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CHAPTER 21

A VISIT TO NOTHING

LEADING TO THE EXPLANATION OF EVERYTHING

Do you remember the Butterfly that Stamped, in Kipling's Just-So Stories.  Wishing to impress his wife with due authority and power, he asked her to watch as he stamped and upset the very order of things, by prior arrangement with one capable of implementing this. The wife, duly impressed, no more got out of line, and husbandly authority was advanced. It is not a popular theme now, but the point is not popularity but singularity.

What if someone could remove the earth, or the heavens, or living objects, as if at the press of some button (nowadays computer type buttons may be empowered in notable ways) ? Let us see what this can teach US!

Suppose John has just received access to a power to make things come or go. He does it by pressing a green or red button. Frank is keen to watch. These buttons are set in a system allowing different aspects or types of object to come or go.

At one push, it is selected to depart or arrive. It is absolute. Thus when a thing goes, its entire organisational basis goes.

NOTHING is left of it.

John rather grandly rids (from a carefully contrived capsule in which he is the exception, with Frank) the world of botanical life. That is impressive. Next come geological dispositions,  then the heavens above, until matter itself is dismissed, and he proceeds till there is nothing left.

Well, said Frank, something can always happen!

Not so, said John, for from nothing comes nothing.

But surely something will happen. It can't just sit there.

Neither,  said John, is there a seat, nor a setting, nor a phase, nor a blaze, nor a potent quiescence, nor any anything; for I have removed all things, including logic. We think, but nothing else can in our newly created void. There is neither room for it, since I dismissed space, leaving such a turmoil and time, leaving no opportunity, and all that involved either. NOTHING CAN now happen outside our observational capsule, for causality went long ago, and any result of it with it.

You can leave it as long as you like (since it has no time), subject to what you want (since there is nothing there), but it will only an imaginary exercise. Nothing can come of it; nothing is there.

This nothing has no time for development, and no potential  for time even if it were there, since then it would not BE nothing but something with development potential, which is anything but nothing. Nothing is not the same as something somehow some time from somewhat. Vagueness does not cover flat contradiction. NOTHING means the absence of anything, including time or space or potential or potential for potential, and so on, without limit. That is what it is.

It is useless to quiver with expectation in changing definitions, as Hawking appears  to do. Being vague and restlessly imaginative is merely a solecism, a logical break-down. There is nothing for anything to come from, nowhere to go to, no power to which to resort, nor any imagination nor any system which to activate, for the same reason, for then our NOTHING would be misnamed, really a something with something which the appearance of ANYTHING would simply contradict. There is no way to avoid this, except by cheating, declaring a model and then departing from its specifications in order to  'save' it.

Talk about "great swelling words of vanity," as the Bible indicates will characterise some of the powers of the last times in our Age. What is the point of saying lots of things MIGHT happen, with nothing, when nothing rules out as a definition, each, all and any of them. Changing definitions in this way is simply a logical slide^*1, fit for first or second year College students.

Well, it certainly reminds one of Jeremiah 4, Frank acknowledged, when things were taken away in a presentation of going back in time through removals, giving a sense of desolation. In II Peter 3 and Isaiah 51:6 we see that in due time our present  world will be removed with great heat; and of course using what IS logical, the source of removal and the source of arrival will be something, not nothing, since actions to be effective, require power.

What is adequate to create has to be eternal, since if at ANY point, absolutely there were nothing in all dimensions and situations, then from it could come nothing. I am not nothing, since I am someone who can think about anything or nothing, which is not the same as being it. Hence there never was nothing. There always was something able to put into being everything that came, or it would not come. Suppose it inadequate for the task of inventing matter and thought and beauty and judgment and causality ? Then these could not come. But they have come, and so the Eternal Adequacy has always been there. Normally this Being is referred to as God.

So instead of our capsule with ourselves with imaginary powers, in it, said Frank, there is God.

Yes, John exclaimed, and now imagine the restoration of what He did, from our imagined situation in our capsule case, where EVERYTHING was removed, we being outside the case. Now to be realistic, it is the Lord Himself who as author, like an architect who is not only outside the case, but the cause of it, Himself eternal with power to BE the reason and CONTRIBUTE the cause for anything. What we did with our button, He could do with His word, being adequate.

Saves us from the case where the button wears out,  said Frank.

Of course, said John, for if God could wear out, then He would be a caused being, subject to conditions, and hence merely a misnomer, for we were looking for the cause if nothing were ALL, and hence to address that proposition. If the solution, the necessary solution, were not only eternal past our  time, in order to invent it so that is there, but past its controls, then this Eternal Being could not explain our system, being merely part of it, and we would have once more to be on the track to rightly specify logical necessity. Past time, He made it. He cannot be subject to it. He has to be the eternal  source of time, one of the items to be accounted for, as to source. I, an author, am not subject to my books, nor do I wear with them.

As a part of what the Eternal Being made, I wear in body, but that is simply one aspect of the fact that the principles of causation are with us, matters of application; but with that Being, they have to be grounded. He cannot wear without being subject to what He creates, nor for that matter can He grow, without already being in a growth type system with its own specifications and directive power already present, which as before, leaves the point of the exercise, which is to find what other than nothing is necessary, not to make other systems to add, but be the basis ALWAYS there. Systems are thought connotations, sovereignly (more or less successfully, depending on who is the thinker!) constructed by what already has the non-nothing power. To have a few kicking around merely exhibits the inconsistency of the exercise, which is to account for ALL non-nothing by what is sufficient for it. Even an assembly of gods would have to have what systematised their powers of communication, co-operation and homology.

Let us construct from nothing, then, said John, now that we have considered the way. Start with nothing and act as if entirely empowered. Press button in our scenario. Bring back matter ? Done. Bring back the psychological: done. Bring back mind in its ways ? Multiple aspects, just as matter was in its own facilities and functions..

Why multiple matters with mind ? queried Frank.

John frowned.

You have to bring back logic with it, causation, imagination for thought construction, semantics, assignment-power to designate with words and understand meaning, assign meaning, find the laws by which logic works with meaning, and as in child birth, have the capacity extant by which words specify what is conveyed, which has to impact on what interprets rightly the otherwise dead and meaningless symbols created in language, which in its creative aspects has to be made as well, with its own laws for comprehensibility as well as its own world in which to specify.

Further, said Frank, rising to the task, look again.

And causality has to arrive, for nothing moves without that. If it just stays on like an unwanted guest, then it is no more a case of excluding self-making from nothing. It cannot be as if nothing is actually there, a source, the only source, when it is defined not to be so. It is one thing which, being affirmed, would assure us (if it could speak) that it is not there. Success with achieving nothing removes anything to talk about concerning its qualities or powers; for there is nothing. You cannot just hijack reason and add it without admitting you need it. Nor can you hijack the imagination with which you analyse and conceive, nor the words by which you specify, nor the knowledge which these convey, nor the things they designate, nor their logical  relationship with each other.

Yes, John pursued the issue. In fact, not only has causality, as an operational constraint, have to be present to enable us to think, consign, assign, in ways both meaningful and a source of activation in outward reality; it does not just float in like a long-lost Aunt. It has to have in man, a correlative. Call the outer causality by which we can trace the inter-relationship of laws and actuality in the objective universe, the Objective Causality for this purpose, and the inward one by which we imagine and construe or create, Subjective Causality, and we would know of which we are talking.

You then have to get over the astonishing fact that 'subjective' tends to be a term of derogation and 'objective' to  elevate; but it really all depends on the subject. If the subject has no limits of power or knowledge, then 'subjective' is merely more expansive, for it is the way of the subject, the thinker, imaginer, conceiver which made non-nothing, or something if you prefer.

Let us use this for the moment, then, said John. So subjective thought and power and causal adequacy, conceptual inventor, made the world which we can trace backwards, in terms of laws found, interactions discerned and the vast impacts of multiple laws of mathematics and  space and time and logical validity. Then these things were objectified, as in an artist's painting or an architect's building, so that you can now see them outside the mind: they are there in the midst of the relevant rules and laws and powers of the created universe.

The subjective (here God being the Subject) specifies, the objective indicates the work done, and the Human Subjective (HS) then investigates and assigns reasons and explanations and  tests, proposes verifications and validations and so on.  While errors in the HS have to be  corrected, and blunders are sometimes found because it is apt to be beguiled by its own imaginations and desires, yet the method does not have to be corrected, in this initial survey and understanding leading to specification of laws and forms and  developmental circuits, as in chemistry's equations. In all this, reason demands logic, which demands validity, such as is missing in the Yours faithfully from nothing, approach. These in turn require language for specification purposes, and that requires conceptualisation for awareness of the objects of the specification.

Well, rejoined Frank, you known John, WE need these things in the re-entry of something from an imagined NOTHING universe, which would not even BE a universe, so we would have to call it a NOTHING CONNOTATION. The Eternal Being therefore has source and is basis for conception, as well as construction, for imagination as well as institution. Language depends on logic as specification denotes the assigned concepts, these being implicit in the laws, which are verbalisable in turn, and conceptualisable as part of their being verbalised. Where the conceptualisation is limited, it does not limit the actual! It takes time to understand for us humans; and God is not limited, but His ways include these things, and as to causation, it is in effect impossible to  operate in this universe without it.

True, Frank, John mused. If like Kant, you try to arrive at things like causation, as if it were merely something which your human  construction puts into the picture (as if it contributed it through human-style glasses, adding to reality), then you are giving us in your theory, what causes causality, that is the human frame. In other words, if you want to  ACCOUNT for the operability of causality, that whole domain in word and thought and creation,  then to  DO SO, you have to USE it. That is part of your very accounting! You affirm it in order to create it, you assume it in order to explain it,  like a man who affirms assets of $1000 000, in order to explain how he got it, a loose circularity which generates nothing but fraud.

Causality is indispensable and undisposable; for your reasons for saying it is only this or that, deriving it, of which you attempt to show its origin, its creation, or its basis,  MEAN that you are using it to explain it. You are first affirming it, in order to show from what it is derived. You use it in order to instate it. You have it already there, in order to show how it came to be, a classic case of begging the question (cf. SMR Ch. 5). It is rather like saying, We were in Africa, and in our site there was no one car, except 100  miles away. So we drove in our Citroen to collect that car. Here, you USE what is statedly not there, to gain it. You assume what you exclude, that for which you are ostensibly giving account as to its being there, and then use it to put it there! What folly is this, that comes from philosophy...

The conceiving, imagining, conceptualising, verbalising, eternal Being creates the universe, and man within it, and within man, creates the universe of thought, including the modes of causation, the subjective and the objective, and for that matter, the whole domain of mind with its imaginative  conceptual creative powers  and disciplines, and that of  spirit as well.

I like your being specific about 'spirit', pondered Frank. Mind has its specific powers to think and conceive and so on,  but spirit has the power to REJECT what the mind indicates,  because of passion, or folly, or pride, or derring-do, or any of a whole population of possibilities, to decide, cognise purposes, apply them, designate priorities. This includes,  in some cases, efforts to deceive others about what the mind known, and often, and results which deceive even itself in its irrational conundrums for ulterior motives, desecrating truth.

No wonder, rejoined John, that the Bible says the human heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17). It has this amazing ability, in the midst of untruthful lusts, that is, ones where absurd liabilities exist and facts are dismissed like an undesired Staff member, without notice, to deceive itself, so that suppression or pre-occupation or dazzling lust or dazed intellectual incontinence leave 'living a lie' a distinct  mode of life, that even internationally, appears to be common, common as blood.

But, said Frank,  since God is there, and all our powers are derivative from Him, and our liberty among them, so that we can make mistakes, which would not be possible if all HAD to be,  or abuse God freely (as to utterance, but truth denial has a cost), then the beautiful, so staggeringly intricate in plants, and gardens, in its basis, and even  more amazing, so wittily contrived for its overall  effects (just as the human body has many sub-designs and integral outworkings of these, and also an overall power in its unity), has a base where spiritual beauty may also be found.

And not only that, mused John, He has given objective causation to the Bible, verifiable and uniquely validatable^*2, and in particular, in ITS inward parts,  and systems, predictions of many things, just as history has given predications, fulfulments, so that the testability of the Divine Omniscience can be used for recognition purposes, to know WHO is talking, just as the coming of the Messiah at the appointed date^*3, shows what He is like, when in our format, enabling deeper recognition, and how HE responds when placing His very self where we are. To confirm His omnipotence and affirm His love, one of the Matterhorns of our construction, He even showed how to experience that forcible disruption of body and spirit called death, first in raising some from the dead, thousands from a multiplicity of diseases, and then Himself, since time is merely a format chosen, and Eternity is what is His.

There is good cause to worship God and receive the vicarious death of Christ, Frank pursued the point, in lieu of our own death for dearth of goodness and sins against our Maker and His provisions for us, so having not only a reality, but a Redeemer, and hence a meaning and a challenge in this fallen world.

I don't want to trouble where trouble is not already there, said John, but what refuses redemption is the most unthankful, unholy proposition (John 3:36), since we were not only caused and made, but payment was provided, to  ransom from ruin, and it was done in a love which declared itself in what it endured to achieve for us freely the free and unencumbered pardon needed, with the inherently lovely position of adopted children that is true and has been arranged (Ephesians1, John 14,I John 1,3), by a divine grace past all measure (Ephesians 2 and3), leaving all complaint merely part of a new rebellion.

NOTES

*1

See SMR, TMR, What is the Chaff to the Wheat ?  Chs. 3-4..

*2

See Christ the Citadel, Ch. 2.

*3

Logic is a splendid instrument. Thus the materialist having failed at the beginning, along with the illusionist (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 2), is found to  lie on a lowway of continuous failure.

Hence it is in line with this that we find the ludicrous cartoon of the origin of our universe in some Big Bang (normally disruptive, not creative), where pressure to a point is immense (complicating the creation), and the whole of space and time is assumed,  along with force and results of force as in the point, together with potential for law in what is lawless (because supposedly it represents some account of how things came to be, and hence does not simply assume them) and so forth in endless self-contradictions and choices for the patently irrational. Such results merely confirm the initial analysis as above, and in accord with undisciplined and self-contradictory imagination, we thus find what is equally contradicted in futile efforts to proceed.

Thus Hartnett is at pains, with some development of various mathematical enterprises, such as those of Carmeli, to show that so-called fudge factors, that is inventions of the imagination based on no evidence, brought into Big Bang fantasies, are removed in a more systematic approach that does not require ludicrous, self-imposed compressions (of what, in what, as adequate cause for what, by what means supplied ? and so on and on). The 'singularity' is not matter become artist, creator (though expansion implies quasi-creation to start with, in any case, with provision for expansibility) and mentality maker, the imagination enduer and so on, but of God who IS singular, as demonstrable, and who makes things to exist, that hitherto were not (in existence until endowed with that, as in a house in terms of human building - it was not there, but now is).

This is a quality of any creator at any level. It is not a question of making one type of thing which has never been found to have mental powers, to be given  such powers by creative imagination never found so to act), or to endue nothing with existence, to have the qualities of something else in which these are in fact never found. Everything, instead, is in its place for its reason, and reasons relate  mathematically, architecturally, in form, in operating power sources and so on.

With this creative compilation, these entities and powers, forces and sequences are instituted in whatever way seems good to the particular creator, that of the universe being God. Diverse modes may then be discerned, but these are not the background, merely possible foregrounds, as when some  witticism of Shakespeare is made. Its grammatical form and semantic shaping may be traced to  some extent, but it is the artist's thought and understanding which put it together, apprise themselves of its likely impact, and actually launch it in a way to use a number of devices, but beyond all these, to use the lot with an understanding which makes their causes and consequences relate.

Hartnett rightly shows the confused and inadequate character of what Big Bang engineers set up, with vast tracts of things not  working, simply failing in the hypothesis, which is anti-verified. So these are invented, like a false fortune in a swindler, to explain, brought in from nothing with no basis and no evidence for their existence, except to make anti-verification have an  ally, in what shows no evidence of being there. His system is given exposure in Starlight, Time and the New Physics, a useful approach which does not evidently use useful rabbits out of capacious hats.

The point here is that the hypothesis which is anti-verified is not properly used at all, whether at the start or in many of the following non sequiturs. It simply fails on known data, to meet the case, and that repeatedly and in many areas. See for example the following.

The Defining Drama Ch.    3,
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch.    9,
Cascade if Truth ... Ch.  6,
Lively Lessons in Spiritual Service Ch.    5,
Dig Deeper ... Ch.   1
The Way of Truth and the Way of Error  Ch. 8.

On the other hand, what stands in validity logically,  spreads its tentacles of manifest truth by avoiding the antilogies to which all evasive approaches to the start and laying down of the foundations of what has to be accounted for are subject, and by which sundered as fabrication and fable - cf. SMR pp. 936-943, 973A, It Bubbles Ch.   9, esp. *1A.

See further aspects of delusion, confusion and logical vagrancy
in the flimsy fabrication of a real universe in the following.

Dizzy Dashes ... and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth, Chs.    3  ,  7 (overview in simple terms of the divine call),
Sparkling Life ... Ch.  4
(review of the necessity of God as good, the Bible as truth,
Christ as Redeemer, diffuse diatribes as delusion),
The Word and Wisdom of God and the Ways of Men Ch.    2,   *1
(resolving and explanatory power of biblical truth, and phases of uniqueness);
Department of Bible ...Ch. 6, Epilogue;
Definitional Approach as to information, creation -
Department of Bible ... Ch. 4,  4,  3, 6;
demonstrability references, review of many religions in this vein -
Department of Bible ... Chs.  4,  2.

Jesus Christ, Defaced, Unfazed ... Ch.   9,

Deity and Design ... Ch.  8, on antilogies and antithesis to truth.