment in ever more intricate divisions, as of a firm, directions and instincts, programs and programs suffering intervention, opportunities of understanding and results of ignoring it: these like a vast skyscraper sit in each yard, in each life (cf. SMR 332G-H).

No manager, but abuse, no standing orders but the self, no purpose but to be there, no care but desired receptions from the clouds that pass, no service but what is lusted, no significance but what is assumed, nothing: this becomes the parlance of the place.  It is the generation of nothings because of dispossession; of dispossession because of blindness; of blindness because of sin, and of sin taught, actively instructed, belaboured on the tormented brows, the lost minds and the steely hearts.

WHY, WHY, WHY do these and those horrors happen even with the very young! they ask. Why do so many children murder, why is there no sensitivity of heart, cluster of morals, awareness of significance! Why is the mind dead ?  they ask as they deliver the mind-destroying drugs of their cultural dis-ideals? Why is there no heart ? they query, as they give the cultural substitutes for good, the heart-arrest drugs, since there is no heart is there? only when it is needed!

But does such vain asking after ruin, does this remove the misinstruction, the blindness which led to the collisions with the lampposts on the side-walk, because not only are the eyes shut tightly, but the arrogance of flesh is promoted, promulgated, survival is sainthood and sainthood is getting there, whatever your thing is, whether in work or play or pleasure: getting it.

YOU are the mentor, the mind, the player, the worker, and NOTHING shall interfere with you; because you come from nothing, it is a matter of nothing. SO what is not there is the imaginary source of what is, and what is there is the object of blindness and yet they wonder: WHY! There is no answer from the dismal nothing, the great myth, the self-contradictory illusion; it is time to turn at length to the Producer who leaves 'nothing' of life's blessing to the dead who turn from Him, who however, will not find that nothing which is their desert. (Cf. Proverbs 8:34-36, Isaiah 66:24, John 3:30-36). What is to be found in such a case has nothing to do with nothing but much to do with the reality, and in reality, with mercy dismissed in the spiritual spree, there is judgment.
 
 

THE REPOSSESSION PHENOMENON

Repossession by demons, by malfunctioning systems, abused mentally, physically and certainly spiritually, by social imaginations of community, and pretences of unity, pieces of manufactured specification which surge on without life or meaning, vision upon vision, the visions of death for the blind: such is the call, such is the tenor, to this due result of desecration is the destiny.

Are not the demons of World War I enough, that World War II has to happen; and is not World War III, the Cold War enough without making more specifications for what we will do with the world, as if we had invented it, or ourselves! Will Brussels teach man, will the United Nations become God, will power teach truth, will force make faith, will desolation produce reconstruction, will a US reconstruction-assist Europe manufacture for its pains, a new world, whirled about in the cyclotrons of human hope, resting on the radioactive powers of flesh in a one-world where the environment is desperately stressed! Why? Because we cannot make it, because we are not God; and His creations die off, and His world is misused, and it cannot be created anew, so it grows old: so the human capital must be conserved, so ever more desperate methods must be devised to make the veteran vehicle, this world, seem capable (cf. Isaiah 51:6).
 
 

IT IS NEVER ENOUGH

It is never enough. There is only one way out of the derelict pretences of a drugged nation, and that is to return to its founder. Even "Advance Australia Fair" once had a verse in which "Christ" at the helm of the nation, was paramount.

More conscious, then, of the lack of conscientiousness which forsakes conscience and is conned into confusion, let us consider the depth and height of the background, which mere process simply represents. Consciousness is a function of a reality which can inject grief into it, or joy, and which has many grounds for either. It is not a mirage, but a picture, a depiction of a multiple-storied works which relates to many others. Mirages do not produce: except perhaps delirium.

For further on this, we look now at an except from News 74, in the matrix of life.

NEWS 74

There may be value for some in having at hand here, FOR THIS SITE, the Index survey of materials on the topic of life in terms of the lower creation.

And what terms these are!

We see:

	Its scope of sheer variety, intense complexity, graded qualities each superb in technical brilliance;
	its games, deployments and wit;
	its rebukes to our complacency and parodies of our pride;
	its consciousness modes, dowered, conferred with a form that allows some individuality, depending on the height of the creation concerned, within the other parameters laid down for each; its limitations and its programmatic heights;
	the vitalised kindreds of computing procedures, leaving these 'modern' inventions of ours by comparison  in the wilderness of kindergarten, mere simplicities, when compared with the sophistication and the manoeuvrings of the lower orders of life as if it were putty.

To the construction of this multi-storied building, and among others like it, and for the debris of the model's requirement which imagines happening its own source, we now look in News 81.

NEWS 81

There is simply no point, let alone ground, for trying to make creatures, in the case in which groups have some marked similarities, tread the uphill gradient so that one becomes the other. Groups internally have such variabilities, such intimate and bold specialisations, that the effort to compare them via some small variable, with other groups is doomed to presumption. Not variability amongst far off creatures, and variability among humans is the need to show; for we know of these things by observation. Man has the reason aboard, the spirit, the incomparable capacity of thought, conscious resolution with grounds abstractly conveyable, communicable and the fashion of purpose and ideal, with the opening of rational self-consciousness and spiritual God-consciousness...

WHERE is the series TO BE FOUND, which by a fleet of working examples, has each one moving up and on to the ‘goal’ ? Where are the steps on the ladder by which ascent was made ? Why is the ladder not there ? Was it stolen ? Have the myriads of failed cases selectively hidden ? What has science to do with concern about the absent in such multitudes, when what is present in real multitudes has only one message. Is this science by inadvertence, or the use of the name instead of the method ? That, of course, would literally be science falsely so-called, the Biblical term used in admonition.

The substitution of variability in each group for such an upward series is nothing if not wearisome irrelevance. It is not uncommon in the spheres where the barriers are strong, the internal peculiarities marked, and the ‘arrival’ is sudden (cf. SMR 236, 160-162). In the domain of the mind and spirit, the change is just as categorical. The very conception - forget the evidence for it! - is almost amusing. Ill-wrought messes instead of logic, hollow and witless consciousnesses or vague intimations instead of refined, discriminating and verbalisable analysis are mere mountains of horror, butts for power steering riotous and askew when manual might work. It is as always, a case of having the operative facility that really works, or nothing. Less than this simply does not work. Nor is it found. Let us however return to what IS found.

Having considered necessary progress, in all its lip-stick and smear unreality, we now examine more minutely man himself, in this quest for consciousness and conscience, the meat of meaning and the reality of man.

LITTLE THINGS Ch. 5

In the case of man, however, as repeatedly emphasised on this site, there is a capacious uniqueness which is far more than that found in formal ratiocinative capacity, intellectual prowess, power to exercise symbolic logic with critical and conscious finesse, investigative method and thought, with modes of procedure and hypothetical testing which go beyond mere patience, into precision; for it can incorporate  moral innovation, his downfall, or conceptual innovation, a major strength, and he may be drawn to far greater things yet, as we shall see.

Man is capable of a discerning loyalty, based on thought, understanding and conception, assessment quite profound and commitment with deliberation. To this, he can address himself with the heart, the mind, the body, or each of these. This is lateral, between members of his kind. However he is also able to depart from his originating parameters, and become perverse in spirit, mind or body. He is capable of a treachery so fastidiousness cruel, so wantonly selfish that it causes an involuntary shudder to consider, or of a cruelty proportionate to his spiritual liberty, and applied sometimes with an eloquence of evil almost impossible to contemplate.

This versatility is proportionate to man's  capaciousness of mind, of spirit, of understanding, and hence with the liberties granted to him, of heart, of moral perception and faith. He can seem to make the very devils stand back in awe at his perfidy, folly and transparent roguishness; he can seem to come close to the angels in his self-sacrificing love, nobility of character and radiant delight in things wonderful.

Indeed, to man, in parallel and basic to all of this, is there granted a capacity to know God, and not only some of the elements, quite formally as well as intuitively, of his own thoughts. Man may soar into vision, rise in illumination, and in each case, be deluded or willing to test, to check, to consider the claims and the values, the verifications and the logic of the matter, and to be a unitary being, not only in body, which is a simple but amazing gift, but in mind and spirit.
 
 

Law, Limits and Wonder

Not that he CAN do all these things, as if he were a miracle worker. His own body is a miracle, if you define miracle as any action of a supernatural being, which is put into the universe, and is not (even mediately) originated by it, but for it. We have considered such things in SMR Chs. 1-3, and That Magnificent Rock (TMR), Chs. 1,  5,  7, 8, as well as A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9.

The unity of language IN our DNA is like the unity provisions in our speech potential, also ingrafted into the conception of grammar, the cohesion of thought internally and with speech, so that we too may 'speak' and create, within limits. The fulfilment of such provisions of spirit, mind, potential and speech, settled in an organised structure called the body,  is mankind.

The unity of logic is likewise, a capacity which, while taking practice, much as speech does (alas too often neglected in today's substitute for the old rigours of teaching English in multitudes of slovenly substitutes, perhaps economically motivated towards the market of today), is a unit implanted. The unity of speech WITH logic, is a synthetic added capacity granted. Of all this, we have the product before us, for it is ourselves. What we do is done in us, to make us, generation by generation, without our aid, in principle at all. We are emblems of the magnificence of our creation, just as we on a lower level, exponents of it.

To what can this be compared ? The conceptual conquest which is illustrated in the orders, commands and conditions, circumstances and procedures which relate to the building of man, like new Empire State Buildings (but much more difficult, for we are without comparison, indeed, that is at all near), from the old one, is thus a far greater thing to behold, that it would be if ... ?  What then does it exceed ? It far surpasses the prospect of seeing the Empire State Building having children, bringing them up, communicating with them, and leaving them with all systems alert and connected, going concerns.

It does this because the magnitude of man's equipment, with billions of synthetically organised brain cells, for a start, all designated for design specifications and functional correlations, and provisions for these to be MADE on site, while the parents may be more ignorant of such things than a humming bird of higher mathematics, is overwhelming. It does surpass, moreover, because man can think and make other buildings, other Empire States, bridges, books and prodigies. His functional, emotional, spirited and logistical realities are so far greater than anything which the limited intelligence of man, or the vaster collections of that of many men, or the still vaster collections of that of many people with much historical provision from former generations of learning, research and construction of able facilities, can produce, that we are as little children. Our powers are completely eclipsed by what is attested in our own creation, AS creative.

That of course, is precisely what you would expect. If we, in using what is merely given to us, can be so effective as to destroy whole parts of the earth with radioactive marvels of prodigious intelligence (there is, to be sure, a little irony here, but still, it was clever if no more to find the WAY to do it), what is the requirement, what requisition must be made in logical demand, of the maker of this thing, himself, called ... what is the name ? man, mankind, the human race ? Take your pick. If vast are man's power to devastate, destroy, degrade with ingenuity, what is the power and what the elevation of majesty in the Maker of man, using a power to create, not desecrate, and rendering a functional multi-purpose unit of integration to the uttermost, into existence!

The engendering of order in no case comes from its absence. It requires a cause. Of laws, the case is the same. Of integrated laws, the same. Of design specifications, no less. The functionality is the criterion, the requisition is the result.

 

To pursue the point, we consider a narrative.

STEPPING OUT FOR CHRIST Ch.  8

It was quiet and I lay down, only to find the location strangely changed. An erratic seeming man arose, like a geyser from the earth, and jabbered away at me, as if possessed by some sad mania, which grappled with and quite overcame his mind. It all arose, he said quietly at first. It just happened. Try to tell me that this organisation and order and beauty and composition and harmony needed more than nothing, and I'll force the words back into your mouth. So far he sounded vaguely like some ranting University lecturer, on vacation.

One day, he composed himself as I watched him, as a doctor might a tubercular patient coughing, nothing was feeling unhappy because it had nothing with which to console itself. There was to be sure, a certain logic in that. If it was nothing, that would be dim. It was just that nothing has nothing with which to feel, no centre for consciousness or mode of wishing. However with such minute details, I did not harass him in the splendour of his diatribe.

Feeling fulfilled when something arose, he went on. Now that too troubled me a little. Something arose. That was very venturesome for nothing to accomplish. He seemed to read my thoughts. Oh, there wasn't ONLY nothing. There was something there. There always has to be.

Oh! I said, startled by the admission. I agree with that. But WHAT was the something there which arose, and which was there all the time ?

Oh it was just stuff, he said, a sort of material.

Oh was it a material composed of matter, or something slighter ? I courteously asked.

Of course it was matter. It was all matter, he replied.

Then one day there was a material something, and it felt lonely because it was all that was there, and wanted a companion ... is that really, then The scenario, I speculated for him.

No! stupid. I SAID there was nothing, and I meant it.

You ALSO said there was something, so didn't you mean that part.

Of course, I meant that too. Are you trying to be clever ?

To be clear. So there was one day, which is time, which is not nothing, something, which for all that was nothing, and it felt, though it had nothing with which to feel, unhappy for the lack of other things, though there was no way a conception about something could enter the mind of nothing, which to say nothing more, was not there in the first place.

You simply do not understand the grandeur of my conception, he said.

Was a conception there ? I asked, rather patiently.

Of course it was, for how otherwise could nothing have an idea of what it wanted though it wasn't there ?

So, then, I continued, you are really implying that one day, when time was there, there was something called nothing which was nevertheless equipped with feelings and conceptions and hence the mind in which to cherish, contain and display, not to say modify and consider them. So one day, in a time situation, there was a location of some kind, where a mind was at work, and it was feeling that it had nothing much to do, and wanted something which was not called nothing with which to ... re-assure itself ? Is that it ?

Except, he said, beginning to warm to the task, of course there was an understanding, for how could this nothing ever grasp the idea of company without a world view of some kind.

Good. One day something with understanding, code-named nothing, equipped with mind and conceptions, experienced a yen, urge, desire, existentialist surge ...

Sure, he said. Just because it was nothing, that did not mean that it did not have some spirit, something with which to yearn and desire.

So then, I said, one day there was in a time-space module...

NO! he declaimed. What is all this about a module ?

Good, so one day there was a time without constraint in a space which was limitless, occupying all that was there, and the time ticked without being too tidy about it, for there was no trouble about limitation of any kind. There was in fact a universal occupancy of what ? of what was or was not there ?

Of what was there, of course, he said, for how on earth or beyond it could you occupy what was not there to occupy ?

Good. So one day there was a terrain and domain of space time, suitably constrained and oriented and organised, which had the facility to be in suitable order, so that bits did not wander about chaotically, and to arise in a sequential mode, so that there was room for development. It was code named nothing and felt moved to become more ... developed.

Now you're getting it, he graciously acknowledged. Further, it became obsessed with the notion of upward ho! A sort of British space-time domain.

A domain is usually something ordered by someone, or organised by some force, constraint or power, I noted.

Yes, it was organised by a power that was purely inside itself.

Good, so then this power in itself, was an organising power; it could conceive and ... well, create ?

Of course, dumb-head, he went on, somewhat less graciously. How do you think anything got here if something could not create ? Why, if you know ANY logic, you will at once see that this is the minimum initial power.

Good. Then we have one day, in time, an ordered domain in which a creator lives.

Who said anything about living ? he asked. The creative principle was just around.

A principle ? This is a form of mental notation about what happens. So there was a mental notation about what happens, which made things happen. There seems to be something missing here. Perhaps what you really mean is this: there was a mental facility which had a movement, a dynamic, a flow, an outward manifestation in making things move in a direction the opposite of nothing, into somethings ?

Yes, that's it. It was not a person, or even a thought, though of course it had thoughts, or there could be no thought of matter having in itself a repository for them, called law.

Good again. Thus we have a repository for thought, capable of exercising thought, and placing thought into material things. Let's call it God.

Why not ? It is just a name.

Fine! So one day God found a place to be, in a space-time situation, and finding within a power to conceive and create, proceeded to use it, so that things became, well, not just variations on the original theme of space and time being ordered, but conceptions with material occupations ... like roses.

Precisely. You are really coming along! he cried with an appearance nearer to peace than I had yet seen. This being then had principles and one of these was the upward move, to more form, structure with which to do things, and more law, ordered function so that things could be done.

Then the scenario is this, I mused for him. One day, in a space time domain, ordered, organised and set in a situation of operational facility, a being bred conceptions and organised laws, and implemented both so that the space time structure became inhabited with a lot of divisible entities which performed their various functions in an inter-related way.

You'll do me, he said. What is a better - a more descriptive name for it, do you think ?

Well, I like God, I replied. But in the meantime, if you wish, it could be called the Imaginative-Conceptualising-Conditioning Creator ?

 

For other presentations, and their involvements in logic, we next consider an excerpt from The Biblical Workman, Appendix 2, suitablly extended,  which encompasses itself with another work, namely ...

DIG DEEPER, HIGHER SOAR … Ch. 2

Thus a note from The Biblical Workman, Appendix 2 is apt here. It is dealing with the phenomenon of alogisms, to which are linked antilogies and antinomies in the grand larceny of logic to which anti-God movements necessarily move. It is interesting here because of its aspect of consciousness, and for its ramification into the background of this functionality. It notes that these matters are exposed in the following references, and then makes an application in what follows, before reaching on to the work Dip Deeper, loc. cit...

See:

The Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 8.

Jesus Christ, Defaced,  Unfazed, Barrister of Bliss Chs. 8 and 9,

History, Review and Overview Ch. 5.

An excerpt from Dip Deeper, Higher Soar … Ch. 2 gives a broad perspective in the logical and the realm of alogism, where irrationality rules and dissociation of ideas is the criterion.

The various ‘books’ mentioned below are design co-ordinates, reaching outward, upward, inward and downward, and their integrality is part of the design. In this, rationality replaces the magic of finding total pointedness with conscious symbolic logic associated with implicit symbolic logic, and written species of the same in the DNA, where order and command, symbol and significance, signification and execution vie for mastery, and find none, there being only the quietus of design, and the facility of inter-connected function overlaid with understanding, and just as amazing, the capacity purposefully to misunderstand if that is the demand of the conscious driver of all this!

Consciousness is simply a co-ordinate of personality functional in spirit, co-ordinate with a material contrivance for application to the physical, a mental composition for the interpretation and understanding and a direct spiritual functionality for purposing, imaging and willing. The ability to act in this realm requires for personality an awareness which allows it to illustrate what it is, perform what it is constructed to do and be responsible for its actualisation of what it perceives.

Morality is no less and no more remarkable and demanding than consciousness, being an aspect of the instructive construction of the spirit of man, in the image of God. The defilements of evil willing, self-aggrandising or self-glorifying lusts, mental compulsions born of fallacious fictions which pander to the pride of man, and the like, impinge on this construction, partly subduing it, but never deleting it entirely. Thus even a prominent al Qaeda leader admitted that he did not LIKE killing kids and that sort of thing, but look, it is war, he declared, with the spiritual shrug of the immoral and immobilised conscience. It is not the deaths alone, but the mode of it which brings to light the darkness for examination! And when it is examined in the light, it flees.

Hence the wounded consciences, the ludicrous rationalisations to salve it, the irrational use of the concept of right and wrong, good and bad by materialists, in their exhortations to others (and this includes the exhortation not to look at morals, for it is WRONG to do so!), the popularity of psychiatrists, so often used as Lady Macbeth comfort stations, to remove the spot which signifies, and the rash denunciations of many, who with their own morals mixed, muddled and broken, are quick to assert the same of others, hence entering into those squalid judgment sessions, which almost seem to be intended to usurp the last judgment; but they are no more this, than is a burp, a speech.

 

Thus introduced, the Dig Deeper ... excerpt follows, slightly revised for our present purpose..

AMID ALL THIS TRAFFIC SURGING AROUND MANKIND,
LET US BE BOOKED

At the outset in our site, we have first noted and then examined two "books" - and it is very close to LITERALLY two books. They are both exceptionally well-known, the Bible for the mind and the heart of man, and the DNA for his structure. Each is inscribed with efficiency, profound symbolic coherence and cohesion, intimate capacity for correlation with command, system to the finest point, and just that combination of meaning and symbolic method which constitutes design, direction and communication. If this is not communication, nothing could be.

This however is not all. There are two additional books, somewhat more figurative, but not in the least imaginary. The FUNCTIONS to which EACH OF THESE EXTRA 'BOOKS' REFERS is as real as any between two covers in our ambit and purvey of scholars.

The third then, or the first of the two extra books is this: the co-ordination of mental world and physical world, auditory reception and command execution, between the man whose bodily equipment is programmed, and the world which has its physical and botanical, biological equipment programmed. The programs intermesh well; their symbolic sub-structures are unitary in kind, so that the efforts of the one, avail in the other, the impacts of the one are understood in the other, and (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Part 4), there are no alogisms to be found: the logic is unitary.

More, the mind of man, using programmed sub-structures for its ultra-programmatic progressions and pursuits, can understand the products that surround him.

There is therefore, and this is the fourth book, this second unit in our second series: and this is the comprehension-combination that transcends. It goes far beyond the mere structural logical cohesion and synthesis. To emit and receive in terms of a common system is one thing, extremely magnificent though this created product undoubtedly is; but to be so prepared in spirit and mind, so that the raw materials, themselves coherent and cohesive between the two systems, within and without, are able to be grasped, intuited, subjected to imaginative incursions, brought into the scope of thought and will and analysis, yes of understanding for action by the non-material, purpose-proposing, imaginative dimension of the being called man, his spirit, this is the next generation of marvel. (Cf. SMR pp. 348ff..)

Yet it would seem indeed scapegrace in gratitude to God who performed this production with the necessary linguistic, mathematical, comprehensive, analytical skill to manufacture symbols and significances (symbol targets), intimations and executions, thought sub-structures in logic and meaning, and interaction with a subject also formed, if we did not notice a fifth book. This is the power to ruminate concerning the Maker Himself. This naturally is the copestone, to which the imaginary relationship of Pinocchio to his craftsman corresponds in reality. Right through to the inward realisation of the thrust of the logic, the communality of the communication, the direction of the design, the strategy of the construction, man can peer toward the God who made him.

He can do more. It is not necessary in this field to speak of a 5th book, although it would be perfectly meaningful. One prefers not to do so, as at the level we have now reached, the affair is inter-personal to such an extent that the term 'book', so fitting earlier, is somewhat distanced. Rather this is the intimacy-provision for creator and creature when that creature is man. This is what book No. 1 provides for (the Bible), book No.2 is sub-structured to enable (the cells DNA and allied phenomena, atomic parameters and provisions), book No. 3 ascends to substantiate, book No. 4 arises to confirm. We shall however give it a name: there is in this fifth dimension, a correlation that is spiritual in kind, so that it may be termed scope for spiritual communication, and for concord. We are moving from the concept of 'book' to that of 'look', or inter-personal interchange.

This allows testing of promises, assimilation of pronouncements, reaction to orders, comprehension of commands, in a SETTING of illumination of conspectus, like a search-light revealing from the nose of an aeroplane, the configuration of the land far below, and something of the ways of those who live there. This is an ultra-programmatic conspectus, and an inter-personal opening. It is a vista on the divine.

It is complicated by just one vital feature, which is equally a vital failure, such as one may get in a damaged automobile, or TV. There is a perverse streak which surfaces in man, so that the more the promises of God in the Bible are fulfilled, and objectively they all are always found to be of this kind, the less they are wanted; the more the prophecies are brought into history, like obedient little lambs in a fenced paddock, the more is the distaste; the more the disciplines for folly, the more the folly, or the less the concern. While this is not like rectilinear motion, a mere reciprocity, and is complicated by the resilience and capacity granted to the immaterial spirit of man, happily able to divorce itself in imagination and purposes proposed for itself, from almost anything real, at will, it nevertheless is a thrust, an historical trend.

These preliminaries allow our minds to realise the UNDERLYING design, before we consider the externally more obvious examples of it. We can now proceed, this base work done, with what is gained from The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2 .

On design definition, the case is clear. You need what has integrity, or better integrality, oneness in multiplicity, so that many things minister to one result. You need the power to imagine it, since commands do not imagine themselves; the capacity to codify it if you want to use, as in DNA, programmatic devices, the comprehension to make code articulate with command, and command with the raw material for its implementation; you need a series and sequence so that the correct data come with the correct  matériel and the correct provision of it at the correct time, and the correct concept with which to edit any errors and rectify any oddments. So is it with the embryo, and indeed in much of the following growth, outside the womb.

This of course is precisely what is found in design, to make it so; and nowhere on earth is that of man surpassed in any visible realm. How is this so ? It is a question of

	complexity for the unity,
	differential divisions of mind, spirit and matter for the components,
	inextricably interwoven for normal function,
	operational sufficiency and efficiency for the command centre or operational agent to secure the results which are to be gained from comprehensive USE of all the equipment and connections and phases of life involved.

Nothing comes near such versatility, power and combination, synthesis of dynamic diversity in KIND, as this. Fulfilling the specifications for the definition of design, it yet surpasses all other visible examples.  To remove this example, this exemplar indeed, man,  from  design, would have to remove the concept; but the concept is based on billions of examples, systematically found and implemented by the designed unit himself, man. It is just that his observable case surpasses all in the various elements that constitute what is defined to be design.

There follow three citations from earlier works, to illustrate the ludicrous results which come when man tries to ignore the data, and invent by magical moments in thought (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9), what no moments in nature contrive to produce; for you may watch forever, for what lacks what it takes, to take what it has not got. Cars do not produce cars; you need the extra features to imagine and purpose, to contrive and to make them arrive. Man-maker has to have all of this, and for such a thing as man, inventor, creator and imaginer, comprehender and amender, you need as it were the machine tools correlative to that; but it is not machinery: it is imagination and all else that the formation and formulation of command exacts.

Correlative with this again is the obvious fact that INFORMATION does not  arrive, but in information science as seen below, we find that information tends to dissipate, like other design. What is based on its autonomous arrival, when the law directs that the natural course of information is  its dissipation: this is not only UN-scientific; it is ANTI-scientific, and justly put into the realm of magic, where causes inadequate posited, with no evidence, are imagined to go with the results desired.

This may be pursued at The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2 .

 

Pursuing yet further the integuments, the integralities and the implications of empirical reality, we turn to History, Review and Overview Ch. 5. For our present purpose, this is re-arranged somewhat and extended.

HISTORY, REVIEW AND OVERVIEW Ch. 5

It is all or nothing. It is not only

 irreducible complexity, but

indivisible integrity,

indissoluble co-operation,

inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,

coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders, 

continuity of sequence from

connotation, to denotation, to implementation,

in a series of systematics incomprehensible except in totality

(indeed see SMR pp. 332Gff., Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, in End-notes,    and   for further considerations!).

 

The path of true reductionism, false to science, of course, is always to ignore what you have got, and to explain what is not there. It is however the essence of the challenge to meet the case as it is, in all of its sequential, symbolic, integral and mutually intimate and pervasively singular procedures, whether in code type, implementation, co-ordination or exuberance of methodology; and to do so in a world which likes energy for construction and time for destruction. The other point about the construction ? it is direction. The third ? something to do as directed. In this world, and by any form of valid logic, the specifications of life parallel the requisites of intelligence with available power.

The result, life, it matches nothing but mind, requires nothing less than something as far beyond mere genius as the heavens above the earth, requisitions an artist, artificer and maker down to the last electron and the least of the biota. Paintings do not paint themselves, Raphaels do not come by omission of the artist, and life is as far beyond these things in what it demands, as a genius beyond a talented toddler.

The perspectives and nuances of art, its undertones and its overtones, its sentiments and its modes of communications to receptors called human beings, who may decide to pretend not to like it as a competitive device, such is their programmatic liberty of will in certain arenas: these do not arise from what does not cognise them; but only in what goes far further than that. It must with enterprise not only appreciate but perform, and not only perform, but meaningfully perform, and activate the executive elements of the body of the artist to ensure that the result actually appears; and that the way in which it does so can be 'read'. Art is merely one facet of life. ALL functions must be accounted for in any reputable endeavour to present its basis.

As soon as one discovers one phase, feature or facet of human life in particular, there are realities within, meanings beyond, there is all the grooming of a thorough-bred horse, all the intestinal reality of a cathedral, the coherence of a great speech, the intricacy of superb mathematics, the intimacies as of love, such is the subtlety and the inter-dimensional as well as intra-dimensional sophistication, as if intelligence were easy, and brilliance a manner of life.

As if ? THIS is the testimony. If someone places a new Boeing 747 on your drive-way, it is not as if it had been built! It is not the nature of life, or logic, to give output without input; and what we see now as the centuries progress, is no more input, but the same residual decrement. In design terms, there is to be found, as Gould emphasises, DECREASING residue. The progress of centuries in this system is the regress of design types. What is needed is simply NOT NATURE. It needs its author.

In the light of our other concerns with excerpts and text above, we may now add to the above list, so that to preserve it all in one we repeat it:

 irreducible complexity, but

indivisible integrity,

indissoluble co-operation,

inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,

coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders, 

continuity of sequence from

connotation, to denotation, to implementation,

in a series of systematics incomprehensible except in totality

 

To this we may now add:

physical, ethical, moral, aesthetic, discursive, ruminative, intellectually integrative, spiritually imaginative and metaphysically cohesive unity of perspective, operation and concentration,

unitary understanding explicative of all,
derived from the summit of experience and
comprehension in the Creator.

The last is as demonstrated in an earlier work, which it is pertinent to provide in its full dress on this occasion. It is -

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

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

A Pair  of Volumes: Opus 128 and 129, of some 2.3 million words

In fact, the concept that not only does

an integral unit

of multi-tasking capacities, dirigible from an intellectual base in what is purposive, lying  in a stupendous system of semi-or wholly programmatic means in what is structurally supportive,

contrive to be alive and operative,

but to possess structural additives for this purpose -

	such as an intricate, multi-layered defence system, multi-stage digestive system, kilometres of blood vessels with multiple agencies mutually supportive and collectively correlative in a multiplication of tasks,
	all integrated in turn,
	a nervous system which can correlate and co-ordinate sensory perceptions from multiple organs for achieving raw data from the outside world, which in sequence relates to a quasi-computerised organ which collects data purposively and distributively for diverse possible purposes, stores the same and has memory provisions for access; while
	this structure, basis for personal action, is presented in code which is a species of language (Jesus Christ, Defaced ... Ch. 4),
	intelligible, perusable, commanding, executable, executed, with multiple provisions for the transmission of the code over thousands of years, to enable the accomplishment of the programs and the provisions for this methodical action, with the result that neither does intelligible direction, nor cohesive inter-relationship of elements, nor arrival of instruments for the fulfilment of orders fail, so that we have not less, but more than design, namely presented design, self-fulfilling through cognitive elements, speciated into the scenarios of language; and
	not only all of this, but a spirit to will and a character individually to develop,

while for all that,  this is not a design:

what shall be said of it ?

What is the genus of such a concept as that ?

 It is one that constitutes far more than a breach of definition. It is as if meeting infinity, it is so overwhelmed that it declares it zero in self-defence.

In fact, these things meet to perfection one of the most obvious definitions of design:

	that assimilation of numerous complexities into integrality,
	that solution to numerous procedural problems with ingenuity of mode not to be found per se in the constituent materials,
	that subsumption of multiplied processes to ordered, salient and sequentially sustained results, whether for comprehension as in art, or action as in engineering, with overall meaning for a stateable whole.

Because of the NATURE of the aspects, it is brought to the realm of what is not only beyond man, but correlatively beyond him, so that appreciation of the work is possible on an analytical basis, just as logical necessity drives to the same conclusion.

What then of the denial of this particular design, to be such ?

It is an exercise in antinomy so profound as to constitute an hiatus of reason.

When however we learn that

	among the other systems,
	integrated and available in unison for purposes of the spirit which directs choice of environment and desire for specialisation, love, friendship and understanding (or other options),
	is a reproductive system
	which is capable,
	without any but the most minimal knowledge of program or nervous system,
	integration or correlation in all of these systems,
	of producing a new multi-design, pan-designating, destiny relating mind-matter format for spirit's operation,
	in short, a baby,
	which will have all the ingredients of the preliminary provision for speech, walking and understanding lodged in it, so that work produces results in the desired fields:

then not merely do we have the very accolade of designer's design, the art work beyond design which gives it name and glory, but unique work of the hand of God becomes both apt and appropriate.

Here is what is beyond man, in miniaturisation, in method, in time, in unprogrammed purpose, in imagination-provision and original conceptualisation capacity, to name but a few. Moreover, not only this so, but what is in man, beyond his capacities to create, is the ability to discern what is beyond him, as being in him! This is the image of God, the ability to see what is required while not having it, and to look intelligently for it, and to find it where it or rather He, has attested Himself (cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy).

Not only is there successively no other source for the various outré features of such a result, rationally, but there is no other basis revealed to reason, sourced in validity and verification, than the Bible; nor person, as there specified, than Jesus Christ who incarnate, is shown to be He whose handiwork, as life in eternity, brought to pass in time, itself also created ( cf. Reason. Revelation and the Redeemer) both what we are and our capacities to deny it, ourselves, Him or whatever else takes our fancy, or rationally rules our will.

One of the features of this pan-operative profusion, girded with personality and alive with reason, is the moral, and one of the correlatives of that is consciousness, as indeed of other elements of the personality and its objects of application, research or action. Some of these are noted in *2a below, and they include such features as the:

	1. PSYCHIC
	2. PHYSICAL
	3. INTERPERSONAL (including friendship, hostility, and the political, social, economic)
	4. RATIONAL
	5. EMPIRICAL
	6. AESTHETIC
	7. MORAL
	8. SPIRITUAL
	9. EMOTIONAL
	10. NOETIC and INTELLIGENT
	10. ASPIRATIONAL
	12. IMAGINATIVE (including both the creative and creativity itself)
	13. METAPHYSICAL
	14. DESIGN DOMAIN
	15. MEMORY FIELD
	16. DIVINE

	Let us pursue the consciousness concept in the light of the above list, perspective and analysis. For man, it is personal, psychic and intelligent.
	With this amplitude, we may return to consciousness, a concern of major importance from the first.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness ? It is merely a filament in the light. It is the awareness of the interstices of things, the symbolism that underlies much, the concatenations which inhere, the logic which instils, the order that it exhibits, the focus for thought, the tablet for truth. Without what it does, the world in which it functions, the source of its powers and the address of its utilities, it would be a mystery indeed, being equipment without purpose, and a template without function. In the setting of its sequences, the scope of its travail, as an arm of thought and a shute to significance, a plateau for survey and a carrier for orders, it implies what does the travail, gives the orders and sees the significance; for the awareness is no more the thrust of it than is a monitor the thrust of a computer. It signifies the significance within, in perceivable form. It is the perceptive implant for the structure, like a speedometer, a RPS needle, but of overall scope for portrayal.

It is merely the exhibition panel of what is done panel-apart, on its own grounds, for which the panel is the counterpart, contrived by design to exhibit the results of design. Without it, personal reality would be bewitched, scope would be suppressed and the actualities of man would be hidden even from himself. So far from being an anomaly, as in the secular model, it is a necessity of substance.

Recently an astronaut expressed, very much comme il faut, the thought that design is not scientific. Perhaps then his space ship is not designed, but like himself (on such a basis of thought) a sort of throw-up of matter, equipped with genius, understanding matter, using it, co-operating and manipulating it ? It is then a contradiction of the most blatant and patent sort, a contradiction in terms. This sort of thought is not merely illogical, irrational, unscientific, but it denies the very conditions of its own discourse. It is orphaned in its model, by the model's postulates.

It absconds with truth and then uses it; it removes the ground for truth, the understanding that is objective and adequate and sourced where it is not mere presumption added to assumption, and then exhibits it for us, as if some child declared, I cannot do mathematics mummy, and then quickly worked out at 33.3 cents per minute, what his pay should be for doing the dishes and controverted any effort to reduce it.

IF he were a series that kept on coming up, so that the concept of series is invisibly and surreptitiously fused with that of movement upwards, the meaning of up-ness, the grounds for it, the machinations in each aspect of it, were it there, and the grounds for it to become there: then series being all, there would be no scope for a series-surveyal which would unravel what a series is, why it invents things outside its own scope and how it can become self-aware, gain the understanding, first in possibility, then in functionality for correct self-portrayal, even if it could work in self-conscious objectivity at all.

What is the object of objectivity when subjectivity is all, except to smuggle illicit objects for the model in view; and absolute reality, how does series provide its sensor, or achieve its existence,  as truth ? Does a happening become a truth-meter ? Or is an event moral ? or does an interactive escapee from causality achieve distance and knowledge of all, in order to relay it back into the midst which is after all, all there is for this model! To what then does it escape, and how, and why does such a model of thought breach its own limitations in order to check in with truth, when experience and interaction without any absolute is the milieu of all operation ?

If the absolute is there, we have a need for abstraction from the model, of what understands it and surveys it correctly with all knowledge, and for knowledge you need the knower, and for the knower you need the ultra-relativistic, and for the knowledge of this Knower, you need a conveying of the truth past the limitations of the one within the model, the man, and for this you need an action in the field of the absolute which overwhelms and instructs the relative, and for that you need a correlative functionality for the transfer, and a willingness, since man cannot operate at that level, on the part of the Knower. In short, you need God and revelation for what the minus-model grabs out of the air of self-contradiction.

What then of the limited elements in the materialist model ?

If it is a series of numbers, it does not do it. If a series of atoms, it does not do it, but goes about its atomic stuff according to its atomic laws and instituted conditions. If it is a thought, where is its mind, and where is the thought in matter ?

It is implicit in its construction, but entirely invisible in its actions. Thus a double negative visits the smuggling of entities by series, by mere actions and reactions.

If all were series, indeed, the concept of series would not be a series, and so the idea is self-contradictory on all sides.

Reductionism is merely an escapee from reality, and all its theories, ignoring the integrity of each element, are precisely like a measuring style scientist, disregarding those findings which are inconvenient for what he wants 'science' to say.

And that, as in all fudging and dodging, is where you have not only an inadequate model, but inadequate morality, itself an ineluctable element even of order, since it provides the barrier of model wandering, as well as the implicit ground of action. You do not have to be morally good to desire to be correct in your statements, it is true; self-interest could propel you: but you do need to know the MEANING of the ACTUALITY of MORALITY even to seek to give an impression.

The reality of series and adequate modelling without mere mischievous or confused verbiage replacing rationality, indeed it is as shown in SMR Ch. 3, an excerpt from which follows.

Here too the nature of cynicism and scepticism is related. But what is it like, this mini-modelling reductionism ? It is like a charlatan telling his troops that all they need is food for victory, and merely assuming they have enough sense to realise that they also need composed and clear minds, fit bodies, purposive motivation and confidence in their leader. These little items are omitted in the grosser folds of the simplistic garment which is a cover-all and do-nothing.

SMR p. 301

Let us then review the broader issues. The gradual elevation of uni-series to substance, of engineered matter in its sophistication to errant human thought, of movement in a line to a concept of a line, and to the failure to draw it right... of awareness to objectivity, processive participation to plenary powers of oversight, of determinism to freedom, of interactive interfaces to supervising systems-assessors, of components to critics, containment to illimitable perspectives, of coercion to liberty and material units into error-prone persons, of forced fragments to foolish philosophising (as mutually often judged) where pundits say what is wrong and hence imply access to what is right; the elevation, I say - of elements prodded by force into persons goaded by guilt, of reagents into agents, jostled particles into judges of particularity, asserting obligation and denying it both in theory and in practice: all this may satisfy 'God' machinists.

It may seem splendid to deity manufacturers, who have nowhere from which to gain all these powers (having denied God). But their manufacture of these gods is one of the most obvious testimonies (*15) to God, manufacturer of themselves, giving them logical bases for such powers, though here they are but abused.

 

LET US CONSIDER THEREFORE

It is not a matter of the god of gaps, but the coercion of nothing into unwonted activity: the gaping gap between ground and cause, sufficiency and efficiency, the empirical and the rational, the actuating and the thrust. It is the expulsion of God from acts. Chance is invoked which, without system before it, has no chance of operating, and with system, is bound to the same system. You need invention, not sedation.

But what is the mentality of doomed man, increasingly self-critical of his world, and uncritical of his own follies ?

It is gaps gasping into creative geniuses, and nothing arising to empower.

It is not just in major categories or kinds that ground for ordering is required, and not gained;
but in major spheres for which kinds are inhabitants,
and their meaningful correlation in order to produce an integrality
in each massive kind of the pack,
in each massive sphere for such kinds,
in each massive co-ordinating and underlying system mode, such as logic,
in each grouping of such massive modes
into interface and co-operation,
with the body-constructive words in life in one language in all,
and works of life in dimensions all but innumerable,
sporting varieties envisageable in one vision of attainment and mutuality

(cf. What is Life ?, Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

But what is this mentality of neglect and this review by omission ?
 

	It is achievement by desire, when the desire is merely in the thoughts which post-date the events by thousands of years.
	It is casuistry with causality, and back-reading of desire into the backwaters of nothingness, or the immersion into imagination, where what rules is magic and the ground is nothing at all. Indeed, whether the ground or the start be nothing, there is nothing in it either way.

Consciousness then is merely an exhibit, as in a crime investigation, in its whole inability to give itself basis or meaning or ground; or an example of Gaping instead of God. In the secular model, in it there is presented Casuistry instead of Causality, the mind well-equipped to know full well that to omit cause is to omit the meaning of language and the reality of logic itself (cf. Causes). 

In The Meaning of Liberty, the Message of Remedy Ch. 6, the point is extended ...

If, therefore, there is a category, a characteristic, then there is a conduct that accords with it, in the thing so characterised. To divorce this simple causal coherence, is to remove the applicability of speech or thought. Hence such theorists of disjunction of causation are involved in an illicit antilogism, and are systematically excluded from coherent speech in their quest. What reason requires, they deny, and so lose their place and gain one as irrationalists; and without reason, and its correlatives, they cannot even speak, or present an issue. If they should still wish to do so, thus, they would need to  abandon their premisses; and so their argument lapses.

Thus if causality is gone, then characterisability is revoked and so language becomes defunct,  the laws underlying its particularities and performance are annulled, the grounds for their operation are removed, the operation of reality is rescinded and a world of imagination is conceived, in which the cause of causality, as in Kant, is assigned (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., Predestination and Freewill IV); but it cannot be.

If there is no such thing as CAUSE, then any attempt to estimate what caused it pre-supposes what is being dismissed, and so begs the question. Remove this antilogy, and antinomies in which Kant moves like a trapeze artist, go with it. Clarity and consistency are the compliments of the season for the return to rationality and the restoration of actuality with its causality.

It is inherent in thought, and necessary for logical action, has pay-load in assignable features, not magical but mission-built,  function-clad, and application in definition of terms. It is confirmed by its application into the resolution of all things, as a component of logic, which is a component of the image of God status of man, which is a component of the universe, which is a component of creation which is a work of God, whose work is as indefeasible as unalterable. You never escape magic or irrationality otherwise: and as to the former, it is merely an exposition of what is not found in terms inadequate for the result, or if adequate, then unattested; and as for irrationality, it is merely the 'won't' of the obstinate, the frowning refusnik, who insists on giving reasons for his unreason, and arguing for his self-contradiction with means which ostensibly, he despises.

It is in principle not unlike the rich American 'teen-ager of the sixties, using his parents' money to flay the system which supports him.

Unfortunately for man, the abuse of his conscience has helped to enthrall him, in his modern dress of irrationality, with the hope that by shutting his eyes to facts as well as  morals, and hoping desperately that somehow everything MUST have come from somewhere he can control: therefore it must go as he controls, and if not, then he will die in the attempt.

In many cases, this last result is true; and in all cases, judgment rather than mere death is the non-antidote to worry as men scurry, flurry, thrust and bust in their inimitable ways, refusing to be conscious of their nature, of its origin, of its destiny, alive only to a destitute surrealism, a depraved reductionism and an irrational casuistry which always wants everything from nothing, either to things granted (from nothing), or the way to proceed (creatively, at the top level, from nothing).

For all this there is nothing for it, but judgment^*2. Of this in turn, mystified modern man with his illicit models prefers not to be conscious. Not merely is consciousness an anomaly in his cut-down versions of understanding, but he likes to pre-empt its action, by downgrading it, either with the enervation of despair, the pragmatism of illicit profit, or the empiricism which ignores what he is, while he does what he does: as being a car, he thought only of four tyres, since there alone did he have contact with the road. To the reason for roads, the purpose of his journey and the point of transport, he is lost.

In politics, misappropriation of funds is at the international level seems more and more to resemble a political perquisite; violent intractability is no more mere pride, or fear, but has a peculiar blatancy which does not much value the existence of the earth, since its meaning being lost in imaginary models, the point of life is neither realised nor applied.

Other Ages may have faced judgment for much less; but this one flirts with it, with glowing eyes and adoring looks. It just has the name wrong.

Drugs are one way of seeking a sensationalism which obscures the reality which impends, and their spread is a futile exhibit of the inability of immoral models to bring the peace of understanding. Reject that, an any other irrationality is not far away, as in the death-squads of militant Islam, rejoicing in their demise, because slaughter is valued in some heaven, and maidens await to solace such brutality, seeking to overcome with horror the ministrations of pleasure, and to institute a rule or regime where what bred it, leads it.

That is always, in addition, the problem with blind pragmatism: its victims of truth, justice and righteousness on the way to its dream, these storm though dead, in the very clothes of death into the conscience, and mutilate the heart, so that it is not angels, but brutes who, were they temporally successful, inhabit their new lair. Judgment is not stalking, or merely talking: its impacts are already rocking the earth, and as in a cyclotron, the more 'hopeless' the case seems, in knights errant erratically marching on this side and that, knights of the night without honour, intractability the name of the game and blatancy the mode, the more adventurous become the sallies into sublime folly.

To this day, however, reality in the mercy of God, is infused with His light, so that He may be found. He has not created us to frustrate us; for He needs nothing from us, being in no way a defective in someone else's system, as if holding a mere place of a creation. That too is simple contradiction of the logical necessity which shows His place and in which empirical evidence attests His action (cf. Celesial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host).

Nevertheless, He has not withdrawn, but opens His hand from restraint at times,  to allow sin to bring its own frustrations.

Yet, for all that, He allays even these, as men, at times bucking and wiling in saddening sequence, complain of His severity at their inventions of heart, mind and society. Indeed, we can provide Him with nothing that He needs, for if we could, His would be a mere compartment of the world which logically and physically depends on Him, and not the Author of departments and the Lord of limits.

As to Him,  however, with no limits, He can provide us with all, and if in our consciousness, we collapse the fact into some alogism, some paraphernalia of a distressed mind and a forgotten mentality, neither true to reason nor the empirical, then so be it. We are starving in the midst of plenty.

At least, however, while we have crocodiles, as part of 'Nature' worship in Queensland, disporting themselves amid the populace here and there, by permission, and sharks doing much the same in our urbane follies, at suburban sea-shores, shooed off in their sacredness to live another day, by the commission of what is the latest sacred sea-cow: let us not complain. That, it is too rich: like drinking a nice wholesome seeming glass of milk, and declaring it is sour cream. To ask for it, to BEG for it, to beseech for it, to write treatises to induce it, and then complain of the result, it is like what ? It is like drinking clotted cream when thirsty, and eating ten pounds of chocolate, when already weighing in at 250 kilograms.

It is a rich sort of poverty.

In this situation, the self-induced poverty-stricken suffer in more ways than one.

SCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

IS AN EXAMPLE OF MUCH MORE

In the Journal of Creation, Volume 21(1) 2007, there is a book review entitled,  Consciousness, a Problem of Naturalism, in which the usual sort of naturalistic reductionism which enters into this field, is considered in a recent volume.

Most interesting is the distinction between pure philosophy and the 'scientific.' These captions are often confused, not only by materialists, but by those long exposed to their cult and culture.

It is unfortunate that it is often not realised that the purely scientific is NOT to be equated with what is naturally observable, and if it were, both organic evolution and other reductionisms and anti-empirical musings would cease at once. The consideration of the causal, as in the article, is by no means limited to the studies of experiments with matter. Vain is the concept of  'Causal Closure', the reckless and anti-scientific assumption that the material, evaluated by the mental and given perspective by the spiritual, is the ruler. Such nonsense assumes what only the categories NOT included could prove, and is hence self-defeating and self-contradictory.

Indeed, it is a vast submission to naturalistic ruse even to consider alone as scientific, what deals with the domain of what is foundationally visible. Thus there is in view a double causal closure, one as to the material designated by illusory definition as a field of such enquiry, and the other as the method, scientific method, as limited to the visible or in principle visible.

So far from the material being the only phase of interest to intelligent and liberated science, the fact is that causal investigation, intellectual experiments and logical analysis are just as scientific in potential whether the case be material, mental or spiritual. The point is not whether you can see, or hear, or observe, or interfere in a given material situation, and see the results, then construct a theory, relate it to cognate fields, ratify or defeat it, predict and verify or anti-verify. The point is whether you can take ANY DATA and pursue a similar course, with additives of the internal character of the logic used and the assumptions made.

Where the data concerning logic, personality and mental ability and agility, imagination and intellectual discourse and dissension are taken into account - and there are millions of such data - then there are estimates of their significance, modes of testing, ways of checking theories and so forth, which need nothing MORE of the physically observable. Certainly, such things should be open to materially construed tests, but to mental ones and spiritual criteria no less. ALL fields must be in view and considered operationally and empirically, logically and aetiologically if a study is to be scientific. What has an area of the FORBIDDEN, is merely a claimant to prejudice, the opposite of science, leaving the residual data a platform for myth (cf.  Dizzy Dashes ... Ch. 7, Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 7, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth). It is scientific apartheid, in part residual from the joy of early discoveries in the visible, with applications to profit and production, in part an exploitation of the miasma of the materialist (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5).

The concept that consciousness MUST be explained in this or that way, in terms of this or that organ which obviously does not show more than material involvements or non-involvements in psychic phenomena sui generis, is merely sub-scientific. Such merely prejudicial philosophy has no room to hang its hat in the halls of science, and the confused notion that what is measurable a concept  itself unmeasurable, is alone real or fodder for science is asinine for the simple reason that it is self-contradictory before more is said.

While it is of some interest to cranial experts to find what imaging provides, what impulses are associated with what mental activities, what damage limits them and so on, this is no more to the point that finding how much List could accomplish on a violin of one string, of two, of three, in one with one damaged string and so on. This is irrelevant IF the issue is whether the violin plays itself or needs someone who understands music, not something which is a part of a material construction in a designable system of limited order, to do so.

Here the question is simply this: does thought have a cranial correlate, or a variable placement in cranial matters when there is disturbance of a physical or mental kind and or a spiritual impact. Interesting, but NOTHING to do with the capacity of the brain to invent pelludic psychic phenomena (cf. SMR pp. 316Dff.).

What is an accompanying utility is not the same as what is an activating function. Correlation does not constitute domination. Accessories and agencies need differentiation. Modes of deployment are not identical with what deploys. Efforts to make impersonal personal, transmission truth or modalities institutions lack rational interface;  and merely avoid the question and the power needed. Issues must be faced, and not eluded on the basis of inadequate philosophies which have nothing to offer, and merely create systematic logical problems at the outset, while breeding both confusion and frustration, since that avenue is excluded from the outset, by lack of evidence, basis and adequacy for the result desired.

The tiresome imagination

	that time replaces origination as a need,
	or that advantage, being small,  invents what is intrinsically advantageous and developmentally advanced,

is met by the continuously observed fact

	that the little does not observably or by necessary implication become the big in this way (cf. SMR pp. 136ff., 206ff.),
	that variation does not exhibit innovation but adaptation,
	that the larger ‘changes’ which Gould so liked, as attested input, because of the appearance of sequence in time of products of various kinds (cf. Wake Up World! Chs. . 5  -  6, SMR pp. 315Aff., Ch. 2, TMR Ch. 1), are mere post-mortems, not explanations,
	and that in any case, the capacity to invent information is not exhibited in empirical fact any more than in the demands of logical thought,

which requires an arena of capacity for such work,

not a sub-moronic participant for the systematic whole: such as matter.

Interface for the requisite lacks, results lack, evidences of the information self-additive facility lacks, ground for it lacks (cf. SMR pp. 140-152).

What does not lack  is the inversion of scientific method into a stilted and stultified exhibit of finding non-answers by assuming them, and ignoring non-verification. This folly contributes to the contemporary restlessness which in its frustrations and uninhibited aggressions is costing, quite literally, the earth.

Dynamism misdirected readily becomes devastation attained. It has application not merely in the polluted halls of biological misrepresentation, opportunistically and meretriciously visited on students, but in politics, military ambitions and social unrest.

Matter has not the substance anywhere exhibited for it (cf. SMR pp. 79ff.); evidence has not the heart to present the failed cases in their billions, since they cannot be found; and failure of a system not directed to thought to invent its products in an intricacy defying emulation by man is merely correlative to the failure of a brick to become a building, of a toy to become a brilliant work of genius for man, of the base without mind to become a brilliant expositor of its best works.

As to naturalism: Magic is its name, myth is its function, inadequate grounds for imagined results, told tiresomely or tirelessly its method, itself a substitute for thought, and a renegade from reason.

Time is not the point. It is the truth of the matter which matters, that of adequacy for the products in what is imagined at the first. And as to that, it has the same need for something adequate for its own existence. What is contrived cannot arise causally from nothing; only what has the position of eternity without contrivance needs no cause, being its source. Hence the allaying of reality by making little jibs and jives into territory vacant except for imagination for its works, is mere temporising in both senses.

We need to move to where the cognate action is, if we want the correlative result.

List's fingers are a personal extension, his violin is an accompanying medium, but it is his spirit where nothing weighs in grams, for thought, and invalidity is not specifiable in terms of shape, which is the originating factor.

The physical phenomena are no more intrinsic than is tape for an opera singer. To be sure you will find the most interesting wave indications on the tape, as the singer gives vent to the emotion and understanding, the communication rises in rhythm and altitude of thought, the nuances, the subtleties and the penetration of perception move  into the soul of the characters in an opera. Nevertheless, these wave motions have NO PART in the working of the realm of thought and emotion, moral critique and feeling which is being communicated.

They are useful for the transfer of the created product : no more.

Such physical attributes, on the contrary, are instrumental only, allowing the physical to relate to the spiritual, so that it may be expressed in an incarnate form. To INSIST that this must not be so, that the physical MUST have a different realm with different characteristics, codes of working and conditions of validity, and work there without sign, signal or evidencne, is merely obstructive philosophy, illegitimate in kind, anti-causal in concept, insisting that what shows no capacity to invent domains of another kind, MUST have done so.

In science, you SHOW it doing so, have a theory to explain it, test this on allied applications and verifications or non-verifications. You do not STATE what is to be found. You await what IS found. You do not create what is not there, explain it and then teach it, as if romance were a suppressed particle in the scientific mind, and explication had to be irrelevant as a sop, a make-weight to discipline in other fields. Ostracism of rationality is not a perquisite of the roving theory-making of science. You work in the apposite, not its opposite.

Either you show that degree of function-matter correlation and that all else is excluded in this arising of other disciplines from that specific to what is observed in matter, and what is found in its interstices and in all its tests, or you do not even assert it at all. Even to talk of its possibility is Vernian, since no evidence in this direction exists. What does exist is a series of disciplines, functionalities, closely related in degrees of ordering of organisation, of priority and direction, but in no way showing a capacity in the one to invent the other. Even when one invests the other, it is merely a carrier situation that is observed, applying or denying via one domain, the results into another.

Nothing causally creative is ever found in the work of matter in the realm of imagination, purpose, thought, validity and its testing.

In fact, causal phenomena - those associated with causes, in the realm of effects, whether these be simple and direct , complex and interactive, or involving several layers of dynamic, structured in priority and correlated in kind - are the true work of science, and the imagination that material ones or measurable ones alone are the work of science is one reason for its colossal stultification in the realms of evolutionists. Here arrive, as per bus load,  enemies of its methods and philosophers at work in invasion, and particularly bad philosophers at that. They merely change their coats to invade other coasts.

There is no limit to the realms of investigation by science, and it is in fact one of the methods useful in finding the truth^*2A. To be sure, it is limited, but its has its own special limits. The farcical conception that because it has certain methods, therefore it is related only to certain fields is precisely what science abhors: knowledge in advance!

It is interesting in this connection therefore to see how it should relate to religion, where this has a testable, authoritative, directly empirically challenging aspect. The answer is not difficult to find. It should examine the empirical evidence, consider the nature of the perspective in view, consider its applicability and its vulnerability and its coverage on all sides, see with what theories scientifically it is in consonance, and with what, if any, it is not, refine the theories on all sides from philosophical presuppositions, where these are the mere preference of some minds, and get the read-out.

In the process, it should consider any other options, their empirical testability, their standing in terms both of verifiability and verification, their validity in terms of both the data available and the statutes of logic, and move behind what meets the case, and away from what does not. This neither requires those who know the truth, to act as if they did not, since testing does not pre-suppose understanding, but requires fidelity, nor allows those who specify otherwise, to distort the data or ignore segments of it. It is much the same in a game of tennis between friends in a championship: there is no requirement that love of one's fellow is at odds with testing of abilities, matching of wits in integrity. Results follow; but attitudes do not require enmity, merely fidelity to whatever is the purpose of the exercise, matching here of skills, development of understanding and exploration of possibilities.

Love for scientific method, one of the means of weighing knowledge, does not require efforts to seduce truth for its sake, or to secure philosophy despite its requirements. Integrity in the truth loves challenge, enjoys test and endures procedure. It is in a way like a teacher seeing a gifted student in examination role. So far from meaning hope against hope, it means delight in opportunity to show what is known.

In the case of consciousness, for the reasons of conception and coverage noted, it has to move away from unverified hypotheses, which simply assume what is never found, and act on what is found, to what is cognate and is verified. Thus it is wholly scientific to relate consciousness to spiritual phenomena, and wholly unscientific to legislate in the face of the empirical evidence, to the contrary. The cognate and the correlative as always, need emphasis, and their due tests are to be compared, if necessary, in relevance to result and cause alike with any other aspirants that for this reason or that, seek entrance into the light of test.

In this case, the position taken in these volumes, on this site, is more scientific than those of the materialist, not only because he is falsely pretending to be scientific when the non-arbitrary, non-prejudgmental approach to ANY evidence from ANY source is the correct option, but because the evidential spectrum is broader than his inspection scope. Both the will  for science, therefore, and the work for it, being deficient in such a case, we have the irony of the ages, that what calls itself science, in these now common cases, is mere emotional umbrage, cultural propaganda, stalking the evidence as a fox a rabbit, selective for its own interest only. In this way, what such scientists may choose to REJECT, is nevertheless is empirical obligatory.

Thus the omission of all such domains demotes the work of such to the point of pure philosophy in the worse sense: verbalisation of prejudice, which some with some justification might prefer to call impure philosophy. After all, it is not thought which is impure, but its defilement.

Accordingly, it is important, not only to think in terms of all empirical evidence, to excise all antilogies and antinomies, as part of thought, and validity exercises, in ANY domain, but to watch for all verifications, all anti-verifications, and avoiding all imperial protestations from unvalidated fancy, to seek that realm which has as method, investigation, and its thrust, confirmation, not in soiled hopes but in propositions testable by means capable of falsification.

This is to be done with all the catholicity, fearlessness and fairness of an omnivorous appetite, not a selective sounding, let alone with an evasive exclusion technique, by authority of culture omitting in advance spheres of action, with lordly hand and philosophic irresponsibility.

Therefore,

matter, mind, spirit,

consciousness, conscience^*3,

categorical constructions of thought,

imagination,

logical concatenation,

validity, verification,

alternative modelling in any and all areas,

comparison of results, of morals, goodness, worship,

beauty and understanding:

all are to be surveyed with this in mind.

The problems in each are resolvable readily with this Biblical basis, which giving the correct lead and perspective, enables the collation and comprehension resident when it is looked for where it is (cf. What is the Wheat to the Chaff Chs.   3 and   4) and where scientific method is not deprived (cf. Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers ... Ch. 5).

Our present concern, it is with scientific method: not the debased pathological exhibit of it which has become almost normative, but the impartial procedure which checks all points indifferently, and finds what happens. It is when this is done, as is painstakingly and in vast detail shown in

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,

that the result is not merely achieved, but obstructively apparent, that ALL problems of all kinds stand resolved and resolvable, on the biblical basis only; and as in predestination, salvation and creation  in particular, this is possible ONLY on the Biblical basis^*4.

It is vain blindly to dismiss areas and indeed arenas of functionality: verbal pyrotechnics do nothing to validate such realms of the forbidden, the spiritual 'negros' of apartheid in the old terminology, or excuse such preliminary presentation of understanding. Science must not fear to reach all realms; but if it does, it is a cripple and a casualty, here of casuistry. When effrontery adds to these misdeeds, you have the very peak of braggadocio, the use of what is no longer there to evoke praise for the remnant, a pitiful residue now defiled.

As the Bible indicates, it is wrong after vows to make enquiry, and so here: It is error before work, to determine results.

Materialism's demise logically is merely part of the folly (for example, as seen in Repent or Perish Ch. 7). A theory which requires that it be wrong in order that it could be right is rather eccentric: for even at the outset, it may be seen that without absolute truth there is no ability to communicate the same (you cannot give a million, however your heart throbs, if you do not have it), and on the relativistic model, there IS no absolute truth, merely interaction within the cover of your creatureliness (cf. Barbs ... 6  - 7). You cannot escape to have lordly survey of all, when you are mere participant, nor imagine vast realms which you exclude, in order to do so.

Indeed, as to materialism, its exclusive use by some in the field of science is the flummery of fashion and the captivity of science by erratic culture, the defilement of its name and the end of its contribution while such a reign occurs, and where it occurs. This constitutes a second and aggravating error, so that whole cannot readily be separated from mere fiasco.

That the Bible has foretold such an attitude is the majestic reply from millenia ago, to such devices, in itself one more verification of the knowledgeability back of that book, one without change to form or fashion, but rather criticising it in advance! (II Peter 3:1-5, II Timothy 4).

As to the former scripture just noted, see Joyful Jottings    8; as to the latter, see Secular Myth and Sacred Truth. ANY theory of sufficient magnitude for consideration, which seeks from what does not provide the power and the presence necessary in ascribing grounds for something, and cannot validate such action, participates in myth. This is now ironically the domain of a segment of 'science', which insists that magic (in deed, not in word normally) must do what the focussed materials never are shown to do, or have power or principle or procedure or equipment to do.

Knowledge per se does not guarantee method, and a field of endeavour in any one area does not entail consistent understanding, logical validity in assumptions on all sides; for wisdom is a different matter, which requires attention to its own domain with perspicuity, universality of scope and fearlessness of enterprise. Mere facile familiarity with a field is no assurance of the comprehension of its place. Alas, the technological revolution has given to those who enter into the disposition of some material things, in appointed and limited spheres, a feeling for some, akin to that generated by football, baseball or soccer stars; but the expertise does not in fact devolve from any such areas of expertise.

Indeed, so vain is the presumption that it does, or might, or could, or should, in any reasonable fashion, that it merely betokens the human desire and NEED to worship, which follows from the mode of man's creation.

When you are not God, the effort to act as if  you were, by whatever mis-based and misplaced error, of course MUST lead to vast domains of breach. One of these being man's frustrated worship thrust, then the ludicrous naturally results. On a lesser scale, the loner who despises friends may end up with mayhem, as in one famous US case of a bomber. On the broader scale, whole cultures can become duped by foolish expectations, and put charm, or savvy, or even sickness and wild conduct ahead of integrity, admiring as in worship, the facility so to 'succeed' despite all faults. Whole nations can be skewered on this roast: for leadership has much power, and when minds are already pathologically fixed on such, without discrimination, results can accumulate relatively swiftly, as power on all sides mounts.

In all fields and in all things, all must be tested.

On scientific method, which one of many approaches to reality and a good one in its place,  when it is not confused with unscientific promulgation, and secular pretense, reductionist imaginings and contrived thought not based on evidence, but on hope baseless to the point of fraudulence, see the following 11 Chapter volume:

SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD

AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION.

For modelling in science, based on constraints of reason, evidence and validity, see That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1. In this, successive actual implication is pursued, however contrary to mere mouthing of philosophic bathos, dressed up as science; and the conclusion is permitted to appear.

For even more elemental confusion that must be corrected in this sphere, see op.cit.,  Ch. 5,
 Ch. 6 and Ch. 7.

As shown in SMR, the position ample in scope, requisite in logic and confirmed by verification, while endorsed uniquely in validity,  is that the Bible is the only authorised word to man from the only God. How does this relate to the due use of science ?

The application of propositions which are testable: this is a matter of method from whatever source they come. Thus after this demonstration which is part of the initial work of SMR, there is the testing, verification and validation criteria. As shown in the work featured above, the last is unique, and as noted in SMR, so is the verification. This is of course massively extended in the other 131 volumes in this Set. Thus while reason cannot create the word of God, since this function is merely a creation of His, to whatever extent correlative with His own, and man cannot telepsychiatrise God, since his spirit is merely derivative, yet reason in general, and scientific method in particular CAN confirm, validate, ratify, verify as the various results and implications of the authorised word of God are put to the test.

This is not to put GOD to the test, a work of folly, such as the temptation put to Christ,  to throw Himself from the tip of the temple structure, which Satan advanced. Christ rejected this on those grounds at once, from the book of Moses.

On the contrary, it is with the confidence of faith and the concurrence of mind to test the word of God as befits its regality and as God Himself has challenged should be done, that one proceeds. This is to exhibit His glory, and so we act with relish. Reality is the handmaiden of God, for creation is His work, and thus the jmore you initiate test, the more His way is seen to be best; and more than that, incomparable in the midst of comparison's request.

 In comparing it with what does not compare in empirical result, or virtual standing we find His glory, contrary to vainglory, as light is compared with the mere word for it, set in darkness. By the latter is meant that some things are by their nature inadequate for the results claimed, being thus mythical in kind: such as a material ground for the mental realm, or a mental origin for the spiritual. This is creation by chatter. It creates neither matter nor mind nor spirit. It is vainglorious.

	God in telling us to test (as in I Thessalonians 5:19-21), is not inviting us to sin, but to dismiss the febrile fascinations of wayward spirits and get back
	to reality,
	to what works in all dimensions,
	to what is unfalsifiable in any dimension and
	to what endures throughout time, invulnerable, adequate, non-reductionistic and fair.

Not only are we to test all things, but the spirits in particular! No realm is free of the spurious, for evil is not inactive. It is not the basis of faith, to test, but the outcome; nevertheless, faith surveys all and being instructed by the Maker of mind, does not shrink, nor yet blink when something untested is merely set forward as if in a flurry to harass. Faith KNOWS because it is in communion with God, comprehends His word, is open to its leading, and evidence attests. The whole is like visiting a vast Autumnal Garden, set in natural splendour, effusive in beauty, conceived in aesthetic wonder and even in the Fall, showing the true colours of profundity.

THE DIVINE CHALLENGE

All must be tested. In Isaiah 41:21ff., the prophet presents the divine challenge.

"PRESENT YOUR CASE ... BRING FORTH YOUR STRONG REASONS. "

The challenge is repeated in more detail in Isaiah 43:8-17 with 44:24-45:6, where blindness is the considered symptom divinely attributed to Israel because of its failure to perceive in things past and predictions nurtured to fulfilment since those times, the hand of the only God. Indeed the Lord proceeds to make epochal predictions, naming the king not yet born to deliver them from the exile, not yet come, to which they approach because of unremitting sin. This in turn is merely part of the long-range initial forecast of what would befall them, and why, made in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32-33.

For what reason then do they ignore, frustrate or deviate from the ways of the Lord ? Such is the challenge. They have reason, they have as a nation have miraculous access in a sustained and systematic way; and they have without reason forsaken truth in mere rebellion.  Such is part of the message of Isaiah 48:5-19, which follows.

"I have declared the former things from the beginning;

They went forth from My mouth, and I caused them to hear it.

Suddenly I did them, and they came to pass.

 

"Because I knew that you were obstinate,

And your neck was an iron sinew,

              And your brow bronze,

Even from the beginning I have declared it to you;

Before it came to pass I proclaimed it to you,

Lest you should say, ‘My idol has done them,

And my carved image and my molded image

Have commanded them.’

 

"You have heard;

See all this.

And will you not declare it?

I have made you hear new things from this time,

Even hidden things, and you did not know them.

 

^"They are created now and not from the beginning;

And before this day you have not heard them,

Lest you should say, ‘Of course I knew them.’

 

^"Surely you did not hear,

Surely you did not know;

Surely from long ago your ear was not opened.

For I knew that you would deal very treacherously,

And were called a transgressor from the womb.

 

"For My name’s sake I will defer My anger,

And for My praise I will restrain it from you,

So that I do not cut you off.

Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;

I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.

For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it;

For how should My name be profaned?

And I will not give My glory to another.

 

"Listen to Me, O Jacob,

And Israel, My called:

I am He, I am the First,

I am also the Last.

Indeed My hand has laid the foundation of the earth,

And My right hand has stretched out the heavens;

When I call to them,

They stand up together.

 

"All of you, assemble yourselves, and hear!

Who among them has declared these things?

The Lord loves him;

He shall do His pleasure on Babylon,

And His arm shall be against the Chaldeans.

 

^"I, even I, have spoken;

Yes, I have called him,

I have brought him, and his way will prosper.

Come near to Me, hear this:

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning;

From the time that it was, I was there.

And now the Lord God and His Spirit

Have sent Me.

 

^"Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer,

The Holy One of Israel:

 

'I am the Lord your God,

Who teaches you to profit,

Who leads you by the way you should go.

 

'Oh, that you had heeded My commandments!

Then your peace would have been like a river,

And your righteousness like the waves of the sea.

Your descendants also would have been like the sand,

And the offspring of your body like the grains of sand;

His name would not have been cut off

Nor destroyed from before Me.

 

^'Go forth from Babylon!

Flee from the Chaldeans!

With a voice of singing,

Declare, proclaim this,

Utter it to the end of the earth;

Say, "The Lord has redeemed

His servant Jacob!"

And they did not thirst

When He led them through the deserts;

He caused the waters to flow from the rock for them;

He also split the rock, and the waters gushed out.

 

                   'There is no peace,' says the Lord, 'for the wicked.' "

Man was not made for spiritual impotence, guesswork or vainglory! Why do they seek to compete with self-made idols of no more evidence for that day, than have naturalism's idols, today's parallel devotees likewise in millions, at the wand of organic evolution! God remonstrates before He demonstrates in judgment, the morality based on fact, love, mercy and power, on design and creation, on the very nature of Himself, whose ways bring sustenance and peace.

"Present your case ... bring forth your strong reasons!" is like an echo through it all. It is carried further in Isaiah 48:3-5.

As in times of yore, in Egypt and the crossing through warlike tribes to the Promised Land, it was DO and God did it; it was go, and they went; it was escape and they escaped; drink and waters flowed in the desert. It was said and divinity secured objectivity in empirical fact at once.

God made sure that even from earliest times, His words were clear, incisive, chronologically apt and testimonially true - as for example in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 32. He did not ascribe excellence to Israel, but prescribed the consequences of foreseen wandering in the nation. He left no room for naturalistic idolatry, or the dynamics of the human body or psyche, as the resource of potency, when it comes to ultimates, origins and destiny.

The divine lament is in Isaiah partly in preparation for the coming desolations to result from increased acuity in rebellion.

"Oh, that you had heeded My commandments!

Then your peace would have been like a river,

And your righteousness like the waves of the sea.

Your descendants also would have been like the sand ..."

It is in Isaiah 49, the next Chapter, that we see the remedy, in Isaiah 50, some of the redemption cost to the Lord of truth, justice and righteousness, and in Isaiah 52-53, the mode of transfer of guilt and the opening for pardon by faith, in Isaiah 54 the everlasting character of the love of the God of redemption, where the truth is received and salvation imparted, while in Isaiah 55 the freedom of grace and the non-earning nature of redemption, paid for by God, is declared.

So it was foretold, and so the foundation came at the date appointed in the prophet Daniel (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4). That ? It was God the sent, the sacrificial Saviour as we have just seen in Isaiah 48, where the Lord is one SENT from the Lord God and His Spirit, yes and He, it is He who as Lord has been speaking to Israel, yes He who is the First and the Last (Isaiah 48:12). There is nothing new in the incarnation: it was always in view, right from Genesis 3:15, Genesis 22 and now in Isaiah, as in Psalm 40. God speaks with one voice, as one, and in His Being He consists as three Persons, infinite in intimacy, glorious in integrity, differential in dealing and filled with fellowship both in ordinate and glorious.

Having presented His face for battering, His body for crucifixion, His message for believing and His power for exhibition of goodwill, Christ, the predicted Messiah,  presented His life for reception (John 1:12), and His Person for trust (John 6:47), that sin covered in cancellation through redemption's payment of correct weight, righteousness as a gift might be made (Romans 5:17). With this transfer, the container to hold it needed change, so that there was to be, and was and is, transmutation or regeneration (Titus 3:3-5), so that what was given to deliver, should always be available to correct, in the pardon of peace and the grace of eternal protection (John 10:9,27-28). In this threefold way, redemption, regeneration and sanctification moved also with a oneness that was founded in that of God Himself.

There was glory, in this, that He who made man, became what He had made in form, that is man, that He might inform the deformed and reclaim the lost, regenerate the ruined and enable the impotent.

Even a man knows how to look after the temporal life of his dog; much more the Creator, the spiritual life of what He has made. Dog or man, however, it is necessary first to belong, and when will gets in the way, want follows (Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.), deficiency disease of the soul moving raggedly to judgment, perhaps long delayed with initial intimations and hopes.

PRESENT YOUR STRONG REASONS for divergence, rebellion, wresting your beings from rest and wrestling with your Maker instead of following the verified directions, both past and for further verification, to come. Why do you die ? why do you diversify your spiritual thoughts from objective reality, uniquely verified and instituted from the first for your race ? This is the more trenchant now, since both in Israel and in the Gentile nations, the entire gamut of predictive sovereign has now almost been run. It is said. It happens. Why diverge ?

Yet it is the same love of mercy and for man which proceeds, as ever, for God never changes, and swears that this is so (Malachi 3:6, cf. Psalm 102, Hebrews 1), thus being able to predict in interminable truth, all that is to be from one reality, always in control, never inundated with change, seeing all things from one perspective, that of His own all-inventive Being, always knowing all, never growing into something else, or altering the basis of direction.

If only man had the same steadfastness of character and perspective, not declining from the truth, like a drunken indicator needle on the dashboard, not deluded or delusive! But man rebels, and God challenges not only to return, but to reason. Just as the challenge comes in various forms in these Chapters of Isaiah, so the theme continues, and it is just this:

"PRESENT YOUR CASE ... BRING FORTH YOUR STRONG REASONS. "

Where are the grounds ? let us consider these!

Those words present a challenge as real and durable in result as was that on Mt Carmel when Elijah confronted the illusory power of idols with the intractable power of the living God, where truth is never falsified, this not being its nature!

Tell us in retrospect, in prospect, the Lord challenges, predict, grant knowledge, let all things be before you as you instruct, He chides. Let us see YOU do what is being done continually by your God! (Isaiah 41:21-26, 43:9).

                          Surely there is no one who hears your words."

God in this Chapter, and more expressly in 44-45, predicts the Cyrus deliverer before the exile even commences, and in 42 predicts the Messiah Himself, as in 49, 52-54, the actual sacrifice for sin. Imitate that level of knowledge, wisdom and power! Let us see you do it!

The divine irony is excruciating, like the pain on the Cross. Love exhorts, and love in mercy paid.

There remains the confrontation.

That is a simple challenge. The divine words, as shown for example in SMR Chs.   8 and   9, and in The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet  Ch. 4, are of precisely that stature and character. Other words are not. If so, MAKE THEM and SHOW IT!

Where is science now ? It is merely man's wisdom in terms of one of the methods of gaining knowledge. It is human, and not divine; it is to be sure, the result of the operation of a divine gift, but the user of it is not divine! Far from it is the reality of the born and expiring product of creation called man, continually changing his knowledge, sometimes with what seems an inglorious or even debonair assurance (until next time change is rung).

Such is not the word of the living God. This is the challenge in Isaiah.

The Bible's words and predictions and backward coverages, retrodictions, are almost innumerable. They are not falsified. They remain OVER THE MILLENIA, multiply attacked, singularly repellent of any success for the assailants. They rise only to fall; they seethe only to become sop.

Knowledge falsely so-called, of which misused science is one of the varieties: it can change with such speed, that this or that food wrong yesterday, is marvellous tomorrow, as it is re-scrutinised with much éclat, with first one limited understanding, and then that.

The theories of 100 years ago can be relished with amusement, of a decade ago realised with a sense of the historical, being old in age already; but the words of the Bible, from some 3500 years ago suffer no such come-uppance. After all, this is what is to be evidentially expected when, on the one hand, the speaker is observably man, and man alone, and on the other, the speaker has identified Himself in various victorious and unique manners, as being the God of creation; and then has gone forward in a consistent, coherent and developing context, to develop systematically both the understanding of Himself and of man for man,  and the attestation of both in His own terms! What less would be worthy to stand, and only less would be able to stand

God however takes time like a child, and leads it (cf. Hosea 11!). For a time, at least, as in Hosea, it follows and does what He says, and He sustains it with His arms; for in having created all, He understands all, and foreknowing all, can without compromise of the challenges He has set, the opportunities He has made, open what is to come like a book written.

And so He does.

Indeed, to Israel He undertook to trace its place as a race, and what in Amos 3:7 He undertook to do, He has done with such a style that it is one of the wonders of the world, how it has all unfolded, in detail and in sequence, as He said^*5.

Powers would destroy it, Inquisition, pogrom, abuse for profit as by Louis XIV, Hitler, Stalin, or with profit, as the expropriating papacy: but the afflicted race endures.

Ranges of nations like guns loaded, point at them, but they escape. Religoius empires of billions of people, and available dollars, seek their destruction; but yet they remain, and Jerusalem with them. This is as foretold by Christ (Luke 21:24) and Zechariah 12, when Christ indicated their end of the Age restoration to their city, and when that latter prophet foretold from the time before Christ came, not only that He would be betrayed, but the price to be paid by that traitor to come, in fact Judas Iscariot. Thus as predicted in Isaiah 49:7, is the account of His rejection after He came to this earth, and  that by His own nation! This was and is to be followed  after their return (1948) and the restoration of Jerusalem to them (accomplished 1948, 1967 in total), by their eventual repentance for it!

Nor is Israel alone in this summary of their sententiousness, sentences and follies. The devastating deliverance of itself to death of the Gentile body is as Revelation 6 indicated, death like a horse delivering destruction; and the plethoras of devastations for the world which refuses to believe in what God did last time (Genesis 6, II Peter 3) are likewise foretold by Christ in Luke 21, Matthew 24.

This ? It comes. It has come. It arrives. The word of God constructs man, and then history, and then both happen as commanded; but in the latter, there is the allowance for the point of the issue in the liberty which allows love and the results which attest truth. So does man keep his awful tryst against truth, with fiction, and fallacy rules while beauty is raged against and virtue disdained. Yet some as chldren of God, having returned to that better land (cf. Psalm 143), like Noah, shame those who do not believe. What is done is never impossible!

So all is to be seen.

	Conscience,
	that component of consciousness,
	speaks;
	as truth demands.
	And love invites.

There is no change here.

As to God, His ways are eternal (Habakkuk 3:6). It is because this is so that He demands, asks, beseeches, Return to Me! It is then that He returns to us (Malachi 3:6). It is God who seeks us, but it is we who must come. When we have returned to Him, He is already there.

 The only change needed for man, therefore, is to get into reverse gear, and having returned, to turn around and enter, once and for all (Luke 13:1-3, John 10:8,27-28). Heaven and earth WILL pass away, as Christ quite simply declared (Matthew 24:35): they are struts, of some magnificence, but of no eternity. What will not pass away, it is the word of the Lord. That is what He says; and accordingly, He so acts.

What receives Him likewise will not pass away, but have pass to eternity with all the children of God, with one Lamb, one God, one faith and one result (II Corinthians 5:1ff., John 3:16, I John 5:11ff.).

As to God, it is good to be with Him (Philippians 1:20-21). It is good to be conscious of an eternal ‘tent’ in the heavens, to become manifest in the resurrection (II Corinthians 5), as it were, to be over-coated, not left naked before Him with whom we have to do. When command, consciousness and conscience agree, with history an entranced observer, and the word of the Creator calls, what an office of liberality and love is this!

NOTES

*1

See for example:

 Downfall from Defamation Ch. 2

 Dig Deeper, Soar Higher ... Ch. 2

The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test  Chs.  2,   4

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 1.

*2

See:

The Biblical Workman, Appendix 2 (recently revised and expanded).

This may be pursued for an examination of the god of forces, his various idolatrous emblems and self-expositions, to which men often give the name of 'theories', his expatiation in blood, his dealings with spirit and the human inanity which values such seduction more than marriage, and finds such deletion of destiny more desirable than life itself, by a mere god of misrule, no more imaginary or helpful than sin, or more hypothetical than cruelty, no more choice than the dump or desirable than blood poured on the ground in some ecstatic exhibition of the love of power and force and devastation. This is becoming one of the witless wonders of the 20th -21st centuries, whether in the backward or the forward.

To destroy morally, physically, the aesthetic, the wonderful, the created ?

That, it is easy. Creation itself  is not (cf. Downfall from Defamation Ch. 2, TMR Ch. 1, SMR Ch. 2, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4, 5, 6).

Miscreancy is easy. Ignoring the spiritual schema for life, like disregarding the scope of the other domains of life, is deficit dealing, and of course commendable for the lazy, as attractive to the disingenuous. Righteousness is not; and it is well that it is not, since man without it feels its loss, and some of the race at least, seek God where He may be found, as the gaping chasm in the heart  yearns for more than the fill of the tip, for its content.

He is not to be found impounded by the flitting conscience of man, or the fault planes which he seeks to establish to buttress his soul. He is found where the words are; for with words He made us, and His commands construct us, each one, from birth, in the body. His command instructs us for return to Him, so that our modules, not man-made but man-meddled, should find both their power and their mastery, their source and their destiny, their meaning and their salvation.

This too He has instructed, and the word of the Book which alone is verifiable and valid, remains thus as it always has these thousands of years, with the depiction of the Saviour, Jesus Christ, its central call, and His coming to His glorious return,  its closely predicted focus (cf. TMR Ch. 2,
Ch. 3).

His return is the next! (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). Soon, it will be the last call for those who hear, and do not fear, who shout their own praises, or follow their own book, constructed by imagination and founded on nothing.

*2A

For a list and consideration of methods, see The Defining Drama Ch. 2; and consult SMR pp. 316A, and What is the Wheat to the Chaff Chs.   3 and   4.

For convenience, a short excerpt from the first of these references, follows.

It behoves us then to consider some of the ways in which we think out and discover, and to place these together in their overwhelming testimony, here simply structurally, to the truth.

Such ways include the following categories:

	1) CAUSATIVE
	2) HEURISTIC
	3) STRUCTURAL
	4) RATIOCINATIVE
	5) PRAGMATIC
	6) SCIENTIFIC
	7) MAIEUTIC
	8) PERSONAL

As to the first, the CAUSATIVE, it is an inescapable pre-condition of thought, such that even those who wish to argue against it, use it in their grammatical formulations, conceptual interaction and speech-depiction, in communication and argumentation. In order to invalidate it rationally, you have to become irrational therefore, and hence exclude yourself from effectual argument. See SMR pp. 3ff., 17ff., 81ff., 1113ff., the indexes on causation, and Causes 1.

Reason relishes causation, and irrationality in the muck of incoherence, eschews it futilely.

As to the second method of seeking, the HEURISTIC, it involves the act and attitude of keenly seeking out, eliciting, even soliciting, finding by watching, discovering by looking, considering by estimating and involvement in the world of the empirical, not necessarily material or immaterial, but without bias: whatever has effects.

The third, the STRUCTURAL, goes beyond this. It seeks for the apportionments, the appointments, the structure, in what the coherence consists and has its being.

The fourth, the RATIOCINATIVE, refers to something slightly different from the rational, but inclusive of it, practical with it. It means that you look for the reasonable associations, the inferential, the implicative, the course of procedure: in a way, it is rather like the distinction between structure and function, this being the function aspect.

The PRAGMATIC refers to an attitude in discovery which looks for the results as they impact on oneself, one's tribe, nation, society or fellowship, with perhaps scant regard as to WHY this is so, and with maximal concern THAT it is so. Explanation, in this attitude, can wait until eventuation occurs, is made to occur, or is conserved and activated for the purpose in hand.

The SCIENTIFIC is a structured approach, but not only to the structural. Its view and concern is this: that one STARTS with what occurs, and then in an orderly domain of reasoning, PROCEEDS to WHY this might be so, working in the meantime with due care on systematisation of data, depiction of developments and various devices to help highlight aspects of occurrence, in order to facilitate the operation of reason in seeking an explanation. It now also involves the structural intercourse, intercommunion of past findings with present ones, and all with reason. Not satisfied with this approach yet, it insists on finding what are the implications, the results, the projected consequences of the explanation (called an hypothesis initially) which it makes, and then checking these where the thing is testable (and it normally insists that it BE testable, though at times in prejudice against its own approach, refuses this or that SORT of test).

It then finds the explanation verified, since the thing happens, or not verified, if it refuses to do so.

IF it is unverified, and the projection from the hypothesis is clear, then the theory is wrong, abandoned on site, and another invented, preferably with more data carefully exhumed first, ordered, classified and prepared for thought. In this case, it is always possible that the classification of the data will be based on a theory, and so make one blind to some of it, or it may even lead to falsification, either purposely or through a blind spot in the desire-reason duo.

This is what SCIENTIFIC METHOD ostensibly is, but in practice, as in organic evolution (cf. SMR Ch. 2, TMR Chs.  1,    8, Earth Spasm...    1,   7,  Secular Myths ... Chs.   7,  8, Spiritual Refreshings 6, 13, 16), repeated anti-verifications, where the projected not only does NOT appear, but the opposite, or something wholly dissimilar, may come to be disregarded. This has NOTHING to do with science, and is mere myth, the insistence on a robust desire enshrined in the emotional structures of the mind, without credibility ACCORDING TO THE METHOD.

However, such intrusive vexation of the Method,

which is itself a good one as far as it goes, a worthy contribution to thought, while it can and often does so debase science as to make it a laughing stock at which not so many join, since this failing is usually mystically covered up,

should, and need not do so.

It is not the method but the meddling which brings ill-repute to those ensnared in this cultural invasion of science.

In such cases, it is scientific method which errs, but the anti-methodologists who import their naturalistic religious desire into the realm which excludes it, by anti-verification. It is this which becomes a cult of the forbidden, an irrational desire to exclude the explicatory force of one particular arena of investigation, because of a hallowed religious desire, vested in prejudice, unannounced, irrelevant to truth, except as its enemy. What is true needs no such apartheid, but values competition in open field. Why should it worry: it will win because it has the facts. That however is the trouble: those who disesteem the facts for religious reasons, however repressed these may be in some cases, because of philosophic pets, cannot find.

What, says Proverbs, is the good of money in the hand of fool for wisdom since he has no heart for it. In the Bible, the 'fool' is the foolish one who ignores or rejects God (Psalm 53, cf. Proverbs 17:16).

Quite to the contrary, some of the most famous names in science have used this method duly and truly, men like Maxwell, Boyle, Newton, van Braun, Faraday, Babbage, and in so doing, have contributed vast advance by their invasive ingenuity, in discovery. Their reasonable expectation has become a valued consummation, as they find what they sought, believing that reason has its place where reason dwells, in this universe, that there is reason for this affinity of reason to this other phase of creation, and using it with all diligence, they have found and discovered with a buoyancy bred of well-grounded desire.

Next we come to a somewhat different method, one nevertheless worthy of some esteem.

 

This is the MAIEUTIC METHOD, roughly that of Socrates as exhibited in Plato, and it has an appealing variation from the above, because it is so different; and yet still it relates to one aspect of the reality to be investigated. It is a matter, here, of eliciting from the mind of the one in conversation, this and that principle of procedure, assumption, inference, and so engineering the discussion that it becomes virtually unavoidable to make certain admissions, and to proceed with these as a basis, to certain consequences. There is with this, at least in the historical case of Socrates from Plato, a trend to seek to establish vast currents of thought, making inconsistencies of principle a butt in the process, if by any means some construction which endures may be found, immune to dismissal, and soundly based. As a contributor, such a method has a place.

Lastly, there is the PERSONAL METHOD. In this case, man as a person acts in the integrality (not by any means always the same as 'integrity'!) of his being, and finds what he may. Matter of course is a mere theory of mind, depending for its validity on the latter, while mind is in some ways a dependency of spirit, that power to dismiss its findings, or on the other hand, to endorse them and demand further esprit in a tour de force of some kind or other. In this case, there are intimations, illuminations, realisations, events at the level of individual personality per se: there are conscience, mental and psychic dynamics, disarrays, remedies and the like, for the entire being of man as a personality. What it portends can be considered rationally, and what it does not may be excluded.

These human methods of discovery are not to be confused however, with the domains into which they may proceed. Let us then now list some of the latter.

 

 

Correlative with these methods of thinking and discovery, are the domains of discovery. These are another excerpt from the same Chapter, and follow. Both should be seen in situ for their full treatment.

DOMAINS OF DISCOVERY

This, then, is as distinct from FUNCTIONS of REALITY. This is where it is, not what it is, except for the measure of meaningful designation. Here we have a surprisingly long list.

There are some 16 of these readily apparent, and these we shall seek to arrange in an acronymic format, to aid memory.

First let us simply look for them

There is such a list as this.

	1. PSYCHIC
	2. PHYSICAL
	3. INTERPERSONAL (including friendship, hostility, and the political, social, economic)
	4. RATIONAL
	5. EMPIRICAL
	6. AESTHETIC
	7. MORAL
	8. SPIRITUAL
	9. EMOTIONAL
	10. NOETIC and INTELLIGENT
	10. ASPIRATIONAL
	12. IMAGINATIVE (including both the creative and creativity itself)
	13. METAPHYSICAL
	14. DESIGN DOMAIN
	15. MEMORY FIELD
	16. DIVINE

The order of the listing above  is in some ways a functional one,

enabling one to trace the more readily a series of actions leading to results.

Thus varied indeed are the domains of discovery as are the valid methods of discovering; and if in the hauteur of any one, at any one cultural epoch, the others are disregarded, this merely minimises the richness of human culture, aggravates man's fallen condition, and the better serves the aim of stultification.

*3

See News 19.

The objectivity (cf. Barbs...  7) of moral focus enabled by the fact of God (cf. SMR), becomes the ground of man's empirical responses (cf. News 19). Without this, it is inexplicable, since man is not so mad as to be hoodwinked systematically over all generations, following leaders and thinking their collective resultants to be GOD, or their designs to be 'goodness' so creating the concept; nor so maniacal as to internalise their most varied ideas of oppression into a faculty of subjective slavery. The driving rain of the concept of goodness is not to be associated with a quirk of the fallen, any more than with the ire of the rebel. Its abuse as with the other strengths of man is the point; and as in any other slavery, it may be wrought by direct oppression or by guile.

All kind of reactions to power, merely misused or purely selfish occur; and one of the chief is the offence at the concept of fallen justice, abused truth or crushing disregard of the nature of man. These tend at last to over-ride even where custom conditions and lust devises.

Man does not create the faculty of conscience or the thrust of the desire for goodness (in someone else or in oneself) by periods of intimidation; but rather whether in the rebel, the sloppily acquiescent or the weakly deliquescent, he may abort its leading to avoid peril, increase temporary comfort or secure a place; yet in all this, it is the faculty which is so abused, and not created.

The facility for dysfunction does not arise from nothing, but from an inward awareness, a consciousness of right and wrong, good and bad, which however distorted by confusion or manipulated by foxes, is still the reason for man's vulnerability. To twist an arm, you need an arm, and to twist man's concepts of God and goodness, you need the raw material of awareness in these domains. Otherwise, all attempts would be laughable, except what truth requires and reason attests. A thousand fantasies would collapse if reality were not available both in and beyond man, for imaginative reconstruction, as man flees truth and finding no rest, receives impressions from the impacts of spiritual impresarios, becoming gullible followers of this or that.

In practice, truth and reason are often the enemies of erratic belief systems, as in organic evolution (cf. The gods of naturalism have  no go!), or Communism (cf. News 37, 98, SMR pp.  925ff., Repent or Perish Ch. 7). Indeed, as in the fall of the USSR, disenchantment attested so well in the journalistic report preceding it (The Games War, Christopher Booker), the recrudescence, the restoration of these more apt inward desires may bring down at length the harassments of such fictions. Their claims and names may at first enthrall as other fiction, but less so when reality cuts, immorality soars and clandestine motives become more apparent.

While deludable, man is not left after his dream evaporates, with anything less than a conscience that asserts itself, reason which obtrudes like glowing eyes, reality which insists on verification and an awareness that vile jaunts or virulent dreams alike are to be judged in the light. This is the continual reflex, that beyond mere relief, of duty to truth; and it comes to the many,  however much with cloaks of society or army, priests or prelates, attempts may be  made to hide the spiritual sun and to blur its reflections in reason. It may yet be resisted; but the vulnerability of that anomaly,  man as devil,  is vast in the domain of his various gifts and graces, all subject to operation of truth, contrition, morality, equity and justice.

Man is not so easily duped, and despite his fevers, it is a moral reality which he seeks, to which he alludes, as well as spiritual; and it is this which is so readily derailed, not destroyed, as he jaunts into this or that substitute, easier on the heart, less exacting for the spirit, more pleasant for the prospect of self-will, self-direction and self-fulfilment.

Rather, man equipped with consciousness of God, however much this be perverted, diverted or misdirected,  invents gods at times to cover the case, repositories of his philosophy, emblems of his desire, projections of his aspirations or butts of his wit, sanctioned into existence by florid joys, bewildered hope or evil intentions: and there is no essential difference in this respect between the rambling nebulosities within Buddhism (cf. SMR pp. 925-1026), Nazism, Communism, New Age humanism (cf. SMR pp. 867ff.) or the re-inventions of the Bible found in liberalism (SMR pp. 68ff., 367ff.).

Gifted to invent, brightened with imagination, man not only creates in the full joy of his constructions before the One who created both him and his gifts. He desecrates also, as a miscreant; and sometimes, in his jaded spirit, takes joy in rampaging against truth, as did Nietsche, who however became literally insane.

Man's gods of forces (1.v.) or features or passions, animated whether by hope or by despair, gain hold not because man is mad - for in much mankind remains of sound mind, but because the diversion of reality and its corresponding detectors in man, is an attestation of estrangement from God. The one feeling jilted, because rebellious, readily becomes the spiritually wilted, and this, subject to disease.

This being a twist from truth, becomes an instability in life, like the motion of a car with one tyre missing. One may wonder how so much that is excellent could be so diverted so far; but when thought arises, it is easy to see that it is precisely the power in the product, the car, and the error in the method of running, the missing tyre, which creates the virtually predictable havoc!

The distortions of mental motion, the riots of imagination, these come with a force which in its basic thrust, rushes into whatever is around: irrationalities abound, obfuscations ferment (cf. SMR pp. 422Eff., 422Qff.), often in societies as well as individuals.

None stand up to reason, or are warranted by it; but all have their inventory of desire or their repositories of concern.  For this reason, and because God is not the subject of human invention, but man the object of divine creation, these mislead. Indeed, these foul up man's ways with considerable facility,  and it would be beyond even the amazing, such are the unfounded nebulosities irreconcilable with reason and evidence alike to which man in religion and philosophy is prone, if it were not that man is gullible because he rejects the God whom he will not bear. So is he diverted, like fast traffic, into some other lane. There he speeds, often without concern, except to escape into a liberty which is not thus to be found; for the ditch leaps to his field of vision, as his erratic steering and desperate avoidance comes to its due grief.

This is the simple but most adequate answer to those who ask how anyone of any intelligence could possibly even consider seriously many of the philosophies, and any of the sects. In this is verified, in this stunning instance of the embracement of the erratic, the ground of the action, accounting not only for the degree of folly, but the extent of it in those willing victims of such harassment.

It is because inward being and outward attestation alike are overwhelming in their attestation of the true God (cf. SMR), that perversion of these functions is man is so easy, so disastrous and so much like fermenting wine in the result. Without a stomach, food has little appeal; but when it is present, amazing fare may be consumed when appetite becomes passion.

Despite such errors, even at that, man's conscience is not to be so confined. Compunction and anguish still move, and revulsion does not at once lose its way in man, even in the worst of the irrationalities or the most lurid of the sacrifices to be made. Hard do some work to continue the harassment and to further foster the asininities of much of mankind.

There is in man an insurgency for what is right, readily seen when others do not meet this implicit standard; and there is a quest for goodness of which cynicism is largely the frustrated resultant (cf. SMR Ch. 3). How this is so is correlative to all the other spheres of enquiry, and hence confirmed empirically and logically!  For this, see SMR Ch. 5.

How rabidly are all brakes thrown away in many for a time, and in more for eternity"  This is the contrary labour, and it is a measure of the passion for autonomy, for which read slavery, and for the love of flight from God, as if speed with anodyne and saviour jointly.

Yet while billions are swallowed up, millions do not return to their vomit.

Conscience is correlative to consciousness.  Both aspects of the spirit of man in its functionalities are derivative from what enables the one, requires the other and both categorically and collectively explains both, both in their institution and their pathology.

Some of the positive outcomes and incomes with the negative, will be pursued, DV, in the next Chapter.

*4

In one place in that set, we have this summary (Ch. 1), adjusted slightly for our present purpose:

This scope  is not only unique, like the heavens covering all.

The Biblical model, depiction, perspective, coverage and declaration is not only this, but also changeless in basis and uniform in application. It goes far further even than that! It in fact leaves all  clear where the only other options become befuddled mud-slides of misdirected muddle, scenes of constantly changing anguish, scenes of defeated if blustering hope amid elemental irresolution.

The uniformities imagined, outcomes of the opposite in  model, do not occur; the prodigies of order, do. The Cosmological Assumption is merely the butt of derision, constantly overturned by that nightmare of philosophical science, one from which it seems determined not to awake, fact (cf. TMR Ch. 7, Section E). This is merely one of the snafus that laugh at pride.

As noted on a former occasion:

It is important to realise continually that the reason why the reason for the faith is certain, its testimony indefeasible, is this, that its basis is  God Himself, to whom it points, directs and impels. It is because He is immutable, immovable, unimpugnable, illustrious and good that the epistemological, logical, metaphysical, physical, moral, aesthetic, linguistic, cosmological, aetiological, methodological - scientific and other, that the vitality and the validity have but one resting place, one source and one end.

Just as many in Christ's day sought to find refuge not direction in the scriptures, failing to follow them to Him who had given them, along with life, as their historical and national, their mankind manual, and this disclosed a failure to act which He attested as seen in John 5:39-40:  so some may instead seek to find substitute for spirituality in the testimony of reason to righteousness, of logic to the Lord. While their minds may rattle off creeds, however true, their hearts may yet look on from a distance. This is the dilemma of dither instead of the deliverance of dynamic. While only God can transform the heart, yet He is not in the least deaf.

Reason does but lead to His word and His word requires ACTION. So too the word of God leads to Him; but its injunctions require RECEPTION ... of Him as Saviour and Lord, not begotten of the mind of man, in its spurious, furious transformations, but with power to transform man himself (cf. I Peter 1:10ff.). Thus we come to two pathologies.

In neither case in itself,  therefore is there rest, not because either fails, for reason can but attest the truth, being established in this way for man in God's image and the word of God is not there as a mere spectacle, but a prescription providing free restoration of spiritual health. Mere observation will not suffice. Reason will not suffer such violation, while the word of God manifests its splendour on a daily basis in all dimensions, directing the universe in life as it directed life into it, and made it for it at the first.

No, it is because the testimony of our construction and our functionalities on the one hand, and of His word to us on the other, the one refusing to be alienated except by irrationality, the other except by the ultimate and foreknown rejection of rebellious will, are from Him, that man in enigmatic withdrawal or plain rebellion falls foul into the pit.

It is all from what He has done. He made us, so that our best efforts in alienation fail to justify departure, and in self-will merely make a mound dug, where a mountain everlasting is the inheritance needed.

He gave His word, which being truth, stands beyond all testimony and banishes all complaint, except that of stark rebellion, aloof and alone like darkness in a universe of light, hiding in some insalubrious corner. The time is near when such privacy will be removed and, the light manifest, all will be composed spiritually, each part in its place.

It is now therefore time to seek the Lord, and according to His word, by His Son sent for the purpose, to find Him (Isaiah 55). It is living in the living God which is crucial: there is not any other, and He is definitive of Himself both in His written and His living word. There is no other way, God or truth, no other hope, nothing hallowed. It is Jesus Christ or nothing (John 14:6, Galatians 1), the Lord's Christ or woe; and finding Him, like life as a child in the outset, is something which is His gift. You do not try your hand at altering your nascent form, as the embryo departs the womb and comes to the table. Yet many are never satisfied, even there (cf. Hebrews 6 and 10).

His word is given that He may be found, and His Son has been sent that the cost is covered for all who come (John 3:16). The way is won, the job is done: it needs to be entered, and with the transmutation of life which then occurs (John 3, Titus 3:5ff.), followed faithfully. HE is faithful.

Indeed, as He gives His power, illumination and enablement to write, as here, reason for the faith, and to answer challenge, so He gives to those who serve Him, what is needed (Psalm 145:18-19) in their various appointments; and as He disposes to service so He is disposed and brings dynamic to enable it.

HE is the LORD!

Such things are specified in detail in the scope of the systematically defined chapters of

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST,

covering basic features, one at a time, in their startling strength and glorious composure.

*5

See on this site:

His Wounds Opened Eternity Ch. 3, 

It Bubbles Chs. 10  -11,

SMR Ch. 9,

Earth Spasm ... Ch. 5, .  

Israel Ch.   1(Review),

Red Alert Ch.  10 (Review in broader perspective),

Gracious Goodness and This World in Disorder! Epi (brief coverage in verse),

Let God be God Ch.  4 (Review - its meaning, purpose and historical significance).