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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 3

BEYOND NATURALISTIC MYSTICISM

AND ANTI-AETIOLOGICAL SELF-CONTRADICTION,

GOD HIMSELF,

AUTHOR OF MIND, CREATOR OF SPIRIT, SOURCE FOR MATTER

OVERVIEW OF THE UNDERLYING ISSUE

Michael Denton has presented a splendid case for the folly of gradualistic evolution in his, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. In his chapter 3, of the work, Are We Spiritual Machines?^*1 , he dances on dilemmas, and seeks outage, it appears,  from mystic naturalism, a kind of enhanced  matter which has marvels beyond it in ascertained kind, resident within. They can never be detected, it seems, or  show  themselves actually doing anything, or having any lair;  are a postulate without any basis, a  deployment with no more reality-interface than has  Darwinian evolution: that is none at all. You cannot find how it does anything to formulate itself (the point at issue); you never see it doing this sort of travail, cannot induce it to do anything even  if it were there, cannot clearly formulate it in rational  sounding terms,  and indeed: it is altogether such a piece of mystic naturalism, seeking to force into matter what it has  neither visible nor inducible nor activatable home for, as if desirous of being a twin to Darwinism  It is, as if again like Darwinian evolution, there was no  other way but simply to throw up the hands and say, It  must be there, must be great. It  gets  done.

To be fair, this phase of Denton's hypothesis is a tad better than Darwin,  since it does not so smudge the initial facts  of the nature of life, but frankly  acknowledges discontinuity, like Nilsson, another brave  fellow. It does at least give actual attention  to the data  at the base of it. It is not, like  that of Darwin, built  on verifiable absentees, in the face of  verifiable presences (cf. SMR pp., 140ff., TMR Ch. 1). Yet in common with that  fault  line in biological philosophy, not  science but a philosophic substitute at this point, it presents what neither evidences itself, nor can be induced to  do  so, nor attests innovation, nor information addition, but is a thing of  regularity and assiduity.

By all  means, let us have unusual types of action, after the  drought which was  Darwin (cf. News  94, Wake Up World! Chs. 5-6, TMR Ch. 1, The gods of naturalism have no go!  25), but let there  be  interface, phase of interaction between the power that does the thing (making up life), and the thing itself. If you are  going to  look to grand-sire it into 'nature' in  some way, then at least show the family tree. In other words, if you want to produce for consideration a theory of life's development, at least  show something testable, investable, with results  which distinguish it from  ANYTHING!

As usual in such cases, this is based on a confusion between performances with elements yet to be fully covered in terms of their systematics of operation (as once to a far greater degree was electricity, electro-magnetism and radioactivity), and something merely imagined,  here closely akin to entelechy, a striving within life to reach certain kinds, degrees, patterns or accomplishments, literally, 'end'. From what ? by what ? with what formulable  expression of itself  ? in what way distinctive  from  guesswork, painfully contrary to existing laws as well, such as the second  law of thermodynamics, and observation, which NEVER finds any identifiable and distinctive correlation  between such a theory and reality as observed.

Entelechy moves one back to Aristotle. While the divinity in view was outside involvement for some odd reason, Aristotle had in matter, or in life, a kind of self-fulfilling, ADVANCING-TO-IMPROVING-DESIGN equivalent, a something moving to an end, to a point in view. How  ? How is an 'end', óbjective, point of rest to which things move to become kinds, how is this to be for things materially connected and controlled ? At least he got the design and designation part right, the idea being in control.

Not in matter ? then why put it there ? Associated with matter ? then as what associated ? As material things ? then the problem is as before. As  immaterial things ? then what kind of immaterial things. If we are  going to think, let us use reason.  If any is not prepared to use reason, then why argue ? and how defend  ? If it is to be irrational, then just say, blah, blah, blah, for that would be equally effective.

What kind of immaterial things then ? Mind bits, entities floating about in a sea, or other medium that has to be created, as do they themselves  ? this is merely inadequate and unattested thought. Spirit bits,  with vision and uplift floating or soaring or snoring or waking, round  about ? But what is their source and what inter-face in  terms of scientific modalities is to be given for these ?

What then ? We look for what is self-sufficient and eternal, since nothing produces nothing and what is inadequate for results rationally does not produce them. We look then for what is eternally existent, uncontained (for that merely puts the point back to what did the containing), limited by nothing, in need of nothing (for alternative to that implies a system in which it inheres, and as before, merely puts the necessity back one, to which one then needs rationally to move, so having THIS as the foundation). This, then, eternal, is present first of all.

As the cause^*1A, it is before, and not afterwards, is there to  do it, and does not arrive postage paid from nowhere^*1B; for when you deal with all, what is not there is nothing. The actual and ultimate cause has outcomes as basis, not incomes, can speak if that is the desire, or not, being unconstrained by any lack of any kind. Systems of mutually dependent causes are its outlay, inherent capacity to  cause is its nature, which is  not given (if otherwise, by whom ?), but a balance of desire and actuality,  all in harmony, nothing pre-determined by any other or diverse entity at the creative level, but everything sure, because knowledge being unlimited, it is foreknown. Indeed,  since the lack of limit to knowledge removes growth and change: if the Eternal  wanted a holiday, to be different in itself, then it would lack and not be unlimited, but delimited, and hence a mere mirage,  and not the Being of whom logic forces us to take account.

You have it; it creates; it stops: it says so. That is the Biblical Model. The information, the commands, pour out. Creation occurs. Its brief period is clearly specified. Then it is finished, and so it stops (as for us, for that matter, when we create).

That, likewise, is the empirical fact. It starts; it has proceeded briefly. It stopped. The Bible and the facts are like two hands together, in total derogation of evolutionary gradualism.

Information poured out in flourishing profuseness, making as Gould points out, enormous productions, types and sub-types, hierarchically composed, not gradually different, as Denton confirms: that is early. Then it stops. It is NEVER seen now without intelligence, that is, information being formed.

What would you expect ? After all, it involves such syntactical knowledge for the reliability of conformity and uniformity, such semantic accuracy, is committed with such a vast prodigy of miniaturisation, making itself magnificent because of what has the ability so to act, way past all human invention, that how would you ever expect it to form itself in SUCH A STYLE by some sort of quiver, shot out without a bowman, to be pinned down without a point. incisively inscribed and even edited (as it now is, even in new generations), that it would work for such mutual operative efficiency as is necessary for life ? If it did so, we would have to have little gods, or robots from a craftperson's hands ... but these are not found. Nor is their product, information coming without intelligence.

When the creation acted, it left the interface tracks of mathematical  super-genius, symbolic, intellectual expression of triumphant miniaturised magnificence. It leaves undone no facility;  deploys things so sophisticated that many of the brightest find it hard even now with so long a time, to grasp them:  then finished. Now it has left off. They, its productions, put in place, function with necessary and sophisticated provisions for their correction and so functional continuation.

After the initiation of it, however, it has ceased. It is like a book written; and rather like a book, the pages over time, yellow. That is, as Professor Sanford shows, there is danger to man in the rate of deterioration of genetic information. Re-arrangements of information often occur by ingenious means; novelties in that field fail. The sufficient cause in the validatable and verifiable handbook has stated firstly,  cessation of this kind of creation, and secondly, trouble for it because of its handling of its own exalted case (Romans 5).

New information as required in creation, it does not come. Every day is a test of the LACK of failed efforts (even the simple cell,  Denton tells us, is a masterpiece of flaming functionality, to phrase it so). They do not appear. Palaeontology cannot produce the limping experimental or adventitious clumsy flops as less than moronic non-intelligence goes to work, if you can call it that. Ludicrous functional failure do not litter the paleological landscape. This is NOT what is found.

Thus, the thing being made, created, with language, some of the language by which God  spoke it into existence, after myriads of  copyings, has after millenia, with much mistreatment, begun to break down (cf. Ch. 2 as marked, above); but that is normal in such a world, subject to the actual laws we have, which are the opposite in direction  to the assumed direction of  the assumed evolution.

The obvious, as Romans 1 tells it, is not popular, but mankind has a habit of seeking to suppress this. It is so and has been in all kinds of innovative nothings especially as the Age advances  to its definable end (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). That too is fulfilment, that it is increasing at such a pace. It still has a little way to go, as governments increasingly look to net filtering, which can readily spew from removing obscenity to removing God, the Bible, argumentation in this area,  which has almost been done once before in Australia, for example.

The obvious remains so, and is indisputable by reason (cf.  SMR, TMR), continuously attested by evidence, overwhelmingly above in performance all evolutionary nostrums (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., Ch. 2, The gods of naturalism have no go!), and confirms itself in prophecy without rupture or release.

It is summed in Jesus Christ (cf. SMR Ch. 6, Chs.  8, 9),

	who not being mad,
	but exceedingly accurate in His many forecasts,
	and asserting Himself to be God in flesh,
	indeed showing His incomparable sanity by the fulfilment of His diagnosis for man and His indications concerning Gentile and Jewish developments,
	including His death,
	the thrust of Christianity throughout the earth,
	and its strong countermanding by antithetical forces before His return:

is self-attesting.

It is shown also in that, once received (that is Christ Himself by His Spirit, as Redeemer and risen from the dead, sacrifice for sin and speaker of truth in all His doctrine), what it says is so lived, through faith, and induplicable without it.

This has been considered at  large, and in small ways before; but in this Chapter, one particular ramification of mystic naturalism is considered in its place.

LOOKING INTO DETAIL, DYNAMICS AND CAUSATION

We read this, concerning the Chapter, 'Are We Spiritual Machines': 'Michael Denton asserts that the most basic vital characteristics of organisms, such as self-replication, morphing, self-regeneration, self-assembly and the holistic nature of biological design, cannot be achieved with machines.

Denton does very well on the machine aspect, and dismisses its reductionist confabulations by showing from expert knowledge the specific ways in which the mechanical and the vital differ, as in self-duplication, origination from parts, trans-morphing in stages of development, as creatures born and growing often do, and so on. However he has a rather unfortunate trend when ultimates arrive, towards nebulosity, in which things not yet fully codified, to his knowledge, in types of grounds, mutually assembling, co-ordinatively operative elements in growth, are made inlets of what appears a naturalistic inwardness, a mystic seeming sovereignty which impels.

The formulation here is not precise, as is natural for such types of envisagement, where interface and causation are minimally apparent; but this appears the trend. As noted above, however, if we examine the cause of such things, on pain of negating causation (there is not some divergence here, between material and spiritual or mental causation, for all alike have criteria and characteristics, whether volitional or mechanical, programmatic or personal, and all are accountable), we find only God. Nothing else has assignable, verifiable interface. That is, there is no other source which has a statable capacity, derivable on assignable grounds, with results in comprehensible categories.

From the site noted above for Denton, we read this (reference added):

Michael Denton asserts that the most basic vital characteristics of organisms, such as self-replication, morphing, self-regeneration, self-assembly and the holistic nature of biological design, cannot be achieved with machines. If this is the case, then how will consciousness^*2 ever be instantiated in a "spiritual machine"?, asks Denton.

Most commendably, Denton rubbishes the machinations about the machine-analogy in human life. He dwells with expertise at length on the differences of vital phenomena, at the physical level, and mechanistic ones. Self-replication, mutual adjustment of developing parts, interactive reactions with relationship to a whole, amid the parts, these are identified and stressed, whilst Aristotle's concept of entelechy is given attention, the whole being moved  to a  design resultant, as if from within.

He then proceeds to confuse two very different things. One is the mechanistic concept in which things are put together bit by bit ^*2A, with no reference to outcomes, and no  ground for the compositions of the  mutually beneficial, artfully, mutually accommodated parts, or the integral significance of the finale.  This is rightfully dismissed as invention  from  nowhere. However, Denton fails to deliver on the additional process, indeed the dire dynamic actually needed, now that we discard removal of the old as the only visible operative ground for the building of the new.

This missing  process, is that by which - whether through genes or the overall control directives from what had been conceived as 'junk DNA'^*3 but now is seen as significant in development modes of the renewable living creature - living forms  acquire and deploy these  very things. That is, these varied, developmental, overall controlling dynamics, be these seen as  expressly codally directive, or fascinatingly mutually co-ordinated with a result instilled into their very comprehensive and overall features, perhaps from multitudes of simultaneously activated positions, to judge from what is taught in this area'^*3.

Whether indeed,

	the definitively directive words of the genes, or
	the broader indications and indexes of the bulk of the residual DNA in inciting the construction of items, the outworking of chronological sequences, or
	the amassing of interactively ordered relationship, fabrication masterpieces,
	or all together, and whatever more is needed,

be in view;

and whether

	there is placed in such dynamically contoured, focussed and featured resultant constructions,
	an inherent characteristic of a co-operative kind, as in the vastly simpler case of molecules in supersaturated solution, which suddenly but not for no reason, when seeded, may almost pervasively form a  mass of crystals,

or there is simply a series of crafted instructions in the broader mass of the DNA, outside the genes, interwoven in the complexities which even experts can find intricate and convoluted almost past imagination,

the result is the same.

The cause is under investigation, and it must be found, not imputed to what is both examinable and wholly negative towards any such imputation. The OPERATION is not an answer: it is the question. The PARTICIPATION of the directing dynamics involved is not question: it is observable. Its ground, not able to be evidenced within, except through mere operation of what is already there, must be searched in what can start or stop such things, as any writer may. In this case, as in the Bible, it has stopped. We are merely verifying this.

As to the MODE of working of these things, as hinted above:  at this point the tendency of the working of the various windings and bindings of the DNA, magnificently multiple and involved, one with the other, appears to be gaining weight as a observation^*3, so that systems are NOT ONLY masterminded, but subjected to a multiplicity of constraints and directions so intricate and multiple in place and mode, as to amaze the intellect by its sheer brilliance in the conceptual constraints which govern symbolic orders and directions.

Formulations without conceptions, when symbols are concerned, are merely a contradiction in terms.  An order is not a happening, but what makes things happen. It is not a mere event, adventitious; it is a key, sedulous, directive, composed as information and received by facilities equal to response to such operational orders.

How can something designate ONE THING, with almost perpetual certainty, like the bead on the rifle of an expert marksman, and  go on  doing so in combination with masses of other contiguous and co-operative directions, and how can the receptors of the orders or constraints be systematically confined and compelled by these, in a manifest of interwoven dynamics, unless symbol and significance, direction and performance are versed in their respective formations, with the meaning intended! While orders as orders are occurrences, they differ from the merely happening in this, that their design is to make happen, what without this formulation would not do so. In the formulation for the intended  formation, there is a conceptual, because symbolic basis, and this is so conceived that it is made correlative to the receptors, attuned to this kind of symbolic logic.

Things may happen in a system for the  reason that the  elements and the environment are mutually so made that this is the type of response to be expected (and THIS being law and order, constraint and characterisability, requires a cause of at least legal or legislative capacity, to cover the environmental conditions); but when symbolic direction, as in DNA, is added to constitutional proclivities, as in the materials formed in the chain of command, then the symbol-substance milieu requires conception.

Search must then be made for the reality which results in such conception plus command plus facility for reception of the command, plus provision by command of the materials for the execution of the command, plus synchronisation of the orders in sequence with the correlative orderings of what is to receive the outcome of the orders at any single or continuing point or series. It must exist without effective inhibition in a miiieu of potential, in which it is the constraining impulse, like any other order. The cohesion of these elements is a system, a system of information, complex conception, reciprocal command centre and reception centres, leading to creation which, when it stops, leaves as here only the husk, that is, the result.

The formation of the information is never found without intelligence for the very simple reason that it takes it to codify,  symbolise, and make type-term correlation. It needs it far more when as is the case, you also have information about information left by the Informant, so that in this larger area of the DNA, you have a  repository of ultra-system to guide the system, something not subject to joint 'arising', for if symbols are mental products, the more conspicuously so are symbols about the use of symbols. This is the plain read-out of mind (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! 25) , the way it works, and what it requires is intelligence to decide upon the symbols, their various sub-sets of informative media and their workings in such intricacy and unrelieved objectivity of function as is in fact  found. It needs intelligence, resolve, decision powers, assertion, enterprise, wisdom, knowledge and a grandeur of power vast beyond prodigy. Compare with our own power and humility, if not thus obtained, would need to be excluded by apartheid!

╬╬Words and their equivalents are objects of mentality,  expressions of abstract  thought control,  specifications of understanding, and to delete their significance as if they are 'just symbols' is, as with creation itself, mere reductionism. Is an airplane just an object in space ? (cf. The Unsearchable Riches ... Ch. 7, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, The gods of naturalism  ... 37, History, Review and Overview ... Ch. 5, Christ Incomparable ... Ch.  5, *3 ).

Are its systems just things that lie around ? or is its unitary, purpose fulfilling, elaborately mutually adjusted mass of equipment assuredly the result of underlying materials with intrinsic properties, in an overlying system of environment, with underlying properties, with a conjunction by concept, that of flying, by understanding, that flitted in from nowhere as per usual in these models ?

This is merely the ultra-programmatic substitute (as occurs increasingly now on earth with car manufacturing technology), imparting the means and commands in terms of the how to do it' category. In the car case, first the direction was to workers, then to other workers to make the machinery and codes, then through the resultant, to materials to be assembled according to the meaningful symbols, in a total situation made for the purpose. From workers, we proceed with increasing sophistication, to the substitutes for workers, made by workers, with tasks assigned as if there were still workers, though now they are not here needed.

This is the logical basis, and whatever mode of representation may be chosen, such is the principial requirement here met; and now entirely stopped,  as per the Bible, and observation in joint accord.   As to the car, it is now in this regard, no more an object of thought; but it runs. As to the universe, it is in this regard, no more an object of creative thought, but it is one that goes. Where it goes is a question to which we shall return.

By this our so clever earth, words are  now being sought in  messages, hopefully for many, in intelligible ones, ones which involve conceptions and relationship  at the mental and purposive level. These are sought with the expenditure of billions of dollars, for one  main purpose:  to find  INTELLIGENCE. Such messages are thought, should they be found in space and shown not to have been put there by man, to indicate this conclusively. THERE, there they are prepared to say, there is intelligence. But the messages from outer  space are not found. There is not intelligence. It fails to be verified. 

Look in the matter,  look in the outside peripheries of it as far as you can, you do not find it at work; only its resultants in terms of what it is. Intelligence is functional distinctively when what it makes is intelligible to intelligence, so that the giver and the gainer of the product, are at the same type of functionality. What is presented is that: the universe. What presents it is that: the intelligence. Part of its product is constructed intelligence, not artificial, but freely imaginative, in man^*3A.

Why then is it even imagined that  ANY symbolic ordering of units intended to express understanding, be this to machine or man, involves and implies less! Symbols signify, and significance is not a natural object, but one of the understanding, based on concepts fit to convey it. Symbols without significance are a contradiction in terms; significance without meaning is another. Those who so look for messages, words, symbols in systems  to  convey orders or ordering or meaning,  do not look in vain. In this only, they are right. Let us emphasise this next point,  already touched on.

When however, as is the case shown by Williams in the above endnote, that you have a semantic reference set, information about information, you have a code index which being a second set relating to the first, excludes individual arising, as if not only were the practical outcome phase to arise, but the semantic subjugation phase were to arise, independently, and the two to become wholly mutually effective, and not to die before the garbled muddle of meaningless bits striving (often the vocabulary of self-contradiction such as this model relies on)  to reach and teach one another, showed its folly as a piece of inglorious, pantheistic meditation, at best.

╬╬Moreover, just as the mindlessness of some initial system, does not show itself capable of creating mind, and using mysterious terms about 'life'  or making observations about the working of forces and features of holistic kind, expressed in codes,  constraints and mutual sending-receiving confabulations, concentrates and conditions, for the milieu are dissimilar in kind and capacity as shown by observation and test of functions: so more generally, we would not consent to the concept of such a beginning to such an end. It is anti-scientific in three ways: first, it does not look  for an interface between the cause and the consequence (on this model, the matter-mind marvel in construction). In  science, this is precisely for what you DO seek.

Secondly, it does not TEST the alleged interface, both matter and mind existing, each as it is; and thirdly, the negative results of all endeavours to have a thing with personal creative and constructive, conceptual and  visionary capacities such as man has, to arrive even BY INTELLIGENCE, does nothing at all. The INPUT by its nature must DETERMINE, whether statistically or not, the output. You get nothing from nothing, either at the beginning or at the end, in stages or in any other way. That is the nature of nothing. Hoping it may have turned into an intelligence-module is religion; it has nothing to do with science. As philosophy, it is  folly; as logic, it is a dream, and  as an empirical thing to happen, it is not found do so. Negativity is the entire program for such a model, rationally and empirically.

Why then indulge ? Religion  ? it is free. Science, it is not. Even religion cannot be argued for if irrational; and falls on its own sword, as not even meeting the powers of review given to man, by which he lives. Why die ? A religion must at least meet reason; for that is a mere energy of review, stringency, a strainer and a code for construction. Past that, you also need attestation from your source, to know beyond all possibility of subjectivism of the worse sort, and all probationary considerations, or in other words, to know with a felicitous knowledge which is final, because irreproachably based, what is what, what is not, what man is, what he is not, and how he should act, in ways no less propositionally expressible than the codes that run his body, and the logic which governs them, to make them intelligible and operational in this world.  It is this, with a profound felicity that man has*^{*4, *12}, and to ignore it makes ignoring our bodies far wiser. It is a daft folly (cf. Proverbs 1, in its construction of such a way for living!).

Do you look for a moron to compose systems ? create spiritually uplifting music, give him never so long, to be the source of what he neither understands nor could ever even begin to construct ? and will you make the arrangement of particles a participating MANDATE for the construction of such, give him a million years ? Particulate arrangements of items is one thing; the MEANING which the particles merely convey, as in a symbolic message, intelligently constructed for an intelligence to receive it and  appreciate its wares, this is another. The 'bits' philosophy (cf. Ch.  1, *4 above, and Ch. 3), in its addiction to MODES OF PRESENTATION, has completely forgotten the first arrival of what is to be given the mode, and so presented. It forgets, in short, what we are talking about!

If nature were self-originating (at the first  from nothing, if that is all there is to be, and we follow causative discipline), then it is far worse than  a moron in THIS field: it HAS NO intelligence all, in this organic evolutionary model,  in the initially conceived field of matter. And as to that, it also has to be conceived, its laws framed in co-ordinating impacts, its constraints erected in universalising modes, its machinery machinated, its form and features, originated from what is entirely sufficient to deal with such things. It is nothing or what is adequate; it is irrationality or creation. If Bible believing Christians put their minds and hearts to creation, it is not least because the alternative does not exist, except in dreams; but it is also because THIS option has a self-verifying, and self-validating and PERSONALLY self-validating testimony in the Bible and in Christ. What logic demands in totality, these provide^*3B.

Imagination does not replace reason, though it may adorn it; nor does it remove the point of their causation. Imagination can be fun; by itself,  however, failed empirically and found contrary to scientific law, to three  major universal laws indeed*⁴, as this fuzzy, organic evolutionary concept is,  it is failed manifestly and multiply.

The advance of knowledge does nothing to reduce this; in fact, it is showing only HOW VERY intricate and multiply symbolically operative life at the physical level is^*3.

Just as the DNA was a mystery, so if now there should still be some academic mystery about the life-as-one-whole features which show themselves in the type of constructions emanating from the directive foci of DNA: yet that has nothing whatsoever to do with the necessity for a CAUSE for the whole, whether it be the end product, the DNA, or the dynamics found in the resultants of the work of DNA.

The concept that things make themselves without cause, that effects are naked of grounds is as has been shown, contrary to logic, impossible for rational thought. The concept that DNA is determinative directly in all things in the  elaboration of framework, even if by various singly and multiply inter-related constraints,  by no means collides, but rather is confirmed by the over-riding aetiological necessity always present, of something of some kind relevant to such constraint, to the institution of such constructive syntheses, to the incitement of such combinations of the two in one system, as is found. More and more of the basic coded and constraining entities in the broader DNA scope, particularly the contrivances to build constraints on constraints, elaborate information controls, facile beyond immediate thought, move in the direction of the fluidity of results seen in the orderly but amazing modes of construction behind  living dynamics.

	Natural order, in a word, requires the ordering causatively, or else we abandon logic, and so the power to engage in contesting argumentation..
	It requires it a fortiori when symbolic logic is used for the obtaining of the same. Developing science, so far from shattering this sense and rationality, constantly is confirming it to the point that mental arrest is the only option for those still wishing to ignore the constructional necessities for what in life we see, at this level, to be working. Information to  control; information to control information! That is the case found.
	It requires it still more, if possible, when both such systems are combined.
	It demands it yet more manifestly when there is information about information, so that there is an explicit basis for the concept of concepts in action, a co-optive and intellectually intriguingly astute and comprehending mind that beggars our own, yet not to the point, ours biblically being constructed with some  affinity for His own, that it is beyond the appetite to reach, and the joy of discovery as the powers of our minds meet in the creation, the powers of His, ours meeting mutuality of comprehensibility, those works and these our thoughts, because of this.
	It mandates it in overflowing measure, when it is found  empirically that even information per se is not found, or able to be contrived, without intelligence*5.
	It does so yet more abundantly when the information in view is operative as well as indicative, and magnificent in subtlety and miniaturisation and method, to the point that man becomes almost like a child before such magnificence of symbolic institution, and its conceptual basis so expressed.

Thus has come the directive and the constraint of the  natural order which is set before us, and that not for no reason.

So far from  the intra-dynamics of its products in any  way removing the logical necessity for a cause both of this, and of the genetic constructions themselves, their mutual inter-relationship merely exacerbates the folly of bypassing reason, and the blatancy of befouling logic's good name with its contradiction, that of causality through its being assiduously ignored, and that of science with its demise at the verificatory table, as well as at the methodological counter.

These things merely mean that the design is not only based on the productive and directive powers of genes, with the broader DNA meta-information conditions and contrivances, on the internalised  properties of what results from their action, but also on the cause of both^*5A, a thing of mountingly attested mentality in kind, at the purely empirical table.

In  theological terms, it may evoke the thought not only of the WORD, as in the genes at work,  which directs, but of the spirit, which brooded over the creation, in the sense of the extreme multiplicity now revealed for the co-active works multiply and almost pervasively, which reflect overview, oversight and complexity of co-ordination, all requiring yet more causal input. However, spirit^*2A is not part of the material by any investigation. We should not confuse what has its own expressive capacity with codes, formulae and constraints. They relate, as does a thought to a vision, as a word to a thought; but they are not the same..

There is then a work which directs, protects, controls, and a work which minutely implements what is projected. While much more needs to be done on the vast emporium of DNA ( cf. Waiting for Wonder  Appendix, and Ch. 2, above), yet various controlling and overall conditioning  forces are already found^*3, and doubtless more may be expected. The imagination is often the only boundary to understanding the sheer majestic wonder of what is found in the universe and its inter-relationships,  a lesson that in some ways, Einstein for one has taught. Not only does God not play dice, as he rightly and wisely declared, but He does not ignore means for His work.

Logic works because it is intrinsic to the universe, as to the mind of man, and because both have been stamped with the same brand, with the LOGOS. It is  all,  as always, not without a reason, and here reason is part of the reason for its inter-play in these respects, though not by itself, as a mode and discipline, but where it has power to create with such disciplines, vested in what uses such power, articulates and requires such constraints, can imagine such things as are done, in order to select and to perform them, envisaging the need, performing the envisagement.

This sense of total-control, overall movement beyond the merely itemistic, dynamic interchange, mutual morphing, on which Denton displays such concentration, is after all, though certainly in no way mechanistic (the good part of his dissertation),  not in the least anti-causal. It invites investigation which now, some years later, it is getting with a royal flush of results. The conditions are more and more amazingly diffused and multiply complex controls, modes of control, all exposing themselves like people sunning themselves on the beach, to the eye that sees, and is not merely irritated by the wind on the sand.

These things are by no means complex to grasp in principle.

It is similar in writing. There are many dynamics mutually at work, and these  too, they do not in entirety exhaust it, but they are complementary. There is the concept, the idea, the thrust, the purpose, the thing held in mind, stirring the spirit, desiring expression. There is the interplay of thought, the cumulative composure of expression, the flitting here and there to comprehend,  amend, illustrate,  apply, test. There is the vitality of its expression, achieving outlet. Then there is the combination of various concepts and conceptually linked media from the mind, mutually working in self-adjustments that not only do no damage, each to the other, but enrich and deepen their grasp.

Then there is the vision overall, in which as a spiritual oversight, so that, being thus enabled, one sees and understands past  all the parts, what one is about, and may elect to be about. In an output procedure, such items may be codified, condensed into commands or combinations of settled laws for power and commands, or any other device or series of devices that may appeal to the Creator^*5B. The producer is one; the product isx another: they have different powers.

Making things up and getting them done or formatted have always been two: whether one be the voice of an opera singer at work, and the its tape recording, or some other combination of the living, on one side, and on the other,  the execution of parts of what creativity  has liberality provided. Thus vitality and art, being produced in their own mode, are enabled  by technical storage modes,  to live on, where no longer present, through the medium of various storage modes, simply practical and procedural, ex-personality, though of course devised by it.

This may involve the data being given scope in any given part, series of parts, that serve the maintenance purpose: controlled, meaningful and ordered, with various formats, operative now singly, now together, now synthetically, now in simpler processive mode. Confusion of the two is like comparing a motor mechanic with a car, an engineer with a plan, or for that matter, is parallel to comparing a car to dirt. They are, each according to its kind, not the same, have a relationship indeed, but this far from, being one of identity!

These are matters of logical principle, and the technical part is simply a form of outcome from sufficient cause, in this case, in our illustration, as you turn from one TYPE of cause, an evocative and original singing, to another, an information compressing medium.

In creation,  these things interact, but above all is the spirit which envisages, envisions, sees and understands, giving birth to the mutual articulation of elements, while the words give expressive force with whatever control is necessary. Numerous are the means of expression, to translate from thought or vision to action. The more intricate and the more numerous, the more singular and the less predictable. The more unitary in overall result, moreover, the more manifest is the controlling mind, back of the machinery, behind the coding, the co-operative concepts installed in codes, and the more impervious is the certainty present, when even some symbolic expressions of an intelligible kind are to be found. These features are simply a fortiori reinforcements of the certain, as it is already. And these ? they are numerous in kind and degree, in qualitative differentiation and technical facilitation, systematic compression and in magnificent miniaturisation.

Indeed, were one logically to prescribe what is even the minimuml expression of these creative functions, these causal backgrounds, these necessary inputs from beyond the product, above and beyond the natural order, even  this would be  impossible to beat, since all nature is its doll, its construction, its  enduement, and life and consciousness, capable of choice and ill-will or  good-will, these are but parts of its imaginations stirring into life, so that they might not be merely coherent with its power, but conversant with some of its works, and even the way they work, evocative when rationality is in place, of the greater admiration.

When the Book which is likewise multiply testable, is found, for an accompaniment of this overarching system of creation, instituted by the Creator who makes such systems and imposes and impels them (as for example by creating energy, the capacity to do WORK, in amounts so vast that a small amount of matter can be manipulated to blow up in one blast, an entire city), this is a masterpiece of confirmation.

This validates the verification.

What is intelligence able to do ? It can make a machine and write a book, if it is vested in personal format in man who thinks, purposes and imagines. What do we have ? It is more but not less than a machine; it INCLUDES INTELLIGENCE UNITS, who can think with it, and use or misuse it, to its detriment or to its furtherance, in the expressive unit called mankind. When therefore an outcome in this validatable and verifiable document, the Bible, is found to go with the creation, here is the summit of co-ordination, input to MAKE intelligence, and words to convey meaning to it.

It is rendered operative, and then given documentation (as in computing) to go with it (that makes it much easier). This not merely makes it much easier, but possible to go beyond things apt, to things certain. Here is the operational medium made, and the operation TO that medium, that it might be functional at that level. He is the building and here is the book for it. Meaninglessness, identity-starvation (that massive modern sickness),  alteration and innovation in regimes of horror as rulers do things so vast in cruelty and  arrogance as to astound the heart of man, all these things come naturally, and of course pathologically, from this disorder: that the Book is ignored, defiled, defied or just junked.

It is perhaps at times a temptation to ignore the direction book, and  do the obvious; and if one falls for that, there is the open possibility of abrupt ruin of what one uses. Well does one remember the man who bought a Calais, and did not find it necessary to know about its oil requirements, with unhappy results. There was the potential; here is the result. So unhappiness follows from the ruinous neglect both of reason and revelation, on the part of man, whose miseries rise like the dust clouds about some of his cities. It is necessary to look.

The revelation of this kind, the Bible, fulfilled

	in detail in Jesus Christ in its vast concentration over millenia on Him,
	in its provision of the date of His coming*6 as
	in the data to which He was to and did conform, to which none could successfully point any finger, in history,

is co-ordinate with another.

It is co-ordinate with man himself, that is,

	with the other creativity, that is, with the nature of the product, man, and
	with the nature he evinces both in errors and in imagination,

in pride and in humility,

in qualities of mind, abusable, confusable, utilisable.

Thus man in seeing himself, sees a recipient for concepts and perspectives, directions and their rejection.

He does not however see what wisely rejects this Manual, or what wantonly wreaks trouble for himself in so doing.

He does not with any sagacity whatsoever, marvel at his own powers and dissociate his construction from the commands that accompany so magnificent a creation,  from so majestic a wonder as the Creator.

Let us review a little at this point. So here for man,  in biology, which after all is a physical set-up for the use of mind in man's current case (Denton is right about consciousness not being in line with mechanics, in that they differ in kind, because the spirit of man is directive of mechanics, but does not share its kind in action, even at the minute level), you have the directive word and the comprehending expressive power, one to man, the other from him. You have in man the vision articulated and expressed, in his construction, as in his constructiveness, in his origination as in his originality, being so constructed in such an image: you have this moving with the word to implement itself. In one sense, man as made gives constant birth to the word, as creative;  in another, the word ideally represents his equipment, as created. Is man integral beyond that word ? Not at all, the two, the product that is man, and the product of creativity from man,  are one, indivisible and co-operative in their systematic correlation: though of course not in their ontological status, since the product in words FROM man, has no life! Man on the other hand, does have it!

The co-ordinative cause of both the being and its function, has fashioned man so that what calls him physically to be, is the same symbolic mastery, though less in kind, which animates his mind. The stylistic modes of logic are operative in each, and with these, given life, there is a read-out. It shows both much that is occurring in man, and what needs to occur for him; and it leads, as we have seen repeatedly, to finding this need in a completion and circuit for thought. That however is far from enough; for just as creation may be mulled, or done; so a circuit of thought may lead to action, to what it indicates, or not. The Bible shows, illustrates, gives historical indications of this very thing in great abundance, not unexpectedly, since man is prone to pursuing his shadow, and not the reason for his substance, his imagination and not the One who imagined him, and went further, actually constructed him so that he might live.

As to man's construction, the modes for the continuation by procreation are both available and simple: indeed, here is no secret,  the care needs of progeny do not unduly tax the mind of man, and these being  implemented, the results are usually assured. This is PRO-creation, a form which is an exquisite shadow of the original, combining both the personal and the programmatic, so that the fascinating complexities by which standardising controls and vital variabilities with KIND occur, may proceed, right to the point where more or less stimulus of speech and other elements, may result in some preference in the connections may in the brain, leading to a different result, within kind.

Whatever the modalities of control, however pervasive their operations and sophisticated their self-testimony, we have for ourselves, also the phenomenon of SELF-CONTROL, much admired in the Bible (cf. II Peter 1). Here is a personal variable dependent on vision, power and comprehension, as on will and the spiritual vagaries and even vagrancies of mankind, each individual once more, going this way or that. Hence God freely speaks thus:

"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned each one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all" - 

Isaiah 53:6.

This means that there is no man who has not failed to meet specifications, handled the equipment aright, however vast the degrees of difference among the delinquencies. Since it is outside the grace of God to be alive and without Him in the heart, this is understandable. Even those who know Him, having received the redemption He offers (that is, those being 'healed' as in 53:5, have their iniquities placed upon Him, as in 53:6), remain imperfect, Jesus the Christ representing sinlessness in its unique magnificence, resulting from the fact that He is the only begotten Son of God, Creator of man, and not seducible by the clamour or glamour of flesh, mind or what for the many, is malady-laden spirit.

That is why it is so glorious, than man inglorious, but with wonderful created propensities and powers, is not a mere deadly reject sitting on death row, till it catches up with him, though more and more it is obvious even to the largely blind, that this is his desert, slippery spiritual vagrancy now here, now there, with moral bombast hard to avoid for the listening ear. He is also an invited guest, able to be met by the quest of the best, of God Himself indeed in the person of the Saviour, sent not to sublimate but to rescue man (John 3:15-36). This gives more of a sense of liberty as we consider the case not only concerning man's creation, but what he creates, and this, not only outside himself, but within! (cf. Isaiah 1).

Let us then return to the body of man, itself a wonder.

We have here direct verbal and constraining control as by supervening inspiration which, itself, is expressible in terms, as in the case of DNA, not perceptible by superficial examination, but in classical, conforming, confirming, repetitive mould for all that, so that the result and the command, the ordering and the occurrence is no kaleidoscope of particles. It is command oriented replication in bodily format, conforming to constraint. Nor is it some offspring of oddity, but a conformity-creating expression in symbolic format, which omitting nothing, constrains in multiple methodologies.

So vast,  as with a concert pianist in the most exacting and absorbing of tasks, is the control complexity, so original the originative complexity and fluidity, that to the mind not yet up to all that is happening - vast as it is - it seems an all but impossible mode of organisation; but that is what the uncomprehended can appear to be, as in any more junior science, to the eye not yet informed of its reasons! These always come in due course.

Here then is a work of a control both vigorous and exacting. , whether moving in central order department, or product interaction once the elements are made, or in integrally conceived interactions, such as occur in a a Country Dance with partners at work in their rounds, seemingly seething about, but actually conformed by an inner plan and purpose. This is NOT to say that ORDER, repetitive reactions of the most regular kind, are either mechanical or uncaused. It IS to say that parts can have an  over-arching control, whether programmatic or envisioned directly (as in individual persons as distinct from a working group), which at the physical level, ensures results. The latter can happen socially.

The precise mode by which intensive regularity of mutually interactive components AS IF free, but in fact most controlled with the uttermost regularity, is achieved, and what further underlays of group-controlling dynamics lodged in various parts of the directive apparatus in man and his DNA and related components, known or unknown, may be operational, is merely a matter for research. Its TYPE is shown by its regularity.

That it is not wrought entirely on a step by step basis, as far as is currently discerned at least by Denton, but has interactive dynamics which are interesting, but possibly  indicative of more modes of control that currently brought to light. In fact, as shown, it is precisely such increasingly discovered^*3 modes which are exercising the minds of researchers.

Control hierarchies, mode upon mode, are known in industry as in genetics. That there are more of an even more intricate type is simply in line with what has been discovered so far. To be sure, it is in no way mechanistic, for a purposive composing power is evident whether in DNA wording of orders, or in more  complex intellectually devised means of control, or forms of orders, producing constraints, compulsions or exclusions, be they called this or that. That it exceeds what is so far known, merely shows that the power of what instituted it all is vast, extreme, not readily discerned in the modes of its deployment, and has more and more phases to be unravelled in its product construction, in terms of life. Its products ... mankind at the top, can speak for themselves. Wisdom is justified by her children.

In this, it is rather like the discovery with more and more intimacy of an author's mind, as if you were working with him. You see the vision, the thoughts, the mutually co-ordinating and flexibly interflowing ideas, the movement of this or that segment to here or there, the explicative co-ordinative powers at work, and find the thrill of creation more and more, in empathetic involvement.

Some things are not necessary to be articulated into thought, but they CAN BE, if necessary, and when necessary, ARE. Thought and word and vision move and merge, and outcomes are invested with controls so that what results is what was in the original. Such is creative mind; and such are the results here, in man, his inward bodily movements with aspects not merely mechanical, but able to be deployed by the programmatic, often through the call of his desire; his actions not merely executive, but able to gain execution at will, perfectly conformed to the thought and the word, to the idea and the consequence, whether the former be that of the masterful or the exuberant, the discerning or the miserly, the liberal or  the mean^*7.

Whatever increasing attestations of these things, at the bodily site, may be made, there is no mystery whatsoever; merely a scope for finding more of the constraints of creation, at the merely material level, whether they be item by item, quantum by quantum, surrounding constraint by constraint, imposition of impetus from this or that supervening or intervening force, equipped with quality and impact. We are  examining in this, the increasingly unravelled modes of implementation in matter, relative to life, as in words relative to thought, as in modes relative to results. Design and designation co-operate in many modes. The RESULTS, the uniformity at the material level, the regularity, the crisp performance consequences and the increasing knowledge of the constraints are like a dance.

HOW the various modes are imparted, programmatically in known or unknown modes, or personally, is in one sense indifferent (that is to the format and mode of the dance). Liberty and necessity, program and preference, installation and execution, spirit and mind, these features have their various foci, both in the observation of the nature of the construction, and in its operation, most variously at the personal level, above the material by two steps, first the mental, which grasps, and then the spiritual, which directs, chooses, discerns with inspiration or is dull with duress, needlessly harried, surrendered to circumstance.

As to the first level, the body,  regularity speaks the reasons, the results bespeak the cause in TYPE, whether it be direct and personal or indirect and moved by a combination of modes, the idea, vision being back of it all, and the moving constraints various as desired, dependent on power, originality, intellectuality and capacity to over-rule. The RESULT is the testimony to that.

THE MEASURE OF MYSTIFICATION

AND THE DOMAIN OF THE LOGOS

Mystification of nature has always been a deficiency in man, or almost from the first, as he sought to have a parity with the Creator. But it is not given to the controlled, constrained, regulatory, repetitive side of physical being, its ultimate cause so apparent in its unitary results, to become the source of itself.  This is so, whether we now can read the orders or find the constraints expressed in regulatory overrulings, which are expressible in words, whether man has yet found their format or not. No knowledge or power given to man either permits or enables him to make, procreation's programmatics apart, himself, or more of this or that kind. He can only interfere with the directions, not endue a genome of his own making, of a wholly different kind. Imaging that this or that mystic something as back of it, amid the products granted to this world,  often invoking worship of nature, is a short-cut to confusion. The levels of being, each one, demand a construction; and to make them their own creators defiles logic, makes nothing the basis for their original calling forth into being, and ignores the empirical.

All of these things, at the material level,  are of a given order: regular, regulated, directed, whether as in atoms, by the very nature of their construction, or through the powers of laws which operate either in micro- or macro- fields (atomic configuration forces, molecular constraints and arisings, electro-magnetic and gravitational forces, no less needing institution nor any less expressible in verbal terms). It is interesting to learn of them.

They do not have magical natures, indulge in schematic innovation, beget information: they merely allow its discovery on application, more and more, of a given type, constraining, directing, compelling. Spontaneity is not what is found at the physical level. Extreme creativity is found elsewhere, in the mind and spirit of man, and in the ground of his existence.

When then it comes to mind, there is, even for the product, man,  an articulable, cognitive, cogitative capacity to move with idea and word, mutually interactive, using whatever constraints are necessary, to gain expression, sensed, created, implemented. This is by no means of the domain of mere matter, itself the product of supervening law-creation, which continues, error-free, with no context for test. 

This, mind, has its own ground for existence, on a causative and not casuistical basis. When mind itself is the product in view, then there are these explicitly logical, multiply-ordered, mutually organised constraints which are IMPARTED to make the idea and the concept-construction what it is. Thus the RESULT, seen in operation whether in a book or in a theory or in an imagination, is not to be confused with the cause. We know internally and constantly see in our own living how creation works. The investigative, analytical, verbally constructive power of mind and the animation of spirit which gives it direction, vision and perspective, are not magical by-products of a magical matter, itself on the model, sans origin, sans basis, sans construction.

We see the cause and the consequence. This is not analogy; it is in the case of mind, the very stuff of moving from what has NO vestige of existence in one domain, to its being given its  ground for being; and in the case of spirit, being provided with relevant existence, so that it may be subjected to, and even a subject in,  a realm of inspiration, vision and creation that leaps over what is, to what is not, but might be, and may even be implemented.

For mankind, for normal specimens,  their spiritual and mental operation, what it NOW is, is the product of the means and the constraints which in turn result from the vision and the understanding, which being creative, has created, leaving for man powers which in turn work for him,  in a milieu where rationality within and rationality without, thought in one's mind and thought-structure in the external world, are intimately correlative.

Existence IN our domains ? this requires its functional grounds: yes, but that applies to the domains themselves, which have the same pressing rational need for grounds, as what is ground into them, contrived, caused, conveyed and installed that it might work as directed; or in the case of human will, for example, work or wilt,  err, mar or find the magnificence which is the Lord, who made it, far beyond all the capacities of man.

Even the product has its significance, being so constructed, so that man is one who knows and compels, whether by statistically directed devices, prone before his own thought, or by commands or inflections of direction, in this way and that. Man acts, but seldom understands. He looks, but seldom sees. He is so swallowed up in autonomous pretension, traditionalistic invention, rebellious renegacy, power-play and dark works, mixed with entertainments of virtue, hope for love, yielding to folly, mastering midgetries in life, that for all the good wrought, the race is verging on dissipation, not merely moral, but physical. The means for its very extermination at at hand, and the heads which have those hands, are often immersed in one or other of the ecstatic delusions which void reason and ask for judgment. Man tends to forget this: that when you ask for judgment often enough, hard enough, systematically enough, you may get it. It is not a pleasant thing to find, to have, to embark upon. Yet man sets sail in multitudes, as if the 'boat people'  were merely a useful illustration of such vagaries.

A soul is beyond man's understand  to make; and by itself, beyond its own understanding to live; but it is not beyond God. 

The soul and the soil, the living humankind and the universe about it: both are of one kind in this, that they are invested by the LOGOS, whether within or not, whether discerned or directly directive.

This is no more to be merged with the product than is the mechanical. Every level has its level of creation, and all have their synthesis overseen, so that opportunity and importunity alike may proceed in this often feisty, often glum, often depressed, often exhilaratingly wilful and sadly dead to reality, this mutiply self-manifesting being man. He is meaningless wihtout God, rebellious wihtout the Lord, redeemable by the Saviour, apart from God, alas, more than slightly ridiculous. But that is the way of it. Cut off a branch from its stock, water it, cultivate about it, it may last a while, with increasing modes of degeneration and possible horrid results; but in the end, it does not because it cannot last. This is the sad part; but since it is able to be re-attached, there is here a need, both for the operation and for the indication that it might be done.

Thus is the multiplicity of man; but while it is not simplistic, in essence it is not too grievously hard to understand. There is much behind the making of man, as in a steam-train, but as to its going, there is a brake and an accelerator, and there is the question of which line, and of movement of the locomotive to one or another. Then it goes with it...

Each has its cosmos of operation, and each its ways, its limits - thus matter cannot make mistakes, since it exhibits what it is, whereas designers can, unless one speaks of omnipotence, not given to man, where the vision and the result be disjoined or marred, contrary to intention or even by it. This relates to choice, and that to the knowledge of God, who gave it in the first place, and never allows its meaning and depth to be lost.

Indeed,  determinism is a ludicrous philosophy^*8, a  model wanting to tell the truth while there is none there, merely orders, laws. Mechanism is mere means. The ground of it is the point. The cause of it is the logical necessity. On the other hand, autonomy is ludicrous since there are limiting constraints, except to the final and original cause and basis for all the modes of product continuity and contiguity, which being God and not man, is not the point in terms of MANS OWN responsibility.

What, however, is not ridiculous but rational and indeed necessary, is ground for will and liberty, imagination and constraint, alike. In our minds, we have the capacities for being mini-creators, and understand the nature of their constructiveness subjectively. This is not the same as being subjective, but bears the sense of being what a subject finds in internalising observation (cf. TMR Ch. 5). Beyond our minds, is what we need to give mind to, the Creator of mind, matter and spirit; and if we would have Him mindless, how much more ourselves. The real mindlessness is not minding, but being carried on whatever track our locomotive happens to be on, at any given time. This is a matter of being irresponsive, yes and irresponsible as well.

WHENCE the  word, the verbal configurations in DNA, the various overall modes of control already discovered in what was once deemed 'junk' DNA, the capacity for ideas, the masteries of mind, the relevance of natural entities to such mental investigation, intelligence and intelligibility, vision and imagination, powers of thought and powers to abort thought, to deliberately deceive, to conceive and to concoct, to masquerade and to reach for explanation upon explanation, till this and that featuring more and more, we find their cause and show their product resultants ? Whence are these things, whether of the segment that may be made by us or that wholly beyond us, at the power of the Maker of the whole ? Whence creation and creativity ?

Whence the  derivative cause, in view,  man! Whence all of the derivatives, not self-sufficient, but delimited, defined, directed,  constrained, regularised, or with some, equipped with will ? it is from the non-derivative cause, the source of causation, the eternal Being who alone allows escape from the dilemma of question begging, giving no grounds,  ignoring the very causative logic with which we are endued for rational thought, on the one hand, and on the other, having nothing as the basis,  a manifest self-contradiction! To confuse the various and varied elements of creation,  mind, matter and spirit, to gate-crash into mysticism without ground, when more features are continually being found in the creation, is as unwarranted as it is confused.

Cause and effect are not deleted by the variety of effects; and overall powers of constraint as are common as electro-magnetism and gravitational forces do not die into nothing, while man in his earlier phases, awaits their discovery. That the means, from time to time, require further investigation is not a mystery; man is not God. That they continually reveal, amid amazing complexity and interactive brilliance, more and more of the laws, the constraining entities, whether rendered inherent or directed in words as such, is their function. God has many ways of speaking, not all direct (cf. Psalm 19:1-3, where

"the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse shows His handiwork.
Day to day utters speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, their voice is not heard ..."

Finding out these thing presents a thrill just as the more direct communication by word to the word-creative being, mankind, provides delight to knowledge, understanding to the heart, to which with the mind of man, God speaks. Hence the Bible is a treasure, verified, validated, vindicated; yes, but AVAILABLE for investigation.

As to mankind, the cause of their invention, constraining power, mutuality of interaction and capacity for this, is no more mechanistic than it is mystic. It is what has what it takes to invent ALL of these motions, the mechanical, the vital, the programmatic and the personal, and in the last, its material modes, mental powers and spiritual facilities and responsibilities. Investing the last with the first, is as if to crush a flower and call it dirt, to slaughter another person and to call it clay. It resembles, on the one hand,  nothing more than this, the imagination of a child that daddy and mummy are REALLY part of the furniture, something that does what it does in an inanimate world. Again, on the other hand, to become mystically irrational, this is to make furniture and parents all, a fairy tale with no ground.

Actually this is not so, for there are things animate and inanimate, vital and mortal, imaginative and mechanical, creative and created; and it is necessary, as one grows, to differentiate these realms and objectively to take note of their difference in kind and capacity, similarities in part, divergences overall of the most amazing or at times almost alarming kind (as in discipline, directed and not merely detected!). It is also necessary, as in the case of a house in which one is born and where one lives and grows in mind and apprehension, to consider where it came from. It and daddy and mummy did not all grow from the ground from seeds, and even had they done so, the seeds, these too, need origin, whether conceived as mystic seeds,  or material ones.

These, even these too, are a phase of the programmatic, with special ordinances to match their kind. They however did not make the house. They may adorn it, in the garden, this too.

We have the particulate, the atomic, the molecular, the legislatively interpretable, the laws of nature, real and imagined falsely, the vital and its modes in sub-conceptual cognition, the rational, the comprehending, the imaginative, the proposition-moulding, the schema constructing, the perspective sourcing, we have what is originative of expressed systems, the visionary modes of desire and comprehension and the compositions to implement this, the understanding of reality, what rushes adverse to logic, what muses in conformity to it: we have in fact, persons and conceptually originative, deliberately envisioning beings and the modes and modules enabling them in this world, to act powerfully as such.

This is the nature of creation; and the lust to make one part MERELY and REALLY another is as common as history,  from early Greek thought on (cf. Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13), and as unhelpful as war, itself often built on the irrational, the merely arbitrary, the wilful, the self-aggrandising, which will not recognise the Creator, and if it does, will not recognise the Bible, and even if it does, will not OBEY it.  There it is, they say, these Greek ancients from the follies of whom many moderns inherit. What do they say ? theirs were such concepts as these: that all was only FIRE, or REALLY water, or ONLY change or NEVER anything but solidity, the works of gods, or mystic natural forces, or even perhaps a good thing to worship. In this field, many of them so popular, did not seem to grow up, disdaining reality in terms of magical mystics, void of evidence, and voiding realities in terms of reductionisms deplorable and inexorable, obsessive and recessive, then as now others do, as if following on with the same program.

It is man's lamentable misled facility, the misuse of logic and will jointly and even conjointly, that he is trying to make nature up, instead of taking it down, that is: finding out what it is and looking for the source of its multi-form and multiplied characters and characteristics. Dancing elements, items are always a peril for the over-imaginative, who would have them magical, mystic, and fail to investigate and find their sources. This process is continual. The magnificent magnitude of vision and vigour discernible in the results, on the one hand, and from engineering skill and creative munificence, in the underlying means to allow these things to be in a world where building blocks of various formatted and constraining kinds are SYSTEMATICALLY at work: these are proper causative elegances, not to confuse, but of which to take note.

Proposition and propulsion, it is there; and product and resultant performance levels, these are there too. The least is not all, or most; the most does not disdain the existence of the least. Factuality rules, logic proceeds smoothly to its final validation, in the Bible; or else fiction rules, and mumbling mysticisms erect their imaginary totem poles, pseudo-functions and anti-empirical nostrums, as if diversion were rest.

When reason however is followed, you do not find causal ground for making a syrup of everything, or a magic of meaningless arrivals. You look for what is adequate for each and every cosmos of operation, each in its own right and light. New features, discovered from time to time,   do not even disturb the waters; they are things to explain in the inordinately prosperous way in which knowledge has been active for millenia. As to that, this advance too was predicted (Daniel 12), together with the passion for death,  such as many in Islam show repeatedly (Revelation 6), and the MEANS of control, that enable it (Revelation 13). Such was to be, was written, and is.

What then ?

Explanation of the beginnings and developments, by divorce from reason is in itself a self-defeating action, since then the means of discourse are deleted as to rationality, so making argument not only metaphysically ludicrous (truth speaking when there is none, rationality working when it is denied at its necessary focus in causation), but a flat contradiction in terms. You must humbly, in accord with scientific method and reason, using all foci and cosmoi available, find the cause for each one, for each correlation and for each differentiation: for their existence, for their co-existence and for their complementarity in consolidated systems, with integral results, such as persons, if you are to avoid irrationality, and become argumentatively obscure and indeed, witlessly disallowed: a self-contradiction^*9.
 

THE DIGNITY OF DIVERSITY

It is vain to merge what is diverse in type; to insist on a beginning in each other without evidence and contrary to it; or to make a loss in designs over time, as Gould attests (Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6 cf. Chs.  4-5), the basis for theories about an increase in them; the non-arrival of information without intelligence as ground for its arrival; the second law of thermodynamics^*4 a basis for believing things have an inherent uplift; or a wonder of mutuality in living processes, at the material level, to be a negative rather than one more attestation of the nature of creation as known to us and seen in our own works. The more forces are at work in integral results (such as persons and their equipment largely at beck and call), and the more repetitious but staggering expressions we find giving such equipment, enabling it to be, grow and continue, the more we look for adequate causes of EACH of these things, the programmatic means or the integral compositional qualities imparted, and contrasting these with originative powers, delight in the differences.

Then, inordinately, inescapably, as over millenia, avoiding the fallacies of naturalism, we move with the minds so useful so far, with their rationality in place, to find what is adequate for each and all of the components, This is inclusive of their obvious, varied and vast mutually co-ordinated characters, both in themselves as characteristics, and in coded form,  as characters symbolically expressive of command,  and in particular,  of the inventively staggering diversity of means and modes, both in the way they act, and in the codes and modes of codes, employed. WHY should we seek this ? It is because much is amiss, as noted^*3B; it is because much is needed to be conscientious in character, responsible in heart, using opportunities to find what may be duty and must be help^*3B, so that remedy might be understandingly applied, depth of wisdom being most  apparent in creation's construction,  rather than in man in his present generic state.

Thus beholding what is dynamised by diversity, causally exhibitive of innovative genius in the objects of our observation^*1A, all the faculties of design being inveterately present^*9,

we seek firstly,

what is adequate for its myriad-form invention, complementary laws, assiduities of control, magnificences of measured variability in life, about a norm, with its bustling laws and strong measure of fixity of continuance, short of  formal servitude, expressive of individuality, but this, according to the model assigned (cf. TMR Ch. 1);

and secondly,

	expression from the same Creator,
	not  merely in constraints summable as verbal, as in the DNA (cf. The Unsearchable Riches ... Ch. 7, Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 4, The gods of naturalism  ... 37, History, Review and Overview ... Ch. 5, Christ Incomparable ... Ch.  5, *3 ),
	but in those imparting vision and understanding, as to what HAPPENED, where this has impact on life, and the due and true living of it.

Sought no less from this very, veritable^*3B and unvarying^*9A Source and Creator, are

	those comprehensible words,
	explicative of wisdom to understand the use for the product in  mankind, called purpose,
	as well as supply the need in the field of vision
	called perspective, and
	consultation on correction
	in case of error of understanding.

Not only then, is there sought information for the procedure in life, for the procedure for man, the designer's teaching, but

knowledge of what is the cause of the masterpiece of consolidated and controlled events called  creation, happening;

the ground of its existence, co-existence, 

the source of its volitional  surges, as also the basis of the compulsions, controls and constraints, laws and inherent structures, 

of the composition of the whole and variety and continuity of the parts.

We seek, in sum, not only revelation of the cause of the constructional felicities and modes, and our own purport and correct  operational specifications, purpose and purity in truth,  but of existence itself IN modes, of ANY mode, for ontological reality for ANYTHING other than God Himself, Himself eternal that anything ever might be - as much already is!

Nowhere can we rest in mere systems of mind or matter or spirit, since for these to BE systems and co-operative ones, you need what gives this same power and contiguity to each. In the end, you come to one cause of all, or nonsense, rationality or unreason, self-made things for no reason and with no expression whatsoever of any such powers, themselves product of nothing or magic, the latter merely a name for unfound powers, or flighty phantasms, secretly doing nothing noticeable, equipped with creative power, never creating, sitting silent as the grave as the assumed source of life, entangled in schema, but with not provision for the schematiser, far less the Creator of schems..

Avoiding these shunt-lines, we come to God, one God, one Creator of ALL the systems underlying motion and vision and auditing and walking and running in body or mind or spirit; and of the spirit of man itself, in its ordinate imaginings and inordinate speculations and rebellions from this same Creator. We search for some ONE, authoritative, confirmed, investigable, verifiable, validatable (^*10) expression for us. We do not seek the voice of demi-urges, far less inactive and imaginary ones, nor the competitive illusions of strange gods, entangled in self-contradiction; for we seek God Himself, not dubious interlopers, or spurious spirits, imaginary or not.

We have seen much of the expression in matter, mind and spirit within us; but now we look for a word to impart vision, not for our construction, already done, but for our instruction.

Is there no hand-book ? Has our race become almost like eft things in a universe of matter,  mind and spirit, most of humankind still divorced from its source ? In a word, precisely. The one such book and expression available to man, which has uniquely all these features and so confirms itself, imparts exactly this. Mankind has become divorcees from God, conquest subjects of rebellion, important impartees who have often compartmentalised themselves in nature, this sort of nature, or that^*11, with psychological, economic, militaristic, social or historical, reckless and reeking determinisms, impossible to logic^*12 , reductionist in kind, proclaiming what their own models forbid them to know; and the very spirits of some in our race, with undisciplined imagination of which organic evolution is a type  (cf. Secular Myths and  Sacred Truth)  have engineered ideas for escape.

They will have racial or schematic or political or philosophic or economic or  some kind of imaginary total power and intimidate, bluster, push, grab and proceed in mighty effusions of delusion,  to rule the race. They try and millions die. The long-suffering  self of many a man has both injected false jubilation and grounds  form misery into many, the pundits a farce,  their thoughts drivel that do not dribble however, but spit out with flames that ignite the  foolish minds of  many. It is quite biblical:  BECAUSE they did not receive the love of the truth, God has given them up to  an active  delusion, the Bible declares in II Thessalonians 2, indeed in the very Chapter which deals with the man of sin, with the dictator seeking  to oust Christ,  for his own convenience. If these  WILL not take wisdom from God, then others the more need to!

For the miseries of our race, there is no mystery. There is simple straight creation by a multiplicity of means, implicit in means, aggregative and individual, constrained by a codex of causes, summited by the creation of persons who can and often do knowingly lie, deceive and rationalise. To this condition, the Creator has given firstly, assured knowledge, for where He is, truth is inherent, His doings and sayings both being works of the irrepressible totality of His being, with no imposed limits, or inherent ones, with no needs, psychological or other.

Able to speak the truth, He tells it; able to expound, He exposits. Able to speak, He spoke. Able to remedy, He did, to rectify He presented the result. Able to give evidence to the minds He created, He gives it. Wishing to make remedy for His miscreant creation, He provides it. Seeing the grandeur of His original creation of the person called man, He faces the nature of the case^*13   now present for those whom, with liberty,  He has Himself created.

This He has done  with precision and power, speaking from the first, indicating to the  last, being  testable on the way, and rejoicing in it (cf. Isaiah 44-45, 48), as this gives man whom He loves, even more ground for finding, believing Him, and  following His way in a world snaking more and more, like angry motorists over a very steep hill.

TO man capable of knowing Him, this finale of creation in such a universe as this, our own, He gives Himself. Hence many have now been found, reconciled by redemption provided in His own Person, on the Cross. This is one more of the majesties of truth, as in a theorem in mathematics: when you are on the right road, more and more elements settle down in place, and  wonders a moment before,  quite unavailable, suddenly loom and then shine in place.

It is  all the more necessary then to look at this remedy, this revelation of restoration, this redemption  as it is called, in the Bible. To this we now  turn.

How is this done ?

THE DECLARATION AND DEEDS^*14 OF DEITY

God has acted to  provide, with munificence  and majesty, with love and personal involvement, what is needed by man,  fallen in condition, confused in concepts very often, contained in narrow philosophies in multitudes, from which he bursts out, like a growing 'teenager who can no longer fit into his clothes. What this divine action has been, with enduring results, and season of availability to all,  we  can  look at with relish, for many, with reason for any.

It is then God who has personally acted. In what way has He done this ?

He bears the brunt of the burden (requiring much well-directed energy,  like a panel-beater), for though man's essential fall and failing is immaterial in kind', it is not so in consequence! He Himself has taken the measure of our guilt, providing like a rich father, cover for our delinquencies, but unlike the normal case, doing it in Himself, not merely deploying means or mediums.

Thus it was He Himself who was smitten for our iniquities as a race, and bore the sins of everyone who receives His gift now of eternal life, this being the consummation of the summit given to man (Isaiah 53:1-6, I John  1:1-4).  Notice in this passage of Isaiah, that the 'we' whose sins He has borne are those of the people who have been HEALED, pardoned, purged, forgiven, reformed, indeed regenerated.

Thus, Christ declared this: Iff you do not believe that I am He (the Messiah as in John 5,8), you will DIE IN YOUR SINS. There is a placement service. If your sins by His mercy are placed upon Him, then there they go; but if left to yourself, then there you stay, and as He declared, you die in them. They are not voided at all, but stay put. It is He who gets them or else you who keep them, nor is there  any situation in between.  As with Israel of old, the Lamb on atonement day, is for all, in the scope of the offer and the sufficiency of the provision; but it NONE who do not believe, having an amplitude of mercy flowing forth indeed, but not of remedy for the disbelievers, who narrowing their throats, cannot and will not drink (cf. John 6:54ff.).

It is all through faith (cf. Deuteronomy 29:19ff.). That is the operating medium. If you, being desperate for God, take Him at His word and BELIEVE HIM, part of believing Him, then happy are you. HE has done the work; YOU need  to receive it. It is finished (Hebrews 9, Ephesians 2); you may receive it, but cannot contribute (Romans 3:23ff), but as you receive it, the God of creation becomes the God of your salvation,  acting as assuredly as in the creation, this time not to make real, but to  make redeemed.

This kingdom, this family living, this individual care: it  is delightful because now you are with the most delightful Person who ever was. It is sure, because as in Hebrews 9:12,10:10-14, the grant is that of eternal redemption (cf. John 5:24, 4:14, II Timothy 1). It is like being born into a family (John 3,  Ephesians 2).

It continues, for there is no other rule; and in this family, there is discipline but not duress, development but not lassitude, clarity and charity but not flightiness, sobriety but this with joy, gravity but that with delight, wonder but not woe of  spirit, for even in hard places you are provided if you seek, with impetus; for here all is given, even including power to do the will of God as son or daughter, as He directs (Ephesians 1:19, Romans 12:1-2).

It is ample, distinctive, for it combines the generic with the individual, omits nothing that is needed for man or indeed throughout the entire universe, the Lord proceeding not only in laws, but with love where this is received; not only to cover the  abuse of laws, but in co-ordination and co-operation. For rebellion, it gives realism. It speaks with command to test (Isaiah 41,43,48, I Thessalonians 5, John 14:5-6, 8:46, Mark 2) or provision for it, assuring of the complete integrity of revealed divine truth. This shows His word, the Bible,  as distinctive past all comparison and true past all rational rebuttal^*12.^*4. Just as He commands us to use our non-programmatic feature, our personal focus, this one of our abilities to deal in truth (Isaiah 48, I Thessalonians 5), so He provides it by His Spirit according to His word (cf. Proverbs 1, where He pours out His Spirit to make known what is needed).

The test for all things, is to confirm, or to evidence grounds for denial; and since HE IS the truth, it is the former that is found, and not the latter. What IS found however is a skulk of foxes, a place of prowling lions, with their master the devil; yet there is no fear, for His rod and staff provide strength; so that we rather rejoice in affliction or weakness, knowing full well that His power and peace and grace and  goodness will draw us on, keep us going and deliver us (cf. II Timothy 4), from every evil work to His heavenly kingdom.

For me, what is heavenly is good; what is devilish can have itself, I want no part of it. It suits reality to have truth, it suits our weakness to have the strength of our Creator, it suits our liveliness of heart to be tested, our desire  for life eternal where it is good, to go to Him who gives it.

That unsaved mankind is too harassed by dysfunction resulting from irrationality and refusnik oddities, to realise his own position unaided, is  covered  too in this most comprehensive provision for our so complex and magnificent construction, the gift of  humankindness. Aid, it is present in the power to pardon, the grace of invitation, the freedom of having the debt paid, the mortgage cancelled, not hanging over like a stupefying debt,  the no  man's land between sinner and God, removed in one sweep, as man is swept by the power of God to the Kingdom in which righteousness dwells, joy is to be found because of the Lord, who is good, a breeder of gratitude and an ungoverned, but gracious, an untainted and true Redeemer.

He did not poise at the time of the Cross; nor did He come down, though taunted as if this was a lack of power, rather than the consignment from integrity. He is faithful as no one else; reliable as none among mankind; He is for ever.

Indeed,  God has foreknown us, just as He foresaw what He would create and THEREFORE instituted with aplomb and brio, address and comprehending comprehensiveness, the most multiplied causes and grounds and entities and influences and constraints from many known and known resources (that is, unknown to us, but known to Him), and in fascinating abundance, He has provided for us, as for the universe in its other domains.

OUR crucial provision is not in the DNA but in the Gospel in the testable handbook, the Bible. It is not so much in our construction, as in our instruction. It is still more not in our mere continuance, but in discontinuity, from the sovereignty of sin, rebellion, indifference, chagrin of various kinds, that heavenly grace leads and divine favour moves us.  It is not in laws, though these are for our best instruction, but in love that He cardinally moves. His word we love because it is His, and seek to do because it is part of the college grounds, university procedure, professional way: it is HIS and that suffices (cf. John 14:21-23).

With this, His good news, He meets laws in love by redressing the negative impact they are set to make, with His positive input of His own Person in Christ Jesus, sent for this purpose, to save, to redeem, to rescue truth from irrationality, rebels from rabidity, will-bound relics of manhood and womanhood, from their perversity of spirit.

But what of others  ? He would like to redeem all, has redeemed many, and says so (cf. Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, John 3:15-19),  and  did not come to condemn but to save the world. In this, He is no casuist; He does not draw into a battle to promote things. IF one in heart receives Him  as Lord and believes in one's heart that His very body was raised from the dead, attesting authenticity as He did in all other ways in His sacrificial life and ministry, believing in Him  and not in  some other Jesus,  Lord or Gospel, holding to some other spirit or desire, then the case is clear: one is accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6). Nothing then  can separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8). He gave His blood as He states for many, and full many are those so covered; but His love has an illimitable amplitude, though it be spurned by many.

Yet like love, it does not force (cf. Let's Be Reasonable About God! Ch. 6).  It is not in matter, which cannot err but simply does: it is in spirit, which can and often does err, that the treasure lies, and the cost was met. It was met even in body, since this is our created status, and as we are, so He has come for us, and acted on our behalf.

As to matter, that will go, a multitudinously created entity, set in systems innumerable, matrices bound in themselves, characters and characteristics deployed, whether mechanical, mechanistic, programmatic or endued with oversights and constraints yet to be discerned: Isaiah 51:6, II Peter 3,  Matthew 24:35.

As to man, he may come, he may return where he belongs.  It is only the human will which prevents it (John 3:16-19), for God is on record as not desiring that any perish (I Timothy 2, Colossians 1:19ff.). When Christ in love was sent, He was explicitly NOT coming to judge, but to save the world; and HE it is who specifically cites man as the obstruction in his preferences (John 3:19). There lies the inhibition of salvation, the exclusion factor, and it is God who says so. In seeking God, you have not a headwind, except from sin, but a supportive wind: so seek Him while He may be  found (Isaiah 55).

Some MAY prefer for a time,  some godless desire; but as  to those who come to Him in faith according to the Gospel of divine grace (cf. Galatians 1,3,5): God knows and has known you before time (Ephesians 1:4, Isaiah 46:8). He makes your way straight.

Some may indeed find God like a hell, for if you cannot stand truth and light and reality on  earth, what would it be like to be right up next to these things in heaven!  To be near Him for such people might be like living with a divorced and alienated wife. But God does not hold alienation except to sin, and what insists on being immersed in it. To be RECONCILED to God is an open door of opportunity, and however sunk a person's very will may be, He sees beyond its current state,  to the first, when He FOREKNEW you apart from anything you could do in mind or will or spirit. HE KNEW you, and since He would have all, rush! Therefore if any one seek Him, then run to Him to find Him, and seek Him while He is near! Far off, it may be different  ...

Here seen, as so often in such matters, without Alpha and Omega, you are left with a muddle in the middle. It is better far to follow reason to validated, verified reality^{*4, *12}. It is better to find God.

NOTES

*1

 Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong AI -  first published by the Discovery Institute, 2002.

See also on this, our site,  News 57 and Sparkling Life  ... Ch.  8.

*1A

 See: Causes, SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill Section 4.

*1B

EXCURSION

ONTOLOGY, AND THE CHRONOLOGY OF CAUSES and EFFECTS

Consider the operation of causality, as constituted by the Creator, for the temporal, as distinct from its reality in the eternal domain.

Firstly, we note that authors,  creators, and their products, do not have the same ontology. Their state of being is one remove at least from that of their products, which depend first of all on the creative manipulation or mandate of their authors.

When time itself is the area of creation, in some temporal mode, there is a special case. This is in stark parallel with an author setting his novel in some time  frame according to his imagination. There is however this difference, that when the universe is the creation, there is a certain disposition for continuance inbuilt into it, as it  does not move as in chapters here  and there:  though of course what modes it may be given, FROM  time to time, constitute another art and artifice of the Creator.

How can time, in the to-be-created module, in this case the universe, be invested to be BEFORE happily proceeding before this creation, so that at a certain time, the universe comes into being. The mode to be made is not made, so how is  it there referred to, as if time's creation (the universe kind of time),  is simply a matter of timing. Augustine has it that the universe is created with time:  time is an adjunct. Suppose now we wish to refer to the ontological situation in which this 'time' about to be made for the universe does not contain that species 'time', so that upon its creation with the universe, we come to what in inclusive of this kind of time ? With what words is one to express this disjunction, if not 'before' and 'after', relative to its invention in the created format for time ? However, it is well to use reason carefully, for all such matters are verification of truth, when it has no bulges or harassments, but flows.

If then one says, God created formatted time at a certain point in time, how then can it be there before it is made ?

That is the question. Now to the answer let us look.  This is a simple confusion. Whatever God uses in terms of an act done and one not yet done, as far as the temporal time is concerned, is His business. Guesswork does not help, any more than if one were to endeavour to work out the exact musical state of Beethoven's mind before and immediately after the beginning of his composure of a symphony. You can guess; it may be fun; but as you do not possess his mind, you do not know.

When man is concerned with God and His dealings, the case is far more extreme, and verges on the ludicrous should someone presume to  'know' what species of things,  modes or perceptions chronological, were before and after the state, mode or condition of things created. In this, we are looking at a time dimension, and an ontological status,  with God relative to creation. If our time, then, is part of the creation of a time-space universe, inhabited by people with a sense of time and power to philosophise about it, then, this gives no occasion to discern how the Almighty may deal differently with cases where this time dimension in creation has been made, and where it has not.

There is no slightest difficulty: one thing is certain, in view of His having no limits, on pain of a limiting body, a condition which if  violated, would make the discussion of the work and will and mind of God irrelevant, since we then must move to what is assumed to have SET those limits over him: nothing is antecedent or commanding over Him and His ways. Nothing constrains Him, or autonomously makes  Him wait. It is all His election, choice,  determination,  desire and consummation. What then is that one clear and simple thing ? It is this: God never HAS TO wait for something to happen in His own mode of Being. If  He elects to wait in any other, it is in situation He both made and desires  to be there. It may be a test condition, or a gift condition, or a developing situation as the condition: but it is as He has willed  it;  and in His own Being, no such condition can be, applying only to something else.

His institution of time as we know it, conditions our realm, not His.

In one sense, it appears to resemble the selection of creation modules for performance: they are either potential or actual, and if only the former on the part of Him who has no limits in waiting-time time, then their type of time has not glided into existence. He moves simply in His own mode of dealing with what then is His own potentially variable modes of dealing with various time dimensions which may be used to CONSTRAIN creations; but of course, not Himself. What He sets ANYWHERE, is the way it goes. If He makes our type of limiting time, then this does not limit Him,  even in this, since He does not have to create it in one way as distinct from another. He can, if He has a mind to do so, create a time-containing unit or universe in which the artefacts of time can be changed: He is not limited in either the modality of time-making machinations or compilations or controls. He can make miracles of intervention disrupt the normal results of time, so that a time-invoked norm from the matrix of material events, is aborted by intervention; but time does not control Him,  whether directly, to make Him do something by such and such a time,  or to make this or that system in which, without intervention, this or that will happen.

As to language, then, when referring to the institution of a particular universe in which time has a certain notion for material substructures, as in our own, we can refer to before and after in terms of the INVENTION INTO EXISTENCE of this kind of thing, a creation. Thus such a time is referred to as the start of this type of time, and later than this, being after this. Let the creation and 6 seconds be in view: then it is after the creation of time, after God's action so to do, by precisely 6 seconds. Let it be one second of created time before this invention: this does not exist,  except in the mind of God, which is not the same as an extant condition FOR that material creation.

To prevent confusion, therefore, when time is itself the object in view, we can refer to 'after' the invention of time IN TERMS OF THAT TIME, and to the situation when this is not yet made for operational in external reality, as being, in that kind of time measure not yet. To do this, we are  considering such time (earth model), WERE it to be envisaged as operational for convenience' sake, as before it. It is thus an hypothetical usage purely for convenience with no implications. In this case, our language is in terms of what we know, how our kind of time moves, and this is simply considered at its first, or later, in its own terms, and before that, in terms of an extrapolation backwards, again in its own terms, perfectly easy to understand without any confusion at all.

Now, leaving aside linguistic matters, and coming to the actualities which language describes, we can speak readily and easily. When we refer to the necessity, therefore, of creation for the aetiological existence of something, its due and logically rational status at any given point, the term "before" time was is at an instant comprehensible. We know what is meant without merely guessing as  to the mode of ontological approach to what for us is 'time' in terms of the Almighty. We do not need to know this; what we know is that the creation is either made or not, and when we consider the case in which it is not, and that in which it is, there is need for action. This is that of creation.

To induce existence, then, from the unlimited, from God, the action of creation being required, the cause in all respects comes before the creation. It is useless to come afterwards, since then the creation comes without any action. It is equally useless for it to come within the creation, so that both Creator and creation are  eternal; for then the creation has to be there, without cause, before a causative action to make it come. It is then an orphan, bereft, with no ground, delimited and eternal, there without action, possessing eternity though limited, and so violating the conditions for delimitation. If it be said that God always willed it, yet then time of this waiting kind would be a co-extensive part of Him,  so limiting Him, so showing that the one of which we speak is not and cannot be God. The same applies  to anything  else  with supervening delimitation, controlled or contained or delimited. Only by the action of time-creation can it  come. Before that, whatever be the mode for time, it is not this one! so it cannot then be. It always comes later, like everything else in creation, using the terminological procedure noted above.

Time then, or  any other consequence of  creation, eternally with God ?  It is not so. God is God, and not a combination of the made with the unmade, entwined by mutual nature, to that anything might ever come to be made. Anything deemed creative, similarly, must be machinated and placed into existence, and to this we turn shortly.

It is  simply a meaningless proposition, to have about you,  what you are about to create, in order to work on it before it is there. For anything at all to be there, creation must first occur; what is to be in it, this can be put there at leisure; but it must be there for things to be inserted. Otherwise we are thinking not of creation, but of aftermath, and that  illicitly.

It would of course have been possible if the Lord had so willed, for Him to have invented a creation so complex, so needlessly complicated, that it would include potential for upgradings in this or that manner. Thus as with seeds, there could be contrivances within it, so that these would act as demi-urges, or uplift exponents, rather like fitness experts, except that in this case, they would actually be modelling new formats for the body as well, being more expert and creative and endowered than are simple gymnastic  experts, in actuality.

If this were the case, the inputs would be amazing. If not mini-pseudo-creators, endued with understanding enough for the colossal needs to prevent bugs in the mingled programs then in view, program complexes over program complexes in mind-boggling intensity and immensity, then programs themselves, automated, churning out all sorts of new things for protocols, or practices, or to prevent collisions of conceptual backgrounds and bases as you need in programs, and so on. If they  were personal, these creative exponents imagined as created as shown, if rational at all, then this makes it a more complex thing, for the living has to have more qualities than matter, not less.

For this imagination to be practical, we need therefore to find these programs, or at the very least, the work of these quasi-magical beings, mini-creators, with whatever programmatic or personal characteristics one may have in mind. As with all fairy stories, if you want to move beyond the realm of the fabric of pure imagination, you have to have evidence. This applies to beckoning figures, spectres for advancement, as with Hoyle, or inward principles (which of course must have the interior realities for themselves, of which principles are but one form of expression, these being merely formulations,  not activating entities), as with Denton.

For example, in the case of the Butterfly that Stamped, in Kipling's Just So Stories, the butterfly could indeed but stamp his foot, to all appearance to the (potentially) admiring female of his kind, and as he told the lady butterfly (butterflie ?), as a command to have the gardens whisked away. Such, to her it might appear, was his power. Actually, in the invention of the story, the King is given power to do this sort of thing, and the butterfly had been observed by the King, with his domestic problems noted. Thus the King resolved that when the butterfly stamped, things would happen, this duly impressing the wife, the butterflie, though there is surely an element of deceit in all this. Let it be, that is the Just So Story.

To  tell us that there really is such a liaison between butterfly, or matter in our own case, living systems in which matter appears, and some outside power, something adequate for actually DOING what is in mere words envisaged, plausibly, there are certain normal requirements. You show us, for example, evidence that this hypothesis is the correct one. To do that you first show that there IS such a movement, not hypothesised, but the actuality which invokes such a (potentially) rational thought. You see such things things, and so you tell us such things about what to you may seem a plausible explanation,  but to us an implausible imagination. What to do to test ?

If things DO in fact increase in information content,  as this would imply, then something needs to be done in thought in effort to envisage why this is so. If however we do not find this in information  as time progresses, outside the operation of intelligence, then there is nothing to explain, and it is another Just So Story, a little out of place. To explain something that is not known to have happened, IS out of place. It is scarcely science, and of course has no rational foundation.

Moreover, it has no bearing on creation in the ultimate,  just imagining steps and modes of its being done, by initial appointment and by  subsequent activation of means  duly lodged. Many might hope for such means, but neither they nor their litters of results appear.

Thus causation of creation is not something occurring after it has in FACT happened, as a sort of series mode of writing a thriller. It does not so show. Mini-post-Creation-creations are not found. If they were, it would alter the mode, but not the underlying necessity, whatever be the mode.  It is not relevant to the reality of creation, merely a rider on it, an extension.

To attempt otherwise, is merely to have the reality simply bypassed with irrelevant words.  What is created has various inhibitions, constraints,  enablement, limits; and in this field of the universe, what creates lacks all of these. The difference is infinite, and the results are not hard to find empirically, with no hint of confusion.

If mini-creators, programmatic or personal, WERE to become operational after the creation, what then do we find ? These, themselves created, that is, additives for the envisagement of the creation,  if also created, do not alter the realities of creation in principle at all, being merely part of that operation, not present before it, present after it. There is then no mystic material mystery: you envisage mind making more phases for post-creation creativities than are yet found, and you envisage this for reasons that have no objective existence; nor is this  all. You can do a work to show creation and then invent such considerations if you will; but they are irrelevant to the necessity of creation and undiscoverable empirically. They do not alter the case; but the case does alter them. It refuses to verify, even that! Nature is most selective concerning hypotheses, it keeps to the biblical  fact.

What then of such beings,  mini-creators, dynamic trend inducers, whatever you have in mind ? You envisage such for results which do not appear. Information does not grow in this way; and as Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard was so emphatic in insisting, we are not in the business of accounting for increase in designs, when the observable fact is decrement. They are, he decides in his own terms of research and thought, down by far more than 50% since other times when there resplendent  splendour exhibited itself on the earth. We are then accounting for the opposite of what is happening, he indicates (Wonderful Life cf. Wake... Ch. 6), in gross design terms (using the term 'design' in the semantic and vocabulary-defining normal mode shown in Deity and Design ..., Sections    2 and    5, which deal with such matters).

Thus the simplicity of the matter is this,  logically: NO CAUSE, NO RESULT. The cause precedes the result, in whatever real or imaginary format one may find it, or suppose it. With the universe, there is absolute cause, and constrained, coded, limited result. First comes the cause, and then the consequence. A consequence for the cause to deal with, like a property for a man to deal with and develop after purchase, must first be there and gained. Imagining it will never make it be there, but is a mere dream. It must be made or donated, first.

Who then is the donor ? If you insist on going by such stages, then it makes no difference in principle,  and is merely tedious in type. This merely displaces the cause in view, the basis of creation, to give it a new location, beyond the thing imagined to exist in limited state, all by itself. That, then,  makes no difference  to the logic of necessity. It is just there ? not so, it is to be causally instituted by what is internally self-sufficient, dependent on  nothing and none, autonomous  and eternal. To envisage what is not eternal, on its way, in terms of creation, is a mere stage of thought about how it might have been done, or a self-declaration by the Creator. Either way, it has no effect on the reality of creation, merely on the mode.

I  can similarly (in principle but not in scope!) use paper or not, a mechanical type-writer or a computer, stir my imagination or be all but overcome by its tides: but the result is one,  creation, the rest of mere peripheral interest. Were I to insert some program in the computer option, which would continually examine and upgrade some of the sentences by the application of rules, that would simply be another of the usages chosen for the result, these  too being created, in the case of the universe, for the purpose.

Before God there was no God,  formed, not after Him,  He declares in Isaiah. This both stirs and confirms what reason shows. If there were any God before Him, then HE of whom we spoke, could NOT be God, for eternity would be lacking for one who had a god before him. On the other hand, causative construction of his own being, would be present, if the God of all were before Him. The initially conceived god then would merely be a part of creation. If there were a God after Him, this would have to have eternity as part of its premises,  to be God, and non-causation as part of its being, so that the prior god would then be of necessity, caused by Him,  a mere contradiction in terms. That cannot be; God is eternal, the alone cause and ground of all creation, the alpha and the omega, and has finished the creation of the universe, the current phase being deterioration and judgment, wearing out of equipment, but stability enough for more madcap misalliances against Him,  resulting in more judgment, both now and later. Such is not wise, even in thought, irrational as it is. That there is a Gospel of re-creation (Colossians 3:10), back to the original unsoiled state, in principle, re-introduction to God for what was made in His image, enlivens things magnificently, but it does not alter the nature of the universe: just that of some in it.

You start with all that is necessary or you do not start; we have started, so thus we start with the Eternally Self-Sufficient more usually called God, though inadequate efforts at definition abound, as various irrationally conceived idols proliferate, now as with ancient Israel, for which the current Gentile world is becoming fast and furious, an injudicious imitator, say what it will!

Thus the universe, or whatever else one may have in mind at a given time,  must be gained by one's own work, or be a gift if one is to have it. If it be the former,  it must first be there to be gainable, or else one has the divine powers to make it, which not being the case, is in no need of further consideration. If it is gained by one's seizure, it must be first there to be gained, whether that 'seizure' be in the case in view, by imagination or a grab of something actually extant. If it was put there by the Creator, then it was done in steps or not. If in steps, then each step precedes the other on which it depends for its own activity, but each is part of the total creation, like pages in a book.

Whatever is simply assumed, resembling in kind a new car on your front lawn, is bad science and aetiological failure, which unlike some Government handouts, should not be mischaracterised as deserved,  as if produced by their own work. It comes, not from themselves, and assuredly not for no reason!

What is delimited comes from what is not; whether in stages or not; and as to that, evidences can give indications. Information, in particular, is given in the creative surges, and not afterwards; or it is added afterwards. We do not find the latter, and have no reason therefore either to assert it or to try to account for it. One of the chief problems in this whole domain is - and again, Gould in right in this point - accounting for what is not there. It is time instead of seeking to account for what does not happen, to do so for what does. This is science, and here creationism from the Bible deals with every facet and fact rationally. There is no decrement. Without it, there is no science, but  froth of theory discountenanced by the evidence, not once, but repeatedly as shown in SMR>

What then ? The other and of course the preferred course is this, refusal logically to account for what is there, non-facts, and instead  to follow as in SMR pp. 140ff., for example, means to deal with this in reality and not dream, aetiologically and empirically, and not in a trance substituted for actual truth. Account for what is; do not engorge the throat by attempting to speak of what is not there, and explaining it with such vigour that truth is sidelined, and fallacy is wined and dined, in schools,  colleges and religions.

Having then multiply avoided efforts to have things outside logic, and hence placed in an irrational system, and hence one not subject  to rational thought, for which results would then be as skewed and useless as in any other intrusion of wrong methodology, so that any such 'science' would be an expression of failure and futility in such a case: we  move back to rationality.

God is neither implicit in, nor bound to His creation by eternal, mutual involvement: for if He were, what is NOT the Creator would have eternal  existential status, and so not have been caused by Him,  a logical orphan of delimitation, law-girt, existing for no ground; for if the Creator caused it, then there is no eternal connection. It is a mere postlude of His power. Moreover, our 'time' itself is a delimited  and  delimiting factor, bound and confined by order and constraint,  of which it is the butt and not the builder. It must first be created, so making the point wholly irrelevant in terms of causal necessities. All is created by Him, thereby gaining en bloc and in each feature, in His fathering, its causal ground, its explanation, as distinct from its contra-evidential creation, or use whatever term you wish for this irrationality that for millenia has variously distressed mankind. 

God starts, He continues, information pours out and hence comes from a suitable source; He stops. It no longer comes, for the suitable source has no further interest in this particular outpouring of creative information. This is precisely what the Bible says, and precisely what empirical findings show.

Moreover, as it applies to one as to all, the Creator is the cause of our causal system. Whether the system be such, as in the material case in our universe in our discovery of it, that it has the type of causes that you must wait for, that is internalised procedures which being programmed, have a before and after time for their stages of operation, though all is set forth as one whole before this in the constraints created, or whether the things be spiritual in kind, the call for creation is the same, though varied in the inputs required. Again, it may be, as in thought, that the causes of spiritual cognition and inspiration, are such that a concept, an understanding flashes fully formed on the mental screen: nevertheless, it is not without antecedent, spiritual and mental though this be, and its sudden propulsion is indeed diverse entirely from material things, but not in this, that it has a cause. It is just that the type of cause is different, here, that of a person WITH mind and spirit, who USES them, but is not directing them like slaves, but rather enjoying their works in their various ways and domains.

For  all that,  the cause precedes the effect, bound to it by the integuments whether of matter, in one kind of way,  of mind in another cosmos of capacity;  or by the originative constraints of spirit, such as one displays in all perspective and orientation argumentation, where different preferences  arise, and may be pursued with passion, insights teeming and dreams reeling. God is creative; man is creative; and in creating us, in His own image, He has made us creative, whether with direct effort and labour, or with enthusiasms of delight, which flow like a river from the mountains.

The creation is varied; it all needs account.

Thus what logic, and not mystic magic,  requires is an aetiology both rational and conformed to experiment, and in this case, that is merely confirmed by experiment, by information, as by such patient proddings as for some 50 years, was the case with the poor fruit-fly Drosophila, which had X-ray treatment for half a century to see what might come, and whether improvement would arrive. Improvement  ? in such a case one might justly expect that if any were the case, it would not be progressive, just as would be the case if you threw beer bottles as your new Jaguar car. You would not expect this to be what was found. Oh to be sure, if your car did not quite fit your garage, one of the bottles you threw just might make it do so by a well-placed dint, but there is no improvement in design in this, merely an adjustment for convenient storage. Engineering is different from invasive rays ...

Not only, then,  is God in operation when the time of creation had not arrived, that time when engineering skills were in view and used, that is, beyond time as we know it in our created format, but such time has in and from Him, its very making. Like all the rest of creation, it comes into existence by His designating action and contrivance; and similarly and in parallel, He is apart from the product, being eternally distinct from subordinate and caused 'nature'. That, it is the sphere of things which are created, designated, detailed, fitted, given function by His will and overall planning. He does not lurk there by oversight, as if He forgot who He was. He may call in any form He wishes; but He is not and cannot be bound to it, for this is contrary to the ontological facts of the case. If so, He would not be God, but some part of creation. It is well not to confuse things, entities, which are infinitely different, as if to say,  Ah! I have one dollar, that is to say, an infinite number  of dollars. This merely confuses both language and facts!

Do we then find mind belching into matter ?  chattering away so that things are newly created at the non-intelligent level ? No, not actually. Matter steadfastly declines to be so  dubbed with any grounds at all (cf. The Majestic Might ... Ch.  5, The gods of naturalism have no  go!   31,  21,  News 94), except to the extent that living processes of procreation  continue to produce or induce the creation, man. That, it is merely a specific part of the operational medium of the creation of the universe.

The creative and productive source of itself, eternally extant  without any other entity, configuration or complex, and the created consequence  are in one  sense, as close as thought and action. But then how close is this, ontologically, for by action thought might make a bomb, which kills, whereas the thought  might have had considerable vitality in itself!

The case is simple, like light in a dark room, though it may dazzle some with eyes shut, when these are too suddenly opened. It is presumption and abandonment both of logic, and of observation; or  else, it is creation. Nor is this all: what is minds is not matter, what is matter is not mind: the two have distinctive cosmoi, spheres of operation and conditions, modes and  abilities, exclusions and inclusions. Whatever may be the form or format for convenience or creative desire  there may be for their joint operation  - as when a brain becomes an operational medium, or a spirit an inventive contrivance issuing into matter with directions, via the brain: distinctives are logically arranged for joint use, without surrendering those distinctives, just  electrical current does not become iron because it moves through it.

Thus we ourselves have OUR OWN information creating intelligence at work. That makes of it neither information nor simply an information creator. It has many facets and features, like error and inspiration, perspectives discerned, or obsessive. Matter is not obsessive. So the entirety of most varied creation moves in its allotted channels, cosmoi of operation and vitalities of mode, with means and instruments, and the danger of what uses means becoming the instrument of what it makes, by confusion and obsession. Spiritual life is challenging: it is good that the Bible shows how it is to be lived. Otherwise, in such a world as this, it might become so overwhelming that its denizens  might destroy it; which, in rejection both of the Creator and of His remedy for man, it is coming close to doing already!  as predicted (Matthew 24:22).

As to Christ coming to this created sphere, though the Creator (Colossians 1:15),  we ask: Is an author to enter His own book and become a page or a particle ? No, for that is not personal, able to think and imagine; but He is. Pertinently, when Christ CALLED on this earth as a visitor (John 1), He did so by decree for a purpose, as contra-distinct, never merely merging to lose identity (John 8:58), while at the same time, allowing a convergence of the vulnerability of creation and the wisdom of eternity, for His format.

Why did He come ? This is the expression of what He is like, and if He likes to do that, out of love for a spoiled creation, ABLE to be spoiled by misuse and abuse of  His creation of the power to love or hate, distort and disturb or understand and bless: that is His initiative. When He came, as He did,  to become a sacrifice  for confessed sin repented of, to bring life to those seeking it from His Cross payment of man's cross-purposes against his Creator, and to become thus the source of reconciliation with God, this was His intention, His prediction, and His fulfulment alike, as so often in so much and in so many ways. When He broke death, as the coup de grace for a disgraceful race, then life eternal prepared for man, blossomed and its scent has been ever since available, pending the final resurrection, where the creative power of God again operates, not to make, but to make new.

What was it like then ? It was like a prince becoming a private soldier, on a mission for his people. The realities do not change, nor does a selected mission mar them. They are logically contra-distinct to mere appearance in this case, but do not suffer for that. Many things may be not declared, but present for all that; and He DID declare who He was, just as the Bible DID declare when He would die and what He would do and why He would do it, centuries before^*6 He did it, before He acted according to His word (cf. SMR Ch. 8, Appendix C).

When He visits what is there, that is one event. When He makes it, that is another type of event. He is not in front of it, leading it like a dog, as it moves up at His request. (The point is imaginary and imaginative, and better than leaving out a sufficient cause, but it still leaves Hoyle in the normal and often-found ditch, that the thing that does the calling is merely a step on the way from the all-sufficient God, and if it were to be esteemed God Himself, then the creation has to be there to be called in the first place, and at His instance: so what is there to call about ? Its information is not increasing, there is nothing so to explain: it is logic and not imagination which must be satisfied.)

No, God is not in front calling, but antecedent to it; nor is He within it, as an influence pushing it up continually to better things, a student of teleology as it were; for it first must be there from His action, before there is any relevance to being within; and if within, then there is need for evidence of the actions thus to be taken, for which such an hypothesis should be the result; but they are, as noted, not there either.

He only can create a universe, and all the rest is irrelevance, unless empirically found, in which case it would show merely steps and modes; but it is not. Even if it were, it would but indicate what modes He had employed. Biblically, it is finished. Empirically it is finished.

In science, you do not dither about what your philosophy HOPES; you go by what is found. If you like to imagine something different, you could make a novel; but it is not in the realm of science. The overall necessity, nothing short of irrationality can shift; and when that shiftless thing is found, argument can no longer consistently be engaged in at all, leaving the field where it belongs to creation in all its simplicity and finality. You cannot move God; it is not He who is a transient. Become irrational  ? you cannot argue. Be ratoinal: you cannot escape. Why try ? It is sin which seems immovable; but even it, it can be moved.

Just as He only can create a universe (cf. The Wit and Wisdom of God ... Ch. 4), so it runs as stated, not being eternal or equipped with uplift, but rather susceptible to downgrade (Isaiah 51:6) and dismissal (Matthew 24:35), to which all created things are liable, unless made viable for eternity,  as through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In that case,  a celestial  additive, a transforming and restorative remedy is applied to  prevent the  disaster which voluntary degradation entails (II Corinthians 5, cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy). That to be sure is a separate act of creation, but it is to secure for eternity what did not start in that  domain; and it is to do  so,  as a gift of  restoration  and culmination.

In whatever way, He only can sustain (cf. Hebrews 1:3, 11;1-3); and in this current universe, such restorative gift to the spirit of man and eventually for the body of man,  apart,  in the resurrection which laughs at decay, the source of that there being covered: His creative information flows no more empirically, statedly or nationally.

It is so, as precisely in the Bible, relevant to the universe. He did it; He stopped that construction. God states it, we find it, in one of the endless seeming stream of confirmations on all sides in the dispersal of container units of information, equipped with drive and dimensions of all but stupefying complexity, code upon code.

Behold, it even runs down, in full conformity to Gould's horrified findings (cf. Wake Up World!   Chs. 4-6), and the configuration of relevant law^*4 as well as in ways that directly affect ourselves, this human race! as Sanford has shown. It does this also, in equal conformity to the word of God (Isaiah 51:6), the theological and the empirical knowing no divergence.

What is delimited and defined, given nature and characteristics in this threefold creation, mind, matter and  spirit, as indeed in the parts  apart in their uninterrupted trend, it runs down. In this,  the  Second Law of  Thermodynamics merely essentialises verbally, this fact; and it is so because in this information-possessing world, that is the nature of what is subject  to its own grindings, and its own rebukes (Romans 5).  Eternity is one thing, temporality is another; and the latter does not qualify for the first by right or law, but as with the first creation, BY DONATION,  on the part of the One who gives the one, or the other, or  even to Christians, both.

What lasts is the word of God, as a matter of fact: it is this which always wins in any temporal controversy, as indeed in any other: because His knowledge is more than ours, and than that of any; and our species of time itself (as  with an author as cause of his book) is a mere contrivance of His creation (that is gifted  to it), its farthest reaches under His direction, both to be, how to be,  and when to exit.  Eternity may indeed  at  His will be conferred upon any, even among His creation, wherever it is made applicable, for His  'new  creation', the redeemed and restored man or woman, who is so changed within, ready for the accompanying format to come (I Corinthians 15).

Yet even so, being applicable and being applied are  two  different things, as far  apart  as being  marriageable,  and being married.

Eternal life accordingly is donation  for  man, where it is given not from eternity at the outset as a possession, to this temporal  world, but for eternity, as a specialised intervention. Where  divine grace finds man, there eternity meets its  target, and the love of God passes by the smouldering philosophic muddles of man, and from being Alpha, He then becomes for  man, as many as receive Him,   the Omega which smiles.

*2

On this topic,  see Glory, Vainglory and Goodness, Ch.  1,  from which the following is taken.

Consciousness is a matter of vast concern to the unruly. HOW does it arise as something different from directed mail, from directed ingredients, directing all things ? WHY does it work as it does, in acute correlation with that of which man is conscious, such as stars, and cars, communication and concept, physical and chemical law, aesthetic conceptualisation and artistry ? If it has to be, why is it such an indubitable component in conceptual parallel to many things, all with their own systems, significance and significations, and what leads it from what is, to what ought to be!

Seeking to find from materialism - that naive insistence on the material component as if it were all, when in fact in consciousness it is necessary to have validity for thought before you can have any theory about anything at all with warrant, what it is all about - is like seeking to find from a nib, the purpose of a pen. You really need to consider the whole pen. Then you look for this: by what it is being used.

If it cannot be seen, heard, quantified, it is not real ? But is that theory quantifiable ? This is mere antilogy, the antics of angry fluff, the hubris around bluff, making man sneeze unwarranted words.

You move from consciousness as a conveyor, the thing at work, to what it works. What does it work ? It is an enablement for thought, personality projection, communication, symbolisation, reading of symbols, resistance to force, or to breach of law, deliberate false assessment to further illicit motives, deceit, greed, connivance with corruption (that is, what removes the functionality of man by trickery, deception or force, on the basis of desire).

WHY is it such an enablement ? and what is its relationship to the component called conscience ? and what does it so work ?

It is because consciousness is not only a link, as an overseeing part of a multiplicity of systems, all attuned and co-ordinated with the brilliance of a military compaigner, a scientific genius, a mathematical star and an industrial giant (except far more so, the sophistication surpassing man's ability even after thousands of years to get going with his gifts). It is an also interpretive part, formulable in command, functional in creativity, fathoming in address. It can embark on the assessive, whether physically or morally.

Thus we need to pass beyond mere consciousness, an aspect of the human capacity, to the powers which it enshrines, the personalities which it enables and the laws and rules which it admits. We come then to spirit, the name not for a mere graphic, verbal or conceptual awareness, but for the willing, purposing, conceiving, imagining, imaging, surveying, sympathising, hating, loving, corrupt or virtuous producer, according to taste, waste and basting. The products require a producer; the functionalities require what functions and the multi-purpose deployments require what deploys. It is neither a vacuum nor a nullity. It is what has what it takes.

If we are going to consider one part, we must in all order, conceive all of which the element is that part. Consciousness in this broader setting of integral functionality of the type noted above, is merely the screen, the awareness of the powers, of their use, of their usability, including the power to propose, to purpose and to fight. The self-awareness of spirit is a necessary correlative of its capacity to be personal, to be functional as a unit of thought, thrust, plan and assessment.

It is part of what spirit is, and without spirit it would be a mere phantasm, a figment, a thing hanging in the air, with neither physical nor logical roots. That is precisely why secular 'science', that is, the sort of thought which assumes the irrationality of materialism as a preliminary to thought, fails to 'solve' what consciousness is, and talks all around and about it with the daring non-composure of a child walking on the keys of a grand piano.

 

We hear so much about the 'god of gaps' that there is a strong tendency to forget the gaping gap between what is and what is not. What is ordered and systematic and conceptualisable and subject to command by symbols, but only within its own scope, and constructed in logical terms, some implicit, some written, is not a matter of gaps. It is a matter of a chasm between this and the empty naturalistic chatter which assumes everything, from substance to law, from order to logic, from force to fashioning: and provides nothing.

ALL that is required is missing; all that is needed for what is, is not present in the secular world view. The gaps between types of things, always vast in units of information input required, and the conforming ability of each kind that lives, towards various pressures, alike are simple empirical facts. The gaps between each realm of order and of operation and the basis, origin and power to make them, and nothing, the other option, are rather like a choice between a chasm as the source of a mountain peak, and earth with power and propulsion upward in its system.

We have then not a god of gaps, but a gap in place of God, a logical gap, of which all the smaller gaps are mere applications. It is rather like finding a house and four garages, one with a boat, one with another car, one with a space vehicle and one with a robot, and then entering the climate controlled house, and asking how the underlying matter really managed to move from the floor to the walls, from these to the ceiling, from there to the roof, from there to the air, from there back to the basement, from there to the vehicles in the garages, and before there, to the garages, and finding the one questioned becoming slightly impatient with those who do not SEE that OF COURSE it was all like that. Like Topsy, it just was: why worry about how or why! Such science...

See also:

Christ's Ineffable Peace ... Ch.    1

SMR . 4-7; 144, 349B, 582ff.

GVG    2,

Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch.    7,

Deliverance from Disorientation Ch.    1

1504, 1505

Barbs ...  Appendix 1, pp. 274ff..

 

*2A

See:

Waiting for Wonder Appendix, REFLECTIONS Ch.    4,
The gods of naturalism have  no go!

See also on spirit (using acronyms in this case):

MESSAGE  5,   4,
CHILORI... Ch. 2, NOGO 14
Evidreal 2, 5, 6, 7
OPENTOHIM ... Ch. 3,
DISAGLOR   1,
KWKC    8, HMCCKING    3,
GVG ... Ch. 1, GIFTGRACE     7,
HHHH    5, CALL   9,
SFSD   4,ROP    7.

*3

Denton refers to the limited, but crucial actions of the genes, and the amazing complexities of mutual interaction apparent. As Williams points out, however, some 97% of the DNA is not genes, but what had formerly and wrongly been thought of - in the lusts of ignorance and naturalism - as 'junk DNA.'  Advance in this field is recent.

The pleiotropic devices that deal with multiple results in different regions, coming from one gene are  well-known.

This is a prelude to interspersion, and complexity of multiple usages that can readily hide functions not realised even to exist.

in some form of aggregate oversight, figure among a medley of provisions, yielding to investigation, with advances being made

In fact, this great majority of the DNA is now known to incorporate amazingly important functions of facilitation and controls dealing with aggregates. Amid causes of fabricative results, there figure a medley of provisions, yielding to investigation, with advances being made. From such major DNA sources, outside the simpler though intricate gene work on construction of proteins,  much more is expected to be discovered, just as fresh revelation of this part of the contents of DNA has become available only recently.

Intriguingly, we are reported to have the same number of genes as mice! but in the 97% of that noted above, there lies much for thought, and expressive of it. Indeed, in an outstanding article in the Journal  of Creation 21(3) 2007 Alex Williams gives much for consideration!

About 93% of the genome is transcribed (not 3%, as expected). Further study with more wide-ranging methods may raise this figure to 100%. Because much energy and coordination is required for transcription this means that probably the whole genome is used by the cell and there is no such thing as ‘junk DNA’.

• Exons are not gene-specific but are modules that can be joined to many different RNA transcripts. One exon (i.e. a protein-making portion of one gene) can be used in combination with up to 33 different genes located on as many as 14 different chromosomes. This means that one exon can specify one part shared in common by many different proteins.

• There is no ‘beads on a string’ linear arrangement of genes, but rather an interleaved structure of overlapping segments, with typically five, seven or more transcripts coming from just one segment of code.

• Not just one strand, but both strands (sense and antisense) of the DNA are fully transcribed.

• Transcription proceeds not just one way but both backwards and forwards.

• Transcription factors can be tens or hundreds of thousands of base-pairs away from the gene that they control, and even on different chromosomes.

• There is not just one START site, but many, in each particular gene region.

• There is not just one transcription triggering (switching) system for each region, but many.

The authors concluded:

‘An interleaved genomic organization poses important mechanistic challenges for the cell. One involves the [use of] the same DNA molecules for multiple functions. The overlap of functionally important sequence motifs must be resolved in time and space for this organization to work properly. Another challenge is the need to compartmentalize RNA or mask RNAs that could potentially form long double-stranded regions, to prevent RNARNA interactions that could prompt apoptosis [programmed cell death].’

The problem of using the same code to produce many different functional transcripts means that DNA cannot be endlessly mutable, as neo-Darwinists assume. Most mutations are deleterious, so mutations in such a complex structure would quickly destroy many functions at once.

Their concern for the safety of so many RNA molecules in such a small space is also well founded. RNA is a long single-strand molecule not unlike a long piece of stickytape— it will stick to any nearby surface, including itself!

Unless properly coordinated, it will quickly tie itself up into a sticky mess.

These results are so astonishing, so shocking, that it is going to take an awful lot more work to untangle what is really going on in cells.

Functional junk?

The ENCODE project did confirm that genes still form the primary information needed by the cell—the protein producing code—even though much greater complexity has now been uncovered. Genes found in the ENCODE project differ only about 2% from the existing catalogue.

The astonishing discovery of multiple overlapping transcripts in every part of the DNA was amazing in itself, but the extent of the overlaps are huge compared to the size of a typical gene. On average, the transcripts are 10 to 50 times the size of a typical gene region, overlapping on both sides. And as many as 20% of transcripts range up to more than 100 times the size of a typical gene region. This would be like photocopying a page in a book and having to get information from 10, 50 or even 100 other pages in order to use the information on that one page.

The non-protein-coding regions (previously thought to be junk) are now called untranslated regions (UTRs) because while they are transcribed into RNA, they are not translated into protein. Not only has the ENCODE project elevated UTRs out of the ‘junk’ category, but it now appears that they are far more active than the translated regions (the genes), as measured by the number of DNA bases appearing in RNA transcripts. Genic regions are transcribed on average in five different overlapping and interleaved ways, while UTRs are transcribed on average in seven different overlapping and interleaved ways. Since there are about 33 times as many bases in UTRs than in genic regions, that makes the ‘junk’ about 50 times more active than the genes.

There is a 'pecking order' of control. Preparation for replication may take place at thousands of different locations, but once replication does begin at a particular site, it suppresses replication at nearby sites so that only one copy of the DNA is made. If transcription happens to occur nearby, replication is suppressed until transcription is completed. This clearly demonstrates that keeping the cell alive and functioning properly takes precedence over cell division.

• There is a built-in error correction system.

Here is already seen something of the intervention and control in multiply coactive sites. Nothing comes from nothing, and even the most complex correlated functions have their basis. Indeed, as Williams indicates (italics added):

For the article by Williams, see this link -

 http://aufiles.creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_111-117.pdf

As noted on this site, in the volume, The Wit and the Wisdom of God, the Bible True to Test, Ch. 7:

LIVING objects show no power to invent information; they only show the power to conserve it, and gradually lose it, but in any case, not engender it. Information being coded, comprehensible, communicable report, it HAS to be suitable for mind by being MADE so. The power to engender conceptually coded and comprehensible report is not part of matter. The power to CONTINUE such information is indeed in the DNA, by reproductive devices, with room for variations which NEVER show any power to invent new kinds, because new information has no source, and hence no result.

The MEANS of variation within kind are numerous, including such features and foci as diet, transfer of information, damage to genes or to the pleiotropic parcel covering control units, and so forth. Knowledge grows, but things do not change their kinds, while we learn more of the editing which controls, the leverage systems and the parameters of programs.

For that matter, and to be complete, we might add that imaginary 'spectres' as with Hoyle, himself far more realistic in facing facts and implications than most! or organisational powers with teleological foundation, as with Denton, when unhappily he leaves the facts at which he showed such promise, to fall into the ditch of philosophy and imaginary, non-causally, non-empirically attested fantasy: these do not attest themselves.

 

*3A

See His Wounds Opened Eternity Ch. 5.

 

*3B

On this, see:

TMR Validity,

It Bubbles ... He Calls Ch. 9,

 Barbs ... 6    -7,

SMR pp. 44  -64,

Repent or Perish Ch. 7

REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER,

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy.

 

 

*4

See  TMR Ch. 1 ( as marked 1  , and   2), Ch. 2 above, Reflections Ch. 6, *2,

Let's Be Reasonable! Ch. 1, *15.

See also:

SMR 1, pp. 8ff., 17ff.; 332ff., The gods of naturalism have no go!   7
TMR 8, pp. 200ff., 210ff., 224ff., 226ff., BEN 68, 82 cf. SMR 329ff., 315Aff.,

A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.  4, pp. 58ff.,

Swift Witness 4, 5 (STEP 2, 3);

Stepping Out for Christ Chs.  8, 9, 10;

Wake Up World! ... Chs.  2, 4, 5, 6
(incl. overview of the torturous windings of a meandering river, that ends in silt), and

Epilogue;  Wake Up World! ... Ch. 4.

Together with this, on the parallel topic of information production, relevant and parallel,  see:

The Track of Truth ... Ch. 3, together with:

THE DESIRE OF THE NATIONS ... Ch.2,  Epilogue

LITTLE THINGS Ch. 3 (esp. *3),
THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS Ch.     4,
DANCERS, PRANCERS, LANCERS AND ANSWERS Chs.    3,  5,
JESUS CHRIST, DEFACED, UNFAZED: BARRISTER OF BLESS Ch.   4,

THY WORD IS WONDERFUL  Ch.        5

*5

See Little Things Ch. 5, The Biblical Workman Ch. 4, The Generation of the Dispossessed,

The gods of naturalism have no  go! 28

*5A

What then of the mystic naturalism and its spiritual surrogates irrelevantly enshrined in matter ? What of this imprisoning drama that seeks to put spiritual powers in material media, as additives, investments, void of sight, sans activatable teeth, sans ground in operation or cause of being ?

You can engineer as many propulsive sub-stations as you wish, each one without evidence or ground, and imagine as many of the necessary powers of creation as you will, like star-dust on a trail, but neither one nor all of these unattested postulates removes the necessity of the power production, plan, integral oversight and appointments from their source.

Nor does any attest itself on test, more than nothing. It is merely a popular pastime that pre-occupies without accounting, pretends without grounds, and builds on air, without anything firm beneath it.

The rational requirements beyond imaginary sub-powers, mysterious in origin, dreamed in production, installed without ontological basis, remain;  the evidential attestations do not, because they do not even come in the first place. Return to evidence which REQUIRES accounting, and to account which confirms itself,  and the dream dissolves in factuality and departs before rationality. Instead there is the Creator, not dissipated as in hallucinations in dreamed up particles, but directive that particles might be, act according to construction, minds likewise in their domain, and spirits in their cosmos, yes their concourse with their Creator, according to the case, in confrontation, violation or in peace.

*5B

Law implies the power to form and formulate it, and its mode of formulation enables the reciprocal attestation of its formulation, when man 'finds out about it'.

 Explicit command goes even further, as in code. This implies the capacity to command, and hence to formulate and intimate, in its specialised mode of information expression. This is explicit, the other implicit, while man's involvement is reciprocal, as he does not create the laws of nature by research, but discovers them, as Cook found the East Coast of Australia for Britain:  it was of course already there so that he COULD discover it.

Together with what is implicit, explicit, we have this,  that all is complict, whether as under  direction, or as available for inspection, and that,  for imaginative searching and induction, or for imaginative linguistic perception in the case of directive code, a massif of ingenuity superadded, and for recognition. So does the Logos operate in different modes of transparency, in non-life types, living types, investigable types through one mode of logic, and further ones, through a more directly conceptually oriented signification.

In the nurture of necessity, aetiologically, the whole in its complicity, reciprocities, the explicit, the implicit, the intellectually formulated and as such, investigable by intellect, the laws of logic never transgressed: we find the satisfaction of all causal considerations to the uttermost. It is these which demand the prior adequacy not of nothing or inadequacy, but of what without aid, has all that anything and everything will ever call for from the first. It is customary to refer to this Being as God. It is not so customary to know what is being talked about: hence in this Chapter,  among others, we remove the covering of clouds of dust, even if it may seem  to some, laborious. Man is like a car which has gone through a long trail of mud with punctures.

Mercifully God has provided both correction and  cleansing. Let's start with the windscreen and see what is there. Praise  God He has made it very possible!

 *6

See Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2.

*7

The relationship of these creative areas is almost too obvious to note, relative to the self-revelation of deity. There is the Father, the Word who speaks, and the Spirit which implements, moulds and has overall searching and investment of things with the scrutinising vividness of life. Since man is in the image of God,  as the Bible declares, it is not at all surprising to find in man some degree of  correlation, in his ways, despite the gap between the  finite and the infinite. Such a degree of suggestive similarity in some things, though He be Creator and we creation, is in itself still further confirmation of Creator and His revelation.  Man, he too in his own way is a revelation: but in increasing degree, as with Sodom and Gomorrah, this moves from the beauty of the draft,  to the deadliness of  the declines, visible and increasingly virulent as power and population increases, but not desirable, a matter, as with a disease,  of observation (cf. SMR Ch. 8). Such is the depth to which such height may fail: the unprogrammed has its options, self-destruction, fast or slowly, being one of these.

*8

See Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2.

*9

 See Deity and Design ..., esp . Sections    2 and    5.

*9A

See for example, Calibrating Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith Ch. 6,

Worn Out Earth and Coming King Ch. 2.

10

See: Let's Be Reasonable, For God Is! Ch. 2

*11

More than mannerisms, are in view, but even ostensibly self-made types of man ... Little Things Ch. 5, as marked.

Types of man

j

*12

See - *4 above.

See also:

SMR, TMR, Deity and  Design ... esp.  Section 8,

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Of interest in direct overview, certain conclusions appear.

Rationality demands God as shown in SMR.
The alternative is the irrational.

No truth, relativistic conceptions preclude truth in the intertwining interactions, without survey. Hence these are irrational at the outset.

Again, their organic evolutionary phase is not verified as shown above as in The  gods of naturalism have no go! Nor is it validated; in fact, in the various laws contravened, you have the annihilation of the irrational, as is only to be expected.

In biblical creation: the model, unlike the other, is rational: it includes what it presents, truth.

It is verified: what is claimed is what is found.

It is also validated: the discovery of the Bible allows the force of reason to have concourse with the force of revelation; and combining, instead of coming together to mutual annihilation, as in the relativistic or non-truth model, they reinforce.

The only fight is at the educational and political level, to devastate the young and more broadly spur on the resultant war which glorifies war, which is the result for many of such imaginings, however horrified may be the self-contradictory minds of many who detest what they insist upon, and wish to depart from what they do not find, but still affirm.

Re the physical laws contravened, see:

TMR 1, pp. 8ff., 17ff.; The  gods of naturalism ... 20;

TMR 8, pp. 200ff., 210ff., 224ff., 226ff.,

BEN 68, 82 cf. SMR 329ff., 315Aff.,

A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.  4, pp. 58ff.,

Swift Witness 4, 5 (STEP 2, 3);

Stepping out for Christ Chs. 8, 9, 10;

WAKE 2, 4, 5, 6 (incl. overview of the torturous windings of a meandering river, that ends in silt), and Epilogue; 

and indexes at " T ". 

 

*13  TMR Chs.    3,    2,  Barbs ... 17,  SMR pp. 582ff..

*14

See  Ch. 4 below:

Courage, Conviction and Enterprise from Christ, and for Christ.