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CHAPTER TWO
The Law, the Lord and the Man
Retrospect and Prospect
See also The Way of Truth and the Way of Error Ch. 4
It is of no small interest that in a work that is sometimes of notable value in surveying historical movements in science, via a concentration on The Great Scientists (its title), two remarkably erroneous statements are made (pp. 85-87)*1. These are selected here as illustrative, at a slightly less than senior level, of the dogmas of evolutionism, and with what slack logic they are often and even characteristically intoned.
Thus in a survey of the remarkable genius, Charles Babbage (1791-1871), whose trials like his contributions in many areas of science, were great, it is declared that his contributions through his machines, prelude to computers in a numbers of ways, well over a century before they came into sight, showed the fact that invisible laws were there, and could be found to apply suddenly as events unfolded.
It is not this part of the statement which is perilous, but what is annexed to it. This, it is affirmed, is in line with the nature of evolution.
How can this be ? Has anything changed in the scenarios that Babbage brought to light with his machines ? Did machines of themselves 'progress' or 'prosper' in making mighty moves upward in complexity, sophistication, sallies into profundity dependent on the movement of natural forces, so that given a push by Babbage, now they pushed themselves, in the classic magic of the doomed and deadly theory of evolution ? Hardly.
Is it unusual and in some way illustrative of the congeries of naturalistic concepts in evolutionism that a man of great intelligence and wit should construct machines which should use the underlying concepts of logic and mathematics to construct servant units to deal with tedious mathematical processes, which is the way it started ? even if these constructions were remarkable contrivances testing both mechanical and mathematical skills to the uttermost, in the end ? Such were his Difference Engine, but more particularly his Analytical Engine.
Is the certain fact that we have much to learn, despite profound centuries of concentrated thought in a race now numbering billions, and DO learn, in some way any attestation that the natural background itself is changing ? and if not, how is this illustrative of evolutionary principles of thought, such as are being so often touted ?
Does realisation of Einstein or Newton, at the various stages as human understanding of the processes outside ourselves and visible to our minds or eyes, in some way show an internal mutative force in 'nature' ? whatever that may be supposed to be. In fact, there are billions of 'natures' or at least a vast number of them counting all the variants which are within 'kind' (cf. The Defining Drama Ch. 10), and to sum them up as 'nature' is in some contexts at least, merely to beg the question.
What has 'nature' done to make 'nature' ? We have investigated this in The gods of naturalism have no go! and find nothing (cf. the SMR pp. 81ff.). Man can make something OUT OF natural objects, laws, scenarios and procedures, to be sure; for that is one of the defining elements of intelligence. God can do the same out of what He creates, and if He were doing this now, it would be an attestation of His intelligence; but there is no such evidence, none that He is doing it now. The evidence is that the laws both of logic and of matter, and the construction of the mind of man are what they are, being made, and that nothing has advanced its status through new information in all the time man has investigated his biotic and inanimate environment.
The arrival of these laws and procedures, with their magnificence of stability and the provision in the biotic realm, for variation within the kind, as we have in some of our own constructions, such as cars with optional equipment usable at will, or even under stimulus - such as electronic stability control - is not seen.
They are here.
Their multiple enactment is not noted. Experiments with them are not to be observed in the realm of the universe's operation. In the whole history of science, the workings of what has yielded such information do not exist to the visible eye of man, or the invisible eye of thought based on evidence. Not even illustrations built on such laws (cf. SMR pp. 252Aff., 252Hff., 208-209), at a particular level, are to be found, not even practical applications. These laws are, to all observation, there, made and operative, certainly invisible, certainly not inactive. That to which they apply, happens.
Yet when a man depending on such brilliance of mind as he did not create, utilises such laws of brilliance of kind which man can learn about, as he lives with them as neighbours and in some cases, participants in his being, we supposedly, suppositiously, allegedly learn about some idea called 'evolutionism', itself an invention of man never having the privilege of showing itself in any form (cf. SMR pp.140ff.,. TMR Ch. 1).
The so-called micro-evolutions, in fact the variabilities within kind, have been multiply attested*1A as not providing a scenario of progressive movement upwards, yet people try to make out of plasticities within information bounds, a source of new information. This is used to surmise, to hypothesise - despite the lack as far as any knowledge which has been found (Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4), a procedure for creation. What is this like ? It is as if electronic stability control, if present as an option, were evidence that cars make themselves.
Quite simply, laws are not being seen creating themselves, types of creations in the biological realm are not found either laboriously or (as Nilsson and Gould more aptly affirm) or suddenly*1B inventing themselves. While evolutionists, as if drawn into some kind of philosophical pendulum movement, turn from the incessant chatter of the ludicrously irrelevant gradual, to the 'arising' from the mirthful void of interface in sudden natural invention of kinds, of laws, of scenarios, both to create new worlds or branches of the nature of this one: the facts that relate do not appear.
Let us then see this prodigy, in law, in logic, in event ... Alas, poor Yorrick, it dies in the laboratory, and is dead in the field.
WHY does it die in the laboratory ? It is because matter, biological or inert, has neither the nous, nor the intelligence, the provisions nor the thrust to do this. In vain are the machineries for it sought (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go 21); for it WOULD have been conceivable for them to have programmatic devices to do this sort of thing, though it would have been a very clumsy way of handling things, to invent all those logically intricate methods of ensuring at later times the scope for manufacture of yet more refined and sophisticated things. They are not to be found, either in the directive, in the constructive nor in the realm of exemplification. They work like a sloth on a hot day, like sand dune with no wind.
Think, by logical analogy, of ANY other device, this time of man, like a car, or a mathematical theory, suddenly or in stages MAKING greater logical advances and applying intelligence either to the laws surrounding its existence or the scope of its action, through a perpetually on-board apparatus for doing this! What a waste to sustain such apparatus for development over so vast a time, such as thousands of years! It would be like carrying a walking factory about with you in case you wanted air-conditioning. Such encumbrances would weight their poor burden-bearers out of existence when the sleek do-it-now cases competed. Material for creation is as absent as its products in the natural realm. You might just as well, both logically and empirically, expect a book to write another chapter, every now and again. It is a confusion of resources, of the creative and the created.
While in the natural realm in life, in the DNA, there are provisions indeed for checking, inhibiting and exhibiting this and that, that is a very different thing from having creative and inbuilt manufacturing equipment (never of course found) for creating what quite simply was not there. We find neither its presence nor its product, nor the logic on which it would be based.
We can find in the development of multi-stage life plan beings, such as humans or frogs, a programmatic procedure for the womb and the exit path, with the feeding in the meantime as a necessary means, all things requiring presence in totality for any operation whatever: but this is not creation on site, but creation in sight. It is precisely as in this current universe (there is no harm of thinking of what another could be, but it should not be confused with finding what this one is), a matter of having either a circuit, as in electrical diagrams, or a responsive facility for given equipment, with provision of programmatic dynamism to make it work. The circuit does not create either the understanding inherent in it, nor the work, but it depicts it, and where directive, it exhibits it. It is thus in life with the programmatic.
The fact of a program does not create the program: it merely shows that some capable body has been at work, first to create the electrical laws and then their application in a system that is schematically exhibitable. It works on the basis of how it is constructed, and of the environment of terms and action in which it is placed. Nothing now is created except its result: the power moves as prior programming requires. Frogs continue their enormous litany of law, as do ferns. They create nothing, except of course in the case of frogs, noise; but that too is a part of their construction's procedure.
Again, as in a car, many things may be so constructed that they are aroused or yield under pressure. This is a parameter issue, not a creative one, except in this, that the mode and scale and scope of the creation allows for this; but it is not the same as a process for building the things that yield in some cases, or are brought into play, in others. Their play may be activated, according to the scripted provisions. They are not being written because at times they are activated.
Thus the work of Babbage in NO way illustrates evolutionism, but merely how the mind of man can find, and then make wise procedures to tap into the resources of logic and plan which surround him, in order by intelligence to facilitate his desires and meet his needs. His intelligence of course matches the logic and method of operation running in these spheres of the natural creation, one Mind and purpose having made both, so that he can use that fact and comprehend its results with advantage. His mind and that of his Creator work in a certain symmetry in these fields, bearing the same procedural signature, providing a systematic interface of intelligibility, whether he is asleep to the fact or not.
Anything less like the magic and the myth, the hype and the type of evolutionism, this work of intelligence by man in a realm of copybook analogy to his own creations, but more profound, it would be difficult to find.
This however is not all*1A. In the same chapter of the work, The Great Scientists, we are given another false start. We are advised that Babbage in his computer work exhibited a principle of thinking which computers can manage. It is, in context, apparent that by 'thinking' here is meant the derivation of results beyond the scope of the mind of man, through what is not personal and yet is productive in this realm. However it goes further, for the instrumentalism of material constructions to perform works for man is simply, in the domain of intelligence available, using the works of intelligence to derive intelligible results, while directing the flow and providing the scope. Directing a means to secure an end is thinking; the securing of it by inlaid instruction, is not.
The important point is the flair beyond this. The term thinking carries a concept of something analogical to man's work, when surveying the computer. Now in the latter, there are indeed elements that are caused by program to probe into areas where man does not take the time to do so, personally. Thus the machine could be directed to probe multiple possibilities in order to find what fits certain criteria, and then to do certain specified things to the results of this directed investigation, on its own programmed probe, to execute some further specifications. This could in theory go on for multiple steps, announcing felicitous or other results. It is understanding however which has directed these tasks, multiple provisions for action and methods of returning data.
This has a relationship to a certain part of thinking: some of the hard work which is needed to allow it to happen aptly. However it is not the thought itself which is here in view, so much as the secretarial work of providing what the programmatic probe requires, and reporting in stated form, what it so finds.
This is pre-thinking. However it is not strictly thinking, but a methodological prelude for it, if you want to go to the essence of the matter. Thought may HAVE to undertake just such steps as those which modern computers may perform for it, indeed; and the machine may obviate the necessity for this tedium, and unearth things which result from the attained results of the probe, and consummate this with assigned steps about what is to be done next and so on. However it is a master-slave relationship.
The whole imaging of the totality and the imagination behind such imaging and the logic to create the logic chip which is thus given bounds for operation, and conditions, is NOT in the machine.
It is an extraneous intrusion which utilises and deploys the created situation in the machine, in the case of the modern computer. It is human intelligence utilising the laws of mathematics and physics without having to DO the thing in tedious and time-consuming steps.
It is logic and imagination, servants of thought, pushing for stated steps to be done by conscription, through electric power and symbolic commands in a setting where these being made, are recognised and fulfilled by the executive branch of the apparatus. This in turn is correlatively constructed so that the whole bears the brand of thought, the impact of law, symbolically in code, in the presence of law, creatively imposed in the first place where law may be composed and imposed.
The laws of thought are used to investigate their parallel in creation, and using the findings, to perform purposes correlative with this power, as imagination thrusts, and creativity directs. Thus does law operate within law or lordliness, by command and executive flair being used in symbolic format, within a creation where some of the same sort of thing is occurring on a completed basis, namely programmatics and specifications based on prior thought; and it provides the basis for this type of application of mental, logical skill, and imaginative constructive flair, to co-operate. Such preliminary programmatic results reside within imagination and rationality as their source, as by-products of reason, associates of causation, unsavvy servants of sophistication. Service in the data, drawn from imaginative seeking, is followed by due securing of imaginative constructions, joint product of thought and purpose, imagination and desire.
The basis for our own imaginative exploits is within us, able to be constructive in the use of existing mental and physical law; with the creation itself, already constructed. That is there. Ours follows, its powers part of what it investigates, in survey and construction.
Illustrated is this: that law, intellectual or physical, relates to what is adequate for its formulation, AND to what is receptive to its direction, the two being systematically unified in one totality of operational background and basis. Intelligence is what is capable of concocting this symbol-command-response-execution marvel of synthesis; and imagination what is capable of considering it in the first place and deploying it creatively, in the second. Thus the thought to interpret imagination, select from its possibilities, seeking to impose its purposes and deploy what is necessary to its ends, this is the next phase of action, actual thinking and not its minions, and more fully, creative thinking. Sometimes, it is more: creativity and flair to stir the various fields into total action, carrier of envisaged purpose.
Thus the programmatic is a prelude; the conformity to what is available in method, is a heightening. This is not yet become the slave of thought, but exhibits slaving thought, doing its preliminary canter. When it has found its desire, and programmed its specifications, then its servants can carry out the work on the road on which it has elected to travel. There is thought; but the preludes, if thinking at all, can be set as tasks, non-thinking products of preliminary thought. THESE are not thinking, though thinking made them. In themselves, they are no more intelligent than a bullet, though more complex, selected from an arsenal (chosen by intelligence), amongst other possible repositories (elected not to be so used, by imaginative prudence), directed by such dire purposes as accord with the principles and particulars of the spirit involved, for the achievement of its mental aim. By itself the bullet is meaningless for intelligence; in its logical and causative setting, being a propulsive unit propelled. However it is full of meaning, as examinable by logistics experts and crime analysts, who probe past event to its cause, and do no more neglect the totality of the situation than wisdom permits. They have to investigate an actual system of many components, some seeking to manipulate it; not a made-up world of reductionist fancy.
Thought inspects, imagines, understands, controls; agencies apply, obey, implement, return results to specifications. The two are as close as the moon and the sun, in power and character, and as far removed from each other; except indeed that they occupy a different ... space. The one is originative, the other is its effecting. The one is thought, the other is thought-directed labour. Programs do not think, but thought makes them, uses their results, for other programs, or further purposes in complexity for the singularity of objective. In fact, commands figure in life-processes as creative tools, the impress of desire, the speech of purpose, the intrusion of the imagination into the settled base of the things that are, and just work as made, governed by intrinsic and constitutive law.
Babbage, a Christian*2, was moved to make his own derivative creations, using the laws of creation which did not arrive from nothing or anything inadequate: these, his own laws, were invoked from the store of reality, and applied for his purpose, equally not arriving from nothing but from something adequate for even such a derivative work of creation as that of his machines.
They were able to be wrought, these machines, because causality did not take a little holiday in order to facilitate the self-indulgent self-deification of man, as 'modern' thought seems to like to imagine.
They were in fact made for the opposite reason. BECAUSE causality in its precision and deftness, was available, and man's mind was adequate and apt in this case to rise to the occasion of this particular utilisation of those laws, THEREFORE the machines came. Both the thought and the creation illustrated, in this case, the personal nature of Babbage, capable - in a limited and derivative style in a intelligibly constructed universe - of cognate power to receive direction, just as he was equipped to give it. He did not create new universal laws; nor did matter think for him, as it proceeded to do what it was, in this artful scenario of symbols, told to do. Nothing does not make; matter does not think; imagination does not shrink, purpose does not evacuate, and comprehensive and comprehensible consequences are not made by less than asininity, but the sufficiency of causation that underlies all effects (cf. Causes and SMR Ch. 5, with Predestination and Freewill, Section 4).
Evolution is shown only by contradiction, and shown irrelevant. Laws and ordering, intelligent, imaginative, applied constructiveness amid constructions, this is the topic. But let us consider Babbage further.
There was individuality too. The book in view is very interesting in its personal narration concerning the scientists, and can in some ways be quite charming; and we see in it, the harassments and constraints to which Babbage personally was exposed, and rather are inclined perhaps to relish his endurance, perseverance, imaginative facility and fertility in many fields, his originalities and constructiveness under adverse conditions.
Thus together with the consideration of Babbage's imagination, intelligence and endurance, comes that of his being a PERSON, so that his harassments and response to these, his personal equations of the spirit within, his ideals or objectives, his purposes and his hopes, these were all relevant too. Without this, the imagination might not have worked, or working, might have flagged, or flagging, might not have been exposed to the resilience to make it continue anyway. There are personal causes in personal actions, such as his, and intelligence and imagination are not things that float about in the air, but are found where motivation and activation, ideals and hopes, the whole scope of life are at work.
THAT is what is found. That is what in principle is equally required.
Empirically, therefore, Babbage exhibits the powers of creative logic and imagination, their association with other personal facets and functions as they operate, and the presence of laws which show NO slightest exhibit of change in NATURE (though of course, as with all laws, plenty of sight of their impact AS laws). Here is found the existence of profound scope for human originality BECAUSE of the tremendous scope of the comprehensive and comprehensible laws of logic and procedure, written into the universe in its going.
No script is now seen being imposed ... we do not see the Creator writing now; but seeing the book, we do not imagine that it wrote itself. We do not find laws 'arising', but supervising. When men create, it is not in an evocative vacuum, but in a convocative assembly of continuous, cohesive law, principles, procedures and extant creation. What develops in this case is thought, assigned to purpose, devised in intelligence, invoking an increasingly characterised world where the script is written and the challenge is to live in it, as man, without either becoming subservient to it, or arrogant as if one were creating it. Evolutionism is thus in this case of Babbage, startling by its precise, systematic absence, while on the other hand, creation is exhibited by its completed scenario, allowing human creativity a place to use laws to encase purpose in intelligently constructed and constricted results.
Amusingly, one has even found a firm called Evolution Crash Repairs. Does the dent depart by evolution, or by intelligently directed, law-responsive authority, working in the midst of paints and hammers, scrapers and atmospheric conditions as the surround ? It is in such opposites that we see the extreme extent to which these notions are used, even when the precise contradiction of the concept is manifestly what is in view!
What then ? Such errors in this book on scientists, that we have found, in these cases just cited, typify what on a large scale are those abstractions from fact and reality which are part of the specious substitution of roving thought, for precise and incisive logic, and not only accurate and controlled, but observant and empirical correlative labour. We move therefore in the actual realm of creation, using the phraseology of evolution, even when the clash is conspicuous.
This sort of fudging of the realities of the case is to be found in many forms of communication, areas of expertise, and this has long been so, illustrations having often been noted on this site*3. It is all part of a pandemic of philosophical pollution which sweeps our uplifted earth, which falls as it rises, a spectre like that of someone living on capital, and forgetting how it was made in the first place.
Thus the retrospect on man and his trends, directions and desires, leads to a less than attractive prospect; for this is at the heart and essence of his nature and his future. If you err concerning what you are, where you are, or how you are, to whom and to what you relate and in what capacity, whether through individual proclivity or as here apparently, through the impact of what is nearly a cultural norm, you and reality do not bind. When this is a social affair, as it has increasingly become, affecting individual, society and government alike, then the race as such is approaching a cause célèbre condition. Reality writes books, being divine; and it makes matter, being directive of what is formatted and functionalised; but it also scans the screen of sub-spiritual performance in man, the erection of nature as deity, design as a nothing, wisdom as outmoded or dependent on the resources of man as measuring himself by himself, and hence knowing nothing of the units or the result. And that reality, it is that of the Creator, who having done, also judges.
Reality and regality in God are combined. Assertions from this race out of place are serious; political regimes founded on it make more out of place by compulsion; science - just certain clearly codified procedures leading to a tested type of knowledge, pro tem ... with of course concourse with other results - as its leader, then becomes more like a witch than a hitching post. Let us be clear: this is not a generic assertion about science, but about a highly specialised division of science that has a critical relationship to the point at issue, in its proclivities both irrational, unscientific,while equipped with a wholly unverified reductionism. Envisaging an imagined world, it interprets what it does not find.
Science, doing this, or more precisely, scientists making it a 'scientific' but in fact scientistic fashion to do this, are leading man astray like a braying donkey. It works to add practical, pragmatic knowledge as it seeks to rule by misdirected imagination, like adding arsenic to aspro, now more and more conspiring with misdirected aspiration for races and nations. Thus the scientistic vanity and the autistic pre-occupation with dreams, so often the rod to ruin man, is seen as the race is already grooming itself for its solipsistic dreams, its yearning to be all and end all, which alas, is merely as in much else, the prelude to an end in judgment.
In this way, it is subservient not to all creation, but to itself, and through its naturalism, to and with the rest, debased and oppressed, its latent excellence the dude of desire.
This, along with a temporising of both morality and worship, eventually becoming centred in man himself in the most intensely autocratic and autonomous fashion conceivable, brings in the prospect of judgment. Man's multiple activities increasing subsume themselves under the one spiritual banner: naturalism, humanism, irrationalistic magics, burdensome supremos in business and rule, who lead where goodness is not to be found, and move where life has no savour.
Be asinine and suffer rebuke; but endeavour to walk the way of an ass, and you may be treated as one. May God give grace to many to find in their Creator the Saviour who, knowing the madness of man's misdirection of spirit on many grounds and in many areas, has provided not a machine, but a man to bring soundness of heart, sanity of spirit, worship in life, wisdom in sanctity and guidance for function to mankind. It is already there in the Bible ? To be sure it is, but the diagnosis must be followed to the remedy in the Redeemer, before the result of the biblical wisdom, as with the taking of an antibiotic pill, can become apparent.
Man must take or become a pill. The pill is to pre-empt the prospect of judgment. It is provided in love. It is to be taken in remorse and repentance. It is not physical, though the physical format was used to accomplish it on the Cross. It is brilliant life provided in a deadly capsule. If you take it, your own life is crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20, 5:24), and you find that this sloughing of the sinful self is after all better than a renovation. It is release and regeneration and restoration, yes and return to truth and fidelity, to the trustworthiness of the Creator whose logical prowess and principles are one of His glorious features, whose mercifulness is another, and whose salvation capsule, so simple, is yet a third. There lies the mercy.
The infection of sin in man, of lie in the fabric meant for truth, it is so deep that not a mere pardon, but a re-propagating pardon, a restorative and regenerative work is needed, based on a model so supreme and blatantly beautiful, so confirmed on every side, prophetic, prophesying, in power and in precept (cf. Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8), that in Him God brings us to God, and He who is the Saviour is also the end, as He was the beginning (Revelation 2:8, Isaiah 44:6 cf. Swift Witness 6, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 12).
Our generation, specialising in lapsing in the law of the fear of God, that clean fear (Psalm 19), because of the slummocking sleaziness of its self-conceptions and ludicrous re-writing of law, which has no more effect than that of drug-misuse, child abuse, casual slaughter, mind confusion and political riot, both mingled with and mangling philosophy and spiritual perception, brands itself a novelty. It is not used to judgment as a certain reality. Yet when the marvels of the depths of mercy, in which God is prepared to render sin a lost object covered in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19ff.), and that for good reason (Galatians 3, II Corinthians 5), and this freely (Romans 3:23ff.) and eternally (Romans 5:1-11): when these are evacuated through man's riotous recklessness even in the realm of redemption, then judgment remains, austere, unromantic, to be realised, factual, unoppressive, expressive, detailed and forever.
The mountains of God's righteousness are heavy beyond description, and the prognosis for the current fever of self-diagnosis of man is the parade of sin before truth, and of life before justice. You can have your judgment. For me, let it be mercy in the midst of the valiant action of the Messiah. For correlative considerations, see Note *1 below.
NOTES
THE CRUCIAL EXCURSION
ON CREATION, COMMUNICATION, MAGIC and MIRACLE
Giving more particular Review on 3 Points and their Idle Trend
1)
Levelling with Laws
On these pages, The Great Scientists (4 authors, Farndon, Woolf, Rooney and Gogerly) speaks of a natural universe that could bring in surprises, in operating according to laws invisible, till at some later time, they took effect; and it calls this a 'crucial notion' in the theory of evolution.
Laws may take effect in a given situation when the relevant one arrives to be sure; but this is no crucial notion in evolution, which has
a) to account for the laws in the first place,
|
|
b) show modification and progress in
them or |
|
c) show that their impact was new
because they were new, |
|
d) show some manufacture of the components of the total situation
which is new, |
That this is not shown is a trifle; you have everything but the creation in the creation. The main thing missing is what is needed, the creation of this and that in components, in schema, in attestation, so that it might do its stuff when it arrives on the vital tarmac of what actually is, rather than the thought world, where nothing really has to be very clever, since vital steps, like GETTING the advance, may be left out as if the skull were numbed by excessive dental injections, or the brain were in quietus in some period of profound rest. The creation is what is always required, whether in imaginary, imaginative phases of illustrious brilliance over a self-productive and hence irrational time, never observable, or otherwise. NOTHING can alter this, and flat contradiction of all observation is not science, but intellectual escapism.
The logical principle remains the same: the anti-empirical effort to compartmentalise procedures, having surges of it from nowhere, and entries into the stakes from nothing, is bad logic, bad science and an effulgence of precisely what makes man such an exhibit of spirit as matter never makes: the spirit of imaginative power, conceptual innovation, a function of his construction, capacitation, yes creation. One may rejoice in the scope of his creative capacity at the same time as deplore with pity, his arrogating misuse of it, not only avoiding the issue but in the process, eliminating by misused reason, the need for reason's generation within the functionalities of his own being.
In fact, the matter of Babbage shows nothing concerning creation, the generation of our universe at all. It merely draws attention to the rich diversity of its logical and constitutive laws and the vast cosmos for scope of their operation, that exists. Laws in themselves do not create life, of course, being merely exhibits of symbols for what occurs - directive in that their symbolic state and the facts of what happens are in step - even when you get them. Nor for that matter, prior to that, does nothing create laws, nor do their delimited actualities come straight from no constraining source; nor is it science or logic indeed to tell us that it all, programmatic and propulsive, legal and ordered, was just there without cause. Nothing whether in stages or all at once, can neither create nor effect anything. Even if you want to imagine it all working, without bothering about the causation always and inherently altogether need, such restless surges of thought, when examined in empirical reality, do not work, for such orphan theory when it comes to tracing it out, does not show, does not go, has no basis, nor any attestation (cf. TMR Ch. 1).
Yet to PUT it there in thought is as ludicrous for any rational conception as it is to put the ingredients of brilliance of creation 'there', brilliant step by brilliant step (for it is all MOST intensively symbolic and profound, at the micro-biological level, as to type), in order that they might survive, as if the absence of symbolic wit and wisdom is the reason for its presence. The results of such imaginations do not litter the universe, but are on permanent vacation; indeed, the more they are searched for, the less they are found. Muddled messes of programs and results are to be found only in the mind of man - and whatever other beings of spirit share the desperado state of his pathological lot. They do not appear empirically , any more than they are even relevant, as merely imaginative escape hatches, logically
(cf. Christ the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9, Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 6, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service Ch. 5, Dig Deeper, Soar Higher ... Ch. 1).
Time and potential alike have to be created, if the question is not simply begged, and their powers likewise. In fact, just as morons have not the internal facility to work at the level of Shakespeare, time or not, so nature does not show the ability to create itself not just from morons, but precisely from nothing, the more so if it were not there to do it, instead of itself being another case of begging the question. Begging the question is not science. Doing so irrationally is nothing but the demise of logic. Doing both is playing god without having that facility. The results are both a matter of shame and sham. It does not work. HENCE the evils of misalliance with irrationality, pride of life and frankly dreams, disparate from reality and finding in it no salve for the conscience nor peace for the peoples. Fraud does not work, and in the end, it pays.
What then are the actual invisible laws ? they are indeed invisible in this, that you have to see what the power that propels the universe, and has packaged vast energies in packets of matter, is doing in certain systematic manners of inscribed action, and understand in a symbolic way, that is expressive in words with the possible additive of mathematical symbols as well, what appear the means and purpose on the two sides. Then you can test your formulations of this against empirical fact; and if you cannot, and fact does not show interest in supporting you, then you abandon your procedure, law, and look elsewhere for explanation in some other law to explain the consistency of results, and the exquisite marvels of methods. Operation and co-operation of laws, orders, contrivances, inputs, forms and formulations (as in DNA) are just matters for research that does not unbounded and unfounded imagination as a prelude to it, or prejudice as a fundamental.
What prejudice is this ? It is that to be investigable means that these things made themselves! On the contrary, for logical investigability to be relevant, there must be logical deployment of what is being investigated, so that reason MAY investigate it as cognate to itself. You look for the cause of everything, and are not satisfied till you find, whether for nature and its non-self-making laws (as you watch it), and logical enthralment (it does not do what you want because you want it, but for good reason). You are not stunned at immensity, but the sharper because of it. WHEN an operative ground for whatever is your interest or concern, is found, well; if not, you do not know. What cause requires, you follow, what verification attests, you adopt, what validity requires, you pursue with reason, and what attests this, you rely on with good basis ( cf. TMR Ch. 5, 7 It Bubbles Ch. 9, esp. *1A).
This is reason in rule, not irrationality as a premise, which then has a world which you investigate by its opposite, in a parody of confusion, by reason.
Let us however be reasonable. As you proceed, then, evidentially, to examine what is, and not what you imagine as philosophical substitute, there is only one result, that is, in the procedurally investigable, as in the logical that gave the scene its character. Everything, as always, seen in logical reality, coheres, and in fact as in SMR, leads irrevocably to the unseen God, maker of the visible and of the eyes, both logical and physical, that perceive. What then of procedure of what did not create itself, let alone from nothing, and which is never seen to have such capacity, being too occupied with the business of being itself, as it is, and not as it is merely imagined to be ?
Organic evolution never finds a confirmation in this strict, logical realm at all. Invisible laws operate for rational reasons and results that visibly accrue are of the order of the input of structure, mirrored by law. While miracles occur (cf. Lead us Not into Educational Temptation, Appendix, esp. pp. 233ff., To Know God ... Ch. 6 ), this is not the present domain. This is a systematic supervention of law; while our present concern is its norm.
Instead, in the natural arena, laws provide some of its parameters when you have it, in a realm where they are allowed to operate in a totality of system of contrivance, causality and consequence correlative with unity of thought and symbol. Here, in its living phase, there is ONE major language for the operation of biological life, with integral results in terms of creatures, like man, with multi-partite facilities and unitary character. Supervening law, but not superintending it, is man's spirit, which can envisage opposite kinds of things, and shriek into the order of things like a wild dervish, without really changing it so much as himself!
Integrating the teeming teaming of vast arenas of minutiae, to make a functional colossus like man is like asking a kaleidoscopic splash to invent a Raphael painting with the full flush of brilliance of technique and depiction of understanding which being a concept, needs conceptual consideration. Having them there to integrate is a prior problem; the universe for such creative discourse, in symbols and in fact, is before that, and having a uni-verse is one before that, and the energy and cute, astute packagings and proclivities for control is the next, and gaining it from nothing is the next in line.
Anything other than nothing, being always necessary, since nothing does not have such a THING as a future, the anything really begs the whole question, requiring in the end, all that God has in the beginning, back to eternity, that it might be made thus, instead of inventing itself from nowhere for no reason with no means and adding from no place the ingredients required for the operation. It is all rather an aberrative abstraction from reality in a dream world, an engineer's nightmare, a logician's laugh and a child's delight.
But let us move along to the 'invisible laws' to which the book in view, refers.
They do not pounce or bounce, or scuttle things and occasion imaginative results; they are operative constantly, in logic and life, and are operative in circumstances which match their symbolic statement. Creation involves far more than this; and law involves anything but 'chance', being its total opposite. But creation does not involve less.
To create you need a medium of exchange between thought and symbol and operation and contrivance, and a systematic basis so that the imagination can rove over it and implement its designs in it, without a mutantly kaleidoscopic ruination of thought, devastation of contrivance and ruin of reasoning by meaningless, arbitrary and incoherent occurrences.
This is what obtains, this is the systematic provision, the logical construction, the creative unification, the coherence proclivity, the legal basis and the palette for work. From this total ensemble there comes scope for action. Being created, it suffers creation by man, though of a different order, and part of this is the aftermath of the creative surge that puts man and the universe into operation, so that -as a sub-creator - man may seek, for example, to mirror in symbols of words and mathematics, what is already in operation before his very eyes. This he does for particular applications, of which those of Babbage were part.
What then of these actual laws, into which man delves with such much rewarded persistence ? what of this system of sovereign majesty and power ? It is both a butt for man's thought, so that he can like Babbage, use it for his purposes adroitly or foully as the case may be, and a book of God's own, written in script magnificent, with intricacy past man's correlative abilities as one might expect, either in individual or group manifestation of intelligence, imagination, understanding and perception. Yet precisely as implied in the biblical record of creation, it is susceptible to investigation as one might again expect, for any being made 'in God's image': that is, capable of communication and comprehension in this field.
All things biblical and rational are in constant and total coherence with fact, empirical fact (cf. Fostering Friendship with Facts in SMR pp. 208ff.). Obfuscatory reversal from rationality is an interesting phenomenon, like drinking alcohol; but it is not instructive in the truth.
2) Thoughtless Ways of Thinking
Let's look for some more detail.
On these same pages (in fact on p. 85) of The Great Scientists, we are told that a computer is able to 'think', devising its own way of solving problems without human intervention. This further confusion of material operations and thought is also astray. The computer as noted in the text of this Chapter, does not devise, but is directed. Whatever thought is in it, is behind its parameters of action, instructions of program, intimations imposed on it, planning presented to it; and if there are results from any remarkable prescription for it to find what is not known by performing adroitly conceived and constructed actions which will show either this or that, whether this be things thought of, or something else, not thought of: then these alike are themselves, mere enslaved contributions.
In fact, it meaningfully bears resemblance, as an illustration of the principle, to such a study as that of archeology.
The archeologist suspects certain things, or hopes, or wonders, and so, determined to CHECK, presents to workers things to do. These he knows may unearth various possibilities; and he may, if going to absent from the field, leave detailed instructions about what to do in each case. He may realise that things may happen of which he had not thought, and try to make provisions, within what seems in general apt for the field, to cover in a generic way, such matters. The workers do in this case, as envisaged, none of the thinking, but provide matériel for it. They are subservient to thought only. They do some of the groundwork which it requires.
3)
The Empirical Clock
Finally, in the same work, The Great Scientists, p. 93, there is an approach to the work of Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest and most integrative of all the scientists (cf. TMR Ch. 1 as marked ). It is noted that he wrought a great application of intelligence to the question of the age of the earth, in particular, in the realm of the earth's cooling. He reached a figure so far below evolutionary expectations that it became a challenge, as noted in this book. It then adds that 'further calculations showed that the world is over 4 billion years old." Kelvin, it says stolidly, was mistaken.
Thus does the whole area of dating and knowledge arise, to be squashed into this absurdity (cf. TMR Ch. 7, including these two sites), which contradicts so much, that to hold it is to forsake reason. Our immediate point however is this, that there is assurance based on ignorance in this case.
The concept was in fact, that radioactive materials would increase the heating and decrease the cooling, so extending the time required for the earth to reach this cooler state. Though as the above multiple reference shows, this would contradict vast areas of decisive evidence as a result, it was assumed. However, Dr Harold Slusher of El Paso University in the USA, for example, in his work, "Age of the Earth" destroys with elegant mathematics, the concept that radioactivity, in its small layer of the earth, would increase earth's cooling period to a relatively long one. In so doing, he moreover pointed out the absence of empirical confirmatory material for the concept.
In this case, it is the peremptory abolition of Kelvin's relevance by an unverified and unsustained means which is in point. These things are not so readily disposed, and what does have empirical evidence, as noted in the many cases in the reference above, is safer when dealing with the vast and complex powers of the earth. What is discernible in happenings, testable and confirmed, in the texture of truth, the interaction of laws, the provenance of principles, is required in scientific reconstructions, if these are to be distinguished from philosophy.
Fascinating are the actual empirical facts, and constraining to an intense degree. The scope and variety of the grounds for the young earth are so pervasive, invasive and deeply seated in empirical science, that mere dismissal of what meets ALL the evidence, is another testimony to the cultural force of evolutionism. It is as in politics at times: the people WANT someone or something, and even the most atrocious elements in that person do not suffice to turn them away, till having voted, they have a self-inflicted wound.
THE REVIEW OF THE VIEW
But what are the criteria, what is the common element in these three errors in the work in view. In the case of the invisible laws which were to operate in a way reminiscent of evolutionism, when Charles Babbage made his constructions, we are given the impression of the mutable, the change dynamic and so on, but in fact, it has nothing in the least to do with this. The laws continue dutifully, man makes use of them beautifully and the result is therefore functional and envisaged at the first, performed at the last. It is an articulation of creation. Thus an impression contrary to the fact is imported in order to support what is lingering supportless in the air, this base evolutionism.
In the case of the 'thinking' machine, the term is employed to cover an action which lacks the essential criteria of thought, so that its presence is incorrectly associated with matter doing a job of thinking, as if this had something to do with the real nature of material things. It was a mere prelude or arm for thought that was in view, and what is imported by terminology is absent in reality. Again, we have an intrusion of the irrelevant to support what NOTHING supports, and is thus insupportable, this evolutionism, this naturalistic fallacy, this vivifying of the inert and creating by thought of some other world, unrelated to this one.
Thirdly, when we come to the imagined despatch of the cooling curve of Kelvin, we are not advised of the theory concerning radioactive heating of the earth, from the tiny layer where radioactivity is held to exist, supposed to falsify his thought, and of the critique applied to it, or the unempirical basis on which it rests. Again, a situation is invented by imagination, in a realm empirically decisive and challenging to thought at its peripheries (cf. TMR Ch. 7, in such sites as these).
The whole trend in the three cases, it is this: imprecise intimations and verbal tangents suggest what is not supported in reality by anything known.
What then ? If it is not assumptions, it is omissions, and if not omissions then it is misapplications.
The God of the gaps as the requiem to reason calls it, is correctly seen, as always, not as filling in among the mutant realities of empirical life, but rather as creating the diversities which being different, have no connective tissue at all. The paranoia of 'nature', personified into a figure of intoxicated seeming mirth, must now create all that is not gap. In fact, it creates only confusion in this role, just like Gould's punctuated equilibrium, which is fine for explicating punctuation and pause, but irrelevant for creating life (cf. Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4 -6).
The gaps are fine, and nature can 'create' them, that is witness them in its mould. It is the provision of what is NOT gap which is to the point. A gap anything can make, for there is nothing in it. When you want creation, you need what has that particular power, and it involves the correlation of composites in imaginative exercises of competence and envisagement, which flow from intelligent discipline, and power to direct, whether by DNA, a programmatic symbolic interface with the agencies of execution which must follow the laws and words of the code; or else directly. After all, the DNA is merely potted words. It is their speaking, formulation, expression so that they mean, that is their coming as speech which is more intimate, and as in all programming, requiring the artificer who has the knowledge, understanding, wit and desire to do it.
So far from this being argument by analogy, it is the dual application of causal principle and the requirements of the various cosmoi of logic, command, executive reading of the same, material provision for execution, timing of presence of what is commanded, correlation of the consequences and integration of the correlation into the unitary being in view, or the unitary object.
Analogies are everywhere, since this is the causal reality which from many agencies, already made, exhibits the principial basis of the construction of the agencies themselves.
The purposes, principles, procedures and power of the consummate Creator, whose works surpass those of man as the starry universe, the dust, both to start and to stop His work on the creation and its schema, both as factually attested, are the kind of ingredient logically displayed in that creation of which the creativity of man is a part - derivative, designed, effectual, as both a product and mini-producer in his own assigned domain.
Man ? he is very creative, and very suppressive as in Romans 1:17ff.. Being created, he creates the illusion that creation is a nothing. Nature however is the creator of naps, God who does not sleep, of creation. Man in his cultural hypnosis, being creative by negating the creation which he exemplifies is impressive in power, and hence as an attestation to his being created well; but it is for him contemptible as an excursion into illusion, which can, will and must lead to judgment.
The last sentence beyond all DNA, and finishing the career of creation, is not to create; that has been done in billions of things. It is to reward the desecration of word and idea which acts to abort creation, ignore information, both in cells, DNA and the direct speech in inverted commas, if you will, of the Creator concerning what He has created in His image so that it both CAN and MUST listen, or in irrational rebellion, be finally desecrated (John 3:16,36).
The Bible is that solely authorised, amply attested, inexorably verified written declaration of deity to the creation called man
(cf. SMR, TMR,
The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,
Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer,
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ).Jesus Christ is its centrepiece and expressive focus, Saviour and certitude, God as man coming direct, not simply to inspect, but to correct, and that not simply by word, but by provision of a pardon linked to a regeneration which makes of man a product most personal, with a peace most supernal in a place most sure.
Meanwhile, effort is made to void, in vain, but to avoid, with success, so that in the end, for many, slaves of culture, captives of spiritual brigandage, there is no remedy, for remedy ditched is salvation blitzed. It is available on the call of faith; but it is not available from force, or to pretence.
Modern history is particularly impressive as an exercise in desecration of man, of nature, of environment, of truth and of history, where lies are used as cannon fodder while millions die as what is shot out by the powers that be, finds grievous targets. What an ecstasy of lust! If judgment is severe, it is only a matter of truth. What does not fear the truth, must suffer it.
What loves it, stands ready to find in it, redemption. With this is both the grant of divine righteousness to faith and of rationality for relish. This use of reason and its proofs is not in itself the gift of salvation, but it comes as an expression of it (cf. Romans 3, 5).
Thus the gift and deployment of reason in apologetics does not create salvation, nor does it procure the gift of salvation, with its gracious accord of the divine righteousness which to faith comes as a gift (Romans 3:23ff., 5:17, 6:23). Reason may however be used, in the presence of the creative and compositional works used by God to act and to speak, to demonstrate the Bible as truth (cf. SMR, What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs. 3 and 4). Indeed, its use can exhibit an expression of the inordinate and co-ordinate wonders found in salvation, so that Paul could and did as indicated in Philippians 1, act both for the confirmation and the defence of the Gospel.
Just as you may have a surcharge on services, with man, to cost you more than expected, so with God, here you have the opposite. This is an additional delight, that reason may run to, to attest, and then, on requiring the Bible as demonstrably the word of God, through with sheer joy. To the heart, helped by the power of the Holy Spirit, as it ceases its defiance and finds the Lord, then comes not only the reality, but the brilliance of divine truth, exhilarating to the soul, enlivening to the mind, found in exuberant loveliness, as a Summer scent wafts through a garden. Reason does not create what it perceives, but in its perception is fulfilment for one more avenue of joy. It is one of the many gratuitous rewards that man gains when at last, he comes home to the spiritual realities of the glory of God in Christ, where light dwells and truth holds its own reward, the cascades of reality encouraging man to imbibe its wonder.
EXCURSION
JUNK DNA, IDEAS AND IDEOLOGY DOES NOT ALTER THE TRUTH
The concept for example of junk DNA, left over from experiments or failures, is without attestation empirically. What has been found is far other. Thus, a recent Journal of Creation, Vol. 21(3), 2007, pp. 111ff., attests in considerable detail that DNA information is "overlapping-multi-layered and multi-dimensional". As with human speech, it has multiple rules and conditions, symbols and inventions to cover its inventory. This of course has to be put, like human speech, in a milieu able to respond to the symbols, with sophisticated and unified interface concepts and considerations. We find now that much DNA formerly little recognised for function (‘junk’), is now found to contain information about how to use information. More and more of the genome is now being exposed as intensively operational, many times more of it revealed at work than ignorance had formally found verified.
Not only so, but Williams in this article gives data showing the once so ignorantly named 'junk DNA' "is about 50 times more active than the genes". The significance of information about information, to take an illustration, is not only crucial - how to use a dictionary, this way or that, taking this phase or that would be a case - but is intensively operative in a genetic schema now seen to be far more complex in co-ordinated conception, intense in correlation complexion and brilliant in miniaturised contrivance than had ever been imagined by mankind.
Indeed, so complex are the composure, composition and brilliant overlays of mandatory and executive symbolisation in DNA that there has to be a species of handbook, a governance of information disposition and disposal. So far from junk, this is one more overlay, supervisory disposition, in addition to that for editing copies of DNA to minimise mistakes, and the more direct information itself.
To have named 'junk' what is seen now to contain what is ardently or at least arduously supervising either embryonic or other action, conserving the kind, enabling the species of variation within code, or such things, is an irony superb, as one considers the response first of Mendel, in his work on showing variability to order within kind, and that now of micro-biology, in showing the sophistication to be far more intense and immense in the symbol-performance realm and interface than ever imagined. That man has nothing like it from the uttermost use of concerted intelligences over a long period, with great resources available, speaks for itself. What trails the productions is not failure, not realms of messed-up attempts, but regions of information control.
You do not compose symbols to produce meaning to the impactive field by dreaming, doodling, and far less, by doing nothing at all. It is a discipline and requires enablement. No, you do not invent an interface for command by symbolic connotation to be translated to action by symbolic interpretation, the essence of language production and reception with comprehension, except that this is an automated version, by proposing fantasising substitutes for gaining logic by its absence, meaning by its negation and transference of information to action by nullity.
What a piece of work is man, and what a translation is in him, of creativity in code in his DNA in the midst of a correlative world of command obeying interface. So we come and go, and grow.
The brilliance of the micro-biological factories by stylised words (in ONE language in all DNA), making styles of physical being such as we are, is the acme of imagination, the coping stone of intelligence and the absentee of natural rousing of mere matter, which subjected to the inquisitorial forces of blatant hope in the face of patent omission of means, rigorously refuses to become ingenious by an afterthought. This is the empirical and notorious fact.
Matter does not do it. It cannot. It lacks means (cf. TMR Ch. 1, The Wit and WIsdom of the Word of God Ch. 2, Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3). It is an ingredient, itself an art form of exquisite conceptual ingenuity verified in its rational investigability: it is one which is apt for conceptual building in its own kind, by what has the creative power to do it: but it is wholly defective as a god.
Morons do not so produce; non-intelligence does not so contrive; lower systems do not arise into what hope would manufacture but artifice must contrive.
The information holocaust is merely one of the many indexes of the destruction of the Twin Towers of blatant human presumption, daring to call that 'science' which is its absolute absence, contrary empirically, logically, in terms of all known operative laws, our own capacities in their logical expression and the necessities of labour at any level to have that level operative. As information about information technology in the factories of life increases, so the disinformation crusade called organic evolution, from the first wanting something from nothing, and then various coding devices and correlative calls for marvels such as man on the production line of kin in time, becomes the more odious, a testament to blindness and a Hall of the Infamous to this race's ruin.
This information has come through two projects, the Human Genome Project, published in 2003, and a recently published ENCODE Project. The contributions to the point in view have been successive and require as Alex Williams points out in the TJ noted, massive re-thinking of the topic. Indeed, he lists what was relevantly in view in 2003 and then proceeds to see the later advances from the ENCODE project.
An interesting volume in this field is titled: Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (2005). In effect, it embodies a report and thought from Dr John Sanford about years of research, indicating that that genetic mutations are not only found to be recessive in terms of information, with none able to show any new information, but that the negatives relative to the original continue to accumulate in large blocks of undivided materials which mean that competition and survival are not really as relevant as might be thought. Thus the difference is often exceedingly small, in a given generation, as degeneration of the complex commands and implementation devices occurs, and the accumulation of these errors is not to be stopped by wishful thinking, or unrealistic assumptions.
The RESULT proceeds in an unfortunate way, for survival might take a long time to become relevant as an issue, for much time may pass before the negative regress, distortion or dismissal is discernible, by which period, a massive amount of degeneration has occurred.
You do not make an image better by changing it from its refined nature. This noted effect however is shown to be occurring relentlessly, remorselessly, and even intelligent effort in laboratories to make better vegetables and so on, still does not create new information, while merely tending to maximise the deterrence of loss and concentrate what is left that is good, by inclusion of what was better from the past. When there is NOT EVEN this, then the rate of decline is even greater.
What then of the research into the genome and its components in this respect ? As more and more information about information and that about handling information with extreme felicity and coded subtleties ramifies and intensifies, making the genome a marvel and a maestro work of almost imponderable magnificence of conception and exertion to match, greater also is the scope for error. It is not a motor-bike, if you like, but a Rolls Royce; but now it is not this either, but a futuristically conceived space craft, the intricacies of which are not yet fully understood, let alone mastered by investigating man with his limited intelligence.
This is your painting firm in contact with Raphael, Michelangelo and Renoir. How would one even compare! The works speak of the insertion of the workings, the cosmoi of thought, the conceptions of the mentality which held them and the action based on this of the power of the conceiver. But what of the current position ? There is the mint, but what of the coins of the realm ?
They wear. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is seen to apply massively. Of course it would in such an exposure of such intricacy and complexity to a world of events not shaped to protect, as is a museum for works of art, but allowing tests on many fronts, ways, for many designs, good and evil of man.
One thing is increasingly realised, not only in empirical demonstration, but from the tenor and direction of discovery: that the last thing that is being found is dude material, and the first thing that is being discovered is broader and broader operative and functional material, brilliant in function, with diverse controls and directions for the handling of information. Here is a multi-layered, ingeniously constructed, consistent systematics that makes man’s best a prelude only, except that this preceded it, so that generations of man might be, being from a Source Sufficient for ALL of it in that measure of simultaneity without which it is ALL useless junk, however highly sophisticated. It is not however useless, but adroitly functional, like an army in its specialised bureaux, and more and more of it is now being progressively and substantially verified as having s sophisticated relationship to the entire modelling by information that makes former ignorance dazzle!
We in our bodies are one immediate resultant, from birth! Those bodies are scarcely futile, their information is not substantially mangled but the eye-goggling summit of invention in material form that faces man the inventor with his come-uppance.
How fast is the achievement of this information resource ? By natural means, it is infinitely slow. It is the same as asking, How fast is the making of profits by the provision of losses ? How fast is the building of mountains by erosion ? How fast is the positive made, by adding the negatives ?
Deny the source as eternal, and rationally, you either have to have nothing invent something in due course, a simple contradiction in terms, or confess to a ‘coming out’ in your belief in magic, a mere name. If you wish to be irrational, then you deny the validity of your means of argument, and become irrelevant to logical thought.
Let us however return to the Sanford volume, and in particular to the review of it by Royal Truman, pp. 43ff. in the Journal of Creation 21(1), 2007.
Another observation: it is that the rate of decline of this marvellously and minutely operative and increasingly massively relevant genome rises critically, in proportion as its working size is gauged to be more and more massive. Huge in significance and portent is the number of degradations in nucleotides in one generation only!
]MORE information is what is NOT found. Indeed, the reasoned estimate presented in this review of the Sanford book, is this: that "30 new genetically relevant, function-altering mutations occur per individual each generation." Further, "all of the individual 100,000 to 200,000 linkages blocks in genomes are deteriorating." Again, defective nucleotide components tend to remain in the gene, along with all the rest of it, masking its presence while mutations accumulate: none with new information, whatever the change, and whatever its effect.
MORE deterioration is what is found, and whatever variation in terms of different sorting or loss in diverse particles and symbols is found as errors are made despite the checking apparatus, constitutes no help! It does nothing to remedy the structural felicity and completeness of the whole, as the precision and order of these constructive means spoils, decreases.
What inherently declines is not that which inherently advances. What cannot support itself at its own level, having come, is not showing itself capable of coming by that method. A disassembly plant is not a factory for novelties. It is as Gould attested in the area of major design methods in what is deemed the Cambrian Age, that design at the macro-level is far greater then than now. What was far exceeds what is now left: but decrement is not increment, and departure is not arrival. That is to make the negative a positive, and destruction, construction.
If there is any normal limit to the arrant and erratic magic of the mythology of evolutionary theory, it is past here by a margin like that of stars in their distance from earth, compared with that of the moon. This concept of construction through destruction, in that sense, is over the moon.
There seems a never ending increment as research proceeds, on the utilisation of information in the cell structure. This is exhibited in some detail in the review of Alex Williams on the Human Genome Project, and the later ENCODE Project, results of both now published, to be found in the Journal of Creation – 21(3).
Let us summarise and extend a little.
Increasingly it is found that there is information about information and the intricate and brilliantly compressed, interactive and concisely coherent systematics of different information sources, co-operating for action and construction are being feted as foci of life. The fastidious magnificence of the conceptually co-ordinated controls, symbolised in language, are not in the domain of the chatter of matter, itself with its own delimited facets and features, marvellous enough; but in the cosmos of code, composition, comprehensibly command and transmissible orders, imaginative in perspective, starting in power and … man is simply one of the results of command, now seen as programmatic in style as far as the physical equipment is concerned, whose spirit allows him to rove through using program as a technical base, to find his own basis. In this he is helped by the word of God which declares it, in verifiable format, in formula and in functional command.
Matter does not have the power to speak: it is spoken into being in its format, but is not functional for code manipulation; and that is why this is never found. You need code for command in conceptual proto-creation, outside intelligence, a fact that nothing can or does contradict, for the very simple reason that any system has its kind, character and bounds, according to the input for its creation.
Matter has power of various assembly in chemical organic and inorganic, aptitude for division and even release of contained energy, but it is mind which has the power to functionalise code into command through conceptual realisation and functional implementation. The range of imagination is the new limit for this action, and where there is spirit such that novelties of thought and enormities of error alike may be committed, we find further elements which CAN use matter, dependent on their own power, and often do, as in the case of man. This is no nearer, however, to matter moving mountains to give itself code-creative power and unity-creating scope of imagination, even up to the level of that trilogy called man, than is a wood pile to creating a house. It is relevant, to be sure; but not sufficient.
Man loves to dither and declaim in this area, but never manages to escape the empirical facts, or the logical necessities (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ..., Deity and Design ...). The constant endeavour is rather like that of al Qaeda to possess the West. It is based on theft and may seem a good move for power; but in the end, it is an idle substitution of money and arms in the hope of snaring much of this world. Man in general has a bigger endeavour: to grab all of it from God, a massive insurgency, insurrection and rational irrelevance. Man does not have what it takes to be God, and to seek to strip Him of oneself is nothing short of theft and mockery of reason, not to mention God Himself.
Interestingly, the cost of failure to service the ‘vehicle’ man is spelt in considerable detail in that sole verified and validated book of revelation of the mind of God to man in written form, the Bible ( SMR, TMR, Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer cf. Proverbs 1, John 3:16-19,36); and not surprisingly, when he imagines he or something less invents this dwarfing dynamic of code and command, and refuses the necessary power concerned in its designable Source, the cost is as great as in any other delusion.
The SIGNIFICANCE of the cost, of course, increases as the remedy of the error is despised, rejected or ignored. This world is constantly seeking to blame its Maker for the results of such indifference, malfeasance and misappropriation of divinely made resources, as if a thief were to blame the government for his incarceration on the ground that he was only fiddling with the locks in the bank at night, and the door happened to open, and culture and heredity forced him to take the money and spend it. If a pardon is offered and then ignored, the result is predictably most grace.
Delusion, confusion and profusion of provocations is not a matter of mere irreverence; it is one of suicidal ruin of your situation, site and purpose. The case is bad because of misuse of any feature of focus and significance.
Indeed, it is more than that, since this delusion is not about something, some element; it is about man himself, all of him. It is a delusion transmissible in turn, just as the code is, and its results are found socially, financially, militarily, in degradation, just as the genes slowly degrade in a world being held to account.
The auditor is shortly to conduct the final assessment (Acts 17:31,Luke 21 cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). It is well not to tell Him the outcome, but to find it in His word, and in His mercy to discover from Him the REASON for life, and the GRACE God is willing to give in Jesus Christ, the Creator who came to His own (John 1:1-14, Romans 5:1-11).
See Nilsson and Goldschmidt, with a latter day variant, Gould, in SMR pp. 108ff., 252B, with 315Aff., and Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6 .
While this is not intended to determine whether or not Babbage was a Christian - certainly some of his points are very individual and not those with which one could agree - nevertheless, it appears that despite some of the efflorescence of youth, he may well have been one. Thus he was invited to be the ninth contributor to the Bridgewater Treatises, which were intended for a Christian purpose.
Their call into existence is shown in the following statement:
"The Right Honourable and Reverend Francis Henry, Earl of Bridgewater, died in the month of February, 1829 ; and, by his last will and testament, bearing date the 25th of February, 1825, he directed certain Trustees therein named, to invest in the public funds the sum of eight thousand pounds sterling ; this sum, with the accruing dividends thereon," to be held at the disposal of the President, for the time being, of the Royal Society of London, to be paid to the person or persons nominated by him. The testator further directed, that the person or persons selected by the said President should be appointed to write, print, and publish, one thousand copies of a work 'On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation ;' illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as, for instance, the variety and formation of God's creatures in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms ; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion ; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments : as also by discoveries, ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature. He desired, moreover, that the profits arising from the sale of the works so published should be paid to the authors of the works.
" The late President of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, Esq., requested the assistance of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of the Bishop of London, in determining upon the best mode of carrying into effect the intentions of the testator. Acting with their advice, and with the concurrence of a nobleman immediately connected with the deceased, Mr. Davies Gilbert appointed eight gentlemen to write separate Treatises on the different branches of the subject."
Babbage himself states his thoughts fairly pithily at this point, as he presents his own contribution to these Papers:
"The object of these pages, as of the Bridge-water Treatises, is to show that the power and knowledge of the great Creator of matter and of mind are unlimited. Deeply engaged in those other pursuits from which my chief arguments are drawn, I regret the impossibility of bestowing on their full development that time and attention which the difficulty and importance of the subject equally deserve ; and in committing these fragments to the press, perhaps in too condensed a form, I wish them to be considered merely as suggestions intended to direct the reader's attention to lines of argument which appear to me new, and to views of nature which appear more magnificent, than those with which I was previously acquainted."
Again we read this from his contribution:
"But if this respect and admiration are yielded to the mere interpreter of Nature's laws, how much more exalted must those sentiments become when applied to the Being who called such principles into living existence by creating matter subservient to their dominion—whose mind, intimately cognizant of the remotest consequences of the present as well as of all other laws, decreed existence to that one alone, which should comprehend within its grasp the completion of its destiny—"
See SMR pp. 211, No. 28, for a number of similar cases.