BULLETIN ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN
AN UPDATE ON LIGHT
In the realm of update over the years since SMR was written (1988-1992, and extended to 1997, 3rd Edition), there has been interesting development, as noted already, and attested in much at the head of Ch. 2 of SMR. Something may further be added in the area of astronomy. The astrophysicist Dr Jason Lisle in his overview at a relatively simple level, of current areas of data here. has many points to make on which we touch in a broader perspective. The outline is not least in pp. 44ff. of his fascinating work, Taking Back Astronomy.
Thus there is what is called a 'horizon' problem, in that neither on the naturalistic and uniformitarian approach nor on mistaken applications of the same wrought in a logically illicit manner, by some critics roving into the creation mode, is there solution found. There is no room for mix. The path is indeed narrow. Truth cannot be flexed.
Thus creation model in accounting for the universe, its objects and subjects divests itself from the nothing model, categorically and with infinite difference. Thus nothing being
a concept of what is not capable of ANYTHING,
an item which in fact is not even there
(actually, this is so both now, and in the past, nor could it be operative at any point in the future, since then in self-contradiction it would now be "something with a future" which decidedly is not nothing). Indeed, it is here merely a word, which is malapropos, not an object, subject, or situation! As Jason Lisle points out, this is mere circularity, arguing in a circle.In this our home site the point is sometimes made that it is a matter, from one angle, of mixed models. Yet to bring in the opponent's ideas and seek to work with them in another model is invasion, confusion, inclined to bombast in assumption, and ultimately and outrageously meaningless.
This is mere confused entanglement, ludicrous in any context. Separating out the two approaches, naturalistic and supernaturalistic, you find that the former cannot account for the arrival of light on earth from the distances at which certain objects appear. This is hardly surprising. It helps at all times to remember what we are here talking about: the matters of the nature of the universe, its mode of being brought into being and its current position in relation to this, and attempts to explain it all.
Since original nothing (with whatever wholly irrelevant and irrational additives as some naturalists often have brought into it, such as those with complex concepts in view, full of sound and empty here of significance) is an illegal immigrant in explanations, let us note this:
a) if it were initially ALL that was, it COULD have no future and we would not be here; and
b) if it were EVER all that was,
this deletes what is to be explained, and there is a certain result. This removes indeed the problem, but also the universe.
If however instead we continue with logic (and to deny it removes, in terms of coherence and consistency, from this approach the very means with which to argue, leaving it in its own terms indefensible, an ultimate in the denial of its validity), then there is a resultant situation rationally. Then SOMETHING and not nothing, in terms of the total situation, must always have been the case. There were only two options: something or nothing as the origin.
That this must be competent causally for the consequences (as with finding a new car on your front lawn for those who do not believe in magic), is the demand of logic; and what are these consequences ? They are the universe we now have, duly emplaced, where at the extant level, characteristics operate to produce results, in terms of causation (cf. SMR Ch. 5 and Predestination and Freewill, Section 4).
This, as recent DNA studies exquisitely and increasingly make plain, involves a co-ordinated complex of often mutually supportive, multi-tasked work, chronologically astutely governed, mathematically intensely brilliant and in terms of size, with magnificently miniaturised functions. As Dr Denton*1 (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis) has long pointed out, here evident and active are functions far beyond our human capacities (cf. Genetic Entropy, by Emeritus Cornel Professor, Dr J.C. Sanford who specialise on showing decline not advance as the crucial factor in DNA and life's condition on this earth).
Thus the always-there, totally-adequate, the super-natural God of creation must always be in existence. EVER omit Him in a model, leaving nothing as source, then NEVER could He arrive at all! for Nothing is completely unproductive. Not for nothing is God called in the Bible (Proverbs 10:25), the available "everlasting foundation."
Following logical necessities as in SMR, we find that He has even spoken, not only in DNA for the generation by generation construction of our race, but in comprehensible words, testable formulations and predictions, and these evidentially and in history, experimentally confirm, verify and validate what logic required*2.
God has not made man for a hell of vacuity, a clash with His reality as the Creator of truth, having all things of His desire and needing nothing, let alone what contradicts, invades and denies Him. He has spoken. Verification as noted above, and in the references, is on a massive scale.
God is, always has been, and has made a universe of what is full of amazing liberties, tests, trials, offers, remedies, and is explicit both in what He forms and what He formulates; and models concerning the universe concerning Him as source, are thus infinitely deep and more appreciative of all the facets, than any possible naturalistic or other invention. Though the authors of these, trying strenuously and continually without success, to have it all just make itself, abound, yet their universes do not. These, to go beyond arduous myth, need more than imagination: verbal articulation needs matching work to secure actuality.
Well then, Dr Lisle points out that attempts to endeavour to deal favourably with the naturalistic model, where God is not around, and the fact that light is here which is apparently from a far too distant source to have reached us even in the magnified times which the naturalistic model envisages, has here one of its major problems. It is no surprising development, that omitting the base, you find it difficult to mould the top tower.
Going beyond the most expansive dreams of naturalism, which tends to make time the creator, they have used the concept of 'inflation', a strange acceleration of major proportions in the speed of light contrived and imagined for a shortish time only (like fashion sales, only for a short time). Unfortunately, but expectedly, this has problems, two of which are simple: WHAT started this famous acceleration, and what turned it off!
What started this not currently observed inflation, and what finished it ? This is a supplement to the question what started ANYTHING. It is this merely an aggravation of the quaint impossibility of literally starting from nothing, when neither you nor an agent or agency or anything, is there. The results of such leisurely luxury are certainly there, making the term 'appalling' inadequate in impact to expose it!
The biblical model has no such logical trouble. Indeed, it is obvious at a glance. The Creator of space and time, of matter and the logically sensitive mind of man, for a reason, may have stretched out the universe, and done so to indicate His own handiwork (man is very often inclined to ignore it or scoff at it). This also provides scope for the reflective.
He may well thus at some point have stretched out the heavens so that when this extent was deemed sufficient, in a way incapable of any misconception, He stopped it. As is often pointed out, not least by Dr Russell Humphries, the Bible in fact refers to such a thing, namely God Himself stretching out the heavens (cf. Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 44:13,24, 45:12, 48:13).
Thus references to this divine, creative action abound at the very constitutive level, for creation. The reason for it, the power to do it, the nature of the result, all cohere like the peace of a quiet Summer night. We are in that context not talking about inherent laws in the created universe, but of the free operations of its Creator - just as the creation of the words for a book by some author, is not the same as arrangements for their remaining. It is not surprising for creative man to write a book; it does not stretch credulity. It is not surprising for his Author to write him (in the physical aspect with DNA, literally!).
As to any transfer of data or light, in the case of creation where the laws of operation are quite distinct from those of maintenance, as is normal in any creation (again, like that of making a painting and then preserving it), there are basic features and categories. For the Creator, this creative facility is quite beyond any current residues of results of His creative work. By this He PUT them there; by another type of His power, He keeps them there. These two are by nature entirely different things. Cause is not consequence, the act of creation is not its product, for each is a highly distinctive item: the one is what is held in mind, the objective in view as distinct from the other: the object you are hoping to arrive when your labours are over.
Almost as if it were an intensification of the confusion created, in this model, different models are also mixed by those having one of them, needing supplement, quite illicitly, from another. That, whatever the purpose, has some aspects of stealing.
Sometimes, then, in confusion, naturalistic atheists carry over their presuppositions into the Creation Model, scarcely, it seems. realising what they are doing. But it is perhaps a sign of their desperation. that In no field does it work, nor is that other than a verification of the model from which they borrow. How could it work when the necessary agency of God is removed in mental gymnastics, while trying to account for the size and style and wonder and work apparent in the creation. It would be a little like finding the best paper in an examination and then finding there was no student anywhere near that level, in a case and class where all were very well known and cheating was alertly excluded. You would of course seek to find the acutely able star scholar who did it.
As to the temperature similarity, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) over the observed universe, the near identity of which throughout is so impressive, this too fits wonderfully well in a practical fashion. Before the stretching out, the nearness then of the components of the universe, Lisle points out, would be very much closer, enabling a readier heat exchange, as basic to the observed very close uniformity.
Thus the unnaturally naturalistic Model has no solution in this sphere as repeatedly is the case in others, while the Creation Model not only has answers, but they seem so natural as almost to be expected; and certainly there is coverage of the point not only once, but often, in the revealed Revelation of God in the Bible (cf. Isaiah 41, 44,45, 46, 48).
Indeed, all uniformities, whether of the pervasive laws which enable predictions concerning astronomical or terrestrial physical objects, bespeak or imply a law-constraining force acting upon nature; and certainly it is more than a little ludicrous to suppose that 'nature', before it was there to do it, was the source... first making itself from nothing, although it was not there to do it, then applying itself. Nature making itself from nothing before it was there to do it, is a mere part of this woeful myth.
Nature is itself merely a department of creation, others such being maintenance, power distribution, consistency, origin and destiny. And of course, we are not logically going to make some kind of lucky dip situation, where to gain something new in kind in life (and put it into code for action - the DNA), we have just to stretch a lazy hand and say, It came because some of the worst went. Abolition (even if it were the case) achieves nothing in the way of creation of higher and better creations.
To call such an imagination simplistic would be flattery. It is not the case, founded on no logic, ignores cause and effect (cf. SMR Ch. 5) and equally the lack of finely graded multiplicity of corpses or bones of an enormous number of unsuccessful failures prior to successive working productions. This of course would need to be in this model, on the part of what is not personal, a matter of breeding itself without specifications.
VAST is the number of fossils required, failures. Few are those found. It is like clothes from a bad failure: nothing fits. For this model, once again, the disparity between fact and expectation or requirement for the theory, is disastrous/
Going is not coming, and departure is not invention, so that evolutionary ties or tantrums are merely close to tautologies. We gained the better because we got rid of the worse! Small wonder in simple practical fact. there are working results right back to the Cambrian, but the causes of such multi-method abundances ? of its vast coming to be, of the apparent sudden onsets ?
Never are they seen at work: scarcely surprising, just as in an Art Gallery you don't expect to find the artists at work. It is there to preserve it, not create it. THAT is done in order to have something (for the library or any other party). Creation is an entirely different matter which has parameters of its own; and matter, a specialised creation with many laws involved, is not empirically found adequate, except as a material basis for material things. Other things, like the mind and spirit which use it, which are used in thinking about it, which can make deliberate errors, which are not bound, transcend its lowly but useful ways.
I once saw something like this summary of the evolutionary method: nothing times anything equals everything. But that is giving them logically far too much. Actually it is nothing times not anything which is presumed to give everything. Times means a sequence, and this has to be of SOMETHING, which therefore has to be there. The system of mathematics of which such things are part, has to be there with it.
For that matter so does the ludicrous fantasising Big Bang pseudo-hypothesis and the power mentally to envisage hypothesis, and the imagination often enabling thinkers to be wrong. It is all there now ...
Amidst the other items of this begging the question type of Big Bang parade site, you also have to have compression and (then) expansion, which means pressure and available space (it is extremely important to have it there ready), and something to compress so that it might then suddenly first expand and then, as in the inflation theory, stop doing so.
It must also have potential (without which the result is zero) which involves a virtual infinitude of ready tools fit for the task. The Big Bang, or Vast Illusion simply makes the requirements for creation from a competent source all the harder! It is in one aspect like living cells. it is one thing to have their multitudes of contrivances and methods; but they are in life on earth found with a miniaturisation far beyond that of which man is capable, a fact strenuously emphasised by Denton. Like a sunset compared with a misty morn, there is not only one difference or another: there are a multitude of diverse and systematic differences,
That is the position, on the twisted atheist theory, the naturalistic thus having some sort of brakes and accelerator; and then again, you also need what has the potential to be compressed and expand and then stop, to be stretched out, and then arrested. Moreover, for pressure, you need force, and for force its generative means for it as well as for what is to be forced (you can't have things conveniently lying around when you ascribe nothing to the ultimate source).
Likewise, for a universe crammed and clamped with laws which scientists so nicely find and express in mathematical terms which mirror what they find in place and operative, including those which operate in your brain: you need a scenario to put this in place. In many features and dimensions.
Ignoring the question, which is quite simply what is being done in this attempt, in this false model to explain all that is, is a classic and citable logical fault. The use of it here is perhaps its most eminent example!
You have to exhibit that something from what make can laws, and for that matter, even non-existent, unformed, unforged matter is not in existence (only its product is acknowledged!). It is even in a model touting its exclusion at every point, just as it was first excluded altogether. It is all outcome of the original misconception from the idol called nothing, Now binding and discoverable generic laws as a testimony, these are to be explained in all their prodigious detail, granting the uniformity on which our science is base. It is like climbing a mountain that isn't there. It is impossible, however much exertion be made.
These laws and cause considerations, leave the followers of that model to spice their nothing with mounting additives, in good order, from nowhere. After all this metaphysical self-contradiction, you need again, a logical structure of cause and effect... and so on. it is not a mere matter of matter, though this is filled with its finesse and electrons and protons and neutrons and quarks and mesons and its slavish performance of what is demanded of it, by what ? It is by the adequate mind which conceives these things and systems, and implements this in the symbolically expressible conception as also found in it: for this is but one vast arena of cause and effect, law and result, potential and performance.
Though elementary compared with thought and vision and purpose and creativity, procurement and artisanship, not to mention artistry. it still uses its contribution till it is done, eventually de-energised declining in the specific efficiency of what is first was given, with the huge amount of relevant work enabling it. It is like a would-be Socialist State; everything is simply provided. But flick of the fingers arrival of a universe is better comics than many, and the lapse in logic seems almost compulsive or obsessive, losing out on every side on investigation.
That area is just one of myriads of questions 'begged': all these things are there because the makers of this 'model' say so, and what more do you require of origins is the impression left. This seems to be the attitude, just as after creation, there is a mini-type of the same thing.Then each new (and DNA commanding) step on the one way up (the opposite of what is actually found as noted*3) has to be supplied from the same source, labour duly done, DNA written, even as the ground for the sophisticated work involved, is evaded. At least it reminds one of the phenomenon of evading income tax. But neither the source of the tax nor what exacts it, fails to be there because of evasion; and all this organisation is in fact needed.
It has needs too, just as for matter and life do, for spirit and thought, fact and actuality, not verbally mesmerised imagination. What is required is not myth but mastery, not the contradictions of chaos but sovereign order by command or its inherent constraints by their institution. Not nothing but something is the logical necessity; not an indolent something like some tumours, but an operative one as creative as the universe in all its depths and heights and dimensions, requires for a valid result: normally called God.
As if ITS source, this Munificent Provider is not indifferent to its use, or unaware of its limits and of the laws He so carefully enshrined in it, and to which made it subject. You are not here alone with matter (and all the other things necessary together with it as traced above), but with its source, cause; and when you ignore its provision, then you still have the consequences. Like a journalist hiding a hidden source of a new item, so here. But it cannot be hidden.
I do not suppose there has ever been so big a begging of the question, taking everything for granted in a model or type of approach, with nothing to grant. It is like a young man starting out on a career, and assuming he is a millionaire already; and forgetting the work part ... and who does it!
Romans 1 even spells out some of the ultimate reasons for such errors with due predictions. It even spells out milenia ago, as the Age trolls towards its end, the passionate joining of increasing knowledge (as in Daniel 12) and increasing mythology (as in Darwinism's heart thrust - II Timothy 4:1-4). As to these aberrations and this spurious axioms-exposing trip to the Bible-diagnosed results, read in Romans 1: the failure in these things on the part of many does not relate to the deficiencies per se of the individual capacities of those caught. It is not a matter of individual difference but of the condition of the human race before God, who with magnificent grace, has provided for one as for all who will take it, a remedy (cf. Galatians 6:14), in Jesus Christ (Romans 3:25ff.).
To set God at nothing, is not a bright idea, for you can never start, and without starting, never finish; but to set nothing as God and then as often hide this fact in pompous sounding words that are logically irrelevant, what then is this! It is a very fair dynamic towards the destruction of the human race. Nothing does not go, for it has neither force nor form nor function; and anything which it specifies as present, does not go along with the theory model chosen.
Shakespeare had the precise phrasing applicable to it: Much Ado about Nothing!
NOTES
*1 On various ideas from Denton, see News 57 and The Wit and Wisdom ... Ch. 4.
*2 See for example Ch. 7 of The Meaning of Liberty ... with Ch. 10 of the same work.