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CHAPTER 10

HUMAN Jealousy

The Dawn of Dawkins and the Prior Dawn of Creation

So often one finds manifestations of what in part is a human jealousy, and in this case, it is not a metaphorical thrust to illustrate some select points, but a disappointing, vaunting, lusting for a greater share of glory than is accorded to the luster, an envy for heights of acclaim or attainment or depths of possessions. It can even be directed against God. Why should HE, the reckless humanistic boaster of what none of us has made nor even contributed, have all the glory! Why not delete Him - where IS that delete key ? Such is often the cry of humanism.

Thus jealousy can be individual, national and as broad as the human race, and directed at whatever gets in the way of vainglory, absurd pride or ludicrous ambition:  its  current idol is variable from stones, castings, forms, mental, physical, conceptual. Its spirit has been shown in Isaiah 14, where it is as it were exhumed as to its source, from the King of Babylon.

 "Hell from beneath is excited about you, to meet you at your coming...
How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of the Morning.
How you are cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations;
for you have said in your heart,

 'I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the throne of God...
I will be like the Most High.'

Yet you will be brought down to hell."

You see it again in Ezekiel 29:

"You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty ...
you were the anointed cherub who covers;
I established you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created:
till iniquity was found in you...
Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty;
you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendour."

This has also be rendered, "

Your corrupted your wisdom by reason of your brightness."

What is the curriculum vitae of this infamous spirit,  as exemplified and paraded in the king of Babylon ?

It is this.

Beauty bulged into self-sufficiency and self-admiration, then lusted into ambition and loosing its bearings in reality, became doomed to corruption. The splendour was now illusory, because flipping like a space-craft away from its basis and resources, breaking up on its way, like Challenger. it could pretend no more.  In the case of that rocket  propelled craft, a representative school-teacher was included among the passengers, in a figure to take the next generation into space, as a t hing congenial or apt or occupiable. Yet God has made it clear in Psalm 115 that such is not the case. He has paths and ways and wisdom and appointments, and decidedly did not make man into a god! Indeed, when the propensity in man to forget ALL limits and to imagine that imagination is the new conveyor belt to glory, comes into occupancy of empty and vainglorious hearts, all is not quiet. There is a ready, steady answer from God.

It is this.

"Will you still say before Him who slays you, 'I am a god'?
But you shall be a man, \and not a god, in the hand of Him who slays you.' "

The 'He' here may indeed refer to the human instrument for the levelling of pride, namely the armies to overturn this preoccupation with greatness, by sinking into a deserved mire. In that case, it becomes 'he'. Other vainglorious empires  could sweep down at the time appointed and make of the self-image of man or image, noble or commoner, philosopher or pedant,  mere evacuation and air.  What it was in principle, it now is in practice.

Limits, whether of  speed, or courtesy, or indifference to reality in any form, do exist. Denying them is quite as futile as ignoring them, but spiritually more lethal.

Naturalism is a useful base for indulgence in this kind of recklessness. Here 'nature' becomes a kind of god, and the most apparently advanced occupant in the humanistic variation, becomes a lord of creation, and sets about handling everything, changing the nature and structure of life and thoroughly indulging the fantasy that order is spawn of disorder, disorder of nothing, and that nothing is productive if you leave it alone for long enough, in a time which, though not nothing, is to be treated as if such, so that the thing can go. Truly the mind of man can be inventive, for good or evil,  for masterful logical exercises or impudent twittering, like that.

It is always so in fantasy's recklessness, nothing is the source of ever so much. But it can have neither future nor order nor disorder, being a non-entity, whereas one with potential or even possibility, is assuredly not nothing, but just this: SOMETHING WITH POTENTIAL. Whatever its form, its force is such, or it would not be POSSIBLE for it to have a future any more than any other port of call: this being denied by definition.

If now a naturalist wants SOMETHING, for this reason if for no other, to be hanging around somewhere in his metaphysical muddle, then it had better be adequate for all that IN FACT follows (like you and me, and other people, and things), or they cannot do so. Adequacy for mind and its logical laws, matter and its physical laws and spirit and its directive position, requires facility or more in each of these domains, as likewise for their synthesis. We are really a VERY long way from nothing; and you may think, Well that is nothing much! but the originally extant sufficiency is the basis of all. But what of this ALL that is brought to be ? Showing and knowing no way to MAKE mind and spirit and matter and universes, whatever, or itself except by reproduction of a defined form and format in the case of relevant life, it evidences itself partial to performance as made, impotent to make what it has, in form and format, fully occupied with being what it is,  and without the majesty of instituting this or like things.

Such is what is found (cf. TMR Ch. 1). Though as to what we have within us, mind can think it and matter can resist it and spirit can dream it, but these things as creators are really not on as the basis. They were not there, for one thing, to BE it, for man is an import, from where ? From where sufficiency for the  task EXISTS, and always  has done; for it at any time, there  were nothning, then nothing would be the current situation. Yet this is not so. It is good to look around a little.

Thus neither do  currently observable things,  show capacity for such creation  as is evident, nor to proceed now to make spirits and  minds, being mere copiers, exhibitors and imitators of bits and pieces and methods; nor does matter show power to chatter out matter, as if it were the simplest thing in the world; and even if it did,  it still  would have to have been set up to  do it, as an origin, not being self-sufficient by any attestation  whatever. In  fact,  its laws and containing constraints evidence something which itself requires legislative construction: and law ? it is not really the same as chance! As to chance, this is itself merely the name given to  a system in which a given purpose is not seen to be operative, and that system has itself  first to be created to be there, magic and nothing  apart. It is contained, accorded existence in its relevant domain, extant within set limits, exhibiting law and constraint,  forms and formats,  formulae and oversight at the conceptual level (because conceptualisable).

In the case of man, on the other, there is the power to formulate, he having been formulated as in DNA at the physical level, a series of multi-level symbolic directions and interactive provisions, and to attest formulations already made, but not by himself: and this, it is in a joint exercise of  LOGOS, reason and expression. Concepts  are found to be in the 'nature'  and its  commands,  formulable, being of this domain of activity, the formulations inherent thus discovered and indeed, discoverable at all. You do not discover what it is not there.

' Nature' ? Being what it is, it does what it can. In the case of  the spirit of man, directing his mind, in its ambition and casuistry, as often occurs, this part of 'nature', that is, human nature can use intelligence to talk about the lack of it, but the lack of it does not produce it, or even information (The Desire of the Nations ... Ch. 2 Epilogue. On these things, see SMR,  TMR and The gods of naturalism have no go!

Today, we turn to a propagandist who has ambitions to influence greatly that formerly godly nation (as least in form and format), Great Britain, one Professor Dawkins. Some of the refutations of his insistences formerly put on this site are here collected for convenience. Each is set in its overall context, since it is not a mere case study, but a review of principles, for which this contestant from England, is a useful exhibit at the verbal level. In due course,  we come to his denunciation of that  Creator known in the Bible as in history in its intensive co-ordination with His biblically expressed commands,  as God.

  EXHIBIT A

To be sure, the first sub-title at the outset, seems unappealing.

Even if a certain tendency for humans to think of pigs, in the vernacular, as those who are lustily selfish, with boorishness snouting out their desires, is to some extent offset by the feeling of some for their pigs, so notable in P.G. Wodehouse's works, as in the intense desire of one lady in Adelaide to have her pig as a tender pet -  it seems to work: there is still about the word 'slimy' a certain repugnance. The lack of an inbred delicacy in many pigs gives perhaps, together with the habit of many owners to grant to them things that are not in the best of order at the outset, a bond for slimy, with pig-pen.

This is admitted; indeed it is asserted! But when you see the point, you will realise, as in the case of those who are dealing with the ruins of the World Trade Towers, that the evil has a point and a purpose to it. It tells of much that needs telling, and if the tale is tragic, it may help other tales more so, to be distanced for some at least, in the future.
 
 

The first acronym, for that it what it is, is now unlocked.

Seek the Lord in Miry Yearning, Precious in God the Soul that Yearns:
Turn Realistically unto that Hope.

SLIMY MIRE!

Let us briskly to the point. Mire ? Naturalism, seeking to pound its material base to produce its spiritual purpose (as exemplified in the desire to pound it!). Yearning ? The effort to GET IT (one remembers with some mirth a youngster who would, at around 9 years of age, accost my son's ears, after some simplistic effort at a joke, with 'Get it!' with such a yankee sort of twang, as to constitute a household item!).

Despite all this effort and misled enthusiasms, vain, vapid and nebulous, there is the residual fact. The very yearning is an attestation of the desire for unity, for understanding, for comprehension, for knowledge, that is part of the image of God in man. Its ferreting, its fevers, its fiascos notwithstanding, the effort is part of that aspiration for the divine which however contorted, twisted with pride or hate, is resolute in purpose, like a Palestinian bomb victim, starting with himself.

The burning yearning, however, vain as it is in its misled and futile meanderings, is something which when turned to its efficacious and purpose-built path, finds God, and when it does, it comes to be in Christ, who is God manifest in the flesh, and so comes to be in God. When it is, it is part of His treasures, which He will make up in that day when His kingdom comes, as we have prayed, we Christians, that it will, for some two millenia, and not, you may be sure, without effect; for it is His purpose in the Lord's prayer, which we follow when we so pray! It is this sort of prayer, doubtless, with many others which the Lord heeds as we see in Revelation 8:4.

One recalls that precious scene. The vision of heaven is just complete (Rev. 7), when there is a certain necessity appearing. History has yet to come to the point where all the number of God's chosen persons is complete (it is not an arithmetical exercise, just as a marriage is not, yet in a marriage there is an arithmetical component which needs to be 'made up', namely two, and in heaven there is a mathematical component, though love is its base and truth its light, peace its river, which also needs to be made up, and it will be! - as in Revelation 6:11). Its many lessons, its exhibitions of truth, its uninhibited follies, its restrained rebukes, its empires, its fashions and its follies, its sacred trysts and brilliant sacrifices have all to be made up - as in Acts 17:26-27, Amos 3-4, Genesis 15:16 a leading example or illustration.

In Revelation 8, therefore, the need for history to unfold, for the plan to be completed is intense, for has not heaven just been seen in Rev. 7! It is grave indeed, what is to come, and grand also, like the vast mountains where some are killed, but many see the majesty and the wonder of it. Care is needed. At this point, we see that  "the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints, ascended before God from the angel's hand" (Rev. 8:4). Now does the thing proceed! We are reminded to this end, of the word of John,

• "He who testifies to these things says, 'Surely I am coming quickly.' Amen. Even so, come Lord Jesus!"

We are likewise brought to recall the prayers of the saints under the altar (that is, covered by the blood, the vicarious atonement of Christ) in heaven, who ask this: "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth ?" (Rev. 6:10).

So in Rev. 8 do the prayers arise, and the action proceeds. It is thus with a great sense of gravity, reality and solemnity that history unfolds, and it is not unclear why there is such a depth to the matter, when we see NOW in our 'advanced' century, Danielically filled with 'knowledge' (Daniel 12:4), the carnage and the guilt.

But it is in Revelation 5 that an even high point of drama and a greater massif of certainty arises, if it be possible. There the very unfolding of history as such, stands poised, the scroll on which it is pre-written not opened, but sealed. WHO would open it ? It was in vain that effort was made to find such a person who would be worthy to unfold it.

How would the love of God inhabit the scenes which were and are (for not all is yet past, though much of it now is, being fulfilled by this late time!) to be disclosed in history ? Only when there is the ONE who has given His life in the love of God for the people of God, a people gathered from an entire world, and an entire history of the world (Colossians 1:19ff. showing its TOTAL scope of relevance) without prejudice, even all who receive Him, whom indeed He has foreknown: only then can the scroll be opened. Only then can history proceed to its grand conclusion, and to the dregs of dereliction which it also will and does contain.

Thus in Isaiah 51:16, we find the one who is like a sharp arrow in the hands of the Lord (Isaiah 49:2, the Messiah cf. With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Chs. 4-7, and Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 15 ), without whom He would not have created the Universe! It is the Messiah, on whom all rests for the salvation of the world, who is the light of the world as in 49:6, and who as in 42:6, IS the covenant, being the very word of God.

This is He without whom, not merely technically, but morally, the world would not have come. He, the word of the living God, eternal in His own being, is expression of God consummate, and by His work is creation and salvation alike, accomplished. As He is sent (John 17:3, Colossians 1:15ff., John 1:3, 5:19-23, 8:58, Isaiah 48:16), so has He done; and intimate is the mutual access between the Sender and the Sent, the Almighty and His eternal word, so that there is joy in the creation (Proverbs 8 cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Ch. 27).

Without love, without sacrifice, without redemption, no go! Unless quality is to be there, quantity will be zero. God IS love, so that necessity flows by His will from the Being who is He, whom He wishes to be, and knowing all, eternally and changelessly is, having no development, progress or progression; for He knows all at all times and in Him is comprehensive certainty in hallowed truth. Thus does freedom occasion certainty, for as He freely desires, so He is; and as He is, so He executes, blending human actions with divine resolve, so creating the certainties of history, which at will He thus predicts.

So it is that  history is not without the sovereign bestowal of what is required. Human liberty has its say, but not the last word; for God, He has His sway.
 
 

This brings us to our second acronym: SPATULA, which blends with the first. The Special Pearl and the Treasures under the Lord with Awe.

The spatula of offer provides the preparation of salvation!

To our point then, when the yearning turns to Christ, and when the soul that yearns is thus received, and redeemed, then precious in the Lord, is the soul that yearns, for he who seeks finds, as Christ says, and when you will turn and seek me with all your hearts, you will find Me, as Jeremiah declares from the Lord (29:13). We have in this way nearly finished the wording of our first acronym. Let us look further at it. Thus, in the slime of the pig-sty, in the illusions of naturalism, in the murk of evolutionistic fables, in the mire of psychic delusion may have been the thwarted and clayey yearning;  but in time for many, all this is past, so that the soul is turned to the Lord in simplicity of faith, He is to be found, and when HE is found, then the mire is over, and the new scene swiftly composes itself under the hand of that God. So do people come to Him, and it is He who esteems those who are His, as precious pearls. Thus we proceed with our acronymic message. Let us go further.

Thus have they TURNED REALISTICALLY TO THAT HOPE, as we have it, in the last of that acronym above. In terms of this former one, moved from the trash from which they have in spirit come, they find the other, the definitive place of peace, and thus relish the TREASURES UNDER THE LORD WITH AWE.

That is, they find the other members of the Lord's inheritance, the other saints. Of these, the Lord declares in Malachi, of those who come out and receive Him openly (3:16),

"They shall be Mine," says the LORD of hosts,
On that day that I make them My jewels.
And I will spare them
As a man spares his own son who serves him.
Then shall you again discern
Between the righteous and the wicked,
Between one who serves God
And one who does not serve Him" - Malachi 3:17-18.

But WITH AWE ? It is not alone the other saints, whose justification and sanctification is a cause of awe, but the Lord Himself. It is HE who  IN AND OF HIMSELF has unsearchable riches (Ephesians 3:8). God who made all, the Trinity: whose mind is attested in the unmatchable marvels of His intricate creation; whose love is shown  in His words and works through the prophets and in Christ, His only begotten Son; whose majesty the stars cannot contain; whose supremacy the devil but idly contests; whose purity leaves all the slobbering pigs in their sties, unsated.

By contrast, it is His divine sufficiency covering and making all things, and this by His own will which needs nothing, but has all and gives much (cf. SMR Ch. 1), that those who have found Him stand in awe at Him! All creativity is from Him, all artistry, all POWER to invent, dowered to man, the universe itself one of His pictures which He has painted; and He has already indicated His will to make a new heavens and a new earth.

His intensity is past parallel, His grace is without competitor, indeed so far past all comparison that infinity from mathematics, may be borrowed to give some conception of it! Thus HE is the SPECIAL PEARL for whom a man would sell all that he has, that he may acquire it! in the spirit of the parables of Jesus. Moreover, when He IS found, He is found as Lord, under the harmonious holiness of whose word one lives (Luke 6:46, Matthew 7:21ff.). He is the KING of the Kingdom of Heaven, and heavily has He paid for His crown! When you find Him, you find His own saints with Him, whom He loves and cherishes, so that Pre-eminent Pearl has baby pearls in rich abundance, by it!

So with AWE do those whom He has MADE pearls, regard Him and His other redeemed. It is, as in Revelation 5, UNDER the Lord that one is found, for He is LORD, and His cover places one under His grace, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for all who are His (Romans 10:4). That is, when it comes to the attainment of perfect righteousness, it is only by grace that it is to be found, for it is donated as a gift from His excesses, whose infinitude moves such mountains of righteousness, and still lacks nothing (Ephesians 2:1-12, Romans 5:1-12).

However, this:  to be under such a boundless fragrance, and garlanded, covered with so glorious a gift and free  (Isaiah 61:10, 55:1-4, Romans 3:23ff., 6:23, 5:15, Galatians 3, 5, Ephesians 2:1-12), it is a mark infinitely to be preferred to the mark of the beast (Revelation 13), that signal to the sty, that the pigs are carnally crusading, lavishly lost at the trough. The free gift of eternal life is infinitely removed from the forced 'gift' of the dark rule of hell and its pawns. By the former, a life being linked to the absolute loveliness of the Lord, it is transformed by faith, moved by grace, and walks with God (II Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 5:22-25).

So it was with Abraham (Genesis 15), so it was with David (Psalm 32, 132) and so it always has been and will be with the Lord and His people. (Cf. TMR Ch. 3,    Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17.)
 
 

It is with a certain measure of regret, that after all these things have been surveyed from their biblical basis, itself attested by reason as continually seen on this site, that we come back to the unhygienic and unhealthy state of the pig sty. In vain will someone decree that pig sties can be places of peace and plenty, ably maintained and very clean; for this is not the basis for the belief that a pig-sty is a place of shame to cleanliness, to refinement and to order. However much the dear pigs have been improved, these days, and their quarters made like a cafeteria table (though that is in itself a question ...), the concept remains clear: certain idiosyncrasies of pigs do have a tendency to manifest themselves. "You pig!" is not an endearment. "They are pigs," is not an accolade.

We have been acronymically complete, now, but why the slip into 'slime' anyway ? We are really looking in terms of slimy pig-pens at that disease which mars man, manufacturing that slatternly substitute for the spirituality only God can give, that debasement of man, that disease of the soul, which brings down what should inherit the heavens, to the pit, and looses the bonds from which purity can come. But pits ?

David in Psalm  40, that Messianic Psalm (as in Joyful Jottings22), speaks of being brought out of a "horrible pit". He is indeed drawn up from "the miry clay". There you see the link. To be sure, mire and slime are not entirely identical. Let us then to the substance of the theme, past the environmental depictions for the moment. First however let us note that a HORRIBLE pit and MIRY clay, to boot, make a combination of some infernal summitry - despite and indeed IN their depths - to beat! It is a kind of negative summit! an inverted one...

'Free among the dead' says the Psalmist in 88, and there IS a certain freedom in necrosis: you don't have to do much. It is being done for you. It is so with naturalism, shattering, battering, clattering, spattering the universe with its unnatural claims, inane as the braying of donkeys, off-key as the cacophonies of musical hopelessness, a dark licence to a fallen generation, invasive, intrusive in search of that always elusive power, design, purpose, meaning, not found in clay, or pits, maundering with slime, smashed consequences, like broken lives, of misled zeal. Batter your books, but you find not author there.

In the case of Jeremiah, for his righteousness attacked, and how blessed says Christ, are those who suffer for righteousness' sake (Matthew 7, in the sermon on the mount), there was a stinking, sinking pit (Jeremiah 37:11ff.). As for him, he did not seek it; for he was thrust into it for the detestation in which he was held, because he told the truth about God, not acquiescing in endless fallen schemes for a fallen nation to practise the functions of its fall, with all the freedom of dead. Into a sinking pit ? Now that is a case of transferred epithet, for the pit is not known to have been sinking, but the effect was a sinking one for Jeremiah (38:6), for its murky depths were moist, the ground not content with being stable, giving way beneath his sucked-in feet. Further, a 'sinking pit' merely puts the concept of sinking with that of pit, and does not specify in what respect the combination is operative. A lowering is the dead heart of the matter.

In all this, however, we are brought the more intimately to the condition in which the prophet found himself. A little more and he might die from hunger, if not from slime. What is slime ? It is a combination of dirt and moisture which brings about a concept of some distasteful odour as a strong portent, and perhaps a certain foulness, involving some organic material. The dictionary tells us that it is "any ropy or viscous matter, esp. of a foul or offensive kind", which is fine: that is, the definition, not the slime which underlies it.

Accordingly a slimy pig-sty would be inclined to be one in which ropy things were to be found, possibly excremental, possibly undigested remnants, or ingredients of one kind or another, not to the taste of a pig!

Why on earth should such a fouled and offensive things be conceived ? It is because it is better to be offended by the stench of rotting flesh than to become it! When all question of metaphor is past, the fact is that Christ in Mark 9 made things enormously clear. There is a continuity involved in the picture of relentless worms continually consuming a residue that once was a person on this earth, in the place called hell. Kings, societies and cultures can participate proleptically (cf. Isaiah 14:4-11), almost grasping from beneath what falls into it.

There is similarly a not attractive look about flames that are not quenched. At once, the sensitive soul sees the point, does it not ? Worms are instruments of slow dissolution, with no regard for the dignity (if any) of what they consume. Flames are evidences of combustion which does not hallow the premises on which it burns! There is a sense of dissolution, therefore, with one of pangs, of unsavoury contempt, improper placement; but on the other hand, when it comes to Gehenna, the term Christ also used and which depicts a rubbish dump, there is a certain justness about the co-placement of the disreputable offering and the disintegrative forces which afflict it.

Transfer such a picture to pig-sties and one would need nothing less than slime to evoke the sort of strength, which this other picture provides; while on the other hand, we are near it in any case, from Psalm 40.

Now one could discourse on the slime, the flame, the worm, the unsated destructive power in a word, the unsavoury nature of what is being destroyed. It could be in terms of sexual abuse as in pornography, child depravity at adult hands; or in drink yearning for the one whose stomach is prostitute for the enslavement of life; in the lurch to gambling in its gallants whose funds for function, become feelers for self-indulgence; in addiction to adultery and its illicit flames of desire, theft of body, a brothel for morals, or in many such chaotic calamities that study the pit with acclaim. It is not however at this time, the need to do this. The topic is naturalism at this point, in line with our last chapter, and our earlier note in this one.

Think of it. A pig is thought of as snorting with pleasure, anticipation, if not greed, so that with small concern for nicety, it moves into what it mows down with its mouth, consuming all before it: that at least is the picture. It is never satisfied. It seems to hover ready to consume, to imbibe, settled on the necessities of large and lavish intakes. This, however, is not an essay on pigs but a consideration of the picture they so often evoke, and sometimes, at least, not without reason!
 
 

So we move to the allied contemplation of the fetid ruins of naturalism for here the poor thing, nature, in itself, having such wonder and intricacy, even beauty and majesty in many ways, such intelligence sublime, such imagination unmatched, such ingenuities of marvel, such placidities of peace, such exhibits of grandeur to offer, such accomplishments of sheer magnificence of mind, spirit  and art, is made a mere butt.

As to matter: It is worked on as to particles, as if to find the ULTIMATE in some way, presumably because it is little; though not little in the least is the desire to find, and to blind with the rays of the revelation coming from this uncomely and meretricious combing^*1.

It is travestied as to meaning, so that what this and that does, is to be indicative if not directive for man.

It is pummelled with energy, so that in France a huge tunnel houses space for experiments to prove what can become of matter when amazing energies are diverted into its flattened midst. It is rather like smashing a house to find the architect's plan. The debris however does not speak; nor yet does it create. Directive specifications are not grounds for the specification, even in life; and in the inanimate, the preface is not found in the stage directions.

As to life: this in one form has been  battered with X-rays continually for decades, to find what energy may do to genes.

It helped not at all, as you would imagine if your new Jaguar car were bombarded by forces intended to ... change it. The car would be far less intricate than the genes! (Cf.  TMR Ch. 1, p. 32, End-note 2). Yet so sure are the wave surfers of nature, that it MUST make itself, that they -
 

a) ignore its proof-reading facilities in the genetic program, when more genes are made, as if this were a grant that they will change, which is a system to prevent change.
 

b) ignore the incapacity of material atoms to invent codes and executive suites of programs for construction sites, for the body.
 

c) bypass the obvious necessity for synthetic completeness of program, in multitudes of parts, directive, executive, aggregative, mutually so structured that each part shall contribute to the other, in its need for construction, so  that the program will ensure this happens, parts being disposed or dispersed, as in any other assembly line,  in order to enable the program to operate on them effectively, while the program itself is sited where organisation is adequate to enable its prototype, executive and self-copying arms to proceed without balking; and

d) ignore the fact that the earliest masses of designs found in the Cambrian level, by current theory, had far more designs at the first, than we now have at the last.

Overall, what theory is suggested by such data ? What architect has such sophistication, power and intelligence, imagination enterprise, environmental control over millenia that his buildings copy their own plans and then rebuild as the case may require over time! What moron makes such things^*2, and how moronic is the mindless! The gradual is out; the adequate is required a fortiori; the conceptual capacity of knowledge and the administrative power of correlation is needed; and the features of our own lives, but in much greater measure, are needed to make the originalities and foster the technicalities, invent the purposive adaptations to various needs and implement the whole with codes of programs integrable with kinds of facilities in other aspects of the creation.

Since matter is but the chatter of programs itself, sophisticated, elegant, the impact of law on form, the contrivance of phases of being related intimately to the needs of other and more advanced designs, such as life and mind, there is need for a correlation, integration, sophistication, synthesis which nevertheless preserves the differential, a purpose girt conceptualisation and an aware implementation, taking all into account in every part, phase and grade.

If then the hypothesis of evolutionism is irrelevantly created, the exact opposite of the specifications, then to what do we come, once we move into and beyond the sheer humour, as if in some School Humour Program, some child were asked, What is the need for this magnificent composition ? and answered, Something deficient in all understanding, knowledge, skill and mind, in order to appal the teacher: what is the outcome of such freedom among the dead ?

What then do we have in this devout theory, this anti-scientific nihilisation of necessity ? It is a religion of an arbitrary and irrational kind. Small wonder that Professor Løvtrup bewailed in the case before him, the Darwinesque,  its indolent misdirection of effort, in research (cf. SMR pp. 252A at *43 and 202). There are numbers of such academic tragi-comedies, humorously catastrophic philosophic creations masquerading as science, and this is the specialty of false religion, which by repetition and the outrageous subdues the vagrant minds and erratic spirits which look for 'escape' from reality, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Indeed in The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 10, Part 2, we took this fact into account, and considered in some detail what aspects of religion were at once apparent. It is noted in Creation June-August 2002, p. 9, that British Professor, Dawkins has indicated that if a service concerning evolution (ism) were to be offered at Westminster Abbey, then for the sermon segment, he would "do it like a shot."

It is a religion, so that the old trouble of using the things of the God of creation for the idols of desecration has already been noted as bringing on enormous tragedies to the Jews (88. 822ff., 757ff.), who fell for this error on a scale of lavish proportions (cf. I Kings 14:8-16, II Kings 17:16-18); while it is predicated likewise of the Gentiles in the divine overview of Romans 1:13-32. As disclosed in these scriptures, these innovative vapidities present an abysmally fatal 'life style', as gaunt in destiny as destitute in rationality. They have for us at this point, however,  one advantage.

The designation of such naturalism, such attribution of divine qualities in part or in whole to God's mere products, as idolatry shows the mundane consistency of wanting to bring its tenets into WORSHIP services! It accords well with the persistent, insistent - and now dramatic desire for religious veneration for such members of this world's fantasies. Indeed, this author has seen such things grotesquely and with minimal if any inhibition, crusading into churches for half a century. Thus all is confirmed. What it is, it both desires to do, and does. With this, the outside seeks the inside of churches, the inside like the pseudo-pods of amoebas, seeks to bring the outside, inside.

The 'watch me preach it' suggestion, in Britain therefore,  is a concept is sound in one thing: it exhibits yet once more that evolutionism is not misconceived for the offerings of a religion. In fact, not the laboratory but the misplaced worship of man, on his part, and sometimes for his part, now as for thousands of years, can only waft words when it comes to this naturalistic apotheosis, put it in what words (for variation) you will.

That is precisely what it is; it is not science in the least degree (cf. SMR pp. 140ff.).

In fact, Dawkins cries with joy or relief, at the news that a British bishop has decreed that it is a great disservice to the Bible to have people talk creation from it (despite the facts, however, attested in detail in TMR Appendix), because this may lead to its lacking credibility for ... folk (is that the word ?). We read that Dawkins regrets, or affects to regret what he calls opening the big mouth, when the bishops could do the job for him so much better, and so the dedicated evolutionists could have spared themselves ... some resistance, the Professor and those with him! (Creation, June-August, 2002, p. 7).

Let the bishops sell naturalism's fair bride to the people, seems to be the inference; for they do it so well!

• Similarly, it was easier to let Gorbachev despatch the false religion of Communism, to its restless resting place, to kill it by words and thoughts, by movements here and there, by contrary suggestions and innovations, here a little, there a little,  till Europe strained its voices crying, Gorbie, Gorbie! It was easier to exhaust it from within, than have the smashing woes of war.

 
• So here, it is easier to let those do the job, who within an organisation, have been using the name of the Church (one freely speaking of unity with Rome under the Pope as Chairman, and in Australia, via its Primate, of not needing Christ to find God, thus like a double-barrelled shot-gun blasting away at the faith). More readily, the idea seems to be, can they dismiss what is written with authoritative mien, than have obvious outsiders do the same thing!

 
• Again, the phenomenon of naturalistic religion is attested: it can be bought by bishops, screened by religious committees, inventoried by ecclesiastical inventors. The Pope likewise, half a century behind even the more obvious times, is now decreeing likewise, Darwinesque noises, approbatory sounds, when if there is one thing that is more obvious than another, it is this, that gradualism is scientifically anti-evidential to the last degree! (Cf. TMR Ch. 1, SMR Ch. 2, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13, Wake Up World! Ch. 6).


What is this then ? After the war is lost, the papacy signs a cheque for its maintenance! So idolatry spreads (cf. A Question of Gifts, VI, SMR pp. 1032 -1088H, 911ff., at 5). In such ways, and not for the first time, can the ecclesiastical act as undertake for the divine! It is a presumptuous endeavour, always has been, always will be, and ends in the pit, denying the mandates of life, in the necessities of the necrotic.
 

Like a heart attack, death from an internal organ can be ... less messy!

Thus can an ultra-biblical establishment, in Rome and London, move to make a religious fantasy
out of naturalism's ancient heritage of shame in its more modern dress. Has our contemporary world then moved with the times ?

In this philosophic fantasy, certainly, for it has moved backwards to meet dates B.C. with an effortless seeming ease^*3, dabbling in the dungeons of the human mind, altering but the mode of worship, not the basis and the vacuity of the past millenia.

Of naturalism, evolutionism is one wild phase. It attributes to 'nature', now in this way, now in that,  the creative power and precision of God, who made it, merging creation and creator, to the insult to the latter, and the wild excess of empty worship, to the latter. If then the evolutionism, the evaporative fantasy,  is to be officially recognised as a religion, like the Buddhist or some other that deals in concepts of a less rational kind (cf. SMR pp. 1011ff.), then perhaps we could provide some concepts of its ... shall we say ecclesiastical procedure. Indeed, is there not already a ... quasi-ecclesiastical establishment.

An ORDER OF SERVICE ?

Indeed, it is ALREADY instituted as a religion to a profound degree.

For this purpose, let us quote a little from  the Kingdom of Heaven (loc.cit.), in the religious terms noted some 5 years ago.

The following excerpt from that work will give details...
 

The Priests ?

Of course.

Professors who demean their arch-enemy, the God of fiat creation (He spoke, the designs were executed, like a draftsman), the God to whom they will answer, who distort, deviate, indoctrinate, diversify their own teachings over the years like the wind, consistent in one thing only: their rejection of Him. These are the priests.

No Jesuit is likely to excel them in sheer dedication to the protection of their pope, the exalted transubstantiationist, evolution, which can make things that are not, by means that are not, in contradiction of what is, as may clearly be seen (cf. Matthew 24:26-27). The sheer invisibility of the means, the methods and the results of this grand transubstantiation of the evidential reality, the facts, this is one of the greatest tests of faith of the chosen.

Here are the priests. There can be laymen too, who take up the challenge, factory worker priests who can take it as they work, to extend the kingdom and the domain...

Lecturers who lord it over students, trampling on the evidence, sidestepping scientific method: these too are the priests, in lower orders, for there is a hierarchy of bishops and lesser ones. As in all superstition, mysticism is magnified, here the goddess 'NATURE' is glorified as in the days of Aphrodite. Some of these imparters may become cardinals, if they are careful about the Goddess, the Law (see later) and the prescribed practices of the cult.

The Praise ? the salvation ?

the sanctification ?

Praise is the salutation of the goddess of Nature, evolution her power, racism her product, superiority her clique, hell the terrestrial place accorded to her rejects, scorned and derided with all the shame this world can find to spare: salvation is her progress, sanctification is to love to have it so. (Cf. Jeremiah 5:30-31, 2:27-33.)

The congregation ?

Wait for it. So effective is the Educational Line in the Professional Schools, that this is large. Its devotion is often unquestionable. It tends to stick together in one thing, that those who do not hold to the contemplations of the cult are outré, to be despised and avoided like the plague, derided, slandered as was the Truth and Life Club Inc. at Adelaide University, though none ever found a reason with which to answer it where it could be found for years; and its offers, its challenges, its demonstrations still stand as on the first day they were made.

After all, the process of educational conformism is extraordinarily effective in programming the minds of the neo-religious, and it is doubtless felt to be imperative that these be protected from unsettling influences, which hence must be avoided, as the only safe way of ensuring stability amongst the chosen. The DISCIPLINE which can be achieved in pursuit of these goals is a highly noteworthy aspect of this faith; as with any cult, its members can stick closely together, their minds closed to all evidence, any logic.

Further, de-programming work is much to be feared where facts are already adverse, and a certain sensitivity for those in the evolutionary faith is perfectly understandable. Thus the de-programming procedures of "FREE MIND" or others may here have outstanding opportunity. It is all psychic manipulation; and in it, where is any truth to be found! It may be searched for, but it cannot be found.

Offers may be multiplied to come and show how it can stand, in open style, as at Adelaide University. Yet, though some tried, in the end, none prevailed, and all contenders departed. Truth is expensive, certainly. That is always the case when there is no fiction. When sin meets truth, there is payment required, as in any other disease. The marvel is that the doctor who has the evidence, Jesus Christ, has been willing to make that payment, to reconstitute, regenerate the distorted, the departed, those who have deviated from righteousness; as have all now on this earth.

Yet for all the evidence, and for all the wonder, and all the witness, and all its own idolatrous failure, this delusion so abounds that we shall look at the neo-religious schooling procedures next.

The Schooling ?

a) Inculcation from Primary School, especially in secondary school, in text books and now in S.A., by government sponsored directives to continue the cant of evolutionism without opportunity for competition.

b) Protestation from many an anti-creationist pulpit.

c) Profanation directed against the God of creationism, of the Bible, the Father of Jesus Christ (see SMR pp. 179 ff., 485-498).

d) Indoctrination in the 5 Points of Preliminary Evolutionism

i) Thou shalt sever all connection with the Thought of the Designer-Creator, from whom man fell.

 

ii) Thou shalt never consult with reality concerning the immutable fact of no-mutation relative to major design types. Man is made for adversity, so that the adversity of evidence which is not able to deviate here from the creationist line, must be borne as a cross. It must be tied about the neck, as a chain.

 

iii) Thou shalt despise the doctrines of evidential realism, the 3 main laws of physics openly manifest in the Bible for thousands of years {SMR pp. 329ff.}; and

 

iv) Thou shalt chatter endlessly instead about Science as Hope: which is the first and greatest commandment; for if you cannot prove your point, then imagine what the evidence would have been if it could have been -

then act as if it were there, and in your existential being within, it will be.
 

v) Thou shalt fear the Lord, naturalistic evolutionism, and his Word, theistic evolutionism, which is usually around somewhere, and when naturalistic evolutionism seems too bad to avoid charges of hypocrisy or even programming , then CALL UPON THEISTIC EVOLUTION: for though it can't change the evidence, it can change the topic long enough to permit a strategic escape if your opponent is unwary.

e) Intimidation. If all else fails, threat of loss of employment, such I found when Lecturing, and Moody Monthly has attested in one of its articles; or of failure in exams, as even a year 10 student's father attested; or loss of Honours; or of loss of a Ph.D., as was the challenge to one well-known geologist because he was a creationist; or non-publication of a books, a situation that was clear in the early career of Professor W.R. Thompson, as reported by him in writing - these things frequently work. From scimitar to Inquisition, this technique has been employed by religions which depart from the Bible, with impressive vigour, and often considerable enrichment, then available for the propagation of the neo-Faith of the neo-religion to neophytes.

f) Co-operation. One way to quell much dissent and even unpleasantness is simply to encourage students to be co-operative. It is good for the team, the Tradition. Thus if they open their mouths against the sacred Canons of the religion of evolutionism, this need may be made clear to them in one or more of a thousand manipulative techniques.

Items for use in twisting the minds of students into rugged conformity to the neo-faith:

i) The best students are humble, therefore always willing to learn in the face even of the most unco-operative evidence. Therefore, do not create a ... fuss.

 

ii) The best just trust their teachers, and the Tradition of evolutionism, its Canon Law offered by exponents who, though they frequently clash, always know a sacred cow when they see one.

 

iii) The best students - those who get the prizes for research, are nearly always carefully selected. Let the ambitious ... take heed. Why ? It is because those selected are indeed almost routinely unrealistic, gradualistic, anachronistic evolutionists, Professor Løvtrup ( of Darwinism: the Refutation of a Myth fame) in effect, expostulates in his disquisition.

Indeed, natural selection just does not evidentially do what is required; nor does it make steps in kind such as are required. What therefore is to students a pressure test of morals, if they see through evolutionism - perhaps to remain silent, is to this eminent professor a callow corruption of biological sophistication.
 

Deploring the deceitfulness of Darwinism in particular, of gradualism in general, he finds that this trend diverts funds from more objective reality. These often speciously selective grants help to ensure that biology does not do much to move from the ranks of deceitful gradualism: this appears to be his message.

 

This unnatural selection, he holds, tends to stultify, distort and warp research, retarding biological advance. In terms of 'Nature', he finds, natural selection does nothing for essential evolutionary progress. The idea is a myth. Intelligence and method should be used in the deployment of research funds, not ungrounded bias and blind traditionalism.

	Actually hitting a car with brick-bats is likely to change it, maybe more to the taste of the thrower, if on drugs, but not in terms of more advanced, integral design sophistication; nor if cars could have children, would bashing the womb be likely to improve the infant. Stress can of course activate the provisions and of, or break a design; and in particular it appears to be a component in the causes of cancer: yet it is worlds away from creating the master plan. The ingredients of directive design are more demanding than the provision of corrosive or erosive forces; and that is the area of our concern (cf. SMR pp. 114-159, 332E-H; 257-270; 289-316G).
	Capacity to endure shock is not the same as capacity to create being created by it: for any programmed production. Multitudinous, intricately related, sophisticated code commands with their symbolic significations, assigned agencies and dynamic directions are not really manufactured that way. (Cf. SMR pp. 128ff., 226ff., 251ff., 284ff., 315Aff.,, 999ff..) Noise is not voice.
	Far less are they naturalistically begotten in a bold and daring flash of conceptual brilliance of overview, insight, oversight and symbolic perception, shrinking time into an ecstasy of creation, as some beleaguered biological theories in this post-Darwin era are coming to ponder. Their parameters however are coming close to an irrational duplication of the rational action of creation.
	As for the concept of such orphaned 'advents' of the natural scene arriving unsolicited with massive increase of the symbolic design fundamentals, however, one wonders in which world the theorist is living!
	The fact is that they have been so begotten INTO Nature, WITH ALL ITS CHARACTERISTICS, and it is powerless to duplicate them. Whatever it is, is not what made it. What did, has a name. (Cf. SMR Ch.1.)
	Which world ? As to this one: It is God who has spoken. Not with the utmost encouragement can it produce it itself. Such a creative out-thrust is precisely what the evidence on the one hand, and the Bible on the other indicate. What was spoken endures. In the material creations, we are increasingly able to read it. In a vain speculation contrary to all logic and evidence, however, the brutalities of self-manufactured speech parallel those of humanly manufactured follies such as the World has seen come and mutate for the last sad 83 years of bluster and folly among the nations.

 

The Sacrifice ?

Yes, whole races or portions of them may be sacrifices
because Nazi evolutionism so decrees, in terms of its estimate of the dynamism of variation; or Communistic Evolutionism so determines, in terms of its estimate of the dynamism of historical advance; or U.S. racism so allowed in its slavery days, when Theodore Roosevelt felt so sure of the "destiny" of the white races. Students may be sacrificed to The Tradition, research a sacrificial victim to the Law (the only law discernible in evolution is this - 'Prevail, somehow: be fit, survive away, with and in your day, while you may!' A pretty little ditty, don't you think ?: it is certainly popular!).

the rites ?

Please notice the spelling, since this has mutated as religion has moved to neo-religion. It is now a matter of rites and wrongs.

These are solemnly observed on endless TV programs where the needs of the lore of evolution must be served in endless seeming indoctrinative consolidations.

With all the other programming, at multitudinous levels, there is always the danger of de-programming. Hence the TV and radio must be constantly utilised, droning, intoning, chanting, the Praise, the Tradition, the Prizes, at every turn. As with much religion, doubt is unacceptable; and since here it is handsomely warranted, the means of preserving from its fateful and baneful influence must be many.

Since logic and demonstrable revelation are abundantly available to the contrary, this process of programming through the public media is naturally seized like a million from the casino. What would happen without it ?

As in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Giant Maul seeks his own - so that Giant Media's mauling is always available to reach people in their unsure times, when they are less prepared for conflict. 'Maul the mind, maul the spirit, maul the imagination, utilise anything, everything, get among them: now is the time.' This may be the motto!

For such purposes, this invasion of leisure with business naturally should be made as palatable as possible; a course fairly generally followed by the media.

Additional aids to neo-religion: Have newspapers very sparing in publishing letters to the Editor on this topic, except they conform; and use brevity as a method or the pretence of pride on the part of writers, in order to make them desist. If they get difficult, don't reply. Thus the AAP fax was not even acknowledged (see news 12). If there was some other reason for this, or if this is regarded as normal business practice, it would be interesting to learn.

The time of day, as Rupert Murdoch put it when seeking in vain for time with a politician some time ago: the time of day ? this is not readily accorded from the media for such purposes as this!

The choir

This has already been noticed in some of its operations. However the giant massed choir, though admittedly by no means of angels, sings of the wonders of Nature, her artfulness, yes, and her wisdom, her striving, her efforts to meet need, her prevenient knowledge, her developmental prodigies, her designs, her devices, the difficulties she has foreseen and the steps taken with insight to overcome these, her grandeur, her solemnity, her judgments, her prodigalities, her liberalities, her overall schematic control.

It is wonderful how all this is effected, though it does not happen, and how wonderful she is, though she never does it; and how the One who did it is ignored, though His works are here rightly appreciated, under a new management which does manage to do any of them at all.

the hymns

Countless hymns to Nature, though she has never been found to exercise any of these powers, are made. Sometimes she is Mother Nature, or even Mother Earth, and her terrestrial powers are as well-known to the mind of the true-believer in evolutionism, as her exercise of them before the eye of observation are absent.

Sermon time

As to this, these questions, forget them! That is the Message, the Address, the General Purpose Sermon of Evolutionism.

It proceeds: "If you hear THESE things, forget them, fast! ..."

"Which things ?.."

"Why, also these:-
 

	" 'What has such wisdom ? where is intelligence to be found ? what has foresight ? what invents synthetic contrivance ? what meets understood need with understanding ?' What should your answer be ?
	"Never say - 'a mind', never say - 'a person', never say - 'the creator's wisdom,' never say - 'generative, autonomous intelligence', never say ..." (dramatic pause, while the words filter)
	"never say, 'the controller of nature who has no trouble with the same since it is His invention, and its ways are in the first place those of His choosing, as with any other inventor'. Above all, never say that non-nothing invented it all, created it all. Say anything! Anything at all, but never be logical. There is no prize for that, and if you want to survive and stay alive, say anything, but stay evolutionary.
	"'God, the God of creation' ? Only for blasphemy, PLEASE!"

"We men," it proceeds,
"are our own fountain pen:

Wrote ourselves,
connote ourselves.
Are the very model of being,
Just what we must become -
Before we're there to do it,
In order to get it done.
 

"Nature was just the same
That Grande Olde Dame,
Inventing without a mind,
For the progress of great mankind.
Just herself she blissfully made
To join, from nought, the grand parade.

(This may also be said three times daily, after meals, with wine!)"

End of Excerpt.
 
 

Matter's chatter and life's provisions considered into the phase of religion, we have two duties left at this level. First, we must note that space too is investigated with appetite, and billions are spent in its ucongenial resources, making recourse to endless invasions, in case this part of 'nature' should reveal its secret composition (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3).
 
 

Nature ? What is it like ? How is it being treated for this religion of evolutionism ? It is like an old-fashioned and heartless teacher: his student is sat on a hard-board bench, for hours, the better to avoid luxuriating in sinful content, so that 'learning' may more aptly occur. He is caned relentlessly, subjected to sarcasm remorselessly, given homework stolidly, without regard to originality, inventiveness or colour, to individuality or any question of particular gifts which he may or may not have. Exams scream at him, work loads land on him, drillings load themselves effortless on his tiring back.

Now this is not to say that authority and discipline, vigour and vim  are not desired by this author, an ex-Principal himself. It is merely to note that there have been EXTREMES in both directions, and that the impersonal, aloof, all tireless pummelling of students is as far from the warm and kindly, the thoughtful and watchful, the sensitive but well-ordered path as is the current movement to Mickey-Mouse substitutes for any organisation and system in knowledge, as often happens, sentimental apprehensions of students as if their youth made them virtual gods, above direction, correction and discipline, and the willowy concept of teachers as 'resource-persons' where the whole sense of inspiration and wisdom is lost.

The reason for the development of our hideously authoritarian school picture was not to endorse the equally horrendous opposite, but to expose the incredible seeming misdirection and harsh disregard of reality, present in the endless scheming and schemes directed to making 'nature' king, author and so on, of itself.

It is harried, harrowed, it is narrowed and enlarged, it is smitten and efforts are even made that it might be unwritten (fragmented), it is stirred, it is whacked, it is driven, it is bashed, it is tested, touched and wooed. Why ? It is that its ULTIMATE meaning, its ULTIMATE particle, its ULTIMATE nature and so forth, might be assessed. Why ? It is that it might be shown to have made itself.
Why ? It is that God is not desired, so that some substitute is sought. THAT is the nature of naturalism.

It never rests; indeed it cannot rest, for the wicked departure from God is such that it KNOWS no rest. God told us that long ago (Isaiah 57:20-21):

"The wicked are like the troubled sea,
When it cannot rest,
Whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

" 'There is no peace,'
Says my God, 'for the wicked.' "
 

Is it then being indicated that it is wicked to investigate 'nature' ? Not in so many words. What however is 'nature' ? If it is meant as some autonomous substitute for God, then to investigate it on that ground is indeed 'wicked'. It is the fool, according to the psalmist, who says there is no God, and it is those who are NOT contrite who are in the position of the wicked (cf. Isaiah 57:15), for those who ignore this order, are not those with whom God dwells. He will contend (57:16), but not with these. The judgment is the other wing.

Thus the investigation of what God has made is fine, and the endeavour to realise more and more intimately its nature is not wrong. However the endeavour IN doing this, to find the nature of nature, without the necessity of its Creator, is merely a wasteful exercise in irrationality as we have often enough seen before ^*4. To find what evinces no mind, as the source of mind; to find what evinces not thought, as the source of thought, what evinces no will, as the source of will, from matter spirit, from substance the invisible, is like seeking from the laboratory examination of ancient bank notes, the source of wealth.

It is a basic confusion of purpose and procedure. The tired and long retired 'nature'^*5 which persistently and consistently allows itself to downgrade, as highly specialised codes and procedures, exposed over thousands of years to events not always or in all things by any means conducive to their welfare (like atomic bombs, volcanoes, plagues, cosmic rays), slowly lose their pristine perfection, this is not the book of life. Rather, it is the life of the book, the work God did, the resource that the resourceful One has made, the call for its sufficient cause, the book of His writing.

Books do not write themselves. They evince what is the result of the one whose personality and ingenuity composed them (or the stupidity of the one who woefully sought to do so, without the requirements to be requisitioned for such a task - publishers could be helpful in terms of experience here!).

But life does not declare itself when it is subjected to such bucolic energies (cf. TMR Ch. 1, p. 32, End-note 2). It manifestly and continually (like the worms in their activities on corpses) yields only more evidence of deterioration. Hurt the furniture with a saw, Johnny, and Grandma will not be pleased! What did you expect ? 'Oh,' says Johnny, 'doesn't the furniture respond when you give it attention ? I saw grandpa playing with it, and thought if I did the same, it would be better. Sorry!'

Irrespective of the possible sincerity or otherwise of Johnny in this case, the fact is that grandpa, in making the erstwhile furniture, was NOT, repeat NOT playing! He was working with skill adapted to the case, with thought and ingenuity, with effort and resource. That is HOW and WHY the resource-filled objects of art were created. It has what it takes; it is made by what it exhibits.

In Mars exhibits, likewise, in the discursive excursions into space, there is the same relentless, restless energy looking where the answer is not found. Thus in Creation, June-August 2002, we see a very interesting specific exhibit. It is this.

It is found in the University of Dayton News, for March 25, 2002, that a geologist researcher is further discrediting claims that Martian meteorite ALH84001 contains evidence of past life on Mars. He does this in a delightfully straightforward way, by showing that such 'remnants' can be manufactured by purely natural means, indeed duplicated!

Heating a synthetic rock to 200 degrees C, we read, then quenching this with water, was a procedure producing structures of 'the same size, same shape, same bevelled edges and same lined-up atoms' as in the meteorite.' Thus a natural collision of Mars could have  generated both the heat and pressures needed. It is therefore not a sign of life, but of mere chemistry without alchemistry,  in matter!

This is merely one of the disclaimers against the original clamant and clamorous Mars claim, and it is interesting in its simplicity, that it tends to reinforce the oft-found evidence of a virtually mutinous outrage style of insistence on earth, in this world's hut, that anything and everything, all but infinitely surpassing the powers of man to make, even with his utmost ingenuity, must be found not to be the result of powers correlative to the functions shown.

This is of course anti-science. In science you look for what IS correlative to a consequence, in terms of a cause, and you do not favour a postulate which excludes what is required, and exudes as consequence, what you look for in cause. The reason is simple: it is unbalanced, does not work, is logically derelict and follows not evidence but desire.

The concept of genomes is similar. Here the hype of newspapers tends to make people think that in some important way the genome is life, that you get another life like the first from the similar genome and so on. We looked at this misconception and misconstruction in News 166 and 153, in detail, but here merely mention the matters. In this case, it is imagined that because the instructions for the construction of the casement for man are similar, that therefore the man will be so. Identical twins can be most different, and the reason is clear. The physiology is not the psychology; the psychology is not the spirituality and the spirituality is not an open door to environment alone, but to God also. God deals  with individuals individually. That is one reason why there either are or COULD be individuals.

Otherwise, they would be mere automata, vainly confused about their status, imagining their decisions matter, when they are programmed; that their errors are wrong, when there is no wrong, only occurrence; that their guilt is real, when it is merely happening; that their thoughts are significant, when they are mere jerks of matter; that their dreams are meaningful, when they are but the festering of disorganised ideas, and that their visions are significant, when they are the delusions fostered by misconception. But are they ? Of course not, for then the theory to this effect would be a mere jerk of matter, and the concept a mere fostered misconception. SINCE this is then its nature, the nature of its validity is zero. You cannot contest when you exempt yourself from all competition.
 

In fact, of course, individuality is a work which has many elements: the physical structure is a basis for its expression, the mental endowment is a potential for its development (and desire and environment alike can alter this greatly, in simple fact), the spiritual relationship to God is its anchor or its debris enabler, and so on. Visions do or do not meet the facts; interpret the realities; find their fulfilment in what happens on all fronts. Relationship to results is fractious and pernicious, or receptive and sensitive: individuals have an almost endless regime of elements, all incorporated in one, all one to the spirit of the man.

In this swift review of what has before been a more major subject, then, we see but one more effort to endow 'nature' with a meaning it does not have, cannot provide, and to assume its forces to be determinative, when they are merely provisional, providing for what is to be done with them, as a 'teen-ager is provided with his father's car, scarcely a determinative gift for the son, though if wild enough, the son may be most determinative for the car! THAT, it is the nature of material things.

We have often seen^*1 that the endeavour for physical, cellular and moral particles which are to be ultimate, declarative of ultimate meaning, is as jejune as the other bashings of 'nature' in an effort to interpret 'her'. The smallness of a particle is not the largesse of its meaning. The isolation of a cell is not the interpretation of its integral plan. The making, the 'creation' of morals is not a function of society, in multiplied instances of delusion on participating and credulous cretans (cf. The Other News 19, SMR pp. 583ff.). Preferability is not confusable with actuality. Goodness is not attributable to statistics. The call of the sublime is not equatable with the sad queuing of the drafted.

What is it like ? First it is like a notorious publisher. He is disgusted with his author. He is fogged, and cannot explain his popularity. HOW COULD people buy such stuff ? What is its appeal ? Wherein lies its meaning ? He is determined, indefatigable, indefectible, inexorable and ineluctable in his proceedings. He is, if we are to make it a just parallel to the foolish preoccupation with 'nature' as source, meaning and ultimate for man, AT LEAST ALL OF THAT! Never will he give up. He will find out. It is part of the mesmerised muddle of his being.

He employs chemists, physicists. The paper on which his author's books are  written (he is careful to give specious reasons to the actual author in order to get, as far as possible,  the very 'original' hand-written script for that writer's works) is subjected to analysis. The pulping factory is found; the forests are investigated. The early growth patterns of the trees are scrupulously examined and reports 5 volumes thick, are given on these topics.

Physicists examine the nuclear ingredients of the sweat they look for on the pages, DNA tests are made to see if during creation there are any signs of degeneration or regeneration or recuperation, or destitution, and psychologists are employed to find out how and what this would mean if it should be found to be so, and why it matters anyway. They are all on contract, and having a good time of it.

The slope of his script is considered, and compared for passages of irenic kind, with those of high dramatic content. Nothing is left undone. Years pass. Eventually, bewildered and impoverished (as man is continually coming to be), the publisher decides on what for him is a novel course. He is inspired, you may say, to follow it. He goes to the address of the writer and ASKS HIM.

As C.S. Lewis shows so well, this is wise precaution. Cambridge's Professor Lewis, a man in the news often enough in his day, found that NEVER did a reviewer make a correct analysis of his ground and situation in writing (cf. SMR p. 859). Assumptions of a personal character did not have the felicity ONCE to be right.

The spirit of man, by which he estimates options, considers cultures, observes bodily distresses or impacts, conceives and surveys estimable responses, adjusts in terms of principles, moves according to divine indexes, examines evidences, demands a reason for faith, and finds faith in accord with reason, but God the summit to which reason pointed like a sign post, is as far from programmatic matter as a bird is from a piece of pitch (cf. It Bubbles ...Ch. 9, Licence for Liberty, Predestination and Freewill).

People, after all, are people with wills, vision, industry and illumination, with liberties and losses of liberties, with equipment and psyches, with or without God, and with or without hope. They are desensitised or resensitised, they are morbid or exultant, radiant and pictures of peace, or anguished veterans of inward scars. This is what becomes of their equipment. They tend to make it so. Their spirits soar or roar, they descend to the pit, they seem in the escalating drafts upward, like gliders soaring. They understand many things in their lives, or nothing. They pass by magnificent opportunities, or take them as effortlessly as a bird appears to take a 6 inch hole in some dense foliage, to soar through at 25 miles per hour!

They overcome bodily defects, or make them. They overcome social defects, or induce them. They overcome the sins of the flesh, or yield to them. Their equipment is their piano; they play it. Many parts of it are not available for optional activities (like inner strings), but some are most available. So it goes, and so lives result.

Now our publisher, having followed the inert domain of 'naturalism', in a figure, comes to the point of finding who WROTE IT, and asks him WHY and thus finds out. Now a man could deceive you, for all that, on purpose. After all, he is a creature of purpose, so that his universe could never even possibly lack it. He himself is to the contrary at once. However God cannot lie as we have seen often enough (cf. SMR Ch. 1, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7), for in a word, it would puncture his consistency, and make him at war with himself, demolishing with a word what He accomplished with His wit, at His own instance, when nothing is denied Him, and He does what He will; so that this would exhibit an internal war, which presupposes a constituted character which is contrary to will, and so on, so that He would not be god, but an image of the mind.

God then TELLS us what is the score in our match. We do not need to use ever so many types of telescope to try to find the score-board, or spend years in linguistic research to seek to find how to interpret the symbols upon it.

In a word, 'nature' is the unwitting and witless butt of witless excursions into the nature of its construction, to find the reason for its composition, or more extravagantly yet, the way in which it made itself, before it was there to do it, or how its inadequacies for propounding things, in fact propounded it, so that it could be there and ready for investigation to find how in profundity it propounded its premises and premisses, before it was there.

'Nature' is not amused. Indeed, it could not be, since it has no mind. It is merely the testimony of mind, like any other book. We do not find in the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a trifle compared with the human body, HOW or WHY it constructed itself. The question would be inane. We find the testimony to the mental prowess, the integral capacities of thought, the conceptual capacities of design, the institutive felicities of expression, in making the vision actual, and so on, of the author, authors or makes and builders, jointly; and if there is more than one, as here there is, we see reflection likewise on their capacity to work as a team.

We do NOT find in this, the DIRECTION they had to build the bridge. A library might have this. We do not find what was the private preference of the architect. Newspapers might have revealed that, or a biography. We look where the knowledge is germane to the topic. We do not need to be geniuses to see the need to align action with ability, ability with implementer, implementer with knowledge of the same, and team-work as an item for separate analysis. We do not look to the bridge for all of this; but as an exhibit of overall CAPACITY in the constructor or construction team, it is a certain evidence. The final vision MAY have come from the COUNCIL, which hired the builder's gifts. In that case, it would be wrong to attribute to the architect personally, the power to conceive that plan; but the power to receive it, certainly would be assured of him. Everything as we well know, has to be found at its relevant command centre, revelation resource, and everything has its contribution at the facade, functionality and reality of what it is.

There is, in short, a certain proportionality, and individuality, a discursive propriety in relating all results to sufficient causes, and construing these in terms of their precise input and impact, not in some listless holiday from reason, in which the precise opposite is posited, and the bridge is to speak for its author, and announce its genesis and ground, as if the engineer's past presence gave a tape recording of his thoughts. It is an exhibit, not a cassette. Wisdom looks, but with a restraint which sees what the bridge CAN and CANNOT provide, and a willingness by research to find the agents, agencies and wisdom resources which were at various times, and in various stages and indeed, possibly the very structures of authority and disposition, involved before any action transpired at the bridge site.

The universe is still requisite of cause (see Causes and SMR Chs. 1 and  3). It does not evaporate logic because of size. Thus the tinny tedium of tireless wastage of funds, spoilage of fun and dereliction of intellect which is now so fashionable, as Nazism's goose-step march and salute were once, but are now seen as ludicrous posturing of the impotent, continues as a tribute to human ineptitude ? No, but more to human obstinacy of unbelief, rigour of inconsistency, prostitution of mind and alienation of spirit from reality, from - that is - its source, God Himself. For the purposes of the architect, consult him. Don't ask the bridge! In simple cases, you may guess, but debonair delusion is always the pit for pride.

That is where the slime comes in. The thing is malodorous, misdirecting humanity to a sort of grubbing greed which does not mind the dirt, and is not discriminating in its direction. It tends to stick to the feet of those in this miry clay, and it leaves it marks all over the world, on the global carpets of wars and flurries, as if it all depended on our wit, our naturalistic wit, where we all got, hope to get or imagine we are getting, as each uneasily eyes the other, and some make bombs of themselves for good measure.

It sinks like a bog surrounded by quicksand. It has abandoned the rock, as did Israel, the cause, the sufficient cause. It blinks at it, winks at it and then dispenses with, by a wit which leaves it so barren of peace, so leery of justice, so wrought in mind, so intimidated in soul (for bullies tend to be intimidated within, by their very superficiality), that the world fills with fears and their ample absorption in wars, with greed, and their excresences aplenty, bestrew the globe emptied of hope, except in vanity, like naturalism. Man ? HIS works toil on this globe, and philosophers, politicians and social sophisticates try to work out what on earth the creature, mankind, is about! With God ? yes, even with man, it is wise to ASK HIM! As to God, He knows... Alas, for many it appears that the risk of finding out allays curiosity to the point of total spiritual stultification.

What is it like ? It is like trusting in the book, as paper, as ink, and examining these things, without once bothering to read it! It is not these ingredients which reveal what is finally necessary; it is He who wrote it.

When however this irrational greed for human control, march for 'victory' which is the most defeated since Napoleon's from Moscow, or Hitler's for that matter, when this is abandoned, and reason proceeds, and the spirit is willing to find the resource of the Maker, and the word of His book (Isaiah 8:20, 34:16-17), which verifies itself empirically, just as it requires itself in validity as we have seen (cf. SMR), then what ?

It is then that the reality of the mind of the Creator, the regality of His Spirit, the humility of His love, the grace of His victory, which He confers on His people (cf. I John 5:4, Romans 8), becomes accessible. To this man will I look, says He, to him who is poor and of a contrite spirit (cf. Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the Mount), and who trembles at My word (Isaiah 66:2). Indeed, when this is given you, already your gaze can discern and your heart is loving the One at whom you look (Isaiah 45:19-25):

" 'Tell and bring forth your case;
Yes, let them take counsel together.
Who has declared this from ancient time?
Who has told it from that time?
Have not I, the Lord?
And there is no other God besides Me,
A just God and a Savior;
There is none besides Me.

“' Look to Me, and be saved,
All you ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
I have sworn by Myself;
The word has gone out of My mouth in righteousness,
And shall not return,
That to Me every knee shall bow,
Every tongue shall take an oath.

"One shall say,
‘Surely in the Lord I have righteousness and strength.'
To Him men shall come,
And all shall be ashamed
Who are incensed against Him.
In the Lord all the descendants of Israel
Shall be justified, and shall glory.”

Thus is the Lord found when one comes to Him. Then there is AWE as our acronym advised us would be so, and then in awe there is delight; for it is in the NATURE of man to love to have awe. That is merely one of the multiplied attestations of whose he is, what he is, to what he most naturally flows. When there is perversion of spirit from God (and it is this perversion of his spirit which explains enormous masses of human data), then the most ludicrous substitutes for its object are found. As the desire is natural, as natural as that of a child for its mother's milk, and it insists on finding something, then when it refuses the breast of truth, what does our vagabond race tend to do ?

It finds it in rugby stars (and this is not to diminish admiration for their persistence and acrobatics, but awe ? ), its excitement, instead of in the mind that made the stars, it seeks it in glamour, in wealth (often, other people's), in the power of this or that nation state, in majesty of kings (and some kings are good indeed, as kings, but awe ? ), in intellectual capacity (and this helps, but
awe ?), in 'nature' seen in this or that guise, and it is wonderful in its testimony: but as to the
Maker ?

"The ox knows its owner
And the donkey its master's crib:
But Israel does not know,
My people do not consider" - Isaiah 1:3.

What does He say ?

"Hear O heavens, and give ear, O earth!
For the LORD has spoken:
I have nourished and brought up children,
And they have rebelled against Me..." (1:2)

Again as Jeremiah puts it from the Lord:

"Even the stork in the heavens
Knows her appointed times,
And the turtledove, the swift and the swallow
Observe the time of their coming.
But My people do not know the judgment of the LORD" - Jeremiah 8:7.

Thus does man abase himself before what is small, because he will not abase himself before what is infinite in majesty, glorious in praise, doing wonders, filled with love, delighting in mercy, precise in understanding, deep in wisdom, appealing in heart, providing redemption to his perversity and sin (Isaiah 55:6, Micah 7:18ff.). There, in the sum total of sovereignty expressed, in Christ, is the answer, the exclusive answer, but not exclusivistic, whose death on the cross was not high fashion, but the height of ridicule from the cruel, whose love that drove Him was not glamorised in comfortable cushions (Matthew 8:20, Luke 9:58), and whose resurrection was not artful verbal ploy, but a fact as brutally frank as death for an opera singer because she wanted a face-lift and as evident as a strong-man whose staggering weight-lift is raised above his shoulders.

This artist, however, the Lord, covered the cost of folly, and offered not a new face but a new life, restored in the image of Him who created him, by yielding His own, satisfying the scales of justice, making the expressway of fellowship, opening the highway of holiness, without tremor or failure, but with many a sigh, and much depth of anguish, as He performed what makes all other surgical operations seem but the work of children. THEY may save one body for a while; HE has saved all who freely receive Him, for ever. They patch the body; HE provides at the general resurrection (I Cor. 15), a new one.

Theirs last a few years at best; His does not wear, being eternal by the power of God, declared before men, insurmountable, indefeasible, triumphantly predicted a millenium before it was, and still executed before the scurrying, worrying criminals who conspired to kill and were dismayed that no body was to be found in their clutches any more, as foretold in prophet and Christ Himself (II Cor. 5, SRM Ch. 6, Biblical Blessings Ch. 15, *2, SMR pp. 931ff., 937ff. ). Not only so, it all happened on the third day, as carefully prescribed, to give arithmetic for sauce!

AWE is not in vain like the denotations for 'AWFUL'. If you refuse awe at His wonder - one clean, glorious, light filled, radiant with glory, acquiescing not to sin, but to the reception of its sentence that in justice He might pardon; if in stability you reject, rather than through redemption receive, then that is a case of negative awe, profound horror at the supine traded for the sublime.

It is awful, the slime for the glory, the slippage for the security, the invidious for the victorious.

• That, it is to be human. That choice, however, it is to dehumanise.


It is the unnatural perversion of nature. Its fruits are bitter, personally, nationally, internationally, politically, morally, socially; its spirit is squalid; its future is not bleak but divested of light entirely; its destiny is according to its folly.
 
 

NOW TO THE EPILOGUE

ALSO SEE Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3 for an  extensive treatment of the themes of naturalism, the Dawkins attack, theistic evolution, in historical setting.
 
 

*1

For example in:
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9,
Little Things Ch. 5,
Repent or Perish Ch. 7,
A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9.

*2
See Repent or Perish Ch. 7, A Spiritual Potpourri 1-3.

*3
Cf. TMR 1, p. 21, TMR 6, pp. 131ff.;Spiritual Refreshings ... 13, Wake Up World! ... Ch.  6, pp. 130ff., pp .138ff., and Ch.   7, above.

4. Cf. Little Things Ch. 5, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9, That Magnificent Rock Chs. 1, 7 and 8, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9,  Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6 with SMR pp. 422E, Ch. 2 Supplement, and so on.

*5 Here, see Beauty for Ashes, Ch. 3, *13.

  EXHIBIT B

This comes from Beauty for Ashes, Ch. 3. It  relates  to a practical use of naturalism  to make unnatural suppression of the rational powers of man in intimidatory fashion, obscuring in effect, juvenile thought with dogma.  Dogma becomes doctrine when truth is served; and liberty is a means of preserving sense amid nonsense, such as dictators from time immemorial seem to love to export  to the recipient  world, which does not return that love!

The story of the Vikings is intensely interesting; but fear not, this is not to be an account of their 800-1000 glories of war, passion for death in battle as a religious passport to Valhalla, their Danelaw in England, their incredible fortune hunting, exacting massive payouts from England and elsewhere, their use of the Dneiper to access the Byzantium arena, their touching on the coast of Africa, their contact with America via Herjulfsson, ravagings in France, and gradual overthrow and then slow decline. The point is this: once, they were such a plague in their bloodthirsty martial religion that the prayer came to be: Lord, deliver us from the fury of the  Northmen! Such things are found in the National Geographic, April 1978. Thus it could be hard to characterise it as news.

What IS news is a new thrust of pagan ferocity, dabbling in powers and forces with its own imagery, aloof from reality, fighting for what vanishes, as did the short-lived Viking hegemony, for a time under Knut, even found in England! before consolidated forces in various sections of the globe, overcame them, drained by bloodshed and meeting more obstruction.

The new forces also have had a day in England (as in many other places, where they have invaded what often were but poorly defended sites). Since the 1850's, the follies of Darwinism, preaching glory in this world by thrusts of might, the alleged pattern of progress, have ravaged their prey. Wars of glory have become commonplace, the only shame being this, that as with the Vikings, the ultimate end is pathetic and poor.

The world is becoming poor, though a fringe is rich.
Millions walk in hunger, myriads slave at war, foolish and vain pseudo-religions abound ^{*1 :}

• like Communism in thrall to the god of forces^*2, the concept of doing it by this or that sort of imaginary might, on this or that sort of imaginary spree,
• like Darwinism (Darwin did not dump the fact of God so readily as the God of fact^*3, himself inundated with foolish concepts never established, and later comprehensively refuted, a fact he realised in the geological record, and acknowledged - that is, the unestablished part!), with the same sort of undivine god as Communism (Marx was keen on Darwinism),

 
• like Islam, with its much older vain delusions, trusting in a power, a force, a battle-conscious overcoming, promising to warriors the golden entry to their own sort of heaven, filled with gratifications.

The bloodthirsty character which plays about it, now here, now there as shown in detail and summed up in More Marvels (cf. Lord of Life Ch. 9), is now being adequately attested as you have Dr Mahathir advising the world of the need for action not limited to peaceable means, because of the Palestinian situation, and similarly Moslem Iran, Iraq and Syria far from appeased, while news of Iraq's holocaust plans circulate and are addressed in various meetings of various parties, who evince concern, advise of action, and wonder what to do about it.
 
 

It has of course been going on for a long time (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 8, News 118, SMR pp. 125ff.), but although it has raged and ravaged in the USA, with various court cases, involving States, and found something close to supine submission (though not by this author) in South Australia, now we find its image-crested prows ploughing into England, very much as did those of Vikings in times of yore.

However, these prows are if water-vessels at all, only found on the rivers. The threat is from within!

In the Guardian Unlimited, June 19, 2002 we find quite an article devoted if not dedicated to the work, the labours, the oratory and the passion evinced by one, Professor Richard Dawkins. Now it is really best if you read Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 8 first here, for otherwise the author would be involved in needless repetition, the reader quite possibly in needless ignorance about what has already happened, and some being bored, have to wade through the preliminaries, and others, being uninformed, wonder needlessly. A  good plan ? One assumes it done for benefit to all.

The term 'guardian' seems to evoke a useful thought here. England fell (temporarily) to Vikings through lack of integrated action, being bled by ceaseless raids without proper response, with a weak king, it appears: it won back independence with concerted action, determination and considered response, involving in the domain of Europe, no little presentation of Christianity, eventually reaching the heart of the problem, Sweden, with considerable result.

It is in danger of falling quite as needlessly to the onslaught of this other weird mythology^*3A which presents itself with blatancy, insists with repetition, like the Viking raids, and argues by mere force. Its reasons are absent as its words are present. It seeks to rule the schools .

But first let us note the fact that this Guardian article declares that Dawkins is wishing to characterise the religion once so strong in England, that of Newton (Sir Isaac), Faraday (d. 1867) and Babbage (d. 1871), Maxwell (d. 1879),  and Morse (d. 1872) , Boyle (d. 1691), Lord Kelvin (d. 1907), Joule (d. 1899) and Fleming (d. 1945), and across the channel, of Cuvier (d. 1832), Linnaeus (d. 1788)  and von Braun (d. 1977), as in one basic aspect that of "fanatics" whom "we have to contend with."

Between the arms of this selection alone, we have astounding developments in biology, computing, integration of the whole physical system, chemistry, electricity, rocketry, classification of living things, medicine and communications, mathematics, physics, with developments in thermodynamics and electronics. The work, in general, is that of genius, highly original, propelling understanding with éclat! It is in no sense that mere painful panacea, that anxious pseudo-anodyne, cultural conformity which so often turns into cultural calamity because of its reinforced pride in man, his manners and his moeurs. (Cf. SRM pp. 422Eff., S 1ff., and 422Qff..)

This is arresting, indeed, but not as much so as is the mythology presented by this evolutionism, this naturalism, to the minds of oppressed students with a professor of high profile disparaging teaching which shares what such men believed. As Dr W. R. Thompson, when Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Research, expressed it a century after Darwin dabbled in things of which he was largely unaware (such as genetics, and micro-biology, the underlying system of structure):

"A long-enduring and regrettable effect of the success of the Origin was the addiction of biologists to unverifiable speculation. The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity." As if this were not enough, he also wrote in the following way,  in the same Preface to a new Everyman edition of Darwin's book:

As to Darwin:

If we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing a gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond to a true time- sequence then that would be something.

However:

This is certainly what Darwin would have liked to report but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory; the absence of the primitive types that should have existed in the strata regarded as the most ancient; and the sudden appearance of the principal taxonomic groups ... Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce palaeontological evidence sufficient to prove his views but ...the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different to-day.
 

But what was his characterisation of this ill-thought out pageant of tradition, still persisting in some quarters, despite the work of Stephen Jay Gould (cf. SMR 234ff., 226ff., Spiritual Refreshings (SR).... Ch. 13, Wake Up World ... Ch. 6) and Professor Michael Denton (SR op. cit., End-note 1), whose end-of-the-line dictum  "The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature" based on a classic presentation, deserves attention.

It well accords with Professor Thompson's incisive characterisation of such baseless imaginations, as seen in the citation of SMR p. 199.

Speaking again of  Thompson, we find this: 'He moreover notes that since "there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the process," it is "therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non- scientific public to the disagreements..." '

He proceeds :

To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.

If it were a matter of logical debate, as often seen on this site, there is simply nothing^*3B to be said. It is all doctrine and dogma, unsupported by actualities in the laboratory, laws of science or verifications except anti-verifications, which support creation, and is despatched like a yelping Spaniel under the wheel of a cart. (Cf. SMR Ch. 2, pp. 140ff.., TMR Ch. 1, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6, Stepping Out for Christ  Chs. 2, 7-10 and Repent or Perish Ch. 4, for example.) However, rather we find that as in South Australia, children tend to be indoctrinees, examinations to be slanted so that it is easier to answer if you use the concepts implicit which are naturalistic, and so on. They are being put through the fire.

This phrase is not mere metaphor. It is based in historical activities found in Israel and biblically attested in the days when Israel, like England, having had much of the truth of God, elected to do OTHER THINGS to their children, and with their own lives to boot. You find it in II Kings 17:17, where there is a survey of the devastation which came to Israel (the northern part, which had long separated from Jerusalem and Judah, and served its own idols! and on which indeed, an early prognosis had been prophetically delivered: national disaster - I Kings 14:8-15). ONE of the reasons for this predicted judgment is here itemised. It is this:

• "And they caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire, practised witchcraft and soothsaying, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke Him to anger. Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah alone."

It is seen just the same earlier in II KIngs 16:3, where Ahaz, that bizarre exemplar of double-mindedness, as seen in the profoundly significant interview with Isaiah (Isaiah 7 - two bob each way, as the old saying has it!) tried to keep the FACT of his kingdom without the FEATURE of trusting in the power and provision of the living God!

Causing their children to pass through the fire is a ghoulish testimony to what naturalism with its seedy symbols can produce. As Jeremiah 2:23-27 has it, it is all too clear from that day, and it is not different in this, for God the Lord does not change; it is the world that changes at His word!
(cf. SMR Ch. 8). Black print points will be made, to help understanding and to apply, as if in parentheses, between segments of this continuous bllue presentation from Jeremiah.

" 'Has a nation changed its gods,
Which are not gods?
But My people have changed their Glory
For what does not profit.
Be astonished, O heavens, at this,
And be horribly afraid;
Be very desolate,' says the Lord.

There is a change from what has the divine efficacy, to what lacks it.
People with electrical power on, have opted for candle light, with no matches. People with reservoirs, have decided on wells.

“ ' For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns - broken cisterns that can hold no water.
Is Israel a servant?
Is he a homeborn slave?
Why is he plundered?

The wells do not even hold water! The personal God is replaced with impersonal, or impractical non-conductors of spiritual reality, making them like mere slaves, without liberty and without strength.

" 'The young lions roared at him, and growled;
They made his land waste;
His cities are burned, without inhabitant.
Also the people of Noph and Tahpanhes
Have broken the crown of your head.
Have you not brought this on yourself,
In that you have forsaken the Lord your God
When He led you in the way?

" 'And now why take the road to Egypt,
To drink the waters of Sihor?
Or why take the road to Assyria,
To drink the waters of the River?

Politico-religious alliances can be opted, but with devastating consequences. Reliance on flesh is like relying on a balloon when you jump from an aeroplane without a parachute.

" 'Your own wickedness will correct you,
And your backslidings will rebuke you.
Know therefore and see that it is an evil and bitter thing
That you have forsaken the Lord your God,
And the fear of Me is not in you,'
Says the Lord God of hosts.
'For of old I have broken your yoke and burst your bonds;
And you said, ‘I will not transgress,’
When on every high hill and under every green tree
You lay down, playing the harlot.

Other peoples have failed and walked in baseness, and have suffered the judgment; so why does this people follow so barren a way ? It is its own wickedness, not some strange 'problem' which has brought that barren fearlessness which treats the living God as an unfaithful wife, her husband.

" 'Yet I had planted you a noble vine, a seed of highest quality.
How then have you turned before Me
Into the degenerate plant of an alien vine?
For though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap,
Yet your iniquity is marked before Me,” says the Lord God.

“ 'How can you say, ‘I am not polluted,
I have not gone after the Baals’?
See your way in the valley;
Know what you have done:
You are a swift dromedary breaking loose in her ways,
A wild donkey used to the wilderness,
That sniffs at the wind in her desire;
In her time of mating, who can turn her away?
All those who seek her will not weary themselves;
In her month they will find her.
Withhold your foot from being unshod, and your throat from thirst.
But you said, ‘There is no hope.
No! For I have loved aliens, and after them I will go.’

No naturalistically conceived solution exists to sin; lords of life of this and that dynamic are imagined; but the problem is spiritual lust. The people move as if inebriated, unable to stop, forced by the obsessive compulsions of sin, that must be indulged in its ideological, immoral messes, that repay what is asked for, in the coin that fits the slot of revolt.

“ 'As the thief is ashamed when he is found out,
So is the house of Israel ashamed;
They and their kings and their princes, and their priests and their prophets,
Saying to a tree, ‘You are my father,’
And to a stone, ‘You gave birth to me.’
For they have turned their back to Me, and not their face.
But in the time of their trouble
They will say, ‘Arise and save us.’

You seek to attribute to 'nature' the power and personal majesty of God: it is revolting in its arbitrary fallacies, a sure expression of the depth of the delusion which comes when the powers that reject God, are ignored in their very basis, as if they could be what they manifestly are, by virture of thoughtless, mindless matter.

" 'But where are your gods that you have made for yourselves?
Let them arise,
If they can save you in the time of your trouble;
For according to the number of your cities
Are your gods, O Judah.

“ 'Why will you plead with Me?
You all have transgressed against Me,' says the Lord.
'In vain I have chastened your children;
They received no correction.' "

Let your imaginary pretences help your lusty pretensions, let them help you when terror (or terrorism for that matter! ) shall come. It is useless to play a double game. If God is Lord, follow Him; and if you want to mix your spiritual drinks, you will only get drunk. Correction rejected, what is left but judgment!
 

This passage from Jeremiah was related to the second step. Israel was gone, the northern segment of the nation, already given a categorical judgment to disperse.

Here, then, is the next stage in which even JUDAH (cf. Ezekiel 23) fell away to a vast extent (though always there was a remnant of the faithful as so dramatically exposed in Isaiah 6:11-13, one of the places where the NKJV is far clearer than the AV translation, not surprising entirely in view of the fact it was rendered some hundreds of years nearer to our own time ^*4).

So do nations sometimes have multiple opportunities to return to the Lord in substance, though not of course entirety, since even Jesus' disciples, the 12, had one devil (predicted of course, and useful, but wallowing in his own will cf. John 13:2, 6:70 cf. Joyful Jottings 25).

Acts 17:24-26 with Romans 1:17ff., Psalm 94,  together not only speak of these national things, but also on the decline of nations, the failure of spirit, the blindness which leads to a worship of absolutes which are not there, or relativisms which merely contradict themselves.

England has long been declining in spiritual things, with some little peaking perhaps in World War II when at times such as Dunkirk, there were very many indeed who sought the Almighty's intervention! This has been an arresting topic in such sites as The Other News 13, A Question of Gifts VI and Wake Up World! ... Ch. 3.

Nor is it alone in Europe or indeed the world ^*5 in this, though certainly singular, since it once came, like Judah, so far towards the Lord. Transatlantic, the USA is not vastly different. The fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, like an announcement was far more impactive than would be the fall of say, a 14 story building in any city! It was not only a question of size, but elegance, advanced architecture, and like the Titanic, special reinforcement to take care of (almost) any eventuality! Its fall was grotesque because its arising was so high, with so much, in so many ways. It was almost like the obliteration of a suburb, using its gas supply! Ironic, devastatingly bloodthirsty, unprincipled, but as its own electricity was lost, so it electrified the world! It is not so safe ... any more!

This has been so for long, though in some ways, the Cold War paralysed its perception in the very magnitude of the stand-off. Now it is coming home.

Let us however revert to our current special interest in England because of the virulence of the assault on sober scientific method, as if it could be made to avoid, for its naturalistic opponent, direct negation of verification, which is the case, or confirmation in its due results: creation. This, it stands THEREFORE ALONE, since nothing else meets the due methodological specifications of scientific method (cf. SMR pp. 140ff. and *8 below)  and covers the case as does biblical creation in particular, in this whole field.

Whatever, therefore,  the intention, which in the end is known to God alone: this is the outcome of the attack.

England then, it is now applying more pressure for its nature gods. The best that one can say is this: it does not know what it is doing.

You may say, gods ? The matter is covered in the references provided in *1 below, but the point is that evolutionism thrives on references to 'Nature' - note the capital quite commonly employed - striving, or needing, or foreseeing, or wisely producing marvellously satisfactory solutions in the invention of kinds of life, as if what it is seen NOT TO DO were quite properly to be attributed to it BY ASSUMPTION. Since these powers are what require more than man or nature exhibit, both products of limited capacity, and material nature evinces only this, that it is mindless (cf. SMR pp. 80ff., cf. 348ff.), this therefore constitutes a religion. It is investing in SOME OBJECT OR OBJECTS or other, the powers, prerogatives and precepts of the Almighty, and then attributing these to it in a LEARNING mode so that it is INSTRUCTED by it.

That, it is religion, but as noted in Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix IV and 30, it is also idolatry. It is just the same as in Israel of old, but simply tied to the myths of the Greeks, and with some updating of externals, dressed in modern clothes that really alter but little of the 'body' beneath: man's ceaseless excursions into naturalism (cf. News 122 with SMR 422ff., 252Aff., 419ff., Ch. 2 Supplement and Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, SMR Ch. 3).

Like all idolatry, it tends to be cruel, for it forgets the God who made man, ignoring the reality,  that his sensibilities are to be sought where they came from, not in the plight to which sin has brought them, and in which rebellion has clothed their smitten environment, let alone this with simplistic selectivity (cf. Beyond the Curse). It is not for nothing that the empires have tended to be vile, violent and insurgent; that the declining West with its return to such paganisms as evolutionism proclaims, has showered every evil hue on this earth in the last century, neglecting or distorting not only the goals of life but its God, if it were possible: yet for what is possible,  performing this operation  in their minds.
 
 

Among them have come the theistic evolutionists, whose mixing of pseudo-divine dealings with the secular follies of the nature myth, make a mixed marriage of the supernatural and the naturalistic, as open to moral decline as it is closed to scriptural sanction or evidential support.

This they do, as derelict towards what geology in general takes as the Cambrian evidential realities, the data attested by many including Stephen Jay Gould^*5A,  as are many others amid the mutually discordant, jumbled mass of eager but frustrated contestants, lauding, or lording it over the turgid surge of evolutionism, itself but a phase of naturalism (cf. Romans 1). Amid all this, they proceed, liasing with the enemies of God, while all together their heedless, reckless onrush proceeds, here one advancing the more guilefully, there one more fiercely, brandishing their roused spirits till the earth reels, as it began to do in 1945, and the whole history of the world whirls into that dark depravity so tellingly forecast, and in such detail, by Jesus Christ (cf. SMR Ch. 8), whose way is diametrically opposed to these depravities of spirit as to the distortions of creation.

Thus relative to  Genesis 1-3, and in particular Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, we see these jointly related by Christ to the beginning of the creation, as in Mark 10:6 with Matthew 19:4-6. Here, from the Messiah's mouth,  we see the very deeds and words of God in Genesis,  being attributed to God, the Father of Jesus Christ,  in terms of practical, contemporary outcomes, binding on the people of God (cf. John 12:40, where Christ relates Jonah's incarceration to Nineveh's actual fall, and His own  actual coming death and rising). In the Bible with decisive consistency, it is God who made things good, who loves mercy and kindness, and who has made man in such a model, yet not without liberty; and it is He who has brought on man the derelictions which depravities produce, and the curse which only Christ can redeem (Galatians 3, Romans 5). From Him have come the judgments on the ceaseless spiritual innovations, making new gods without ground (Deuteronomy 32:15-21), or of nature a god without power (Jeremiah 16:19-20): a perversion of spiritual liberty which in its vanity, brings blight.

Not at all after this biblical model is theistic evolution, which invents a god following nature, where curse is confused with creation, and judgment with the joys of the Lord.

Indeed, all this is as far from biblical creationism as it is possible to get (cf. SMR pp. 179),  so that when some seek to make a wedding of this and the other, as if carnal aspirations could comport with Christ's affirmations, or sacrifice with self-interest, it is an exercise in delusion^*5B. The degradation of the theme, evidentially as morally,  dissonant from the word of God,  needs to be faced and remains judged. What does it portend ? In this thrust and survival way,  darkness is quite simply preferred to light, and made a motif. When it is dark, its is easy to stumble (John 8:12, 11:9-10).

The world is excelling at this fallen and failed practice. Its ways do not work: they blight the earth, ignore life's worth, found only in its source, not in its (imagined) summit, man, and

• as in its naturalistic confusing, we find millions abasing themselves as if to hell (Hosea 7:16, Isaiah 57:9-13, Matthew 7:13-15),

 
• so do we likewise, in the scriptural application, as predicted by Jesus Christ, find the climate is warming (SMR Ch. 8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

Since this has to happen at a specified phase of history, if it were otherwise, the Bible would not be verified. As always however, as it says, so does history follow, like a lady in a waltz.
 
 

Let us however notice, in the milieu of such things, as formerly in Israel, so now in England, what is occurring. Let us see what is to be found in the Guardian report to which reference has been made. In England, an assault has been made. What has been the nature of this assault ?

We have observed news concerning this popular author, and noted Professor, Richard Dawkins, and his call to arms! Evolutionists awake! comes the thrust of his theme song.

Let us consider the principle of the thing, all personalities apart, which is really quite essential in a thing of this magnitude. In terms of history, it is as if Danes in England, having temporarily taken the throne (here the cultural sceptre is intended, only), are calling on Danes everywhere to unite to prevent the English reaffirming their ancient codes, and returning to their ancient religion and ways of thought and practice.

After all, what the Bible ITSELF teaches is indubitably creation (cf. TMR Appendix, SMR pp. 179ff., cf. Colossians 1:15ff., John 1:3), and what the sovereign of England undoubtedly takes as the Book of Wisdom is the Bible, and what the Church of England addresses as truth, is the same (in its 39 articles - it is now as a standard, and has long been on vast mutation exercises as noted in the reference above to A Question of Gifts).

What then would Dawkins propose ? We have already seen that a school, formally authorised by the Government is one which he might rather like to see merely formerly authorised, seeming to be inciting a negative review of the glowing accreditation which even PM Blair noted, it holds. Why ? What would lead to such a desire that such a school should depart ?

It is quite explicit, which is quite wonderful to see, in terms of frankness at last in some such cases. It is because it presents CREATION as one thing to study in ascertaining reality! It keeps to the national curriculum but ALSO teaches this topic in certain places! Is it to be short ? No, it appears, just silenced. Such seems the thrust of the recommendation: HOW on earth could it be accredited! Let the inspectors retread their (errant ?) steps, and proceed to put it in place: which appears to mean, out of place! How dare independent schools ever teach any course on such a thing in the domain of science, even where the State required syllabus is kept!

This  in the land of freedom of speech, noted as a refuge for Nazi-fleeing denizens of the deep in Europe in mid-20th century infamies, and long before, a place to research and THINK! THIS! Oh England, you have waylaid yourself.

Does he propose debate ? Is there evidence that is to be shown in open and equal concourse ?

No, whatever may be the subjective grounds, and we know nothing of these, the objective fact is that this becomes in setting, a matter of authoritative power invoked, which could then be used to quell, suppress and perhaps exterminate the teaching in science at least, of creation in schools, EVEN AS ONE OPTION TO CONSIDER! By a startling irony however, in terms of scientific method, as noted above, there does not happen to be any OTHER (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10, TMR). Here is how humanity baffles itself, and not in this field only. Let the ONLY answer which satisfies all the criteria, be removed.

Let that, for the moment,  as a matter of procedure, pass. The jealous wife may like least the best looking option for her erring husband; but here, it is the broken marriage between man and God which is looking at the least of all possible substitutes.  But then: as logically and morally, spiritually and historically there IS no substitute for God, ANY option looked at, is bound to have broken teeth, when inspection is made!

What in the name of all science, is there to be afraid of, that force must be used ? One radio announcer here in Adelaide shows the state of mind of many of the populace, when on radio he assured the author that the University of Adelaide could just be visited to find examples of evolution. Of thought, perhaps, away from truth, but of the biological fact ? It is precisely BECAUSE there is NO evidence of this ever happening, of the increase of information in the generation of generations, that the fight is tough for the evolutionist; but the hands are tough. It is the same in some other countries, and indeed in the 1990's multiply laden prize winner, Dr Kouznetsov of Russia indicated that at that time it was easier to teach creation in Russia than in the USA! (Dr Kouznetsov spoke as a noted creationist in so saying cf. SMR pp. 218ff.).

The author had some touch of the same passion without knowledge, as evinced by the radio station on that occasion,  when in an academic  institution in this country, lecturing in communications, he met an impasse. The presentation of scientific method to show the facts relative to evolution and creation, as an exercise in communications, distinguishing between prejudice and care, was forbidden: a tremendous academic storm being roused by such 'audacity'. Naturally, one had to decline further lecturing when the prohibition on freedom of academic presentation, based on defensible logic, was to be enforced. One pointed out that it was necessary to ameliorate the slant away from numerous realities in the passion for evolutionism which vacated the institution of balance and factuality; but the answer was not to dispute this fact, academically highly proper and justly mandatory. It was simply to say this: IT IS NOT CONVENIENT. SO truth had to go in order for convenience to stay!

It was not a question of 'teaching creationism', but of presenting a methodological critique, and examining the consequences.

It is a pity that such zealots as those acting in such a way as this, who appear -  to be fair in terms of the above definition - to be religious zealots, cannot abide competition, but tend rather with journalistic eccentricities or with administrative nostrums to rule the roost, to push the buttons to such an extent, while yet they never manage in this modern world to cover the academic debating floor with sustainable and sustained victories. The work and words of Dr Gish throughout the USA and elsewhere have been proverbial for their victories in open academic debates by the scores, and the author and scholar, Phillip E. Johnson, appears to have found it an exhilarating experience to do much the same, simply using logic and scientific method to deflate and explode the pompous pretensions and personifications of nature which so often are rendered by this religion when it is in academic dress^*6! (Cf. SMR pp. 129, 147, 211ff. ).  Expert in law and teaching for 20 years at Berkeley California, in the University of Cal., he found the gradualists inept and the case for naturalism hopeless, in debate and presentation.

As they found, so has this author found in some 50 years in various nations, churches and academic institutions. There is never an answer. The acclaim is purely cultural^*7. The opposite, creation, is demonstrable.

What then does Dawkins desire, as his words of exhortation would seem to imply,  as part of the new pseudo-religious establishment (as it appears at least to be) ? It is this, according to the Guardian report.

Misnaming the science falsely-so-called as science^*7A, and confusing the 'evidence' with irrelevance, as is quite normal in these cases where the desires seem so to void the method relative to this topic, that it is not noticed, this assault on teaching integrity or skill or both,  calls the never invalidated Biblical account 'myth', and the naturalistic myth 'science' in a verbal tour de force which omits an important fact.

That fact ? What is it ? The RESULTS of the evolutionist anti-scientific method, over the decades past, have been such a plethora of mutually contradictory and evanescent theories, each criticising the other, ending in a dual effort to make the origin NOTHING or else START with no known ground construable, let alone viewable or observable in action of ANY kind, that to abuse the name 'science' for these efflorescences is merely to lower the level and standard to which it more properly refers^*8.

In practical and actual fact, there is ONLY ONE record in this affair which has stood AT ALL, for none of the others find peace or victory, since each is so amply subject to aborting criticism from the others and logical considerations not hard to find, that none of these theories can say, I AM IT. Which is that record ? It is the one in the Bible, which has stood for 3 and one half thousand years, is espoused by some of the great scientists of today and the past, has groups of eminent scientists, making like King Alfred in his day at the national security level, an organised rebuttal of naturalistic assault, while it meets with precision and meticulous exactitude ALL that scientific method requires, is verified on ALL fronts. The rest so lack verification and so are subject to its opposite that even to suggest them is an affront to the method of science. It relates intimately to that well and forcibly exemplified phenomenon of religious distortion.

The Bible on the other hand, has long been written, often been smitten, but never falls. It accords as noted with the three main laws of science as NOTHING to the contrary in this, does or even can (cf. TMR Chs. 1 and  8), it contradicts none, which is what no other theory can do (cf. above refs. and Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 2, with SMR pp. 140ff.), and its provisions satisfy what all monism fails to do (It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Little Things Ch. 5), the entire range of the data.

What then does Professor Dawkins appear to want with this pseudo-religion ? Is it that it face the facts nationally, in all class-rooms, in copious debates, that it stand or fall on its merits or lack of them, so that not politics but logic is called to account ? We do not hear of it, but merely the real-estate sort of pitch for the benefits of this religious seeming passion. It has words; but the deeds that go with them ? We see them not at all, nor has anyone seen them, for they are missing. ALL links are missing as Denton so well acknowledges in his immensely scholarly work, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, and what does he say ?

Let us consider a short excerpt from Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13 here:
 

In fact, even in the biological realm Denton in his EVOLUTION:  A THEORY IN CRISIS, a work which is a technical masterpiece, though its chief contribution is not philosophic or metaphysical, and its religious position is uncertain, is at pains, in all conscience, to show in realm after realm that DISCONTINUITY is the name of the game. Continuity is the name of the desire in historical thrust. Man wants the latter; nature provides the former.

Thus he declares (p. 353):
 

• "The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature."

 
• He adds:
• "In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism, and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists,, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach."

 
• Indeed we have this: "Even in classical times Aristotle's opposition to the evolutionism of the pre-Socratics was based on his acute observation of nature and his appreciation of the facts of  biology." Things tended to be fixed, this was their genius, that it what he saw.

 
• The DISCONTINUITY simply means that things are not equipped for ingenious upgradings. Information theory deplores such a thought; the second law of thermodynamics PRECISELY opposes such a thought (cf. Index) ; nature does not co-operate with such a thought in the entire gamut of variations about a type; cells, Denton tells us, abhor such a thought: that is to say, there is NO primitive cell, NO intermediate cell, ALL cells are intriguingly and fascinatingly sophisticated.

 
•  Professor Thompson's note on the relevant observational facts of palaeontology (in his New Challenging Introduction to the Origin of Species (1956, Everyman)), to the point that:
  
  "If we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing a gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond in a true time-sequence... well: but This is certainly what Darwin would have liked to report but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory... The position is not notably different today." (Cf. S.J. Gould, SMR pp. 234-235.)

 
• Dr Michael Denton (see pp. 114 ff. SMR) affirms that not only is there no "primitive" to sophisticated cell sequence in time, none being primitive, but also that just as sequenced fossil intermediates are lacking morphologically, similarly developmental sequences lack in the micro-biological relationships between creatures.

 
• Thus, he states, these do not appear, but what is present is a "highly ordered hierarchical system" (op.cit., p. 278) at the micro-level, from which any such sequence is "emphatically absent". Moreover micro-divisions between them are "mathematically perfect". Indeed, to take a case, different kinds of frogs, though relatively similar, have a "molecular divergence" as great as that between extraordinarily diverse kinds of mammals (op.cit., p. 290) ... These findings, with Genesis are more parallel than railroad tracks; and Genesis ... came first. They, within the ramifying network of attestation of the word of God, provide verification of it, unmatched, extensive and refined.

Similarly, vestigial organs, a concept more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and indeed conspicuous by its absence, in terms of empirical verification, have been now almost entirely verified as misnomer, while the actual FUNCTIONAL NEEDS of what are merely by unlicensed imagination attributed to posterior products of past usage only, lie fallow in the soil of fact (SMR p. 198).

End of Excerpt.
 
 

• However, Professor Dawkins in a way grotesquely evocative of that misplaced zeal in the witch hunts which spoiled some of the early American history, might appear intent on ignoring the mythical element in the inventions which no matter and no life knows, which no eyes see, nor yet its attestation, which no valid logic can create. Instead, with vaporous and irrelevant attributions to the bold declarations of the Bible, standing then, standing now, in vast and full accord with all evidence and logic, and required by the latter, what does he do ? He appears to be insisting that creation, Biblically defined,  which with sophisticated and unique ease does cover the case,  is in some way a weapon, an instrument for evil.

 
• The sober realism, neither reductionist like the evolutionist myth, nor sloppy like so many vague and imprecise myths of man, the explicatory force and verified compilations of the Bible are, we learn, in science to be dismissed. Life has not its equal, no presentation* compares in longevity, resistance to all change, evidential felicity, predictive power; and it is to go, unheralded, no sadness to see the best depart, without competition, by a seraphic sentence, inflicted as on millions of people,  in Communism's wayward day in Russia, without warrant, without appeal, without ground.

 
• Why ? Because for its own part, it does not FAIL ANY test of scientific method, whilst evolutionism with the other myths, fails repeatedly ?

 
• Is truth then evil ?

 
• Is verificatory preference on the part of the data, when sifted into slots,

a danger ?

If so, then to what!

Thus does religious passion or its parallel, produce in even the most brilliant of minds, gaps like that in the relevant geological record; and as there, so here, these CAN be systematic! It is neither skill nor ability, nor even conscious motive which is in question: it is just the relationship between the clamorous statements and the state of the case. That relationship is, as noted, negative; and the Bible, to its even greater credit, has long characterised the CAUSE of such things as this, as we saw in the last chapter. In one sense, it is entirely impersonal, for it applies to the greatest and to the last, as does influenza! (cf. Ch. 1, above at *1).
 
 

Dawkins, in the Guardian report,  proceeds to exhibit a gratuitous mischaracterisation of two Genesis chapters, which signifies a confusion about Genesis, one merely mirroring the zeal of his passion. In religion and politics, such things are almost pandemic; and it is always necessary therefore, to examine the case most carefully.

Genesis, says he, has two creation myths. This is contrary to demonstrable fact in two regards: the character of the text and the elaborate, sustained and consistent application of its declarations with ongoing history (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9, SMR pp. 179ff., 485ff.), on the one hand, and the inter-relationships of the sequential parts, on the other. It is like the case of Bultmann, noted by C.S. Lewis (cf. SMR pp. 861-867), one of reading between the lines in preference to the perception of what is actually written upon them.

Firstly, the record of creation in Genesis is

• one of the most monergistic, majestic and irrefutable claims, in terms of all related evidence, that it would be possible to make, economical in verbiage, incisive in tone, providing first the splendid depiction in the monergistic majesty of Ch. 1, and then the intimate account specialising in man (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9, TMR Appendix),

 
• leading on, with pointed relevance,  in Ch. 2, to the surrounds and bounds of the historical episodes which flare out into our present time, interpreting, applying and specialising as the case requires:

 
• without apology, without interruption,

 
• like a jet, having crossed the Pacific, gliding slowly down to Sydney airport.

Lacking these baneful features, so often found in what is indeed myth, as in evolutionism, which thoroughly lacks any interface with evidential reality, let alone systematic law, a point Popper^*7B soundly declares, just as it lacks predictive power, and for that matter, ground and account of any organ's invention, as Popper also soundly notes, and as he further affirms, is NOT a scientific law, having no power for verification: biblical creation triumphs graciously. There is really, simply no competition. Nothing else has this stature of predictive power.

By Genesis in particular and the Old Testament in general, kinds remain; variation about them is provided for; system is explained; principles of propagation and coding with its revisionist editing to distance error, all is accounted for, long before 'science' knew anything of it. Through it, the second law of thermodynamics is in principle propagated from early times, as the law of conservation of mass and energy, in its basic account, and with this, the law of biogenesis.  By it, the lack of transitional links between major categories is predictable, just as Denton most strenuously affirms to be the case. Through this the lack of developmental simplicities in cells is predictable, for the record omits all steps and stages for any given eventuation of life, merely declaring that GOD SAID and that it was DONE.  The data for this, is to be found is seen, for example,  in TMR   Ch. 1.
 

The time reference (cf. SMR pp. 174ff., Answers to Questions -AQ - Ch. 8) that introduces us to our world via its creation, is in terms of days, with day and night sequence. Minor issues are dealt with in the above reference, but the explanation of days is not in something else. The terminology is what we use, the direction is explanation, concatenation leading to eventuation. There is then no time for something OTHER than the WORD-DEED explication (which DNA so magnificently confirms, as to the words inscribed!); and what is found is not other! Distortion of context, thrust, wording and the use of double definitions and the like, is merely to attribute to the writer, an incohesion which in fact is in the mind of the critic. What is written could not be more decisive in attribution of time periods, command sequence, word-deed correlation, than it is.

Special definitional dilemmas, based on imaginary double-standards, as if the sun meant the globe, and the light meant the stars, and the kinds meant no kinds, and days meant months or years or something other than the designation of astronomical reality to which direction as to its institution is given, are total eisegesis, intrusion into the text, and confused, illicit intrusion at that: for if there had been such an abuse of clarity of terms, it would undoubtedly have been a fault in the writing. It has to be made clear that the attribution of loose verbiage to a document should result from evidence of the practice, not an invasion of the erroneous habits of a critic, or his imaginings that the writer has them! As to the magnificent clarity and data in detail, then, see the SMR loc. cit. and Answers to QuestionsCh. 8.

Genesis is testable, has been tested, and has been attested in test as providing all that it says, with objective eventuation, at all verifiable levels: and these are many. The more modern science in its actual empirical reality becomes, the more the declarations of the Bible on this topic, once beyond human probing in some things, are quite staggeringly attested. WHO would have thought of words ACTUALLY governing the work of KINDS! WHO would have thought for that matter, of general relativity as having some bearing, as it may do, according to Professor Humphreys (cf. SMR pp. S21-30) ? or that his highly specific magnetic predictions using what he propounds as biblical principles, would be astonishingly verified, when naturalistic assumptions failed appallingly to come even near the prediction which he made! (cf. op. cit. S 22).

By whom would the concept of a periodicity implanted into things, by writing, as in Psalm 139
(cf. Joyful Jottings 16) ? Who would have imagined the laws of information technology, that information cannot be increased in a closed system, and imagined their application to the ever triumphant Genesis ?

The first record of creation to endure without mythological features, it is also the last to endure with its scientific features. Its majesty is not merely in manner; its precision is not only in presentation: it is in eventuation, confirmation, verification. What speaks contrary, falls and is washed away. So much of science has this fate, which has sought to attack it. It is past, passé. Genesis, it is in no difficulties whatsoever, after 3000 years. Indeed, it exults and is exalted. They have hounded and harassed 'nature', but it like a stubborn donkey, won't go: indeed, like Balaam's ass, it seems to say, Have we not served you all these years, and look, you attack me! It makes no difference. It does not go. That is all (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 8!, Little Things Ch. 5,
A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3).

Science to the contrary is muddling into endless claims and counter-claims in just a few years, and sometimes sooner. The record speaks. It calls, from this alone, for what is commensurable with the results of millenia, contrary to the failures of the theories of mere decades. Let us be objective.

Verification is not subversible.

Those who wish a priori to exclude God and personality from the account, do not for this reason achieve objective grounds for criticism; merely illustration of their monism which is itself met by indefeasible destruction from logic (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, for example, and SMR Chs. 1 and  3). Genesis and the whole Biblical creation record, however,  does more than avoid all failure. It simply surpasses: it endures with majesty, in the very tone of its declaration, for the PRINCIPLES which we find, are wholly consonant with the DECLARATIONS of method, found in this book! That surpassing splendour, for what comes from God, is precisely what one would expect. It is assuredly what one finds.

If, on the other hand, without seeking to beg the question, you look at the work of God, is it so inadmissible that He should actually DO and SAY and PLAN and PURPOSE and ACT ? It would be like wanting mathematics without figures, numbers or logic! It is a mere dabbling with the self-contradictory.

In fact, Genesis first gives the vast and incisive overview, and then, a little later, the pointed preoccupation with the part which the divine mind is designing to focus: MAN, and how he in particular gained his precise situation. (Cf. A Spiritual Potpourri  Ch. 9, and in particular, *1, and Ch. 7.) We examine the moral brilliance likewise in SMR pp. 179ff., and consider the implications with other scriptures.

Dawkins seems unaware of the developmental thrust of the first chapters of Genesis, the descent from the majestic to man, from the general to the particular, from the creation to the desecration, in explication of all things. It is not wasted: omission would damage the conspectus, just as compression would distort the grandeur allying it with the shame, as is not uncommon with what is in fact mere musings of man.

When God speaks, it has style, sublime clarity in what it wishes for all, and his insistence on verifiability backwards (from his speech at any time) and forwards (to history confirming it at any time) is most emphatic (cf. Isaiah 48:3ff., 41:21ff.). Does it not occur to some that this CHALLENGE is in the nature of SCIENTIFIC empirical testing! Repetitious concepts are mere ad hoc application of philosophy! What happens must be tested in all ways, according to all kinds of events. Knowing the answer before you test is like becoming a magician instead of a scientist. It is not really recommended for science, and represents a blatant abuse of scientific method (cf. SMR  pp. 330-331 - the cult of the forbidden).
 
 

Secondly, the concept of duality is ludicrous in view of the intense, cohesive integral character of the functions in the text. Each chapter contributes its sublime and direct part to the development of the whole, like a body with working parts. Not to notice the body is not a good preliminary to the discussion of its parts!

What then is it like, to say this sort of derogation of Genesis, that we have witnessed in this report from Great Britain ?

It is like a test situation. Let us consider the thing in a dialogue.
 
 

Student: I had a low-power microscopic picture and then I took a high-power one. The resolution in the second was higher, though the coverage was less.

 

Examiner: When will you make up your mind! Which is it ? the high or low power one.

Such an approach is worse then appalling: it is evocative of thought concerning the utterance and the validity of any world view descending to such vilification of the straightforward. The case in Genesis in this respect could scarcely be clearer, and it is outlined in some detail in A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9, and in Appendix to TMR.
 

As to myths, see SMR pp. 378ff..

That is mythical which attributes powers to objects which show neither the latency nor the patency of power, and imbues natural objects with resources with which they fail to show any attestation; and which then seeks to imbue such things with illicit and undisciplined 'meaning' (cf. SMR Ch. 3). That is naturalism precisely, and the EXACT record of evolutionism’s niggardly and reductionist approach to the necessities of performance for production in every sphere and dimension, as for validity requisition concerning the attribution itself! It fails in process, principle, procedure and performance, and in domain validity alike. (Cf. Little Things Ch. 5, TMR Ch. 5.)

It is FOR THIS REASON, that it has no stability, and it is really rather evolutionisms than the singular,  since there is neither peace nor progress in its resolutions. It stabs in the dark; acts as if to mesmerise with endlessly protracted hopes; falls constantly and fails to follow scientific method with a ruthless seeming passion which appears to blind.

The Bible attributes to one demonstrably present (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10), whose word verifies itself without exception over millenia, the work of creation. It presents the data in the light of ongoing history of the most precise kind, often checked, and evocative of data which merely grow in stature, if possible, as they constantly meet archeological challenge, which, by the nature of the case, is a continual thing, and a good one (i.e. exposure to data).

Its method is explicatory, its manner is didactic, its procedure historical, its integration of all, total (cf.  A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9, SMR pp. 485ff. where wider fields of scriptural integration of concepts are displayed as well).

Indeed, in Paul, the fiat creation of the new-made world is once presented as a basis for the mode of donation, of creation, of the new-made life in the Christian, on conversion.

Thus he declares:

"For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6); and again, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: old things have passed away: behold, all things have become new" (II Cor. 5:17).

In all these things, the Bible divulgement, the valid depiction, stands unique. Its fulfilment in science's investigation merely the more confirms it, though science changes so in these fields that it has in some of them, but little reputation; and the Genesis-style, code-conditioning character of life is merely one of the remaining facts that continues unchallenged, being the more obvious as time progresses and research augments. (Cf. Joyful Jottings 16.)

What then do we find ?

No elements other than those in line with the sovereignty and power of God appear, and all things are coherent, consistent ^*8A and in exquisite logical array; but they DO have one provocation which, as in Romans 1:17ff., some find inexcusable.  In terms of the ACTUAL evidence however, it is THIS which is inexcusable! (TMR Ch. 1). The fact is that the Bible speaks of God and His creation in terms of distinct, simple, clear-cut, decisive, incisive, efficient and proficient action, orderly, organised, resulting in both the possibility and the actuality of history, which it immediately and in direct terms, in a most practical way, uncovers, inviting contest, meeting challenge, both explicitly and implicitly, identifying the source in word, as in ‘nature’ in deed.

Unacceptable to mere prejudice, this is the consistent and to be expected situation when God, as Creator, speaks to man as created. It explains, it speaks in relevant terms, it is consistent with both aspects.

What then ?

This rejection syndrome^*9  against the deity's declaration, indeed against the mere conception of it, this exclusion zone for thought, this anti-specification for logic, this mere miscuing of nomenclature does not stand when you get away from the mythological, naturalistic preconceptions, and turn strictly to a discipline which knows no favourites, bills no philosophy as if required before it tests,  and looks at results. That, it is scientific method. Just as a priori, validity is precluded by a world without absolute truth (TMR Ch. 5, cf. SMR pp. 999ff., A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, Barbs, Arrows and Balms  6 -7), so  a posteriori, verification is given gala treatment by the readiness and indeed appetite for examination and test, exhibited by the Biblical statements (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., Ch. 2, TMR Ch. 1).
 

This is precisely where scientific method makes a contribution. The fruits of the Biblical statements are consistent with every application of this method. This is outrageously to the contrary with the strictly so-called, evolutionary myth.

In sum: Genesis DOES attribute to God the things He created; and it DOES refer to His doing so. It is this of course, for the irrational and arbitrary approaches of naturalism, is IPSO FACTO, outrageous. It is however so clear, concise, consistent and supernaturally insistent, without trace of synthetic combinations, that it stands alone.

Moreover, the evolutionary myth attributes to something inexorably not attested in principle, in power, in perception, in residue, in verification, in any way, capacities it never shows.

• It acts as if strength or force equals intelligence and code-making facilities;
• it ignores evidence of and the constraints for the close casual connection of facility and ability;
• it imagines strengths where absence is the fact of observation and test constantly, without exception.

 
• It ignores every presentation of necessary assignable power, and its minimal prescriptions (cf. SMR pp. 252Aff.);

 
• insists on the presence of what does not show it,  where the visible renders the null-facilitating nothing the answer to all such tests; to the point that one physicist has loudly proclaimed nothing as the inventor of it all! (cf. TMR Ch. 7), which while a pointed reductio ad absurdum, does nothing to answer anything;

 
• and then has the facility to talk of Nature wanting, seeking, striving, meeting needs and so on,
• in a way not merely ludicrous, inconsistent and question-begging,
• but quite fanciful and utterly unsuitable for adult minds, dealing with non-leisure pursuits! (Cf. SMR pp. 211ff., A  Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3.)

THAT: it is myth, not as a term of revealing abuse, showing the disarray of the position being defended, that it must descend so far: but in this case,  by PRECISE AND ACCURATE DEFINITION, never invalidated. Is this evolutionism, then, A Beautiful Myth - à la Dawkins' specification for some things he evidently has read ? not at all. Its ugliness, anti-utility, obloquy, frank divorce from the ideals of many who nevertheless with a double irrationality hold to it, its infamy with facts which it murders as freely as the bodies of those whom its specifications inflame, such as Hitler and Stalin, its stark inadequacy to cover its field: all of these things are the height of the grotesque.

Again, in the absence of absolute truth, to declare it, is a contradiction in terms.  Validity does not attach to such antics (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7, TMR Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 3). This diversity from other seats of rational enquiry is another characteristic of myth.

And the correction for this, so much purveyed by Dawkins and many others, this in England, he would have as a ground for exclusion of schools ? Is he then recommending the demise of the authoritarian, high-handed irrationalist repertoire of evolutionism in government schools ? Not at all. Quite the opposite. Indeed, not only in government schools, it appears, but assuredly even in private ones, he would have this myth mandatory, teachers not holding to it in schools, told they are unworthy of the dignity of science in their professions.

• This is a recipe for decline, a proposal for national suicide, a defamation of truth and an instigation
• to the loss of that very thing for which England is - or rather has been - so justly famed:
• the insistence on fair play,
• due competition, freedom of expression.

When clarity is obfuscated, at least then, some may appeal for remedy.

Yet here, the concept seems a social forcefulness to determine these things with a myth which lacks all force, and can accomplish just what it shows itself to accomplish: nothing. When however the affront to both reason and to God is considered, it may indeed accomplish something, but that, it is not what is desired! It is a rough replacement, justice, for education; nor is it merely from above, but in the very minds and hearts of those abused with this delusion, and fed this mental drug with State-made spoons, that it comes so readily to be felt.

England once did - and now is in danger of losing this - one thing very well as the nations go: it insisted on performance in contest, the goods in context, competitive display of ideas and voluntary conviction about the result. Now, with the disciplined pursuit of the actual requirements of scientific method in danger of giving way, where what appears to be felt necessary for religious enthusiasm of those following the secular myths, freedom of expression and due competition, nearing the sacrificial pyre, England looks as if it may lose much more than the World Cup, for which also, for some time this year, it fought so well!

In spiritual things, there is always the greater tragedy, which so far from exonerating the misled, rather the more deeply brings out the error. When you for long enough, in enough ways follow what is against what God has said, and reason directs, and are misled by convention, corruption, complacency, ambition, contrariness or whatever other thing may eventuate, then one may see in practice the fact that the mind is not a mere machine. It reacts. It responds.

The spirit of man can be soured, or seared as Paul puts it to Timothy (I Tim. 4), and just as ulcerated flesh cannot act right, neither can a spirit so left, inhabiting a mind in this condition. Then wrong conviction actually can come to those actively misled, just as necessary unsoundness in the flesh comes to the ulcerated wound. It cannot sustain its arguments, but it certainly will try.

There is a balm that can heal even this; but then, when the desire for it is missing, the remedy is lost. Spiritual ruin is not a beautiful thing to behold in a nation, or in an individual, be the merits of self-protestation what they may. The ashes seem but the more acrid when one ponders that beauty either that was, or that might have been.

How lovely on the other hand is the compassion of God, not for the presence of  "a lie in my right hand" (Isaiah 44:20  ) amongst those who scoff, but  for the people who hold it, if at any time they may relent, repent and return to reality, and being restored, be redeemed. Listen to Jeremiah 31:18-20:
 

"I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself:
‘You have chastised me, and I was chastised,
Like an untrained bull;
Restore me, and I will return,
For You are the Lord my God.
Surely, after my turning, I repented;
And after I was instructed, I struck myself on the thigh;
I was ashamed, yes, even humiliated,
Because I bore the reproach of my youth.’

"Is Ephraim My dear son?
Is he a pleasant child?
For though I spoke against him,
I earnestly remember him still;
Therefore My heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord."

Meanwhile, the case seems rather to sport a certain virulence, perhaps expressive of a New England, not to be found in the USA East coast. Contrasted with the eminence of what is rejected, it is the most unlovely of newnesses.
 
 

Thus when Professor Dawkins is reported as strongly criticising Emmanuel College, Gateshead, for teaching creationism as a valid alternative, to evolutionism, he is not wrong in one aspect.

It is not a valid alternative: that is not a fair description of its degree of victory and mastery, its unique validity. Far MORE than this: creation is the ONLY available option, and evolutionism is an invalid, much varying, never stable, inconsistent and by definition, mythical alternative which is being used as a dictatorial substitute for reason.

However it hardly improves the position of the critic when what he excludes is the only answer! That nevertheless is the way things have proceeded in multiplied colleges, in terms of the cultural condition of the world, a vast, spirit of the Age, intellectually requisitioning and spiritually characterisable dynamic (cf. SMR pp. 422Qff., and cf. 316Dff.).

Thus this contrary-to-reason indoctrination course which is being so vehemently pushed in Great Britain, apparently in some cases at least, with a seemingly splendid surge of militant feeling,  changes things (not for the first time, but here very explicitly). At least, its aim is to change things, and since they have already been changed almost without limit, to the degradation of scientific method, the nation and its young, the change appears to be more likely to be one of the final thrust. However God is not mocked; and the sword, in principle, rather like the case of the celebration for a wedding recently reported, when the ammunition was wrongly inserted, wounds the bearer. In the gun case, it killed bridegroom and many guests.

The wounds appear in the end, though the scoffer mocks at first. That, incidentally, for this phase of our Age as biblically defined, is also predicted as an acute phenomenon: which as seen in this case, is precisely what it is (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5 on II Peter 3).

That sort of prediction some two millenia ago, moreover, it is just what correct method, and sound logic tends to expose when in mercy it meets truth: an exhilarating and continuing exhibition of reinforcement whether in the pronouncemnents of the revelation attested, in progressive logic, empirical compilations, verifications or  concatenations. Truth, it is like that!

Let us however consider the apparent aims of the British action, in terms of the report of the Guardian .

It has these three interesting features: if it were implemented, it would appear to

1) remove from the young, freedom of investigation and enquiry, in schools, including INDEPENDENT ONES!

2) dictate professionally in terms of myth to teachers, so that their abasement before this mythical idol (as it is, in that it is an implicit religion, in this case aggravated by having neither revelation nor reason to support it) could be made a condition of having work!

3) expressly cast doubt on the propriety of registration of a school, to say no more, if it fails to conform to the cultural clique, labelled aptly enough, naturalistic evolutionism, which in the simple light of fact, is a philosophy at war with scientific method!

So does England continue to fall, but not at this time, on her knees; and if she is not careful, she may yet find herself experiencing the ruthless cunning of the 'god of forces'^*1 which is always near at hand, using those deceived at one level, whilst its plans proceed to another. That is how it happened in Germany with Hitler. Not all saw his folly; not all balked as they should at his 'forceful methods' and it might have been thought that all this would stay at the level of balmy if impassioned politics. But it did not. While the mere provision of authoritative verbiage is not sufficient to stifle liberty; oppression of student and teacher, school and independence alike, moves further; and the love of myth, under whatever name, is a most unwise ground for imbuing science with this grossly defective exemplar.

Vigilance as Dawkins indicates, is indeed required, but the stifling of freedom of speech in favour of obligatory myths, wholly unverified claims, and this in the gratuitously rejected presence of what has only verification, whether in terms of its total presentation which is broad, or of the detail which often appears, and that over three millenia in its triumphant course, this is not its due application!  Rather it is to preserve what is good, what lasts, what endures, what wins, what has the victory, what meets the case, what leaves all opposition worse off than cripples who cannot move.It is not however creation that will suffer, but those members of it, those nations within it, which treat the case with cavalier contempt, from their ill-constructed falling wall. This is the pity of it, heightened immeasurably, when the young are made victims of the authoritarian assault.

The corpse of Christ did not fail to be resurrected; and the word of God, in this way impounded despite performance and validity criteria, will not be bound either. It simply continues to do what it said (cf. Isaiah 55, Matthew 5:17ff., 24:35). That is simply the way it is; truth is like that, and so attests itself.

Further, the case is merely aggravated when we consider that the Biblical report not only accords with all known scientific laws, but unlike evolutionism, virtually predicts (or if you will, simply declares) three main ones long before their 'scientific time'. On the other side, in terms of method, failure has been fatal already for the organic myth of naturalism, through lack of verification where required (TMR Ch. 1, pp.  5ff.), for in this sphere, negative verification after due trial, simply dispenses with a theory! Thus evolutionism has long died, but the funeral rites are engaged in, long after decay has been complete (cf. SMR pp. 315Aff., TMR Ch. 1). In this respect, it is a far more religious phenomenon, even than the World Cup Soccer, which can have music rather like boisterous hymns chanting away, and mourning like that for some decayed idol, when loss occurs, even at an almost national level!

If it is not 'nature', then perhaps sport or sportsmen, SOMETHING, our poor humanity NEEDS, and irrationally insists on investing with pseudo-divine dignity, lest in its departure from the living God,  it feel its nakedness, as at the first.

So it continues, this regime of what is rotted, this continuance with a theory ANTI-verified when in fact, this is, after due test, quite simply fatal. If it is wrong, it cannot be right. That is all there is to it at this verificatory level.

This combination of positive and negative elements, then, its total failure on the one hand, and on the other,  its total eclipse by what meets ALL requirements of scientific method superbly, and beyond imagination, makes of this dismissal of the latter,  a thing of putrefying shame: the term is not too strong, in contrast to that stridulous jactitation which is used, as against Christ in His day, so against creation in our own, that it might fulfil the biblical prediction, that so it must be!  Evolutionism is without support, hanging in space, kept there only by human gravity.

As to this furore, in some ways like that for Diana of Ephesus (Acts 19), one of the symbolic goddesses of earlier times, in its love of symbolism and 'nature', it is not new. Nor is it new in other countries today. Force (via law) is often used to seduce (in fact, whatever the intention) scientific method into an allure for what is never more than glamorised hopes, irrelevant oddities better explained by creation: and this in the light, or better in the darkness, of flat contradiction by anti-verification repeatedly administered to this ebullient, erratic, despotic and necrotic substitute for a scientific theory, this same evolutionism. (Cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3, 7, TMR Chs. 1, 8.)

It is to be admitted that something not far from this devastating revelation of the allure of this naturalistic theory has happened in public (that is government) schools in this one's own State, in Australia,  for a long time (cf. TMR Ch. 8); but the matter has not been nearly so public! And no resistance has been offered to the exposure of this imposition on young life, through the use of government facilities as an indoctrination forum. As one Minister of State declared, "I cannot argue with you." The cupboard is bare.

One says, 'Forum' ? Yet there is scarcely room for any debate at all, and none in science, so that instead of forum, what shall we call this situation of oppressed school-grounds, evidently afraid of freedom, excluding open rational debate for the children: an indoctrination camp ? But there is not usually night accommodation. Then perhaps an indoctrination regime, or more fully: an indoctrinative educational regime.

If it is less, it has yet to show the evidence, or give any rational, logical reply to the challenge of over 10 years which has been provided in this State!
 
 

Meanwhile, one may ask further where this naturalistic fallacy fits.

It is kin to the god of forces, as above, a defiling of reality with an abstractionism which loses even logical coherence in the telling. It is force without face, intelligence without mind, it is symbolism without thought, it is administration without source, it is code without thinker, it is construction without builder, it is nature without beginning or ground or cause adequate for its construction, it is something endlessly from nothing: it is invasion of categories without simplistic reductionism. It is magic without sufficient method, and methods exploded, for literally it is magic without any method at all, being thus the better magic, but the worse science, if that term, in view of the vast violation of scientific method, could aptly be applied at all.

In this lies its similarity with communism. This too needed a face, and Krushchev tried to give it one, to repair the omission in the robot face; but in the process lost his own place, and became a strange unslain survivor of a regime mainly noted for death to what it does not like, and threatens. Then it needed cash, and decided in Russia, its great point of origin in practice, to revert to other things, so that it could live.

In China, it did just the same, employing vastly the technical prowess of liberty as  found elsewhere, in its constructions, and the desire for gain, in its distributions, while keeping political power at the dictatorial level. It failed from the first (cf. SMR pp. 925ff.), and shows it to the last. But these, the naturalistic symphonies of which man is so proud, they do not work. That really is so simple even for the pragmatic, the empirical. Logically they cannot; and that is one good reason why they do not! (Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix IV, 30, It Bubbles ...Ch. 9 ... , Little Things Ch. 5.)

That, it is the way when death tries to live: it needs injections, and if left too long, it needs an undertaker. God, for His part, He never undertakes for naturalistic confusion, mocking its jejune simplicities and complicities against His manifest power (Romans 1:17ff., Jeremiah 2:19,27, Psalm 94).

So man blows himself up with arrogant pride, abuses science with invasive philosophy, and next, in the very glory of the inspiration, but with no little consistency with his first and fallen error, he wars on himself, to survive, to be strong, to show, to blow, to enact the whole saga of spiritual death, of which evolutionism is merely one exemplar, communism another. Both become mass killers in the exalted mind, and broken bodies of their victims. Inconsistency of morals with the underlying theme does not continue for long; it sags. It falls. Man then returns to his naturalistic worship, and this being a mere symbol of rebellion, he gets what rebels get.

Frequently he dispenses it, the one to the other, the one nation to its ilk.

There are two special features however in this, which distinguish this particular rebellion. First, it is against God, hence against life, hence its death toll is high, its life wearying and its soul destroying influence is augmented vastly. Secondly, it is against reason, so that reasonableness is never the spirit of the thing. This vacancy is increasingly in our day, whether in the seemingly almost pedantic insistences of many strikers, or many independent nations, or the sheer assertiveness of it, when the mordant determination becomes the theme more than the realism of the issues.

Strife increases its testimony, at once a verification of the revolt against the God who having made creation, has demonstrably laid down its rules, and for man, its redemption.

Man has fallen in love with his 'nature'; and then, as the imagined head of it, with himself^*10A; and thence, since his errant heart and clamant clamour is so great to the very heavens, he hates himself, and so wars and preys on himself, reason long since fled, and foolish mouthings of pretension and pretence, becoming his speechifying symptom of defeat. It is exactly as in Romans 1:17ff., from start to finish, staring man starkly in the face, like cigarettes in the light of atrocious TV advertisements, which at least expose the realities somewhat! They still smoke.

Man in general still rebels against more than his own body; it is against his own God.

Humanism thus raises itself on the wreckage of naturalism; and they seek to control, yes to seize the controls and direct, like naughty children with no idea of the nature of the home, trying to run it!

In this way, the excess of enthusiasm for man without God, finds

• man without man, and in need of repair,
• lacking individuality,
• with meaning excised by 'meaningless' thinkers who meaningfully tell us all about it,
• without ground for originality, scope for error,
• and ex all interpretative force for the whole round of human endeavour^*10.

Thus man so engrossed and controlled by fiction, is led by the nose, for  it plays about as in Communism, as in naturalism's legacy, with international forces, with laws and legalisms, with freedoms that do not work, with work that has no freedom, with theories of this and that kind which go on in martial order, to kill millions, till it sees that it should really INTERPRET, or it may die.

Confused, it turns to panaceas, which have failed so routinely that FORCE is the thing.

This direction  is seen in the new WAR ON TERROR, which is taking, in terms of pity for man,  some all but terrifying swipes at liberties, and these have vexed Australia in its political considerations, as it ponders powers by one man to decree organisations illegal, to hold without warrant and the like: all for safety ?

• For this, or perhaps the force deployed will also be for the purpose of helping people to find what it is socially DESIRED they should find, that sort of life, that religious direction which always implicit in naturalism, finds its own level when fear or love of fiction, arrant or rampant religious surges oppressing the defeated spirit of man, dictate. (Cf. the vast gulf between this and meta-religion, both in spirit and in result, in A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 15, *1.)

Just as Dawkins in his own way and in his own field wants certain things enforced, it appears, even what someone or other THINKS, so the whole direction of flow of the naturalistic fallacy, like that of fictitious religions without warrant, validity or verification, pushes man over the cliffs by which he so loves to walk. The preliminaries have been long. The academic assuredly is one of these. Long has it afflicted, in vast numbers of cases, the vulnerable student with its misused didactic authority, bringing in grievous servitude to irrational naturalism in the delusive appeal to ‘science’ when it is in fact to ill-conceived philosophy, as old as it is new, and as baseless in any day.

What Dawkins is speaking of is presumably merely social force, instructor pressures, examination requirements for a preferred point of view, authorisation pressures to remove from acceptance, those schools not yielding to all of this endeavour.

It is an appalling intrusion, by all appearance, which he fosters; and still it is not yet physical force.

It is this however which nevertheless will come in quick step accord with  the war on terrorism mentality, in such means as the new ICC (Ch. 2 above) and the new unities so zealously and confusedly being sought and in numerous other ways, as the various passions mount, including those of monism in matter, monolithic scenarios in politics, and social ideological babels, blaring their wares^*11.

Already the USA has become noted as a combination of Moslem and Christian, with Judaistic values and so on. The war on terror has evoked this comment from India, as will shortly be attested. The folly of the co-operation with Moslem (cf. News 195), and the praise to this religion, gratuitous for government, has already been observed; but our present point is that it is there. It is one of the many unity movements which are propelling societies and bodies towards unity. Fear propels; anti-God lust, seduces; natural desire for unity, perverted, induces. It all proceeds as predicted, and at an all but amazing rate, to the unity which is to come for the political power to dictate as predicted (cf. Revelation 13, Regal Rays from Revelation Ch. 11).
 

• It is all tending to unify, to congregate nations and powers and thoughts (cf. Red Heart, Dead Heart and Pure Heart Ch. 10, Answers to Questions Ch. 10) to get a peace before the pieces leave no need for it.
   
• There is passion in this movement which is galvanising the anti-God forces, the anti-biblical groupings (you see the Islam-Christianity approach gaining in the USA as an Indian witness very interestingly attested - More Marvels Ch. 10 cites it^*12).
   
• This passion is augmented by the passion for ONE which is a perverted distortion of the FACT that God IS one and that there is a unity for the race, a peace for the heart, an understanding for the mind all in ONE place, who is a Person and who KNOWS, indeed has declared it (cf. Isaiah 41, 43, 48; Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, Epilogue, and see Repent or Perish Ch. 5, A Spiritual Potpourri 1-3,  7, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9).

Biblically, as in creation, so in politics and war, in history, in redemption, in gospel prediction, the forecast of moral decline, ecclesiastical decline BUT NOT the failure of the church, of Christ's death prediction, and its date, that of the trend of events, of the special case of the Jews (cf. SMR Chs. 8 and  9, The Biblical Workman Ch. 1, *3): the word of God has it all.

In creation as in all the rest, it speaks, and it happens. The forces to the contrary surge and purge, renew and err again; but the Bible, it does not change, has no purge: it is merely DONE.

It does not change as does this erratic pseudo-science, this science falsely-so-called (SMR pp. 315Aff. ): it does not have to, for it does not - unlike this passionate substitute for actuality of method, go wrong at all. It just stands like Gibraltar, and will long after that has gone, just as it has for 3400 years and more, stood not only unabashed, but a tower impregnable, that cannot be destroyed,  already. That of course, it is what you would expect with the word of God; and as to the other, it is what you would expect of what contravenes, contradicts and seeks to replace it, not being God, and being contrary to Him.

It all fits. Everything fits: the only thing that does not fit, is this fit of imagination which wants to make scientifically theories, debarred by scientific method, to 'go on playing', like some erratic player from some errant club, which ignores the rules.

Politically and militarily, it moves as Biblically it must, as logically one would expect in view of the naturalistic fallacies, towards FORCE. If it won't work, says the distressed householder, MAKE IT! So in his ignorance, ill-temper or both, he tampers with it, using a ... hammer! Force is the ultimate depravity of abusive minds, when reason has been dismissed! Cf. SMR pp. 125ff., 154ff., 721ff., 750Bff., 707ff., Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch.  6, Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4.

It has come from various idols, naturalism being but one, in the past. The 'beasts' of Daniel 7 and Revelation 13, are, after all, nations, empires, fitted with idolatry, without the knowledge of God, doing their inane business, presuming into religion, exercising power in the domain which in the end, is also their doom. Intoxication is their spirit's frame; power is the lust; control is the quest; glory is distorted, perverted, and given to man, till his time comes. Meanwhile, there are the people of God, who being without change, with His word continually ineluctable, find in Him ultimate meaning,  ultimate direction and since He is eminently merciful, though never gulled, deliverance both now and ultimately, from judgment (John 5:19-23, 3:15-36).

In the meantime, oh they try, yes they try!^*13  There is some divine irony at such things, in view of the unscrupulous haste and waste so often found in the process. For example, in Isaiah 14, you see a picture of hell being excited at the prospect of Babylon, Great Babylon's king coming to join the ranks of the ruined, who went before him (Isaiah 14:9-17), and of course the sense of the satanic is not far away: the used goes to the user. Of no use are either in such a setting!

To take recent cases, there is a lack of ground for personality in the forces, the faceless forces, smugglers of God without a name, in Nazism, Communism and Humanism. The hideous pathos of the first two we have noted; but the last ? it talks of face, of meaning, but has no base, so that  it erodes into the ludicrous worship of man, which being unrealistic, produces the reaction of CONTROLLING and CONTINUING the BEAST! as in International Actions, shrouded in a sort of misty glory, tainted by error and prejudice, in ICCC provisions and the like. Man then sees himself as the lead in evolution, ignores the logic, and taking the bull by the horns, imagining he is the crest of the nameless, meaningless, causeless^*14 wave, tries to move it (genome, genetic engineering) the way he wants, and then ?

Then, waves not readily being bent, even surfies knowing there is a quieter place in the tunnel (cf. Wake Up World! Epilogue): behold it is as in II Thessalonians 2.
 

It commences; it ends: this Age.

The man of sin appears, showing himself in the temple that he is god, in a sort of spiritual display which ends the mockery of many years, the humanism, the naturalism, the evolutionism, the spiritual posturing and the irrational pretence.

He'll give it a face, man a place, as excavating from his nothing with relentlessly futile tools, he seeks the impossible and is met by the actual in the calling of the END, by God. This poor man, summing up the delusions of many for so long, he is god ? not almighty alas, any more than was Sennacherib whose robust pragmatism fell likewise in dramatic circumstances, since it lacked logic, principle and truth. You may trace that in Isaiah 37. This other ? it comes and you may trace it as it arrives, like all the other Biblical predictions (here II Thess. 2), mocked before it suns itself, its end accounted before it begins.

The end of the whole list and litany of beasts will not be other.

One of its first delusions is to subjectivise truth, then pragmatise it, then internalise it, then reject it, and then force rules. The other is to ignore God, and that puts man into the place where at last he deems himself best for the job, and what he does with it, it is already empirically clear. It has not worked, does not work, continues not to work, works more and more vainly with a payload of less and less and an appetite for more and more. The universe ? It merely makes no response. That is the nature of matter. It neither talks nor can make speech.

But the thing appeals. Hell does not. There is the cross-road for man, his will and his woe.

The other cross is the only alternative (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 10, TMR Chs.  2 and  3).
It is God's woe for man's weal, but man must first take his hands off the wheel, and seek the will of God, for which He made him. Trusting in himself is like garbage trusting in the bag. It is garbage because it is dead; it is dead because it is severed from the source of life, it is severed because it sins, and refuses redemption. It shrivels (Mark 9) because that is the end, where spiritual life was, the heat of exposure arising,  while death wilfully unmet by mercy,  insists on coming, even to the delusion.

The beautiful thing is this: that the garbage is not so by its creation; by its misuse; by its fate: it is garbage because it INSISTS on not being redeemed, and so dies what is called the second death (Revelation 20). The first death, it applies to the body; the second is the exposure to reality of the fictitious, which cannot live a lie in the light.

WHY WILL YOU DIE! is the exhortation of God!

Let us hear it (Ezekiel 33:10-11):

“Therefore you, O son of man, say to the house of Israel: ‘Thus you say, “If our transgressions and our sins lie upon us, and we pine away in them, how can we then live?'

"Say to them: ‘As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?’ "

For other related files, see News 1,The Other News 13, Joyful Jottings  5, and  14, A Question of Gifts VI,Wake Up World! ... Ch. 3, TMR Chs. 1, 6 and 7, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9.
 
 

*1 Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix IV), 30 - Highway to Hell,
The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 8 (the Spirit of Envy) , Ch. 10, Part 2,
Repent or Perish Ch. 5,
Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6, SMR pp. 125ff., 925ff.,  News 37, 118, 121, 122, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 8, Cascade... Ch. 5,
It Bubbles ... Ch. 11, for example.

*2 Cf. SMR pp. 707ff., 721ff., *11.

*3 Cf. SMR pp. 221ff. at *31, 226ff., 140ff., 108ff.,
Wake Up World! ... Ch. 5,
Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 10.

*3A

On myths, see:

SMR 202, 251, 252Hff., 305, 309-310, 315C-316A, 327, 332D, 378-385, 438, 443, cf. 934ff., 976, 999 with this note, 1025; and in
The Rest, News 111 (demythologising demythology cf. SMR pp. 374ff.),
Lead Us Not into Educational Temptation, Appendix, TMR 8, pp. 254ff.,
Answers to Questions Ch.  5 pp. 116ff.,
Wake Up  World! Your Creator is Coming ... Chs.  4,  5,
News  82, SMR 374-385, 252H-I, 422Eff., 999-1002C,
A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.  1-3,
Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 8;News 90;
Spiritual Refreshings  Ch. 16.
 

*3B
Of interest here is a summary after extensive reviews of many disciplines, in SMR pp. 422B:
 

Even when there is some element of spontaneity (and we men in part have a measure of it via our enduement with creative personality), there is need of a cause of the structure for this: which operates at its own level, all duly contrived, produced, conceived and constructed. No consideration of different ways of working removes in the slightest degree, the need, the necessity of causing what works. Nor does it remove the contradiction of imagining 'grounds' of the concept of causation, if not objective: a mere sophistry for begging the question. Calling into being on adequate grounds is, after all, causation. You can account for nothing by demolishing accounting: and scarcely speed its demise by assuming it. (Cf. pp. 332E-G supra.)

Objective causation, as we have seen, leads only to the transcendent, Almighty God who, in different domains and dimensions, has provided for a creation and a creative component, called man, indeed one both discrete and frequently indiscreet, whose insolvent insolencies include even this: that what is not there spontaneously produces what is; or this, that man caused causation; or even this - that a causeless base is the real cause, of what happens happening. Truly man is remarkable, when in full flight from God, for the works of pure fancy, fantasy and folly which he self-contradictorily dreams. That indeed, is what the Bible calls them - dreams (Jeremiah 23), the hallucinations of unholiness.

And the cause of all this hullabaloo, so often repeated as men seek a magic mirage to support their insupportable contentions, whether mythical or physical or whatever might be the current mode: it is a rebellion which try though it will, can never unmast the tower of reason from the ship of thought.³

Thus in physics we find this erratic passion, as also in biology and psychology: this irrational lust for result without reason. Just as in primitive iridescence of splendour, biology invents life by academic fiat, saying, Let there be Life, and there is not life, not even with man as mouthpiece, rather than matter; and just as psychology invents goodness, saying, Let there be goodness, and behold, from all this, no goodness arises, but merely a reductionism in thought which is only too aptly mirrored by the reduced morals of contemporary observation: so physics now has its turn. The universe must now likewise 'arise', with no causative interface, naked of ground, free of basis; deprived of observation: nor is law found for it; neither is means, nor basis for any of it. Frustration becomes the father of the universe!

The hilarity of it all is the more pointed for this: we are told the 'truth' of these magical potions from magical potentates who invent irrational 'reasons' while despising the integrity of reason; who tell us 'truth' while imagining scenarios not only necessarily deprived of truth, but in a system where it necessarily could not exist (cf. Ch. 3; pp. 30-41, 284-289, 299-316G, 321, 383-385 supra; 698, 934-936, 1014-1017 infra); who give reasons for unreason (cf. pp. 1-10, 30, 264-266, 284-310 supra, 999-1002A, Chs. 5, 10 infra) and grounds for groundlessness; who use what they abuse, and affirm what they dismiss in the very interstices of their thought. Self-contradiction always however has this delightsome result: contradict yourself, and others need not bother.
 

*4 For detail and data on translations, carefully reviewed, see Bible Translations.

*5 Cf. Joyful Jottings 5 and 14, with
News, Facts and Forecasts 121 and 122.

*5A

See SMR 236ff., 224ff., Wake Up World! Ch. 6, Spiritual RefreshingsCh. 13. See also Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 16.
 

*5B Using the reference to SMR pp. 179, the reader finds the diametrical opposition of all thought of using cruelty FOR creation, instead of rebuking sin by exposing it. Theistic evolution and its spawn, the usual invasive forces which seek either to bypass, ignore or surge into scripture, in which case merely using it for philosophic purposes in a sort of grand theft and plagiarism, not merely ignores the text (cf. TMR Appendix, SMR pp. 485ff., A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9), but contradicts the theme, thrust and morality of the Bible inordinately: hailing from afar, it leads swiftly to anithetical religion.
 

The commencement of the SMR treatment at 179ff., appears below, to introduce you to the reading of it.

EXCERPT:

The special pleading of popularisers of the irrationalism of organic evolution makes it desirable to deal rather directly with this aspect, for the sake of clarity: you might say for clarity about charity. As the exponent of charity, Jesus Christ is equally Biblically presented as the co-Creator with the Father, to use the apostle John's words, of 'all things'; so that 'without Him was not anything made that was made.'

The crisis of collision is perfectly apparent - it is a matter of using power to protect or using power to delete (others) and advance (oneself)... and we turn to the scripture to prevent philosophic accretions posing as 'Christian'.

Apparent, then, from the Bible are a number of points strongly relating to theistic evolution. At once, one recalls that Scripture concerning Jesus Christ, which states:

"He, though He was rich, yet become poor, that we through His poverty might be made rich" (II Corinthians 8:9).

He paid a ransom to redeem those who, being penitent and having faith in Him, were n themselves wholly unacceptable.

Imagined (*42) evolutionary procedures, on the other hand, hold rather a strong relation with the doctrine that a creature, though it be strong - rich, possessed of power to secure its desires - yet will annul the life of another creature, if its own survival (or perhaps even its own satisfaction) is at stake... and this, it purports, is the way of creation! The given creature will secure itself; and the devil, or anything else that may happen to be in the rear, take the hindmost.

This amiable philosophy holds the view: the creature must survive.'Thou shalt survive' echoes its elevating exhortation! This is the extra-Biblical commandment, here biologically pronounced. If the reason for it is less obvious, the popularity of this call with Hitler, Stalin and an impactive, large segment of teachers and politicians, those very vocal in these areas, is too well known to deserve further comment here. (Biblically, this is the creation's "subjection to vanity" - Romans 8:20.)

The two procedures, Christ's and this one, may now be related. They differ roughly as do God and the devil, harmonise 1ike plus and minus, are akin, like light and darkness. In the way of Christ Himself, one dies for the unfit (in the sense of 'deserving damnation'- John 3:30-36, Luke 13:1-3); while in the other way, the creature takes what it can get... (You might almost paraphrase the spirit of it: 'And be damned to the consequences for the rest'!)

*6 See his books Reason in the Balance, and Darwin on Trial.

*7  Cf. SMR Ch. 2, pp. 140ff.., TMR Ch. 1,
A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9,
Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6,
Stepping Out for Christ Chs. 7-10 for example.

*7A Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 7. and Cascade...Ch. 3.

*7B For the data concerning Popper, see SMR pp. 305-308, 145-148, 105.

*8  Scientific method: cf. SMR pp. 140ff., 226, 251ff., 234ff., 307ff., 315Aff.,
TMR Chs. 1 and 8,
and see indexes,
in SMR, as such, and in The Rest as a sub-division under science.

*8A See the factual presentation in contextual environment, in  A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9, esp. *1. See also TMR Appendix for more detail. Dispensing with facts, whether in 'nature' or the Bible, is no way to progress anywhere good.

*9 See SMR Index for the multiplicitious illustrations and nature of this syndrome.
 

*10
Cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 7, which covers this in detail,
SMR pp. 292ff., 257ff., Ch. 5,
Repent or Perish Ch. 4.
 

*10A
Indeed, it is just this now more than latent trend which has been increasingly exhibited as man probes, like some questing adolescent, intent on his powers, scheming ignorantly with the illicit, hoping as he strives, striving as he hopes, always wanting to be arriving, yet without his home from which he has come, like some some garageless car. Meandering, murdering, thirsting, bursting with energies untamed, resolve inflamed he careers; but the result can scarcely be called career by this stage, more a careering.

I AM becomes more and more nearly his inflated philosophy. It is precisely such a naturalistic myth which can lead to that ultimate solipcism, that utter disregard of reality, by which a man, called "the man of sin" (II Thess. 2:4ff.) is to rehearse his act before admiring humanity, and SHOW HIMSELF THAT HE IS GOD!

So do biblical predictions not only fulfil themselves, but prepare historically very often, with long warning if you are looking at all, a people for their judgment. It is like people in a canoe coming down the Niagara River, hearing a sound for quite a time, and feeling a vibration, so being warned; but feeling mighty and not at all to be intimidated by ANYTHING, proceeding as they row with great energy, over the head of the falls.

Proverbs 1:20ff. says it with incisive eloquence and rigorous realism.
 

*11

Cf. Dawn of Light Ch. 2, pp. 53ff., including the Scene,
News 121,
SMR pp. 732B, 743ff., 750Bff., with 374ff.,
News, Facts and Forecasts 8 - sham, shame and co.;  13 - symphony and seditions - two heady heads,  14 - deadly d's;
Repent or Perish Ch.   5 inventions in mind.

*12 The US, it was reportedly indicated, is now not a Christian nation, but a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic one! See the cited Chapter for this from ABC  News Radio report (red print helps identify).
 

*13 Let us consider here but one example.
 
 

In Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 8, we were looking at one source for endeavours, that of transcendent 'Nature', invested with deity, magnificently arrayed by imagination, but alas, like some beauty queen chosen for the wrong reasons, unable actually to perform!

One of the many chores which this humanistically sequestrated 'Nature' has to perform, one of the innumerable powers accredited to this idol that cannot speak, think or understand, but which through the provision of life, is in multiplied members endowed with instinctive exhibition of 'frozen thought', and in man contrived to be operative by creative brilliance, intellectual grasp, presented with the gift of understanding, spiritual perception, moral awareness, God-consciousness, wisdom's survey and error's blight (the negative of the photo!),  is this.

It must be made a maid of all work, for there is so very MUCH to be done. Starting from nowhere in particular, or simply nowhere at all, it has quite a feat to achieve. All these products must come teeming from its material grasp, and this itself, must come - the form of transmission is hard to conceive when nothing is the source - but from nowhere. Nothing without cause, can certainly be. Causeless, we can begin there. But there too we end!

'Nature' might be flattered, but it is supremely un-cooperative. Nothing of these kinds can it create; it merely plods along, and man proceeds along, just as made, without change of kind, without new inventions with new information, without further episodes, the equipment for them discernible in any way, the principles for them knowable at all, their procedures observed, their fitness accredited. Nothing is to be found. Thus when this collapse of mind known as naturalism proceeds, there is a lot to be done. It reaches everywhere, and finds nothing anywhere.

Hence it must serve, too,  in the fallacy of the dates. This is a sort of dance which has been invented by perverse human understanding, perverting practicality into unreality in the interests of the magic mystique of the magnificently foolish flop called evolutionism.

Thus enormous TIME is necessary. That is the normal sermon from naturalism. It is repetitive in the extreme, based on nothing, and achieves nothing. One is reminded of the days when at Scotch College as a chemistry student, one would hear: Smith, nought! It was the teacher's rather individualistic way of starting with the lowest mark, for the exam, as he brought out into the light of public air, the doings of the students in their test.

This work for 'nature' in prodigies of time, is similar. It achieves NOUGHT.

It is of course a mere misunderstanding, but as seen in *1 of Ch. 1 above, this is par for the course. If you divorce from God, then divorced in measure is all truth, the core and kernel of it, the viewing platform and the perspective of it, so that not only do you distort automatically, but your alienation as in Ephesians 4:17ff., Romans 1, is a ready source of self-defence, as of some desperate criminal in a law suit, moving here and there ill-advisedly, delinquently, as if to escape.

God exposes in practical detail such an attitude both in Malachi 2 and 3, the torturous excuses and manipulations, and in Jeremiah 2:31-37, Proverbs 1 and Isaiah 7, where the devious Ahaz in uninhibited vainglory, makes words serve one purpose, while his heart serves another.

It is not always conscious by any means. The scriptural attribution of blindness, sclerotic spirituality, reaches to the point of a pathology of principle so vast and so profound that endowed with arrogance, or endued with acrimony, it can declare infinity a zero, and a zero an infinity. You see examples in such scriptural sites as Isaiah 42:18ff., 48:3-8, and even good kings could wallow for a little, before being rescued from immersion in mud.

Thus Jehoshaphat - whose son was a monster among monsters, killing all his brothers for the sake of the crown and 'safety' within its purlieus - not once but TWICE followed the folly of his marriage to crucial collaboration with an unbeliever, by joining forces in war with apostate kings of the North, the sector of Israel which rebelled formally from the Lord, and working with kings of that land.

In the first case, he was almost killed by the treachery of his apostate partner (I Kings 22), and in the second, even the prophet Elisha called for music, before announcing the deliverance of the Lord for the straying monarch, declaring this. "If it were not that I regard the presence of Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, I would not look at you nor see you!" (II Kings 3:14). This word was to the improper partner for Jehoshaphat!

What! the grossly devious and delinquent son of King Ahab via an unbelieving wife, the now deceased King, the son himself now a murderer of distinction, namely young King Jehoram, who followed the ways of his apostate father, was he a right choice ? Was this Jehoram of Israel to the north, a fit companion in battle for good King Jehoshaphat of Judah! Heaven forbid... This almost fatal weakness of the latter, Judah's king,  his fall into fellowship with the forbidden, came to develop into something close to a kink, and it was this which led him twice into such false alliances with the North, just as Bush of the USA has a false alliance in Moslem lands, expressly handling the religious element the while (cf.  Red Alert ...Ch. 6, Cascade... Ch. 5 ).

It cannot be blessed (cf. Romans 16:17 with the above and see Cascade loc. cit, with Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 7).

Let us however now return from illustration of the desperations of biblically defined spiritual delinquency from the Lord, to the little matter of dates. Both attest making combinations and collaborations which are unfruitful!

It is remarkable what some people do in order to get dates. It is so with the affairs of the heart in romance. The slightest pretext will do, for the aroused emotions and desperate desire which motivates.

It is not limited, this desire in man, to such emotions. It occurs in the more profound devotion, or lack of it, to the Lord Himself, who very often compares the love for God with the love of man for woman or vice versa; for the love of God for man has created man with a potential for love.

In marriage, especially now that no-fault laws gloat over morality, it may degenerate into fraudulent sentimentality, not really valuing the other party so much as the emotion itself (not that sentiment rightly placed in purer quarters is anything but admirable). It may debase itself into disloyalty express and assured, as when one royal personage is reported to have declared of alliances outside marriage, in secret, that this is the way of men! It is not. It is the way of sin.

Man without God may DESPERATELY seek for a date of another kind, a chronological one: but with the same intensity, to propitiate the conscience, attenuate the arrogance or extend the sense of dominion in the false and febrile domain of inveterate imagination.

It is difficult indeed to find any other ground for the endless ignorings of data so tremendous in scope, varied in kind and amassed, which allow nothing in the billions, or millions of years, but only thousands for the age of the earth!

That, however,  is how the thing goes. To GET ALL THIS, we need TIME, gentlemen, TIME!

 

Its Magic

It reminds one of some Chinese business persons of one's acquaintance. (This is not suggested as specific, in any approach for Chinese persons, for whom one feels considerable cordiality as a race; but rather appears the particular proclivity of some  met, and as such, deserves its place, along with other perceptions of others with other features, whatever the race, elsewhere formed and expressed.)  As to these of whom one speaks: They do not believe this in commerce, it is clear. Desire is not taken for the result. On the contrary: They assign causes for results!

A house, said one, is not only a place to live: it is an investment. He bought several of them, and chose his districts with financial, if not spiritual, discernment. There was a massive price rise in houses in the city, and presumably he 'made' hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It was not, he would be quick to assure you, TIME, which did it. It was CHOICE, selection, wisdom, understanding of his own worldly sort (seeking such things as mandates, it seems), action, intelligence that did it. Time was a mere accomplice, not to the point. It did not create: it was a mere butt for action.

In this regard, the case is so. Time does not create anything. Intelligence IN TIME, as when we mature, that may create. WISDOM, spiritually pure and godly, in time may create greater depth of understanding and a more mature love, it is true. But the FORCE is not mere push; it is apt dynamic, directed intelligence, endued spirit, working with what IS, and what is appropriate and sufficient, namely God, not with what is irrelevant and laughable, a comic and derisible ditch for pearls!

No system creates: it merely illustrates. What it has, it gives. What it lacks, it cannot provide. Whether air conditioners, cars, cranes of computers, what is 'created' is precisely what is the enabling power resident within that system, and nothing more. There is absolutely NOTHING for nothing. When we say, thus, that the Gospel is FREE, it is true; but it did not cost GOD NOTHING! It cost the cross of Christ, the labours of endurance, the pure and pitiable cries to His Father (as in Hebrews 5:7); for He was not putty but man, and the bearing of sin is an infinite horror: yet He DID it because of who He was - and is. God is not defective; Christ, God as man,  did it. He did it with the full power of God; He did it with the full vulnerability of man, yet without sin (I Peter 2:22ff.).

Thus the passion for time is misdirected from the start. It is a reality without regality. In this sphere, it is irrelevant. (Cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs.  9 and 13.)
 
 

Its Maid does not Co-Operate: Its Evidential Abyss
Relevant Data and Discipline

On the other hand, it is also contra-indicated by the evidence. That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7, Section E, and Answers to Questions, Ch. 5 in section L and Appendix, SMR pp. S1ff., show some overview of grounds for this assertion. It is so. NOTHING can be understood of ALL the evidence except on a young earth notion. ALL can be understood however on just such an understanding.

There is only one  small major area of bitterly and astutely contested concern, the radioactive, in which specialised minds show a lack of concert, a variability and a brilliance which leaves the matter incapable of total resolution. What is known however emphatically removes the possibility of giving great age radiometric datings: the variables in this method, the uncertainties theoretically, or if you will, put differently, the mutabilities in some of the data presented as regulative of time measurement, are far too great for guesswork. They are themselves in need of measurement, and not all may be susceptible to this at all, as shown in the above references.

In this radiometric field, there is ONLY one sure result: the date of the foundation of this earth or the universe by this means,  is NOT KNOWN. It is presumption ALONE which can assign it.

There is however a coverage which meets the case, and in TMR above, this is noted, as is much further to cover the case more completely yet, and indeed from a logical perspective, entirely. That done, one notes that all then harmonises, from all methods of dating, whatsoever, with thousands of years, not millions, not billions. It is a simple fact that no other harmony is available. That in itself, in terms of scientific method, puts the biblical time of thousands of years as preferred. The two methods, from man's estimates and God's mouth: concur.

The bulk of evidence, taken as one whole in survey,  is clear and relatively simple, consonant only with a young earth. The rest, in this one area, is an arena of conflict, but with no current difficulty in the sense of disharmony. It is developing, as science must, and the current status quo is highly agreeable to all the other evidence, so that a coherent and unified scientific comment is available only from this direction, nothing else covering every item. The earth, quite simply, is comparatively young, if we are to follow all the canons of scientific method. That alone is what meets the whole scope of the case, and is contradicted by nothing.

The maid of all work, 'Nature' cannot even be requisitioned here, where physics strains at the leash for more understanding, and mathematics seeks to find repose. It is of the nature of the case that it should be so, as you seek to grasp the physical ultimates, and the more so when so many fecklessly imagine that these are THE ultimates, and try in vain to make them create, as if time and matter could account for the vast specificities* and galactic walls in the universe, which with many other features outlined in the above references, refuse to submit to such a slather of misrepresentation of their tasks, as the pseudo-divine naturalistic postulates would require.

Time does nothing but evince what is in it, if intelligence, intelligence, if wisdom, then wisdom, if brilliance of understanding, then brilliance, if meaning, then meaning, if truth, then truth, if judgment, then judgment. Man is in time and such qualities are in him, potentially, but only if he takes what is entirely beyond our time, God, whose these resources are, whence they came, He being their sufficiency, and indeed, the sufficiency of the entire universe which, without Him would have no cause, and causeless no chance of existence. In vain do they seek to make "nothing" king as we see in TMR Ch. 7 and Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29 and Cause. It really never could have had any future, which would make our time nullity; which manifestly it is not.

In vain, to they try to make 'nature' invent itself, then having made itself, make its qualities. This is mere magic, investing with the capacities not evinced ever, anywhere, in any way, systematically, in principle or in practice, in experiment empirically or in thought experiment noetically, in equipment or in its performance, what lacks them (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, *2). Imagination without discipline (cf. SMR pp. 287ff., 293ff., 313ff., 315Aff., 249ff., 251ff.) makes a discipline without imagination. That is, when imagination does not suffer the disciplines of thought, it leaves its field evacuated of that realism which makes of imagination a sound and useful worker, and disenables a topic from being correctly termed scientific!

Otherwise, it is the febrile licence of the unlicensed, working magic for children, unfit for the sober works of mature mankind!

* See TMR Ch. 8, Sections E and F. Here detail is provided, in this fascinating area.

*14
See Causes. Cf. SMR Chs. 3 ,  5, TMR Ch. 6. See also Predestination and Freewill, Section 4.

*15
 
 

  EXHIBIT C

This comes from Ch. 9 of The Kingdoms of This World and The Kingdom of Christ

Now we come to the dogma of  Dawkins, and examine such thoughts.

Chapter 9

THE DAWKINS META-MYTHICAL  CREATION

DAWKINS’ ILLUSORY DELUSION ON HIS MAKER:

TIME FOR REDRAFTING
WITH THE EYES ON THE ACTUAL TARGET

RATHER THAN ON IMAGINATIVE EXCRESCENCES

 MORAL: IF YOU WANT TO CHARACTERISE,
LOOK AT THE OBJECT FIRST

        EXAMINING A META-MYTH,

ALAS, LIKE THE DARWIN MYTH,

MADE IN ENGLAND

News 411: The Film from Ben Stein: EXPELLED

The text below has some additions.

A myth, as in Dawkins' evolutionism, is the imaginative postulate which ignores necessary causation for an assumed result.  A meta-myth, as in Dawkins' hideous caricature of God, is one which is set on a different plane, creating out of God plus imagination, to defile or deface, or both, an illusive and defective deity, which explains nothing, but illustrates a mix of human presumption and defilement:  so that you snatch defeat from victory, and end worse off than when you were merely subject to mytho-pathology.

Let us see his meta-myth.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”  Such is his acrid aversion as exposed in his work,  "The God Delusion," which logically is this delusion, that there is no God, no eternal source that anything might be, nothing adequate before it, that it might be as it in fact is. These evacuative excursions lead nowhere as they come from nowhere and rest literally on nothing, all else being a question-begging rampage (cf. News   21, Alpha and Omega: Discount That and You've Got a Muddle in the Middle Ch. 2, especially as marked).

The fiction which Dawkins creates about his Maker is as spurious as his language is furious.

If Dawkins' explosive  literary enterprise is not in the category of intended fiction – and one has no ground for thinking his anti-God crusade (he admits he believes in NO GOD AT ALL) is fictitious, nor the money made from it a specious pretence – then what he has to say is so unrealistic, slanted, biased, inaccurate, that had he just been divorced from the Lord, even then, it would seem rather grandiose for pure hate. It would need surely something more to account for it psychologically, since theologically it is a mutation from fact and historically it is an invention of fable.

In Secular Myths and Sacred Truth, the factual side of things concerning the God of creation is presented, as indeed in The gods of naturalism have no go! more broadly.

But let us look at the construction Dawkins makes of his Constructor, of the aetiological basis for the myriad of correlated laws and orders, commands and integrations, and his (implicit) invocation of intelligence with spiritual perception sufficient for him logically to argue for or against God without a ludicrous faux pas to end all faux pas. That ? It is to assume the capacity to state truth (not fiction, though he seems to want to extend fiction's terrain in a compulsive sort of way),  while first abstracting absolute truth from his model. It is hard to use what you exclude, but not too hard for this assailant of God!

Despite the model, he happily uses it, trucking and nestling WITH the absolute so callowly dismissed,  and so inventing it by his own fiat, all over again.

Dawkins spoke, and it was so. This is fine, except it does not happen that way at all. The contrary is in this relevant field, the case in a somewhat systematic manner. In the major part of this thing, he speaks and it is STILL not so. It is enough in this instance, to examine the Dawkins assault on God on the one hand, as summarised by him, and the book from which he supposedly draws the data for assault, and to compare them. That is the method here.

Thus the Professor speaks; however Dawkins is neither God nor able to act for Him, having dismissed Him, as did the USSR, telling Him, before its fall, it depart, bag and baggage, from the joint. That was before it went bankrupt.

What is it then that Dawkins has made: it is a god with NO credentials, an invention of his imagination, spawn of his own brain, a caricature of distortion drawn tauntingly from the Bible, compressed, extended, poked, subjected to addition and subtraction and in a general sort of way, made by this creator's hands, a contorted clown from a creature's hands. However, man is never any good at making gods, for whatever purpose, to taunt, to ridicule or to worship. It is all one. It simply does not because it cannot work. It is action in reverse gear. You take God as He is for what He is and has done, or you enter a dreamland, whether for defrauded worship or defrauding consignment, as if to reverse reality, and send to a hell of demonisation, the God who made us all.
 

These human creations  don't have what it takes: something infinitely more than the imagination of man; for man merely is a derivative creator, and for this being, this creative snippet to make the Creator of the power to derive creators, of a type such as man is, this is mere mockery both of intellect and of God.

Thus, when man systematically removes, by modelling, what has the power of God so that His provisions are aired off, being zapped, then he has no logical power to assess truth. All he can do is talk about what happens; but this is precisely where he fails. NOT GOD does not happen. On the contrary what happens is in such unique and systematic conformity to the God of the Old Testament^*1 (who is as it happens, also the God of the New Testament, the composition of testimonials being named the Bible), that Dawkins' meta-myth, obtained at such expense (that is by removing God from his model), becomes the more ludicrous.

NOTHING works for him. He has no beginning, yet he begins. He has no absolute truth, yet he presumes to know it in a contra-model extravanganza of invention. He uses space, but does not know its source, time but does not account for its existence, evolutionary progress but does not show one instance of its occurrence, or the machinery for such machinations as express themselves in the DNA symbolic information which commands.

Time happens; space happens; commands happen; and then things progress from this triple failure to account, by methods which do not show themselves in the laboratory or demonstrate themselves in verifiable hypotheses applied to visible matter. This is failure stark and total, an ebullition of anti-religious fervour with the force of missioning; but fact is revolting from the coercion on all sides.

Having made the thing, by imagination (any engineer might tell you that that is not the same as making it by power and intelligence), divorced himself from this invented idol which he attributes to God while rubbing GOD in ENTIRETY out of His system, he fails to supply the most elemental substitute: WHAT WAS THERE FOR EARTH AND LIFE TO COME.  No idea! says he, while as if the employ the asininity of irrelevance; but he does provide a clue. Maybe, he says,  maybe,  slowly ... slowly^*2,  aliens got the intelligence stuff, (itself coming to be in some way or other, presumably, in order to be ... got, or just ... BEING there).

It begs every question, puts 'there' all that is needed, and shamelessly evacuates any logical semblance of basis.

What then is the picture ? Somewhere ELSE, all that is needed here, happened to happen;   in some happy way, it  happened (the fields are greener elsewhere), so that some alien type of thing, having 'come to be',  drew up to earth (which had come from other things that happened to happen in the meantime), disembarked or did whatever was necessary to put its august intelligence into touch with this orb, and  so having landed, proceeded to do the earth stuff, in order to make it all and all that. The earth ? presumably it was just ... around. It got itself assembled from the other happenings which came from nowhere in particular or in general, and all nice and apposite for the intelligence bit, imported from beyond.

If this is not nebulous, what could be!

The language above, deliberately chosen, is to illustrate the quaint, eccentric seeming indifference to the whole point: WHERE FROM AND WHY ? Is it not enough to invent death as a potency for life, as in survival of the fittest, removal as a portent for arrival, and to imagine that the whole work just does itself, without going even further into the realms of absurdity for any rational discourse, without proceeding to remove ANYTHING from even being of interest, which IN FACT was there at the first ? It does not even MATTER. It just IS.

THIS, however,  just is an evasion, fatal to logic.

Now what we have  IS TWO TYPES of approach.  One is that something unknown just is, and has no known powers or articulation with anything, a blob of nescience. The other is that what had the power sufficient for the observable result, the universe, was there (for if nothing were EVER there, and were all that was, then it would still be so; but it demonstrably IS not!). Some of us are here, and here is ... in place, for example.

As the universe manifestly is not creating itself, shows no power even under maximum stimulus from man's intelligence, to do so, it is necessary to find what made this intelligible orb with its intelligible commands and its intelligence in man, and its laws, forms and formats in matter, its commands in our DNA construction camps, its contrivances of advanced mathematics in our own construction and the mental powers to know, test and consider this, available to our operation. You do not find this by saying, UGH! or I do not know. That is not testable, and a forlorn contribution, as when some students sitting an exam, do sit, but nothing more, being stage-struck, or defeated. It does not earn anything, for nothing is there to assess. It is not just failure; it is nil score.

As to the adequacy of what was there for its results, and the testability of this, its predictions biblically, its coherence logically in terms of a validity missing from atheist, and all that does not know God:  empirically, there is ONLY ONE place. The Bible has been factually verified and logically validated as the ONLY PLACE where this is done. TO vacate that place and to substitute something or other, with no known or testable features is an extravaganza of anti-science. The essence of science is twofold: imagination to find what MIGHT meet the case and testability, verifiability and of course validity, to confirm or deny the hypotheses. NO hypothesis is nullity, and of course in any contest gains NO marks.

It is rather like the case in mathematics. My son tells me that of the pet no-nos of mathematical teachers at the tertiary level is this: that when someone is asked to provide a proof of some mathematical proposition, he might just proceed from the beginning of what is given,  as far as he can, and then work backwards from the hoped for end as far as he can, and then just say: BY INSPECTION, then, we see that this is so. WHAT inspection ? The thing is to be demonstrated in point by point provisions of symbols, not just imagined ... in, by a fatuous wave of the presumptuous hand! Do that, and fail! That was the position, and a just one.

It is so here also.

Remember, then, that this universe CANNOT come from nothing, for what has a future is SOMETHING, not nothing: it is SOMETHING WITH potential. Nothing is a definably self-contradictory hyptohesis.  What was it in the beginning ? Professor Dawkins advises frankly that he does not know. How were things made to come ? He does not know. Why then, why not show us the current creation of information, the arrival of the sort of thing in view, the kind which, empirically, has internal differentiation power within its type ? He does not show.

What is this ? A carnival of imagination. It has nothing to do with science, nothing at all (cf. SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION).

Time however is no answer to logical need, any more than is space, and begging the time and space and matter question is rather like saying that mathematics 'arose' because numbers 'arose' and intelligence 'arose' so that the conjunction of the two could bring forth fruit in logical abstraction, the power to perform with which, this also 'arose'. This is quite definitively, ANTI-SCIENCE, myth and fable, and this is PRECISELY what the Bible said would come, when our Age was coming near to its end. If such things did NOT happen, the Bible would be wrong; but they happen as many scientists dare to so cloud the issue that they in effect assume materialism in order to think.

First, this is mere prejudice. Secondly, it assumes the validity of mind in order to reason to the basis of all in matter, so contradicting itself at the outset. It is in fact multiply  logically irrational (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2);  but whether with this pundit or that, such freaks of thought not only happen, but are used as invalid bases for insistences on philosophic preferences in the name of science, itself a name which forbids untested prejudice and irrational hobby-horses, and has stature as a result!

This is now occurring,  with a consistency and a constancy, a continuity and an oppressive hand in many cases, as if the whole effort was to FULFIL Biblical prediction, which it does (read II Timothy 4:3ff.).

That is one of the troubles when people are fighting God: He knows what you are about and even tells you before you do it.

Give what lacks what is needed forever, a moron a pen and paper, and it still does not produce. Time does not create: creativity does this. Time merely gives scope to what has what it takes to do its stuff. Remove what it takes, and time is irrelevant. Space does not create; it merely gives place scope for what has the power, to do its stuff.

So in turn, TIME and SPACE are used; but the source of both is not even touched. Forces, powers, constructive creativities, these are assumed, but not mentioned; these act but are excluded in the province of THE FORBIDDEN^*3! This is a substitute by authoritarian, cultural occlusion, for science. It has become a CULT, the cult of the forbidden. Its exponents, as is normal in any cult, are inflexible, unreasonable, militant, use means to manipulate, do not desire free discussion, or if they do, have no answers when pressed, but a kind of 'faith', which differs from the Biblical faith, in this, that so far from being independently demonstrable, it is demonstrably assumption without ground, and both in experiment and direct observation, it does not have the felicity of exhibiting itself at work.

This is a fine demonstration of the beginning, which simply OMITS it, and having BEGGED the question, proceeds contrary to evidence, to invest what is here, with what it does not show itself able to do, either in principle or in practice. And THIS ? It is some kind of ground for insulting the God whose works DO show themselves as demonstrated over and again on this site!

Indeed, in the EXPELLED Film noted, Professor Dawkins indicates that he would confront God with the question: WHY did You hide yourself so well ?

Hide ?

	What is hidden is taken to be true,
	things that do not happen are taken to be sure,
	things that are not implied are alleged to be necessary,
	what is bidden is taken to 'happen', commandments in symbolic, multiply interactive language in DNA are the speech of ... chance (in terms of an penultimate source*3A in matter,  which yet is never known to perform that species of mental operation known as making a language and applying it by command to create integral results, let alone the best ever seen on this earth),
	what is the greatest exhibition of the definition of design*1 is taken to be non-design,
	what breaks all logic to exist, is taken to be an option,
	what is demonstrably the word of God*3B is taken to be unworthy of thought,

or if given thought,

to be hate where it says love,
inequity where it insists on exquisite justice,
manipulation where it says mercy,
irrelevant where it continually fulfils itself in detail -

one of which details, as in II Timothy 4, attests itself
in those  at work like Dawkins himself, in mythical replacements to deity;

and where it designates the very leading features of this part, this predicted terminal part of our Age, it is taken to be unworthy of attention.

This it does with a rigour which is the more amazing in this, that it predictively, from millenia away, captures military, geological, financial, oceanic, political, electronic matters directly or indirectly, national ones as with the Jews and Israel in GREAT DETAIL, international ones, those concerning the development of knowledge and travel, morals and churches, false messiahs and religious trash, anti-flood imaginations (as if to ask for something worse, being uncorrected in conscience), ferocities, hypocrisies, platitudinous pretensions such as those of the UN, a coming, blatant international cohesiveness amid warring sub-themes and far more:  and yet does not speak of God. In fact, this level of competence is impossible EXCEPT from God, for even ONE change at ONE point would have vast ramifications by further interactions; and only complete competence in all knowledge can perform in this manner.

Likewise, it forecasts the premium on myths, such as organic evolution, Marxism, Freudianism^*3C, which ignorantly fume away in their illicit reductionisms attributing grounds that do not cover the case, and inducing expectations which do not arrive, as well as making claims which contradict their own bases, being not merely fabrications of what cannot happen, but artificers of what will not happen, mechanics without engines, prophets without evidence, false prophets amid falsities and false claims and false christs. It is presented in detail in SMR Chs. 8-9, Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and almost passim on this site.

Yet it is ... hidden ? The ONLY things that are hidden are the grounds for these myths, the morals for their imposition, the reasons for irrationality: but even that, it is covered in principle in the Bible as in Romans 1:17ff., which has come true as a prognosis, fulfilling itself successively, impressively, being impassive to pretence, piercing in coverage, assured in outcome. The facts of God are so obvious that it is only by hiding from them, and attacking without ground, claiming without foundation, that any words at all can  still be even spoken to the contrary.

The Bible's insistence, in Romans 1,  that the things, the divine nature and eternal power of God are obvious, and that man is holding down the truth (like a wrestler) are confirmed in book after book published, lecture after vapid lecture which trails its vainglory in the dirt, polluting the coming generation in these fields, while the total testimony of God continues irrefutable, rejected by ignorance, assailed by desire, unchanged by violence.

Let us even consider once more for a moment, the alien approach. As shown, this is in argumentation terms, a mere slide: the need is logical, not geographical; and moving it to outer space is a species of geometrical irrelevance of so high an order as at once to exhibit the fraud. It CANNOT happen here, so it HAD to happen elsewhere, despite the logical void.

THIS is the reductio ad absurdum in exemplary mode. Desperately unevidenced, the invention of unkind necessity,  irrelevancies of this kind, are a sound demonstration of the straits of mind which led to such fantasies. It is barren. There is nothing there.

Little figurines are captured, as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and made to strut about, arriving en scène by the playwright's audacious fairy tale composure; but we are not here interested in fairy tales, about aliens, but strict and stringent logic. If we want fancy, we can turn to Shakespeare's romance; if we want fact, it is time to alter things, and ignore the little aliens creeping about in their disastrous irrelevant.

Displacing a logical need in space, or in time for that matter,  does nothing to the point. It is merely a trip, as with a drug; then you come back to where you were, and still have to get on with it, and face your problems: here God! For some He is a problem, because they do not want Him; but problems must be faced. In vain, such person apply themselves to the pursuit of attacking the One with ALL credentials by means of the logic which ONLY God can sanctify as even meaningful to truth.

The devil, we find in the Bible, would like to displace God and BE it; but it did not work (Revelation 12), for there are too many advantages in any contest, for one knowing all about the foe and having no limit to his power. Even the devil, for all his ambition, however, knows well that God is; and trembles in the mode of devils (James 2:18), and rages (cf. Revelation 12:12), as the case may be, depending on the particular spirit-pathological item in view from time to time.

We continue to examine Dawkins' verbal assault on God. He considers more as we remind ourselves of the litany of negation.  

"Jealous and proud of it" - that was one of the terms.

However, Dawkins, for his own part,  in the words heard in the film, "Expelled", appears jealous of the reputation he has for being anti-God and of any work, impact, selection he can make through the fire, ire and flirtation with unreality which it constitutes, and of any effort to remove the pith of his case. He seems to want to possess it, and to destroy any opposition...

From what he says, he apparently thinks it would be a matter of sadness, loss, false leverage, antithetical to what England and this world needs, should his words be disestablished (as they long have been, for he has merely essentialised the stirrings of many for centuries, long answered). He is jealous of his reputation as an instrument of proselytisation, or if you prefer, for acclimatisation of humanity to his virtual crowning of  King Chance as Creator Extraordinary, a royal entity having neither wit nor mind, but creating both. He would safeguard this, be zealous for its continuity and seek to be faithful to his conception, and its relationship to himself. In other words, to use the idiom which means all this: he is jealous for the impact and sustaining of his theory, for any displacement, seeks success for his concepts and removal of any success for its opponents, seeking to preserve it with a faithfulness such as a swain has for his beloved.

It would be difficult to receive any other kind of impression from the words he utters in the sound-track of the Film. Jealous in this case ? It is just a matter of words and imagery, but such is the way we sometimes use lover-imagery for ideas, concepts or positions, simply by metaphorical extension.

Now if God had been, that is the God of creation, of the Old Testament, the verified and validated one^*1*, in some way akin in His passion for the kind of thing we perceive in the case of Dawkins for his own tribe of those interested in his anti-God litany, it would not be entirely surprising. It is a matter of the BASIS for such an attitude, and of the necessity PURITY in truth as benevolent because right, knowledgeable and so unpresumptuous. This is needed for the metaphor to be not only applicable but an expression of zealous benevolence. If invasion occurs, it is hard to have to fight, but it is necessary if you want to deliver the victims. If madness occurs, it is hard but you may have to shake up the perpetrators ...

It is commonplace for such zeal and desire to preserve what someone holds valuable, sacred, necessary, good and productive, especially when sullying of its reputation, its name is associated with harm to those it is designed to protect. Thus for a person to be 'jealous' of his reputation does not imply that he and his reputation are having a fracas, and he want to abuse the poor thing, but THE OPPOSITE. It is necessary to understand language, and its application. It would mean in that case, that he was zealous to preserve his reputation from being stolen, maimed, dishonoured to the point that his work and function could be so compromised as to render him if not useless, then far less effective for any good purpose. That would be the sense of it.

The term, in other words, depends on the concept of ideas, the subject and objects of reference and the usage, metaphorical or other, and the stated milieu of its usage.

It may be a good thing; it can be a bad one. It can be positive; or negative.

However, God, the God who made heavens and earth, intelligence and the power to weigh things objectively so that what is affirmed is not reaction, but a contender for truth, has no relationship to such a concept in its negative reaches, perfectly understandable though it would be in the positive;  and though it is one which could apply to the unsubstantiated assaults of some atheists in their misplaced and even destructive zeal - assuming the reader had any sense of usage and imagery at all, it lacks in application to God. The 'jealousy' here is informed, rational, benevolent because based in truth (which happens to be demonstrable), is designed to protect, to prevent pollution, distortion, exclusion of goodness, spiritual disease, and to magnify life to the uttermost in its recipients. For their preservation in truth and with the light of eternity in their spirits, He has a zeal which in matrimonial figurative speech, is 'jealous'.

Its parallel, in Dawkins' zealous exhortations to his clientele,  is not commendable because not well based; and there is not the knowledge to make it objectively benevolent, or practically effective. In other words, the attack he makes misses the mark in God, but not entirely in his own presentation. It is in this measure, not so much a matter of the pot calling the kettle black, but giving this attribute to a gleaming, stainless stell, brilliantly washed vessel.

In the case of the Lord, indeed, the imagery is SPELT OUT. In Ezekiel 20, 23,  we find the nations of God’s interest as ambassadors of His truth to this world, spoken of as sisters, as women, as being faithful or rather unfaithful, but in this category, to the Lord^*4. After all, as you see in the last Chapter of Joshua, they WANTED to be so allied to the Lord, and to be under His express and total jurisdictive oversight, to serve Him as Lord as HE defined it. To do otherwise and still use His name was like unfaithfulness in a wife. If then the husband were to be jealous of His name, of the disruption of the same by a contriving and devious wife, we could understand this without the slightest EXCUSE for the diabolical distortion of which Dawkins is author, or should one rather say, since the idea is common, one presenter.

However, even this is far from meeting the actual literary criteria of the Old Testament context. To say all this would still be to short-circuit relevant aspects of the divine presentation, making it libelous to issue suit against God, even if anyone went only so far. The case is far more serious. It is, by the way, quite an accomplishment to be libellous against one’s own Maker! The context should prove interesting, since God does not sue or need to, in secular courts. Courts may be used where reason cannot come ... can become a substitute where failure seeks cultural aid, a crutch for its deficiencies. Sometimes the Lord allows people like Bernard Shaw to inveigh against Him for quite some time, before their pathetic parades die with them, supermen being not particularly handsome after all, or long-lived.

GIVING SOME ATTENTION TO RELEVANT FACT

In fact, in this same Old Testament, here under Dawkins' scrutiny in order to characterise the Lord in it, God is presented as a Lover of Man. Not only that, He is a SPECIAL lover. Some lovers may think of happy times spent together with their loved ones, in which the beauty of Spring, the loveliness of lakes, the mutual sharing were as birds in the skies in temperate climes. They think of a creative episode, a sharing of personalities with éclat and joy, and if then someone comes with lustful countenance to seduce one party or the other away, it is a matter of jealousy. This can mean either

	a) low-grade seeking for self’s satisfaction or
	b) a devoted, pure, sacred, holy and just desire to preserve the departing one from what is rightly perceived as an illusion, a breach of what is lovely, an unholy alliance, a dalliance to hurt if not destroy.

It depends on the case, what is the nature of the ‘jealousy’. It may be beneficial and self-sacrificing, seeking the best for the beloved with informed conviction, or it may be artificial, a mere presumption in seeking to have still with one, a soul who was ensnared by one’s own evil devices, or whatever. It may be sincere or not; and it is by no means to question anyone's sincerity, to say that they are mistaken, wrongly led, doing harm. The inward state of the person's motivation can by no means be equated with the outward results of error. You cannot 'guess' the motive, or simply put it there, the way some are putting WHAT IT WAS there, by nescient insistence. There is ALWAYS need for attestation; guesswork is NEVER good enough, let alone nubilous guesswork.

To assume the one or the other kind of 'jealousy' then,  is mere anti-scientific erraticism (you NEED that word), because it does not check the facts to determine the case.

Let us however further test^*4A and check the facts in the object under review, which Dawkins specifies quite clearly, the Old Testament.

In THIS case, the Lord once more is explicit, express on the point. He loves Israel (Hosea 11, Deuteronomy 32:11ff., 7:6-8, Isaiah 5, Hosea 13:14ff., Micah 7) with a heartfelt love, so pure that it is that of the Creator who knows and invented man, and selected a nation for peace, blessedness and purity, for the display and reception of redemption, reality and realisation of the wonders which life contains – or as Christ put it in the New Testament, for having life and that more abundantly. These are specifications of motive, desire, atmosphere, perspective. In parallel, someone may be known as a mingy, crimping, money-ridden puppet of commerce and despised, when in fact the care with money in SOME case may be BECAUSE of a passionate desire to spend on those in need; and the one who saves it to give it, may be of the most liberal and merciful disposition.

MOTIVE MATTERS. Truth matters, Reality matters. Ignoring specifications is not wise, where scientific accuracy is in view, to say no more!

What more then is to be found of this Old Testament divine love ?

It is a love equipped with absolute knowledge from absolute creation and absolute wisdom (Dawkins' absurd failure to account for the entire arrival of reality is pathetic  in contrast, an untested and unverified imagination, which does not even reach the 'height' of being equipped with features at all!

This Old Testament fact at once removes Dawkins' concepts from being a scientific account – it is like saying that concrete and girders and cuttings arrived somehow on the building site, and the site arrived without being purchased, and the building went by means which have nothing to do with how the stuff got there, or there got there, and so forth. This omission of the necessities for commencement, in blathering or verbalising uselessly in the face of necessary causation (cf. Causes), has logical results, then. It renders the whole atheist construction presented little more than begging the question. Obviously, whatever put the place and the time and the stuff there, is causatively highly competent to the cause and relevant to the result; so that removing it, removes the lot.

Thus to ignore such issues is to admit irrelevance. Such are atheism’s toils (cf. SMR Ch. 10). Indeed, you need ‘something’ to invent causality and the relevance of what is put there to its operational functionality. This too ? omit it ... or as they say in the vernacular, 'forget it!' But in systematic work, it is not possible to forget. It is the issue!

THE SUM OF THE SCIENTISTIC

IS A NEGATIVE BALANCE

With what scientifically observed things, functions, operations, verified by reasonable attestation then will you place your order, your tall order ? With Dawkins, he does not know. It is explicit. He does not know the MAIN thing; and then he seeks to argue for minor things (by comparison with substance, time, space and causality, these being principial operatives and not consequential outpourings).

This he does,  by means invisible to observation, inscrutable to thought, expressible only in terms of a magical connivance of phrase with nullity; and then, as if this were not enough, he proceeds to have them improve by removal. Take off the mullock and just SEE how the new houses come, each made step by step, in logical array, and in our case, with facility to deploy logic. Objectively the penetrability of what is investigable by us, and the power in parallel and in intimate connectivity of symbol, to investigate, plus the purpose to do so, and the verifiability of results are indicative of a coherence of conceptual control.

Biblically, we learn that the WORD, ever and eternal with God, who was God (that is, the WORD of God is not as with us, just what is spoken, but the very everlasting power of speaking, acting, enterprise in rationality, the mirror of His being as in Hebrews 1), this spoke and it was done. ALL things were made by Him. If you want to see testability, then, examine man and matter, mind and the potency of all (knowing that disease and disorder, as in any design, can be traced and compared with the optimal powers), and SEE if there is a parallel in investigability with reason and accessibility by reason, with the powers of reason to create this KIND of thing itself ... or not!

It is the very glory of man that HE HAS this ability, but of creation that it PROVIDES the base for its operation. Indeed, the further power of man to investigate himself, and find the nature of his image is even more startling, especially when it too is subjected to the canons of verifiability and the criteria of validity (cf. SMR Chs. 4-5, and contrast with Ch. 3). It is even more amazing when you consider, as in these references, the logical failure, in a quite consistent fashion, when you assume otherwise!

With the word of God, verification is on all sides, in whatever domain of reason you choose to act. There is no competition in validity and verification in existence^*1.

Return to Dawkins' theory, however and consider the matter. The operative causality is not even MENTIONED. Removal of sheets from an examination desk does NOTHING to create new ones. It is not even relevant. Similarly, removing what is worse does not create ANYTHING. Non-survival does not create. It is a mess cleared, not an invention made. For that, you need what is competent for the job.

But let us pursue the jealousy concept a little further.

	Not only is this metaphorical concept - a figure indeed but  yet highly portentous - one in which husband-wife correlatives are the spring-board of meaning, and the emphasis in the Old Testament context for the term; and
	not only is it the case that the type of jealousy needs to be known before assumptions are made about it IN ANY CASE; and
	not only is the Creator equipped with objective knowledge (for you cannot scientifically employ your own model in estimating the interstices of someone else’s model – that is mere confusion, which in this confines Dawkins’ outpourings to irrelevance), so that his concern and exceeding desire for the Nation is objectively grounded, not in mere subjective preference, but in truth:

the facts of the Old Testament case are far more decisive yet!

In addition to this, the tenderness of His solicitations and the extremity of His own suffering as He sees what is the result of abuse of created status on the part of mankind in general, Israel in particular are in their own right, extreme, as seen for example,  in  Isaiah 63:9 -  “in all their affliction, He was afflicted”. It is the same in Deuteronomy 7, 32, Micah 7, Hosea 11. It is constant throughout the early Chapters of Jeremiah, rather like a father pleading with a son to stop taking drugs, because prison and murder are on the door-step, and this is what comes of it!

In such passages, and in the enduring overall coverage (as in II Chronicles 36, II Kings 17, Isaiah 40), there is testimony to His sympathy, empathy, deep and unselfish concern. He sees ruin for His creation which had been meant for felicity, joy, peace, holiness, sharing of the wonderful, participation in the marvellous (as explicit in Isaiah 5) – as many a delighted father might once have hoped for a rapidly declining son, one entering on depravity with wonderful zest as if a quest for self-destruction were his unwitting accomplice.

Such a result, God, the God of the Old Testament (and we remind ourselves, of the New, which has similar tutelage as in Revelation, Matthew 23-24^*5)  does not desire this. Indeed, we find in this same Old Testament that He loves His creation so much that He will become one of them and die for this^*6.

THIS is part of the Old Testament. Let us have at least SOME scientific accuracy about our examination object, and not invent in mere libellous lassitude, in unconcern or in indifference.

But where is this seen ? someone asks.

It is seen in Hosea 13:14, where God indicates that HE HIMSELF will be the ransom for His people and will in Himself remove the curse. HOW this is to be done,  you see in Psalm 22, 69, Zechariah 12:10, Isaiah 49-55, by the Lord as man being pierced and cursed, desolated while given death for His love^*7.

THIS is the sort of zeal for the real, or in imagery, jealousy for the reputation and reality to be found by the erring ‘spouse’. He dies for 'her', and being eternal, breaks death in the process, so bringing immortality to light as the New Testament phrases it (II Timothy 1). Thus in Psalm 145, the Psalmist is set to praise God for evermore, while in Proverbs 12:28, we have this: "In the way of righteousness is life, and in its pathway, there is no death," and again in Isaiah 25:8, God will swallow up death for ever, in harmony with Hosea 13:14ff., Psalm 22 showing the detail of His action and Isaiah 26:19 the intimacy of this provision reaching His people who have faith in Him, and know Him.

THAT accomplishment, THAT suffering, that meeting of the measurable by the immeasurable, the sinful by the sinless, the temporal by the eternal, taking man's form to satisfy justice and remove judgment, dying the just for the unjust: it is some unhappy lovelessness ? Come, let us be reasonable. It is the precise opposite, a holy zeal for goodness, backed by infinite resources, wit and desire, and accomplished WITHOUT DICTATION, and given freely.

And this is ‘petty’ and ‘unjust’ and being a ‘control-freak’ ? If objectivity is unjust, if dying for what is astray is being a control-freak, then how could words have any meaning ? In fact, as we now know, the DNA is the uttermost of control. COMMANDS are the nest and nexus, and if there is anything more controlling than operative commands, what is it ?

We are MADE by command, and the commands are printed out in biological paper, if you will, for us to read, and we increasingly read them; and yet it is imagined that the illiterate wrote them and that the ‘paper’  just arose -
 

(that is, in this case, that
the exquisitely organised,
monumentally integrated,
temporally operative,
extraordinarily complex deployment of symbol-manipulative power
together with operative dynamic
and material sequencing as in any construction, causatively needy,
that we have and find,

instead of bothering with grounds,
even before it was there, proceeded with aplomb,
first finding and funding itself from no place,
drawing constantly on nothing nowhere,
and so brought everything everywhere:
an assemblage of eager irrationality doing double duty for dreams!

for as Christ put it, figs do not grow on thistles) -

and that this is scientific ?
 

 Everything is by nuance, by dream, by assumption, by construction without interface, constriction without cause, production without reason, so that floods of work are done in magnificent array, without any worker, contrivance without any contriver, art without any artist, one code to cover it, brilliant life to  express it, modelling as per maestro,  and existence enters with no ground or entry point, from nowhere to facilitate the ways of skill. That, it is not a tour de force, but a tour de fraud! Indeed, that this is precisely what we never find, and disobeying all reason, stands nakedly irrational as to base,  bankrupt  as  to empirics. Logically and practically, it has one standard assessment: it  does not go (cf. Causes, Alpha and Omega ... Ch. 2, SMR Ch. 5, pp.402ff., The gods of naturalism have no  go!  17, with  16, Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service ... Ch. 5, Red Alert Ch. 11, TMR Ch.    7).

How scientific is it to select the most jealously contrived anti-reality to explain the commonly observable ? If you want speed, do you look for a tortoise, if you want stupidity, do you look for the fox, or if you want wisdom, do you seek fit from a moron, or worse, from what lacks all understanding BY NATURE!

Why that would be scientifically absurd! Instead, to be scientific, you survey the scene, you find correlatives, you see what in such and such cases did something similar, you examine the causal nexus involved in other cases, you consider the applicability to your own realm of interest of the imaginative hypothesis you make, you invent tests, or in Einsteinian mode, move to intellectual paradigms for them, you scrutinise what COULD do the things observed, and consider evidence for what it would mean if it DID DO it; and you seek negativities which might divorce your model-based expectations from confirmation, so that if it be false you could anti-verify it.

Moreover, all this you do with discretion, with resolve, hopefully seeking with address and finesse as able, for every nearer parallel and hopeful possibility, refinement of relevance and confinement of error, till it is smooth and without overthrow by any factual source, applied in any way imagined. That is not everything; but it surely helps!

In seeking the highest correlative to the workings of intelligence, which nothing else is EVER FOUND by observation to do, you then look to non-intelligence ? This is your refined investigation field ? This is where correlativity is to be found ? This is  near ally ? This is productive in a way systematically relevant ?

But this is not only not in accord with scientific method, it is a gross and intrusive: a comedy act,  a type of lampooning of science, as if to abuse it. If there is anything ludicrous, it is to do the opposite of what is the norm on the basis of experience and logical relevance, and call this skill. THIS is WILL, and nothing else. It is wilful non-science, scientistic oblivion of science (cf. Freedom, the Nation and the Next Generation Ch. 4).

After you have done all this, you find it never verified, never observable, always deficient compared with the creation model; and then you exclude the other, as if to loiter on good soil, and deny it to farmers who would use it ? Why ? It is an anti-scientific junket.

WILL has nothing to do with brilliance. The most brilliant man can become a thug, a drug-addict, a highwayman, a dictator, whatever, being jealous for his life and wanting to explore and exploit it with a sudden rush, or flush of favour that breaks all bounds. It is not unknown. It comes because of instability resultant from not having a stable basis for personality, as when a Jaguar is driven by someone on a ‘high’ of adventure, at night, at 200 mph (if they have one like that). Such a thing is not fitting for rational consideration, though it IS susceptible to rational explanation.

Explanation of anti-scientific method, moreover, however sensitive, does not justify the name of science, or the claim to have used scientific method.

Quite simply, science for its part, requires creation, and the causal consequences of the same. Science and logic are inextricably related, for logic is a pre-requisite for thought, though it is not all of it, a structural preliminary, and where its disciplines lack, its point is absent, argument ceases and the model concerned is in abeyance systematically.

Controls in the biblical as in the empirical field, are very present; and not total. You can by will negate design, or adorn it; your can negate logic, or use it; you can give rational grounds for doing so (you are having fun, for example, indulging a sense of the ridiculous for relaxation)  or fail to do so; you can err on purpose, and you can ignore the implication of error attributed to those who disagree with you, while still trying to make there to be no freedom.

	You can have everything necessary, and yet speak of error which is impossible if it could not be otherwise: for then it would just BE, be itself, simply not useful to you. You can be ridiculous; but such fun is not the stuff of informed criticism.
	In characterising what you criticise, it is useful to have relationship of a positive kind to facts on the one hand, relative to the field,  and these not only in the DOCUMENT you attack, if so inclined, but in the DOINGS to which the document relates.

Designs such as Genesis describes in the relevant document, need care.
Spoiling them means trouble.
Mercy may put them right again.
Rebelliousness of spirit may refuse this.

The case is not so very hard to understand, since we see it continually,
even among ourselves.

THE DISJUNCTION OF WORD AND WORK:

FLIGHTS OF THE IMAGINATION CRASHING ON THE TERRAIN OF TRUTH

Is then the Lord a ‘vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser’! (cf. The Desire of the Nations Ch. 5). This sort of language reminds one of the reactions of students to discipline when they have behaved the larrikin and failed to sustain their bombast. They tend to arrogate language to themselves which would put the troubler of their adolescent self-will dreams into the cupboard, and make of such teachers any sort of monsters. The spirit of this verbal blast on God is just so. It is inaccurate, ludicrous, unwarranted by the nature of the Old Testament text, and has a vindictive feeling, as if there is not sufficient gall with which to spray the victim of this assault.
|

Vindictive ? That would suggest an uncontrolled desire to get one’s own back, in an intemperate manner, without concern for the victim.

Is this the Old Testament presentation of God ? is this in fact how He acts in terms of the stated principles, overviews, perspectives, motivations and correlations of the same with actions ? Is this the result of due research into these appositions ?

In fact, it contradicts God’s stated motives, the entirety (as in Psalm 103) of the responses to His nature by His servants (who, knowing Him, are in a better position to judge than someone who is divorced from his Maker, and proud of it!), and falsifies, rather as do the Marxists, the concept of justice.

It moreover ignores the patience of God (as shown spreading out almost interminably,  for a 400 year period in the case of the Amorites – Genesis 15),  and the grace of His tutelage (as in the last chapter of Jonah!).

It makes into vindictive haste, the gracious longsuffering of  HUNDREDS OF YEARS of exhortation, sending or prophets, warnings, invitations, shown to Israel before the ruin of Jerusalem at the hand of Babylonians.

It makes the intense, continued, immense pleas put through the prophet Jeremiah (as in Jeremiah 1-18), to be forgotten. It allows the most intense and sustained provocation to love, mercy and peace, to become a thing of two seconds, no thought, or bad intent; and it libels the model of God, without ground or excuse.

Now what of this ‘bloodthirsty’ bit ? Does God ENJOY shedding blood ? or is it that justice has a certain vigour of retribution when all things ignored, every appeal dispersed, every mercy discounted,  every slander invented, every assault on the divine name digested, every fatuous digression from the point borne for long!

He shows the sword of justice at last (as in Ezekiel). The appeals, their grounds, their persistence, their insistence, the suffering of the prophets who presented them, all this is gone. Jeremiah 48:36, 17:1ff., 8:18-9:3 has been then deleted ? Hosea 11 is excised; Isaiah 63:9 is no more, II Chronicles 36 is sent to the pit. Is this however, interpretation or destruction ? It is one thing to bomb the Bible, and it is quite another to blast its heart out and then complain at its absence.

Was it bloodthirsty to desire the death of Hitler and to pound Berlin into submission while jealousy for the freedom of the race and for opportunities to develop and mature the good things of life were being thwarted by such adversaries: was it hatred, lust for blood, that activated the airmen ? Is it bloodthirsty after all possible efforts, to seek with vigour to remove such wantonry and impoverishing passion by one race against another ? Or is it bloodthirsty to be pleased to purge ? and is it grace and sacrifice to overcome at cost what so acts ? When God so sacrificed, is it bloodthirsty ? can you be bloodthirsty for your own blood ? Is there no end to the turning of things upside down, are we to walk on our heads ?

The airmen then ? bloodthirsty ? Some may meet those who suffered to perform that airborne  liberation, and argue with them; and some, on the other hand, may consider what the likes of Dawkins have GAINED by such liberation, in exceedingly free conditions to speak what they will.

Thus also, it is the case that God SUFFERED as shown in the Old Testament prophecies (cf. Joyful Jottings 22 -25), and suffered intensively, becoming Himself the RANSOM, shedding SLOWLY (perhaps those of the Dawkins group will like the 'slowly' which seems to be a principle with them), His own blood. Such it was in format as taken for the purpose (Acts 20:28), to liberate from spiritual viruses, objectively known (remember, we are discussing a MODEL, as is normal).

Is this bloodthirsty ? In the end nothing less would do. Is He thirsting for His own blood ? Is Gethsemane (where we see the outcome in some detail, but in the same principle as this, that “in all their afflictions, He was afflicted” – Isaiah), is this to be deemed a wanton display of indifference to the shedding of blood!

But what of this, the ‘ethnic cleanser’. Let us know what we are talking about in this onset and onrush of feeling, the cited words of Dawkins, the reported ones. What is such a being ? WHO does this sort of stuff, the ethnic cleansing bit ?

It is someone, it seems, who having a subjective and unrealistic concept of one race, tribe, nation, people, wishes to remove other nations, tribes or peoples from MIXING with them, SHARING land with them or in extreme cases, and in fact, normally here, wants to make them not exist. There is no question in such cases of JUSTICE. It is an emotional thing, a philosophical or political idea, and it is based on superficial and unwise delusion, a deluded sense of superiority and an inverted sense of service, to become self over others, fiction over fact, and prejudice over truth.

Is God superficial and unwise ? the model does not admit it. To speak of someone like that you have to use another model. This is model-mixing, the opposite of science, mere confusion of words. Do you condemn by confusion ? In this case, yes, decidedly and indeed, decisively. This is not to be commended. It is irrational.

But did God make Israel, A RACE then, did He make of it a paragon, ? Did it occupy an intoxicated racial eminence ? was it a ‘pet’ and did it have a special place in His unwarranted affections so that it was wantonly favoured while another race or other races were discriminatingly, unfairly, abominably, horrendously, viciously, by mere passion and pretence, removed or exterminated ?

Is THIS THE MODEL being examined, that is the Old Testament ? If however Dawkins is making up some god of his own, some straw-god for examination, this is merely a psychological exercise of outrageous vilification, and has nothing to do with the subject or science.

In fact, WHO seeking earthly favour, would want to be part of the history of the JEW! WHO would want over 6 million, a substantial fraction of the race, removed by indignities extraordinary, cruelties all but inconceivable, devilries unthinkable, sustained while this in itself, was the acme and finale (perhaps ? the UN is not doing badly in its deprivations since) of what had for centuries been at least in style, the vindictive folly of Europe and Russia!

They did it in pogroms, inquisitions (Gospel condemned misuse of religious power and authority by Romanism) already! Wealth was taxed or erased in violence, not once or twice; devastation was wanton; exclusions were numerous. Is this favouritism ? Is this to give wrong face-place to a race ? In fact, if one is at all interested in facts, one finds that in Isaiah 43:21, God desired Israel to show forth His praise, to be a beacon of truth, a despatch box for mercy, a lead-in to salvation, an instance for redemption, an expression of deliverance!

However, as in Isaiah 5, they continued to breach the covenant, to haunt the unholy, to worship at the pit of imaginary gods, to pollute their nation, put their children through the religious fires, extort, leave equity and so on (as in Amos, Isaiah 1, 28-29, II Chronicles 33,36) until the point came that failing to listen, hard of heart, spiritually double-talking, they were after centuries confronted directly by God.

Is that vindictive ? capricious ? racially purgative ? In fact, it is a patient endeavour to have something far better for man, according to design and scope and spirit, and to bring the opportunity to many to receive free redemption in an expression through stages, culminating in the Messiah (cf. Daniel 9). Putting in strategic irrelevancies, and assuming other models as a base produces a hybrid without historical or textual validity, and is a work of odious imagination, pinning ideas from thought onto facts of history, like seeking to cross a bull with a tree.

In fact, JUSTICE seems just one major notion missing here; and it is PLACARDED in the Old Testament (this is our laboratory for checking theories about what is in it – it is important to keep to the point, which Dawkins systematically here fails to do).

INIQUITIES, fatuous failures to use the created equipment, mental, physical, spiritual, moral, aright, these were the grounds of wrath, and their continuance over centuries at the racial level, whether of the Canaanites, as noted above (Genesis 15) or of Israel (as noted in the two chief episodes of judgment in II Kings 17 and II Chronicles 36): these were the grounds of long delayed action. How is this racism, which afflicts after extreme patience, either this one or that ? How is this ETHNIC cleansing, when it applies to one as to the other! Does not God compare them with fallen races, when they so err ? (as seen in Amos 9:7, Isaiah 1:10). 

In FACT, not only did God show equity between the races in justice, and call Israel very heavily to account in its due time, but He showed deep concern for other races, even while pursuing the primary purpose of bringing salvation to the entire world, through Israel. Consider Jeremiah , consider Jonah, where the prophet was sent with a divine determination to warn Nineveh, in that foul and arrogant city and empire, so that it might be saved. Does not Jonah 4 have permission to exist either, then, when the compassion of God is so vast and He rebukes the narrowness of the prophet ? Or was Ruth the Moabitess not good enough to become one of the ancestors of the Messiah ? Was Babylon then also, never a cause for divine concern (so that we would have to remove Jeremiah 51:9)!

Are words, then,  to become ‘scientific’ BECAUSE they are both a distortion and irrelevant, a construct of the mind ? Is this a mental investiture, the God created by Dawkins given the boot, because the facial downlift he gave to Him, he did not like ? But what has that to do with the Old Testament ?

Is it not enough that the NON arrival of new information before our eyes, from non-intelligent sources, the NON observation of basic alteration of type, the NON achievement of this by bombardmnent with X-rays for 50 years, the NON making of life even BY intelligence, that his is sanctified as ground for believing in the ARRIVAL of such things, the exact opposite of the case in view as tested: that now the NON Old Testament God is to be parodied and subjected to theological cleansing by Dawkins, a kind of divine ethnic cleansing, by first recreating and then killing with the tongue! Is it to be this, since it has no part in the reality of the ‘laboratory’ in this case, the basis for observation, the Old Testament itself!

THE REALM OF THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE:

NOT MERELY MAKING SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

OR HAVING THE QUESTION BEGGED AS AN OPTION,

BUT ACCOUNTING FOR DISTORTION FROM THE MIND OF MAN

In fact, this mischaracterisation appears merely as one application of the words of both Isaiah and Christ (who cited them) to the effect that they have eyes but see not! It is nothing to do with intellectual capacity, but will (cf. Matthew 23:37, Jeremiah 9, Isaiah 29:8-29). It explains HOW IT IS EVEN POSSIBLE for anyone to make such charges against a mental invention, named ‘god’ when it is pointed as if it were relevant, at an historical account called the Old Testament. It is as if one were to dissect and comment on a whale, when in fact before one’s knife was a mosquito. The two are not only disparate, but grossly so. It is better at least to acknowledge the alteration of the ... subject!

But the libel on the Lord continues. A nice looking complex word, misogynistic, follows in the Dawkins assault on the God of the Old (and therefore of the New) Testament (as in Matthew 5:17ff., John 8:58, 10:30ff., Matthew 23:35, John 12:48-50). Misogynist, now. That is the Dawkins charge against God.

That normally means that the person afflicted with this pathological approach, hates women. Now in that God (as predicted in Isaiah 7,9 cf. SMR pp. 770ff.) used a woman for His incarnation, this does not suggest a hatred. In that this was an action by deity (we are, one recalls studying what the Old Testament God is, and studying that book as a result, not someone's fictitious imaginings, or model mixing zeal), that led to enormous suffering, sacrificial love, the acme of this, that "in all their affliction, He was afflicted", the zenith of a vast, multi-millenia strategy of benevolent and deep love, THIS action is enormously crucial. Was it hatred of woman that led to the selection of one for the incarnation ?

Would one hate that to which one committed oneself, in a gratuitous (that is uncompelled but chosen) work of self-humiliation, when moving to a format at the vulnerable level of mankind ?

I think not. Does Ruth suggest a hatred of women ? Does Proverbs 3 ? or Proverbs 30. It seems that this must be some concept concerning the specialisation which God has made concerning men and women, a hatred of creation in this field. After all, if children need tenderness and felicity of social skill and patience and gentleness, then the one to provide these might be expected, in any really good creation, to have those qualities and even in the very mode of disposition, to be readily adjusting to them, and even to have a body more adjusted to this than to robust tolls amid violences which because of sin adorn the outside world, beyond the home.

Women are adapted to children; they need to be: they move in them, from them and then to them.

This is however specilisation, not misogyny. Did God hate the type of thing, a woman, to whom He sent Elijah for shelter ? Did He show a disposition not to honour her and help her ? Did Elijah show conscientious care in rewarding her, and even in protecting her reward!

Moreover, in the case of  Elisha in similar role, with the Shunammite’s land (II Kings 8), was he careless, or enormously protective, and zealous for her ? Again,  in the case of Deborah, or Miriam, were these flops and hidden, or outstanding and much praised ? Why if He hates them, did He so use and exalt them ? It is obviously not a categorical thing, and the concept of hatred appears merely a logical slide from specialisation to a desire for that not to be so.

But what of this: homophobic ? That is another of these unhappily reckless seeming charges, as if an electrical fault developed, and a short occurring the electricity grounded itself pell-mell.

This however, is not electricity, and hence needs not absorption but rebuttal.

It IS hard to say that the Battle of Britain pilots HATED ENGLAND or Englishmen. Did they suffer for hate ? It IS hard to say that God hated man, when He did so much for so long in so many ways for him, and warned, exhorted, implored, delivered him so much in so many words, images, protestations, improvisations, and then sacrificed Himself in love to save Him at the last resort.

Still, if we are to wander from the scientific basis for this investigation, the chosen one, the Old Testament, why not gallop into the stars ? It is similar in relevance, and possibility. But the words ? they come anyway.

But what if it is meant, not what the root would suggest, but what common parlance indicates: namely, that God hates the use of sexuality in a way contrary to design for the continuance of the race, so that it becomes a thing to be played with, altered in usage, subjoined to desire contrary to design ?

We must remember that we are looking at the Old Testament and the concept that God is the designer is endemic and the basis of many things (just as it is in fact^*1. Even if it were possible to show that we are not in fact designed, this would not alter the moral situation. To judge on an alternate basis to that given in this case, would simply be to attribute irrelevant morals and intention, when the actual one was explicitly stated. It would be to judge without knowledge, the contradiction of scientific method.

Thus if someone thought the earth made itself, and then did not seek for God, you would not say that he was irrational in the second part, but only in the first (as shown in SMR, TMR. That moderation would have that element of science known as accuracy and care. Even if this were so, then, in the case in hand, at that, it would fail at once.

When design is the case, it fails doubly.  

However in this case, as shown also Deity and Design (and other works cited in *1),  design by Deity is the case What is definable as design, meeting with its fulfilment on this earth to the uttermost degree, must be faced in outcomes. In the Old Testament, it is explicit and that is the point. Would you call Holden Motors, or GM, for example, autophobic, if they insisted on due care, proper use and no abuse of the car, for any insurance deal ? If they did, would it be hard to understand or unusual ?

If God then objects to the misuse of what has now shown to be a COMMAND-ORIENTED CONSTRUCTION known as the human body, and does not like the commands being voluntarily subverted, after the construction work is done, by misuse; and if He conceives this as a sort of sacrilege or at least the defilement of what is sacred, since it is in the Old Testament statedly in His image, capable of fellowship with Himself and exalted to the point of having a certain resemblance potential in spirit : what of this ?

Is this something justly called –phobic ? in any sense. It is a love and jealous desire for the best of what He has made, for its proper and judicious fulfilment, joy, grace, peace, prosperity and triumph, as when a coach trains an athlete. Is this considerable source of AIDS, sexual perversion as biblically defined, to use the Old Testament environment as well as that logically demonstrated: is this to hate anything good ? Is it to hate man to seek his welfare, his non-abuse of his construction and due use of protected membranes in the way ordered ?

Take a far lesser case. Man has been given such all but inordinate powers and prospects and hope, that misuse leads to enormous consequences in the psyche, the emotions, in heart, the spirit, and in society. But even if it were a far less case, like that of creating  birds and finding they peck off their own feathers willfully, would this be to hate them, to command otherwise ?

To be sure, we often may say that we hate this impassioned desire of people to have youngsters mauled with illicit sex, and that we are infanto-sex-haters, or something of the sort, without in any way being malicious: quite the contrary! It is concern and love for the child, and not hatred of it, which leads to hating the abuse, and confronting the abuser!

If Dawkins should in any way have other ideas about using highly and exquisitvely specialised equipment, it is not apt to blame God for making it that way. Whatever the possible source of this amazing attack on God as homophobic, it fails in the very essence, since the welfare of man, the deliverance from deathly substitutes for life, for design, for the eminence of which he is capable, from aberration, is the stated and applied mode.

Many find sexuality good as a means of pro-creating and continuing the race, rather than dealings contrary to design. They find this, in the realm of continuing the race and showing love to the one with whom this is being done, apt for less disease, effective in personality conjugation, and that the design is a marvel of utility, grace, charm and kindness. Is this a just cause to call the One who made, -phobic in some way or other, as if this were not a compliment, as we see in the parallel case. It is a matter of perspective: if you do not believe in design, but crown the ludicrous King Chance, who never lifted a creative finger in his life, that is your option. Your freedom matters. You will be judged, as we judge competitors, on it in the end. Make the most of it then ?

But it is not scientifically just mode for blaming the one who made such marvels, that you would have then conformed to what is contrary to their form. It is that, and not their design-use, which at least looks like hatred of life, and not unnaturally, hatred of the One who made it, for whatever humanly inscrutable reason. Whatever be ground for  the assault on God, then, be it conscious or unconscious, it has no place; and it is to be rebutted

One has already dealt with the irrelevant and all but comically inapplicable concept of ‘racist’ in this context and need not revisit.

THE GAME OF INAPPOSITE OPPOSITES

What however about infanticidal ? Here is a new charge against the biblical God of creation.

Normally, this would bring to mind the abominable insensitivity of those who do not value human life and thrust in the blade at infants for the satiation of desire, and the fulfilment of perverted joys of some kind, massively inhuman, anti-mankind zealots, bean-heads where perspiration has replaced thought, some kind of ineffably dreamy zealots, escaping their mingy dreams for a moment, in order to satisfy vastly uneven blood-lust: people whose despotism of spirit knows no bounds, for whom neither morals nor kindness have any place.

As applied to the Maker (remember, the place being examined is called and has been named by Dawkins, as the Old Testament, so let us try to be consistent, not making it merely a ground for firing rockets at the unresisting heavens, in ire or fire or smoke or some other confusing agency), this the Dawkins mode.

Is God like that in the Old Testament ? It would not be too much to say that this would not even rate as libel: it is reconstruction. What then could possibly be in mind ? When such charges are made, their relevance to the book in question is the point. From this, we must seek what could be said, and if it is not to be found, enough!

Perhaps it is the fact that when a race becomes so vile, violent, outrageously arrogant, meddlesomely pseudo-divine in killing others, making other SUBMIT as one religion likes to stress, that their continuance becomes a menace to all, a peril to themselves, a sort of abortion of life which regrettably still lives in order to torture this earth, there is scope for its termination: perhaps it is this which is in view.

Perhaps, the concept, to be realistic, is this: that God having given a race many a warning, in general or in particular, by this means or by that, after centuries decides to remove this strain, stress, mess, marauding band of murderers, so that their children must go with them, and so the earth be relieved, and not pollute more. This amounts to a culture-removal, unselective: it is not infanticide. It is uprooting of a poison tree, new sprouts and all.

Indeed, some cultures are such vulture cultures, so adamant to achieve early slaughter of the freedom of thought of the children, to infect them with anti-design ways of disgracing their bodies, and  odious paths of self-seeking as a moral duty, are so corruptive that, given God has made it all, readily understood is His divine option for the removal of some who  exalt in being devastated, or worse, in devastating the grace and goodness of God in body, thought, spirit, morals, in persecution and in culture-compression of otherwise apt minds: this at last in its wholesale grinding and blinding being resisted, the entire plant is uprooted.

Thus the pure HORROR of children continuing to grow in such a mass castigation of truth over the years, such a debasement of human nobility and divinely moulded character, becomes a vastly imposing consideration. While only God could so act, knowing all, yet that He should, after waiting precious centuries, purge the pollution can at last become kinder than suffering it to ruin more millions of children, put through the fires of a juvenile abortion, one of heart and mind and spirit, by the devious works of dissidents from the divine source of man.

If God resolves to act, in this diseased mess, after long waiting, and the race goes, this is infanticide ? It resembles the case of Israel: if it decides to seek to remove killers who hide behind civilisations, because they are ruining their own land and exterminating lives there, then it is homophobic ? or if a child is killed, it is infanticidal ? Not so. If there is ground for removal in a war which is ruinous to man, then to imagine that the results that may accrue indicate what would be the case if the war were not on, the peril were not in mind; and to seek to apply this as if there were some evil motif, or selective hatred, is mere warping. Infection is not only physical, though here this phawse of it also results both in martial and civic war - that is war in a society on God and His children. 

It is similar if you seek to escape a murderer, and using some force, happen to overturn him. It is not accurate to call that hatred. IF you refuse God and morals, then this is your affair; but to attack a  contrary model in which immorality is to reign supreme, corruption of the young is the entire program, the creation of civilised brutes with no understanding of their identity or duty, as if its continuance were worthy, is simply to beg the question. The separate horror of each aggrieved, mentally molested, spiritually sedated, morally deceived child being tilted against truth from the earliest years of education, given praised social models of it, and then being thrown out like unlovely litter, to forward this revolt from reality, is to be multiplied by the mass of millions in this condition! NOT acting becomes close to torture, though freedom and opportunity allow for repentance and finding the way of life for which man is made.

If a race of zealots is almost from the cradle (Palestinians as a matter of fact are reportedly from a very young age, taught to hate, in many cases, as part of education), turned to slay, and if the ideology is like that of Hitler, a time may come when God would act. If in so doing, there were children killed, this would not, repeat NOT, indicate a selective work on infants, a desire for their deaths as if it were infant-death-day! In fact, a civilisation may become so corrupt that the only way of removing its world-epidemic basis is to deal severely with all of it. The ALTERNATIVE is a mental churning, a moral burning, a spiritual devastation which is  almost beyond comparison, rather  like extending the life of the brain-damaged by artifices which keep something going, though precisely WHAT, it may be difficult to discern! MANY are they who PREFER  not to be kept alive in such circumstances. To judge therefore on one's  own model what is true in another, is to ASSUME oneself right before argument: which is mere mental beggary and moral cowardice.

This is not for man; but if God so elects, the motive is removal of the indignity, indecency, corruption, pollution, distortion, ruined relics of people, its spreading, its irresponsible and irrepressible contagions, from the earth till  ALL the earth,  as at the Flood, becomes mere pulp, like paperbacks no longer used, and ready only for something other to be made of them, wasted, discarded. Thus continuance of this line, with all its motivations and emotions and traditions of hatred and vile violence may before God and in HIS sight become a torture MAINTAINED, no longer justified by His desire for liberty for man; and to deem it otherwise is to play the psychiatrist in a way those persons would be loth to presume to do. HOW do you know that the STATED claims of someone who acts insistently and persistently on a stated basis and in a stated perspective of seeking good and liberty and love and mercy, and follows words with actions, is NOT stating the truth ? This is merely a colossal anti-evidential lunge! It has no basis in scientific method.

Perhaps it is deemed infanticide when such a scourge includes all ? But that is a wanton disregard of the perspective in view. What then ?

It is NOT relish in killing kids but relish in preserving them by removing, after centuries, the entire  culture of corruption, productive of  miscreants who kill other people’s kids, in purging the earth of what threatens to destroy all, that is in point in the Old Testament. This perversion of justice, this contempt not only of the ‘Court’ but of justice and mercy themselves may  be a psychic lift for some, who like to attack God on their own constructions of Him; but it is contemptibly irrelevant, a mismatch of word and the subject of observation (here, we recall, the Old Testament) so vast as to become a kind not only of anti-God but anti-science display. The heart of God as seen in His patient pleading, intense love and insistent, persistent seeking of lost man is merely parodied by delirious wit in such a case.

Such things, by the grace of God, we are even ABLE to do. It is part of the liberty which in love God has given us, so that we may, if we so choose, even irrelevantly insult Him. This is a wonderful gift; but one does not relish inaccuracy. It is a liberty which only love can give; but in the end,  truth cannot be subverted for ever, nor reality denied innocuously without limit (cf. Isaiah 57:15ff.), though the love of God knocks with vigour. You see that for example in Hosea 11:

"How can I give you up, Ephraim ?

How can I had ou over, Israel ?

How can I make you like Admah ?

How can I set you like Zeboiim ?

My heart churns within Me;

My sympathy is stirred.

I will not execute the fierceness of My anger ..."

 How often He deferred due and judicial punishment you see in the overview in Ezekiel 20, or Psalm 106! You see it again as in Matthew 23:37ff., and Luke 19:42ff., and you see the principle in Ezekiel 33:11, and the cost of taking the penalty in Person Himself as in Hosea 13:14, the ultimate in love, breaking the menace, death, and bringing life and immortality to light (II Timothy 1), by His own trenchant action against Himself, vicarious victim and victor alike.

Next we come to ‘genocidal’. This however is the opposite of the case. God’s exhortations, pleas, keeping covenants, graces, mercies, creation itself in the first place, provision of the Gospel as so summarily shown in Isaiah 49-55, Micah, Psalms, Zechariah and so forth, is the opposite. GOD DIES, that man might live.

This criticism, therefore, is the opposite of the apposite, and constitutes a case most stringently unscientific in utterance, given the nature of what is to be examined.

But here is a nice one: filicidal ? It is a nice looking word and one could congratulate the writer for thinking of it, were it not for its strangely provocative, evocative and dismally inaccurate usage.

To be that sort of thing, you have to want to kill your son, sons and so forth. There is in you some kind of kink: you do not have the normal desire to preserve, care for, nurture, nourish and provide for your child; but to kill, this is your will. The thing snatches at your heart, plagues your mind: this is the way! you say to your distorted, aborted, cruel-minded and unnatural self. That seems to be the sort of thing that the abusive self-declarations of Dawkins concerning the Deity of the Old Testament would imply. Otherwise, how would it fit into a consistent torrent of abuse!

Does the Old Testament suggest a God of this kind ? By even the most cursory reading, does it ? Rather we find that SO great is the LOVE of God for His CREATION, which as DNA illustrates by its commands (matter is NEVER found to formulate commands, only to carry the things out), He laboured to make, that He was afflicted in their afflictions. This is the insight given. He is disgusted (as in Genesis 6) at their deluded, depraved, ingeniously crooked mischiefs which mar and abuse their potential heights of life (He does not hate life, He made it), and does not remove them (as an inventor might throw away a messed up model, or a scrap yard might receive a smashed vehicle – here one which smashed as it were, itself). Instead, He acts yet to spare the race; but still they do not listen. Proverbs 1 brings the exact spiritual perspective out very clearly. In Genesis 6, the pollution of mind, the straying of spirit, the mixtures of grand things with evil, it was from day to day, the chosen way.

God declared as in  Genesis 6, that He would not be forever striving with flesh, with mankind, for after all, they being a creation, taut with untruth, wicked in mind, imagining folly and acting like space ships that had become persons, investigating every foolish thing and declining mission constantly, could not endure (as in Isaiah 57:16) the constant friction of faction from their Spiritual Source and Creator.

The thing reached the point that "every intent of the thoughts of his heart was evil only continually." Imaginations - as now, indeed in our own contemporary world - rioted continually, the most captivated concepts replaced the captivating ones of truth, folly concerning God was by now endemic. It appears that the humans, instead of being like charged particles, to make an image of the situation, equipped to act, were like particles charging about, charging anything, designed for good, devoted to evil, with scarcely even a small quirkish look at the facts, unless with a mind to distort, as far as their true nature and work was concerned.

This present time is becoming increasingly bound in just that direction, with the able service of TV and schools devoted to materialistic propaganda, sometimes by courts, just so. The most tender minds are invaded by sardonic cynicism and the cruel, the wicked, the lustful, the selfish, the thoughtless is given screening with relish, so that the mind of the very young could be caught before it has vigour.

He shortened, before the flood, the time of man therefore. At the time of the record, some 120 years remained before a corrupted, pandemically unspiritual, energetically ungodly, wantonly wrested generation would face the end of the patience appointed. It is not racism to destroy a race when the Maker of it finds it unwilling to repent, unreasonable about its status, undisposed to listen to reason, as from Noah, inclined to every evil way and thought, exalting itself past God like a flea trying to cross the Atlantic in one hop. It is not being against this or that part of the race; it is an end of the cultivatedly corrupted, inanely and wilfully deadened attachment to spiritual vomit, instead of spiritual life, to the remnants of life rather than to its Source, and this continually, that led to the terminus of the unspeakable infection.

Man now has much the same trend. He WILL not listen, he MUST deride his Maker, divorce from His care, lampoon His lordship, decry His mastery. Man must ignore His testimony, and do so with a body built from birth, yes from zygotic commencement with such precision of order, multiplicity of integrated commands, mathematical marvels and administrative skills that to see, unaided by human hand, a skyscraper 10,000 feet tall, industriously making itself, with invisible technologies to make the mouth of engineers water and their research arm to be industriously writing down what they can make of how it is done, and this before one's eyes in the open, would be as NOTHING by comparison with what is the prelude to the birth of each one of us. In Noah's day, there were 8 exceptions. In our own, known to God are those who are His, amidst the contrived creations of new 'gospels', new 'christ', false prophets without a scintilla of evidence, but followed like ants at honey.

In Noah's day, those who acted were THEREBY saved. In our own, those who similarly enter, not the ark, but the kingdom of heaven, that spiritual ark, Jesus Christ, are likewise saved. If you do not enter, then what do you expect ? that somebody will drug you and put you in ? Why blamed anybody!

120 years were then to be left BEFORE the flood. That is not a bad time. While Noah builds, man rescinds repentance or relenting, and continues as if blindness by option were a new set of glasses. Is this impatient ? is it impetuous ? is it even unkind to remove at a stroke, a series of follies so great that what man is had become a kind of offal, and this by a persistent desire, invasive of youth, devious concerning truth, wanton, wilful, immovable ?

God in pity and mercy gave man a new field and scope. Sometimes ingratitude can so exalt itself that it is sad even to watch. So God came in the flesh, so He was in flesh crucified, but instead of doing what many would, exterminating the whole race, He permitted Himself to be killed and rose to bring authentication of the offer to be forgiven EVEN THAT, on an individual basis, without racism or any other deflection. The enduring character of His love then went into operation for some 2000 years, while His servants were murdered, imprisoned, their good name deleted by lies, fraud, their children mistaught by monstrosities of unreason increasingly, paid for by taxes, indefensibly by reason, calamitous in consequence.

Thus, the alliance of Hitler to Darwinism is well shown in the film EXPELLED, especially in the reference of Darwin to the conceived folly of breeding from weak or inferior cattle or any other kind, such as man, a precursor to eugenics, just as his survival idea, to promote excellence, induced wild ideas of racism for some kind of Aryan, or death for any kind of weakness, such as war might contrive. The Descent of Man (1871) was a piece leading to thoughts of the ascent of man, to deity, which so many have ludicrously conceived - or at least, to some species of divinity.  Corruption in one, as in a disease, ideologically as well as physically, readily leads to others consummating the process.

Where error is worshipped, irrational folly is bred with lust for greatness, there is virtually no limit to the misplaced non-worship of God, here transferred to the human race, or some nostrum for its advance, or that of some race or system or ideology, such as Communism's heaven on earth, a fair imitation of hell. Fraud is like that. But continually, they push it, as if taking up a collection for the blind. THIS blindness, however, it is optional.

Does one then blame God because human hands set a bush-fire ? because they are taught their woeful misperceptions by misinstruction, because the sacred self is exalted, and its surviving strength is adulated ? Is the folly of man, in abrupt and blind misuse and wilful abandon of God, is even this to become a ground of indictment of the One who freely gave to man both access to Himself and a salvation from his own evils, again freely (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2) ? Is man's mischief to become a warrant for the arrest of God ? Fanciful ? Not really: it has already happened (John 18).

Is man's determined exclusion of God to become an accusation against Him, and not him!

Is there no limit to the desire to escape justice, rule the world with deceased thought and then cry out at the rotting!

The Old Testament is the predictive SOURCE for the NEWS of His so coming. It is not contrary to it, but the consummation of it, as you see in Isaiah 7, 9, 11-12, 28-32, 40, 42, 49-55, 66. Indeed Hosea 12, Isaiah 49-55 and Psalm 22,  show the extent to which the protestations would go, even in divine sacrifice. It was not to be done lightly, but with a determinate desire. Psalm 40 shows how vast was the desire of the Son of God to save by His own sacrifice, Isaiah 48:16 the launching from eternity of God in the sending to save, as outlined in 49-55. Hosea exhibits the heaving of the heart of the Lord in intense, immense love so that in HIMSELF would come, at HIS PERSONAL action, the deliverance for man.

One does not usually sacrifice oneself for those whom one hates; and it would be strange for anyone capricious to devote Himself to such a task, in a prelude of a millenium, and then to do it, at any cost! It is stranger how so many love to delude themselves, it would seem, or so act, that the greatest becomes the least, the imaginations seemingly constantly being distortive to the facts.

The Lord decides in poignancy of heart, depth of love, infinite solicitude, to send the most precious, His only begotten Son, on the mission of sparing some of humanity. In the process, we find written, the amazing scope of mutual delight in love and HENCE to save, between Father and Son.

Let us review a little.

You see the delight of the Son to be used in this way, in Psalm 40 (and remember, we ARE examining as our laboratory inspection site, the OLD TESTAMENT! it is easily forgotten in this verbal insurgency against God). You find the suffering of the Father in so yielding in sacrifice that many among men might at last be spared in Isaiah 42:1-3, where the scope of His LOVE for His sent Saviour for man, is shown, and hence His grief at so acting, attested in Hosea 13:14, where the movement of love to man is so great that the Lord resolves in the midst of such need, to go so far as to make in HIMSELF the ransom, the offering. Again, we need to look into our laboratory, the Old Testament, the environment of terms for analysis …  Since God (as in Isaiah 48:16, Zechariah 12:10, Psalm 45), makes it clear that He is a trinity, not separable into autonomous units, but infinite in intimacy as God, then of course anything that One suffers, so does the other.

God then decided to act in sacrificial love, each member of the Trinity in perfect accord, in the midst of this sacred moment, the incarnation leading to the slander and travesties of truth (as for example seen in Luke 11:53-54, with Matthew 12:24ff.). He recorded His intention in the Old Testament and displayed it in the New.

The confrontations AS MAN BY MAN, and the slow murder, maximising the savage solipsisms of the wandering minds and wanton will of the slayers of His incarnate Son, yes, all this occurred. Man however, despite many who wrought wonders in His name, in large measure, received a very different spirit; and as foretold, it is growing in rambunctiousness.

It is now becoming more and more a world-wide addiction to the survival idea, the morals void, with desire rampant; and indeed it is no coincidence that what is not least applied Darwinism, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra in the 1870s, with its derision of the weak and of Christianity in terms of superman power and exploits enticing the deranged will of soaring man, preceded the First World War with its strutting pomposity and wilful rioting of power and human glory, on the way to the pit. Kaiser was indeed a Caesar, as this new feature for the same old self-exultation in man, unwound its pathological powers.

Into and for such a world, then, one still shuddering with spiritual solipsism and its results as it consults itself, pleases itself, invents morals and abandons its design, came God. Not with an army, a secretariat, or at least a tenured post, came He, but as a babe, when grown, for sacrifice. And this, it was not to be wielded against the wrong-doers,  but to be that of Himself. It was statedly directed so that without being dictatorial, He might save ANY who have HIM take it for them, and GIVE it which was lost, life in Him, to them, yes tenured eternal life (cf. Jeremiah 31:19ff., Isaiah 53:10-12). What a topsy-turvy thing, to give innocence from guilt by redeeming, and power to life aright by rising from the very dead, so showing not in inconspicuous ways, but with a thrust that covered the world, instead of water this time, a finale of grace, mercy and love.

Does this evidentially appear to be the work, attitude, perspective, emotional configuration, desire and design of "a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Such an idea would never have occurred by any rational application of the mind.

To the present point, is this then  to be filicidal, or conducive to such construction concerning the character of the God who IN THE OLD TESTAMENT showed plans for such suffering on HIS part for the erring race (Isaiah 53, Hosea 12, Psalm 22 are mere items in the whole concourse of it - cf. SMR Chs. 8-9) ? The case is woeful, and so gross a distortion as to make any father’s heart all but shrivel at such affront to sensitivity and human sensibility.

Now we come to the  ‘pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully’ submission.  This is the last part of the assault of Dawkins.

Pestilential could mean horrible like a pestilence, and be written in order to liken the victim of such verbal assault to a disease. Is God in the Old Testament like a disease ? He who created life and laid down specifications for its continuance, blessedness, completeness, ways of being wisely handled as in a car manufacturer’s handbook ?

No handbook, someone may suggest ? but no, there is one: you may recall that we are examining the basis of Dawkins’ abusive references to God, in a certain place: it is known as the Old Testament, and it is his characterisation of the God shown in this book which is in point. If we mischaracterize, contrary to the evidence, it is confusion, inaccuracy and contrary to scientific method – scientistic. That, it is related to science; but not well.

But let us continue with the concept applied to deity, who made the creation called man and health which is the norm, therefore, that of pestilence. God does create disease firstly for misuse of organs and mind and spirit, mental, physical disease, though it must be said in all scrupulous care, that He is amazingly patient in this, and things can go on for centuries in some cases, before correction and exposure arrives. Is this pestilential ?

The term in this aspect would be abused. Is it pestilential to CREATE a pestilence, as in Egypt, when that nation wanted to keep using millions of another nation as slaves, unreasonable, unkind, unthankful for great favour shown to them by that nation previously, and by God ? That depends. Let us look and see.

The term has a certain negativity. It does not suggest judicious exposure to justice after longsuffering, now, does it ? Yet that was the position in Egypt.

In the case of Egypt, indeed, this judicious exposure to justice, THIS was however precisely the case. Their delusions about gods that were not there, but which they claimed were. This is parallel in some ways to the delusion that the Creator, constructor, origin of laws is NOT there, but instead,  at first were unknown forces, or indeed some quiddity, uncharacterised, just THERE. This question mark it is that provided the base for what has wrought with exquisite power, and this is affirmed without concern about how it got there or acts. That as we see in EXPELLED, is the option offered by Dawkins. It is imprecise, a work of nescience in a realm of nature which never does what it is supposed to do, by any inspection, excitation, moving on from the unknown basis, with an extraordinary finesse, out of this world in its creative resultant.

In Egypt, this glorified naturalism, with gods set up for various natural phenomena, illusions as are the evolutionary nostrums which have to act without being there, since matter never can be made to do this sort of stuff, yet it is done, then as now, it had results. It led to a certain arrogance, indifference to man as such. Their cruelty was perpetual, their pride ineffable, as the supposed glory and imperial majesty of their system continued its rampant course in their midst.

Very well: if you want nature to beget itself, and invent what does not bother to show itself in action, but contradicts reality, there will be results. There were. God had an interest in the salvation of man and so had a demonstration lesson and an exhibition nation to show this to the world. At that time, they had been made slaves, and He resolved to rescue them. Time after time, He gave Egpyt opportunity, but by that time its irrational naturalism and myth-making powers were so far on that it was like giving tea to cancer.

God resolved on the rescue. Pharaoh resolved to keep them. God induced more minor action; Egypt yielded and then recanted. It went on, like the appearance of some devious nations today, wanting this, and appearing to conform, but at once seeking to have it again, having gained some advantage in the meantime, as they weave their way towards mutual destruction for both parties. In this case, however, destruction is not an available option for the Maker of Man. The result was patiently deferred to its finale arrived.

Thus a confrontation occurred, to DEMONSTRATE under test, in a scientific manner, what happens, step by step, when you INSIST on cruelty to the victim nation, when you relent, and when you deviously refuse to honour your agreements. It went stage by stage, like a stage coach, opportunity by opportunity, for Egypt to be delivered, just as in the end, Israel would be. But Egypt was irrevocable in lust, devious in manipulation, manoeuvring to a monstrous degree, acting as if God were a convenience, not the Creator.

When therefore God corrected this mischievous and fatal misalignment in Egypt’s religion, being applied with such monstrous cruelty, was this to be pestilential ? Again, were the Allied bombers pestiliential which were instrumental in the deliverance of millions in Europe, including those constantly tortured, whole races from virtual oblivion ? That would be a courageous proposition. Does motive then mean nothing ? Is the man who has to kill the monster who is torturing children become pestilential when he has to force the grip of the torturer, and find this leads to its death; or the army which does it on a larger scale ? One would not think so, no, decidedly one would not.

If nations, and indeed the human race, misled by a whole troupe of which Professor Dawkins is but one, insist on their mistreatment of man, by enticing  to or eliciting delusion (intended or not, or even if the intention be the very opposite of this, delusion still kills in the end), results do not fail to appear in the long run; and it is by now, since the 19th century, quite a long run.

Thus, what if the peoples are misled by this and that nation, such as the USSR, philosophers, religious extrapolators like organic evolutionists, who imagine what can neither be seen nor made by any means to occur ? What manner of result can there be ? If these nations are faced with increasing warnings as their peoples misuse mind, body and spirit and ASK for the results of thus injured equipment, which misfires more and more, is this then a case for the denigration that God is pestilential ? even when the ultimate in pestilence bearing has been wrought by God ? upon God! Is this a correct ascription, interpretation, review of the evidence ? It would not appear to relate to it. And that ? It is precisely the case with the naturalistic idol of dead Darwinism, or any sequenced impossible contestant, as the mighty fight each other with more and more myths about what they do neither know nor see nor evidence! (cf. *3C, part 2).

What is lacking is any kind of sense of injury wrought against the Lord, upon His creation. Here we appear to have this: a despising misuse of His patience to the point of actually daring to attack and deny Him, a removal of any kind of desire for pardon, for peace, for propriety, for return!

In such a case, to call calls to return to reality before the final destruction of what is actively destroying itself in spirit and body, in environment and in heart, pestilential, it has a certain flavour, nature! It is like a school-boy kind of mischief, denouncing the ‘monster’ who dared to care enough to correct. What pestilences has man made, with his radioactivity and sexual liberties! If correction does not come, man will go! This is a far better treatment of the term for an extravagantly extraneous rebellion, which misnames patience weakness, kindness filicide, and correction pestilence! Is it not this which is pestilential rather than the prescribed butt, the verbally scarified Saviour, the  God of the Bible!

Is it  not frequently the way out, to call the judge by the name of the wrong-doer, so that when someone misuses power to afflict others, authoritarian in demeanour, he reviles his judge as authoritarian when he gives sentence!

History shows in Egypt, the type. It sins. It imagines things, it contorts the evidence, it consorts with naturalistic inventions. It  cannot relent; nor can it face its end, the grounds for which it constantly repeats,  beginning over and again its errors when corrected, as it had a sort of repetitive disease, an obsessive compulsion to rebel. So be it. It costs. Reality in the end, even with mercy, with this one cannot dispense. It one insists, what goes ? reality, or one’s own autonomous presumption ? and this, to its place it goes.

To call - to continue our inspection of the list of affronts offered to the God of the Old Testament - God megalomaniacal is a very special contortion of the evidence. IF we are interested in examining the Book under review – the reader if not the reliably critic, will recall that it has a name, the Old Testament, and is a just inspection site in detail, and in spirit  – then we will find that GOD CREATED ALL THINGS (as in Isaiah 43-46). How could One who is infinitely great (cf. Psalm 145^*8) possibly have magnified ideas of His own importance ? Is infinity to be excited to think above itself ? This is mathematically impossible, so that this claim is absurd, a veritable effusion of folly, and ignoring of the text under review so vast as to become mere verbal splash.

Sado-masochistic ? This is said of the God of the Old Testament. This would seem to mean, if anything, that He would either have bouts of liking to suffer, and of liking to make others suffer, for no good reason, or have some kind of blend of opposite and inapposite emotions and dispositions, which fought it out with interesting results.

That is a strange concoction, that which we see there. It is a difficult personality to conceive, and is not at all conceived in the Old Testament, directly or inferentially. In fact, the ‘sado’ part of the abusive talk or torque, here, the twist, is the part which we have just sought to trace a little, the fact that CONTRARY to pleasure, and BECAUSE of need, God was at it were willing to enlist His own being in a movement of sacrificial mercy of infinite proportions. This He did so that He would have to suffer with great grief, and desolatory experience (as in Psalm 69) in order to fulfill His love. You get that sometimes with love. The suitor is willing to serve for years (as with Jacob indeed), in order to gain the hand of his desired lady. So great is his love, his enduring affection, his honouring and delight in the lady of his choice, that mere years of burdens and pains and endurance are not in the balance. This he does out of love.

With God, who is a Spirit, though He can do many things such as incarnate Himself in the person of His Word, if He so desires, it is not a lady. It is the human race which is His concern. To this, He has shown such love. It is not sickly sentiment, but brave beauty. It is not in a romantic mist, but in a deadly real, live situation, where hatred and mischief breed like lice, ruin like grass-hoppers, defile His name, misconstrue His intentions and fight against His relief, meanwhile injuring their own hearts the more. He perseveres, moving to the climacteric wonder on the Cross, the resurrection, the sending of His Spirit, the inundation of this world with the Gospel, towards the end. Any experiment has an end: and this, it is not an experiment for God, but for man. God freely became a participant, while knowing the result since His is all wisdom; but as a man, it was not so easy...

Is this masochistic ? That would simply be to pervert his motivation, a ludicrous and inept mischaracterization. So here!

But what of the sadistic part ? To be sure, the term does not necessarily imply the gaining of sexual satisfaction (the God of the Old Testament is SPIRIT and having no body, has no sexuality); but to the extent that this tends to be a basis very often for the use of this word, it would be a schoolboy howler to make such an assertion.

We should, should we not, reader, be more lenient ? Very well, let it be given the metaphorical extension and mean simply that the one who is like that, has some kind of kink such that he or she takes joy in afflicting others, as a species of psychic kick.

Do we find evidence that God enjoys afflicting His errant people ? On the contrary, if you read Ezekiel 20, for example (make that verbal ‘experiment’ with the matter before us for scientific investigation, for science is the basis and scientific let it be), you find something concerning God in this our Old Testament field. You discover that in each of MANY cases of vast folly on the part of Israel, God PUT AWAY the punishment, DEFERRED the result, wrought within Himself to avoid the impact, like a good father with his delinquent son; and that this went on (precisely as in II Chronicles 36, in the overview of centuries), until in the end, it was too late. You get this physically when someone refuses to give up smoking, till lung cancer arrives. That is reality. We are not infinite beings; there are limits^*8, to our follies, though these may be so lightly impressed, as to seem all but absent for a season.

THIS, it is sadism ? What of sadistic mothers, then, who are forced to slap, at times! This is to misread motive to the usual degree in this barrage of belittlement, and scientifically outrageous mismatch of word and subject of enquiry. In fact, this matches the mismatch of terms and facts in organic evolution, where ALL required is NOT met, and by comparison, ALL required of the model of creation IS met; and yet the one, creation,  is called false and unscientific, while the folly of scientistic mountebank, organic evolution, is paraded like USSR weaponry in former days, in May.

There is an inversion, and as with the meteorological  illustrations of the process, the result dirties the very air. It is as in Isaiah 29:14-16, a turning of things upside down, and it evokes the attitude of God as in Isaiah 5:20-21, where alas such declensions are considered.

                           and prudent in their own sight!"

The upside down version has its problems. Being upside down has results. It is best to avoid them; the blood goes to the head.

THE ONE CONSISTENCY: AND EVEN THAT IS A MISFIT IN TOTAL

We can, then, rescue one thing. In treating these things, there is something left.

Of this, we may make one admission: in this point it is internally consistent. The misuse of evidence concerning organic evolution is parallel to that concerning the God of the Old Testament: in both cases, words mismatch the facts under investigation to an inordinate degree.

It is in reality, one approaching comedy, if it were not for the tragedies this poor world must suffer because of this travesty of reality. You cannot long ignore reality, however much you may misuse both science and words more generally, and yet hope to escape indefinitely: not rationally. For example, Darwin’s little idea about The Descent of Man, his idea about the folly of breeding using poor stock in his assessment of what is best for life, was USED not only in Germany, but in the USA on many, who were sterilized because of bodily defects, and this without their consent.

Follies of thought, unscientific abuse, mismatching words and facts, as in Darwinism and its assessments (a theory, in terms of scientific method, dead long ago, and now eroded bones only – cf. *3C part 2), these create horrors of results. It is so with designs; and ignoring even that, it makes it but the worse. Kindness seeks to correct, as here; and it does this not for this or that kink, but in kindness and hope for mercy for the race. It is a duty of compassion as well as a need for accuracy, relative to the God of the Old Testament, and of the New (cf. Matthew 5:17ff., John 8:58, Philippians 2), who does not change (cf. Psalm 102, Hebrews 13). If you are compassionate, you do not turn your back, equivocate, never act; but you turn your front, as God did His...

Now we come to another invention of Dawkins in his meta-mythical creation. It is the ‘capriciously malevolent bully.’ The bully part has already been dealt with under sacrifice, trinity, suffering, patience, the works of love, and it is as far from the truth of the text as well could be imagined. Bullies do not normally sacrifice their lives for their victims. Would you call a life-saver who had to make enormous physical efforts to save a struggling and disoriented surfer, to save the same, a bully ? Would you use this as your considered designation ? and if he died in the rescue, would you still charactise him, overall, all things considered, in this way ?

It would present, certainly, a difficulty. It would not go smoothly; the press might be reluctant to glorify such a characterisation.

Indeed, if this sort of thing can be so, what does it even mean! If so, why bother to use words at all, why not make a splendiferous festival of imaginations that hate reality, and of words that are opposites to deeds, and flinging caution to the winds, unwind!

This however, this metamythical bully which has been imparted to the scene, it was to be a certain kind of bully. The imagination incorporated more. What kind ? It was a ‘capriciously malevolent’ one. Remarkable. Let us consider this creation that Dawkins presents.

To be capricious, you need to follow the thought of the moment, an unstable, desire-ridden paradigm of indiscipline and lounging relaxation, moved intemperately by your own much loved self.

Is this the case in the Old Testament, concerning the Creator ?

Is it capricious to outline plans of self-sacrifice to deliver, not only Israel from Egypt, but man from judgment, in advance ? In the latter case, is it capricious to STATE your plans to this vast and consummate effect, a millenium in advance, supply the date for the execution involved in your saving action for man^*9, and then carry the thing out, grievous and horrid though it was for you,  though this was disregarded because of love and the love of mercy towards mankind, in the execution of the executed ? In fact, of course, it is the EXACT OPPOSITE.

Now to be sure, the exact date, though stated for the death of the Messiah, in the Old Testament, is by the nature of the case, not realised until the events of the New. However, that is mere verification^*9. It is STATED in the Old; and in any case, this is merely a part of the entire vast work of salvation which occupies vast territories in various modes in the Old Testament, starting with Genesis 3, in the protevangelion. He thought it. He said it. He increased the detail, gave the date for it, exhibited it from various angles, set it in love, presented it in mercy, laboured to make it apparent.

He waited till the set time had come (as in Psalm 103, Daniel 9, Galatians 4:4). Then He did it, and He did it accurately as planned. At the moment, the point is not the absolute power to do this (for any ONE change from what was envisaged in the millenuium in some matters, and in the many centuries in the other, would have thrown all out of kilter - but this did not occur); it is rather to the point at issue, God's  fixity of purpose in its performance. We will recall our topic, the GOD of the Old Testament, of whom Dawkins has had some remarks to make.

Let us consider the issue.

Now to be sure, a weak character could carry out some things, when they did not hurt much, without being noble in reliability and stability – though even here, it would not make for being called rightly … ‘capricious’. When however such things are vital and vast in their impact, and STILL they are done as prescribed fashion by the party under review, then the term capricious is not an apt one for the case. Indeed, it appears to be so blind an assessment of character as to constitute a schoolboy howler. Certainly, not ALL things are of this kind, by the nature of the case once more, but in investing a person with a characterisation, with any approach to being scientific, we assess implications in all things, and giving due weight to the weighty, and relative slight weight to the slight, we seek not to slight the subject of investigation but to do justice to it . Why otherwise bother, except perhaps, to rail ?

In Amos 4, once more, you see what might appear a virtual ecstasy of disregard of the evidence, as we trace the text and find with what steps, with what care, with what caution, with what mercy God acted in a carefully orchestrated fashion, before the climax of judgment came into sight! In this case,  in seeing how in fact God acts when the matter is presented in detail before us in what could almost be called an autobiographical manner, we find a patient industry, a longsuffering progression, a processive series of impacts, and a non-sublime disregard, indifference.

This is capricious and malevolent ? Is this a game then, where we show, as in certain English grammar exercises, the OPPOSITE of what is APPOSITE, and set down not the point, but the word which is the contrary of it ? Not apparently.

Again, the same divine qualities of patience and love of mercy appear,  in the patience of God toward David (Psalm 51), and the vast scope of mercy, in decisive disjunction from either caprice or malevolence, as in that towards his enemy Saul, who was spared over and again, in his foolish flourish towards autonomy while on divine mission (cf. I Samuel  24-26). While judgment may come at last, is there any sign of capriciousness, forged on the anvil of malice ? Such is not the Old Testament testimony. Such a Being would never be trustworthy let alone a subject of coherent praise (as in Psalm 103). You great, blustering, malevolent bully, some spy might declaim against his captors when they interrogate him, and do not release him, while he retains his malicious mien and devious secrets. It might be so. It would not however be a correct estimate of the nature of justice for entrepreneur of disorder and disaster, by his foolish dreams and uncontrolled speech.

One always remembers a lad who once told this: you allow things to happen for so long, that when you suddenly act, it is amazing! Those may not have been the exact words, but this was the sense of it.

It was something like that. Now it so happens that I love liberty, freedom for children not to be constantly chided, to be happy, to be expressive and creative, and in these interests, often seek to delay action of an intrusive kind in the disciplinary area and arena. Therefore, however, with this in mind, at times when I DO act, it is considerable. Is that to be capricious ? Actually, even when it is sudden, it is thought out (this is no claim remotely to perfection, but an indication of method and aim). The recipient might think it so, but it is the obverse and patience and mercy, and benevolence.

Thus one who is patient may seem sudden, when the one concerned SHOULD have known better and has had opportunity to reflect.

Capricious ? It is hard to consider any person in history less so, by evidence, than the God of the Old Testament.

‘Malevolent’ ? Were the pilots of World War II, the British first of the few, were these malevolent because they had to defend, to bomb, when seeking to deliver ? one would not think so. Is malevolence involved in creating a race at all, which had the liberty to be opponents and to slander and libel the Lord who loves to make us free (as in John 8:30, 10:10, Romans 8:13ff., II Corinthians 3:17) ? Is it malevolent to be so benevolent that you come and die for miscreants, hideously unlovely in their blind misconceptions ? Is it malevolent to love the spoilers of their own souls and those of others, and while they are yet sinners, to die for them (Romans 5:8-11, Isaiah 53).

Once more: It could be so if you have a game on your hands, to use only words opposite in meaning, perhaps even in order to show the hilarity of verbal carelessness or for the joy of the ridiculous.

Not otherwise.

The kingdoms of this world,

	its colleges,
	its political-academic collages,

	its chronic blindness to truth,
	its self-contradictions,
	its oppressive denunciations of what helps, and
	its helps to what hinders the blessed happiness and holiness of that design 'man'  *1, 3B,

its atrocities in word and deed,

its division from its Maker,

its rescinding of the laws of its construction in a folly to be seen to be credited at all,

	its abuse of the Sovereign who made those laws, to add to the insistence on breaking them,
	its mischaracterisations of the obvious, and

its musing myths and fatherless fables about itself:

they go.

Yes, but it cannot be with sorrow that they go. The sorrow is for those who insist on harbouring such vessels of woe in their hearts. How Christ sought for and wept at the coming things which disregard of patient, potent mercy needlessly invoked! (Luke 19:42ff.).

It is best to seek for what may be delivered while the ark waits, to revert to the illustration.

GOODBYE WORLD, YOUR TIME COMES:

BUT MAN, COME BEFORE YOU GO!

Nothing false CAN stay. The kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ (you can acknowledge Him or not, it does not alter His position), it comes. When it comes, why then

 

the battle, the test of fidelity, of being not an errant ‘wife’ or
an erratic creation but a godly person with LOVE at the heart of it all (cf. JOB^*10),
the battle that precedes the provision of peace with integrity, happiness with honesty, holiness with honour, grace with truth: 

it will be over.

Christians, do not yet seek repose. The battle rages. It is time to be strong, and to despise what mocks, from within or without, and to be thankful for the grace to continue, using spiritual weapons (Ephesians 6), glorifying God, serving Christ, who died the just for the unjust to bring us to God (II Peter 3:18).

Let the one who has not yet found the reality of redemption, read Isaiah 55, John 3, Titus 2-3, Galatians 1, and pray that you may escape the day of the FINALE, while faith is still open, like a one way express-way, open only for certain hours. May God bless you all, for HE IS GOOD. So I have found in persecutions often, in troubles incursive, in opportunities marvellous, in endurance needed, in patience trying, in creations numerous, in strengths needing moulding, in weaknesses needing strengthening, in challenge and in confrontation, when slandered and when praised. It is HE, He IS good! That is a glorious fact of testimony, that shines like the light of day, where darkness loves to peek, but where the Lord lives (Colossians 1:27).

May God be praised who changes not, and meets all appointments faithfully, both to this world at large as He has prescribed, and  to those who become His own children (cf. Psalm 1), with that intensely honourable  holiness which is the joy of love to be, and of those who receive such love, to find. Indeed, such love induces a love, for lovely is He who created, and who redeems (I John 4:9-11, Romans 8:5).

NOTES

*1

See:

Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,
Who Answers Riddles, and Where He is, Darkness Departs,

Deity and Design ... (esp. on Design, Section 2),  on irrationality of atheism,
and all voidance of a known God, Section 8

SMR, TMR.

*2 Such is Dawkins confession, or assertion, whichever way you like, as shown in the audio of the film EXPELLED, from Ben Stein.

*3

See the Cult of the Forbidden:

SMR pp.  330-331

TMR Ch. 8,    * 7, , A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.    4, SMR pp. 150ff..

 

*3A

The materialist as here, assumes matter without ground, so that it is not really materialism when its basis is considered, but a combination of the magical unknown (magical because lacking statable grounds, and yet assumed to be there, without evidence of any kind) with an endued matter which does all it does not show itself capable of doing, or engaged in doing. This matter, being incapable of being found, shown or exhibited, is found only in the minds of those who create it.

This is the perfect myth, and as a diverting entertainment could earn a good mark. However, this is not its ostensible purpose.

Matter is then in this model, only the penultimate basis.

*3B

See *1 above, together with
 

Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation

The gods of naturalism have no go! and The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,
 

for example.

*3C

See:

1) on the psychical side:

Spiritual Refreshings  9, incl. End-note 1 (esp. programmatic psychology and its ilk), Marvels of Predestination Ch.   7,  including *1;
News 80;  44,
SMR 4;
Repent or Perish Ch.   7, Extension 1 ; TGHGGGG  2,

See also SMR Index under Freud and Jung; NEWS 51,  52, 152, 166, LORD  5,  ALERT  1 ; BEAUTY 2 (human psychiatrists)

2) on the biological side, inter alia:

News 94, Delusive Drift ... Ch. 4, The gods of naturalism have no go! Ch. 34 (other chapters are relevant). Wake Up World! ... Chs.   5 and   6.

 

3) on Marx, see:

Aviary of Idolatry,  Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch.    5,

News 37. 44,  69, 97 (the exploiters, the fanciful,
the Communists, the de-godders and the realities),  98,
News 150 - Taiwan,
 

The Grating  Grandeur and Aggrandisement of Man,
and the Meekness of the Majestic Messiah Ch.  2

Beauty for Ashes Ch.    6 (and Hong Kong, and the movement of nations in the last century a concern),
 

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.   8;
SMR  pp. 925ff., 971-972;
  

Beauty of Holiness Ch.   3
(war and force, rising downwards, Tiananmen and truth),
Ch.  4 (liberty, Tiananmen, worship and its direction in time, its terms and code of truth); History, Review and Overview   Ch. 1,
Impossible to Men, Open to  God Ch.    5 

See also Lord of Life Ch.   8.

*4

The 'sisters' in this case: they are Judah and Israel, the former having been left in an earlier rebellion by the latter, which was composed of ten of the twelve tribes.

*4A

See on the love of God in terms of accuracy to the text of the Bible, in both Testaments, and its sustained emphasis, in

Gratitude for His Glorious Grace Ch. 2,
 

Great Execrations, Greater Grace Chs. 9 and   7,
 

The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch. 4,
 

A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 17, 
 

Jesus Christ: Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch. 2,
 

Outrageous Outages ... and the Courage of Christ, Ch. 9;
 

Beauty of Holiness Ch. 2 with The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 3 and its Appendix
and Downfall from Defamation Ch. 3,

How Great is the God We Adore, Ch. 3, Epilogue (looking at it in principle).

 

 

For convenience, an extract follows from the first of the above references.

In Jeremiah 5:2, the Lord asks, "How shall I pardon for this ?", in the pressure of love in the face of remorseless renegacy on the part of the loved, Israel. He expostulates; indeed He refers in the gamut of intimate intensity of emotion (5:30) to something with an impact resembling that on many, of the sinking of the Titanic, now taken up in monumental pictorial form.

"An astonishing and horrible thing has been committed in the land:
the prophets prophesy falsely, the priests bear rule by their power,
and my people love to have it so.

"But what will you do in the end!"

 

The prophet enquires for the Lord, with no little pith ( Jeremiah 6:10 cf. 5:1ff.!):

"To whom shall I speak and give warning, that they may hear ?

Indeed their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot give heed.

Behold, the word of the LORD is a reproach to them.

They have no delight in it."

"Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD,"

the Lord continues (as if a king would say, I am full of the fury of the Royalty).

 

He proceeds to give His word quite expressly in complete continuity and contiguity (6:11ff.):

"I am weary of holding it in,

I will pour it out ...

Because from the least of them even  to the greatest,

Everyone is given to covetousness,

And from the prophet,

Even to the priest,

Everyone deals falsely.

They have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightly ...

They shall be cast down, says the Lord."

The LORD asks them to go to the place of Shiloh, where the explicit testimony was earlier made to His name (cf. Deuteronomy 12:11). He spoke to them then, rising early and declaring (again see the clear use of human terminology for divine action and emotion, without the least question arising at to what is meant, for it merely makes it more intimately assessable, the proper work of metaphor). He will again cast them out. Therefore, the LORD says,

"Do not pray for this people ..." (7:16).

The alienation is intense and immense, and is seen stretching for a considerable historical period, until in Jeremiah 8, we hear the strength of love coming with pity once more: "Shall they fall and not rise ? Will one turn away and not return ?" Continuing to expostulate, the Lord speaks of the stork knowing her appointed times, whereas

"My people do not know the judgment of the LORD."

Thus once again, it is not "this people" but "My people"! (8:11), that phrasing of the melody of the music of His passion, that speaks, that evokes. He evidences His continuing fostering desire, in the very midst of their misrule.

 

"MY HEART IS FAINT IN ME ... WHY HAVE THEY PROVOKED ME TO ANGER ..."
 

Then in Jeremiah 8:18, we hear once more the divine soliloquy, if one uses the word of drama, and this is a divine drama:

"I would comfort myself in sorrow,
My heart is faint in me.
Listen! The voice, the cry of the daughter of My people from a far country.

'Is not the LORD in Zion ?

Is not her King in here ?'

Why have they provoked Me to anger...."

 It is, and it remains His people, His land, His place whether or not He sees fit as He explicitly promised for chronic, continued covenant breaking in Leviticus 26:32-33, to expatriate them for a period before they should return. In His divinely inimitable and frequently repeated mode, like an initial strings phase for a concerto of piano, an introductory pattern, He asks, "Is there no balm in Gilead!" a richly rhetorical and evocative query! "Why then is there no recovery..." (8:32).

Just as He has condescended to use human terminology to paint divine emotion (and as noted above, this is in the incarnation perfected, for it becomes His, though holy and divine in quality), so He goes a unit further here, stating this: "For the heart of the daughter of My people, I am hurt!" (8:21).

How great was that hurt to become in the vessel of time, in the field of history, when the due date for it, aptly predicted through Daniel 9 (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), in the fulness of this appointed time (Galatians 4:4), came around, and the clock for crucifixion (as in Psalm 22, 16), struck One!

The Lord even declares, "Astonishment has taken hold of Me," this amid mourning (8:21 and cf. 5:30), thus indicating that beyond time, there is that same awareness as we find differently IN time, for the Lord is not void of feeling, even to the point that His own human, late incarnate form, became void of seemliness as it was butchered more than any man, defaced, deformity for deity the human acclaim! (Isaiah 52:12ff.). THAT is the extent to which His sensitivies are activated, that He permitted their physical loss for their spiritual gain!

Just as the soul of Christ, facing sin-bearing was full of heaviness (Matthew 26:37, as foretold in Psalm 69:20-21 cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25), but alight with love and duty, with discipline and devotion, seeing the joy that was set before Him (Hebrews 12), the redemption of many, so did the sheer horror of the cost of love, the cost to man of sin, awaken in Him the divine equivalent of what in human terms is the evocation of being staggered (Jeremiah 8:21, Hebrews 5:7). Time did not dim the eternal reality; but it merely was a base as He transferred it to human terms.

All this He suffers because it is His people, His place, His redemptive love, indeed the love of the Creator for such a people, so found, so provided for, so entreated, so known, so covenantally close to Him (as expressly in Deuteronomy 4, noted above). This Creator aspect is shown profoundly in two ways, as in Jeremiah 5:22-25, where the sheer splendour of creation and its delimitations is in view, and in Jeremiah 4:22-27, where it is as if the entire creation were to be dismembered into a disordered reversal, and things to become once more without form and void! Sin desecrates, and this can be seen from the mind of the Creator Himself, as a movement back to the very springs of His creation, a defilement evoking the image of the earth unformed, since to be wilfully DEFORMED is not unlike being not yet formed!

So intense is the Creator spirit, as the Lord looks on the defilement of MY PEOPLE!

In Jeremiah 5:22-25 case, we learn the extent of the human disorder, called sin, when the Lord declaims (5:26ff. - bold added):

"For among My people are found wicked men,

They lie in wait as one who sets snares:

They set a trap,

They catch men.

As a cage is full of birds,

So their houses are full of deceit.

Therefore ..."

Notice that therefore! It is a continual refrain, this 'therefore' concerning judgment, and as here, where every conceivable means is used to prevent it, overcome it, with offers both direct and subtle, a panoply of peace continually provided, yet in the end, it comes, as an old coat goes, when (if it could), it refuses to be cleansed or mended. There is nothing else for it! It is sad, most sad, but sure, most sure ... It goes.

The junta rules mischievously in HIS NAME, and the people love to HAVE IT SO! (5:30-31).

How like to the time of the crucifixion it was, and what a time for realisation was thus provided, in the 70 year exile that followed the words of Jeremiah, before the 2000 or so years which would come the SECOND TIME, when they actually did not merely reject the word of the Lord through that great and faithful prophet, Jeremiah, but rejected their King Himself. It was always in view, and the emotions were displayed with incredible realism, or so it would be if it had not been the LORD Himself with His own expressive power (of which our very beings are part, as creations), who has shown it so, making the seemingly incredible certainly to be accomplished. Such is the prerogative of unlimited power and illimitable purity and majesty.

What folly, then,  it would be to try to defame His love by seeing all of this, and then trying to remove it, in its expression. Is it not a case of blinded eyes, or perhaps for some, just a blind spot! But the reason, the reason ...

Where does the prophet in indisputable manner, infuse with the very divine terminology of advanced and precise delineation of their position, his own word! He may comment on himself, or allude to this or that, but as to the divine message of his Mentor, it is as inviolable as the iceberg which impacted on the Titanic. It does not yield to any work at all, from the seas. It has its job to do, and it sinks men's thoughts, before those of the Lord.

This is not merely empirically so, but needful: for confusion in this aspect, of instrument for musician, of servant for master, for just this very thing, even in appearance, but perhaps in spirit for a moment, Moses lost His entry into the promised land, and died merely seeing it. The terms of speech, collected in their "My" phrases, indicted with majesty, determinate with assurance, directed with judgment, aflame with desire, arresting in their intimacy, extended in their appeal: these are sacredly significant, an autograph of power and omniscience, direct, immediate, linked to the whole gamut of divine emotions.

If at times they are expressed in human terms, prior to the incarnation, this is the depth of empathy, approaching the infinite, as in time expressed in that very incarnation: on which all the world depends, without which its end would have been sooner, but through which the divine passion being made practical to the last degree, there is hope. It comes like a helicopter above the wreckage of the ways of this world, ready and waiting, with this difference, that the pilot Himself, He knows whom, and when each must come, and the rope, it is the Gospel, nor is there any other (Galatians 1, Ephesians 1:10).

The preliminary words in the prelude of judgment, in the intensity of love, are all the more potent for their expression at times in human terms; just as they became yet more effective, when expressed in God manifest in the flesh, AS man (I Timothy 3:16, I Corinthians 2:8). He in turn, using still more imagery of still more tender appeal and solicitude, meaning and clarity, when on this earth, referred to a hen with her chickens (Matthew 23:37), in terms of His expressed desire to find. Again, it has the patient dedication of fishing! (as in Ezekiel 47, Mark 1:17).

Again, think of it as free-range chickens: it  is so very unwise not to listen, when the foxes abound!

It is all personal and expressed as such, for God IS personal, and we are made in His image, so that it is readily understood, once the fear of the Lord is also understood; for this is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One, this is understanding, as Proverbs advises us (9:10 cf. Jeremiah 9:23-24).

Because the wisdom was rejected, the LORD announced this in Jeremiah 6:26:

"Oh daughter of My people, dress in sackcloth ... make mourning as for an only son,"

for the disaster to come.

"My people do not know..." (8:7) unlike the stork, which with its merely instinctive and instilled wisdom, yet knows timing and events to follow, exactly. At a discount compared with such purely natural wisdom, Israel stands condemned. Alas as in 8:11, they "healed the daughter of My people slightly." Thus, "they shall be cast down, says the Lord."

In this line, we come back to our old friends,

·         "For the hurt of the daughter of My people, I am hurt!" (8:21).

Why then, He asks, is there no balm ?

Thus there is this intensive, extended, multiply expressed, diversely designed method of appeal, approach, expression, intimate with wisdom, discursive in expression of what is found, both in the realm of evil and in the mode of the pathetic; it is zealous in provision, even if in the end, this is in necessary judgment. This it does, while looking yet to the glory to come, in the destiny grasped by undying love, for some of them, as in Jeremiah 3:12-18, where the transition from the Old Covenant to the New is expressed.

This is that which as Isaiah showed in 4, 32, 9, 11, 49-55, 61 and so on, was to be accomplished by the Messiah, in precisely the fulfilment of such language as expressed the heart of the Lord. It  is that seen as above in Jeremiah, now put into action with feelings authentic to the point of becoming human (cf. Hebrews 2).

It is useless to try to invest Jeremiah the man,  the prophet with this sovereignly attested and peculiarly sovereign possession, one gained by virtue of creation and redemption to come, famed in history, personally intimate in discourse, the counterpart in expressive mode of the wrath, yes and more so, for it is so persistent in mode and at times all but flamboyant in fervour (as in Hosea 12:10's overview). It is the LORD who so speaks, and no other; who CAN so speak, and there is no other.

It is this love which is the environment in which, and despite which the wrath at last comes.

In 9:15ff., accordingly, we find this:

"Why does the land perish and burn up like a wilderness,
so that no one can pass through?

^"And the Lord said,

'Because they have forsaken My law which I set before them,
and have not obeyed My voice, nor walked according to it,
but they have walked according to the dictates of their own hearts and after the Baals, which their fathers taught them,

therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel:

'Behold, I will feed them, this people, with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink. I will scatter them also among the Gentiles,
whom neither they nor their fathers have known...' "
 

So does He speak, in the congeries of well-matched terms, as though we were hearing throughout much of Jeremiah, phases of a long conversation, absorbing, vital, distilled in wisdom, unequal in vigour, but deep in desire, design and development.

The LORD asks us to understand the depth of His passion, compassion and truth (Jeremiah 9:23-24), for though it be purer than that of man, and not marked by selfishness, but by a glory of provision and gift: yet it must be seen outside the rigorous carvings of philosophy, for the personal glory that it in fact is. Unwise is he who jilts Him, in such a disclosure, though it be not intentional.

To try to force a comment of Jeremiah into this whole integration of interests and declamation, uniform declaration and sovereign majesty of style, as in Jeremiah 10:19-20, after the annunciation of the LORD speaking in 10:18, it is insupportable intrusion, not comportable with the Lord's repeated declaration in this very place,  that it is He speaking, nor with the integrity of His style throughout, His key-notes and His disclosures. It would be like a magazine, paying much for the words of some author, to be cited, having the journalist put in a few lines of his own, in similar style, even when repeatedly, almost every few words, the declaration is that it is the author himself who is speaking. 'O Lord' muses the prophet, but it is not he who speaks in the divine vein, merely to solicit the Lord, and so to show.

It is clear and distinctive, shown as shared by true credentials in the text. Otherwise, master and servant, speaker and instrument, Lord and one of His redeemed, the mixture would become a horror of misconception, a ruin of unreality, a confusion of folly.

To inscribe indifferently into what is to be transcribed ? That ? It would appear not merely cranky and piquantly odd, but an abuse of the stage.

Thus in 10:20 we read of the tender zeal of Him who though aware of the necessity of discipline, is yet poignant for what is lost, because of the love of what it is that is lost, and what is symbolised with it:

"My tent is plundered,

And all my cords are broken;

My children have gone from me,

And they are no more.

There is no one to pitch my tent anymore,

                       Or set up my curtains."

The all but incredible seeming consistency of the love reminds one of a mother or father who so delights in the offspring, that every little thing is significant; but here, how much more so, since these sacred objects were typical and illustrative of the divine love to be conveyed into practical form in the Messiah, and with them went the preliminary preparation of heart and mind for that greatest event in the history of the universe, without which it would never have been created (Isaiah 51:16 with 49:2).

The poignancy and piquancy is that of the parent; to imagine Jeremiah speaking in this phase would be like someone visiting the Antarctic, envisaging that he were doing a topographical map of Adelaide.

When Jeremiah does wish to be heard in himself, we hear him, "O LORD..." with the utmost clarity, as in Jeremiah 18:23-24.

It is, as we have already seen in early preparation, here that we find that the wound must indeed be borne (10:19), and it was so found as Hebrews 5:7ff. shows, and Matthew 26:53ff. at Gethsemane, no less, as for that matter, Isaiah 50:4-7 in prediction, and Luke 9:51, in the process of fulfilment.  We see the mode both in Jeremiah 8:17ff., and 10:19ff..

These in order follow below.

"For behold, I will send serpents among you,

Vipers which cannot be charmed,

And they shall bite you," says the Lord.

 

^"I would comfort myself in sorrow;

My heart is faint in me.

Listen! The voice,

The cry of the daughter of my people

From a far country:

 

'Is not the Lord in Zion?

Is not her King in her?'

 

"Why have they provoked Me to anger

With their carved images—

With foreign idols?

 

"The harvest is past,

The summer is ended,

And we are not saved!

For the hurt of the daughter of my people I am hurt.

I am mourning;

Astonishment has taken hold of me.

 

^"Is there no balm in Gilead,

Is there no physician there?

Why then is there no recovery

                   For the health of the daughter of my people?"

                                      ************************

 

"Behold, I will throw out at this time

The inhabitants of the land,

And will distress them,

That they may find it so.

 

"Woe is me for my hurt!

My wound is severe.

But I say,

'Truly this is an infirmity,

And I must bear it.'

 

"My tent is plundered,

And all my cords are broken;

My children have gone from me,

And they are no more.

There is no one to pitch my tent anymore,

            Or set up my curtains.

 

Why have they provoked Me to anger! ...
For the hurt of the daughter of My people, I am hurt.

Woe is me for my hurt!

My wound is severe.

HE is hurt ? but of course, it is precisely this which is shown in practical outcome on the Cross, where as I Peter 2 tells us, He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. How would such a necessity for justice and a provision of mercy NOT hurt!

 Strange emanations come from an assessment of such Old Testament language in terms that do not include such phrases as these, spoken of the Lord:

 

Intensively compassionate, heartily concerned, awesomely involved in His created people.

 

Indeed, He is shown to be seeking for their good at any cost except the loss of what is necessary for truth and integrity in these His products.  Now to call  good evil is indeed one of the loathings of the Lord (as in Isaiah 5), and for Dawkins or any other so to falsify the testimony of the Lord is simply irrelevant. It is a psychological, not a logical problem. It is also a predicted one (as in II Thessalonians 2:10), for such cases.

 

The other references above for *4A give further categorical indications of the sustained and unchanged nature of the love of God, not soporific sentimentality, but self-sacrificing realism, in the pursuit of the joy and goodness of His people, not as a remnant sale, a proto-robotic set of performers, but as PERSONS who CAN and do  love, and CAN and do worship its source in the Creator-Redeemer, so transfixingly shown in such Old Testament sites as Psalm 22, Hosea 13:14, Zechariah 12:10ff., Isaiah 50-55 and Psalm 40. As is necessary when reality is not removed, they need also to be, for eternity of life, lovers of the truth, not disdaining logic, or having an inventory of nothings for their god, or his evacuative scintilla. The consummation of evacuation is as we see it increasingly to be, in a misled earth writhing as it writes tone poems to itself, striking God off the list in increasing numbers, like sailors drunken while the ship sinks, stoutly refusing to  radio for help.

 

In fact, the intense and intensive outpourings of divine grief, as in Isaiah 48:16ff., and in much  of the above references, as so often foretold,  culminated in  Jesus the Messiah (Luke 19:42ff., Matthew 23:37ff.), and His lamentations, moving on to His sin-cancelling provision on the Cross of Calvary.  It was He who was sent as pre-planned before time was (Ephesians 1:4), and as exhibitive of the unwearying love of God expressible in a tortuous redemption which HE Himself, the very God of the Old and New Testament (for they are one in theme, realism, plan and performance), brought to light in His death. In this WAY,  bringing life and immortality a free provision for those receiving them from Him, HE WORKED for our benefit, and if we disdain Him, it is but the greater attestion of His patience, as so often shown before, as in Ezekiel 20:7-9,14,22 and II Chronicles 36.

 

It is here at the Cross, central to Christianity and to Christ's own work, that the reality that love is willing to sacrifice and restoration from woe, like creation,   takes work, is shown. It was there that He exhibited the consummation of love with power, after so much patience for so many for so  long, arising from the dead as pre-planned,  following the prior testimony of doing this FOR Lazarus, and so founding that Age of Grace for our race. From this,  in large multitudes it races away, moving from racism of this or that people, to the final version, HUMAN RACISM, self-worship of those more and more characterisably as one whole, as departing from God for its own worship in a stricken world,  stricken by its own cyclotronic sin. A more disastrous mis-worship, mis-shapen spiritual romance, it is difficult to conceive, except one which deals direct with the destructive dynamic itself,  which it growingly exhibits. 

 

Glorious is one fact:  to this very hour, that Age of grace has place, and without the corruption of politics or the scientistic aberrations so popular, this same Redeemer is available, in patience till He comes. The worse the thrust of evil, as He foretold, the more this world enters into the nearness of His return (cf. Luke 21:24ff.), one heralded by the restoration of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.

 

 

*5 See the Sermon: The Just One.
 

*6 See Joyful Jottings 22-25, SMR Ch. 9.

*7 For the coverage in Isaiah, see With Heart ... Chs.  4 -7.

*8 See for more data in this field, Ch. 7 above.

*9
 

On this, see Highway of Holiness Ch. 4 with  Mini-Messages with Maxi-Point  ... Ch. 10

*10

See on Job :

TRIALS, TESTS and TRIUMPHS in TEMPTATION.

 

 

  EXHIBIT D

This is taken from Possess Your Possessions Volume 7, Ch. 3

This short excerpt is taken from a very extensive chapter, and those who are keen to  follow scriptural  data on the love of God are recommended to read this in due course available by the above hyperlink.

THE DISMAL NON-SALVATION OF DARWIN BY DAWKINS:
ESCAPING AN UNHOLY HOAX
FOR WHICH MANY HAVE  FALLEN, NOT ONLY IN NATURALISM

THE GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT LOVES

In his mandate for man, Professor Dawkins, the Darwin devotee, speaks of the God of the Old Testament as if ignorant that He is one and the same with the God of the New Testament, filled with compassion, not absentee, ready to judge, willing to pardon, never duped, not co-operative with delusion but a lover of truth and of man in the truth, where not nothing but God is his Maker, and not nothing, but truth is his Mentor, and not uprightness but sin is his downfall, and not ruin but redemption is His offer.

This has been pointed out before both in The Kingdoms of the World and the Kingdom of Christ Ch. 9 and Gratitude for His Glorious Grace Ch. 2. In the former, Dawkins is exposed point by point for inaccurate exegesis of the Bible, making a god who does not exist, foisting him on the Old Testament, and seeking to convict God of sin, merely expatriating his own dislikes, making a scare-crow of God, the God of the Old Testament, and putting the old clothes of his own pet hatreds upon Him.

This is like the mockery at feasts of which the Bible speaks (Psalm 35:16).

"With ungodly mockers at feasts," it says,

"they gnashed at Me with their teeth ... "

 

"Let them not rejoice over Me who are wrongfully My enemies,"

says the Messiah seen in vision of things to come,  

"who are wrongfully My enemies, nor let them wink with the eye who hate Me without a cause...
Let them not say in their hearts, 'Ah, so we would have it!
Let them not say, 'We have swallowed Him up."

Here is the same situation as in Psalm 69 and 41 and 109, where the Messiah is lampooned, dismissed dishonourably, mouthed with spiritual slander, which came to its height at the crucifixion (foretold in some  detail in Psalm 22) prior to the resurrection (the same in Psalm 16). Psalm 35:5-6 shows as109, the utter loss of those conflicting with this 'seed of David' to whom he so often refers in his Psalms, moving in time to this climax of his own encounters (as in Psalm 73, 45, 110, 2).

 Indeed, in Psalm 69:19-21, you find this:

"Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour:
my adversaries are all before thee.

"Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness:
and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none;
and for comforters, but I found none.
They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink."

Something of the empathy in Jeremiah and the wonder of the love and wounding of the Lord is considered in Gratitude for His Glorious Grace Ch. 2,

 EXHIBIT E

This is taken from Possess Your Possessions Volume 8, Ch. 3

Often would the Lord Jesus Christ, author of creation as the Word which called it into being, saviour of any, offering to all ( Acts 4:1`1-12, I John 2:1ff., Isaiah 53:1-6) have called from Jerusalem its children to Himself: His heart was there, but as in Luke 19:42ff., theirs was not. The daughter of Jerusalem as so often used in a figure^*1, shook her head imperiously and would not turn, for that generation, which the term signifies, were of a heart so adamantine in hardness, that the most tender, repeated, opportune and lively call they would not hear, like deaf chicks.  He like the mother hen, they would confidently ignore!

Recently, I was watching by the sea shore, a large emu with a band of youngish chicks. These were slightly tall, athletic looking, though smaller than most I have ever seen, perhaps 18 inches tall. Lean, lively and without the slightest lassitude, they advanced as they worked their way, looking here, there, pursuing this mini-detour and that, the mother always in front. In a few seconds one might lag in its little epics of discovery, and become as much as perhaps 4 to 5 yards, from the mother, and then, with a resolution commendable, an aptitude both strenuous and diligent, that chick would come as if in a race, swiftly to the vicinity of the mother, as they went, a group of lively sprites, energised, active, alert, watchful, but for all that, learning and active with great zest.

It was a lovely sight, the sea beyond them, and one of us captured it on a video. There we could ponder it later. Speak of a call ? In that case, one  did not notice any, though it may have sounded. If it had,  one can  scarcely imagine with what diligence the response would have come! What a team! what a group of vigour and diligence, discipline and liberty. They were highly diverse in their ways, but utterly one in their concord for operation.

With Jerusalem, Christ uses the hen and chickens analogy (Matthew 23:37). In this case, there was evidently very much cause for calls, so that the errant if not erratic chicks could come to order and attention, in the face of perils and dangers numerous enough. That brings us to the second difference from the emu case. The chicks in Christ's stated case, they did not come. Once they did not come, a subject for concern; twice, a matter of strange impetuosity; a third time, almost denatured, they were a wonder. But it was OFTEN that He called and they did not come. What then is to be expected ? It is nothing less than a denial of the whole structure, teamwork, diligent application of safety rules, is unnatural, brimming with potential tragedy! And so it was.

In this case, leaving the analogy, they were "not willing".

That is the depiction which Christ gives, and unwise is the one who does not follow it,  like a recalcitrant chick at the theological level! It is as in John 3:16ff., God was willing, God acted, God treated things with concern, compassion, diligence and  application, strenuously, victoriously, grandly in giving, great in heart, nothing lacking in His desire that the world be saved, nothing intended of judgment in this saving mode; and God assigns the ground of condemnation, which assuredly comes, to the preference for darkness over light. He excluded the slightest thought of some unnatural lack, includes to the uttermost all thought of the vivid and vast desire on His part, and utters His assigned estimate of the situation, vis a vis, Himself and the said world: men preferred darkness, but He preferred their salvation, one and  all, as Colossians 1:19ff. makes so dramatically, repetitively and incandescently clear.

THERE is the love of God, and not in its slack-chick denial. God has spoken, and it is, as in  Luke 19:42ff. where the statement is even more direct, time to listen. 

Often has this been brought to the attention of the hyper-orthodox^*2, who frequently appearto defend in their confusion, a sovereignty which does not have behind it the heart which God repeatedly depicts of Himself. In fact, the divine sovereignty is not one of mere power, assertive will  as in much of the Gentiles (Matthew 20:25), but one of willing service, that of a personal Being who has a heart of love (I John 4:7ff.) with the world in His eye, though in His foreknowledge, He has no illusions as to the outcome of His love, and in His wisdom has assigned salvation where He knows His own to be. Yet the desire for it, the provision for it, the intensity of feeling for it could not be surpassed, as here in John 3, in I Timothy 2, in Matthew 23 and Luke 19, in Ezekiel 33, as in such a parade of biblical cases in history and in detail, in broad coverage as in II Chronicles 36, in Jeremiah and in Isaiah 48, in Jeremiah 48 as in Colossians 1. To cut down motivation or its height, to its outcome because of a slanted misconception of divine sovereignty distorts the word of God, and shows a failure to appreciate His unique holiness.

It is not a weirdly distorted sovereignty which stems from a different kind of heart. The sovereignty of the God of pity, grace, compassion and love, is what exhibits the qualities of love, and here it is repetitively shown in the very face of the prophetic messages throughout the Bible, and in the face of Jesus Christ, in which the glory of God has been shown (II Corinthians 4:6). Nothing changes the word of God, and its self-interpretation does not a linger when the text is compressed into the ruinous runnels and funnels of philosophy, as if some new thing could be composed by such interference. The text is clear, the concept luxuriantly repeated, like Spring crops, each blade a part of a waving mass of grain of one type, with the theme clear as when the wind sways it as one mass, the wind of the Lord's inspiration.

What is man that he should seek to substitute his own breath for that of God (II Timothy 3:16), or in any case, do it despite the non-mutant genes of the Lord's disposition of His word, like a crop!

He has commanded His word (John 12:48-50, II Peter 1:19ff.),  and who is this who would countermand it, even in His name!

There is the simplicity of the thing for all to see. There is the exuberant beauty, the splendid majesty of creation, with its glory of seascape, landscape, cloudscape, mountainscape,  as serried ranges mount in ascending order to the skies, and reflect heaven's glory.  There is the utter ingenuity of the exceedingly miniaturised DNA, the if possible excessively complex technical provisions for variation about a norm, allowing fidelity of kind of creation along with variation of its individuality, so making the wonder of the rose not of one, but of many, and of man, like that of stories in a volume of short stories, each one similar in theme, each diverse in detail. Brilliance is its name, conceptualisation is its mode, implementation by code is its method, language is its generic name, power is its correlative,  creation is its consequence, maintenance is its implicit, and degeneration is its liability, when sin divorces it from its source. With all this, there is the very spirit of man in the image of God, so giving to him an essential liberty in love, in hatred, in caricature and in confession, however much marred he may become, and whatever heights the Lord uses to bring reality and fidelity to the outcomes for this, His creation!

Thus is the brilliance and the beneficence, the provision and the power, the love and the lavishness. Equally, there is the devastation, there the lamentable, there the cruel, there the imposition, there the derangement, itself brilliant, and there the curse on this garden of paradise, extending to the whole world (Romans 8:17ff., 5:1-12, Genesis 3), just as it did in particular, in an intensive form, in the case of Pharaoh's land, in the day of the Exodus, a day to be repeated in power when God again delivers Israel from ranting, rampant bullies (Micah 7:14ff.).

There is creation and there is curse on that creation, set forth, in both lines, with a genuine sovereignty.

If that were all, where would the love be ?

But that is not all.

There is the provision for repentance which God assigns where applicable, knowing the depths of the soul before it was ever formed, or light and time came to the earth, or indeed, existence at all (Ephesians 1:4).

The impact is potentially horrendous, and its ramifications ruinous. But the divine application of His love is beyond all this, as the sea-shore is beyond the wreckage, and wisdom provides al life-boat in Jesus Christ, to get there. It was not built without appalling anguish, for to rescue in these seas, it is more than difficult: it involves virtually a fresh creation, that they even enter the boat, and with this, the annulment of the asininity of the old, with the guilt which divides man from God,  covered in the construction, paid for liberally.

Into this grinding of greatness and grandeur, then, comes blood of Christ. It is the work of God. In all their suffering, we read, He suffered (Isaiah 63:9), in their affliction He was afflicted. In Isaiah 52-53, we see even a beauty in feet when they bring this good news. God has poured Himself out into a human form and format via a virgin (Jeremiah 31:15-22,Micah 5:1-3, Isaiah 7 with 9 and 11, Matthew 1, Philippians 2^*3), and this form grew to manhood's realm. There the pressure between creation and curse, those edges made jagged through sin and its consequences, was unleashed and drew blood from the babe, now grown to man, crying, If you had known, even you, in this the day of your visitation! ... to Jerusalem, centre of His manifestation of salvation for millenia!

He did not only cry. He was crucified as those edges rammed into Him, where beauty and curse met, ruining Him (Isaiah 24, 52-53), as man's sin became treachery against truth, law, wisdom and love, exactly like that in the image so often used, of an adulterous woman, yes one one wholly given up to it, despite many a warning and a plea from her husband! as in the prophetic images so often used and epitomised in the entire book of Hosea.

There on  the predicted place of crucifixion,  the blood flowed, yes dripped to make an eventual equivalent to a flow, for it was, as in much torture, a slow thing, though in the end, in a matter of hours of anguish and agony, the despatch was fast enough.

So does this salvation of substitution succeed, the so-called substitutionary atonement, this emplacement of God in human form to receive the cutting edges not of technology, but of the infamy of mankind, where these rasped against each other, the glory of creation and the shame of sin, so that man's sin could be covered in atonement, and the horrendous impact on each other of the clashing surfaces, like vast mountainous interfaces, could be overpowered by an escape for their clangour in a death most pitilessly imparted, most lovingly given.

Yet what is its outcome ? Does God invade with spiritual panzer divisions ? Not at all, He pleads, He calls, but as we find in Jeremiah 5:3,  epitomising the matter:

"O Lord, are not Your eyes on the truth ?

You have stricken them,

But they have not grieved;

You have consumed them,

But they have refused  to receive correction.

They have made their faces harder than rock:

They have refused to return."

In Jeremiah 5 you see the prophet in heart turn to the "great men" of the city and speak to them, seeking some truning from the spiritual and moral follies which were eating away the nation, like rats never quieted. But (5:5), these too have broken the yoke and burst the bonds, refusing to be anything but gods in heart, blatant in rampage even before the word of God, which wrought havoc now in their bodies, now in their minds and now in their hearts and spirits. This sin is likened variously to that of silly doves and lusty stallions (Jeremiah 5:8, Hosea 7:11). It is that of the impervious heart, the inflamed will, of the riotous rebellion and the imperious mind and will (Ezekiel 16:30), yes complete and replete with vanity (Isaiah 3).

Gods who do not need to heed their Maker, the brilliant artificer of their bodies, the institutor of life! these quasi-gods, these ludicrous lords, they strut as men! In His sublime and divine irony, the Lord deals with this in Psalm 82: Having exposed their folly, He declared, "I have said, 'You are gods!' but you shall die like men." Here is the mordancy of compassion, where grief becomes exposed like veins in the rock, subject to erosion till there is no ground cover of earth left.

Gods! ah yes, let us have some such exaltation and distortion! but that it IS distortion exposed in irony, consider: for if being gods means ANYTHING, it means a certain security, power, dimension of immunity at least for a time, it means something above mere mortality, a dimension apart. Does it then ? and you are of this kind, to be jeeringly exposed in your self-made drapings! It is as if a mother, in her disgust, said to her vagrant son, dressed with her money in arrogant self-exultation, "I have said, 'You are a prince', but you will die a pauper!"

Die  like men! Forget the illusion in this allusion and end the confusion in this profusion of profane folly! That is the challenge. Come to reality and live, repent and find truth as in Proverbs 1! This is the divine message to the recalcitrant, like Jerusalem, twice doomed to destruction, and now replaced as the centre for dissemination in its own rebellion (cf. Isaiah 30). It is however by no means disposed of as a centre for dissemination of truth by the Lord's continued dealings with it as a centre for prophetic instruction for the eyes of the world, as it watches what He does with it to this hour! A harbour for return in that divine, implacable mercy, which is His, which stops only where there is no more scope (cf. Isaiah 57:15-17), has He made Jerusalem, Israel, and nothing will deter Him (cf. Jeremiah 33). Even to the advent of the Messiah as King will He so act, bringing back the once faithful, then faithless people to Himself, as in Hosea, as in Ezekiel 36-37^*4.

He, the Lord, is like that: He has all and loves to give, has no self-interest, Himself being love (I John 4:7ff.), having the need of His creation, man, at heart, that he might rise to his construction-contract, but freely; and inherit the kingdom of heaven, but as an entrant in repentant mode, made new in regeneration no less. So does freedom find its culmination, distortion its correction and objectivity its zenith.

Foreknown as such, these who are His, are recreated in this mode, not by mysterious oblivion of principle, but in this, that He would have all to come back, and in this very perspective and passion, KNOWS HIS OWN, who in the face of  the penetration of His eternal knowledge, are in Him found willing above and prior to the domain of sin, so to do. As in the case of  the first creation, He knows us better than we know ourselves, thus preserving liberty, appointing blame (John 3:19) and being a fountain of munificence available without detriment or prejudice, to man. In the first case, He knew us before He so much as created us, and in the second, before we were soaked in the invidious solution of sin.

There are vast results. Let us take one. He accordingly WILL BRING BACK ISRAEL, as He has already done both physically and politically, and in the coming days will do spiritually, this time to the same Messiah from whom the nation catastrophically disjoined (It Bubbles ... Ch. 10, The Biblical Workman Ch. 1, *3, Ch. 3,as marked, and  *1A. Here is the very type of mercy, and the glory beyond man, available to him.

You could disrupt the astronomical composure and the heavens, before disrupting this! Cancel that if you can, then try to move God from His word that not only will a newly covenanted Israel (Jeremiah 31:31ff.), be found and bound, where repentance comes (Zechariah 12:10ff.), but it will be one where the cities are repopulated (Jeremiah 33:13), and the Royal Monarch, the Messiah will rule (Jeremiah 33:15ff.). It is not some specially glorified Israel (cf. Isaiah 19), nor is it some non-Israel which has a non-return, but it is BOTH of these things. How long will it be before theologians in major numbers have to fight out inelegant, inadequate and misleading cases for this or that, when the word of God in delightful discipline, indicates something more than either, but not less than what it actually states concerning most prosaically clear components! But let us return to the love shown in all this, for God is o faithful (cf. Genesis 17), that it is pure delight to contemplate His grandeur, when so many so often are so unfaithful, as alas, His word so righteously records.

What then of Christ, meeting the curse, ground between the interfaces of curse and beauty, as the incision  appears!

HE has already been seen and found ground between the brilliance of creation (taking the format of the height of its physical format, in man) and the folly of sin and its curse (becoming a curse for us, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but be saved for time and through eternity, as in John 190:9, 27-28, 6:50ff., II Timothy 1, I John 5, Romans 8:29ff.). What more ? If He can and will divert the guilt of sin to Himself, catching in His own being the impact of the horror of it, and swallowing it up (as in Isaiah 25:8,  following the indictment, as in Isaiah 28:14-22 where you see the edges grinding, curse and cure!), without deleting holiness, deploying force, grinding what man is along with his sin, then He will.

Let us go back to the agonising choice as it is confronted before the impact is taken by Christ. Consider once more the task, as well as the task  force.

Is He interested in ALL the creation ? in this way! Yes as in Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, I John 2, Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.,  very definitely He is. Is HIS HEART in it then ? Of course, as in Jeremiah 48:29ff., and the affair is such that He makes such declarations in the form, "As I live!..." (Ezekiel 3:11). TO the heart, FROM the heart, WITH heart toward all He acts.

There is no room for doubt. This IS God, God IS love. But yet, if there be such a shut-eyed, tight-fisted, sin-encrusted, heart- infested PREFERENCE for darkness in the presence of such a mellow and moving light (John 3:19), and there is; and if this is as known to God before time first moved its hands on the earth, or the light of the expanse found its way into the darkness, or force and matter, mind amid the creation and investment with spirit which made man, occurred, and in Him is perfect truth: what then!

Then alas there is the CAUSE and the REASON for the grief which prophetically and  empathetically^*5, and in Christ, directly and personally led to such a cry and such tears, that it remains more salient then the Statue of Liberty, for this is now the  overshadowing Exhibit of Love: Calvary!  It has been erected before man, for all the death of mindless wars and meddling greed, these two millenia, with the preliminaries before that for more millenia in the Bible! The Statue of Liberty may lose its liberty, which seems now a grave danger as social and personal liberties are being legally re-examined in the USA, so that what is deemed best for all may become an ingredient in what is permitted in free speech for any, truth included (cf. legal survey in Israel, My Glory September-October 2010, p. 9). Yet the Cross of Calvary will never lose its love, and its loosing is not a losing but a lavish grace and gift from God Himself, whom nothing can subvert, invert or divert. He IS love, as I John 4:7ff. declares, and history attests, however man may wander into the zones of horror, even the brilliant made hacks of sin.

This love, to such works as that of Dawkins, is immune. Such works lack sight, with contrary and ineffectual imaginations set before the love of the Lord (cf. Possess Your Possessions Vo. 8. Ch. 5); and this of Dawkins ignores the text to which it is directed, allegedly to interpret it, despite the fact of the contrariness of light-obscuring obfuscation. It ignores the divine and diligent desire for man, what has been both said and done, so often, in such depth, with such profundity in the Bible; but instead,  it disparages grace, oblivious of the cross and the love and universally adequate and relevant provision which the Bible embraces, and Christ implements. This is total in scope (I John 2:1ff., John 3, Colossians 1:19ff.) however much this is finally made inapplicable to man by his use of his image-bearing facility of freedom, by his choosing to avoid it. On this, see further, in Volume 9, Ch. 7 of this series.

Thus you have the sin of man to defy God, but then the later one to defile the testimony of God. This is but one modern expression of the pathology of non-peace with God, non-perception of the centre, as if to see a house in the air, and not notice that it has no foundations, and to criticise the house which is on the ground, confusing the two.

Thus from Paul we have this in Galatians 6:14, concerning centrality in kind, impact and significance:

 "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ,

by whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world."

 

 EXHIBIT F

This is taken from Possess Your Possessions Volume 12, Ch. 9

In this case, while the term 'Dawkins' does not appear, BUT ONE OF HIS CLAIMS DOES SO.  The exposition here gives the lie to his defamation of the divine Lord, in his accusation that the God of the Old Testament which is in fact that of the New as well (Matthew 5:17ff., Isaiah 45, Philippians 2, John 8:58) is off-putting in terms of being 'jealous' . It is a contra-textual mischaracterisation, quite simply, as shown below. Dawkins bully-boy verbal assault on God comes in terms of the assertion that He is 'jealous and proud of it', which in its own way, must stand high among all competitors for an infamy of misconstruction of text. This is in the area and arena which the Bible designates, so that those not born again from the recreative and pardoning power of God CANNOT see or enter the kingdom of heaven (John 3, I Corinthians 2:14). Brilliant they may be, therefore; but wise they cannot be. This by no means removes the power of logic to expose their errors, or betokens a lack of love to them, though it does not extend to their errors!

 

CHAPTER 9

DIVINE Jealousy

and Human Understanding

The Hebrew term used in Exodus 20:5 in the statement that God is a jealous God has, we find in Harris, Archer and Waitke's Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, has a range of meanings, from jealousy to zeal, and of  applications, from zest for serving God whatever the cost, (Psalm 69:9) to the zeal with which the Lord will stir up His protection to  deliver Israel when such times come, as they very often have come, do come and will  come (Zechariah 12-13).

The term represents a very strong emotion, one which Christ had, as foretold in the Psalm 69, to such a degree,  as ZEAL for the glory of God and His will and way, that it had "eaten Me up." In parallel, "the reproaches of those who reproached You have fallen on Me." Hence represented here by this term is a self-sacrificial zeal in the performance of protection, salvation and the weal of those concerned, just as in place, it can become a flaming quest for purity which is never satisfied with the loathsome, the pretentious, the bumptious, the presumptuous and the uncaring (cf. Isaiah 29:13, Isaiah 1).

To be sure, there are many images in the Bible, as in much that concerns one's love for a wife, country, vocation and so on, in literature more generally. Since there are ultimates in value, meaning and power for life involved, this is the natural tendency, to do some more justice to the strength and significance of the attitudes, outcomes and intentions involved.

The Bible often uses the figure of marriage (as in Ephesians 5, Hosea 1-3, Jeremiah 3:1, Ezekiel 23:19) to signify a quality in the relationship either between the theocratic nation Israel and its Lord, or between Christ and the Church or Christian individual as implied in I Corinthians 6:15, where the call being to each and every soul, distinctively,  in that sense is and can only be to individuals in terms of the imagery. Just so, there is the phenomenon of 'jealousy' associated with that imagery. It is quite the same with Amos 3:7-8,in another piece of imagery. Here there is a lion roaring. The lion represents the Lord giving His word out to mankind, and there is an associated 'roar'; but one would never imagine that this means that there is some vast sound to intimidate, but rather the equivalent in a divesting of the imagery: namely,  a sovereign, assured, vastly significant announcement that it would be folly to imagine to lack power and majesty.

Let us return to our current term. The jealousy is not to be understood to mean a mean, base, loathsome,  self-centred, narrow-minded and selfishly abhorrent emotion, such as may at times be found in some aroused males who have a conceited conception of their dominion over some female or females, and may come to sartorial expression in some who insist that their wives or even women more generally be so covered that people may not even see their normal and relevant functional features, such as face or legs, at all. Such harassment MAY be connected with jealousy, but this appears in itself more pathological than pure, since if sin of heart in others is to be stopped by so wrapping people up, then where should it stop, until the one in question becomes so swathed in restrictions as to be virtually dehumanised, and a subject of male tyranny.

Even a jealousy which is neither outlandish nor unreasonable in the scope of its purvey on the one in view, can become abhorrent, if it represents an incitation to needless conflict, contest and trickery, treacheries and physical violence, based on roused emotion and not on rational reality.

The term is often used in such a way as to be not normally attractive, therefore, though in the SENSE of ZEAL, ZEST, QUEST for purity as often used in the Bible (cf. Ephesians 5:26-27), it is both loveable and lovely. Even in imagery, the baser forms of the emotion are not to be assumed, since after all the word has both noble and base possible meanings, and the actual one in view needs to be determined by the context, both overall as in a legal document, and in particular. In the Bible, there are a number of underlying meanings for the term. As just noted, one is for the purity, development, beautiful maturation, deliverance from marring of the object of admiration and love; with this, goes as a negative but appropriate side, the barring or effort to avoid for the loved one, what soils, spoils, ruins, depraves, deprives of due development. In particular, biblically, it concerns the intent, the matter being spiritual altogether, of preserving from spiritual profusion: which here would involve other 'husbands', that is other gods, sources of controlling ideas and ideals.

The use of the figure of amorous love for this purpose has many advantages; for here lies a sense of strength, passion linked to desire for purity,  willingness to act, zest. The casting of other gods as other husbands, or paramours, thus brings out the spiritual sense that there IS, as a matter of fact, precisely ONE God, and HENCE as in marriage (where there is but one husband at least ostensibly), there is an absolute embargo on mixed 'blessings', that is multiple ménages of gods or ideals, as improper, inappropriate, yes, but far more. They are unreal in themselves as in Deuteronomy 32, things literally of ''nothing'. Such 'gods' exist only in the mind of man, of their deception base, and worship of them is more ludicrous than ever, since it represents not only a straying mind, but a benighted thrust of thought and a besotted heart, not merely as it were, with emotion, but with stark and plain irrationality. As such, THEY are not even there! The gods of the heathen are idols (Psalm 96)

Such entities may be devils (mere imitations of a god allied with lying), delusions (pathological sediments in the mind of mischievous man), enticements (means of becoming wicked in one's life, as a sort of quasi-divine cheer-squad or encouragement): but they have nothing worthy of worship, being in all cases pathological in conception, incapable except for destruction involving the work of macabre passion, however much it may bless itself with unsavoury illusion.

To deliver from such is the very due and proper work of the spiritual 'husband' who wishes to protect and perfect the life of the loved one, here the Christian or the nation in various contexts. In this actual sense, there IS no other husband available; for God is one. The rest is imitation and self-elevation. The divine zeal therefore involves rescue from illusion, delusion and peril, form weakness that may for a time shout its own strength (as with Hitler and Sennacherib - Isaiah 36ff.), but in the end is simply ludicrous, like a dog posing as a bull, a bull as an army, or an army as God.

It is THIS zeal which, with God as the husband, in Christ as the Saviour, has "eaten Me up," so that His entire strength as in healing and exposing and raising the dead, but especially in bearing with and later in bearing the sin of the ones sought and besought, becomes an explosive current, like a dam bursting and releasing its waters into a valley; and it accomplishes its task, draped in the divinely chosen format of weakness of flesh (Romans 8, Hebrews 2), following the incarnation, itself therefore a further expression of the actual tenderness of heart and willingness to sacrifice for the entirely necessary, natural and blessed fulfilment of the thing made. It is LIKE jealousy, LIKE zeal and LIKE zest, but ONLY (as in any parable or image) in the respects shown relevant by the context and the association of relevant terms, jealousy. It is limited and delimited by the substance which it represents.

What then is in view, it is like jealousy in being filled with desire, singular and singularising hope and expectation, devoted love, and hence the term can be used; but that stops at the concept of wicked distortions and passionate pollutions which stoop to inept and merely self-bound desires, that have no relationship to reality, but only to a feverish heart. God is never represented like that; though He MAY indeed be shown to have after long patience, a readiness to visit on those who pollute, deceive, bring into bondage and evil what He loves, when the time comes as in Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 66, 59.

The use of this word of multiple meaning in ways contrary to context and merely foisted onto the imagery without verbal discretion is thus merely one more trap and trick of the devil. It means zeal in essence in the format of the figure invoked; and  when in imagery it means jealousy, it must as in all imagery, be divested of the inappropriate and given the apt phases of its meanings: that is, those where the OTHER and LITERAL meanings show the actual inten. Thus it is to be used with discretion as must all imagery and parable! You do not make a comparison in order to make an identity, but to make a likeness that reveals, reinforces, makes graphic, vital, that invades a slow mind or activates further a strong one, penetrating with mission and message. Distortion is purely the work of ill-will in such cases, and may rightly be despised like all other propaganda and superficial snarls.

Revolt loves to incite against the purity of what it wishes to dismiss; delusion loves to enhance this; but redemption is the ultimate in mind, where the zeal is so deep that the very life of the divine Lover, instead of in lordly fashion curbing the life by overflowing desire, as its passion dictates, allows the passion to be deployed on His own Person. Thus,  it is Himself who is 'devoured' in the binding of guilt upon Himself, taken from the sinner, scarcely alluring but still loved, to enable liberation and fulfilment of what it was, from the first, created to be (Romans 5:1-11, Galatians 3). That this divine action through faith and repentance involves becoming a child of God, the ultimate in parenthood not just in historical institution but in eternal life in the beauties of holiness, is its incomparable but matching achievement.