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ALPHA and OMEGA:

DISCOUNT THAT

AND YOU'VE GOT A MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE

If You Don't Grasp That,
You'll be Grasped by the Wrong Party

Chapter One

ALPHA and OMEGA PERSONALLY

DIVINE IDENTITY PAPERS

Try starting without having anything there. Of course, YOU are there; but you were not, beyond all argument, there at the start. Very well, you will not succeed in that venture, for two reasons: you were not there, and if nothing else is there, nothing has neither potential nor past nor present, and so continues as defined. Nothing doing.

Try starting with something temporary. Where did it come from ? Why ? We are not dealing with romances and dreams, but logic. From nowhere ? no such place.

Try starting with what precedes your thought, because it was always there: good, no problem. The temporary, like unbelieving man on this earth, needs something as a basis, in order to be. What next ? Have time ? Fine, but where did it come from ? A delimited and inherently systematically contained thing does not come from nowhere. Not self-sufficient, susceptible for example to self-production by any evidence, it is yet there. Where the is its source ? From the same eternal something ? Good, then that must have power to  create time; and so it is for space, and the capacity of any such things to be controlled by concepts, that is, to be definable so that you can even say that they are there.

Where did the concepts come from ? A concept is something which covers a case with ideas which are expressible in principle, and which are applicable in practice, when we are asking for something like the universe; for if there was no application, there would be no universe.

We have then applicable concepts. Where did they come from  ? Since these are not things under the duress of delimited forces, but capable of any madness or sanity, suavity or gravity in their construction. they are matters of construction rather than mere constriction, but by whom ? The everlasting something thinks.

You cannot have thought without a thinker, and if He did not think, then no concepts and nothing correlative to and requiring these could be; but we are looking for logical ways for the universe to exist; and not existing is not one of these.

You have to have ALPHA. There has to be a FIRST, and in this case, it has to be an ETERNAL FIRST. Since what is first, is distinguishable from what is second and so on, which are not the same, but later, thus this is THE ETERNAL FIRST.

Creation recognises this simple fact and notes the brilliance of the concepts captured in the midst of the working of intricate systems in the DNA (cf. index under genes below and  *3A), and sees this as simple derivation from the Eternal First. Any instrumentalities proceeding from the Eternal First are merely agents, and do not alter the logical case. When designs come, as Gould asserts they did in amazing numbers, so that major designs have been GOING from an early stage, LAPSING and not increasing but the opposite^*1, then this is a product of the Eternal First. Like a King, this Being could build  through someone else, but the activating power is His^*2. Since however He (or this Being) is highly accomplished in thought and engineering as well as mathematics and feelings and life, it is best to  extend the name in the denominative,  to The Eternal First Creator. (In Chapter 1 of SMR a less summary approach is  employed, and the acronym letters are built up in careful order over space, but this has more the air of summary procedure, in order to specialise on certain aspects.)

Now people simply love, these days, to delete God, for that is the short name, one which however we need even now to understand a little. The EFC however, is not available for deletion. It is He who has control, and having manufactured time and space, knows all about ends (as in Isaiah 46:8), and is not only Alpha, the beginning, as the first letter of the Greek  alphabet designates,   but Omega, the end. That is, as far as beginnings are concerned, He is it, it is His domain, and He is basic to it. As far as ends are concerned, He is there, they are based on Him, and like any other author, except that here it is absolute, and includes time and space as we know it, at His discretion and chosen mode of creative expression. If He were not also the End, that is present at, creatively constitutive for and self-expressive in the entire domain at this, then He would be delimited, and so the product of whoever is not so delimited, and is thus self-sufficient, a source not in self-contradiction.

Alpha and Omega is the beginning and the end of all  Creation. Indeed, in the Bible, this Alpha and Omega is used as one of the names of God, at certain points. Some think this demeaning, to  relate to Someone with such completely unlimited knowledge and temporal oversight; but it is actually demeaning NOT to relate to what is there, so making a person merely lost, like clothes left on the beach, things that DID relate to someone, things or objects that WERE personal and used, but now regard and are regarded by time and space, without recognition. It is this which is degrading, in that your grade of being is then diminished and simply made anomalous. How this will work out once again, depends on the discretion of the EFC.

How biblically He refers to His use of such knowledge may be considered in the 6 volume set on HEXAD,

ON PREDESTINATION and FOREKNOWLEDGE,
LIBERTY and NECESSITY,
RESPONSIBILITY, DUTY and CREATIVITY

but more succinctly  in such sites as Let's Be  Reasonable, For God Is! Ch. 6, SMR  Appendix B, The  Glow of Predestinative  Power  Ch. 4. The Bible is shown in these references to be unique in solving all  elements of challenge in the  field noted for the hexad, a thing within the competence of God, who knows all and leaves nothing out, but not within that of man unaided, since all knowledge is not in his purvey, in himself alone. His perplexities when he leaves God out are therefore predictable (and seen as in SMR  Ch. 3, for example in contrast to  SMR Ch. 5, and throughout the 175 volume set,  In Praise of Christ Jesus).

What happens now in evolutionary theory when the EFC is removed ? (in thought, by man - or He sought to do it more deeply at Calvary, but failed, in fact  merely completing one of the Creator's gracious plans, the major and central plan, to provide restoration for man which, man being personal in the image of the Creator, is not forcibly applied, but rather fully presented and represented). One of the results here relevant is this, that you get people talking about nothing creating things: a nonsense given up by the famous Physics Professor who was pushing it (cf.  Nothing Doing From Nothing).

Let's get reasonable. Eliminate God from your thought in constructive and investigative mode, and return to the beginning. What do you get ? You have first of all, anything-ness, then. But what is anything-ness but an amalgam, composite, or potential trapeze artist with virtually unlimited potential (since in that case, everything there is has to come out of it). It has to be of colossal power, potential, amazingly created, susceptible, like specially prepared paper on which water comes to produce beautiful pictures, thus making ITS creation far more difficult than the actual creation. This is merely ignoring the question by assuming a worse and more searching one.

So we just assume it was there, what it took ? this  anythingness as an alternative to nothing, being if a mere repository for begged questions and unsolved problems, better than the twitty nothing idea  ? That is illogical and unscientific, since it is untested and self-contradictory as seen above. So we don't do this, and accuse those who do of being irrational, incapable, without hypothesis of credibility or relevance. So far, it is pure failure. You NEED EFC.

Forget that (but keep it in the back of your mind). We have worse problems following the deletion increasingly opted for,  among the irrational of  men. Let us face them. Now it is time to have atoms and molecules and the laws of chemistry, and intellectual penetrability of all this by the mind of man, since this is the case. In that case, you had better get hold of the mind of man and bring it in from somewhere. That is, find it from  a rationally defensible repository and active agent for the production of imagination and ideas, and a penetrating agent for the universe. Somewhere not being you, as gratuitously produced man, not the Alpha and Omega, you had then best ask the EFC for one of that style of material universe, since atoms do not know atoms, or conceive them, or direct them, or give them laws. They just get them.

If you are interested in reason and causation (cf.Causes, and SMR Ch.  5, together with Predestination and Freewill  Predestination and Freewill,  Section 4), then you need what causes these elements, to number but one, of the material universe  to be, to be in form, and enables them to get the laws, for which by their own observable and systematic and internal powers, they are magnificently,  empirically unable to be productive. They just HAVE them. Nowhere, we recall, is not anything, and so it cannot produce anything; for if it did, it would be somewhere that has this production pattern possible for it. The minimal powers therein have been considered a little.

Thus the source for these things ontologically, dispositionally, legally and of course interactively and synthetically in the overall program or containing totality for their realm, so that it IS a realm.

By now we are perhaps beginning to see the point. Creation is how it gets here, and what does the creation, it is the Being who has unlimited power; for if it were limited, then there would be somethings outside His powers, and if this were so, He would not be the FIRST, which ruins the reality of the entire system of logical thought, and brings it back a best  to a system of FIRSTS, which is in need of its coherence and composition so that it can act as a system, which means that there has to be what did it for both of them, and this once again, is the EFC.

Now someone says: Well, all right, in our organic evolutionary postulate, we will grant that all of this nonsense, that is the attempt to have nothings and nowheres and no reason, is simple irrationality, so that if this is to be the base, then thought to interpret it would be incapable to meet it, the thought being rational; and if the thought is not rational, then there  is no argument. In that case, the organic evolutionists is self-retired. admittedly irrational.

So far they get nowhere. Now some want just to ignore all this, or speak sweet or sour nothings, according to taste, but this will not alter it.

So now, all this being just begged as a question, irrationally taken for granted, but now rectified, we would like to take the next aetiological step, which is to have something to bring in living designs, since by any pertinent definition  (cf. Deity and Design ... Sections    2   and  5), it is this is of which we have rational need. That provides no difficulty, since the power to design matter is of the same kind, if not order, as that to design life: it may not be at all of the same quality, just as the power  to build a boy's truck and the Empire State Building are cognate, but not in quality,but it of the same generic domain, thought-out construction activity, using the simpler, in itself inept to construct in this way, and the ideational, imaginative, deploying power to achieve what the will or agent of thrust and execution may identify.

It is just that this is a secondary matter, as when for example, with cars, you need first the metal extraction works, and then the design imposition works, and the assembly lines and so on.  This is not necessary to the EFC, but logically the production of facilities to  DO THIS SORT OF WORK, is necessary. It may be done practically in very different ways; but logically SOME way of achieving the result rationally has to be there, or we descend to magic, which is just begging the question again, whereas we are interested in rational discourse, on which hypotheses may be based, or removed.

Some now want periods of intense radiation (you will need the EFC to invent waves, electro-magnetism and modes of  space transmission and application in time for this), and these in some inscrutable way, though capable of interfering with whatever order or system has been invented by design for matter, are nevertheless supposed to benefit to the point that marvellous things come, ordered, brilliant in system, mathematical in basis, original in conception. It is difficult to see how an hypothesised energy source - something that does work in a certain way, though in nature it is not found experimentally - as illustrated by a crashing airplane moving with mutation power as it hits the soil - is going to have special design features which it imparts. Force by itself is the capacity to work, applied. By itself,  it has no direction; and so the term  force does not convey what is logically needed, whether it be rays or more palpable mass in motion.

We thus need not rays, but periods of energy, nor is it enough for these to be of  unconceptual power, but rather to be of power to implant concepts effectively, whether to the conscious or to the unknowing, in matter, in instinct or in minds, so that things work in terms of them.

Keeping however for the moment to matter,  we have scientific law, which we find in our investigative rational minds and formulate concerning the investigable, rational universe;  and it must all be done so that the laws are practically self-relational, so that they do not destroy each other, or activate what destroys their operational capacities, since finding what destroys itself is not finding what does not, the present case. Rather the finesse of the production and arrangement of the laws in the materials in which, by whatever chosen means, they are to operate,  is such that these supplement and complement in a total system, which thus needs to be conceived,  so that the implicit concepts, as in any program, work harmoniously and smoothly together, with no bugs.

SO that ray idea does nothing to the point. It is an ad hoc insufficiency, better than mere question begging, but a beggarly offering. We will later consider actual proponents of such things.

Others want pauses, like full stops, to be productive. The universe, nice old thing, is supposed to do whatever it is good at, and every now and again, having done nothing much creative for a long time, suddenly does a macro-evolution, although the term 'evolution' itself is a logical imposition, for apart from reproduction, which is programmed, implicitly or explicitly, there is nothing doing anything but what it is good at, and matter is no good at thought: check it out and see.

That is where information theory^*3 comes in, with the flat negative empirically to the production of information such as in all these actions above, finding it does not come without intelligence. Codified, symbolically expressed, being operationally felicitous material for intelligence or its programmatic derivatives to use for directionally dynamised activities, it would be expected to be of this kind.  That is the nature of information, and of its logical bases. This is merely borne out in this experimental fact, as verification.

Well no one who thinks it through can have an EFC without intelligence, since our own is dependent on it, and we with ours, investigate what it did with its own, to make the two compatible, so that we can make scientific laws (not produce them, discover them). It is of course obvious that the intelligence which can MAKE intelligences in personal headquarters, such as is the case with man, must be of a vastly higher order than the ones which simply operate, foundation supplied free; but they have a common ground to meet in investigation, the intelligence Producer, and the intelligent product, when the latter is product of the former. This does not present a problem, and the investigation of its actuality becomes a fascinating feature, and a rewarding one as we so often see.

Let us however return to the spasmodic hypothesis, the punctuation being all right, but not the creation,  as to field findings go! It is NOT happening now by any measure, means,  detection, direction or impetus: new KINDS do not array themselves, but rather as Gould so well points out, basic designs depart at such a rate that most of them  are now gone. Similarly,  as Cornell's Sanford^*3A  indicates, our own DNA,  like designed and  designated things in this universe in general,  are breaking down, surely and with coming danger. 

Why however, after a nice long rest, does the model which first of all simply assumes without ground a material universe (and yet calls itself  'science'),  having begged likewise the never observable evolutionary misnomer, leaving behind so many questions without answers, posit a universe suddenly to have what are called macro-productions. It no longer straggles upwards, this being ludicrously anti-evidential. It soars, it leaps, it bounds.

This has all the markings of an unsober, unfounded, flimsy fairy-tale, vaunted in myth, to join the other Greek classics  like a brother. So great  is the attachment,  as this mere example exhibits,  that intellection is abandoned and imagination  reigns unrestrained... and this, this option  from  an insoluble  dilemma founded on initial  prejudice and presumption, it is science ... !

That is, there are many evolutionists who consider that only on the loss of common sense and reason can you systematically and contiguously, move from what is complex and does not work (step one on the gradual way), to an eventual sophisticated design task, as definitions require it to be named, a thing coming suddenly; or from imaginary beginnings of no survival or functional value, in an initial  phase, something devoid of the eventual specialist purpose, lacking its specifications, as a bike lacks those for a Boeing 767, to that very Boeing - except that the illustration is far below the height of sophistication required  for such cells as come at last. Indeed, cells being what they are, as Denton notes, ALL of the LEAST,  small as they are in framework, are themselves sophisticated, and the outcome has to be not only divergent, but ultra-sophisticated.

Thus the movement in view is one from what is devoid of the program or function which higher up, is somehow to come, and this in terms of observable realities remains at ANY stage, to the wondrously composed, long delayed, comprehensively drafted hi-tech and interactive result, through billions of  transitions ? from what to what ? To make it easy, from bike-chains to  electronic surveyance ? Such an  example however reduces the degree of change required: yet  it does bring home the point in a low-key manner.

How, indeed, do you manage this with no speck of evidence to show stages of this dysfunctional wandering about, on the way to superior function and innovative disposition of things, penetrable by intelligence, composed in concept, worked by words or code symbols! Is evidence abhorrent, like the sight of the blood for Lady Macbeth,  that turned her mind at last ? Is attestation in some way,  as has been proposed in one evolutionary quarter, virtually irrelevant ? Believe it or not, the concept of discipline by evidential requirements has been  touted as unnecessary. Reason is becoming increasingly abhorred, because it simply will not fit.  The case is indeed no better now than it ever was IN KIND;  for you find this in Jeremiah 2:27:

"Saying to  a tree, "You are my father,' and to a stone, 'You gave birth to me.' For they have turned their back to Me, and not their face."

Getting from 'nature', the nature of which is as we see, what is in it  from what is in it is just the same as getting anything from the fairies: the thing is there,  and made itself, or the tooth fairy (in one of those vast mega-changes, we have talked about from the lips of evolutionists of repute and standing) has made it. Where IS this fairy, and what is its name, and  where is there objective testimony to its powers in a testable fashion ? There is none. Where ARE the changes, and why are they never seen ? No reason, fairies act  at  will. Will ? Where is will in material things make mind and spirit,  will  and pride, error and judgment ?

As the model is mere imagination, illusion, and irrational, most unscientific

in not building on the discernible

or that which ever is to be observed in any way attesting itself,

but on what is no more than a religion of hope, prisoners of hope who cannot break their bars because they are self-imposed, as with Lewontin,

so it is not supported by any evidence, either in power or in products made on the way.

The support is neither internal nor external, it breaks laws such as the second of thermodynamics, it ignores the three basic laws that Professor Barnes pointed out, indeed, and yet it is taken, and imposed in a torture that is ongoing and enough for far more than blushes, when the time  comes, inflicted  on children. Nor is this to be supported by taxes alone on their parents, some of whom detest this ignorant compulsion, but in impositions even  where parents pay, in addition  to  taxes for others,  for the education in private schools. Surely this is wickedness on a par with that of  ancient Israel, who made some of their children pass through fires for their false and fraudulent, their idolatrous and obstinate religion,  ignoring the place where objective testimony lay, that of their God, and following that of the other nations,  embroiled in naturalistic folly, having the thing to be to make itself before it is there,  and then  to  perfect itself when it is, by what is never observed.

Cause  ? This is just cause for condemnation, as were other  forms of  slavery and torture, in the 18th century and in the 20th., in Britain and in USSR.

That is, if we wish to be rational, and incidentally, scientifically, constrained by evidence, and insisting on rational construction of feasible procedures, we have this enormity. That it is, to which so many evolutionary scientists have reacted so explosively, the Nilssons, the Goldschmidts,  the Goulds, the Lovtrups, the Dentons, the Simpsons,  people in high academic positions in notable or outstanding universities. Indeed,  they dive into comic-style sci-fi, and this is not because they lack brilliance, but because their model won't go, and they want it to go, so they look for something outside the myth that is Darwin's (that is the ascription of causes for effects, which have no relevant rational ground), and in so doing make merely another. Small  wonder one of these  speaks with almost longing for  Darwin, because though his dream is untrue,  at least it had method;  and indeed, though it has no forward and upward power, unless that of the discarded Lamark, this invisible, never seen  to be operative imagination, this religious fervour imported into matter,  ex-landing, and made feasible by faith,  as Lewontin has it,  that includes 'patent absurdity in some of its constructs'! Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University, a learning site to which Gould was earlier attached.

But let us hear from this Lewontin, and trace the tracks left.

It attests this: that there is neither respite nor relief. How could there be  ?

Lewontin, notable figure in the aggressive evolutionary program wrote this: ("Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997 - emph. in original)):

This is anti-biblical, and hence irrelevant to the biblical declaration and resolution logically of all things. It is as useless to  attack a biblical position, or one enshrined in it, as if some variant only were available. You might as well attack Communism for its capitalist zest. It is irrelevant (except in that case for such anomalous items as Brezhnev's love of American cars,or misnamed ventures like that of China since the day of the hero who gave sanction for Tiananmen Square)). Thus FAR is it from being the biblical case that the God who made laws, indolently, casually, or with the smack of disruptive disorder, allows the casual thing to happen, the miracle.

HOW is this obviously unacceptable ? If a child has a toy train set, and at any moment may intervene, loves its thrill, watches its centrifugal force and capacities, considers its centre of gravity as he grows older, investigates its batteries, delights in its momentum, does this ruin, make absurd, disparage these things if from time to time he touches a carriage on a curve! What nonsense of irrelevant emotion is this. Of course He CAN, but the point is that biblically, and we are dealing with ONE of the items relevant to God which is perhaps known by Lewontin, so that it is included in his generalisation, He does so with the same cognitive will which created: THAT is the model. It is not an abandonment of order, but its consummation by the Creator of it, who does not abdicate* for the sake of psychic allergies on the part of some.

On the contrary to such concepts as this,  to  eat the fruit of your doings as in Proverbs 1, is a major element in His judgments. It is true that His mercy can reach the psyches and lives of human beings, but this,  so far from being an interference, is the domain of spiritual medicines. By this reasoning, then, are doctors disrupting the bodily realities by bringing in medicines, applying things which disrupt, destroy or impede what would, without their wisdom, destroy man's body ? Are we to give serious thought to such emanations from those who opt  for the irrational model, dealt with from the first (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2), above, a matter of question begging non-science, and who then  make it if possible, even more irrational, by uttering tantrumesque attacks on the very possibility of divine action in His own field,  as if He were an intruder ? Is it barbarous to have oversight of property ? Is it horrid if you destroy by intervention, the rabbit population for example ?

In what way ? In this,  as shown by Lewontin: by imagining that the only lawful and meaningful universe that can be, MUST not have remedies, like a car which MUST not have brakes, or computer-controlled intrusions to rectify developing faults.

Why precisely is that ?  Is the doctrine, the model,  to be not only irrational but spectral, automated and  impersonal, meaningless and indeed  simplistic ? why ? Are such devices to become more and more normative as such unscientific self-indulgences about the desiderata of some, take hold and issue orders to nature about what is fitting for it ? without evidence and in all things contrary to it. Indeed, this Lewontin has done us service, in articulating as the Age draws nearer to its close*, the precise depths of departure from reason to which he is apparently prepared to go, in order to cleave by desire, to the universe of his choice.

This is precisely in line with the authoritarian folly of man's prescriptive imagination, making of himself the martyr, set in a senseless universe, when in fact  if he thinks, he finds the opposite as shown on this site, and indeed in this series of later books more compendiously. In fact,   if you want to  delete the whole concept of causation, rational investigative science without blinkers pre-set, of evidence, of verification,  of validation (cf. Let's Be Reasonable, For God Is! Ch. 2), so that you create matter from nothing, or just pop it in irrationally, then  create mind  from matter, using nothing, and then spirit  from mind, all from  nothing or causeless, and then protest by the use of reason, in terms  assuming it relevant and applicable, to what then will you not bind yourself ? Lewontin gives  some idea of the answer to this. It resembles in some ways: Stop at nothing! It is when you do this, instead of following reason and interactive law and evidential attestation, that you go nowhere.

If you so contradict yourself, what need is there for anyone else  to do so! If you do not believe in rationally discernible and developed cause for things, then you are already exempt from argumentation based on such a concept, and hence from science and knowledge. If indeed your model has no absolute truth, being merely reactive and interactive (a car on your front lawn one night), then how could you even state it, and produce what your model omits from existence! If truth is not there, how do you have it ? If causation is excluded as a controlling feature, how can you describe things in terms of their features and principles, properties and the causal consequences of these ?

If nevertheless, you insist on such a model, if you do this, following irrational  folly in principle, self-contradiction in method, reasoning about non-reason, penetrating with reason the reasonable result of the irrationally produced, then there is no room for any argumentation: it is a game. You have resigned your post as having a model permissive of the use of reason in its defence. You insist in defence on what you omit in construction. You rely on steel beams for your roof, when there is no steel, and speak of its specifications when you have excluded its use.

We however are  serious. Invoking what we reject, and ignoring what we find is not part of our model. On the contrary, in all points it is tested, it delights in test, like a horse which loves to gallop. Here lies the difference. Its answers are fabulous, its competence is overwhelming, for there is no feature in the God of the Bible, His statements in this or that realm, and this is but one of those realms, which is not coherent with itself, explicatory of what is found empirically, or confirmatory, or even predictive. To that point, such works as Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles and  Where He is, Darkness Departs)   were addressed, in terms of some millions of words of detailed exposition, investigation and confirmation.

There in the self-revelation of the Eternal Being, the Creator, is found a heart of validation for the rational, and confirmation for the revelatory to which reason leads (as in Let's Be Reasonable, for God Is! Ch. 2). 

Let us however return to the prescriptive and authoritarian and non-developed decree of Lewontin. It is admitted that because of prejudice, desire alone, God must be omitted. Causative ground for such a preference is excluded, since merely a penchant of no sustainable ground is provided in the coverage; and yet as shown in Kant (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section 4), this merely produces self-contradictions. Avoid causative ground as objectively requisite, and you end in anomalies, antilogies and antinomy indeed.

It does so in Kant's system as in any other like it. Thus to exclude causation, you give a reason for doing so; IN giving such a reason, you use causation, telling us WHY  it has to be excluded in terms of cause and effect, grounds and consequence which necessarily follows. You CANNOT escape this, and neither Kant nor any other can do so. It is antilogy itself.

What we therefore learn from this outburst of the desperate words of Lewontin is this: that there is enormous difficulty in living with his hypotheses, his dictatorial desires, his decrees shared with some others; but for the sake of excluding God, he will in principle at least, do ANYTHING for his model. Indeed, as to miracles, these are by their very nature identifiable as remarkable and distinctive, unusual inventions and interventions, merely reinforcing the realisation of system by their differentiation. There is no question of systematic law abrogation, but only of such merciful action as enriches, illuminates or controls, contains or delivers.

It is not therefore the rule of law that is threatened, but rather the presence of mercy for persons that is to be reckoned with; and the underlying objection must be this, that Lewontin does not WANT a personal interventionist God, an author, but prefers what is available for mankind for his own purposes. He wants what he cannot account for to be accountable to man, with NO intervention from what is causally demonstrably God.

Though demonstrably invented as a creation himself, he is however not wanting ANYTHING to do with the Creator. This is of course a psychological problem, and not a logical one. In this, his view resembles that of an adolescent who would really rather Dad were not at home, as he has many things to do, and wants only the house and rooms, power and garden, with nothing to inhabit it, but himself and his chosen. It does not stand to reason, but this is like a teen-ager who wants to stand before some other bar, which will not tolerate intervention in a system, in which by no power of his own, he is living with a life which he did not make, and for reasons concerning which, he erects various preferred barriers.

In fact, the diversification by instances of direct miracle is a change, like one in the weather, but less frequent, always directed, and certainly in no way so directing affairs as to remove the liberty of man or the impact of law in its normal course. The Lord in His foreknowledge and predestination* has perfectly adequate control, as He turns evil to its end, and love to its testimony; and miracles so far from being a spattering, like specks of paint on the widow, rather clean it from time to time,  as by appointment of a window cleaner: and it makes it the more perfect as an expression of Him who made it, and not at all the less so.

As a desire of a creation, man as shown in SMR, TMR, it resembles a thoughtful (in that it thinks) and thoughtless car (in that it literally forgets itself) which derides or decides to deal with a high hand with the one who made it, his services and his situation, and to transfer itself, meaninglessly but fulfillingly, to the god realm. SInce however it is not a god, this is active delusion such as the Bible predicts (II Thessalonians 2:10-11), as a result in those who have declined to believe the truth. It becomes active in the sense that, founded on fiction, it becomes feverish with desire.

As with much in way of man's passions, indeed, it is precisely this dramatic, almost ecstatic insistence which blinds. It is so with romance: a man HAS to marry such and such a lady, is blind to al criticism, refuses all counsel, imagines a model, the very woman he wants,  and sees it in her whom he surges to wed; and then,  often enough, having acting on mere emotion and preference for the desires of the psyche, he finds the model of the perfect woman is no longer like the lady, and so divorces.

Elemental insistence will not do; straw men  do not count. The criticism is beside the point, on the part of Lewontin, and the admission IS the point. He is refusing an open mind, to try and triumph in EVIDENCE,  verification and validation. SO be it. It is pseudo-science, a philosophic invasion,  admitted directly, converting his mind to a dictatorial substitute for that willingness to be factually instructed, ready for verification or the demise of the model as presented, which IS science.

Some may ask how faith could so treat science: it is not a difficulty. Believing in the biblical mode, REQUIRES testing, as noted in Isaiah 41, 43,  48 and I Thessalonians 5,  and tasting in order to see is prescribed. As there is systematic ground which ratifies faith (but does not cause it, these being two domains, intimately related but not identical), so just as faith leads to the OBJECT of faith and His propositions, by His own power there is a security that does not waver, and never finds loss. It works. Love is its basis, faith is its operational relationship, results  in fruit (whether in persecution or prosecution of good aims) are for another, for the Maker.

That is the empirical case; but even if one suffers, this too has its place in the counsel of God, who loves, and whose servants love; for pleasure-pain is neither their directive desire not their expectation. Truth however is, and comes like an abundant stream in all seasons, never wiltng, always sustained. To be sure, this is not the epitome of human will, for how then would anyone 'take up his cross' and follow the Creator-Redeemer as in Luke 14! It represents a tie to truth, a delight in peace, a way of grace by direct  association with one's founder, so that one does not founder.

We  are  as Paul states it, led in triumph by the Lord (I Corinthians 2:14), and in Him we trust, reason an attestation, the knowledge of Him the source of vitality; for where He is, the life He made is also; and where He abides, the pardon which brings peace is found also.

Having then duly noted the Lewontin declaration, here a case of open admission of its underlying cause, that is, blindness  to pre-designated actualities for investigation, whatever the rational cost, in pursuit of an impersonal universe at whatever cost  to reason, we return to our encounter with a particular model, that of Gould. Here is the suddenly active universe, which has a rest, and then erupts.

On that model, there is a rush, a coming, where former times are suddenly compressed into rather surging, indeed insurgent action. It moves into what in its model environment, is sudden, magnificent,  all-problem-solving, all-information-providing, virtual rapture, rupturing its former quiescence.  But it is one thing to say, and another to show either the event, or the means for it. Moreover, the logical necessities for such eruption as for any provision of code-controlling language and power, of things in the conceptual domain, in the design vocabulary fold, these do not alter. Logic does not evaporate at the force of fairy-tale model, whether or not the fairies which can never be found in nature itself, but only in the minds of the naturalists by implication, are invoked; or whether it be their equivalent in myth-making conjured before the eyes of the mind. It  matters not what we call them, the causatively competent workers are needed; and people distress themselves needlessly in continuing to whip nature to find them in it. They are not there. 

As stated in the Bible in Genesis and Hebrews, all that is finished, just as information theory confirms ^*3, and the vast coverage of the creation and its ways in the Bible, frequently verifiable, attests. Trying to find that it is one notable if not great way to give verification of the Bible, for its fruit is frustration, even though it is in its way, a splendid verification of what it cannot factually deny. The cry of desolation, as in Professor Nilsson, tired of stating what is not factual in his evolutionary classes, is the cry of confirmation; for there is NO WAY out, but to return to rationality and thus to the testable work on creation-redemption-history-eventuation, known as the Bible.

What then ? Being willing for ANY stress and rupture to reason, and Lewontin is only one of such testimonies, such things, features, responses in the factual field are in themselves verifications of reason, that just as it insists on the Bible as the word of the God who is (cf. SMR), so it cannot with integrity deny the Bible in this, as in any other domain. Quite simply, what it has declared is what stands. God who is the one of whom it is written, I AM WHO I AM, the One who is self-sufficient, eternal, not subject to delimitation but to characterisation, for what He is the commencement of categories and the ground for reason, to the point that the Saviour is CALLED as a name, the LOGOS. He is more than reason, the EXPRESSION of God in definitional terms, but not less (Hebrews 1, 11).

Science, let is be stated emphatically, is not about HOPING that your philosophy will somehow 'make it'; it is about dealing with what is to be observed, tested, and verified or otherwise, and about having the self-discipline to omit what does not measure up. This, this naturalism, is not for this reason available for  it; and desperados against design are not the best scientific basis for children, let alone, when this scene of academic propaganda,  a in this state of S.A., comes equipped with the denial of permission for academic access in SCIENCE of  all places, to whatever source and model works well.

So we have these imaginary surges, rationally irrelevant but apparently dear to the heart, empirically not found, but near to the model. Why do they come ?

There is no reason, natural methodology.

It is not enough, says another. We move from the Gould to the Lovtrup thrust.

This scientist in essence is  declaring, Ah, but these sudden surges after the universe rest periods, they are too small. This is not the thing. We must have REALLY macro-suddenness. The bit by bit program is absurd, he insists, and he is right in this. There is NO record of all this rant about bits happening in bits for long times*⁴. We must have orchids or elephants appear AT ONCE. This indeed in this case is EXPLICITLY STATED by him*. That is, Lovtrup illustrates  well the fact that as to evolutionists,  some of them seem  to get upset at all this irrationality and question begging, and ask for some science, not a philosophy of hope for some concept which is constantly denied in practice as in logic.

Another, Goldschmidt,  brings in a 'hopeful ,monster' gloriously equipped, a bit like our earlier somethingness, with vast potential and all sorts of useful bits, rather like spanners and so on, for use as may in due time be needed. Yet what is the reason for this ? what is its ground and cause, what is its interface with confirmed reality in a scientific realism ?

They try; but they fail. They imagine, but lack reason and cause. SO someone of the scientists says this: Suppose now that some spectral body, leading ahead of man, who draws creation upward. You can't talk rationally of this bit by bit evolution, it is as ludicrous as Professor Lovtrup and Goldschmit and Nilsson said, and they were right. But, this next  model of creation continues,  suppose this nice, lustrous, eminently capable ghostly spectre is really drawing things on by a sort of upward concentration, a spiritual phenomenon of some kind, imparting suddenly new things! This is the direction of the brilliant Professor Hoyle, who despised the gradual bits approach as contrary to mathematics, reason and common sense. His break-out was his spectral concept. It of course has to find its own basis, and to start things off, so that they are there in the first place, has to present the stuff to draw upwards. Then it is really pushing up, since without it, the scenario is not there, and by it, it has to be both formed and formulated.  Let us be reasonable! Gould has in this moved a step nearer to God, but not the One where reason is. And what a task, to interfere at last with what has become so complicated that the bugs actual programmers find, would be multiplied by millions in such mathematical marvels as are in the DNA, in any era for change!

Moreover, there is no evidence of this thing happening,  nor for the proposition. ANY model must be wedded to evidence, and have confirmation, attesting with reason what in reason is propounded. Reason is a test; and it leads to revelation as shown in SMR, which brings validation. God Himself invites us to reason together.

Again, suppose the creative agent is searched for elsewhere, as with Denton. it appears now to be a principle, enshrined invisibly in matter, never shown in its interstices or actions, but there all the same. Children whom I knew when younger,  used to have a game, "let's suppose, and let's pretend'', but even they knew reason from imagination!

 Nature does not show it, know it, act like it, nor is it ever detected, by miracle or more mundane means; and when inspected as by Denton so well, it has nothing but refusal to provide. To imagine a concept, call it a principle, and have it work ? It does nothing. Principles are explanatory formulations of things that operate. What are the things operative, and what are their minimal features, that is the point. A word of description only merely avoids the point.

Principles are descriptions. Descriptions do not invent. What does invent is what has to be found.

What you need is not a mere TERM by which to DESIGNATE what you have in mind, but a descriptive word to indicate what you FIND, where tests are relevant, causal interface is NECESSARY, known and inspectable, whether by reason or eye. Moreover, it must be such that ALL implications are covered and not denied. Here, nothing is covered, nothing is attested, no testable implication is shown for the specific theory, and no apparatus is detected for its working IN THE ALLEGED  DOMAIN, namely that of  'nature'. It does not show itself, being like fairies in the light, shy.

There is reason for this, just as there is verification for the Bible: what we are increasingly seeing it that NOTHING may be found to verify such models, and for the supposition of such powers in nature, be they spectres somehow conjoined, or immigrated, or space people, or principles. They are  all dead weight from desire and none from reason or verification, all mere means and measures to an end which is not met, the connection being simply and merely imagined.

Even if, however, such anomalies acted, they still would fail in their own terms, for the entirety of reason applied to the universe and to man requires as shown, far more than this. Nothing is not good enough as a ground for anything, and reason is not to be satisfied with what does not achieve all, show itself in such achievement in ways attestative, confirmatory to investigation and possessing relevant interface, as in DNA for example,  words, expressive units of command for construction, as noted in Genesis, announceable elements of activation, actualisation, constructed from a power as invisible as thought and courage or peace or love, but more powerful yet, the source of these things, material things, cognitive things, the power to dream and to create, and of all.

The rational option covers not merely the question begged intermediary state, but ALL from the first. What stops short of that is not reason, not a rational model, but mere imagination, launched by desire, foundering on fact.

Wonderful evolution! Even when it fails, you have to have something other than the EFC! But alas this does not work, since the spectral body et al.,  was either there at the first, or nothing could operate. We call it God.

NOTES

*1 See Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6, as below - I , and Ch. 7 as below, II, and contexts for these (here hyperlinked).

How does loss become gain, going down become up, do mechanisms and machinations leading to demonstrable degradation provide means of growth and development, and when will  facts be allowed to speak in the realm of origins once more! Teaching children fairy tales, which many leading scientists consider such, even some not creationists but outraged evolutionists, who justly pillory Darwinism but construct nothing else, is a vice that cannot be differentiated from other forms of slavery, when contrary views and pursuits are outlawed. Idolatry has thus moved from becoming fashionable to the young bloods, to becoming necessities for schools who would prefer to think.  Alas Australia,  why be so provocative against the testable truth, the trampled children and the parents' wishes. Why not provide professional opening for fair contest, in college and university, and cease to browbeat, using education as a tool and rationality as a dustbin.

Below we consider, in *1 and *2, some of the more detailed data to the point.

I

THE CREDO

which appears in Gould's Wonderful Life

A.

The CONTRA-INDICATIONS. Some of these "difficulties" he notes, some vividly! These lead on to the pronunciamento phase to follow.

These appear in *2, Ch. 5, above, but to these we may add.

1. There was in the Burgess shale a phenomenon low down in Cambrian, which was so vast in scope and variety that:

there are found remains of 15-20 organisms so different from ONE ANOTHER and from anything now known to to be living, that "EACH OUGHT TO RANK AS A SEPARATE PHYLUM" (op. cit. p.99).

2. This tallies with his statement that "INSTEAD OF A NARROW BEGINNING AND A CONSTANTLY EXPANDING UPWARD RANGE, MULTICELLULAR LIFE REACHES ITS MAXIMAL SCOPE AT THE START, WHILE LATER DECIMATION LEAVES ONLY A FEW SURVIVING DESIGNS" - op.cit. p. 233.

HOW, he asks, presuming to do so "in heaven's name" - seemingly in the grip of growing frustration and desperation, like that of Nilsson and Paul Davies in his nothing approach (certainly radical, even if radically irrational)
 

·       "HOW ... COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE SO QUICKLY"*^1A (op.cit. p. 227). The Burgess time provided what he calls a "Burgess maximum in organic disparity" (loc.cit.). The Chinese fossil case cited is reputedly similar (p. 226). "HOW," he continues, "IN HEAVEN'S NAME COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHATEVER THE LATER FORTUNES OF ITS EXEMPLARS?" (Cf. Questions and Answers 2, End-note 1.)

·       It is of course far easier to go to heaven in word, than in fact; just as it is far easier to have continuity in nature through the power of phrases, than in the power of evident construction.

The intense and literally immense irony is this: that while Gould's words invoke a heaven of whose power no indication in his words appears that he is aware, in the antics or cavortings of his desperation, it is precisely where he invokes this name, that the answer he seeks is not only present: it is blatantly so. However, how many, how often are themselves amazed in due course, at what they did not see, and as we shall see in our Chapter 7 to follow: the sense of irony is not lost on God ! (as in Proverbs 1, 8).

II

From Wake ... Ch. 7

It is not as if we had to psychoanalyze Him at a distance. That would be blasphemy, presumption and folly, mad arrogance and common philosophy.

HE HAS TOLD US. What is in His heart, He has declared, and acted in magnificent order and love, in demonstrating it (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17, That Magnificent Rock 2, 3 and SMR pp. 582ff.).

In our current theme, God has also told us about CREATION and CONSUMMATION. Gould is fascinated with the fact of what he calls 'decimation' - profound losses of life forms, not new releases since the superabundance of creation's time, long ago: and this, with good reason, since the evidence he himself not least, appears to have unearthed, is precisely the opposite of what denies the realities of once-only creation at the first, with subsequent diminution to the present: and it is, on the other hand, exactly in line with what the Bible states, has stated, and that constantly over some three and one half millenia. The evidence as delivered by such as he confirms the word of God, not the theories of men. This with all the other evidence we have been at pains in no small measure to review, is precisely what confirms this, ribaldry mocking a creative world in and of itself.

The biotic diversity has run down; it is like an unwinding clock, except that much left in huge proportions, leaving whole realms of vital architecture no longer in front of us. In Gould's own  terms, not mere species but a goodly number of phyla are now - omitted from sight, drowned in the sea of circumstances, and perhaps, not implausibly, in other seas as well!

Decimation as a device of creation is certainly rich, like a diet of pure cream, that is off, with no other food. Distasteful, really: not on. Going is not coming.

THERE is the REALITY, the factual and the actual: HUGE architectural prodigies in ENORMOUS profusion, without PLANNING CONFUSION but equipped with RAREFIED WISDOM in their DEVICES for life. We have seen Lamborghinis in profusion, and their racing characteristics have been of the most astute; we have seen tourers, and their qualities have been fascinating. The whole veteran list of life forms is stunning. They of course were just the result of lying on the beach, and they ... what is the word, came to 'arise', ah yes!

However, leaving myth in preference to rationality, let us consider the real matter in hand, the evidential reality both from the ONLY BOOK which predicts and retrodicts to cover millenia without confusion or embarrassments, and NEVER repents of its utterances, in marked contradistinction even to careful science, which is advancing to the point of coming closer to what is written, when it is science indeed. The writing in our cells is so LIKE the word of God with which the universe was founded, and come to think of it, the laws in matter itself are so LIKE the regulative features of speech, wrought  into a realm ordered by such thoughtful power that codes and describable laws express it. No case other than legal, none exempt from law, has ever been defined or even definable in that realm (cf. SMR pp. 418ff., Ch.3, pp. 422Eff., That Magnificent Rock 7).

THEN DECIMATION !

The flood was one such feature, and it is both just and fitting to conceive of this when it is explicitly linked in the Bible to the denial of creation as a twin rebellion in thought for our terminal epoch in this present Age, as explained in the preceding chapters (cf. II Peter 3).

But what of the present and the future ?

Not in destruction did creation 'arise', and not in decimation did it flourish. Neither did abortion create a child, nor did decay invent advance. The laws of the universe are not really to be found as devices of understanding by the exceptionally bright means of frankly contradicting them.

Let us look at science. MATTER has come and is not coming; LIFE is going and is not coming; ENERGY is becoming less available and is not being created (in the matter-energy total complex: cf. That Magnificent Rock Chs. 1, 7).

WHAT THEN IS COMING ? It is rather all going: as Sir James Jeans, the astronomer used to emphasise of the universe, it is like a clock running down. We have noted the work of Lord Kelvin in the similar sphere of thermo-dynamics. Arrival WAS, but now IS NOT the name of the game, as far as the construction of the universe and its biota is concerned. The KINDS of things we have, are those we have had, except of course for the creations of surrogate creators, like ourselves, which are decreasing; and we have for physical media, to work with what was, minus what has been lost, in terms of materials.

That is what is GOING; and what comes ?

THE CONSUMMATION

What is coming ? It is the end prepared for by the artist, the architect, the inventor, the Creator. What else ? It is all planned, ordered, legislated. It is a house in which to live, and the repair man is not available; though there are magnificent inbuilt maintenance procedures which are not planned to ensure eternity for this present world.

It is to be shaken (Hebrews 12:25-28, Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:25) and only the things which are in fact unshakable, those then founded in and on God direct, are to be able to withstand this shaking process (which like old age, disturbs the force and facility and agility of the 'legs' or legislative, and programmatic structure with its own terms and conditions -  on which it all stands). It does not stand because it wants to; it stands because it was made to; and it was also made to decay, and the reason for that, we have also dealt with in detail (as in Biblical Blessings 7, The Biblical Workman 1 , 7 and so on - see Curse in Index, together with Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17).

*2

What name should be given at this stage of the enquiry ? If one says 'it' of what conceives, it is not only awkward, but malapropos, a misuse of language. If one says He', it uses what in the natural world is a masculine as distinct from  a feminine gender. If one has no need or ground for gender in the case of a Being that thinks, then  some might deem it better not to use gender-oriented words. This would deny in view of the above, any specialised pronoun. That would be clumsy. Hence He is used in such a way as by definition for such a case (such as this paragraph constitutes) to indicate a Being who can think, conceive and create, and therefore as ultimate exercise dominion and authority, as unlimited, but who has no gender,  this being a format for the  materially delimited. As the  source of the universe, He cannot be so  delimited. It would thus be appropriate in such prescriptive definition  for expression purposes, to use a pronoun designating not the one who responds to another, the bearer, but rather the one who begets,  again,  with the caveat that this suggests nothing differentially depreciative in human terms in gender terms.

*3

See:

The Desire of the Nations and the Crystalline Fire of the Faith Ch. 2, Epilogue,

Little Things 3 (esp. *3),

Beauty of Holiness Ch.     4,

Dancers ... Answers Chs.    3,  5,

Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch.    4

Thy Word is Wonderful Ch.       5

See also background analysis at this location.

*3A

See Alpha and Omega ... Ch. 6, esp. at this point and above.

*4

See for example:

Reflections  Ch. 4,

Message of the Words of God to Man in the World Chs.  5,   4,

Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,

The gods of naturalism have no go! 14 ,

Evidence and Reality Chs.  2, 5, 6, 7

Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13,

Impossible for Men, Open to God  Ch. 3,

Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch.     1,

The Kingdoms of this World and the Kingdom of Christ Ch.     8,

The Holocaust of Morals and the Coming of Christ the King Ch.    3,

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness  Ch. 1,

God's Gift of Grace in Christ Jesus Ch.     7,

History, Review and Overview Ch.    5,

It Bubbles ... He calls Ch.    9,

Spiritual Food and Drink Ch.   4,

        Repent or Perish Ch.    7.

The pursuit of this topic is no small thing, so that *4 for this Chapter,  from this point on, become in fact Chapter 2.