BULLETIN TWELVE

W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Volume What is New

BULLETIN TWELVE

A Conversation

Self-sufficient.

I am glad you think so.

You seem to have an almost constant stream of plans in beautiful order fulfilling themselves in the household and children.

Seeming and streaming are two different things.

Speaking of self-sufficiency, what is NOT IN FACT self-sufficient CANNOT be the origin of this law-girt and conformed universe, in its material aspect, far less the rest, mind and spirit.

Why, if I may ask ?

If it is not self-sufficient, it is insufficient, and must therefore depend on what would in total make it so; or simply not be it. In the former case, the two are what it takes, in a unison. In the latter, we need to look further.

Where precisely ?

Well logic led to what depended on nothing (was not a dependency), and was always there, for the absolute totality of origins, what could never lapse because always represented - when you are dealing with everything, you can never afford in your plan or model, to have nothing or you will always have it, and you would not be there to fail to appreciate its absence anyway.

True, so the Eternal Self-Sufficient Creator is needed. Matter is not it; it cannot think as we have noted; and it shows no capacity to create itself, and it would have to be there to do so anyway, in order to create itself, which amounts to begging the question.

What is conditioned and constrained cannot be the adequate source, and it took something like what is not able to create itself (especially before being there), to demand what is able to create all, in order for anything even to BE there. What is NOT conditioned and constrained, and IS able to create what is, without itself being dependent on anything, and is never missing (leaving an unfillable gap), it is this which is required to bring into being this universe, and not only that, but haul it into action as well. We would expect no primary school exhibits, of foozled attempts at design, to be found from such a source; but inherent competence from this eternal source from the start.

This, is of course the rather staggering testimony of all living cells. The least, we learn, is a sophisticated marvel (Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis). We would expect stateable plan, since this is not a learning experience for such a Being. In fact we have one, which continues to look magnificently right, as the incredible depth and breadth of the mathematics, finesse, almost endless seeming complexity in living cells becomes known, and the failing genome of man becomes common knowledge, like any other creation in the merely material sense, whether for degradation or disjunction or de-energising for what is needed.

The Eternal Self-Sufficient Creator who imparts laws and perspective in terms of which things work, thus is needed. He imparts a perspective for the manner and conditions of existence which man finds in much, summed up in laws.

I agree. Fixations on matter do not help. For a concert you need a comparatively mindless piano, though even it is a good example of the blending of the designed conditions for its excellence, and a richly endowed mind in the case of the pianist, allowing the composition and the intonation both to be fine; and preferably to cover the case, you need either quite brilliant improvisation or great versatility or both in the exponent of symphonies. That is the thing you get, so that is the thing you need: that is fairly obvious. Grapes don't grow on thistles.

If you want, to follow the same principle, far greater things than these in BOTH sorts of directions, you simply need what covers both to the degree found. It is an empirical as well as a logical matter. In terms of knowledge, matter does not think, contrive or show capacity for mathematical innovation, envisage and collate vast domains to create marvels. It simply does what it is: that is, according to its construction, it acts. It does not construct itself out of nothing before being there, in order to explain its existence, since that is both causally ludicrous and a contradiction in terms: and if that is a person's model for explaining the existence of the universe, then such a person is simply a drop-out for this exercise. Why children should be taught drop-out drivel is beyond me.

Well, it is not that they are so dumb, some being quite brilliant, but brains do not, to my observation, prevent divorces from either God or other people. Education can provide the slant - that is the customary mis-education now fairly normal in a weird looking fixation in this sphere at present, and pride, fear or desire for gain can provide a stabilisation in error. I remember one Professor to whom I was speaking, thinking of co-operating with him on a project in view, but he felt his position in the University was already vulnerable enough because of his understanding and people's perception of it, and that this could be going too far. So it did not happen. He opted out. That is just one example of many citable cases.

No, in fact, matter lacks what is needed to make itself, the creative KIND of capacity to institute those myriad forms and mergers, dissociations and combinations; and what is more, we do not find it exercising what it does not have. It matches.

It is neither source nor basis.

What covers all: the excellence and the beauty, for example, that one evolutionist has been lamenting as absent from Darwinism ? What covers courage and adventurousness, creative thought - it is a gift to have it and a further one to MAKE anyone gain it! in the first place. You need that to operate. What covers will and wisdom, wit and wonder, love and sacrificial nobility, profusion of kindness and devilishness of devastation, sensitivity and sensibility of SPIRIT (for it is useless to deny what is invisible just because it is not apparent to an organ called the eye), wilfulness and restraint, delight in service and obtuseness except for oneself: what produced all this. It is there. Matter cannot provide the span or the scope, the domain or the thought world, the area of concept or the arena of performance to make it all. Why should anyone pretend ? If anyone wants divorce, there is no need to involve the world in it!

It is the mind of man (we all have one and know a lot about how it works), and the spirit of man (we all have one, and find out what it is like in power and danger, in aspiration and compilation, in dream and performance): these require a source, with knowledge and savoir-faire to create these things so that they can be there to use in their highly specialised and acutely produced domains of operation.

It is not from other sorts of physical substances, dress them up as you will, things girt with character to provide all these functions, that origin is to be sort, since these are of the KIND of the deputed, attired, assessable and (if it were more than imagination) accessible, in their fields. In the field in view, they do not occur, only the evidence of such things having been used in their creation, being apparent. But it is one thing to create, and another thing just to be. Ignore the cause and you achieve nothing but confusion, no explanation, only a muddle that ruins all logic for your model.

What is visible and constrained is a means; what is needed is the source of that domain. Imaging another domain, another kind, not instituted in physical but mental and spirit terms, or having such functions, and then trying to squash it into this sort of one, is merely snatch and grab function.

These, mind, matter and spirit, are three utterly different realms with their own type of cause and effect, and to make one of them a carry-bag for the other two is simply one more casse of starting from nothing. It is trying to begin with more words but no more reality, merely a more broadly characterisable one, in collision with the type you have in mind. You can paint a piano, but you cannot make it think. You can SAY that a physical entity you imagine has these utterly alien qualities to those of MATTER, and then try in a prodigy of art, to combine them and push them out into existence by a sort of mental sun flare. But again, in such a case, it is just one more begging of the question, using imagination, not reality.

Indeed, to do so, you lack a) the exhibit of the object you imagine - it is not to be found; b) the correlation of what you imagine and what is there, in matter, in the physical; and c) and the presence of what IS the possessor of such disparate qualities, as well, of course as d) what is able to place any of them into existence.

When the Bible^*1 (Ezekiel 33:11), asks: Why will you die ? It is in profound pity. Alas, rampant imagination (in gambling, in drinking, in making war, in doing so by mental means or physical), can be deadly. It can leave the soul in a straightjacket in a wilderness, tied to unsustainable inventions, not able to look at the things that are temporary and means, long enough to find the things that are permanent.

Rueful wriggles do not make up for demonstrable facts, or rational requisites. Fun, to take one apparent aspect, has its place, but in this field, it is just not functional.

NOTE

*1 As shown in SMR, it is this which alone meets all the logical criteria in identifying the Eternal Source of the Universe; and as this verse indicates, it does much more, showing there is no other name than that of Jesus Christ given among mankind by which they must be saved (Acts 4:11-12); for mankind's condition in this world is not accidental, but resultant from where and what they are.