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CHAPTER 2
THE DUMB PRIEST IN LUKE,
AND THE CASE IN PARALLEL DOMAINS,
WHEN MAN MEETS GOD
Part I
News 453, The Australian October 16, 2011
1) THE AFFLICTION OF DUMBNESS
THE CASE OF ZECHARIAS
The loss of power or desire to speak can be the result of a vast experience, impact or development. In looking at this, to find edification from the Bible, we look first at the earthly father of John the Baptist. You may indeed ask, What's in a name! and comment with Shakespeare, that after all, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet names are by no means insignificant. In fact, significant is precisely what they may be.
The NAME of the Lord means all His nature and character and power and presence, and refers indirectly to His promises and procedures. It is all that concerns Him, but set in such a way as to become a matter of practice, not just talk. A Lord without a name, as Moses insisted, can be unrecognised (Exodus 3:13-14); just as Jesus was made virtually unrecognisable physically (Isaiah 52:12-15), though and indeed this was BECAUSE He had a name, the Lord of glory, which the State of Israel at that time, conjoined to the priestly party, did not wish to accept. God took exception to this reception and thus, much followed.
You CANNOT reserve judgment on Christ, and expect things to drift. If you are not attached, then when the floods come, you drift at your peril. Christ met them full face, and rose from the dead, full body, in testimony that with God, nothing shall be called impossible. This is the God whom we serve, and whom those who knew Him in the past, through millenia in the Old and New Covenants, also served. He is the God of power and resource, though this generation, as predicted, loves to forget this and to trust in something else (II Timothy 3:4-7).
The name of the Lord is what was in view in the Jewish worship, the I AM as revealed to Moses in Exodus 3 and 6; and when Jesus claimed to be He (John 8:58), and nothing less, sent from His source, as the Son of Man and Son of God jointly, this being the case (Luke 1:35), through incarnation as foretold (Isaiah 48:15ff., 50,53, 7:1ff., 9:1ff., Hosea 13:14, Matthew 1:21-23): what followed ? Therefore, the reviling of Christ was identical with the reviling of God Himself (John 5:20-23) and had the expected result! (John 8:24): disbelieving, they would die in their sins!
The Father, having sent the Son from heaven in the format given, wishes that ALL MEN honour the Son just as they honour the Father (John 5:19ff.). Another belief is in another god, and as there is but One God whose testimony reeks in the very air of earth, through the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ, this means a godless reliance on mere fiction. The Bible does not resile from such clear assertion. The results are as to be expected when dreams replace reality (John 3:36, Jeremiah 23). This sort of confusion, Jeremiah predicted, would be rife as the end of the Age drew near (23:20), the very epitome of false prophecy or revelation.
From this, the living God, came a vast experience on the part of Zacharias the priest, father of John the Baptist. As he was going through his appointed priestly duties, in the burning of incense in the Lord's temple, the name of the Lord came to life in the power and presence of an angel who announced that profound news had come. To Zacharias and his wife there was given a mighty, famous and valorous son, one who would not drink alcoholic beverages, but who would be consecrated to the Lord, and filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb. Indeed, this, their coming son, would act in the spirit of Elijah, that confrontational, challenging, incisive, decisive prophet of the Lord, whose works to awaken Israel had been vast and dramatic. Now this John, this son to Zacharias, would even prepare the way for the incarnate God to be received.
This news apparently overwhelmed Zacharias. It is important thus to realise that as you LIVE your time for Christ, if you are a Christian, that you should be ready for any eventuality in service, any opportunity, any duty, any test or challenge, lest when it comes, you should be caught napping. Sentries sometimes do this because so little seems to be happening; but this is precisely the time when the enemy may judiciously act, or when the commander may need those readily called, to carry out a sudden plan.
Accordingly, when Zacharias heard the astonishing news that not only would they, an older couple, have a son, but this would be his extraordinary and remarkable work, then the priest replied: "How shall I know this? for I am an old man and my wife is well advanced in years." They might have said, senior citizens.
In fact, old as they were, a child had not been given to them before! The answer to the priest's HOW! of course is that he should have recognised the authority of the speaker, and based on that, done something better than bring up epistemological questions, or even rank secularity, as if God were in some way embarrassed by doing the unusual! On the contrary, He alone does great wonders (beyond manipulation and deceit - as in Psalm 77:14 and 136:4). Indeed, with the Messiah, it was a case of the sublimely unique, and infinitely glorious. Now in that case, MARY enquired as to the mode of action for the incarnation; but Zacharias in his, asked how he could KNOW it (Luke 1:18).
How could anyone know the Lord and His testimony ? It is by faith in accord with all the evidence. God does not make it too difficult, but does search the hearts! (I John 5:3, I Cor. 10:13). If he had asked just how some aspect would be achieved, that is one thing. To ask, in the very face of the one giving the revelation, how he should KNOW it, however, this is simply to withhold trust. There WAS to be such a messenger to prepare the ways of the Lord, as forecast some 7 centuries earlier (Isaiah 40:3), and this was declared most prominently. Why should it not be his own son! It had to be someone's son! Never imagine that God may not use you!
The result in this case, of drawing near to the Lord, therefore included a disciplinary aspect, though one tenderly enough drawn. The priest, having spoken amiss, would lose the very power of speech UNTIL that self-same, predicted son, whose name was to be John, would be born. Thus when he came out of the temple, although the prophecy concerning John would come true while the coming son's priestly father was still alive (as the dreams of Joseph had fulfilment while Jacob was still very much alive), the case was notable. He had gone in intact, "but when he came out, he could not speak to them," Luke 1:22. That is our text this morning, and it is applied to several categories of experience and divine action.
Here, then, one becomes literally DUMB because of speaking amiss. Deep as were the blessings given to Zecharias, he fumbled and had a salutary lesson taught, about vigilance, and being continually spiritually fit and ready before the Lord, who is never a ceremonial back-seat driver, but present in conjunction with appointed symbols, personally, available, intimately present, even indeed within you who believe truly in Him (Colossians 1:27, Romans 8:9). Nor are the symbols the power, but an index to Him who is.
2) THE AFFLICTION OF KING UZZIAH (II CHRONICLES 26:16-21)
We come to our second example this morning. King Uzziah, also known as Azariah, sought God in earlier days, and made kingly conquests, "but when he was strong his heart was lifted up." That is never a good idea. If you are, where you are placed, humble, meek and contrite in the Lord (Isaiah 66:-12. Matthew 5:3) , strong and courageous in faith, well; but if you are so 'successful' in meeting some of your aims, even just ones, that you begin to have self-belief, a concern about yourself as a source for monolith of me, then readily may you be taught the reality of a far deeper failure, both swift and momentous. IF NEED BE, says Peter (I Peter 1:6),
"In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a season,
if need be,
you are in heaviness through manifold temptations,"or trials.
Even an aircraft has trials at its outset and onset!
In the case of Uzziah, not only did his father, King Amaziah, foolishly force the issue with the depraved kingdom of Israel to the North, which was to be almost obliterated in due course (cf. I Kings 17), by confronting it at the military level, so that his strong forces which might have been useful, were needlessly smitten by that same Israel to the North. He had had gracious warning, as the son of Amaziah, with his father's fault before him; yet he went right on to commit a parallel error. Uzziah's had a heart problem, for although in form he was orthodox, it seems, in fact his was not "a loyal heart" ( II Chronicles 25:2). This counted!
From the one given much, much is expected. Alas for Uzziah, when it came to be his turn for living as king, he also misused his office. He strode into the Temple, where the most ornate and special arrangements were made for priests as appointed, to perform their own sacrifices, partaking of their own symbols. Thus they were to attest the truth in the divinely appointed way, the faith which God grants. God did not choose to make kings priests or priests kings; and in fact, the one who combines both offices is the Messiah Himself, in whom all the fulness of the deity resides (Colossians 2:9, Zechariah 6:12-13).
Amaziah, by contrast, not being appointed to offer incense, nevertheless elected to do this. saucily swinging his censer. After him, in went Azariah the priest with 80 valiant priests of the Lord. IT IS NOT FOR YOU to do this! the King was told. Unlike David, when confronted with his sin by the prophet Nathan, he did not confess and repent: in fact, David was given to write that pearl of repentance, Psalm 51. Not so was the case for King Uzziah. Indeed, He even became furious!
There may be heavy results when you enter into holy things, act amid holy realities and take part as an gate-crasher by rash presumption. This was an intrusive, invasive and unseemly part which the King took; and fury was NOT the required result, but repentance in the fear of God. Thus he quickly countered his first over-reaching with an outburst!
ONE of the enemies of the Christian, potentially, is his or her own flesh, which vaunts itself, or may seek to act untremulously, proudly, arrogantly, disdainfully (Romans 7). Alas for Uzziah, with his censer in his hand, and anger with the priests in his kingly heart; for he gained in body a result for what his uplifted spirit would not receive. Leprosy, an inner bodily revolt, broke out on his very forehead, where his incensed rebellion had just then been burning. He stayed that way, with the sanctions in force for leprosy, to his detriment for life. TRUST in the Lord and fear God, that is, have that delightful awe at Him which makes that which as a small child you may have had towards a Headmaster. This is an infinitely greater matter, and being mature, you have more for which to answer!
3) THE BLESSINGS OF DANIEL (DANIEL 8-10): FIRST THE SOURCE
It is not without relief that we now find the case of the extraordinary life of the prophet Daniel, who as a young man was sorely tried, being captured and taken in one of the raids of Babylon, before its final brutal assault on Jerusalem. He became a cadet in the realms of wisdom, on which Babylon, in theory, was strong; though like Australia now, its pagan practices made the very use of the term, at the national level, almost a mockery in itself. Naturalism (as in schools and many colleges) and anti-supernaturalism, and with that, a special departure from the acts of God which are not only conceived as in the supernatural realm, but found in the natural at His own action: these follies had killed the nation. Isolation from reality had become a cultural icon. Dependence on false gods, social desires, rotted ideologies had become, if not the flag, at least the popular flap.
God is not mocked, and mannerless talk, outside even logic, is scarcely a contribution to wisdom for any people. Reliance on the resources of a godless nation merely exacerbates the follies, and this too, as in Israel in military hopes from abroad, has become an Australian breach in its financial borrowings from an atheist nation abroad, and the tumultuous applications of them. Righteousness always exalts a nation and sin is always a reproach to any people, whether one founded by a Protestant nation, as in our own case, or one founded through the work of patriarchs and prophets, as in that of Israel.
Daniel had none of this. He kept so near to God that when even a relatively small-seeming matter of diet came up, he made a point of finding a way to avoid the rich and possibly intoxicating provisions for such elite fellows as those, with him, chosen for special work with the State. When the breed of 'wise men' was in danger of extermination in Babylon (their double talk vexing the monarch), it was Daniel who in his godly grace, was able to find out the threat, and seeking God with his companions, meet the extraordinary request of the King, even telling him the MEANING of a dream, without being told its CONTENT! The wily monarch in this way was going to test the reality of all this wisdom: would it work ?
Did they REALLY have evidence in their favour*1, or just a lot of talk, with faded ideologies, as some are crying (apart from much money spent in often dubious ways), is the case, even from among aborigines themselves. Similarly potted-'science', which may descend even with apparent religious overtones at times (as with the strange confession of Professor Lewontin of Harvard), despite the generic warning of Nobel Prize winner, astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, is often prematurely and even recklessly made an assumed fact. Indeed, it may be used to attack religious, ethical and research presentations of different kinds, as if the temporary were the eternal, the current the final or the estimate found, unreviewable. Indeed contrary evidence may be simply ignored.
Babylon had the same problems, and of course, with pretentious preferences, in due course fell, with but feeble resistance. In the meantime, to the enquiring monarch of that nation, Daniel told both the dream and the meaning; and from that time on was a marked man. HIS God could act, solve riddles, bring light to darkness, had power, and was there for action. That is what many in Britain once believed, even in high places, so calling for national days of prayer; it is doubtful if such a national approach would apply now; and hence whether any such result could thus be achieved. God knows both how to bless entreaty in sincerity and weakness to His power and promises, and to debunk false faith in false gods and cultural systems, and bury them with their ruin. This applies whether in much or little, as in divine creation, whether of the universe, or of new hearts (Hebrews 11:1ff., Titus 3:3-7).
Thus Daniel then was able, by knowledge FROM GOD, when threatened with the others with death or else deliverance of the royal dream's meaning, to meet the challenge and show that God is indeed a God of power and wisdom. This was different; it was not cultural mumbo-jumbo, with everything correct because cultural, and that in the end, as if you were ruled by nostrums and statistics, as if it were right because people do it. Daniel instead presented a kingly attestation of the God who speaks and acts, whom Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar would later come to acknowledge in His majesty and grandeur (Daniel 4:28-37)..
Daniel's way of speech in this affair, when telling the King the answer from God to his question, was beautiful, apt, careful, just. In Daniel 2:30, just before answering the King's challenge, he spoke in this way:
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"But as for me, this secret has not been revealed
to me |
Nebuchadnezzar's frank amazement at the answer through Daniel from God, later led to his exclamation:
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"Truly your God is the God of gods, the Lord of kings, |
This is the response that all of the servants of God would like to see when God works through them. Whether it be in Biblical Christian Apologetics, help to the poor, peace amid civil strife, the reality is the same: if GOD acts through faith in Him as He is, there is no limit to His results.
SECOND: MANY CASES OF DIVINE REVELATION FOR DANIEL
Having cherished closeness to God, confrontational or revelatory of His greatness and desire, this could bring various personal results in such a one as Daniel. Thus there is vast and deep praise, with the answer provided by God to the monarch's challenge about his dream (Daniel 2:20-23), and Lord willing we will hope to see more of his reactions and responses to the amazing deliverances of coming events in divinely dynamised prophecies from the Eternal God, and see something of their scope.
For now, what is found ? It is a great thing when great challenge is made and one is abiding in the Lord (John 15:7), and the power of God sanctifies the suffering or the smarting which one suffers; and it is faith, reliance, trust in the Lord and not in oneself, self-belief or the like, or in something else which matters, but in God Himself.
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"Trust in the Lord with ALL your heart; |
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do not lean to your own understanding. |
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IN ALL YOUR WAYS acknowledge Him, |
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and He will direct your paths," (cap. phrase added). |
Do not forget, in the midst of travail, what those who triumphed in the Lord were willing to suffer; or the Cross of Christ, without which there would BE NO ACCESS to God (Ephesians 2:17-18, 1:10, John 14:6).
EXCURSION ON SCIENTISTIC PRE-OCCUPATIONS
*1
The thoughts of Brian Schmidt are as given by The Australian, October 15-6, 2011, in an article in the Enquirer , p. 24. The science, he is reported to have stated, is the science, and "policy is policy": science should inform policy. The spheres are not coincidental, or mere mergers. Criticised by Schidmt, we read, were arguments among politicians about science, instead of focussing on policy outcomes. The article by Frank Furedi, former Professor Sociology at the University of Kent, and author, is of some weight.
In this he takes the thoughts of Schmidt as an illustration of a trend, which he discusses at some length, and small wonder with the immense political debate which has become possessed almost of a climate of its own, concerning climate change, green-house gases, human responsibility, its extent, other causes, and the scope of the change in any case. There appears at the official level in the US and Australia, to be some considerable emphasis on the fact of change, though there are doubters, as distinct from the cause of it. There have been echoes of prejudice, of ill-advised intervention and other elements illustrative of man's misuse of 'science' to cover other responsibilities, and indeed to preclude argument, when 'science' is often enough used to indicate someone's model which is taken on inadequate criteria to generate what, because it is depicted via computer, is given a spurious authority.
Other models are invented; cogitation can be far outweighed by representation; mathematics can impart a dignity which is meaningless in itself, as is the computing aspect, TO THE EXTENT of assumptions which underlie such models. A chauffer in cap and tunic, who drives you to your death does not dignify the accident by his outward clothing, or even by his specialised career. It is not the appearance which matters, but the living reality!
In stating that it is not the job of politicians to second guess scientists, Schmidt then gains the approval of Furedi, who pursues the argument against trying to make matters of science and its continual review, to serve beyond its mandate. Indeed, there are many reasons behind any such error, and they are more than utilitarian, and can amount to misuse of tendential data for political convenience or shortening of discussion.
Where scientists rage in debate, and accuse this or that party of misrepresentation, the use of 'science' as a sacred cow to gain access to acceptance becomes in fact ludicrous. Analysts of the data presented as BASIC to models, and the empirical data on which the models are based may readily be subject to consideration from a logical perspective. The use some scientists make of these is indeed susceptible to estimation, lest their conclusions be confused with fact. As Furedi points out, science is always testing. It is not static. Indeed, ludicrous mistakes have been made, and this can reach almost obsessive level, as Lord Zuckerman pointed out in work, Beyond the Ivory Tower. Another notable scientist in the same field (Oxnard cf. SMR p. 235) drew attention to the point that the arrival of new data on the relation of fossil creatures in the vicinity or ape or man, draws almost routine claims of brilliant developments, more impactive in dramatic news than unromantic fact. This was especially so in the arena of the Australopithecines.
A note in SMR pp. 234ff. is excerpted below, concerning this topic.
Of recent interest on this ancient topic, is Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. In this, he investigates the 'Burgess Shale' in Canada, one discovered by Charles Walcott, in British Columbia.
In 'checking out' the facts, he gathers data for the interesting declaration that diversity, ''disparity in anatomical design'' of life in these Cambrian rocks exceeds what is in our contemporary oceans. Of gradualistic concepts in the face of this vital profusion of multiply-modelled, hi-tech abounding life, Gould attests this: ''literally incomprehensible''! (Op.cit., pp. 208, 260; cf. p. 160 supra.)
Not merely, then, is there a substantial contribution to currently known life immediately in this first basic 'geological age', as the theory has it: it exceeds what we now have in the oceans. A more delightfully sharp rebuke to the evolutionary notion of gradual arrivals could scarcely be constructed by Lewis Carroll, even with all his gifts, even if he set his mind to parody evolutionary pretensions. Here, however, the 'parody' is found... in the facts. Evolution is a parody of a scientific theory, one so gross, that if it were instead a scientific theory, those who hold it could be appalled by the gall of the maker of the parody.
Put more specifically, in terms of form: the theory of gradualism
is a parody of the facts; a rejection of the evidence;
is falsified as a scientific theory by continual confirmation of this contradiction
of what it would predict;
and its formally defunct character is re-asserted with the progress of knowledge,
with increasing and now mortifying force and firmness.
That is its logical character. It is like the corpse of Lenin: very dead,
but surprising kept on view. In this case, however, wanton devotee work
is not interested in acknowledging that the corpse is (scientifically) dead.One example of the reluctance to acknowledge this death, comes in a form to which Gish makes illustrative reference, in Eldredge's assertion that the soft-bodied biota in the early Cambrian would not display much in the way of intermediates because they were soft-bodied. At this Gish explodes:
It is difficult to believe that Eldredge or any other scientist could have made such a statement . . . Surely if palaeontologists are able to find numerous fossils of microscopic single-celled, soft-bodied bacteria and algae, as Eldredge does not doubt they have, then they could easily find fossils of all the stages intermediate between these microscopic organisms and the complex invertebrates of the Cambrian. (P. 59, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record).
Gish continues, citing examples, and speaks of many hundreds of examples of fossil preservation of the soft- bodied, indicating that the difficulty, for Cambrian, is that they do not find them, these 'fossils of all stages': easily or otherwise!
A similar astonishing statement is self-confessed by Richard Leakey in his claims in the human palaeontological field, when he acknowledged:
I am staggered to believe that as little as a year ago I made the statements that I made (Gish cites, op.cit. p. 156).
Oxnard, having earlier wondered about new forms which might contribute (1975), is most cautious in his 1981 comment. Similarly, depreciatory and systematic downgradings of some "hopefuls", in the Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) type, arrived from such as Stern and Susman. Their comments are extensively noted by Gish (op.cit., pp. 158 ff.); and in fact, these exhibits were among the earlier cases of the Australopithecine type Oxnard had carefully categorised as way out of human relevance as a line: affirming indeed in 1987 (p. 227, Fossils, Teeth and Sex) that all Australopithecines are further from African apes and man than these latter are from each other. Similarly Leakey was to co-author of a paper with Alan Walker in 1981, which includes Walker's view that the famed 1470 skull was in fact australopithecine; and Leakey, says Gish, "backed down considerably" in his own categorisation.
Small wonder then that Oxnard in the midst of a long history of such happenings could say (Homo, 30; 243, 1981): "There has never yet been announced a new find that was not a human ancestor", a statement made it would seem, not without considerable irony from the one who showed so authoritatively with Zuckerman, equipped with thoroughness and persistence, the alien elements of australopithecines for any station or stop on the human line, which, like the rest, arrives in its own right.
Zuckerman as we note, has referred to this lack of any established ancestry after some 15 years of intensive research with multivariate analysis: this technique being brought in for more objectivity in assessment, involving the use of computers. If man had been created direct, we recall that he indicated, there would be no evidence to dispute it (p. 64, Beyond the Ivory Tower). The Cambrian case differs not in kind, but in drama from some of the others.
With the 'Cambrian' ocean explicitly stated to have more life forms than is now the case, including a mollusc with eyes advanced like our own, it is time a little refrigeration was employed on the corpse of this mutilated theory: even for devotees. It is time eyes of human understanding opened on this sight - not the sightless eyes of the rigid dead.
We might indeed put these considerations into a broader focus, as in the preceding end-note to Ch. 2 in SMR on pp. 226ff., from which a further excerpt is taken. Since that date, vast have been the attestation of word and work, from the information-bestowing intelligence, which unlike natural processes without intelligence worked to write our specifications, commonly known as the Creator.
EXTENSION J: ON THE FULLSTOP WHICH BEGINS A SENTENCE... PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM AND PUNCTURED, POLLUTED YOUTH:
The Dynamics of Human Disequilibrium: A Summary Overview of the Philosophy Of Punctuated Equilibrium
Professor Fred Hoyle (see pp. 224-225 infra) in his New Scientist, 1981 article, p. 527, speaking of blind people with Rubic cubes (10 to the power 50 of them - 10 with 50 zeros), all simultaneously reaching the same and correct solution by random shuffling, to get "just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends"... is aghast. He had constructed this illustration to clarify what was in view in the making and building of life processes, regarded with so glazed a gaze by people ill conforming to the stringency of system; and he indicates the analytical result for the evolutionary theory which he so illustrated, referring to the latter as "evidently nonsense of a high order".
There are many such miracles needed, and simultaneously, together with the operating system, the code, which must infiltrate as well, to direct the materials, being on time, since it depends on them to act.
At that, as noted earlier, Hoyle comparatively has it made, in his case. First of all you have to invent the systematic groundwork which the cubes symbolise (both in form and law and order, and space and their correlation). System as a start in accounting for system is not a bad start, a fair advance since system is a good part of what is the issue! A highly schematised system is still better as a beginning; as if a shrewd businessman should tell us that in order to be a millionaire, it is good to start with a large capital base. No doubt it might help! It might not, however, be regarded as to the point by the recipients of this 'counsel'.
Hoyle then, despite starting where he does, has had more than enough, though he has hardly begun, to meet the stringency of the actual reality. Trying to get something out of nothing is always nonsense of a high order, whether taking it slowly and gradually or not. The case is only made worse when you also want to get the capacity to err out of the capacity to obey laws, the capacity to conceive out of the capacity to be positioned, and the capacity to will out of the capacity to be willed.
Fantasising about what is not seen to happen, on a magical basis of inadequate cause for progressing from nothing... is not science; and having a system which has what it takes in the beginning is merely begging the question - the only point being the particular way in which it is begged.
All this we have seen earlier, and recall it here for review and for convenience, before proceeding with the current topic. This topic 'takes off' from here, in a number of ways.
Aghast, too might the evolutionist be at the reckless refusal of the Cambrian "Age" (cf. pp. 159-161 supra, 234 infra) to conform to what is expected of it... 'Doesn't the confounded thing know how to do its duty ?' an establishment, evolutionary Englishman might ask ... appalled by its sheer dynamic and exuberance, its diversity of type and style and form, its sheer luxury of well- developed varieties in situ, as by the similar eruptive creationism that also appears to occur at the juncture, in the 'record', of reptiles and mammals (cf. p. 235 infra).
What seems to have happened ? A deluge of creation is attested in time focus, flinging itself fearlessly across the material barriers with the seeming abandon, or at least disregard of the imaginative artist, carving up domains, manufacturing types jointly, in even on category, thrusting without escape, providing without tiring, constructing with prodigies of ingenuity, performance criteria of the most esoteric, logic of the most profound, as if energy were the least of considerations and the sheer prodigality of enterprise were blooming in a celestial Spring. It is like saying, 10 serious volumes from a theologian in 3 years and he was merely twiddling his thumbs, to ignore the actual output which is found from what are deemed the first ages of this earth!
To ignore this deposit of fact, what it is it like? It is a monumental thrust of impatience allied with impenitence for which this generation has reaped already in two world wars, continued in the Cold War (which incidentally may prove fatal to the globe per kindness of Communism in its radioactive deposits into the Northern oceans, and seas). It is continuing in a plague of unrest, disputes about sovereignty and rights, disregard of duty and all tenderness, till the globe is becoming as hot as the hotheadedness which wants results without cause, in its own creation, which would accept with scatter-brained and thankless absent-mindedness, the prodigious provision of styles and fashions of results which require the operation of a Being minimally so equipped with facility of thought, abundance of logic and power to render matter plastic to the least desire as a mouldable container for designs and methodological tool for outpourings of multiplicities of life, as to render man an infant of thought by comparison. And that, it is merely a beginning: there is the towering triumph of thought per se, and the overarching splendour of spirit, imagination, creativity, even though one of its most profound current performances be in the wilful deposition of double-dealing irrationality which defiles all reason, sometimes directly defying it, while using it in order to make the defiance seem acceptable! If this is not tyranny, what is; and it grasps and crushes this generation like some besotted ape, truly in New York, and tearing down buildings; yet alas, what it here is tearing is the corrupted heart of mankind, till his own deeds will render his planet uninhabitable, and the most patient judgments of God the Creator, will yet leave man's home a new contender for universal holocaust.
Let us however return to the Cambrian collection with its prodigality of form and effortless seeming arena of activity. It is merely one of the triumphs of modern thought, even when it is given its own way of looking at things; for there it is, even on its own model! Let us look further.
With, as Gish (p. 95, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record) puts it, "the 32 orders of mammals, all highly specialised so that they could be immediately classified," arriving, indeed "appearing abruptly" and ''fully formed'', for the evolutionary theorist, shock perhaps now occludes thought even more than desire did, at the first.
Seeing the disappearing dias of the Darwinian bias, what can he do ? Some proponent of the evolutionary magic might then become quite vexed and say within him/herself: "Ah yes, this is distressingly different from the implications of gradualistic evolution. Not only are the creatures numerous, but they are varied on the spot, no time for a bit of surviving and all that... it is as if time did not matter: but the theory is built on it. What a mess! Not only is there one type of suddenly sophisticated creature like the trilobite equipped, of all things, with eyes, or a mollusc with eyes complexly reminiscent of our own, but this is only one of the multitude, or these two of them! Mm! Ah well, if facts fail, use words."
"Let us see," he might continue. ''What about 'punctuated equilibrium' ? Excellent, for that stresses the stasis side, and the 'punctuation' feels, well, more buried that way in the delicious phrase-making. After all,'' he might ponder along, ''this is a literary exercise at keeping the thing going. This phrase manages to 'cover' it discretely without saying 'creation', which in any normal human usage meets the definition of what is actually happening, in terms of this rum show... this turn-out of up to half the wretched invertebrate action, in the sea around the start of biological life! What, and more life than in the modern sea, in the sea then! No, it really is necessary, and it's good stuff, this phrase: it doesn't actually say "creation"; and that is what I am against."
That is in the line, at least, of the sort of sense in which the "theory" carves out a niche. 'It' is not subject to the test of laws, of prediction, of falsification (if nothing continues to happen under any circumstances you like, that is fine) by observation; and because there is no known means anyway, let alone principle, no known observation, let alone sustainable and testable theory to explain it, it can hope to bask in undisturbable bliss.
It, quite simply - as Popper quite rightly claims - is not a scientific law, this evolution, whether indeed gradualistic, or this more recent and exotic model, we might add. Certainly it denies the principles of science and sufficient causation, and by implication does not arise to the forum for thought, but more of that anon. As to the gradualistic contradiction of logic and evidence alike, its scientific pretence has to yield to a better sleight of thought which, though it involves direct ... creation, at least deals better with the evidence. The orphaned creation at least is born quickly!
Normally, it is said: that theory is wrong; rationally, yes, but not here! Evolutionism is incredibly clung to by some, while others make the literary excursion (just outlined, or something such) into yet more horrible collision with the Edens and the Dentons and the mathematical, artificial intelligence testing Schützenbergers, the merely mathematical Hoyles and the like: violating not merely the deteriorative trend in terms of a self-constructive, auto-designer myth, but having it (not out of trend for the "instant generation"), at once!
Forget that it violates known processes in genetics such as a Kouznetsov bows to (pp. 218 ff. infra), in turning to the creation that it in fact evinces, on such a ground as that; or moves a Korochkin, with similar creationist commitment and comprehension taking up a professorship in Genetics at Yale ... and stirs an Eden of MIT to blast the language impasse, even before that flight of fancy to the creationist fact, without the creator- cause, is engaged in: this 'punctuated equilibrium'. Shall we have eating without an eater, drinking without a drinker, or even work without working, light without illumination and darkness while the light blazes ? How very odd!
One remembers the Adelaide News speaking of the coming of Dr Kouznetsov, referring to the view of the Russian triple doctorate holder, as some 'special Biblical' method of creation, instead of creation by evolution. By evolution ? That is like saying that we shall have communism by some special human method, instead of communism by individualists! To create is so to make that creative effort is expended; and what is so special about that! What is special is having creative effort expended by what is incapable of such a quality of effort: untutored circumstance! that ... it is passing strange. (It is not however that of which Dr Kouznetsov was the proponent. He was presented factual, specialised evidence for creation by the Creator!)
So with punctuated equilibrium, creation without creator; a new turn to the semantic splendour of self- contradiction. What after this...! It reminds one of the propaganda of Communism liberating, and of its being democracy. That also is some special method of being free: to be bound to tyrants.
So the "theory", unscientific entirely in its method, flows this way and that. A religion of the subjectivistic sort, it is allowed the privileges of eccentricity and abandon which are the preference of some styles of religion, at the opposite extreme to Christianity, that evidential homeland for fact and act. (Isaiah 41, 43, 46, 48, Acts 4:19-20, 2:22, John 3:11, Matthew 11:1-5 illustrate the point of emphasis, and it is a bold, unshrinking one.) The Creator moreover has created and stopped; the teaching is clear, in the Bible, for any who will read (Genesis 1, Exodus 2:4, 20:10, Colossians 1:16, Revelation 10:6, 4:11, Hebrews 4:3-11, Ephesians 3:9). The designs are here; life is here; it wears; but it is evidenced as coming, no longer: the 7th day its memorial, the rest continues. (Cf. Repent or Perish, Ch.7.)
The factual fit of course is perfection; the opposite applying to evolution. It can contrive to show nothing of itself in the past or in the present, while the Bible as ever, is sustained in fact.
Some, then, continue in dogmatic slumber with Darwin; many depart; but the broad trend of thought seems not to be concerned about the evidence, in the way which would have to happen if this were science, a discipline following scientific method. Some heighten the eccentricity as in punctuated equilibrium. Thus in the High Schools in South Australia, the teaching of evolution selectively in science, at once an abuse of scientific method both in its substance and in its procedure, is also an abuse of religion. Trebly, therefore, it is also an abuse of the child, be the motive what it will.
Various rearguard irrationalities pollute the earth, more than smog. As for punctuated equilibrium, it remains a failed model, because it is not only untestable by law and prediction, it is also unobservable ever, except where man does it, or the work is done already, beyond sight; the results however not being beyond sight.
This is known as the universe. In it, what punctuated equilibrium postulates is not observed in practice, without personality and intelligence at work. As the use of reason implies its acceptance, the failure of this variant of fibrillating evolutionary theory to meet rational criteria of adequate cause for consequences in law, in will, in order, in conceptually correlated symbols, in language, and something indeed other than nothing: this spells its rational exclusion. What then ? (Cf. pp. 396-422D; Ch. 3 infra.)
If reason be rejected, so is the power to reason; for what is invalid cannot establish validity, or demonstrate its absence. Further, since language implies logic, its symbols being conveyors of the same in order to achieve communication to man in coherence, the laws of cause and effect constantly in use: if reason be rejected, so is the validity of language. For such theorists, rejecting reason, their case is lost by double default, in language and in logic, verbal and rational powers being discarded to the point.
If however, reason be accepted as valid, so is its place in the interstices of language, both of man creating it, and in matter the deaf recipient of it, with all that this implies: in its environment, thus constrained to be that of objectively valid rationality.
To achieve that environment, you also need a sufficient cause, which institutes these results, and which gives and confirms rational grounds for their existence and validity. That is normally referred to as God. Those not knowing Him, are advised to seek Him at the earliest opportunity, rather than simply using what presupposes Him. (Cf. Isaiah 55:6 ff.; Chapter 1, Section 1, Part B supra relates here; as do pp. 252A-N infra.)
Punctuated equilibrium, further, in terms of the Cambrian evidence, requires the abrupt intrusion of a whole host of creation; and that of course is far removed from reducing the reality of what this requires for its cause, from God the Creator. In effect, it is in fact merely a trade name for creation, analytically considered, with its whole consequence merely taken for granted.
This is then covert creationism: the concepts, and the power, the language and the symbolic logic all being implicit at once, and requiring a due source: Not nothing, but God having these ingredients, qualities, powers; a source which is similarly required by the less visible but still fully operationally in force, law of matter. Even if you postulate areas where, unseen, this does not occur, you are not merely abandoning science with its insistence, as a method, on observation, but postulating with reason what excludes it; which renders the process invalid in principle, and so inoperative in making the assumption.
If you attack what you use, as invalid, then invalid it is, and no one else need show it of you. You are thus rendered rationally dumb. So be it. This is the self-contradictory price of such escapades.
Evolution is accordingly non-scientific, lacking in rationality and rationally excluded. Other than that, well if magic is the desire, this land is for the time free enough to let you practise it; it is a gross and sad shame however that high school students are forced in science to study this failed theory.
To be sure, it might be considered as a literary exercise for grade seven, to discover what free imagination can do; or as an exercise, somewhat later, in the history of science, to teach safeguards against tenacious prejudice, such as here. It could be set conveniently in a broad category with the famous case of the much touted, non-existent phlogiston gas, one dispelled not least by the experimental approach of Lavoisier who, using mercury calx, showed the absorption and restoration of the gas in a clever experiment.
As serious science, however, the dogmatic fantasies of either lighter-than-air phlogiston or flightless evolution are simply imposture. In its recent format indeed, of punctuated equilibrium, it is a sentence beginning with a full stop... and here, not only by lore, but by something akin to law! Politics is about as near to law as it gets.
Now what does come suddenly is the law, the political law! Man spoke... and it happened... to the children. One does not object to a proper review of the evolution of evolutionary theory at a suitable level in schools: it could, if aptly done by one cognisant of the sphere, be refreshing and an eye- opener to the history of desperation in thought; and it does have very humorous aspects. An illustration of this, elsewhere noted, is the case of Professor Nilsson, where, after a life-time of dedicated research, and of frustration with non-existent transitional evidence for life-forms, he made his coup. Yes, he said, orchids in his view came all at once! no preliminaries, not stages: voilà, creation! Yet he was not a creationist.
It is indeed marvellous how like creationists the more realistic and factually inclined evolutionists can sound, when like a schoolmaster finding them without homework, Evidence confronts them. This it has long been doing, and increasingly with withering gaze, so that now this noted school of thought, 'punctuated equilibrium', is making its solemn obeisance to fantasy. The adverse evidence, as elsewhere noted, was excellently reviewed by Professor W.R. Thompson in his introduction to Everyman's Origin of Species, at the Origin's centenary. If Thompson was ruthless in his exposure of this absurd theory, at least he was factual and realistic. It did not perform, never did perform, and taught bad, illusory if not illusionist habits... theory first in the face of facts, not following them. This summarises much of his (detailed and closely supported) message.
No, the fact is that informed, historical review of the writhings and twisting of this unhappy theory would be in order, if the matter is to be treated in government schools at all. It is not to this one would necessarily object. In principle it might be done. What is obnoxious, as well as erroneous, is what appears the dictatorial intrusion into rational debate, pre-judging by a mere wave of the educational hand, with no valid or even plausible grounds adduced: a régime utterance with the mandate of authority, yet without any relevant, rational support whatever; and this in the face of reason, as readily demonstratable, and shown in this work.
That such religious bents should be so indulged with such educational adventurism as the South Australian Circular to School Principals seems to provide, and should be so propagandised with such monopoly on teachers, even Principals subdued by this 'mighty word': what does this recall to the denizen of the twentieth century ?
Objectively, it is reminiscent of Hitler youth days, and it reminds one of Mao. In Germany, equally disastrous theories, with backing in Hegel and Nietzsche and epilogue by Darwin, were put forward. The studies of eugenics, how to make the best, most 'evolved' race were no mere chatter: the wrong line... and the weak, were not smiled upon, as the Jews and the undesired discovered. In Russia, the Communist 'new man', who never made it out of gestation in 70 years of 'trial' - and trial it was for millions whose famished bodies the graves covered, attested by mass graves: this was the evolved, the Communist contribution to an evolution which worked for them as well, no worse, as it has worked in more conventional laboratories: that is, not at all.
Here was the 'progressive'; the date with evolution, with the forces of evolutionary theory which Marx depicted, but which history ridiculed and now mocks satirically from the stench of Eastern Europe.
This 'advanced' man was dead before birth, a costly theory, a similarly blind, authoritarian requirement of man, to this dogma of the S.A. government.
In another site in SMR (p. 250), some thought is given to the perspective involved in what might be called scientistic submissionism, or the ruinous subjection to the name of 'science' when as Zuckerman pointed out, a whole line of prejudiced scientists can continue in a misconception long past the time when it is obvious it is inapplicable, and cling to it: indeed, man is man, and it can be as a babe clings to its mother. This is not a peculiar feature of those who work in what is now called science, but of man in his muddles when religion is involved, or cultural conditioning, or professional pride and a whole host of desire that if not controlled, can befuddle.
All this, in the area of rates, is intensively verificatory of creation of objects and the miscreancy of human subjects, in general. Considerations based on assumptions which are not confirmed in any case by the general tenor of evidence in life, as we have extensively shown, and which are not verified in observation or in areas of implication, and which in fact lead to discordant and contrary, and at not infrequent times, to ludicrous results: these things do not attest a rational alternative. Nor is there one.
Logic itself merely smiles with disdain at evolutionism.
It laughs at the adventitious riots of illicit thought,
demanding of one order of things, all the others,
even when the one has contradictory capacities to the other's,
even when they are neither latent nor patent,
and likewise there is neither capacity nor creativity to match;while the sheer exuberant abundance
of form and format, contrivance and consequence, wonder and marvel, inward worlds and universes of attainment, and outward bounds for their display,flits like a dizzying crowd of swallows across the horizon, laughing at need, lording it over the surface with swift and deft movement, unbounded by ground, unconfounded by height, not flung by wind but driven by a dynamic of their own.
The evidences cited in this chapter are in conformity with the speed and eruptive suddenness of creation. Any imagination that there are comparable rates for the institution of a system (such as now works before us) and its maintenance is as illusory in logic as delusive in detail. (For *37 - *40, see also Ch. 2 Supp. pp. 252G ff., infra.)
POLITICS, PENCHANTS
AND PHILOSOPHY IN SELECT AREAS,
RATHER THAN OF SCIENCE
In this section, some citations from my own works, are slightly revised or even extended, for the current purpose.
It is interesting how far scientists can differ in models and machinations, PRIOR to the erection of models, and how abridged some models become, as if selective scientific ideas, void of accompanying considerations and even of due use of scientific method, can contest with what weighs in with both heavily and duly. Superficial computer models thus can become like pagan priests based on superstition without rational ground, so that BECAUSE a model has been computerised, its assumptions explicit and implicit can be ignored, and a veritable papal prerogative is attached to it.
In the case of information science, Professor Werner Gitt of Germany has a contribution which though empirical, coalesces with the prior of demands of logic brilliantly. What are these ? they are that for any level of symbolic action allied to practical results, with a command structure and grammatical mode in the same, you need what is cognate in operational ability, to produce it. To make it of this kind, you need that kind of input ability, order begetting order, organisation begetting organisation, conceptually readable command power begetting command, symbol-substance referents appointed, chronology determined, systematic environment conferred, and not the magic of something-somehow doing whatever-it-took, to produce what is totally disparate in KIND.
Ants CAN build a nest, but to ask them to build, given time, the Sydney Opera House is mere contortion. This is not in line of their rationally investigable results and powers of combination, application and conferment. Matter can exhibit its inherent characteristics, such as forming beautiful crystals in some cases, from an amorphous base, but these are integrally investigable powers, demonstrable on request, that are part of its make-up, not developmental prowess! The ridiculous, figs from thistles, as articulated by Jesus Christ, covers the case. If you want reason, let alone science, consider what is before you, and do not ask words from the silence of the inert, conceptual modes of control by command, from the mentally void, or multi-articulation of ascending orders of systems from what has no constructive ability, being merely available for what has. Let us not, for example, put man into matter, in some kind of fairy-tale merger, so that the anthropomorphic conferment can begin to act in the ways and modes of man. You cannot beget man in matter; it is not a matter, merely a servant.
In science in particular, you do not imagine the most way-out non-convergent means for a given end, but what is mentally, practically or both most cognate, being drawn further from the feasible. If some new abstraction is to be born, it should be borne from research as to what is there, not what is never seen in operation, found in practice, discernible in mode or apparent in any interface. There is a place for imagination of this kind; but this is not it.
Gould was quite good on one occasion, noting that even the imaginations required to cover supposed developments in terms of some kind of evolutionary continuity across time and type, can surpass conjecture. He could not even find it readily IMAGINABLE how on earth you could envisage the steps on the way, as he surveyed possibilities! He found, at the major level, design decrement, decrease in time, and a large one, not increment. Indeed, the more realities formerly taken as mere 'happenings' in an irrational fad, by some all but antinomious minds, are increasingly seen to be highly organised, concept-carrying symbolic organisations with all the equipment about how information is to be deployed, added to it, programmatic marvels, the more amazed or appalled reactions like those of Gould become at least in sight of discipline and fact.
We find this both from Denton and Gould as noted in The Great Divide Ch. 2.
There is a great divide here between fact and theory, instead of what is scientifically normal, as to method: and that, it is, a great sympathy and closeness between theory WHICH COMES FROM facts, and must be wedded to them, in liaison with them, all but summoned by them, at least as to the first throw. Thus in the realm of botany, it has often been remarked by experts that efforts to call forth gradualism and its ways into this field of advent in life, if fashionable, are not fashioned by facts. It was, more generally, the famed Professor Agassiz of Harvard in his 'Methods of Study in Natural History', who, inclined towards facts noted this: "The theory of the transmutation of species is a scientific mistake, untrue in its facts, unscientific in its method, and mischievous in its tendency."
Denton, in is Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, from a later time, adds this (p. 250ff.):
"We have already seen that in the case of the great morphological divisions, where empirical evidence of intermediates is lacking, there is invariably a conceptual problem in envisaging fully plausible hypothetical intermediates through which evolution could have occurred. As we shall see in this chapter precisely the same sort of conceptual problem is met in trying to reconstruct the hypothetical sequence of transitional system which led eventually to the modern cell."
Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould somewhat similarly declares this - Gould and Eldredge, Palaeobilogy 3(147), bold added:
"At the higher level of evolutionary transition between morphological designs, gradualism has always been in trouble. Smooth intermediates between Bauplâne are almost impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx do not count)."
Small wonder is this empirical impasse the case, since as Denton notes,
"Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same
in all living systems on earth from bacteria to animals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical.
The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells*1. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly divers dwellers on earth."As to plants, concerning the geological approach normal, Denton remarks this: "The story is the same for plants. Again, the first representatives of each major group appear in the record already highly specialised and highly characteristic of the group to which they belong. Like the sudden appearance of the first animal groups in the in the Cambrian rocks, the sudden appearance of the angiosperms is a persistent anomaly which has resisted all attempts at explanation since Darwin's time."
Indeed the case is as Professor Løvtrup puts it in his "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth," with his declaration that there are "now considerable numbers of empirical facts which do not fit the theory." Therefore he asks this concerning this monstrous theory:
"so why has it not been abandoned? " and indeed in review he observes this, that
"following Darwin's example - they refuse to accept falsifying evidence." Gould's cry, Why in heaven's name did such diversities of design arise in such numbers so suddenly in the first place ? (Wonderful Life, p. 227), is almost like a scientist's nightmare when, after dismissing evidence feverishly in contravention of scientific method EVERY TIME, he suddenly mentions heaven in the apostrophe about the sheer horror of the facts on his model! THEY DO NOT FIT.
Well indeed, Dr Gould, might you deplore in heaven's name the departure of the ground of your contention, though improving on those who do not appear to notice it! Not well, however, is your continuance in conclusions apt for other premises, the imagination that somehow in some form of words, if not of facts, there will be the directed energy, the intellectual-type systems, the coded linguistic commands*1A, the conceptual counterpart expressible in words, the correlation of performance-obedience to conceptual command, the intricacies of meta-information to boot, directing how information is to be used in system-upon-system in linguistic complexity, even at that level, so that blindness becomes the basis, and what is not, becomes the call! Why worry about means, DNA, direction, for science is long since gone in this field, and communings within the heart, become the nebulous necessities for roving minds, cut-off by decision from the heart. Reckless renegacy from reason in untried, unconfirmed, unvalidated, unverified hypotheses has nothing to do with science, or any sound religion for that matter!
Why indeed do they have a theory to explain increase in basic design when the evidence is precisely, and at considerable scope, the opposite! Small wonder he is so moved, for it gets worse and worse.
Thus on p. 233, he mourns,
"Instead of a narrow beginning and a constantly expanding upward range,
multicellular life reaches its maximal scope at the start,
while later decimation leave only a few surviving designs."
"Burgess disparity," he adds, "and later decimation is a worst-case nightmare for this hope of inevitable order." Making the problem greater in sudden onrushes, descents of ordered totalities from some substitute heaven since the name may not appeal, merely makes the magic more obvious, that would displace reality with night-mares and induce students to listen to these squalid academic dreams (cf. SMR pp. 315A ff.).
You can take as long as you like, but neither empirical evidence, nor the means for such advance testable in the lab, nor the logic behind it (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!), nor the expected multitudes of cast-away biological failures on the way, nor the advent of tiny beginnings in cells, are to be seen by the most probing eye; while only the most amazing examples of miniaturisation, systematisation, mathematical brilliance and total organisational disposition in the underlying command structure for life, and its operational complexities are TO BE SEEN at any time support you*1. In what ? that it was sudden, incorporated and systematic in KIND ? Little support however is this, since this is precisely the PRODUCT OF REASON. A dunce at work NEVER produces a brilliant system: it is foreign to him. Nothing, when at work, never does anything: It cannot, or it would not be nothing. Thus you have to beg the question and put a wholly competent system and many melded, for all to come, arriving there by guess and gulp, contrary to reason, and science, which always demands a reason. ONLY what is always there, entirely self-sufficient and sufficient for all that is to come is a logical base, basis or even possibility. Take that and you take all: otherwise, it is just smuggling God in without a visa, hurried off in a waiting car to avoid the Press.
What IS PRODUCED however is a series of mutually integrated information codings, one for the other, in exquisite orderly organisation to the point of being productive of awe, for here is the testimony of cogitation to the uttermost, investigable by our own, but only with deference! This you see from the work in particular of Professor Sanford of Cornell University. Reference is taken from Waiting for Wonder Appendix.
As was earlier pointed out (op. cit. Volume 21(3), 2007, on pp. 111ff.), in a fascinating article by well-known biologist, Alex Williams:
"DNA information is overlapping-multi-layered and multi-dimensional; it reads both backwards and forward; and the 'junk' is far more functional than the protein code, so there is no fossilized history of evolution. No human engineer has ever even imagined, let alone designed an information storage device anything like it."
He proceeds to note that "the vast majority: is "meta-information - information about how to use information." Let us reflect on all of this. Now in the midst of wildly misnamed 'junk', we find the jewels of the crown, interpretative and collative, directive and explicatory background to the busy engineering of the protein-coding DNA. How often has it been necessary to point out on this site that magic is inoperative. You do not have things 'arise', for they require cause, and that in detail, and if you are going to have specific marvels of construction, you need specific marvels either of the power to construct, or of what such power has made in order that it may do it. With that, you need all that construction of a given finesse involves in imagination, conceptualisation and creativity, functions of person.
You do NOT, repeat NOT, have things wafting their way in on the wings of philosophy, rudely awakening specialists who are either unwitting or unwary or both, to the realms of delusion. You want it, it must be paid for, in cause cost. This world is not a dreamland.
Thus, to have this ultra-sophisticated, mathematical maestro level advent, you need the simultaneous advent of what is coded for command and what is coded to receive command; what is the instituted language for the production and reproduction of the same, and the performance of it. With this also, you need of course, what is available to BE commanded, commendably synchronised in its presence with the orders; for to order is of no use, whether chemically or in the Army, unless you have someone/something to order. A General without those to command is of little worth, and they must be integrated in one system where the fact of command and the mode of expression is understood, both to give and to get, while the means to institute, whatever these may be, persons, products or both, have to be synchronised with the issue of orders to the point that there is no mere wafting of sound, but intelligible symbols uttered in a plan of speech which allows semantic interpretation, programmed or personal, to act in the desired time-frame. To do this personally and in active time is demanding and requires semantic equipment; to do it programmatically is a step harder, for the whole has to be systematised as to method, incorporated in a code-control system, a program, and then automated into becoming simply an extension of thought in specialised linguistic form. You need no space to find similar beings, and to investigate their origin. Look around you. There are some 7 billion of them, made to be able to do such things at an inferior but notable level, and to understand the use of gifts required to make it happen.
Thus there is for example, in the human kind case, need of making a threefold simultaneity of two coding specialisations not only with the same language, but with the same specification-symbol entry equivalents, to give and to receive; and with the correlative commands, the capacity to bring the stuff up for action upon it. For that, of course, it must be both there and in commandable condition, with all due technical specifications for the state in which it chemically exists, and is physiologically reachable.
Williams is especially interested in meta-information, which is information about information, such as any student, whether over long years or shorter ones, needs to understand in order to be semantically functional. You have to know language in order to convey it, how it works, where it goes and does not, and to be really effective, why! *T1
Thus, from Williams, we have further data (p. 115, op. cit.).
Not only is this meta-information case what is found, he declares, but in the regions yet to be more fully investigated, there appears to be a situation where all or almost all of this type of DNA is engaged in the work of gene regulation. This is an arena of current thrust in investigation. Rearrangements and circuits, orders, need some device to protect and to inject, and this meta-information seems full of it. Brilliant devices to use massive information structures to gain specialised variations on them, come with that fluency of mobility in the fixity of underlying structure which allows generic specifications to be adroitly adapted, like Mark I and Mark II automobiles, for example, as people await with expectation what variation on their desired make will be forthcoming. The mobile genetic units called transposons are one such device, which in one aspect, almost seem to resemble working mechanics, hands-on.
Williams moves (op.cit. p. 116), to note the work of Dr John Sanford of Cornell University, citing the latter's Entropy & Mystery of the Genome. Here, the mutative exercise considered is the genome, which as with most designs exposed to the elements, involves deterioration, not progress. This is what could be called the Gould phenomenon: things in terms of design KINDS or types, are going down, not up (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 6). This is in part the Werner Gitt phenomenon: information does NOT arise without intelligence. There are laws, and these need to be known and applied*T1 (Journal of Creation 2009, 23(2), pp. 96-109).
In other words, these are areas of a kind relative to humankind, the way they go at the physical and physiological level, in overview.
What then of this finding of Sanford of Cornell ? That is the correlative both of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and of the basics of information science. His contribution is reported as showing that "deleterious mutations are accumulating at an alarming rate in the human population and that both natural selection and even the worst possible nightmare scenario of eugenics is powerless to stop it." This results from the enormous synthesis of variables, in holistic accords, weak points arising after several thousands of years, in hidden and varied ways. What there is to select from is being impaired, and the old chestnut, that to remove the worst creates the best is seen in its practical drabness. The best is going down.
This, then, brings on further and further dimensions to the information packed into the DNA of man, and to its due relationship to other scientific laws. Marvels of coherent mathematic-isation, coherence of command, implicit concepts in code-action correlation, combination of multiple systems, each necessary that any might operate, virtual words in engineering-facilitation (cf. Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed... Ch. 4), whole domains of diverse type, order, logically demanding character, interwoven, effectual, intellectually investigable, are not to be attributed to some one domain, any more than the Greeks could rationally make all come from water or fire or air or any combination.
You need more than imagination minus interface. You need logically valid, empirically demonstrable realities. These have in fact stopped in this area at the major design level, as the Bible said re basic creation. For each domain, you rationally need intelligence to gain its output, its genre, its mode of operation, and its correlation and before and aft interfaces. To imagine otherwise is not only unscientific, a guess that fails in every test, and a remote address instead of seeking cognate bases, but it is a day-dream; for in the real day, it is never found to go that way, any more than world cruises come from sitting in imagination under some coconut tree on an island. Information, that conceptually pre-mashed combination of characters conveying resource-oriented data coverage, conveyed coherently to receptive receptacles, responding coherently and reliably, does not in practice get itself done for us; it has to be made.
This makes it apt now to revert, to the work of Professor Gitt, noted above, as it enlarges the scope of the domain of information. We find this cognate consideration to those of Denton and Gould, expressed in his own format, from The gods of naturalism have no go, Ch. 34, we have this information.
1) No new information is the barrier at the outset as always. Mutation and new information are not the same. Variation and loss within limits, these are not information, but as near to it as are the wearings of pages of a book, wholly diverse in kind from having either the power, result or transmission procedures of what writes. Gitt's declaration remains as we remind ourselves below.
Dr Werner Gitt from Germany's Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Braunschweig, has made a flat statement which for years has gone unmoved. This fact was noted in Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2001. It was made in 1997, in his work, In the beginning was information. It is this:
"There is no known natural law
through which matter can give rise to information,
neither is any physical process
or material phenomenon known
that can do this."2) Thus methods by which new information might be made are as relevant as methods by which perpetual motion might be obtained. If you want to DO it, fine! That is always the point in getting something for nothing, or from a source not inherently capable by nature.
As always in evolution, natural law is ignored, actual events are bypassed, variation becomes transmutation, while degeneration or dissolution (as Gould so unhappily points out in his "what in heaven's name!" raging) is not construction (cf. Wake Up World!... Ch. 6). Intelligently selective computer programs notwithstanding { Earth Chasm ... Ch. 1}, and indeed existing as mere examples of the need for intelligence in construction, set in a context of loss of such vast kinds as Gould attests in his sorrowing over design restriction over time, its sad loss since the Cambrian 'time', form a tableau in the setting of the unavailability of new productions in kind, for observation. The sad non-provision of the witness-facility of new genetic themes is as obvious now as when Professor Simpson of Harvard pointed it out (cf. SMR Ch. 2).
In short, frustration leading to intelligently constructed selective computer analogues for progress, design diminution in large scale loss since the earliest domains of 'geological time', and non-cooperative natural processes, too hidden to be seen, refusing to show the things happen which are in mind, together with the intensive desire for originality without causative origin, to reside in systems not designed for it: these things are a picture for children. That is, they are fit only for children at the logical level, worthy only of undeveloped mental activity; but they are certainly not fit to be TAUGHT to children, for that very reason!
In accord with the constant null findings concerning the concept of biotic continuity, a thing roundly rejected on empirical grounds by Denton, who claims the supposed continuity through natural process exists only in the mind of man! (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 353), you have Gould's further (commendable) thoughts in this area, as he muses (Wonderful Life p. 236):
"But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that we have no evidence whatsoever - not a shred - that losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those that survived."
We leave Gould here to his nightmare, but continue in the day.
The march of mental marvels without a mind is strangely subdued; and the basis of Gould's musing is his assertion that whole phyla of a given type have disappeared, that most of the major design innovation is gone, not at all come since the era of the Burgess deposits, is a glorious exhibit of the fixity which some ideas which philosophy has hatched in the nest of science. This is the more instructive when its coming and the mode of it, remains without empirical evidence, and is later found quite contrary to it, while the whole imaginary kaleidoscope of happenings, yet manage this masterful 'arising' from higher realms than those to which they have examinable access, or give verifiable response, to achieve in their professional locale. Just as the Eternal God is the non-nothing source required, so does His verified and validated word attest that He is no longer engaging in these combinations of matter, under mind, designating his wishes, just as we, His creation, do in our own lives, but at our own level. What CAN do it, is not doing so; what cannot, is not doing it. It does not now happen. Why act as if the problem were to find how it would, when at every point its extraneous romancing is exposed.
Naturally not all scientists are so duped; but many are subject just as Zuckerman pointed out, to this cultural peril. It is of course not only in science, but in culture and history more generally that mankind, for all his specific powers, can be snared. It is a racial matter only in the sense that it is a pit for the entire human race, and in ANY sphere of discipline, it is necessary to guard against it, as one does when walking on moist moss! Reason, the precious gift to man, must be used, and not abused; revelation, examinable by reason, must be considered and not quenched; the two must be seen in alliance, and the result appreciated, not listed for destruction with Hitler's Jewish consignments, and with as little reason or ground.
The base noun here is antinomy, distinguished from antinomianism, which has the adjective, antinomian, with a meaning in the law-grace area. Antinomy, on the other hand, refers to the holding of two principles contrary in character, irreconcilable, involving a conflict at the primary level of logical confrontation. This is a useful and historically important concept. Hence a crafted adjective, antinomious has been formed. This comes from antinomy, in parallel with acrimony-acrimonious, parsimony-parsimonious.
The theme has application in Christian Apologetics and can be sought out in Deity or Design, Designation or Destiny Section 8. It is also covered and applied in Predestination and Freewill, Section IV, and the logical foozle of Kant is there exposed.
