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CHAPTER FIVE

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING IS NOTHING NEW,

BUT IT IS TIME MAN KNEW HIS PLACE -

FOR GLORY OR DISGRACE

GET READY. START

Start. Are we all ready ? On your marks, get set ...

No, wait a minute. Since our topic is nothing, and all that has come from it, we do not have any contestants.

For that matter, where is the starter, or the track, or the timer, or time ?

Where is speed when there is nothing to be sped!

Very well, then let us start anyway. Now from magic realms of anti-scientific pretension (we still call it 'nothing', since imagination does not do much except prepare for what can be done with non-nothing), let us just HAVE some matter of some kind. That is, form and specifications, limits and laws, governance and interactive provisions so that it does not all turn to nothing. There it is. Isn't it great: we got it from the same source as did Ned Kelly: we robbed it from nothing!

Anyway, once we get used to it, robbery of this becomes culturally a norm. It is regarded most highly, because what is not nothing and has always been there (or it would have had nowhere - a sub-division of nothing - to come from) is by all means to be avoided by those who prefer the shrug, the drug, of mind or body, to the pangs of repentance and seeking God. Some do it with fell purpose, others with mere cultural conformity, but whichever the mode of this enormity, it is immensely common - thus Christ spoke of the way of truth as very narrow, and so it is! (Matthew 7:13-15, 21-22 cf. Psalm 119:142,152, 28-32).

Let us now introduce from these same anti-scientific realms of magic, a series of commands. Now, let us not be confused at all here. There are IMPLICIT commands in matter, by which it MUST be what it is. Here however there are EXPLICIT commands, in all DNA, in ONE language in ALL life. Good, we have this little import of

symbol-sequence-significance-serial-assembly-plant-construction-with-material-consultation-to-implement-orders-into-material-fact-in-things

that live.

That is very good. It is amazing what you can get from magic (equals nothing, because it is a source in the thought only, and has no objective, identifiable existence, but is simply another name for putting what is not there into being, without bothering about having what it takes to do it). Nothing is flourishing and should shortly be worshipped. That, rather, is the type of progression in this sort of thing (one cannot use the word 'progress', and this word allows for any ... direction!).

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Shakespeare had the right idea in his title: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. There is nothing to it! as they say in (far) other realms. You do nothing with what is not there and you get everything. If only the poor of this earth knew how to do this; but amazingly it is practised as a sort of black art (not acknowledged and for some not even realised, it seems), by which you get all you want from nothing, in stages.

It has a better ... ring! It sounds better then, like a criminal amassing his millions from what has nothing of productive labour in it, only theft (as here from what is not there as his), so that it is best to produce the booty for the bank a few thousand at a time, such as COULD (in very different circumstances) have been gained by productive labour. With many small instalments, you cover up your crime and amass 'millions'; or here, create your 'mother Nature' or her children by bits all from nothing!

So here, in many unproductive stages, the nihilist (though they do not all realise that this is their basis, just as many who are married do not realise what their original motives were, it seems) gains all he could possibly want, and this to the great pleasure or content of his own mind; and having invented his idol, the nothing basis, or started with non-nothing but really at the expense of nothing which is the real progenitor, though it is not there, he gains marvels, and can even worship them. Thus he is able to gain all with but little expenditure, except in his own mind, before applying himself very often to creating a whole system for worshipping it.

On that, see Evolution as Religion!

How great is my nothing! he intones, although many give it a name like 'Nature' or 'Mother Nature' (don't hear much of Father Nature, perhaps for religious reasons), or the Supreme Force or anything at all that might appeal, and does not meet the logical need (a 'ghostly spectre' is the phrase^*1of some, or its equivalent). This is examined further in Downfall from Defamation ... Ch. 2).

Indeed, to this creation of his, modern sceptical man gives glory, just as Isaiah shows many in ancient Israel did (Isaiah 41) with what they had made in other ways. This also was from nothing to the point, as here, of actual creation, being a matter of mental fudges, for getting what was not there to come forth, invoking 'nature' to make nature, and like fealties to folly. Obsessing with the result of creation, this itself becomes a manufacturing plant for the creation of natural or metaphorical objects, somehow all bound up, with the totality itself, what ? Why, it is the child of nothing.

Such is naturalism.

Hebrews 11 speaks on this topic.

Now faith is being assured of what is hoped for,
and convinced of what is not seen.

The first line speaks of what is foundational, and brings assurance accordingly; the second of what attests itself and produces conviction in accord with the evidence.

We are told that we understand by faith that the things which are made have come from what is not seen. That is in Hebrews 11:3.

That is simple. If you want to know where eyes and sight and electro-magnetic rays and the laws which govern eyes and rays and their interaction have come from, then positing the things themselves is simply begging the question. You need what MAKES what is limited, legal, interactive, on profound bases of inter-connected tissue of actuality in many spheres of acutely co-ordinated systems, which interact with precision. If this WERE those very things in some system, and you try to make the system such that it will do in the end all you want of it, this is simply an obscure way of using nothing in disguise.

If you would like an irrational universe where causality does not operate, a sort of magic castle universe, or one where things have built-in programmatics to do things (which does not happen to be the observable case, and if it were, would merely the more directly attest its Creator), then this is a fiction for a sci-fi novel. It is not, however, that assemblage of logic and language, action and power, system and sophistication which are characteristics of this universe, to which we turn our attention for the reason that we are interested in its coming to be.

Whatever you have, you have to PUT it or HAVE it there in the first place, in order to DO anything. What does that is either your imagination or adequate power and craft, and simply having it there means it needs to be eternal, just as having it come there needs what is eternal to do it, since nothing itself has no successors when it is ... all. Adequacy for eternity is indefeasible, ineradicable and necessary.

It is only the latter which has logical relationship to the case of orgins. We do not live in your imagination but in the universe. On this, see further SMR pp. 284ff., 307ff., 262ff.; even if you detest causality, and reason, and try to make something odd cause this causality of ours so that we can disregard it, you are still USING both reason and causality in order to get this. What you use, you validate; or else deny your own validity. What you validate is not invalid!

Let us now move on to the next phase.

A current system, once created, does what it is: it acts in accord with its own parameters, being merely an organised series of capacities and powers moving in ambits of their competence with the outcomes of the income for the system itself. What is programmed is not in itself a programmer; what is organised is not in itself an organiser; what is extant is not for that reason a provider of push, power, protocols and systems, but acts precisely as it is, with the ingredients of thought, capacity and actuality with which it is endued. It does not arise into the creator of the universe (except of course for its magically given self), just because it is there.

What is there does not have this facility unless it be what is ALWAYS there (so that anything can ever be there), with what is ALWAYS adequate (for if it is not, what is needed for our result cannot come otherwise, by definition). What is adequate has what it takes, and so is able to get the job done. What is submoronic, without ANY intelligence, is not in that category. Give it as long as you please, and it is incapable of work at that level. Time is irrelevant.

Great expectations were not first invented by Charles Dickens, but where they have no internal reality, they remain like the charade in his book of that name, a continual procession without progress, a diligent dabbling of mind with no correlative action in fact. Facts require what it takes to make them so, and imagination does not do. It can contribute, but then it must be that of the Maker of facts, not the meddler in thought, to one side of it all.

Writers of romances get results from clients who like their thoughts, not those who see their actions in real life. THAT requires real causes really adequate for real results by apt conjugation of power, proportion of operating skills relevant and grounds for their own operation. When it comes to God, and in fact He has come to us in making us at the outset, you have One who being eternal is the basis and reason and ground and wisdom for all. Remove that, and you have, in a word, nothing as the ultimate basis, with nothing in it able ever to differentiate itself into something! The choice is for the will, not for reason, which has as Paul points out in Romans 1:17ff., no option.

ULTRA-LIGHT LOGIC AND IMAGES THAT DO NOT LIVE

But what of the dance method ?

Here you start with something (magic and irrational, a delimited kind of system of some sort, capable therefore of being characterisable in speech, not a pageant of motion of what has neither form nor function, since a pageant is a form, and motion requires space and what moves, and discrete objects to do the moving, so that total chaos is simply a phrase, not a fact). This something, you get from nowhere (for this is all); and then you reduce it (past its non-entityship or reduction to whatever seems the least in the first place), by one of the impossible things before breakfast which the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland was so fond of, and having reduced the irreducible, just as you invented it in the first place, you proceed.

It is all so profound in utterance, empty in fact. To go up you need SOMETHING, and the POWER to make it do it. These are question-begging NON-ACCOUNTED provisions for play. You just have them, no cause at all, just delimited objects and scenarios from nowhere. You go up by words. Obviously you ALWAYS, in balancing acts, have to have enough to go down, in order to allow something else to go up. You always have to have a credit balance at the first, and to get more credit from nowhere. The pluses are not nothings, and like all non-nothings, they need their genesis. Grabbing them from space needs space in the first place, to have been invented, and the grabbing to come into force as well, or its equivalent.

Decreasing what you irrationally invent, you may be imagined to increase something else (which not being nothing is a new act of creation). You do this of course without reason, ground or power, merely fiddling with concepts inconsistent with an account, but requiring the movement of words instead of facts.

You try the up and down dance method. The ups are all just givens, and the downs do not construct anything else, so it has its problems... Indeed, without being uppity, you have to have a net credit balance, you cannot really rob Peter to pay Paul in the construction industry, without having MONEY in the first place to get something done, and the invention of that is the point at issue! However such inventors whisk things about, in this the task being like that of a corrupt financier, you have to have the net funds created in the first place, and to maintain as much credit as the construction requires, however you dabble: debiting to nothing does nothing. You have to build in the end, past this pastime of multiple operations on a zero basis.

You do not really go down from nothing on the one hand and up on the other in some sort of weird dance or unbalanced balancing act, for below nothing is just what there is in it: nothing. Nor do you make a building out of destruction of something else, for you have to DO the building and you or an agent has to BE there to do it. In all these scenarios, words replace deeds, concepts ignore realities and phrases do the work. Substance in whole has to be invented in the end: and doing so by reduction, being the opposite of construction, this is no method of construction!

It is SO unproductive, and as to all such thoughts, there is nothing in them; for nothing is an entity of thought without future or past or any way of instituting either, since that is 'something', a flat contradiction in terms, and the invention to come, in this case indeed, it is QUITE something! There is nothing below. It is not a balance that is needed but an Eternal Adequacy with the will to do it. Take away the will and the adequacy becomes inadequate for the result to be accounted for - that triad, body, mind and spirit, man. To be adequate is not to do; to be able, is not to perform. Creation has to be activated.

Nor for that matter can you have magic simply give you a co-ordinated, integrated system with provisions for coherent interaction, and then have this go down in bits while in other bits it goes up, since degeneration is no crutch for creation, and as you see on any old farm, decrepitude is no key to having another farm built for you or anyone else, anywhere else. It is simply the unsublime degeneration such as has, just as it can have, no exception. The Second Law of Thermodynamics categorically enshrines this fact, and it is a law because you can never find it broken. Chance (1), that bogus blight of mistaken minds, is no more a constructor of things than force (2) or power (3) by itself (cf. Ancient Deeds ... Chs. 9 and 13, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming
Chs. 4-6).

But what of the digitalisation, stipplings, reductionisms, day dreams in the sunlight of surrealism ?

These are in the first instance, operational action on its own premises according to its uninterrupted nature; in the second, thrust for such action to occur; and in the third, rate of thrust. They for their own part - the system, whatever it is which has no interference, the thrust and the rate - require their environmental habitat, and by themselves are without any meaning for construction. What is there does what is in its nature, with the dynamics supplied. It does not do what is not in its nature, any more than a car flies, or a mathematician is an engineer, or a poet a scientist PER SE.

The collation of bits is not the systematisation of bits which then become systematic products in a new situation. Stippling digital points is not inventing what they represent any more - but rather less - than French impressionism with its dabs and daubs is neither a correct representation (however delightful the creation) nor the living botanical beauties presented. If you want life, you must be taken to where it is and find it. Maundering about what is not life, and moving it about is indeed a fanciful and interesting task; but it is art, not part of life.

Spots of anything are not the system, and representations are not life. What makes a depiction is not the reality, and stipple-consciousness, though an art form of interest, is not what is actually in view; for that ? it is the command-directed, physical life, thought-responsive mental life and imagination, purpose and perspective-oriented spirit in a variety of integrity, each in its own form, fashion and function, united in a unity of life where cosmoi of thought and system, imagination and order, option and necessity verge without total merger, distinct yet co-operative, and counsel mingles with conditions.

Whether you look on a screen at the screech, or blessed high soprano notes of an operatic singer, and find the shape of the sound waves and their patterns of progression, or hear direct, there is the difference of life in the latter and art with order, in the former. You can atomise the elements of representation, but not in life, the synthetic and the singular, the qualitative and the mental, the visionary and the vitiating, the true and the false, the vital and the derivative, the reality and the charm of it. The chart tells much; life tells more; God knows all.

Whether in art or in undirected action, the various forces and powers, impacts and bits, and as to the last, the inner-bits, these are an anatomisation, not an explanation; a depiction, not a creation, except in art. Back of the bits are the systems, back of the systems are the meta-systems, and back of these are the personal deployments and the spirit of man, with his mind analytically operative within the fields of his own construction, as an acolyte and a beginner, and back of all of this is its builder, conceptualiser, conceiver and Creator, immune to dissidence, immutable to criticism, on whom all devolves, deployer and maker of systems, language and its utilisation in man's body and to his mind: involved in His own way and time by His own word and will, to the uttermost independent, filled with His own counsel and void of void.

Omit Him, and your perspective is nothing as the basis of much ado; worship nature and you myth is to invent by thought what takes resource for its invention; start with Him and you cover all, from His necessary eternity to our natural identities, correlative with much beyond our own powers, understanding by means of our derivative constructions, mutually operative relative to natural things and each other by language and understanding, incomprehensible without our key, and incoherent without our code, but meaningful with purpose because of His word, and operative in a way correlative with our powers, when our key is used, and our Deployer and Designer, Creator and Redeemer is found by the acceptance of that redemption.

In eternity unmoved by conditions imposed, He has imposed them in His creation: they limit us in our capacities, but do not limit Him in His, by which He commands our creation, organises our logic, synthesises this with the world He made WITH the same logic that we utilise within it. Following this, we find the ways of the things of nature and of ourselves, with constrictions for our constructions, and information for our minds, counsel for our hearts and sound knowledge for our spirits. Otherwise ? we lag in antinomy, loiter in antithesis, telling the truth (by denying this or that or affirming it) when we have no means of finding it; for a universe without absolute truth cannot confer it, nor can man tell what it is. If he does, he is self-contradictory; if he does not, he has no power to argue. If he says none has, then he has truth without any way to gain it, a walking antinomy and a working rebel.

Self-contradiction however is not fulfilment, nor is collision with reality comprehension (cf. Deity and Design ...Ch. 8).

Bits and powers, these are nice to have around; but it is life itself, spirit, mind and matter which is in view, not its depiction. It is mastery not mystery, it is that combination of command and comprehension with imagination and invention which being considered, not a few loose, vague, abstract concepts which relate in a primitive sort of ideational way, to the sophistication and orientation, the integration and the unity which is man, for example, and in his world. It is not in harmony but often in deliberate deceit and devious warfare: sin strikes like an adder and judgment comes like bombs. It is, however, in its own internal unity as life.

Darting around it with words, this is not its creation, and information about it, this is not its construction. Reductionist manglings are just that, and leave, each one of them, the realities as a skipping stone leaves the waters. We consider much of this in The gods of naturalism have no go! Putting things into a digitalised form does not create the original, merely a representation. Bits of nerves put next to bits of bone are not a living system, but a clever mode of its portrayal. Digitalising what is to be transmitted from one form to another, may be clever; but it has nothing whatever to do with what is integral by nature, by operation, by multi-systematic sequences and dynamic methodology of systems operative ONLY because they are entire and correlative as is the engine of a car, relative to its 'bits' - and make these in microns, not centimetres, and the case is yet clearer. Modern man has got so used to his limited modes of representing things that he is in danger of mistaking the depiction, the picture, whether mental or graphic, for the life.

Intellectualisation of a concept and fragmentation of an image can be useful procedures for analysis or coding depictions, but they do not make life, and conceptions based on such mere mutual placement of bits is not in the least degree relevant to life. You need PROTECTION of cell material, ENERGY for it, MEANS of distributing this, CODE for replacing it when it is worn out, not the worn out thing but the original, EDITING for correcting code, MATERIAL for applying the commands inherent in life and CHRONOLOGY for their correlation. No chance can make from one system what belongs to another. No slave matter becomes mind liberty by ... growth, but only by creation, where it is easier to make everything of its own kind, and place them in systems, as we customarily, wedding the disparate by the precise use of that mental feature, that spiritual function, imagination, and intelligence, inspection and introspection. Building on nothing with nothing is a gaunt and useless preoccupation of modern man, however he dresses it up; and inventing by nothing what has all the potential for everything is merely an indirect way of begging the question, in this case, the universe and all that is in it.

This sort of 'invention' is inventive, but only in the mind of man, not in the real world where if you want information, you get it only by intelligence, for the simple reason that it is in itself a processive, logic-oriented excursus into concept and causality. Information which eludes logic is not even able to use definable terms, or make cohesive interpretation available. Logic is in all definition of categories, characterisations such as words provide. Designations include the correlation of concept and actuality when the topic is what is in this world.

That is one reason why Professor Gitt is able to challenge people to show information inventing itself. All the time nothing is being made into a server unit, inserting its nothing products into the existing status quo; but it cannot do this, you see; it does not have that something which it takes it make it happen (The Desire of the Nations ... Ch. 2 Epilogue, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed, Barrister of Bliss Ch. 4 as marked).

You are dealing here with a composite of perspective, process, symbol, reality, cohesion of concepts with action and in our special realm, aptitude for action in such a time-space, and spirit-mind integrity as we face. This does not 'arise' but is a WORK of skill and will, interpretation and construction. It requires what that sort of thing has inherent: namely, intelligence and skill, and to make it come, will. Aptitude, we must remember, is never the same in itself, as performance. Many students show this; and they are not alone! Potential and performance differ not least, by will, but also because of perspective which links like the roar of a lion, to truth and so to direction.

In this field of information, the empirical fact is as obvious and perspicuous as is the logical reason for it. Figs never did nor could grow on star-thistles (unless of course someone made a program...). We are however not having jousts of the imagination but observation of logical constraints and empirical facts in their very delightful wedlock. There, there is a happy marriage (cf. SMR pp. 208ff.).

If you would like an irrational universe where causality does not operate, a sort of magic castle universe, or one where things have built-in programmatics to do things (which does not happen to be the observable case, and if it were, would merely the more directly attest its Creator), then this is a fiction for a sci-fi case. It is not, however, that assemblage of logic and language, action and power, system and sophistication which are characteristics of this universe, to which we turn our attention for the reason that we are interested in its coming to be.

As noted above, whatever you have, you have to PUT it or HAVE it there in order to DO anything. What does that is either your imagination or adequate power and craft. It is only the latter which has logical relationship to the case of orgins.

He has all it takes and it has always been His. He does not grow or arise or come hand-made, concepts in motion. He is always adequate and makes what He will. Engendering is one of His capacities, who with intellilgence and will, imagination and knowledge makes what is temporal and temporary, as we might make paper-aeroplanes, electronic gadgets, books or carpets. Sufficient for all, eternal past all, He enables all and deals with it. Causality as on this earth, separated in time, is one of His inventions, and it mirrors His mind.

It is the originating Original or no origination. If the former, God; if the latter, neither you nor I.

Remove that, and logically you have, in a word, nothing with nothing in it able ever to differentiate itself into something, or else question-begging contributions of crafted potentials from magic, magic invaders from some kind of outer space of mind, aliens captured from somewhere undifferentiable from nothing, themselves products of the unproductive. Yet they are but spawn of the Eternal in the end, for all that, of what has to BE there and adequate and eternal and so on, for anything else ever to be. Such concepts of gifts from nowhere, logical nonentities, are merely red herrings, an alternate question begging avoidance of the issue of origins!

The choice is for the will, not for reason, which has as Paul points out in Romans 1, no option.

Thus, however many magics you get, you have to do the job properly if you want creation, and have the Eternal Being (for this cannot come from nothing, logically impossible, and so has to BE there) equipped with craftsmanship and creativity which is as far from nothing, in the first instance of thought, as is the product from it which attests: and this, as Romans puts it, is His eternal power and Godhead. It is this at which you are staring, whether vacantly or otherwise. The Eternal Being with what it takes has the name 'God'. That is what it means, and what it means likewise to have creation from such a being, is this, that this Being is the Creator. He is not a thought: thought creates for the mind. We need more than this, not less. We need thought, power, craftsmanship and understanding to make the understandable.

What then ?

If you don't want God, abusing the mind (Ephesians 4:17-19), but simply desire assume everything, and have it make itself in stages literally out of nothing, at the outset, and similarly at each stage, then that is your romance. Some do not marry but read love stories. It is not, however, really the same. Some do not give obeisance to God but write nothing stories (often with something nicely defined and extant without cause, as an initial donation from romance). Future chapters have nice imports from the same source.

In these romances, what is not there is to produce what is seen! Rather what is not seen is to produce what is...

It is not only faith which descries the Eternal Creator, but reason which will not rest without that Being.

Thus, there is another opening or avenue. This ? the other option, which has the inestimable advantage of being rational, is this: that what is there has produced all these legal, delimited, inter-active, reciprocally functional entities and the contrivances which make them operate effectually in unitary constructions or agents called living objects or subjects, as the case may be. This Being has what it takes, and the will to do it, and hence logically it could be done, and historically, it has been done. We are here now.

How then will Eternal Being do it ? By having all that it takes in thought, concept, symbol-command-execution combinations in power, system-production, and idea, and using it. HOW did this Being use it ? That can be found in ONLY three ways. First, it can be found from nothing, pure imagination that chatters on. That is not logical. Secondly, it can be found from inspecting the evidence (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1 et al.). Thirdly, it can be found from anything which the commander of the speech (cf. History, Review and Overview Ch. 5, The Wisdom and Wit of the Word of God ... Ch. 2, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4) in DNA may have to say to those commanded into existence: in this case at least to that amazing triad-contrivance called rational beings, even mankind.

These are they who can understand the meaning and method of symbolism and what it implies, and even make mini-constructions of their own, using such techniques as appear from creation within themselves, to make extra-human inventions, so showing to themselves how knowledge and power and artifice and laws can be so used to gain results of great interest.

The evidence that gains total, uninfested, uninhibited acceptance by covering all the facts is that it came in kinds from what was sufficient to conceive and create them. As seen in Ch. 4 above, this is the essential discontinuity of the natural realm. One does not say 'Nature' here, because of the tendency to do to natural things, what many people, according to an article in The Australian on February 26,2008 are doing in the political realm with the US contender Obama. It is there alleged by the writer with some examples, that people in some such cases can gain a type of euphoria and begin to elevate the object of it to great heights and so vote for that party. Great heights require great deeds from a thus greatly adorned source, not euphoria, as their ground.

Mistakenly, the concept that some brain part does wonderful things for euphoria is treated as if it were basic, when that is merely like saying of a slaying, that the hand is the part that activates the murderer's stab. It is relevant, to be sure; but the mind first must have DESIRE, and usually MOTIVE and certainly MOTIF, and the implements are merely methods, like the hand for writing. Important ? the hand ? certainly; but not the essential ingredient in writing, which might have been done through a voice sensitive computer. The mind back of it and the spirit which puts purpose into the mind, it is this which is basic.

Lest then, what is merely a mis-attribution, 'Nature', be in mind, we leave out the capital letter of glory. There IS glory, but it is not in what is made so much as in what made it. I may have pride in my new car (I do not have or plan to get one), but the real attribution should be to the maker of it.

So instead of nothing whether in toto or expressed in stages, as a source for glorious or marvellous or wonderful actions, one always looks for what has what it takes and evidences itself as doing it. TMR does this systematically, initially in Ch. 1, as does SMR, and The gods of naturalism have no go! gives a large survey of the factual situation.

NO NEED TO BE ORIGINAL ABOUT THE ORIGINAL:
HE IS THERE, ALWAYS WAS

In looking for the original, of necessity always there, we look past all the contrived movements from nothing, continually adding to our pile in our minds as we think about these things, knowing that nothing, neither conceived of as active in a heap (as with Nilsson) nor in little steps (as in Darwin), can really produce ANYTHING. Instead we look as in SMR at the minimal this Creator must have, and then look for the evidence of any speech He may have made outside the DNA scripts of so many creatures that as again we read in this same day's paper, The Australian, there is planned an Encyclopedia of Life. This is intended to detail in myriads of pages, all the living creations where matter is involved, whether variations on an original theme, or other or more fixedly moored with less species variation.

Naturally, so imaginative a Being (we put the capital not as euphoria but as a logical necessity, since it simply signifies the Original and Source and Thinker and Conceiver and Creator who must be there, rationally), must have no difficulty in making His thoughts known, WHERE He wants them known and HOW He does so. On what He has done in this, see SMR Appendix C and D.

Not unexpectedly, as He has given, to the creation called man, the power to think and imbibe mentally, symbols and language, and to ponder and criticise himself and others, to evaluate and to think creatively about facts, we find that there is JUST ONE book here. In this, there is conceptual coherence of discourse and rational conformity - just as in biology in DNA, there is just ONE language used, not a chancy thing, but an imperial symbolic mode of expression of one kind with one basic style, the Esperanto of biology, pre-made.

How valuable, that it is discovered that there is just one book that is rationally available for examination and attestation and consideration in the very obvious domain: not that of what is product of man or other spirit, but distinctively, that of the infinitely wise and knowledgeable Creator, on whom there is nothing to impend as we have often seen. What He says is not dependent on facts, but creative of them.

There is but ONE; for there MUST be the original in all domains, and not a combination even of gods, since the laws of co-operation and the structure for a mutual system would have to have been created, just like the world, and by whom ? By the original - it is not an infinite regression but a triumphant procession.

The Bible being that book (as shown for example in SMR, in Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, who answers riddles and where he is darkness departs and Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer), and there being no other which is able to deal with scientifically careful and logically precise questions as to its standing at the level of the product of such a Creator, we need simply investigate it to find what is the message of God, what He has to say.

REASON AND FAITH

Reason requires this. It is however by faith that you can - if you place it where reality is, attested, verified and validated reality - become known to God as a friend and child of His, and so begin to co-operative with the Operator and Creator. This is a gift which is attested on grounds as so often shown on this site, in the Bible, through Jesus Christ, from whom come the unsearchable riches of God Himself to His children, home at last (Ephesians 3:8).

That is the message on this occasion. Look indeed both here and below at the verses given!

Here it is! the wisdom, the explanation, the guidance and the glory, the splendour and the counsel, the majesty and the meaning. It is personal to man, as He is personal, and it is individual to man, just as God, though a Trinity, is neither incorporated nor made up of components (cf. SMR pp. 532ff.), ONE GOD with one message.

That is the not-nothing word of God to man, about the not-from-nothing (in stages or all at once) creation called mankind, about the not-unneeded salvation provided for him. This is, through its being ignoring, either altogether or in stages, as even some pseudo-churches dip in their own ideas with it to make an ungodly synthesis, distancing themselves by degrees from God and His truth - the ground of man's ever increasing distress. Blight your blessing and you mar your being. Man is marred.

The case is not different in kind when other voices are heard, and other heresies, hostile to biblical truth are in view, whether ancient or modern. Violence and terrorism have been of old, and now reach their infamous culmination, where force acts as if to disestablish truth, and forced 'conversions' become mockeries of truth, inventions of Satan, masterpieces of intrusion into the holy by the witless inventions of straying man: for there is no wisdom apart from God. Jeremiah 23 traces these false messengers with vigour, and God denounces them one and all, advising us that this phenomenon will come to its most extreme form in the last times of the Age. As He said, so it is.

Ignoring in this way, mixed with pride in his achievements, gives us some of the template for modern man. Production ? why it is the race's cyclotronic nightmare. More and worse rebellions of almost any body from almost anything good and holy and godly and right and reasonable, using force instead of truth, and cynicism instead of spirituality. It does not work anything good; but it is fine at working ruin.

That sort of self-elevation for man, making of himself or his appointees of mind, his own gods, is so irrational - for supposing a car COULD think, imagine the case if it took pride in what it did, when it did not even create itself! It would be a ghastly confluence of the wonder and joy of creation with the horror of defamation of the actual maker of it, and an artful arrogation of his name!

But there! God's word tells us that pride is one of the best ways to get a fall, and man is still falling. The devilries of the last century have been measured in tens of millions to the slaughter in this country and that, because someone or other has some dream or other about something in 'Nature' which seems to that person to mean that millions must go so that his imaginary productive agency can have its withering will (cf. Jeremiah 23).

People tend to let them do it, although in the case of Hitler, they had so many reservations about his ways that millions of people were expended to get rid of him. The amazing and shameful thing that happened with this very just exercise was that in the process of removing one mass-murdering paranoid, some delivering nations acted in a new consortium.

They used for help, what ? Why it was another paranoid ruler, with what arithmetically seems to have been, taking time into account, an even worse record, and so came the Cold War with its many more murders and tortures and follies and devastating destructions! Not only so, but in that sphere, there was effort made to get rid of this other nub of mass-murdering man, namely his conscience if possible, and to dominate, dictate to and direct his very spirit. Nobel prize-winner Solzhenitsyn speaks well on this topic, and not without personal experience!

Since God Himself is not available for any more murder, since the time of Calvary, that epic at the predicted time with the predicted Gospel (cf. SMR Ch. 9), then it is His redeemed people who have become as He foretold (John 16), the eminent site for the buzz saw of untruth. They have been hacked, sacked, burned, tortured, oppressed, taxed wildly, demeaned, degraded, denigrated by the immoral, and the death knell has been rung with mechanical supports, for otherwise it would make the arm weary!

While it is true that Shakespeare had an excellent title in his MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING! it is necessary for our own century show something about these nothings and much ados, such as organic evolution and the political Nature worshipping of one kind an another in the field of religion (cf. SMR Ch. 10). When that flummery of fashionable invention from nothing is done, and indeed at all times, it is better to make much ado about GOD who created than about the creation. Actually the Bible says this (Romans 1:16):

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,
for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes,
for the Jew first and also for the Greek.
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written,
'The just shall live by faith.'

"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,
who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,
because what may be known of God is manifest in them,
for God has shown it to them.

^"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,
so that they are without excuse,
because, although they knew God,
they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful,
but became futile in their thoughts,
and their foolish hearts were darkened.

^"Professing to be wise, they became fools,
and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man -
and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

^"Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts,
to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,
who is blessed forever. Amen."

That is found in Romans 1:17-25.

Actually, much ado about nothing is nothing new. It is just that it is coming into increasing vogue as man departs from the living God and moves on to the sexual manifestations of this condition of spirit which are spelled out in detail along with the unsavoury spiritual exhibitions which the God of the Bible equally condemns. Beyond these, now fulfilled just as predicted for last phases of declension from God, we turn to the rest of the affiar, as found in the last verses of Romans 1.

"And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,
God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting;
being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are

whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful;

who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them."

God has said it all already, in many ways, over several millenia.

That is the message. It is time to listen. To what ? why to what God calls the Gospel as in Romans 1:16 which is the power of God to salvation as we there read. From what ? from this world's evils, our own evils, sins, lusts of body, mind or spirit, iniquities, inequities, hatreds and loathings of what is right, departure from the knowledge of God and hence becoming like spiritual flotsam and jetsam, tossed about and ending on whatever forlorn or forsaken beach, whether it happens to be at a resort or in a desert.

If you want not to walk in darkness, but in the light (knowing that light is sown for the righteous - Psalm 97:11), and hence to have the righteousness of God placed upon you and your sins despatched (as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103), like a cover (Isaiah 61;10), and so not to stumble (John 8:12,11:10, 12:35-36), then Christ, the centre of salvation is the way. It is He who paid for it, by taking the place of whoever should receive, believe in and trust Him, and so creating anew the friendship with God for which man is made (Romans 3:23-27, 5:1-12, Ephesians 2:1-12, John 5:24, 6:57).

When God promises, it is like the word in DNA, it continues and acts. In the Bible: it sticks and happens (cf. John 4:14, 19:9,27-28). Faith however is what is operative here, that is a meeting and matching of the mind of God and His ways with the mind of man and his, so that man becomes allied not to 'Nature' or some politician, not to mere dream or assertion, but affianced and inbred anew with God Himself (I John 3:9), the God of truth who not only allows us to test His word, but challenges the same and insists on it (Isaiah 41,43-46,48). Truth is fearless by nature, and fulfilled past all devices!.

The disease of man is not small (Romans 6:23), neither is its cure. It took the massif of heaven, the very word of God eternal, to inhabit space and time from eternity (Micah 5:1-3), and to pay.

When you receive Him, be sure to sign the receipt in your heart and to pass it on (Luke 14), not miserably doing it with word without deeds; and the Lord Himself seals His people with His spirit with the guarantee of passage back to Him who made man (Ephesians 1:11-14), in His own procedures and provisions. Here man moves with eternal free life, just as life was given him on trial in the first; but now in Christ (II Cor. 5:17ff.), God has mercifully brought back to man, by coming into the midst of mankind, living, acting, speaking, dying, rising: something better. While man's ways are coming more and more to resemble the machinery of death to the mind, the spirit and to the body, God's way, conferring life at the first, rescues and redeems it at the last.

It is not this time an assembly-line affair. It is individual, private; it is however on a publicly displayed, written basis, which flows naturally, indeed supernaturally from this new life in Christ, into action and words, of salt and substance, fitting for those who know God (cf. Romans 10:9, Acts 9:36).

NOTE

The concept seems to go like this.

You have some ghostly thing, and since you do not want to be too specific, you call it a 'spectre'. Putting those to forms for thought together, you get something which is not entirely material, or perhaps not material at all (it is important, very, to be unclear), and this spirit or whatever kind or dimension of being it is thought or non-thought to have (and it is very helpful to be 'mysterious' here), has a certain DRAWING power.

Apparently, it looks at nothing and wants more than that. Lo, there is something. Then it looks upon something and wants more than that, and by degrees makes it into quite something.

This seems good so it then continually is upgrading things all over the place, except as Denton shows, this is not what the evidence exhibits (see his Evolution: a Theory in Crisis and TMR, SMR, Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny), so the Spectre in a ghostly sort of way, does it however ... maybe in steps.

Now of course why He has to be put into the future, always drawing up, instead of creating from the first, for that is the form of the imagination.

However, it is useful to create from the first, so that there is a 'kitty', something there, something initially created; and it is really no use being in the future, when there is no present first, for in the present at some time, one has to have things done to get creation: it is all a confused riot of imagination in which conception runs foul of necessity. This of course just to make God to be teleologically there, always having purpose in mind; and that would be the truth, if you only took away the ghostly part and just had Spirit, no spectre, no mysterious somethingness, but actual, definable power at a minimum with definable qualities at a minimum to get actual results in steps.

Drawing stuff up (get it first) or putting stuff in place, what is the difference ? The point is this: in the beginning God created; and not towards an end, something or other wholly unattested, with the future in its eye (if any) sort of draws things up and on to whatever. In the PRESENT a PRESENT BEING of adequate power, always there, never coming from nothing, never using nothing, eternal therefore creates. That is all. The way He is did it is as shown in the Bible and in nature in perfect accord. the two languages perfectly assigned, the one to exhibit in the case of the living, that the WORD of God commanded, and the other what He commands for us now.

He is not tinkering in the future to bring us there, but has been in the past to put us here. We simply do not find any evidence of increase even in information without intelligence. He DID it . It is HERE. We are part of it. We need Him to put us in our right place from which will, thrill and pill have as a race, moved us. We need to go to where He is, was and always will be; and the open door is long open, but not for ever (Revelation 22:11).