W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for this Volume What is New
Chapter Three
THE BLIGHT OF BABES
It is not so rare, even nowadays,
for women and even others to be delighted
at the very sight of a babe.
Much is done to them as they grow.
The delight is not without reason, nor is the action without result.
It is only God who can intervene, but He has many agents.
News 405.
The Australian, October 4, 2008
WINDING UP WHAT IS UNWOUND
In a babe, there is, without doubt, enormous potential: an Einstein, a Picasso, one of the Wright Brothers, Michelangelo ... who knows what Shakespeare might leap into life ... but not suddenly.
It will take time. In that time there are processes to be wrought, first into being, and then into skilled performance. Embryo, then babe, then progression, pointed, overseen, grand in conception, excellent in performance, mighty in midgetry, with finesse in finality.
In Psalm 139, you find for verse 16, this point:
"Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed,
and in Your book they all were written,
the days they should be fashioned,
when as yet there were none of them."
Thus, as the KJV correctly indicates, it is the unformed members which are assaulting the astonished attention, the wonder and the marvelling of David, and their programmed organisation is uppermost in his mind, as he regards the Craftsman and what is to be crafted as time rolls on, not in new plans, but in the due, the very due fulfilment of what is laid down as a program, yet with provisions for vitality in its modes at the first, and use at the last.
The substance is pondered, the modes of development, members in train, before in training, to BE before to be used.
Then comes the "days" notation. Yet "days" in any normal sense occur as a sequence focus for the action of the verb.
Organised, like the parts to-be-developed, and for them, they are in a time-product ordained system. The members, not yet formed in the early embryo, a substance, a blob perhaps it might seem, but actually a decisively dynamised and organised spot of wonder with amazing intricacy, delicacy of motion and complexity, was not equipped with those flexible members, our arms, legs, head and neck, far less sinews and connectors like vertebrae.
Yet from this 'substance' there are to come 'members', those with which the active man can build and construct, write and exercise surgical skill, move mountains; and this not directly, but with hand and mind conjoined to imagination in a world with potential for manipulation, like building blocks, but ah! so exceedingly magnificent in potential for action.
Not there at the first, these members have a routine, a regimen, as it were a notice-board in the hands of an invisible foreman, who knowing the work for each day, ensures that it is done, the labourers (protein folding, we learn and shall consider, is wrought by actual mini-molecular machines in the body), the supplies, the chronological succession in which the one has access at the right moment to the other, the plans and specifications and so on ... all come. They are like friends: they visit and act, and then are replaced by other works of the day till the time comes, and it is evening.
Let us glance in passing at this protein folding, and copying mode, the BUSINESS of such things. In 1999, this news item appeared in Answers in Genesis, and at the time of writing it may be seen at -
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i2/focus.asp#dating
The red colour is for emphasis only.
Planned ‘super-computer’ slower than real life
IBM plans to spend $US100 million building a new ‘supercomputer’ to simulate a basic biological process — protein folding. Proteins (e.g. insulin) are assembled as long chains, which then must fold into the correct three-dimensional shape in order to perform their function. As simulating this basic life process is beyond the reach of contemporary computing, the ‘Blue Gene’ supercomputer is being built to run 500 times faster than the world’s fastest computer today.
It is expected to take five years before the supercomputer will be ready to tackle the ‘grand challenge’ of protein folding. And even if everything works as planned, it will still take Blue Gene about a year to run a computer simulation of the folding of a single protein. How long does it take living cells to actually fold one? Less than a second!
As one IBM researcher noted, ‘It’s absolutely amazing, the complexity of the problem and the simplicity with which the body does it every day.’
New York Times, <http://www.nytimes.com/>, December 6, 1999.
New Scientist, December 11, 1999, p. 8.
Denton, as we saw in The Bible: Not the Declamations, or the Distillations of Man, but the Doctrine of Deity, Ch. 4, gives a more wide-ranging introduction to this field. The work of Denton in view is this: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. The excerpt from The Bible: Not the Declamations ... is slightly varied for this present purpose.
What is NOT found, Denton affirms, is any gradualism in the components! Fitted complete, they function at once in a functional domain germane to perfection (Ch. 14 Denton op. cit.).
If you are wise and of a status superior to what you are using, what need for experiment when you create, what call for a long list of lack-lustre failures on the way, for erratic methods of 'speech' in your codes, semantics in its assessment and implementation and oddities of transition! These things are what is not found, and it confounds what envisages what lacks these powers. That is direct verification of the logical necessities noted, and direct refutation of other types of accounting. Divine creation is not an option. It happened.
Indeed, God is not man that He should flutter or fail (cf. Let God be God! esp. Ch. 2 , SMR).
In fact, the shores of history are distinctive in this: there is no example of tentative transition, bits and pieces like paper thrown in frustration into the waste paper basket, or blown there by the winds which leave the desk a mess. There is no such litter on the littoral of history. There is no evidence of a wisdom in development by trying hard, or ludicrous forgings in the domain of mentality by non-mental ingredients into practical outcomes!
Boeings do not take off without power, and their conceptual brilliance does not come without constraint; nor do aerodromes 'arise' for correct weight provision. No cosmos of technology, of discipline, whether mental or physical or material or spiritual, invents or induces what it lacks. The confusion is so obvious, but it has become endemic in poisoned, late-era culture, as foretold in the Bible (cf. II Peter 2-3). The general thrust of such delusions is to make miracles of invisible transitions to 'arise' from marvels of absent relevant powers so that present attestations of style and power and method might be denied, so that reason is scarcely relevant any more. It is like an obsessively rebellious school class: reason is the more hateful since the desire is the more clamant!
What is, works. What works is not micro-biologically sequential in mode, but decisively typed in kind (cf. Denton, op. cit., pp. 304ff., 290, 280, 302). Order and hierarchy are the nature of the impress of authority that accompanies the modalities of the code. Things are categorically grouped, discursively compacted as by an engineering brilliance, using now this and now that feature with a fluency of thought both astonishing and delightful. Happenings are as far from the case, as in any other book, from any other writer, whose rationality and organisation are prominent. There are the considerations both of style, grace, fluency and content, organisation, efficiency, sufficiency, error. It is so except in this, that the divine creation vastly surpasses all other comparisons in terms of the creativity of man.
The creativity that man has in thought, style, concept, requires a creativity far greater to induce the operational function of our own. This is in a new cosmos as we shall see, for there is a conjunction which even surpasses the wonder of each part and facility.
As to that then, it provides an a fortiori argument, for the more amazing (though decisively lesser than those of the Creator of man) are man's creations, the more extensive his knowledge, the more correlative his savoir-faire to that which is inherent in his own construction, the more staggering is his type, read 'kind', as a product, then the produndity increases. The more impressive is man's design, his creativity itself sourced in sufficiency for the purpose, the more sheer is the vertical ascent to the Almighty Creator which such an empowered race as mankind categorically implies. It is easier to BE than to create; and when what IS has eminence, what MAKES IT SO has transcendent eminence.
Denton is almost eloquent on this irrelevance of 'chance' (op. cit. 312ff.), as he surveys almost endless seeming fields, convergent on order, control, constraint, impact by impress in the world of life. Even from a mathematical point of view, simultaneous combinations of prodigies of co-operation in marvels of construction with celllular engines and motors of conveyance and energy sources specified and integrated into the whole, for each cell, with combinations for each organ and the totality in its integrality; and even within one cell, these things compared in complexity to New York city, to be correlatively abstracted into existence in simultaneity is like asking for a city to be built and organised into operational sufficiency and efficiency so that it IS a city, and this without intelligence. This is simply to deny to intelligence its nature, to design its definition and to reality any differentiation from fantasy.
It is not merely that it does not happen, is a mathematical absurdity, but the REASON for this exhibits still more the folly: it is that given systems have to possess what it takes to construct machineries of composition at a level outside their own operation, and matter is not found to be of this type in evidenced capacities, design provisions or actual occurrences. Whipping a dead horse may be fun to the exasperated, but it will never bring it to life.
In fact, it is necessary to reflect, the things described, they are the perquisite of creation, not indeed of some elevated spectre crying to creation to come along, like a boss with his puppy, for the work is DONE already, and not evidenced in contemporary continuity (cf. News 57, Ch.2 above, *7). Just as chance is divorced (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs. 7 and 9), so is acute intellection and discrete deposit attested; and this, it is not something continually moving as an influence, but not now proceeding, though once articulate in construction and the provision of processes. That is the nature of creation. You are doing it or not; when you do, its products roll off; when you are not, it is as absent as a breeze for the ship of the Ancient Mariner.
Continuity (that is, merging movement from this lower type of biological unit to some higher one, in terms of specialisation and functional complexity and ability) has a place for its existence. Where is this then ?
It is found, Denton declares as an observational biologist and micro-biological specialist, in summary, this continuity of living forms, this merger from below to above, "never" in nature, but has its place "in the mind of man." That is caustic wit and apt.
In Hallowed be Thy Name, Ch. 9, we have perhaps some more recent findings yet.
BINDING UP WHAT IS UNBOUND
DESIGNER LIVING - ITS PRACTICE
Man’s design is so mathematically brilliant, the billions of cells so punctiliously wrought in assembly-line procedures, with goods in and product out not only arranged, but various tasks assigned to MOTORS to get them done quickly, all keyed into the overall schema, that it is not really very interesting to consider further whether there could be some magical way in which some designs created others. Using multiple motors to supply, to match, to fold proteins, with all the commands in one language, the programmatic building and maintenance proceeds. In practice, codes just don’t adjust to each other, choose one language and co-ordinate. They must be created, unified, deployed and their results integrated with a forceful unity. This is the innovative work for imaginative intelligence.
Dreams are not good at engineering. In practice LOTS of designs work hard together to enable other designs to be formed, all being coded so to do simultaneously or in sequence, as befits the case; and except for the brilliant way this is done in the body, it is just like other designs, from the bottom to the top, integrated, time-coded, products interactive and the like. This one sings in symbols.
In Hallowed be Thy Name Ch. 7, we have further specifications in view:
Not even a sparrow is insignificant to the Author of life and thought and mind and spirit! Gifted with this élan vital that makes of it one of the units of life, it has this licence for order, that composition in biotics, that conception in integrality which makes it to be what it is, a magnificent totality of creation: and this is one of the least. It is this, and not at all an assemblage of the artless, or a congregation of the uncomprehending.
A veritable depiction of desire, it is wrought in code, taught in orders and manufactured in sequence, with the meta-coding (not really scrap DNA after all, but intensively sophisticated correlatives, like a book provided for know-how on working the thing, but set to its data base programmatically) symbolising thought about HOW*1 the information is to be applied. This is rather like a library resource on the topic of code, drafted in correlation with symbolic unity, composed in sympathy with what is already there, required at every point to meld with the existing codes, the more to interpret their needs and apply their requirements both in language of the same kind, with the same 'syntax' correlatives, in order to work. So does what is conceived in unity as a meta-information base, work together with what is its butt or base in the working field, code directives, protocols with code programs, effecting the joint elaboration of intelligence for the unitary results called creatures.
It is of these that man is one, in that he is created; and assuredly he is neither fish nor fowl, nor animal nor bacterium, but man himself, gifted with symbolic code comprehension, to read it as in DNA and to speak it as in Shakespeare, to be the subject of drama, as dangers are met in his body, and the draftsman of it, as he invents situations and marshals intelligence to obtain spiritual vision, whether disastrously for evil, or deftly for good.
All this resides in Tower One, and with it far more, for here we envisage the very wisdom of God. It drafts bodies and minds, it invents freedom units called spirits, it sets limits, it enlarges vision, it enables dreams, whether psychic or architectural, philosophic or ethical, but it does not force.
Scientific writing on the topic is found in *1 of the same Chapter, with further considerations of consequences.
FINDING OUT WHAT IS UNFOUND
(cf. Romans 1:17ff.)
A section expatiating in the above area is here cited, slightly adapted to our present purpose. A look at non-protein-coding DNA, once deemed junk, is entrancing in this, that it shows both the prodigious wisdom of its construction, and the correlative dunce-cap situation for those who called a marvel of meta-information, meaningless without close and intimate correlation with the information of DNA itself, in effect rubbish. It is rather like a Grade 1 student calling Einstein a gibbon with gibberish (if he could think of that).
This is unlike the DNA pre-occupation, for it must be said in support of this comparison, that it is exceedingly precise, complex and matches its precision with unification of extravagantly intricate collated processes. The intricacy and correlation patterns now reach astronomical proportions, but at the miniaturized level, like a celestial system translated into cellular terms.
Indeed, as Williams has it in his stimulating article in Journal of Creation Vol 21 (3), 2007, there is such a concentration in the once ludicrously misnamed 'junk DNA', such drafts of information, meta-information, information about information, operational information, directions or orders on how to use the information in the much smaller encoding part of the DNA; there is such a multiplication of copies, copying methods, overlays and inlays, twistings up and unravellings to a point for minute, code-controlled selective transcription for various purposes, that once more the response is awe.
Thus there is a marvellous magnification of diversity in the case of one specimen, say man, relative to another, say ape. Multiplied millions of differences diverge into whole highways of specific diversities, where controls on controls and information to direct usage make much of little. It is the same of course in electric motors which can use machinery in varied ways, depending on the design of the motor, the layout of the object involved and its total relationship to the whole.
But the DNA ? is it a god ? Of course not! for it is a varied marvel of multiplied instructions with magnification through programmed availability of minutely directed subsidiaries which move to meet the programmatic whole in an integrated design of thrusting parts which interweave and unravel on command, which edit, which delete, which proceed at this or that rate, and in the industry of the infinitesimal make and construct here this, there that, this simultaneously with that, this in order to be ready for that, in such a myriad-formed complexity that the simplicity of the result is a relief. You have man's body with God's mind having contrived the methods of having it self-replicating as one whole, by dual means, man and woman, as if to underline the liberty of the Lord in securing two such magnitudes of system, which can with freedom of will, then interact by desire to produce another design.
God's mind ? But of course. Mind and mind alone has the sense of symbolism, integration of specifics by order, magnification of mentality by creative contrivance, unification of the result by over-arching vision which leads to orders which lead to entities through command, which lead to operating creations which lead to operations in man's case called thought, which is not controlled because it is capable of wilfulness, error, purposive error, intentional obfuscation for security reasons, from itself, from others, from God, or from all.
Here are the individual variabilities of the personal, and nothing else. It has its own cosmos, and were it determined, it would be an exclusion of truth to know it, for the determination would be the decisive factor, and the nature of this would be not only, in such a case, unknown but unknowable since it controls in that case, the thought itself.
Nor is it chance, since the purposive is as integral and ordered, at will, as the body, and is as vulnerable to disease as is the body; but is as effective, when directed according to design, as the body. The habiliments of design are its dress, and its vulnerabilities its liability.
Validity of the thought of man does not depend on actuality of physical equipment, since this is ordered, and orders, as such, are not in the field of comprehension but a matter for apprehension. A valid mind with valid exposure to actual truth itself is possible only when truth absolute exists, and is willing to divulge itself, and having done so, is available as such. Without that, the mind is merely a receptor-deployer of thought and will, with no knowledge of actuality, only of events. The personal divulgement is a pre-condition of knowledge, since only this can filter the follies, enlarge the unknowns, overcome the diffractions and restore from the inbuilt refractions of reality to which all is prone, and the psyche of man especially, as it roves, raves or misbehaves in fitful prejudice or flowing fantasy, to which most clearly, 'science' is not immune!*1
When this becomes a philosophy that events are the nature of mind, then of course this is self-contradictory, since if they were, it could neither be known nor true if it were, since on this model, truth itself is assumed not to exist.
However, mind has its deployment functions, and logic being one of these, always testable, its application to the evidence produces results that are in turn testable at the ultimate level, by another design of God: His word for reading (DNA being His word for ordained doing). His word for reading does not have to be done but SHOULD be. That is the difference. Default terms in the design when it is not done are numerous, multi-faceted, and occur slowly, speedily or are arrested by the One who made the programs, at His will.
It is not and cannot be events that manufacture truth, but these may express it. What happens is not why, or what. It simply does it.
What it is that is its manufacture and meaning, point and pith, this has to be found.
When a non-self-contradictory approach is in view, then you proceed on the logical requirements of what is, to the necessary conclusion and conclude with this, that the ONLY way you COULD be right comes when you take logic as valid, its deployment as truth-relevant because truth is available and extant, and trying this which is what is done normally anyway, find that it points to the Bible. This in turn exposes by its own verifiable word, testable truth from the Knower of Truth, who is Himself absolute, having made all things dependent that they, as derivatives might, should ascertain from Him what it is. The Bible having by this method and at this point been confirmed as valid, verified and in essence necessary, this points to Jesus Christ as Truth Incarnate, God in flesh.
It is here that resolution comes of all logical problems, empirical ones and psychic ones. All is explained in this way, without residue. This is not to say that now man knows all, but this he knows, that in Biblical terms, resolution is total, and when is found, it uniformly continues to verify. Then you have an open mind and a closed result.
See further on Design and Designer in Ch. 8 below.
Added to the fearfully complex and fascinatingly brilliant arrangements and provisions in the cell, quite apart from the numerous different cell types, there is the phenomenon of protein-folding motors. In an article on the virus, in Journal of Creation 22 (1), 2008, it is found that this type of body has, for cells, an enormously powerful packaging motor to deal with DNA, a molecular motor that enables fast packaging into small spaces by variable speed activity, adaptable to need. This focus on pathological brilliance (a curse is a curse, unless annulled) leads on, in the article by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, to the consideration of other molecular machines.
Thus DNA must be unwound (it has two strands) for copying purposes, and a fast molecular motor is needed for this. So complex is the operation, various dangers of sticking and confusion being in view, that it is a marvel of multiple accessories, with accessory proteins helping. Then there is the copying machine ...
In fact, we learn from the article by Williams, that there are least 100 bits of meta-information, information about information, for every piece of primary (protein coding) information. What a junket had the non-coding equipment in DNA as junk! How amazing is it that people WILL so readily IMAGINE that huge contracts of action 'happen', when the moment they themselves try to program (in which action the 20-21st centuries have become replete), every concept, every code, every quaver of a format is crucial, and bugs exist to bring the mighty to confusion, to make hours, days or weeks of research necessary until one finds that littlest feature, that forgotten clash of concept or precept or symbol, that was omitted in the creation of the code.
OF COURSE it all needs action and knowledge and mental capacity to resolve, review, consider, compare, contrive, imagine, and the spirit of adventure and creativity and pursuit. It may require more; but not less. Information has to 'arrive' from the mind that makes it, the empirical reality, and to be reviewed in its various formats, forms and formulae, for sufficiency, efficiency and relevance to purpose, and mini-purposes have to be mated with maxi-purposes to ensure integration of action and result.
Vast recesses of cellular information are needed to carry out many of the processes which many seem to have imagined 'just happened'. There is nothing that just happens when maximally miniaturised, minimally inefficient, marvellously scrutinisable, ultra-mathematical maestro work is in view. It is TOLD what to do, and in the doing of it, there is information about how to get it done, how fast and with provisions for variability to meet the diverse operating conditions.
Moreover, as pointed out by Williams, since hundreds of deleterious mutations occur for any which could conceivably be helpful (such as in the famous sickle cell anemia case, re malaria inhibition - actually a degeneration, information-wise), then the human race is in the process of dying out: degeneration is the maximal, and it is marring more and more genes continually. Net loss is vast, cumulative and accumulating. What do you expect ? magic! that a design does not wear when subjected to cosmic rays, caustic psyches, physical cruelty, amazing tensions, refusal to be serviced by the maker, and here in particular, rebellion and autonomy, delusion and dichotomy from the Deity! Is the scientistic so to rule the majority of scientists and their woeful followers in folly (outside the rigors of scientific method as in *1 below ), that delusion has its very masterpiece ? It is not just the scientists, but that breed is in this no better than others.
But let us move from all of these wonders (the body is "fearfully and wonderfully" made, as David declares so accurately in Psalm 139), and the mind likewise, its very licence and liberty its danger as in any created marvel not absolutely programmed - to the next phase upward. Indeed, even with what would be utterly programmed, the program itself is subject to the deteriorations that due diligence must find and remedy.
MINDING AND BINDING WHAT IS MEANT
Thus in The Australian, October 4, 2008, we find some recent research being announced on the topic of children learning languages. Here is one more aspect, this time in the realm of mentality, of the devices and designs, provisions and potentials, structures and strictures resident in that non-man-made marvel, mankind. He is as far as a spawn of nothing as of nothing much. He is fathered by his infinite superior, whose abilities extend to the creation of his own, the installation of the mensurations, indications, applications, formulations, formulae and facilities, so that they may not only work, but be worked, and misworked or marvellously employed, deployed or annoyed. Such is the work of spirit, for the angelic or the devilish, in its own mode. Such is man.
Thus we move from the instructed machinery of DNA, to the constructive provisions for language. The former is given, so that we do not intervene or interfere (in any direct fashion), and the latter is a facility, a potential, an operative medium for the exercise of desire and will and endurance. Muscles are similar, being in general readily built up by EXERCISE. So is language. But as the muscle must first be installed with its design devices of fibres and tendons, bone proximity and neurological supplies with a central information bureau with access to and by will, for the use and deployment in the designed medium called man, so the mentality in its learning mode has to have all the paraphernalia of properties suitable for the working of the whole with functionality to ... know, recall, review, realise, concatenate, disjoin, rejoin, form and reform, originate and disseminate.
Language is a multi-functional task, that moves in many dimensions, and requires multiple support and foundations.
Thus this is in another cosmos entirely from mere extension of the power and size of a contrivance for action, intricately mutually involved as tht is with others tissues and organs. Here it is not action in space that is in view, but cerebrally recorded NEW material, that is the building up of intelligently formed and formatted symbols in the matrix of language for the deployment of will in its purposive, spiritual dimensions and depths that require in reciprocity, all kinds of nuances, flavours, indications, intimations in the linguistic medium, like a harp with a mind of its own, to be employed.
Why matrix and its master ? It is because in language in that site called man, it is easy to ignore the fact that 'just learning' is far from being more than a facile interpretation. You have to have:
 |
1) an awareness of symbols as a distinguishable
entity (words are symbols). |
|
|
2) a power to record these in memory. |
|
|
3) a capacity to interpret to what they refer. |
|
|
4) a facility to combine them in symbolically
significant syntax. |
|
|
5) an ability to see dangers in confused, inexact
or improperly construed syntax, and the will to avoid it. |
|
|
6) a function of constructing the 'cells' of
words in the 'tissue' of semantics, via syntax. |
|
|
7) imagination which can rove from your known
areas to any unknowns to which the symbols (words) may refer, and to combine
research into data areas with recording of symbols for reference to these. |
|
|
8) capacity to separate species of symbols, and
their special usages (as in poetry, or scientific formulations), and to become
aware of their modes of individuality of use. |
|
|
9) understanding of topics, actions, combinations
of space-time-action-purpose situations so that symbols covering these in different combinations may be discerned as fitting for that cosmos of comprehension. |
|
|
10) will to penetrate the obscure, simplify the
confused, research the symbols, the arenas to which they refer, and to refine understanding and symbol simultaneously or at least in mutual array. |
This is merely a simple first approach to the topic of learning language. You have to be able to detect what is meant and to seek to interpret why it is meant, the context of thought and action in which it is bent, and hence to receive you have to perceive, and for this, you need imagination and a discerning spirit.
Now research, we learn from the news item noted above, at Macquarie University is being directed to finding out why children perform language learning so QUICKLY, compared with adults. To assist with that project, they plan to employ or deploy a device apt for the realm of MEG: that is, magnetoencephalography.
Processor Stephen Crain was reported to declare this: "All children, regardless of where in the world they come from, are born with an understanding of how human languages operate." This was a prelude to talk of the machinery by which they hope to gain information on why it works so well with them, compared with those of later age.
Thus the obvious is now stated. You cannot DO something without the means. You cannot THINK without some form of logic, which includes the power to associate word and action in a causal manner, so that a name can be assigned to what does this when that happens, and has this at that stage and so on, rather than simply throwing symbols at a thing, as though its performance did not relate to its provisions, and the symbols (words) did not relate to perspicuity on the part of the observer, who has perspicuous things (by THEIR nature) to which to relate his/her nature, so that the operation might be fruitful in naming and knowing and acting.
Similarly, when you learn language, you do not just deposit (like a dollar in a bank account) a bit of information into a mental cupboard. The 10 points above show just a few of the operative needs in order to DO this. Like the motors for DNA unwinding or copying, so the mental motors, or better perhaps, the mental governances to function in these areas have to be PRESENT. Performance requires means; a given cosmos of action requires a suitable means; language requires varieties of understanding, comprehension, structure analysis and so on; and however little some may use these facilities, language arises to its zenith, because both of the structure (the equipment, mental and physical, volitional and motivational) to treat it, and the animus, the spirit to use that structure.
Damage either and you may be in for trouble! Esprit and body, conditions and code with imagination and drive, all are needed.
Children are indeed born with an understanding of how human language operates, as Professor Crain is reported to have stated. Indeed, this is a means of communication which enables inter-personal action, permits reception-expression to engage, and is one of the chief human features altogether, other means being more of a symbolic-action correlation type, without abstract capacity to analyse language as such and become creative in its devices, in principle as distinct from practice.
This is as real as having a leg, or hand, or liver, or brain. A brain understands nothing. It is a device to enable manipulation of thought and symbol, purpose and imagination, and to enable memory and transposition of thoughts into codes that can also be remembered and worked on. As in cell motors, you need mental motors, this time not of a physical but cogitational character. There must be ability to understand, to criticise, to evaluate, to innovate, to compare thoughts and actions and thoughts with thoughts and relative linguistic devices both with reality and their own structure and kind, and to build perspectives and tools for action. The spirit of man is the cosmos worker in this realm, just as the brain is the cosmos enabler for memory and action (cf. consciousness*2).
Children are born with this. It is part of being human to have a spirit. Animals have ectypes, as we have noted, that is, integral capacities to act as individuals as well as types, to be something distinctive overall, and to operate with mental as well as physical strength in the domain accorded: they are not systems alone, but life. They are moreover, not life in general (though in general it has many common features, as does the work of other creative authors), but in particular, and within this, capable of being endowed with decisive individuality.
As to man, he has spirit as well, that conscious, cognitive, alertly intellectual, imaginatively discursive, facilely interpretive, deeply scouring, lightly arising, dextrously devising, innately personal, misdirectible, personally corrigible, often wilfully incorrigible and God-relating power which, however disabled by folly and generations of culture infection, is still operative in its own cosmos.
The spirit and the language of a child are closely wedded, as are its body and this world. There is a trilogy: spirit, body, mind, meeting the world. The results are capacious, illuminating and sometimes expressive of obstinate, obdurate blindness, because of motivation, perspective and desire, as at others, of driving thrust and delighted aptitude, grasping as it were, out of the air the things to be seen before they come, or at that very instant, such is the spiritual effervescence. Then, in such a case, comprehension roves even ahead of its stimuli of sight, and moves in the rapt silences of understanding and vision.
All these things are part of the child. The linguistic is partner to the logical cosmos and the lyrical one, the metaphysical and the musical, the poetic and the creative whether in form, thought or device.
A child is thus a prime exhibit of creation: for it not only IS created, and IS creative, but is dowered with the MEANS, the structure, the facilities for and the abilities in the structure, albeit a MENTAL structure correlative to a physical means one in the brain: so that in its created creativity, it has power to be creative about the way in which it gains the implements of creativity - viz. language, thought trains, thought retention, perspective, and addresses truth.
What a pageant of marvels is the child. Not only is there the physical unwinding and unravelling, rebinding and arrival of structure by command, in stages by command, in chronological niceties of complexities arriving and departing like trains on time, the entire co-ordinated and commanded construction there is more. There appears the on-line arrival of the mind and its complexities, complexions of composition, both for use and in use and through use, in creativity; and to all this is added more. There is the enduement with spirit in its growing realisations and awarenesses, its drives becoming conscious and in increasingly conspicuous fashion, controllable in much, so that dark and devious designs or enlightened and lithe and lissom wishes may be implemented, with destructive or constructive, instructive or delinquent intent.
The child may wander into inarticulation of conflicting thought, or work in articulation of worked out wonders, language and mentality, spirit and drive, program and purpose, indignations and inventions, peace and grace, witlessness and contortions, distortions, all ready to pounce into the spiritual cosmos in which he moves; and he may even find GOD! his or her Maker, from which this multiplicity and integrality, this construction in continuously deployed cosmoi continues till it is finished according to plan, and works according to specification, both using language and made by it, as in Genesis we learn, and in observation and cogitation, we find (cf.SMR, TMR, Deity and Design, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).
It is then that the point, meaning, purpose, thrust, ground and prodigality of the design is found surpassed by the goodness of the Maker, the grace of His Spirit and the confirmations of His words, direct this time to the persons He has made, in the verified and uniquely validated Bible and in the vindicated and soon to return Jesus Christ (SMR Ch. 8). It is He, Himself who is the eternal Word of God (John 1:1, Mich 5:1-3, Isaiah 48:16, John 8:58), His decisive and definitive expression, whose instruction is better and more personal than the commands of DNA; and not less than, but rather vastly beyond its deployment, as is the person of any author and inventor and creator, beyond the habiliments of his products.
For such a product as man, such a person as Jesus Christ, God incarnate, come to suffer and coming to rule, this is the certainty of sublimity and the licence for living, that makes of it, as with a fishing licence, not a mere piece of authorisation, but a scope for wonder in life that is indeed more abundant than even it ever was before. It starts in our time, as babes.
BLINDING BABES
When therefore children, those magnificent constructions of brain, brawn, mind and spirit, with formative powers and formulative capacities, with imagination and image-making power alike, when these are fed materialistic soup, and evolutionary meat, with the maggots of anti-causal decay, as if such nostrums and tainted, tinted untruths were fair fare rather than fractious misadventure of thought, solemn defiance of scientific method and grave-yard abuse of man's life: what is the accountability of those who so act! What is the reward for misdirection, the counterpart of defilement, the crown for crushing ?
Matthew 18 tells us of the situation for anyone who makes to stumble one of these little ones who believe in Christ. It seems rather apt, to say no more: a mill-stone around the neck in an aqueous environment would be better, yes DROWNING with it, than the impact of justice on the seducer of their spirits. Such is the word of Jesus Christ.
For more on the nature of design, see Deity and Design ...; and for more on the verification of Christianity in Biblical format, see Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ ... As seen there, only by shattering semantics is there even any way of approaching the topic of design, as though from nothing (ultimately, unless you beg questions) there came the characteristics defined for design, so that the most advanced cases of it, are attributable to what never shows its genesis.
This is in one sense blindness; but in another, it is seeing Macbeth-like visions, operating powers that are not there, Banquos hovering about, that in fact have neither being nor power. When thus it is all in the mind, these hopeful ideas and anti-etiological confusions (cf. Causes), it dies there. Actuality requires sufficiency. Ideas based on nothing and on the observation of nothing may be poetical, a lyricism of nihilism, or a partial symbolic effort to escape its realities; but they are mere myth. Predicted for our part of this Age as a major phenomenon, they have become so, like arthritis in an ageing and stressed frame (II Timothy 4:1ff., II Peter 3:1-5, cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). .
You need what it takes to get what you've got. Entire mutually co-operative physical, mental, moral, spiritual, imaginative, constructive, constructed, potential-deploying, will-alluring dynamics and facilities are all involved; and the semantic seduction of the 'only' reductionism, does nothing more than show the shame of inducing children to ignore reality in the name of what is a blight on what is right. Confusion may misdirect the well-meaning - for that matter, some Nazis appear to have started out as idealists shanghaied, and undoubtedly some in Stalin's murder crews, had at least initially, some ideological nostrum, however ludicrous*3 , back of their forthcoming executioners' lusts.
Ephesians 4:17-19 as Romans 1 gives some of the racial background to such diminution and demise in spirit. Yet such background does not alter the results!
Irrationality is never a sufficiency, for argument on its basis, is already undone by its presuppositions. Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ Volume 2, and Deity or Design ..., Section 8.
If logic be defunct, then so is argument by those who say so, systematically. If however, it is followed as in SMR, TMR and the above works, then children are really not suitable for cannon fodder, or in certain ecclesiastically woeful cases, canon fodder, by those who want to fire them out with the gases of explosive ideas, that disintegrate on being fired*4.
Christ stated that the night is coming in which no man can work, as He described the routines of the prince of this world with his delusions and contusions at work in our midst (John 14:30-31, cf. John 9:4). It is now twilight, and rapidly the shades, shadows and trimmings of darkness are falling, and not least, strangely as if a lion on its prey, on the young.
NOTES
See -
SMR Ch. 1, 6, 7, Scientifc Method, Satantic Method and the Model of Salvation.
Glory, Vainglory and Goodness Ch. 1.
See Ch. 2, *7 above.