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Chapter 9

 

THE PLASTIC AND THE KEY

SOME RATIONAL PRELUDES TO REVELATION

and the RATIONALE OF REALITY: JESUS CHRIST

 

 

I was reading the other day in Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 4.

Is there anything especially of interest to the enquiring mind, in that ?

Oh no, I don't suppose so, if it is harassed by convention, nobbled by naturalism, deceased with determinism, allied to magic, and makes of magic a plan for life.

Well what is wrong with naturalism ?

It is just that you need the 'nature' efficient to make itself, proficient to make other things which were not there, even in system, thought or nature.

Well, you have to have something.

I agree with that. The only question is what it is.

It needs to have what it takes.

You took the very words out of my mouth.

What then does it take ? You tell me.

It takes a lot to move from nothing to something.

That is inane, talk sense.

You, I see, are a relatively advanced case. You have taken the first step in thinking logically. Nothing has NO future, NO potential and NO capacity, and if anything happened to happen to it, it would make no difference, for NOTHING is there for the things to have as a butt for the action. If you are not there, nothing can contact, impact or impress you.

There's nothing to it. It just happens.

What is the 'it' ?

The thing that happens.

How could it be a thing if nothing were there ?

I have already said that you have to have something.

It is just that you appear to be contradicting yourself. You have something, and it just happens.

I did not mean that the something just happened, but that given the something, something else happened.

But I am not disposed to give anything: that is not thought but imagination foot-loose and fancy free.

If something is not given, nothing can happen, and since we happen, you must have something given.

Not so. You must have something, to be sure; but it is not to be given - not if we are to have that ingredient of scientific method which is rationality, reason, logic; and if we don't, then absence from that field removes equally any ground for logical argument. Where the means is absent, its use is absent, so you forfeit in any reasoned discussion. And that, it is by definition.

Something HAS to be there.

WHY ? You need to have something, but this is not the same as any necessity for it to be there. For that, you need what puts it there, and you have already agreed that this is not nothing. In science, things are not given, but derived, contrived, positioned, by what it takes, which is specified, and if correct, verified on various sides, and tests are then made in case it is anti-verified at any point, as were Newton's approaches, at certain levels, where other aspects became important.

What put something there ? I have no idea.

In science, that would be the same as zero score. The method is to consider options, ponder interface of thought and actuality, work out ways of the one type of thing leading to the other, and verify, look horizontally for confirmation in parallel or integrated processes, procedures, laws and vertically for domains of force, power and format which may impact and control actions in ways not thought of, and if these be found, test them as before.

You INSIST on having something to make the something then ?

Yes, now you mention it, BOTH to make it and to put it there, where it is operative, not merely thought, working, and not merely planned.

Well, let's start with atoms.

No. I see no reason to start with anything, and giving something a name does not in the least degree alter the need for it to be IN EXISTENCE in some form, and there, in the milieu in mind, to do its existing in a practical way.

Atoms are simple.

So is escape from  reason, but it does not lead anywhere.

Well make it a nano-particle.

No, you have read Divine Manifesto ... Ch. 5, which touches on this aspect ? It says what follows, after preliminary reasoning, but it applies here..

Thus the universe is so framed that the organised arrangements, construction and framework, components and their sub-structures, elements and their logical base, correlations and intimations of beauty and goodness, darkness and evil, choice and corruption,  did not at all depend on the arena  'just there', nor did a system by magic make other systems by afterthought; but it depends on Him who being there, had what it took to give what came. In its liberties, love becomes meaningful and may be found; or hate; and in its imagination, nobility may arise, or chicanery. Man is in the image of God who being good only and ready to give, is unakin to corruption though kindred to creation, being beyond its apex in the absolute dominion of deity. Liberty however is not bound, and in its purvey corruption may come to nestle.

What of it ?

It started with your nano-particle, but in a while it comes to this as above. What sort of a particular particle has such a future ? You have ONLY to make it rationally conceivable to start with, a particle of particularly small size, in a system where to be a particle means to be a SMALL thing by comparison, so that anything can 'happen'.

What of it ?

We are starting with a system of which you have chosen a small part to consider. Let us consider what you have in mind, the entirety of the system.

It would be a simple system.

Why ?

That is easier with which to commence.

Easiness is not a quality of composition. You need what composes for a composition, a system, a group phenomenon of which a nano-particle is a component.

What if you ONLY have the particle.

Then it HAS to have space, to be particulate - otherwise it is only in thought, and not thought but practicalities are to the initial point.

Does it need time too ?

Of course, since your whole approach is to give something space and time and then to PROCEED. You want to get here, and that takes both space and time. So you are starting with space, time and a particle of small size, so small indeed that it is just on the horizon of conceivability.

Why not ?

Because what is GIVEN here is a highly systematic combination of concepts in practical operation.

Why can these not arise ?

Not from nothing, as agreed.

From something ?

It must then be there before your nano-particle. Why not be consistent, and go there.

Why should not the system and particle just BE there.

Because if you rightly dispense with nothing, there is no reason.

Do you need a reason ?

Yes if you want to be scientific, logical and coherent in thought.

What if I decide NOT to be reasonable ?

Then you dispense with your tools of argument, to establish something, and so establish nothing.

Suppose these things were always there. Then they would not even have to arise.

That is GIVEN. Nothing is given. What reason is there for some highly specific and specialised things to exist ?

What reason is there that they should not do so ?

This, that in a discussion on origins, you are merely assuming something, without ground, and this is not what is the point of the discussion. Just assume the whole thing at the first. What is the difference ? It is all assumption, and meaningless for discussion of a logical kind. It is like assuming you have a job: it is necessary to get one where they are to be found, with what it takes to find them. Effects require correlative causes.

What then if I assume nothing. I make it a hypothetical starting point.

No hypothesis stands on thin air. You need grounds for it.

We are here.

That is ground for something, to be sure, but what that something is may be found not by assuming hypothetical things WITHOUT GROUND, but by giving grounds, so that reason may have at least a touch-down, instead of being merely discounted.

 

THE GROUND SHEET

 

What sort of a something do you want, then ?

Something adequate for the result.

Are you not in the same position as myself then ?

No, for I have grounds for my something.

What are these ?

Something must ALWAYS be there, since nothing as the entirety ends the matter right there, and as you point out, we are not nothing.

All right, granted. There is something eternally; but that does not mean something eternal ?

It depends on your definition of 'something'.

I see what you mean. SO we must have a universe, or a ground of some kind always, to have anything ever.

True, and if you consider it, there are several possibilities at first. It may be a system - but that is to beg the question. You have something organised and delimited, without ground. It is just there. There is no cause for it. You might as well beg the whole question, and have it all arrive free and postage paid from nowhere, which not being there, is impossible.

What then can it be ?

It is quite useless to try to get bits of 'nature' and have them there, since the bits always imply the 'nature' which means space and time and organisability and things suitable for BEING organised and organising power, resource, susceptibility to logical and symbolical correlation, which is what we have, and for orders to direct it, which again, is what we have in DNA, for example, as well as orders to institute what is not living, but merely contrived, contained and composed with parts in whole with energic composition as well as formal and characterisably distinct in the very components. That is rather like saying that for a language you need, explicit or implicit, a language, symbols and thoughts able to recognise them, meaning and point to which it applies. In effect, the means are inherent in the concept of something to start with, at the material level, which in turn requires the conceptual level and the mandatory level. .

Well why not have this, since it is necessary.

Agreed. Now in this, there are concepts which are operative, and often found in the RESULT, and so must in power or presence be there at the first. All laws involve concepts, and these involve rationality and realisation of the same.

Good. We have eternal conceptual capacity and power to implement and what ?

We have the fact that in matter per se you do not find this.

True, as in SMR pp. 80ff.. I looked that up the other day.

And as in fact. It is instituted, delimited, definable, characterisable, operates in diverse and coherently integral ways, both in individual 'plants', that is operating facilities, and in the total organisation structure of which the parts, being mutually relatable, are coherently composed ingredients. As to both living and non-living elements, whether you consider these ab initio or devised after the imposition of structure and rationality, conceptual composition and orders, the liquid as it were, in the solid, the higher level of composition, self-replicating, amid the lower, the symphony as well as the violin.

So we look for the ground and cause and backing and force and power and maker of conceptual apparatus, such as man's, and for what institutes all this, in whole at once, or in parts, but in either case, with the totality of system, mode as in rationality, form as in conceptual codes, and order as in direction for things both to be and to be in place, as well as in the race of coherent, integrable movement, in the individual items, in the local systems, in the overall structural systematics of which sub-systems are relatable parts, and in the whole conceptual array, which being subject to mental investigation has mental characteristics in KIND.

Do we find atoms making this ? No there are merely resident operating units. Do we find molecules providing such matters ? No, we find them operating in such premises. What of chemistry as one whole, do we find it making concepts and orders, or relating given things, responding to stimuli, though not living, because of coherence of conceptual array creating character in them and HENCE, characterisability ?  Do we find in life, information batteries, in which concepts are hammered out, and appropriate orders given, so that new designs are found to be manufactured in ascertainable premises on investigable grounds, the working of which may be verified on the basis of observable actions, duly characterised, and then, envisaged theoretically, found to operate in just the way assigned in thought. so being verified in the way requisite for scientific method ?

I have not heard of it.

Nor has anyone else.

We look where we may find such things, operative now or ever.

Well as we have just seen, they are not scientifically found to be operative now.

Then we look for the basis for them operating EVER.

The basis not in the things made.

They do not make themselves, either direct from nothing, or from what does not possess originating conceptual capacity, but only operating facility when ordered.

You need to orderer, not just the order, if you are thinking of beginnings.

Precisely.

You look then for what is not matter ?

Of course. If you do not find your watch in the dining room, it is at least conceivable it may be SOMEWHERE ELSE. It MUST be somewhere.

Where is it ? It is not material.

Just as we would look for something which at least acts in electrons and protons, or allied phenomena,  if we were looking for a material thing, so we look for something which enacts them. We do not look where all evidence, facility, correlative function or assertable grounds lack, but where they are present, and then test this against anything else.

Correct undoubtedly. How do you look however, at what is not matter ?

The same way as we do in all our current talking: whether for material or immaterial things, we look with the imagination and reason and mental operations of probing, ascertaining kind, ready to conceive, confirm or reject, verify or anti-verify as options arise.

How can we do this, incidentally ?

It is a function of an equipment we have, which enables it. We are using this all the time, whether we talk of love or hatred, law or disorganisation, advance or regress, hope or heart, bankruptcy or belligerence, candle-wax or the qualities and characteristics of light. The integral combination in one over-arching whole of reasoning, imagining, envisaging, discerning, analysing, proposing, examining, validating, invalidating, verifying and exposing, comparing thought and finding and finding with hypothesis, and this with fact: it is all normal. We should know it.

How did we get that ?

We would look for what has the criteria, power, scope to produce this.

What would have that ?

Ideation-construction equipment or power.

Where would you get that ?

You don't. It has to be there.

Aren't you begging the question just as I did ?

No. You INVENTED something without ground, but rationally requiring it, a bit assuming the rest, a fact to which I drew your attention. There was no reason for it to be there, and I demanded the reason, which being absent, did not come.

So you have invented something with ground ?

I have postulated what is required logically, in generic terms; since without it, we CANNOT be. It is therefore necessary. It must however necessarily provide logical basis for thought and results such as we have.

What else does it have ? If it is not material, it is immaterial; and it is far from immaterial that we consider what this means. The usual term is 'spirit'.

Not at all. This is far more than merely not material.

You are assuming that by 'spirit' I mean a spirit.

Don't you ?

That is simply missing a logical step. Let us add it. Once you come to spirit, you then consider the necessary features of eternity and conceptual capacity and implementative power, and coherence of continuity, so that things can come into organisation, instead of being a litter on the conceptual litoral.

SO you need an eternal, coherent, conceptually oriented being of some kind.

You could have a mind, but minds are what think, and thought can either be a happening or a directed conceptual work, more or less conscious. Thoughts without a thinker need a cause just as do atoms and cells.

Why not a happening ?

Right. Then in an invisible domain ...

Why domain ?

As before, if you move into something, you need all it implies.

All right.

We are moving into the immaterial, the conceptual and considering if thought can be without thinking. Can it ?

Of course not. If thought were 'there' without thinking, it would be abstraction with inherent laws and proceedings and imagination, like parts of a case, all suspended in mid-air. You need what DOES the thinking for thought to be a happening.

True.

 

HAPPY HAPPENINGS ARE HAPLESS

 

Couldn't it just be an occurrence happily happening away ?

Not really. This trend towards magic, just because we are in logical mode, is intolerable. Magic is what makes things happen and refuses to be accountable, except in amusing little beings who deploy it, and then of course, you need the powers to deploy, the agency notation to enable the interface between magical agent and magical power, which implies system and a whole universe of coherent construction; and that needs to be constructed: and that restores us where we were. You are just moving into the extraneous, and avoiding the logical issue.

What is that ?

It is this. Where is the power, thought, rationality to make reason relevant, the causal sufficiency to make effects, and the system where cause and effect, ground and result, are to act ?

We need eternal, non-material, innovative, conceptually competent, thought directing ...

Thought directing ? why ?

Because, if you don't have power to direct thought, you can't think. We all know that.

Is this essential ?

Obviously, for if thoughts 'happen', this means that like odd clouds, they move without intrinsic meaning across the ideational universe, and this constructs nothing; but we are constructed. We have already looked at this aspect, and that repeatedly.

Can we not look at it now ?

Of course. It is then a matter of thoughts wafting around: but do they, with the resutls in view as the empirical necessity for us to cover ? 

No, I don't think so, really, that would be anti-empirical.

It is in fact an issue of a whole system of causally connected, ideationally functional, logically cohesive, interactively disciplined, imaginatively activated, cogitatively directed and result oriented action: a huge system of multiple, co-ordinated enterprise with functionalities of the most elevated and basic kinds, in ordered sequence and dirigibility, given! It is not given however. You have to invent it, the same as anything else, by adequate causation, which must involve far greater cogitative power than the resultant which attests the action which construed and created it.

In the end, persons are the name given to what has all it takes to manage thought with productive results such as we have.

This is the minimal basis, then ?

Yes. The fact that we do not empirically FIND this thing, but have persons, reminds us that we are seeking to account for what is, not for imaginative contrivances, which merely call for the same basics as any other GIVEN, but do it medially, merely making more stepping stones, whereas the river and the stones in it, are the point.

We need what is oriented to, directed towards, adequate for the result as the means then.

Indeed. The entirety of the result, not imagined dysfunctional concoctions, operable only by adding unacknowledged purpose thrust, is the point. Thus if you want to require a cause for a Boeing 737, you do not imagine one with no pilot, no thinker back of it, no systematiser for systems, where thought processes occur without direction, and yet devolve in direction, and so achieve it, concocted without imagination, and yet requiring it, where flight occurs without pilot, and yet it has one. Essays in self-contradiction are fun; but this is for a purpose, not fun. That is for kids in the nursery to evoke the powers of imagination; not for thinkers in accounting for the jet, or in our case, the man, and the world about him.

I agree. Repeatedly but not repetitively. We are forced to it continually. The coherence of the result demands the coherence of the cause.

Blunt pens don't write small.

True. What will we call the thought directing unit ?

A spirit.

Agree. So we have an eternal spirit, which directs thought, deals competently in concept, implements action in terms of thought and presents material things with their ground of existence in various integral systems, all working in concert and overall result, producing integral things like man, matter in designated assembly notations, mind with cogitative rules or ineffectuality, and created style of spirit to direct his own thought. This implies equally, because we are right here experiencing what it is that is in operation, power to make mistakes, and to have reasons for them - even if fallible ones - and to have a spiritual operating system and personal relationship such that in a semi-autonomous fashion we can dispose thoughts, interrupting them with motives, good or bad, assessing them, purposely misusing them, and so on.

We need something to make persons then, with liberty of this kind. They are not programmatic, since the purposeful relates to the personal, and this to envisagement and personal motivation and desire, whether to understand our own natures, or to profit from interaction in these terms. They are personally functional items. Guilt is their commentator, and like their thoughts, guile can be their goad. On the other hand, purity of thought can be their aim, and mastery of error impulses, which seek profit or gain or power or glory instead of truth; or the opposite. It is in this sense that to ignore their personal features is empirically simply inaccurate. You dealt with this in It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 9, I recall.

Yes, and in many other places. We need a maker of spirits first then. But before that the eternal spirit to be THERE.

Isn't that an assumption ?

No, it is a necessity, for lacking any of this, you gain none of the result, which being here, demands such a sufficient cause.

Can't we eliminate cause ?

Only if we eliminate thought, which MUST deal with categories and characteristics, since what lacks these is not in existence. If you talk 'chaos', this means a situation in which no known laws are operative (exclusion force operates), where there is pertinence in describing it (that is, it has certain features and lacks others), and so is a conceptually coherent whole. It is a group of phenomena from which laws and consistency, characteristics and interfaces all lack, and where the moment you assert anything of law and order, you must abstract it. However the lack of anything describable equates it with nothing, which is not a thing called chaos. That is merely a system of conceivable and operable kind with characteristics which do not admit of purposive considerations as to its running.

It is one of these given things, which cannot be given, but must be grounded in cause, the same as anything else of thought, rationality and disputative kind, other than nullity itself. It would simply mean an abstraction from purposive action in a given system, a complicated kind of inclusion-exclusion matrix, requiring the same basis, but with an outcome different from the one we have. It is not even relevant, a thought construction, either self-contradictory or merely a figment divorced from beginning necessities. We however are accounting for what is, not inventing what is either not conceivable, impossible, or merely deprived of one ingredient.

You mean that everything conceivable has to have characterisable features, or to equate with nothing.

Yes, no term would cover it, for the moment it did, it would have features.

Pure chaos is simply a self-contradiction ?

Of course. We have already seen many of the minimal features and the simple exclusion; but if it is pure chaos, nothing may be asserted of it, whereas 'chaos' has much to be asserted of it, and many characteristics.

What may be meant is this: something which is less orderly than what we now have, but which has the capacity to be ordered in just the ways we now see, which is to say, in ways far beyond our own powers of constructive thought. To equate this with some kind of escape from what reason requires is like saying that to make a million dollars, the first thing you need is witlessness and no system.

Chaos then, is not a very good name for what is the necessary basis of all we have.

It is merely choosing a term which contradicts necessity and unless a cover for smuggling ideas in under wraps, is a meaningless suggestion. We need what explains,  not what is in itself undescribable.

We need what has powers of thought, conceptualisation, imagination, initiative, material-invention and creativity for man's creativity and powers, with integrating ability in the realm of co-ordinate systems.

The chaotic in man's thought is just like examination failure ?

Unfortunately, it is far more than chaotic, and its descent from the disciplines of logic, which are inherent both in man's construction and his thought action, is a combination of lack of desire, existence in spiritual slumminess, indifference, carelessness, fatuity, wilful foolishness or laziness, or some combination. Like being drunk: you can have this, but it is merely a disease. It is not what man is capable of, and not an exhibit of the integral capacities which operative in the person's domain, may be made to work. It is like having a gun and using a shang-hi.

So we return: we need what explains, what begins the material, what institutes the ordered, and the potential for it in that immensely complex and gloriously capable manner which asserts itself in all that we find and seek to explain.

 

THE BEGINNING

That is the beginning.

Not less.

Why not more ?

I did not mean to suggest that this is all.

Why not have a spiritual system or two as well ?

Since these would require the same basis, there would be several spirits.

Couldn't that be so ?

It could, but since we are discussing the origin, and finding originality must precede what is in itself lacking in dimension, thought or eternity, we would still need to ask how the spirits came to be: after all, this would be a co-operative system of spirits, if you want it relevant to what we have.

Why not that ?

The capacity for team-work and the system in which it would occur would also need an origin, and as always, as well as the environment consistent for all, of language construability, and this brings us to the spirit worker of which we spoke. ALL this existing system which is not in itself eternal requires this. The unit gods and the system would be a complex whole, delimited and defined, and hence require its cause as does the material, and for that matter, the cogitative, the evaluative and the surging thrust of spirit as well, in man. You get nothing from nothing, and need to find something adequate for any and for all of this.

Why could these conceived spirits not be in themselves eternal ?

It is for the reason just given. If they were, there would be a system NOT the spirits, in which they inhere, through which they work in concert, communicate. That would need its creator.

So you come to ONE BEING.

It is one spiritual being, functional, rational, imaginative, discursive, dynamic, with no limits ...

Why not ? We don't need infinity just because we have a big job on hand.

IF there are limits, you have a system in which these have been imposed; and imposition and delimitation are actions and call for their ground of being, as well as the spiritual being.

So He has to be unlimited! Could He change then ?

I see your drift. If the Being is unlimited, then could He be and do things, all over the place ?

Yes.

That is not the same as doing them. Power to act and chosen action are two separate things. All conscious persons know or act that difference!

Suppose then the Being before inventing space (which confines) and time (which awaits by constraint), just happened to desire to move into this and that state ?

That would be movement in time, which not being invented in the beginning, would be a contradiction in terms. Time limits, requires patience for operational results, is an imposition on liberty, device imposed. We are looking not for results but the cause of them.

You mean nothing could happen there and then ?

There is no there and then. These are terms applicable in creation mode and not at all available for what precedes it, any more than an author is available for participating in his book, along with the characters.

How does anything happen then ?

Any idea that our kind of 'wait for it, then it comes' time is the only sort of ground for action is a mere assumption. As you point out, or imply, the maker if mindless at the personal level, would be hapless. We are looking for what orders, organises and institutes what is so far from hapless, they we are even discussing the differences between such things and what we have!  SO we look for what is rationally conceivable and does work, rather than what merely fails to do what is necessary: work.

Couldn't the spiritual being just go on holiday sometimes, and then flit about and become this or that, before returning to work ?

Obviously; but holiday is a time-related concept, and going on it, suggests a space orientation; and since these limiting and delimiting concepts are in need of calling into being, the concepts you have just initiated, in disciplined thought, could not exist. I congratulate you however on having suggested them, for they show us the more incisively the need to avoid such contra-conceptual divagations. We must not wander into relaying back the creation into the creator, or we merely increase the size of the field for which we seek to account, and answer nothing. This nothing however is nothing to the point.

What sort of time or action basis then is there to be so conceived ?

It is one in which LIMITS are not present FOR the Spirit.

How can this be ?

All things are open to this Being (call the Being God and we will know what we are talking about), and hence He does not HAVE to wait for anything; so that a system in which He would be so reuired,  as CONTAINING Him, this is a mere contradiction in terms, and would in any case require its creator.

And this, as you were indicating,  merely moves us back to God, and not to some sketch which is less than God.

Let us then be coherent in thought.

But HOW would this system operate ?

I am sorry that the idea of system before and containing God recurs in your thought. There is NO SYSTEM containing or moving about for God to conform to, in His internal actions, for the reason many times shown..

Well what about His application in making time. Did this not happen in time ?

Of course not. How could our time be present before the One back of it, made it ? That would be like using a car to get to the auto dealer's place, to buy one, so that you do not have to walk. In our terms, as an example, car-ness is the point in totality, so this is out of the question, and begs it.

True indeed. Then without a chronological system in which one has to wait for each event, but rather in a milieu in which all is known and operation is not limited to time, which is seen but not limiting, God invents one in which these things in fact happen, and when this time stuff is now around in our terms, next things happen. He creates it, like an author with his book; but He does not have to live it, except perhaps in imagination and conception and oversight and with interest.

That is it. One God made time and events of a successive kind worked themselves out in a system which did take time.

How much ?

As long as He chose, and of course, He would place in the system whatever He pleased: some things would be ready made, some He might elect to have develop in some way, in the system, and some He might institute when He desired, to complete the system. He would not be limited in this, but choose imaginatively as He would.

Would thinking types of creations be able to make things by thinking ?

If the systems were such that an interface between thought and system, in which the rationality of thought had a modal consistency with that implicit in the system, this could be.

We do this, and are doing it now.

Precisely. I can write a book because of time, space, thought, interface with outside systems, integratability of thought and action in the system and power of code to be comprehensible to those others in the system who have the same facilities, including those correlative with my own, so that my concepts of symbolism and theirs agree.

Books do not write themselves.

Have you ever seen it happen ?

Not actually.

What would be wrong if you did ?

It would mean that conceptual power and imagination and logical ability and symbolic manipulative power and codes of meaning-symbol correlation were operative without a subject, and would have to be inherent in a material system per se; or that magic was happening.

True. Magic we discount as noted earlier. The assumption would then simply be that a person was doing it, and we were unaware of that person's presence.

We don't have to assume this, since it does not happen under any circumstances, however cleverly constructed in the hope that it would. That's it, isn't it ?

 

COMING TO LIFE

 

Science supposedly moves not from what it does not find for reasons it cannot find in a system which is not there, but from what it does find, for reasons it can find, and tests it can make, to confirm in thought and law, what happens comprehensibly. Thus we move from what matter does, and what persons do, and move in these realms when required by disciplined investigation, moving from actions to be interpreted to just grounds, coherent rationally and comprehensibly adequate.

So we have life, a seed of constructive genius, in this or that form and format, and non-life, thought and non-thought, interface of thought and action, and non-interface. When we try to account for these things, we use what characterisabilities and features, as ascertained, and reason and its needs, require. We then test this. There is no limit but that of prejudice, supposedly not a ground for science.

That's it. Science is not a vacuity for thought, but a repository. Materialism is a limit imposed in impossibility for reason, per se, and in irrelevance for operation, in the end. It is not science but irrationality.

As in ...

As in Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

Making only what lacks the observable, construable, testable powers to do something the only way it could happen is like making sure that a moron lies behind Shakespeare's plays. It is not just an error of procedure, but an asinine activity, more comic than communicative.

Like Shakespeare, man's machination is very deep; but the machination that makes it able to machinate must be greater. Prototypes are harder than manufactures. I can see that.

Pattern, plan, program, conception, reception, symbolic logic and language, coherence, integrality of living means in multiple systems adroitly organised, with liberty of thought as a realm, showing ability to err as in personal living, free from mere irrelevance, but not from guilt and often not from guile, while illumination and rumination, beauty and wisdom, understanding and its opponents all rove on the roads of the domain: it is such a realm that only order and light makes of it a thing with basis and results, rather than a dream. It is like a treasure trove of rich jewels, heavily cut and brilliantly faceted, in myriads of forms in profusion, including necklaces and pendants, astutely constructed.

That speaks of purpose.

The province of the purpose-built is seen in form-structured, and coherence of assiduously correlated design. Design is precisely what we have: that integrally conceivable, rationally describable, coherently inter-relatable, in totality meaningfully operable, in parts consistently deployed structure which differs from the disordered, incoherent and merely amorphous. Design and purpose are by definition inherent in the spirit which makes all. Purpose is that coherent thought or series of thoughts which envisaging a desideratum, resolves means to reach it. Without it, systems may be operative, being 'given', but they are not formed. The discipline of making the coherence and consequentiality happen is outside the system that is, and requires the systematiser that is.

Yes, that's right. You need to consider the origin and the use. When it is the world itself, you need to consider the Originator and the point. You need to conceive that you are part of the point, and as in all things, it is best to find the point, rather than to miss it. This is something I find to stir me with no small passion. Why worry about the sex-life of snails, as some seem to want to do, if you do not know what you are, where from, where bound, and why you exist! We thus look, not as holiday exercise, but as a hallowed enterprise, for the One with whom we have to deal, who 'dealt' us, put us on the table.

 

THE KEY

 

Certainly.  In fact, the other day, I was looking for a highly sophisticated car key, one with computerised symbolism impressed into it, so that various systems interact within it when it is activated, and that it projects from these to other systems in the car, and so opens the lock in the door. That let's me get in, which is important to me.

Getting into the car of comprehension does require a key, and we are using it.

The key  is guarded by systematics against abuse, and enabled by other systematic thought and contrivance, to be effective in the systems of mechanism and electronics which it must activate. Suddenly I saw a little bit of blackness which in shape resembled it. Could this be it ?

Was it ?

No. It was just a piece of plastic which resembled it in certain visual respects. It was a let-down, it did not enable things to happen as before.

I can see what is coming. One day, a piece of dirt managed to turn into plastic, by the use of conceptual chemical application, which is why we often find plastic being made outside living processes, and think nothing of it when it comes out in neat sheets, as if this is the most natural thing in the world.

Your irony is rather heavy, but justified. I'll continue it for you... Then, dissatisfied with its lot, the plastic, already well up on dirt, because consistent and of one colour and of one thickness and of one type, decided that if it could get away with this, it might as well start inventing all kinds of electronic, conceptualised, concentrated, unified systems and make these relate to something out there, a car, and co-ordinating the whole, impress itself into service ...

Wait a bit. That is a bit rich, even for irony. How would it co-ordinate something outside itself ?

Ah, if it can do it within, why not without ? If you are going to avoid logic once, do it all over the place. If you are going to have God in the machine, why not out of it; and if you do not divulge that you have imported 'him', then why not do more on the same disgracefully surreptitious smuggling exercise: there is no limit to fraud.

Once violate reason, you have no restraint.

A good point. Then it would be the kind of world in which you did not have to work for making systems, first by imagination and conception, and then by application and concentration, but they did it themselves.

Lush pastures with cow-mechanics within the cows, who milk and feed and care for tdhem, without ever being seen.

You often see this sort of thing, perhaps less obviously ludicrous, in your imagination; but  in this world, it is in imagination alone. Yield to action, and your thought vanishes into wishful thinking, or thoughtful wishing. As Professor Werner Gitt*1 is so keen to point out, you do not find even information inventing itself. How could it ? It is by definition what is knowable and conceivable in format, as discernible, legible, detectible, reactive with what is other than itself. Why not invent everything from what never is never found to do it, or to have the means to do it, and make "system=chance" and "origination=system" and words equal deeds.

Yes, it could be, this invention of causeless consequence, something like the marvellous new E=MC2 type of principle. Thus since system does it, and system is chance, chance does it. This is as good as Alice in Wonderland. I always rather liked its ridiculous irony and mockery, inherent in the comedy.

Alice has her points.

But let us investigate that point.

Surely. System is the opposite of chance, and an equation is a thought procedure inscribed in communicable symbols, if operational, one correlative to one implicit in the nature of the creation or design-purpose spirit production, if you want that terminology.

I don't. We call it the creator.

Of course, it is shorter and as meaningful. All this, then,  is not what the word 'chance' requires, but that to which the terms intellection plus conceptual capacity and integration function relate. Having a verbal parachute does not take you softly to the ground, and using a term to hide the actual functions needed, when it merely means 'without purposive intervention' and applies to a pre-existing system, of describable powers.

This is verbal evasion, rather like pseudo-comical law procedures, isn't it. Very slippery.

It is what is known as a slide, a move from the actual premises and ground of discussion to something else, without introducing the same. It is like gate-crashing in a drunken party, where nothing like truth or coherence matters.

The plastic, given time, and... the conceptual, concentrative, integrative powers, becomes a key. It has of course to relate to the car simultaneously, and to the systems of symbolic thought invested in the entirety. Concepts being information type things, communicable concoctions in symbols of what refers to things outside symbols, you need the correlation of these components in what can handle them, for anything relevant to happen.

It becomes ...

That is to say, you are assuming as given, all that is in fact required, and stipulating what by definition does not have it ... unless ...

What ?

Unless of course the 'chance' is at work in a system in which intellection and imagination and correlative abilities and interface and coherence of symbol and its interpretation and so on, already exists. Then it would be, say, as if a person who having all these powers, for a moment, drinking his coffee, without really meaning to solve a problem, saw a glitter on the mantle-piece, and this reminded him of something he had seen, and then it occurred to him that this was in a book which had a paragraph in it which spoke of a topic which was just what was needed, to refine the system which had been troubling him. In that sense, 'chance', that is a glitter not purposively induced, worked in one with all the needful powers to stimulate the imagination and drive into this gear, in the first place.

What then is this ?

This is merely an exercise in hiding the 'given' and avoiding coherent thought. It reminds me of the 12 million or so illegal resident Mexicans said to be in the USA, to whom citizenship might perhaps be granted. That is merely to recognise the thing already a 'given'. It does not explain their arrival.

In other words, it assumes all that is needed, to start with ?

Of course. Chance does nothing which the system, the preliminaries in which it supposedly operates, does not contain. It explains nothing.

It does explain the inventor's success here though, in our illustration with the coffee, doesn't it ?

Our terms of reference are these: origins. We are not seeking how someone might be pre-occupied and have an inspiration by some event he had not foreseen, therefore, as to our intent; for this assumes all needed in terms of origins and so is irrelevant at that level. Giving what is not given is merely a work like that in mathematics, when a student has to prove some complex thing, A, equal some other one, B. If the student works backwards from A towards B, and forwards from B towards B, but cannot make the lines of reasoning meet, then he may tell the examiner: "And this is true by inspection." However, the inspection is merely a word to hide the student's complete inability to MAKE them meet, and then to show it. It is a verbal device hiding incompetence, and so devious and deficient both.

What then ? Chance does not create; it is an episode relative to purpose, a negative of it, in a system.

It means no enhancement is in view. Just the system/s ... that is all.

This leaves the presence of the things in the first place, as open as ever.

And as we have just seen, as closed. Such things are considered in more detail in Ancient Words: Modern Deeds Chs.  9 and  13.

We have then to face the music, and bow to one Spirit, eternal and unlimited, but always knowing all, being what is desired, and so never changing.

Yes, for if God were to change, then it would either be an event foreseen, or not. If not, then He is limited, which is not possible for what we have seen to be necessary, as God. Thus He would have foreseen it; and if so, it would not constitute a change in Himself, but in mode. As one God, of one nature with all knowledge, He would be seeing a movement which is part of the entirety which He is, since there is no time. SInce there is no space, there is no room to move. It would then be conceptually, a thing of considering a more desirable way of existence. Since He already knew this, if it were more desirable, it would be His, period, since there is no waiting in time. That is not change but continutiy in immutability.

Yes. If He wanted to change, as in a holiday, from time to time, this would be foreknown, and hence since time does not limit Him, it would be present already. It would not then be a change, but an awareness of opportunities; but since He does not have to wait for these, they would be present already. Change involves time as a condition, and this being a creation, is irrelevant to God in His own Being.

 

THE SPEECH

 

But God found in time, time to tell us ? This was not irrelevant to His Being, since He wanted it ?

Assuredly. Our time is His opportunity to institute correlation in continuity, and for this type of being, which we all are, this means action in time.

Containment by time is one thing, limiting. An excursion into time, however, as in Jesus Christ, would not be for the sake of change, then, but for a purpose of intrinsic point. In a world at war with His designs, you would expect, if it were not destroyed, action. You would expect information to information-type beings, to make it clear. We got this in the Bible as often shown (cf. SMR Chs. 8  -  9 ), the only self-verifying religious book, claiming God as the author and specifying His action since man became vagrant in imagination and action.

What do you mean by vagrant here ?

I mean that the defilement of the design which man contains, and the purposive misuse of his mind, as is frequent and not just found in legal and commercial dishonesty, the attack on truth, this is all an attack on God, since His action in truth, is from Himself, and from His creation He needs and desires nothing for Himself, since if He needed it to be complete, the void would indicate a being in a system which had deprived him of content relative to desire, so that it would be a mde being and not God.

So man fell ?

Of course. Action, indeed divine action was acutely necessary. When Christ died at the time Daniel foretold centuries beforehand, since God invests time with meaning, and not vice versa, and was murdered in the way Isaiah told earlier still, and David in detail in Psalm 22 before that, and the Church arose as predicted with the Gospel as declared before, with the resurrection of Christ's body basic as in Psalm 16, and the world of history surged on to the end situation as described (as in Answers to Questions Ch. 5): then there it all is. The sublime, divine being has acted, not only in creation, but in redemption for the desecrated.

You mean we are all desecrated.

Contra-design disorderes of mind, spirit and body are just that.

So Christ came to pay the damages and restore the design.

This not least.

Why ?

God loves His miscreant creatures called man, having given to them also the capacity to love. He tells us this in that book of the Lord.

How is this put ?

It is readily put like this. God so loved the world, which He made, that He sent, being willing, His only begotten Son, being able, so that those who receive Him, as He is, and accept His action, have not a mere conception of deliverance from the anguish of God-collision, but friendship from God.

By no chance, has this arrived, I see: it was purposively presented to a conceptually implemented world, where freedom has become the idol of many, who are born slaves to sin against God, and ignore liberty on behalf of an independence which makes them more dependent than ever, relying on a world which is not dependable, or more ridiculous still - if possible - on themselves as in their model, items in it. This was done since the world as a creation of God is constructed for conformity to truth, not to lie, to His design and designations, not to autonomously conceived substitutes.  I remember something in an earlier work I was reading. What was it ? It also dealt with particles ... and skipping the implications.

You mean Chapter 5 of Manifesto of Deity ? This goes well with Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 4 and The Face of God ... Ch. 10.

No doubt, let me see. Yes that was it, but it brought to my mind another presentation. Ah! I have googled it. Here it is, the place which I had in mind is in Ancient Words: Modern Deeds Ch. 4. This part seems to zero in on our present topic.

It's grand to be in God's world with God's gift in God's creation with God's mandate to find God's will for the space of time, like a rock taken from eternity, before returning to Him where He is.

The best is this, to my present thought: that He came for me, amongst all the other creations who would receive His restitution program, His redemption, His free gift of eternal life from the One who always had it, and then, since He, Jesus Christ, died the death to cover the case, it is not death, an end, but transmission back to the hand of the Maker, the Author, of God, in the new form, not of one who might be His, but one who IS! He is the key that doesn’t spoil, being eternal. Plastic look-alikes are mere illusion, fantasy.

That is precisely why the name Jesus Christ is a superlative, one which nothing ever displaces, and His kingdom the one which will never end as Daniel 7:14,25-27 informs us from some 2600 years ago, when he predicted so much of all of this.

This Christ,  He is the DIVINE MANIFESTO, on whom all rests, from whom all creation arrived, in whom all has meaning, finds point; and disappointment is what results from missing the bus for the divine appointment. You have only to enter, as in John 10:9, and mind the step, it has to be taken!

A step I happily make. It's been good talking with you this morning, and I'll just stay on a while with Chapter 5.

May God bless your ways.

 

 

ERUPTIONS, IRRUPTIONS AND CONTRAPTIONS OF THOUGHT

 

It is almost pretty, but then, there is another case to which we will come shortly, which is poignant.

It is a little like a wistful face, this exhibit on Mars, and a distinguished scientist has avowed it a human product - at a distance of many miles from a space relay. Another in NASA dismisses such a claim abruptly.
Thus we read also this: "It is quite true the photos appear to show a human face and other interesting phenomena but they are just piles of rocks," says a senior NASA source. How distinguished is the distinction of science, so often to be distinct about the indistinct, in the eyes of some of its fellows!

How personal is the thought of man! He is personal, thinks like it, acts like it, composes his talk, invests his speech like it. As the monkey cannot abstract into symbolic innovation, based on analytical thought, so man CANNOT stop doing it! It is ever so: what you have, you do or die, or rather it dies. Brains prepared for grammatical and other symbolic notation, invent it, this way or that, like an irrepressible stream, never stilled by minor obstacles (cf. SMR pp. 13ff.)

Not signs or signals, but ideational symbols, personally contrived: this is the make of man, his nature. This is the sports car he drives, the robot forgotten in a heap by comparison: for man, transcending device, but using it, as it is given to him at birth, also makes it, with a liberty all but unrationed, but the more so the less it is rational!

Man has not only this, but

the marvel of verbal facility,
the grammar inventing,
ideationally organising,

imaginatively eruptive,
theoretically constructive,
spatially invasive,
freedom loving,
justice longing,
morally contriving,
peace talking,
war making,
poetically abundant,
lyrically ebullient:


there it is, some of the functionality fo this product, called 'man'.


 

Personal, he is ever apt to think in such terms.


 

bullet Even when he tries to dodge his own nature, and
bullet personally, by a personally contrived theory, impersonalise all of 'Nature'*1  as he likes often to think of it in his vagrant and irrational imagination - himself included,

 
bullet he ends only in antinomies:
bullet alleging no reality but matter, in theories with no validity, except through mind!

 
bullet while personally arguing for impersonality,

 
bullet subjectively talking of a 'truth' in terms of  objectivity*2,
bullet about himself indeed, as though he were objective,

 
bullet even when explaining away what he is, in reductionist fantasy, and imaginative delusion.


Indeed, in a delicious but deranged  folly, like kids too young, intoxicated at a party:   WITH what he is disposed to ignore, decry and ditch, he proceeds to give grounds for it!

With this trend in view, it is hardly surprising that the pure irrational pathology of it rebounds, so that he is forever making personal that which is in fact impersonal, in astrology, in numerology, in 'common thought' which he contrives to invent the better to have some basis in imaginary unity;
in life on Mars, in faces in the sky, and so on. It is rather like children - and it is quite impersonal in this, that it is a racial symptom of a common racial fault - if you do not give them outlet, they may make their own in pure fantasy.

This disease of man, then, towards personal constructions of impersonalism, debasing with elevated talk, his status, and determining himself with free thought as prone to error as the clocks forever being repaired by their inventors and allies, and as checkable by logic as theirs by plan: it is far more common than foot and mouth disease, and has endless variants, as befits a being which IS personal.  Assessing and arguing in terms of error, to be assessable in debate, for determinism which cannot have error, since what is cannot be wrong when that is all there is - what is it like ?
It is like being made floral judges, on condition that you have no nose.

All this man does, with imagination as unbound as you would expect from someone made in the image of God, and dismissing it. We find man in his all but unlimited mental antics, having philosophic vogues for a season, then, obviously wrong -  boring as old 'flames' to a roué - and as ludicrous in such errata, then incessantly making new muddles about himself, and calling them thought, till after a little they too die. This is precisely as you would expect from someone not at peace with his Maker, rejecting His word, and making little of His provisions, even to the point of denying what he himself is! He MUST invent, and he CANNOT have it right, since the right is the problem! All this is superb verification of what he is, for the FUNCTIONALITY this displays is precisely that double edged sword, with the sides of massive liberty and massive rebellion, which cuts into the tissue and fabric of fancy and fantasy, and ends illusion. What he does thus verifies what he is, explaining all; and the more he denies, the more he illustrates his antinomies! (Cf. SMR Ch. 5.)

It is WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT ON SUCH A BASIS. It explains it to perfection, both the ability so to err, and the nature of the error. Here is verification in its summit conference! Praise God, He is not left for one moment, one second of any day, without His witness...

So then, just as man often forlornly projects foolish thought into reductionist materialism, and invalid relativity (cf. SMR 422Eff., TMR Ch. 5), so he yet - like a lady bulging from vainly constraining clothes, too small, or a beer bellied man afflicted with far too obvious an overhang -
is for ever seeing the personal. He is it; and it will not be denied. If he is like it, he looks like it; and the more he tires to hide his stomach, the worse it is.
 
 

THE IMAGINATION OF THE CHILD
SPEAKS OF HIM WHO IS NOT SEEN,
BUT FOUND IN RESULTS

Thus the author, without real conviction when young, but with that indomitable imagination with which childhood reeks, has most frequently seen 'the man in the moon', and discovered his moods. Most often, 'he' has a tooth problem, causing some swelling at one side of his cheek; frequently he is rather sad and a little bleak at the sight of what goes on, in the earth, which not unexpectedly, he views with a look rather withdrawn, and somewhat apart.

Almost he can be genial, at other times, and sometimes his gaze is almost scientific. Again, he may be entirely abstracted, and the configurations of 'his' face can be all but appealing.

However, he is not there.

Even childhood would not have endued 'him' with a reality beyond the imagination, or a 'life' past that of appearance, vitally enacted into thought by the labours of imagination, flitting like a bird, with joyous ease, creating the personal which is its homeland, structure and nature, now playfully, now with caprice. It cavorts, but it also aborts.

Thus, if someone had said, when one was seven, 'You know there really is a man in the moon,' perhaps one could almost have believed it; but even then, really not quite. The blood supply ? the reality of the teeth in a bodiless head, adrift or even traffic-like, directed in the sky ? If the material is the evidence, it does not fit its own ways! It would be like that other de rigueur 'interpretation', that it was becomingly composed of green cheese, or the other, more modish nowadays, that it all came out of a hat, called the universe, and that it came out of another called nothing. This last is that according to the vagaries of that wholly discredited piece of spiritually induced childishness, equipped however with aplomb, called organic evolution*3.

With what pathos, delicacy, meaning, one can imbue a piece of rock, or dust, or chemistry! but it is not even personal. Man is that, and his Maker is beyond that in capacity,  as the donation source, the donor, surpasses the thing endued; for man's personal liberty, imagination, logical symbolism and soaring thought, all of one character and style, are adequately and justly based both for existence and for meaning, on adequate grounds, those creative of the creative. It is based on the imaginative logic of the Creator, aloft beyond all perception; for God is invisible*4 by nature, having made the visible as an excursion: that limited, bounded, devised, wait-for-it construction which is such a test, a trial and an adventure for one of the parts of it, called man, made in His image, so far beneath His necessary powers, and so wonderfully placed as a management construction.

 Such an excursion BY MAN then, as to credit to rocks, and such fantasies, whether in fun or temporarily unduly moved, these are man's apportioned domain. If he errs in this, as in other things, however, it is necessary to come back, distinguishing the worlds he 'creates' from those already created! You can make, to some extent, what you want; yet it is deadly to confuse it with what has already been made!
 
 

NO TRESPASSING

Tests never fail to rebuke the trespass (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri (ASP)  Chs. 1-3, 8), and our point is this: it is a systematic thing in power, and there is a systematic reason for it happening in ONE DIRECTION, so frequently (Ephesians 4:17ff ., Romans 1:17ff.). The confines of space are vast, and their magnitude a thing of splendour (cf. Dr Werner Gitt, Stars and Their Purpose, TMRCh. 7);  but the thing called man is on earth, not sprawling in the heavens, and the image of  God is provided not by accident, but by donation, and put in its place, however often it would leave that!
(as Psalm 115:16, Genesis 1-2:4 so clearly attest*5 ).

Small wonder then that as to man, he exhibits just that sort of constructive imagination which he has, and having, is created to have, by that acme and original of all creation and creativity, God by whose Spirit man can be touched, by whose words advised, by whose grace delivered.

Yet man usually chooses NOT to be so delivered, being proficient at this, as  personal and created - though with many controls by which his systems work, yet for all that,  without mere dictation to his spirit*6. It is this in which he works, in that invention categorically beyond ALL man's inventiveness, which constitutes his capacity so to act, and by which indeed,  he invents (cf. Little Things Ch. 10). He does not invent by incapacity, but by capacity, and the capaciousness of that capacity is discursive, equipped with overview, comparisons of symbol with symbol and of each with fact, integration of conception, correlation of integrations, power to err and to rectify and to give a reason for the same, with internal logical validity and potentially, essential validity, when but only when it is able to find the source of validity, and hence surpassing its powers, find release in rationality itself, the basis of all thought by which, from objective source, it can reach ANY objective statement.

Alas, without it, logically, it cannot even say, I cannot know! about its meaning and nature; for that is to declare the possible and the impossible, to invoke conceptions and rationality, which move remorsely to God, and without Him, to self-contradiction, in asserting without assertorial basis, unbased propositions.

IF you know even this, then you must have both absolute truth, its revelation, and its personal revelation, since without this, you are merely presenting your limitations into the assertion, and your viewing into the result. If however you do have this, then you not only CAN but DO know, so aborting your denial!

If therefore, and accordingly, you may know, and there is no impediment to logical pursuit; then, in this sphere, to avoid alogism, and to have something to say, you must find out, and proceed by the logic such as given in SMR Chs. 1-3,10, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, to what reason requires. This you do, not as if intruding, but as dumping the illusion that you could legislate and not discover, by mere caprice, or  retain a logical agnosticism: for how can it be a fact that you do not know, if you cannot know what knowledge is, being merely a relativistic reaction box, unendued with a reality meter! and are you even that, in that
event ? and if not anything, how say anything!

When however God is found, then the antinomies cease, possibilities recede before actualities, requirements are met, and reason rejoices. Obsessive omission must yield to openness and this in logic, to discovery, and this to reality and this to propositions which are valid, and these are found, by this very process as shown in the above references, only in the Bible as to basis and source. There is of course more to this finding of reality, than following reason; but reason inveterately so performs, that it leads you to where it is, in the Bible. It shows you how to find God, from His own self; and this ... leads you to where you are to go.

 

 

 

NOTE

 

*1 In Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, we have an approach to Gitt's emphasis, and later, in    more to the immediate point in hand.

The German scientist, Dr Werner Gitt, specialist in information science has some points which fit here so snugly, as to make it apposite to adjoin them at this point. Thus in Little Things Ch. 3, *3, we have this which follows. 

The delicious delights of snowflakes, like the little, to the naked eye invisible desert flowers, seem so much integumental to the mind of childhood, that one is constrained to add this reflection here. Almost fastidious fancy is inherent.

Dr Werner Gitt, the notable information scientists who lectures and writes so broadly, has in his little work, "Stars and their Purpose in Space", a reference to the notable symmetries and geometrical specifications of snow-flakes. Facing p. 29, he sets out such structures visually.

The appearance is of

bullet a) intricacy
bullet b) facility with tiny things
bullet c) compression of thought notionally in elaborate features of ornament
bullet d) extraordinary similarity of structure mixed with equal diversity in detail and
bullet e) work so fine as to be daunting to the nimblest fingers.

What does NOT appear to the appreciating eye, however, is this interesting reflection from Gitt. He notes: "All snowflakes are hexagonal, varying in size from one to three mm." That, it is interesting in terms of cognition: a cognitive device has this sort of characteristic. He continues:  "Their weight varies from one-half milligram down to one-200th of a mg. It  has been proved mathematically that every single snowflake is unique; the same pattern is never repeated."

This is eminently surprising. Like individuals in face, the difference may be slight, but it is there. Conformity is not the mode; type is; within the type there is an industry of differentiation startling to behold. Thus it is with so much of nature, that to ignore it is anti-scientific (not merely unscientific), it is to dismiss primary attestation so viable and vigorous, that it would resemble a judge who, being told that the bullet in the victim was slightly different from the one which could come from the standard gun of the presumed assailant, went on to emphasise the sameness!

These hidden marvels, like much more now continually being found about the nature of creation, attest its finesse of construction, abundance of capacity in design beyond any need of any kind, except as a spectacle of wonder and an ingenuity of thought; but then, when one IS ingenious, as is the case with the Creator, who created both the capacity for it in man and for verbalising and conceptualising it, and co-ordinating all three, THAT is what one would expect, and constitutes just one more of the myriads, ever expanding in thought, of such verifications. Patterns can be cognitive or apparent, submerged or obvious.

Thus the similarity in construction in wing and limb, by contrast, shows the co-ordinating thought back of it all, for this is precisely what thought tends to do: to see similarities for adaptation, and to render them thriftily in moving from thought to detailed action, in making a co-ordinated series. They do not however move splendidly from one to the other in engineering, or in anything but thought; for the commotion required to co-ordinate and specify for material, living things  more than for the mechanical and not the less because of the intricacies of DNA: this does not waft in like some Summer breeze. It requires honest toil and new prototypes to be constructed, depending for their challenge, on the material.

This tendency for patterns to be related in an authoritative sort of way, as sub-types under a cover-type, is noted by Denton in his "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis". On p. 137, he notes this:

Then in History, Review and Overview ... Ch. 5, the orientation and requirements for the generation and maintenance of the universe appear at greater length, detailed elements of the matter being spelt out in that file, with special reference to logic. It is however in Ch. 4 (op. cit) that the information nub appears, and an excerpt from that location now appears.

 

Dr Werner Gitt from Germany's Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Braunschweig, has made a flat statement which for years has gone unanswered. This fact was noted in Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2001. It was made in 1997, in his work, In the beginning was information. It is this:

bullet "There is no known natural law
through which matter can give rise to information,
neither is any physical process
or material phenomenon known
that can do this."

What makes it the more interesting is the combination of his eminence in his field of information science, where he is an acknowledged leader, and the fact that this statement was presented with challenge for anyone to falsify it. The absence of answer, over the years, represents the inability to show otherwise.

Imagine the philosophical naturalist, dedicated by religious conviction, to the concept that what lacked mind, spirit and intelligence, did the thing anyway; and then, despite the logical lapse involved, the scientific method solecism in omitting the needful parameters of relevance and operational visibility or its equivalent, he meets this new contradiction like a panzer division on the march against him. Imagine his new fiasco. NO WAY can information 'arise' - that most unscientific of terms anyway - either by PHYSICAL PROCESS or MATERIAL PHENOMENON that is known.

Information in billions of units wed to integral results in the form of living creatures of almost incalculable complexity of governing code, chemistry and operation, of mathematical sophistication, must be generated from nothing, or from something which lacks the means by any construction or sight, and which in turn must be generated from nothing, or magic, according to preference. Further, information must be generated by a law or method which opposes that of science in this specialised field as does the hypothesis in each other, so that Information Science puts flowers on the grave, these too grown without information.   Information 'arises' without occurrence, functionality or propensity known to man, and the empirical fact stares down the meandering miasma of imagination without discipline.

For this magical contrivance to which so many lie vacant, like empty houses awaiting squatters: Logic dies; things 'arise', nullity is king and obfuscation is the Crown Prince.

What then ? In information science, there is this to add to the rest: NOTHING is found of this kind. Not one iota is to be discovered of design uplift, informational innovation.

This has long past the bizarre, and represents the height of obscurantism, the nadir of scientific method. and the demise of logic on a lonely hill. Information science, like every other form of disciplined science, can only say: IT IS NOT HERE, this is not where law or observation, function or facet is to be found for the task. It was only to be expected, since in every other aspect, the thing is null. Go away, we as part of natural phenomena cannot tell you where it came from; it is not with us. It thus joins the ranks which cannot conform to such myths*1A.                                    

Empirically, and in terms of scientific law alike, chance does not produce law, matter does not chatter logically cohesive symbols from their absence, contrivance does not arrive from the a-logical and what lacks grounds does not produce has requires them. The GIVEN character of matter and energy, the REDUCING character of specialised construction, the non-arrival observationally of life from non-life, even with big intelligent pushes which make it irrelevant to the issue anyway: these things sum up scientific laws; and the effort to circumvent them in this is the reverse of all scientific method.

Such laws are MADE from what is deemed data, given facts, and are not law when contravened. To assume their contravention in order to account for a particularity is the reverse cycle in scientific method. If you can SHOW that there is an exception, the thing is not a law in any case. If you cannot, then you abide by it, and find a way from evidence and reason, within the bounds of known law, to account for it. Here it is ludicrously the opposite, you seek a means, not observable, contrary to all known law, and suggest it as an hypothesis, even when it is starkly refuted by independent evidence, at the level of verification.