in ancient Israel at its worst (as in Jeremiah 2), or
in haters of
goodness, who are in effect
cynic-clinics for passers-by (cf. SMR
Ch. 3), or
haters of men, or of women, who seek to deny, defy, distort, or merely dint the other.
W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE HIDDEN GOD, THE HIDEOUS CARICATURE,
THE SPIRITUAL NEO-HOLOCAUST
and the GENERATION OF GRACE
THE HIDDEN GOD
Hide and Seek without the Seek
There is a strange lurking presence in much of the philosophies taught clandestinely as if science or virtual fact to our children in this achingly old, counter-Christian culture that warps Australia with many others, today. It is blatant at the political-educational level, but not normally without gloves to mask the fingerprints of its source.
Back of Darwinism, outstanding 20th century Professor Stephen Jay Gould (died 2002) seemed to see something of the sanctions of clash and clamour in misled capitalism (cf. Wonderful Life p. 258). Leaving the nomenclature (for capitalism and free enterprise are often confused, made the easier when there are no rules in captive countries), let us pursue such a point. IF you have sufficient funds (somehow or other), and IF you have sufficient enterprise, and IF you have the nerve and the dash, gallantry or go, and IF you are creative enough in thought, and IF you have thought enough to manage the penetration of one of the various markets, commodity areas and so forth, including mining areas, and IF events do not crush your plans, expose your superficiality or through competitors overwhelm or even subvert your efforts: THEN you might find a niche.
Then you might explore and find, whether territory or markets; you might invent a new way, a new day for something, as small as the openers on shoe-polish tins, or wrist-watch bands in a given country and time; and IF you happen to think of some human need, lustful or meek, and meet it with imagination, then you may FILL A GAP. It MAY be one that is relatively startling, like electric light, or astonishing like unleashing the energy resident in matter, with which in some ways it is restrictively convertible or at least closely relatable, as a formatted storage unit. With such atomic power, the minds of man or a group or even an individual may act for the purposes of destruction; or in the broad realm of such things, it may even be constructive, as in finding a new approach to cancer, through some inventive lair for launching an attack on the disorder.
You do it with thought, understanding, depth of discernment, breadth of knowledge, innovative thinking, discernment or some combination. Enough, this is enterprise, child of imagination, a lift in dull continuance, for good and welfare of many, or for evil and doom to the peaceable; it is within limits, for God does not turn His back; but it is remarkable in results, for God allows to each nation its day and time (Acts 17:26-27), if by any means it should seek Him. Vast have been the opportunities to many, and many have been the crass turnings of such open doors to give lease to tempestuous self-elevation amid the nations, using or being used by lust, cruelty, oppression, as it invades creativity and spits cruelty in the face of useful designs.
The results in the meantime, also include contrivances, conditions, advances based on knowledge, whether of the weaknesses of man, the strength in matter, or the character of creation, for woe or weal, exploitation or simply implementation.
THERE IS THUS A FILLER. It acts in the midst of what is, to seek to produce what will be, by such entrepreneurial aspirations, in any field. It is dependent on abilities, agilities, thought, imagination, often deep thinking, and if its opportunities for some are suddenly made much easier by events they did not control, yet the imagination comes and the opportunity is taken for a reason, with wit, whether in the presence of wisdom or not, with kindness or with cruelty. The filler in the attack on so-called capitalism, but in effect on free enterprise (minus adequate rules) is the mind, spirit and thought of man, his machinations, explorations, innovations and so forth. To be sure it is useless without being first created by what is sufficient to show such commands as provide the brain, and such liberation from mere material force, as can understand and seek to re-direct it. But it is there, this feature, function, purpose and to some extent, power to see what may be done, imagine how, explore and exploit or simply apply knowledge peaceably or bountifully as the spirit in man and the provisions of the Maker of mind, matter, form and law with its special cases and procedures, allow.
In the nature parody adopted by Darwin, and those like him in their hidden-god theories, there is the same impetus, but man is not yet there to provide it as life starts in the material envelope. The development along the lines latter seen in entrepreneurship, proceeds. On this basis, the results of such forces as seen in the ways and spirit of man, are supplied before he is there or any visible counterpart.
In Darwin's bewitched parody, the thing develops, unwinds though never wound up, as if propelled by some overpowering advertiser, only too willing to give you the world if you will buy his wares. This theory of non-intelligence development of intelligence for example, exalts itself as a theoretical reality with or without any God standing around, doing nothing as the thing explodes into action, into greatness, with all the qualities to the uttermost delicacy*1 and the most astounding profundity in its mathematical, geometrical, aesthetic, legal and formatted beings. Such a theory without any entrepreneurial base, any verifiable action, never seen in action, with no attending exhibitions of its action to be observed as it acts, is a monstrosity of anti-intellectual faith, and abuse of scientific method. It is not to things near and cognate that the theory turns, but to what is absent in the relevant powers to the extreme, and imagined to do anything at all from nothing at all, but the matter which is lying around for no reason, but never puts on a show.
Nature manages; but what is nature, but the association of all these things, and how does that make the made the maker ? Does a pen make pens ? Reproductive life can match a past generation marvellously in the format and formulae, with commands supplied for the purpose; but that is merely the outworking of the verifiably inworked, the DNA. It does not alter the case, but rather makes the case much more amazing and logically demanding.
What then ? 'Nature', though no such entity is known to have eyes, being merely a mystical composition of thought, and a personification of what shows no personality: it acts. It sees a need, meets a vacant spot with staggering technical facility and mathematical super-genius, and proceeds doing very well for itself, thank you very much. It does the work, though it is never found to do so, or caught in the act, This fact is exposed in the beautifully revealing dictum of Professor Dawkins (cf. Department of Bible ... Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Appendix). This thing, this development of information in its captive format as in the theory, is observed. Where ? Well no one has ever been there when it happens! That is some observation, but infinitely not science. Built on imagination, it goes with it (cf. also Overflight in Christ Ch. 7 as marked).
This anti-evidential, negatively verified nature-idol does not work, does not show, does not go; but it is placed there, it is imagined to be there, inactive, disengaged, in some ways now like an Aristotelian god of some kind. What of this filling of gaps, of possible places for new things to come into being and live? it is the work of an unacknowledged entrepreneur in this hidden scenario, featuring what is not focussed, using what is not acknowledged, in an assembly line of potencies and powers operating secretly. What is it like ? It is like some spy, which the CIA would never admit to having sent! Here is the power in the cybernetics world, hidden.
While
nature itself, being inanimate, can do NONE of the things required, yet they are
done by this innominate deity, this unacknowledged potency, this marvel of a
person in thought and strategic insight. This wonder does have
a name as to His power and creativity: it is God. He does not keep on doing this particular thing,
however, which has resulted in the universe. It is
finished. Other than that, all is well, an unacknowledged God, not now in
action, taken to mean nature, always in action. However in this regard, nature
is not now in action, let alone always, by evidential display. It does not do it
and cannot be induced to do so, though attempts enough have been made*1A.
This, it is not very bright as an
hypothesis, since it contradicts all the verifiable evidence multiply (cf. SMR
140ff.).
Matter as Entrepreneur
That is an example. Thus the entrepreneurial side is sometimes exported to inanimate things. Matter, that energic impetus clustered in form and governed by law, is made to act in a somewhat similar way to an inventive genius. Often the vocabulary used by zealots of this imposture, organic evolutionists, speak as if inadvertently, but not necessarily so, of their god, 'nature' (effectual god). He, that is by the misnomer 'nature', seeing the opening, the need, the scope, or striving to do this or that, acts. Thus a need is filled, an opportunity is seized, an invention is hurried into action (as Gould insists in his Wonderful Life, a meander in suppressed creationism*1B). As any rate, functional and featured, it comes, it is there, it acts. It meets the need. It is as if a long vision in nature propelled its bits and functions and laws into being, like a great builder, sending his workers scurrying about, in good time for every envisaged step, and procedural need. Good builder too, since foozles and half-witted technical failures instead of littering the earth and its rocks, are not to be found. Decline, yes; experimental or even temperamental or merely occurring nitwit works are not to be seen in their steps towards actually working...
Denton is decisive on the sophistication situation, the initial cells, the cladistic arrangement of the items at the micro-biological level. They do not produce the world's greatest fulfilment of the definition of design (see many examples*2), by being the work of a sub-moron (in intelligence) called 'Nature.' It is assumed witless; but its witlessness outdistanced by far the greatest genius of man. Resultds demand causes (Causes), and causes adequate for them, both in system and in singularity, in episodes and in perspective, in height and in depth.
The Unseen Entrepreneur
Hidden is the unseen entrepreneur, who actually does it. He is capable of it. Nature, however, the recipient of His work so that its principles may be perceived as it operates, is falsely and glibly glorified with the glory of the divinity, though it is far from divine. This is done, whether directly or indirectly; but even that office in fact is slight, since principles are not operatives but results of operation. Where are the operations now to be seen, without intelligence, that principles may correctly be asserted of them! Alas in all these ramblings from God, science has long died, in its method, and its dignity has been displaced by a procedure so false and feeble as to dumb all aspiration for understanding ... were it not for the biblical depiction of the nature of sin, and the sight of its operations amid mankind (see Scientific Method ... , cf. Ephesians 4:17-19, 2:1-12).
Sometimes the creative thing, even if not acknowledged, is endowed with teleological power (as evidently in some writings of Michael Denton), as if something ABLE to have an end in sight, a finale to which it moves, in order to implement it and make a future improvement or desideratum. Such a motif manager could be none other than a thinker, composer, imaginer, directing power, animated agency for construction, with the power of God. He is not even acknowledged, though His qualities are here used, command speech somehow speaking out, expressing, composing means for new action, the interface contrived in some way, so that order and fulfilment matching, produce a likeness. Reception is good, very good!
Thus arrives en scène (it all has to happen... to cover the fact that it IS HERE) an interface which without imprint for command and reception, direction and response, has yet to face up to it and do it. It has to be before anything else can be done to the point in life. Such is the wonderful work in an assigned world which does not think, and a responsive world which does not know, and and so does linguistic personality with feature, focus and command function where absent, till man is made, who however is not very witty in infancy, and often stumbles at the necessary truth of his identity when grown.
Theory however, must yield. It is far from absent, this personality.
Alas for theory! Reception is dead to the principle reaching it to draw it UP, that is the description of events occurring, the principle invoked, the teleological principle. It is the events you need, not a principle outlining what they do, even when they do not present themselves to be seen DOING IT. Active in thought is the unacknowledged director of progress, in the relevant comprehensive power to intuit, discern, overview, relate, relay and institute action in its ward, life in this world, and instruct the inanimate. Such was the institution, now no longer visible. Such were the works, illustrating a principle when they were being done, to make this world. Dead stop now!
Adequate base then. Important principle then ? what was sufficient was also efficient and did it all, showing the principle of intelligence being creative. Man now has intelligence to create as a parallel level; but he was not there to do it before he was made, nor has he the requisite quality of power and knowledge to do it, before it was done. What was put there was produced far better than man can, and just as the one has been shown by results, so has the other shown, by clashing works and inadequate understanding, amidst unyielding rebellion for logic and majesty alike, on the part of most. That way IS broad!
Nevertheless, many worship Him; though sadly many more worship what He has made. Inkdeed it has marvels both of wonder and of curse; and the wonders witness the worker who worked it, not their self-generative power, silent as the dead.
This 'nature', indeed, desired as a manipulable or manoeuvrable entity, refuses to work as what set in being worked to do so. Indeed, though those desirous for a site for such worship or acclaim want it to act now and let all see! Act now in this mode ? This 'nature' refuses absolutely to do, as a thistle might, if you desired of it figs (cf. Matthew 7:16): for it does not have and never did have and never has been shown to have the relevant power, wisdom, facilities and creative entrepreneurship.
Indeed commands need formulation and receptive capacity for those forms, to read and effect them. They also need to be PLACED with their intellectual dynamics in a system of joint action. The system again needs an author, for the aggregation, congregation and functionalising of its components so that they work smoothly together, in an intellectual environment of coherence and cogency. When the inanimate are to have power to interpret the commands no less than what commands, and a principle does the commanding, but all of it knows how to do it, what then ? Then we are dealing with fables. We are not finding it happen. The Bible foretold this for this period of history, and like creation, it is happening (II Timothy 4, cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). It is ALL testable in this field and many another, and verifiable, and never as with nature worship, is it found to fold in anti-verification. The reasons for not following the Creator are not scientific; they are irrational in composition, and in that contradiction lies death for may; for life never acts on what is unreal.
But let us look further at this supposed teleological principle, this which acts like a lassoo to bring forward creation, and make it move to the things better, more developed! Since it is always ahead of its butt, the universe to be stimulated to go upwards, what was it in the beginning ? and what instituted the thing that it should exist out of nothing ? and so be led, or lead ? And how did the principle come to act as a principle, unless what it is and where it operates were put there, so that it might operate ? Nothing is answered and nothing is the answer, and something better is needed. What is eternal alone is adequate for escaping from nothing as author, and when escape is not attempted, it rules as adequate (without which the result would not come), and needs neither contrary or arcane marvel nor antithesis: it has the power, the thought to make what is receptive, and what is responsive or what is free enough, like man, not only to think, but to reject even reason to rebel against his source, and speak against what made him.
Let us look at this supposed type of thing, this theoretical thingummy, this suppositious leader, this drawer on of this world, this life, constantly productive, but never now producing at this level. Let us seek to find what might lie within it. We take it as a category of thought, now, as a kind or type of human investigation and proposal which, though inadequate, can stand some further thought. As an option instead of nothing it is better than nothing; but a hybrid, it founders.
Idols So Clamour for Man
Like the idols in the Old Testament, say in Isaiah, the invention, the teleological principle ? As we have noted, a principle is a descriptive title for what operates, and titles do not do the work: so then, this teleological, creative, matter-stirring principle, in function turned into a power, architectural genius, this formulator and enduer who makes matter itself to move into the realms of engineering magnificence (unless sourced in nothing), so that it may then become a cradle for the babe of its thought, like that of other idols, is in the thought of man, it is lost. It is never found self-identified or testable as an entity; and neither its engendering nor that of matter is taken care of, as in all such self-producing concepts with no basis. There is no explanation for their mutuality, the one there, the other projected, or the origin of either. Or are they eternal twins ? If so, who bore them ? If matter is limited and derivative, of what is it derivative ? if this teleological power is inventive, from what is its inventiveness, and how did it make communicative power with matter, and how were they correlative systems ? and where is the evidence that whatever they were supposed to it, as the nature of the case, they are now doing ? And if they are not now doing it, why and how did they ever! and where is there attestation, other than in nothing and nowhere!
The idol as a principle, as described, can do NOTHING. It has to be a sufficiently capable entity to endue and act in such a form, power and wit that the results in that dimension can occur. Vague philosophic words do not constitute evidential beings; nor do functions ascribed to something given a name, constitute abilities shown. A nonentity becoming an entity should at least be crowned, noted and set up in a position to act, on the basis of evidence; and of course, what brought things out in order to be so led upwards, in the first place ? and from what did it bring them ? and how endue, so that the interpretive medium was enabeld so to act to fulfil the commands which even carry over in procreation to the next generation, being fixed and founded, created into existence and maintained though with room for degeneration as in the human genome now! Such is creation in a world of such laws as ours has (cf. Professor Sanford of Cornell, and TMR Ch. 1, Creation, as marked), needs to be stated, and sited to be citable. Was it a dual nature at the first, the unacknowledged and the acknowledged, the leader and the led, matter and what is functioning as spirit, not limited to matter or contained by it; but if it IS in it, then SHOW it!
That is the position. Indeed, who bound them together, or made either in the joint jurisdiction field, this 'principle' and matter; and how is it that the one is always ahead of the other, acting in the function of creative God, although only god, since enshrined in a total system like a component. Did the leading edge invent itself within the system, or was it always there ? and if always there, did it need matter for a subject for its abilities ? Was matter, despite its degenerative loss of available energy, waiting for an advent while it died in its present potency; and who made it in the first place, and who placed this teleological something-or-other able to act, to be, and to react, and to direct, or draw, or entice, or invite the rest of 'nature'.
For fantasy, this has few equals. Atheism, flirtatious with fancy, or dragooning what is not there, to get up and act, is like a headless monster: it strides about and gets nowhere.
What then here ? Let us survey the position.
In effect, you have God immersed in a material world; but if this 'principle' is to be seen as entirely separate, then you have God and matter. This merely means that matter, despite its degenerative condition, is simply assumed, along with God. That is mere contra-evidential assumption. Let matter SHOW its powers, and have them investigable and found; and let the principle be SHOWN to be now operating, despite the fact that demonstrably, in the required creative function, even to the low-level ingredient of information grants, it is NOT doing so.
Why
weave when wisdom has no confusions, when the eternal God HAS operated to make
what is not now being made, has instituted what is not now being instituted, is
not an inadequate principle, which is a mere descriptive mode, and has the power to
act and MAKE things so happen that they have this principle in their operation,
whatever it may be! This, and the power to STOP acting. That is a personal
matter, as creators know*2A, and an operational nexus in persons. It is not a
mystery; but verified in the category required, eternal energy with intelligence
and supreme abilities, or nothing. The work is done; it stops; that is normal.
It has also happened. All features verify, including extreme versatility of
method, brilliance of devices, that have left the mind of perceptive man at
times so benumbed that it appears almost to have ceased working. That too, it is
always the way when you want something very badly that is not to be found where
you are looking, and when you refuse to look where it is to be found. When you
do so look, in this case, as in
you find all fits, to the last point of verification and validation*3.
Ostracism and Folly work Fiction, but God has Worked, not only to Create.
God presents and exhibits and attests: Billboard advertisements are less obvious.
We return by the necessities of rationality and the work of reason to the eternal God, who invented our kind of time, one when you wait for operations whether you like it or not, but have the instancy of thought if you are human, and the personal power for formulation and abstraction and system-creation at vast levels. All this was started, but notably have stopped advance, as your very genome decays.
Creation was; and it stopped. Man was made creative and hasn't stopped. Man likes to circumvent the Creator, and make systems whether of Eastern religions, with all is one, or one is all (cf. SMR pp. 1011ff.), involving himself in total self-contradiction or mere evasion; or whether of Western religions, where nature is one, whether with multiple inbuilt systems from nowhere, or not; and the hidden God is quietly (or bombastically, depending on type of hype) excluded. He has been hidden, like a child under a bed; but in this case, it is the Maker under a cloud of pretentious unreason. He is manifest in creation, in calling to man, in providing for man; and in not being tyrannical, as is the case with love, forcing His imprint on polluted man, but enabling restoration and return with out cost or fee, but what repentance requires and truth never avoids.
It is PRECISELY as
|
|
in ancient Israel at its worst (as in Jeremiah 2), or
|
|
|
in haters of
goodness, who are in effect |
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|
haters of men, or of women, who seek to deny, defy, distort, or merely dint the other. |
The revolt from God may also take the form of elevation to equality in what is not identical in function within creation, ignoring superiorities in one or the other. This also nullifies the realities of differentiation within equality of dignity, so aborting some of the delicious diversity in the vast imaginations shown in the creation. This represents a sad distortion of what is really wonderful.Take the recently much vexed case of men and women, in this country, their relationship as such. Without women, or without men, forgetting for the moment the trifle of reproduction which is very helpful to the race, there would be a tremendous loss of intrinsic marvels in the two models! Each has deliciously different trends, which together, make for a potential masterpiece of togetherness. Ignoring this lessens appreciation, contributions by forcing similarities where differences appear, and suggest a kind of assembly-line approach to the caress of creation in its wonders of part and counterpart.
Of course, in any field, one party may oppress the other; and this can breed hatred and denial. This does not alter the nature of the parties, but the nature of their current relationship, and some run away from it, like vagrant children.
So with God. Some do not want/desire/appreciate/relish/tolerate God, or truth, or reality, since it has hurt them, makes lame their ambitions, distorting for their action the field they want to invest, or because it simply oppresses their own sense of greatness, like variable Pinnochios. God then is psychically ousted; but he remains, like Geppetto behind Pinnochio. The analogy deals with one point; but it is a point often lost, that needs rediscovery.
Origins require causes; and what is eternal by nature does not. Matter, receptor of laws and plaything of time, is not eternal. You are left with the simple necessity of what always is, adequate and subjected to nothing, being supreme, so that anything else can be temporary, or be at all.
HE HAS the equivalent and superiority beyond measure, relative to the 'teleological principle' in this, that He knows what He wants to make, makes it, and knows in what systems it is to reside, and puts it there, and them likewise, crafted with consummate skill, and rendered determinate with conclusive will. There are no failed attempts! He knows what developments for these creations He wishes, and provides for them. Therefore He can and does predict things on a grand scale, to show that He knows what is to be without limit. It is all tested on many fronts*3, and not merely fronts up well, but superbly with an easy grace. Truth is like that, when found.
When the creations like man, become heady and headstrong and bewildered in wilful ignorance of Him (a decadence and dissonance sometimes faithfully transmitted by alienated cultures), then He knows what to do about it, having created time and all the variables within it. He has provided for the outcomes (Acts 17:30-32), addressed Himself not only in the commands within the tertiary complexities of DNA, but in the temporal outpourings of the prophets signalling the coming of Christ, and the temporary residence of His Messiah on earth at the predicted date*4, for the predicted purpose of salvation and demonstration; and with the predicted result, both done, and to come (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9).
He has made Himself not inextricably interwoven with what He created, but greatly concerned though He has cursed it for its flimsy, misplaced enterprise (cf. Romans 8:17ff., 5:1-17)), in the initial work of misled entrepreneurial flair on the part of man. As to that, it also involved mistrust and self elevation, admittedly through the designs of another, yet for all that, the evil presentation was both received and acted on. Mistrust is one of the greatest separating forces in existence; and it did its work, resulting in taking life in hand, and attempting to run off with it. It was not created for brinkmanship, but for co-operation, the Creator with the created and creative man.
It is rather like a car; if it could, one insisting on going without oil and so proceeding without the power of transport. With God, go without truth, and then go without life, retaining only a shadow. Live in a mess and show it, and know it till you awaken to your plight and seek to set it right. Some messes some find quite congenial for a time ... But what of the provision when people awaken ?
Mercifully, God has already done this on a car-by-car basis, if you want to preserve the image; and entry to the restoration premises is by invitation, which nevertheless needs to be acceded to and acted on ()cf. Revelation 3:20, John 10:9). If you prefer your car without oil, and without manufacturer for that matter, then you are free. If you would like to visit the factory and get oil and explanation alike, for no charge but repentance, to enter in the first place, and humbling, to be ready to receive this treatment as a gift, then the door stands open (John 10:9), and the guarantee is a wonder (John 10:27-28).
On such things, you may care to visit News 57. For that matter, a look at Whitehead's parallel error might lend interest to such cases (see Christ, not Culture ... Appendix on Contortions).
THE HIDEOUS CARICATURE
What then is the direction of flow of the hidden nature, given apotheosis and arisen to become god without any sign of it, in this mythical mannerism of the last nearly 200 years, as a fatuous fable of fiction ? It did not start then by any means, but it is an impressive closing Chapter! (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13)
On the sort of theoretical basis often found in organic evolutionism, time after time, you have a NEED, or an OPENING, or a POSSIBILITY, for some type of thing which at a given moment (in the past, since it is not seen to be happening in the present, in unintelligently produced information for example), acted to create a universe. It seems good that it should be filled (to whom ?). It is there as an opportunity too good to be missed (by whom ?). It must be filled. It MUST happen (why ?), and this for no known reason, and in a way contrary to current observation (normally important to science, earning it a place for respect when followed in method). The action comes; and the detail comes; and the dovetailing data come, and the brilliance comes in consequential conditions, operative at a forbiddingly wonderful level. You look for it ?
'Nature', is contrary to anything empirical, or any logic (the thing is rough on reasons), given these senses and sensibilities, powers and provisions (by whom ?), although never now actually exhibiting them, or showing testable ability in this sphere, it is deemed to have acted and to have had some sort of a lapse. It organises variants on some base imagined for action. Within the intense trafficking of the genome, it provides a usable element, like a new type of wheel that fits for a given car, fitted of course with a tyre, without which it does not work.
Dark in the mind of the mindless nature, there comes advance in the crucial areas of command and construction. Deftly interwoven in the heavily and multiply codified matrix, there come new organised communicative elements, or they will be after a while, when they are completely fitted out for the purpose. Meanwhile, the things (species) which get this beginning of what has the prospect (whose prospect ?) of being a great thing, when set up (like a mine, which is being developed, when the digging is just now dealing with early problems of removing dirt as it moves towards extraction of what underlies it - but why this ?), has some hidden advantage. What wonderful entrepreneurial enterprise is vested in no mind! Though the undug mining hole (the prelude to function) is actually a weight on the system till it works, and tends to be utterly uncompetitive and an embarrassment if anything, this too is postulated. Nevertheless, nature does not give up, being gifted with perseverance and hope, and a thrust to develop itself categorically (never now seen, but believed by faith beyond sight and action both): it continues, plodding along (though Professor Stephen Jay Gould excoriates on an evidential basis, this concept utterly op. cit. pp. 256ff., 232ff., 238, 260, 272).
In impossible adventures towards its high goal, which for unknown reasons it must reach, because it does reach them, it moves. It is rather like the converse of the Galileo case: it was not to move, so he is reputed to have said quietly (yet it moves). Here it is to move (yet Gould relative to the kind of movement in view, is saying on multiplied grounds, yet is cannot move like that!). It is certainly helpful to this point in his work, that on the basis of available evidence right now, it simply does not! As with any author, you can look to his past, but he is not living it now...
What then ? If there were no cause, this universe would not happen, because it could not be the consequence of non cause without losing logic and language alike (cf. SMR Ch. 5).
This is the world unseen, anti-verified, the nature myth, the appetite to apotheosize that lurks in man, noe sated, the idol set up, useless but used; and there it is, the fable taught to the children.
It is a hideous caricature, this breeding, brooding imagined 'nature', made into a mediator of mental marvels, exhibiting the reality of CREATION which in fact CAN do just these things, as we all know, for we all do it with our own creativity. We act, we pause, we cease; then we proceed at will, making adjustments, adaptations of this for that, for this or that purpose, or multiplicity of purposes, using this or that in varied manners in order to innovate, with some things common to what we have done before, and some things not. We are created by a creative Creator who has made us so creative that we can seek by will to annul even Him! The hidden agent is unnamed in this case, equally. THE NAME OF CREATOR IS SIMPLY LEFT OUT.
The things actually found are enormously intricate cells from the first, and marvellously distinct objects at the micro-or molecular-level (cf. Why Not Believe ? Ch. 12 ). These things do not change, nor is their presence in recess, for the sake of any theory! The creation is THERE, with the qualities of its kind. The information-donating stores do NOT arrive without intelligence visibly! That is now the case empirically. That fact is also THERE.
THE SPIRITUAL NEO-HOLOCAUST
and the GENERATION OF GRACE
The Bible itself is there too, referring to the Everlasting God who created the universe, and then stopped, who inhabited it personally for a purpose, to institute salvation, and then on completion, paused that incarnate action, pending the judgment (cf. Acts 1:7ff., 17:31-32). The world is conforming to the dynamics specified for the approach of that event, that judgment, that return of the incarnated Christ, now risen and glorified in terms of His nature before He came (cf. Isaiah 48:15ff., John 17:1-3, Psalm 2, 45). Neither does this world stop (yet), nor do those progressive dynamics which infest it, these not led by some thingummy principle, but by rebellion in high gear, having its way and day as though this little time were worth it, or God were unworthy of the fealty of such as race as this one. Neither does the rebellion cease, nor do the marks of the nearness to the return of Christ, to judgment, stop. Stop! they proceed like a disease (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5). These are empirical facts, right down to the return of Israel and its new wall! (cf. Why Not Believe ? Chs. 2 and 3).
Indeed, as these things as foretold, develop apace, it is necessary to realise that some things become so bad (like tyranny in systematic teaching of the nature myth) that it is a mercy to stop them... Here it is God alone who will do it, and praise God He who gave man freedom, knows how to end the oppressive regime, the more so when it is beyond all recall in its pride and false glory (cf. Ezekiel 28:9, Psalm 2).
Meanwhile the Gospel is there, requiring not invention of gods, but repentance to the One who is there, who always was and will be, on whom the temporary depends, whose judgments are in words both coded and uncoded, in nature and in the Handbook to holiness called the Bible, also the way to life which is itself eternal. Intelligence has done a lot of planning both in time and before time, and man's intellect is a derivative of the Eternal Energy with Eternal Mind and Eternal Capacity to invent better than any entrepreneur: to establish conditions, to rebuke, to curse or to cure. It is necessary not merely to know of, but to know Him by finding Him where He may be found, which is like nature, where He put it. In the writing of the verified Bible, and in the work of the crucified Christ on whose salvation it centres significantly (cf. Galatians 6:14), it is found with confirmatory validation and verification almost without cease*3.
THAT is not a hideous caricature, but verifiable reality; the capacities for hideous caricature on the part of man however were vented on this same Saviour, Jesus Christ, central in the biblical depiction of salvation as in Isaiah 50-55, John 3, 10. They made of HIM in body, what they often now do in mind, a hideous caricature, almost unrecognisable in face as human (Isaiah 52:13ff.). They tend to do this sort of thing to God wherever He may be found, and then teach there children so. When facing a wall, at 60 miles per hour and 300 yards away, it is well to pause. It is better still to act, to take account of the situation, and turn away from what you were doing, to what you need to know. In spiritual terms, this is to repent, open the eyes to the wall of sin, turn to the Maker of mind, and seeking pardon where it is offered (Mark 2, Romans 3, 5, II Corinthians 5), through the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, who died that man, one at a time, might live, find the peace that fits the mind of man as a hand a glove.
But what of the children, seized and muted by authority, having their spiritual teeth drilled with this alien irrationality and this fabled fiction ? It makes it hard for them to eat ANY real food ? Conversion of the deadened heart (Ephesians 2) does take a miracle; this makes it one of a high order.
What of those older assailed by mass media and later education ?
It is a neo-holocaust. Whole generations in many nations await the tortuous fables that invest cultures like locusts, leaving ruin. Pride and anxious competition is stirred mightily; whole nations become obsessed with power, or comparison, or proving themselves this or that, or showing survivability (as illustration China is reported to be noting that Japan, now in some confrontation, cannot match its economic strength ...).They do it to themselves, this pollution. They do not wait for outside oppressors. They are their own fifth column, and engines for death. Vast is their entrepreneurial enterprise! Gross are its outlines. It is like forced infection, experiments on the Jews by the Hitler regime. It is enterprising but misled. Spiritual drugs can lead to match anything evil that the physical ones can do, toppling truth, morals, responsibility, respect, self-discipline, realism. NATURALLY such things are now progressing at a great rate in the young, as they are taught the spiritual equivalent, fantasy creating philosophy, and its proponents daringly using the name of science (minus scientific method), to do it!
Why ASK why the world is as it is, for its good is being overruled in its spreading misrule! It is amazing that its condition is not far worse, but God is both gracious and patient. A couple of thousand years of patience has been rather long, and some people wonder at this, but Peter the apostle told us of this in advance: DO NOT, he taught from the mind of God, mind the delay in the return of Christ. That is the way it is. The time for such a thing as the return of Christ, he indicated, is to be specified in large terms. A day here is like a thousand years. It is not that the Lord is slack, he intimated, but longsuffering, not willing that any should perish. When it comes to the responses of man, the case is not identical with that of the decisions of God; and the Lord has made great and numerous appeals, illustrations, applications, fulfilments along the way. Terminating a universe is not a small thing (cf. II Peter 3), and the time DOES come for that (Revelation 19-20, Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:35).
In Revelation 6:9ff., we learn that there is mercy in the timing, as the Lord has His eye on many yet to be saved, This, in an image, is like new entrants for Noah's ark which was a timely provision, though not greatly used in terms of percentage of the populace! (cf. I Peter 3:18ff.).
The
grace of the Lord is not the least attractive of His wonders: He LOVES to do it,
to consider, to conceive, to conclude action (cf. Psalm 40), to make salvation, to pay its
premises and provide its sanctions, all alone, even to the point of the death of His own incarnate
body, not of another; and it was not by capturing and imprisoning, like
children even in independent schools being branded with the mark of the idol,
but by expending His own blood (cf. Acts 20:28), that He acted in Jesus Christ,
His only begotten Son. In Him is the saving sight for the eyes
(cf. Isaiah 45:22-24, Zechariah 12:10 - 13:1, John 14:1-10), on behalf of man
(Titus 2 - 3). It was giving, not grabbing, that did it. It was providing, not polluting. It
was by pardon, not promiscuity, by truth and not by fable. It was through time,
for ever (II Timothy 1:12); just as from eternity, He invented time.
God, He does all things well, even providing the place of pardon for His
detractors and revilers (Luke 23:24). He created well; He makes a new creation
well (II Corinthians 5:17ff.); He creates a new heart wisely (cf. Jeremiah
31:31ff., Ezekiel 11:19ff.). He also creates a clean heart (Psalm 51:4-10) and in
the end, dispensing with this trial and test prodigy of this present world (Matthew 24:35, Isaiah
51:6, II Peter 3), and its fables, He will create a new heaven and a new earth.
Ah! but it is very pleasant to be renewed, as at a birth, and to be cleansed, and to be given a new heart, and to have a cleansed heart, as externally the car at a car wash; and it is very good to KNOW the source of goodness, and kindness, and love, and sacrifice, and wisdom and power, and to walk in His Spirit than so knowing God and understanding Him through the provision of the Saviour. There is nothing better; and for a world in disaster with guilt like a garnishing or overlay, this salvation to the very heart of God is an astonishing thing, like creation in the first place, for its sheer prodigy, its might and its splendour (cf. Isaiah 63:1, Revelation 5).
NOTES
The disregard of diverse data resembles, to take a farmyard case, throwing a pitchfork after hay requiring to be lifted onto a truck. Neither is the movement right (it is horizontal, not vertical), nor is the effort (it is diffuse, not specialised), nor is the purpose (it is detached, not relevant). So with the entirety of man and the various natures which God has made, from psychological, to motivational, to inspirational, to activational, to moral, to logical, to capable overall.
This 'analysis' which omits entire fields with conceptual disdain and empirical disregard is one of the worst fantasy features of all reductionism, and Darwin's in particular. Apart from ignoring the evidence in the actual field, it bypasses that in all the others.
As noted previously, but appended also here, there is a collection of hidden skeletons, which actually have abundant life. Such is the shrinkage from life is seeking to explain it! In this, the presentation is to look at results of disregard in philosophical foundering, and the results of dealing with all the evidence episodically and carefully. This is taken from Dashes ... and The Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth, Ch. 6
What on any naturalistic or monistic ground
in metaphysics is mere discord (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 10),
or else towers built on invisible clouds,
(cf. What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs. 3 and 4 ),
now on the ground of supernatural origin of the regimented and volitional natural world, becomes
· meaningful,
· in essence predictable,
· continually and assuredly verifiable on the ground of the creator,
whose verified word is without inhibition
· exhibiting the fitting conclusion, like a thunder-clap to a murder.
In all things on such a basis, specifically the biblical
(cf. LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS),
there remains nothing in the least systematically difficult, whereas on the other model, there is nothing but failure; for there is never explanation for knowledge, existence, division, beauty or morals, but only tired reductionisms, these without power, without ground and without the necessary result. It is simple fact that creationism in general, but more specifically biblical creationism with the creator who has acted and declared Himself verifiably in the Bible (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, 8-9, 5), accounts for everything as nothing else either does or can (cf. Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer).
See for example That Magnificent Rock, in the Chapter, Creation as marked.
See also further coverage and general background to the theme in:
The gods of naturalism have no go! 21,
Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 6,
and The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God Ch. 2, The latter is especially relevant to this phase of our present Chapter, and here reproduced.
From what is above and what is to be found in endnote *1 below, we find only one course, and that is the fulfilment of the definition of design in man, eminent above all visible competition from any source, however intelligent, however imaginative, however gifted (cf. SMR p. 211, Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny Chs. 2 and 8).
Neither does ontology produce,
nor rationality deduce,
nor the empirical induce,
nor aetiology conduce to,
such a construction of thought
as unmade man, the peak of composition uncomposed,
nor yet to such a construction as man
arriving en scène, to inspect his place,
landing from the witless into this brilliantly composed
ingeniously integrated world with its commands visible,
inspectable, and its ways profound.
The imagination of man yaps, like a stray dog,
yes it shrieks like a drug addict in his delusions,
commanding that 'Nature' be womb for man.
In fantasy, dream determines to beget children,
where there is neither womb, nor any apparatus for reproduction,
It seeks with engines of thought
the children of desire;
but nothing comes, nothing is done,
for 'Nature' knows nothing of it,
nor co-operates to perform,
indeed to the point, it is barren as stone, unwitting as a tree.
Naturalism is dead, evolutionism rots. Who will bemoan her ?
It is God who lives, alone sufficient,
alone efficient, Maker of the invisible mind of man and of his invisible spirit
by which he can think delusively if he wills,
and soundly if he won't be misled.
It is God who exclusively is adequate,
while the miscreancies of man
merely minister to his death
by this abuse of the gift of life.
However, granted that man is a design, by definition of the term, and that one may ask the Maker for the reason for man's construction, and that the Maker has unequivocally and clearly, testably spoken (as is fitting for creations which can reason and check - why else make them so enabled ?) as to the point of the design, is it not merely what would one expect ? And what would one expect ? It is not that apparatus at this level of profundity in its creation, with so many subservient methods and pathways involved in the utmost intricacy of assembly line production and mathematical brilliance in miniaturisation, would be left to destroy itself by crankily failing to know what it is for. Would you endow a car with no knowledge and at the same time provide automatic steering by a non-map as reference point ? Would you not be insane!
Yet, except by wilful and individual pathology, man, the product, is not insane (cf. Bright Light Ch. 7). His works deployed exhibit an ability to apply purposive intelligence, to review it and to comprehend. Insanity ? insanity, it is something else! That too is simply a matter of definition which is a great way to avoid illogical slides, and one reason for using such devices, aids to reason, and enemies of delusion.
It is therefore to be expected that the REASON for man would be made known; and it has been made known from the first, and implemented in the coming of Christ, to the last, with all the items of HIS multi-millenial schedule, like those for the human body in the growing embryo, moving to its maturity. These similarly, with similar profundity of thought and openness to inspection, have been provided for in the text of the book of the Lord, the Bible (Isaiah 8:20), eminently testable, exclusively valid, so that this, man's purpose in design, this too may be found, just as man is found from the embryo.
Man actually comes; it is all programmed or provided for in myriads of ways; and Christ actually came, He was provided for in myriads of ways, in history, in prophecy, in testable data and detail, in power and in the results following such as this, that the Gospel to result was itself predicted (cf. SMR Ch. 9), and the world-wide coverage likewise.
Yet what was predicted was by no means all progression into fulfilment, for the world was subjected to judgment many a time* , in the flood, in this nation and in that, in Israel, in the Gentile world as now and in detail being fulfilled before our eyes, like the growing embryo. This organisation of predicted knowledge, however, it is as the body of history that it comes again to the eye (as shown in Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and SMR Ch. 8). Just as the embryo follows its WRITTEN pattern, before it arrives, so history, in Christ, and in our present world, this too arrives, fulfilling the written specifications of the prophets of the Lord; and the thing which is the finale, is the return of the Lord.
It is He, who once crucified, comes to be king; and in particular, this completes the paradigm, for the murder of the One to be sent as exemplar of LIFE, as PAYMENT for sin and as provider of PARDON, set to die when He did by the word of Daniel the prophet, this becomes the mastery of the endless Majesty which, where His subjects are willing (Psalm 110), and regenerated and recomposed, brings to them a peace endless beyond all our time, past all test. This too was foretold (Isaiah 2, 9:1-7, 11). It has begun now within; it will be accomplished then when the word written is completed in this finale.
In fact Gould (op.cit. p. 236), has this to say:
"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."
On p. 239, he adds this:
"But we have no evidence that the winners enjoyed adaptive superiority, or that a contemporary handicapper could have designated the survivors."
Indeed, speaking of diversification in terms of apparent sequence over time, he becomes a malcontent with the often taught parody of reality of mini-step self-assembly (p. 233):
"Instead of a narrow beginning and a constantly expanding upward range, multicellular life reaches its maximal range at the start, while later decimation leaves only a few surviving designs."
He might almost be thought of as a mourner of major design LOSS over time (often referred to as 'decimation'), expostulating that explaining the opposite of what actually is in his view attested in the evidence of design-decline over time, is scarcely wise or practical.
Further, on p.230, he remarks:
"Ï just can't accept that if organisms always have the potential for diversification of this kind {as in the Burgess excavations in Canada} - while only the odd ecology of the lower Cambrian ever permitted its realisation - never, not even once, has a new phylum arisen since Burgess times."
This Harvard Professor was witheringly scornful of the concept of mere bitza evolution, insisting that it neither justified itself nor evidenced itself. Indeed, he went further. Thus, on p. 260, he declares:
"The modern themes of maximum disparity and decimation by lottery are more than just unacceptable under such a view of life; they are literally incomprehensible."
What then ? Rationally incomprehensible and causatively irrelevant presentations concerning the arrival of starkly brilliant, minimally sized, astoundingly technical, lucidly sequential assembly-line technologies, such as life presents, and outcomes in unity style of the result, the species and genus and categorical types, by an inadvertent, mindless scramble thus have led to the most outré ideas of how to get a rabbit out of a hat, when the rabbit is not there.
Such mysticisms as in some other religions, have no ground for the result-cause relationship, or have no cause at all, just positing what comes and ascribing it to the unimaginable, whether this be in Eastern or Western philosophy and not a few religions. To be unimaginable is one thing (though for man it is a big take), but to base what you have in explanation and constructive positing, upon such a thing is of necessity irrational. It is in fact in danger of being simply an organisational shift in thought, bypassing explanation with assertion and question-marks, some turning these into affirmations that account for nothing.
In the end, it is all accounted to nothing, or to the adequacy of the eternal God who does not have to arise from the inadequate let alone the non-existent in order to be, but being eternal, has other things arise at will and good pleasure, Himself the ground of our delimited type of causality, using it as an aid to creation, based on His own source capacity to move as He will, the divine dynamic for the activation of beginnings and ends, as well as being the shaper of ends and the maker of beginnings.
Without Him, there is no end to the arising of inadvertent beginnings from nowhere for no reason, masquerading as this and that, or flashing over the logical impasses, as a mouse might jump over a one mile wide chasm. It is sayable; not doable.
See:
The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God Ch. 2
CREATION AND DESECRATION
Creation and Creativity
You never know with creators, those using creativity. They may, in the human and derivative case, write in a life-time, just one book. They may write hundreds, not starting till late, or several, but only when young. Purpose relates; and needs; and the creative flush of wonder in vision and victory in dynamics of confrontation, illumination, dedication to a cause and so forth.
When creation is concerned, and the personal nature of the author is involved, the one who gives the information to express the purpose, be it based on vision, illumination, knowledge or even the thrust of desire, then the only thing sure is that attempts to second guess when he or she will write next are illusory. There may be new vision, the discard of old vision, and above all, the surge of inventive thought, the activation of light; or not; and it may come or go relative to the creative style of task in hand.
When God is the one in view, in His creation of a universe, including sub-creators in His own image, then making a universe by the creative thrust akin to His power is the outcome of His strength, knowledge in truth and inventive wish. It was always right to say He COULD have done it (in our kind of time) very quickly indeed, far less than 6 days, or taken longer. It would depend on His own specifications and desire, including the testimony as to why He did it, how He did it and the impact sought from these things, as well as from what He did. God is very deep. He chose time so short that no ill-accord would occur with some types of creatures, needed by others, so that they could exist jointly and at the same time; and yet long enough (for six days of prodigious labour is not nothing) to signify method and grouping of things being done, first in Genesis 1, on earth and its environs, and then in the heavens, putting man in his image-type post, and testing him, all in one burst of power and procedure, principle and program, dynamic and desire.
So was the tableau made, and fitting to its majesty is its time: the evidence attests what the Bible pronounces, some thousands of years, enough for many entanglements to be made, experienced and assessable, and for the closure movements, as from the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the degeneration of the genome in accord with this, as researched and found, to have their majestic sway over man who has tended repetitively to become too majestic himself, to know the meaning of majesty and to worship his Maker.
A work of this magnitude and scope, depth and dimension, spiritual, moral, physical, psychical, logical, investigable by logic, and found to be accessible to reason in itself, needs time for its total flowering and alas, in much, deflowering through the aspiration, autonomic desire of its tenacious tenants, mankind. It has been given it. Yet it does not need time for a mere squalling in squandering of assets, mental, spiritual, moral and physical without limit, so as to parade deformity for ever.
The Creator, as is found in creativity in man, created in a creative flush which was neither instantaneous nor protracted, was meaningful and workable and later investigable in part by man. It was compared with man's time on this earth, very fast indeed, a matter of days. It will go with a certain speedy address also, and vast dynamic dismissal as in II Peter 3 and Revelation 19-20. By His word, it is announced, pronounced finished, assessed and at length dismissed. That is the way with creation: it comes, is used, and ceases. Its episodes are sui generis. Trying to reconstruct them, as C.S. Lewis loved to point out, is a work of more aspiration than competence: prone to error so vast that it becomes almost comic.
However the author may divulge his reasons, speak of the thrust, the impulsion of the vision. if unlike God, he is subject to limitations of understanding, his own account may not be perfect, but we can understand much of it when he speaks of it
God tells us that He would not have created without the means of salvation. The vast marvel vested in mankind, for example, is not without a still vaster marvel for his redemption (cf. Isaiah 51:16 with 49:2, 53:1-12). The remedy was before all time needful before there could be any question of giving such power to man that he could even mock God and distrust the word sent from His eternal mind to man (Ephesians 1:4). Eternity stretched out before time, and in its limitlessness, the God of infinity knew what He was doing, why, how, for how long, in what manner of creation and dismissal, and with what results, how to be achieved in every dimension.
It is a grand spectacle of wonder, sin and salvation; and it is contained in the mind and hand of the Inventor, the Creator, the Saviour.
As personal, He presents each stage both the with grandeur of power and precision which is His (hence the marvels of mini-magnificence in the vastly complex and logical DNA). He creates and stops, at whatever His plan provides. As He created and stopped. Information relative to creation poured out as it does from a creative mind, and did from His infinitude of creative power and vision. The it stopped. When man fell, as in Genesis 3, information again was given and through prophets and performance, it was illustrated, confirmed, verified, extended, exhibited to the full, and then applied to the uttermost in that period in particular now drawing to its close as foretold.
When the millenium in which righteousness is shown to the uttermost, the creativity will make that new, and when that is over, the entire world and its heavens dismissed, God will create the eternal heaven and earth, where righteousness rejoices without impediment through sin, and love works with those who receive it, in Him who showed it, that such a time might begin, and not end.
Creativity is different from mere process. Quite different. It has ways of its own. This world illustrates that objectively in man and in his world. What is divinely desired is worked; and then it stops when in the grand schema of major events. Just so, man builds a bridge; and he stops when it is done, though he may maintain and superintend it. Process is the work IN the creation, as made; making it is the inventive power and co-ordinating wonder of which man, derivative but a creator at his own level, has some knowledge in his own works. Moving from one to another is like moving from vision to accomplishment; design to destiny; concept to condition. The mode of working in each is thoroughly diverse. Building an painting a bridge, from time to time, are not the same. Not at all. The process of maintenance may indeed continue; but it is by no means comparable with the elevation of the piles, their settling or the planning of the roadways.
Man tends to be so fascinated with what now happens, the continuation and maintenance phases, that he forgets himself. His thoughts come and go; his creations come and go. When they have come, as books for example, they may be stored in libraries. But these, although they contain many books, do not write themselves. That had to be done before there could be books to be stored. Checking the books may be useful; but not for determining the mode of their writing, the mental criteria then in view, or the nature of the creativity involved.
Not, that is, unless in any one case, you are
TOLD what these these things were, by the author of the book, whose words
are now stored with all the rest in the book. In the case of the Bible, we are
given an account of some of the major elements in the creation, and major
purposes involved; but especially, as in a Medical Journal, the nature of
our major disease and the way for its removal. It is well to read in this
special case, when the information is given out freely. In the case of the
divine creation, the attention is given to the response of the highest creation
on earth, to God, and of God to that, first in graciously non-total
judgment, and then in totally gracious salvation. No one HAS to inhabit an
unholy and cursed earth as a mere part of it; the escape button is there. It
needs pressing (Acts 2:20-21, John 10:9, 5:24). When this is done with
heart (for it is an affair of the heart), then the result also comes with
a certain impressive address, with no small speed; for though it
took much to do what it takes, culminating in the Cross of Christ, what is
made, like the universe, now being there, is readily available.
DESECRATION AND THE DYNAMICS OF DIVORCE
In fact, Gould evidenced spiritual problem areas that explain all too Well his strange combination of revealing what is often hidden in his field, and yet assailing the name of the God who made it so plain. As in any divorce, reason is hard to find, since feeling is masterful and often contrives in the heart of man, a revenge, renunciation at all costs or a dismissal from thought. Such is the antipathy appearing p. 44 of his Wonderful Life!.
God is out; Gould is in. But the relevant qualifications of each are disparate: God knows how to make a Gould, and although Gould seems ready to make a god to his taste, the One who instead of nothing, is the basis of all things made, and the remedy towards which Gould acts as if he has never heard, at least with any accuracy, is not he. The living God of the Bible is out of the mind of Gould, just as is the Great Satan, deemed the USA, far from the mind of such as former President Ahmadinejad. There is not only a gulf, there is a boiling gulf, where radioactive waste lodges.
Gould tries to construct an idea that some people (unlike himself) try to construct a zone of cosmic comfort. He appears to mean this: that these folk prefer to look upon the cosmos as not its own thing, not a self-making construction of its own power (since it never shows the capacity, let alone to invent itself before it was there to do it), but the construction of a qualified causal power with wisdom and knowledge to match the observable products. These submissions to causal considerations, with which we in fact reason, back of our own limited versions, and of our own capacity to interpret and understand the constructive features of the universe, seem to evoke his ire or fire.
What then ? If we do not connive with such misconceptions and irrationalities, surrendering to their intellectual squalor, but instead give thought to the factual reality, with empirical features delivering their heeded testimony, with increasing correlation with logic to achieve testable levels of understanding, does this provoke ? Is this, then, an irrational taunting song ? Such may help when you are out of your depth, a sort of last rites ceremony before sinking (cf. Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6). It does not eliminate the necessity so mocked! The mockery in fact was self-imposed by Gould, as noted in Ch. 6 just cited, where he asks what is happening! Indeed, it occurs when he expostulates, How in heaven's name could such disparity arise in the first place ? (his Wonderful Life p. 227), not only at all, but with multiple variants all at once (op.cit. p.233), not slowly formed later!
Heaven had already answered, but he would not hear.
Actually, from the Christian point of view there is no cosmic comfort available, except in so far as the magnitude and sheer magnificence of the designs and contrivances*2 and the compromised but wonderful aesthetic, legal, multi-dimensional and glorious provisions in its now tainted midst attest the appealing grandeur of the Creator, whose mind made our little minds as one creative act, in the thought realm; just as He also created our spirits in their own creative and willing mode, and forged the synthesis in one magnificent production, staggering in its overall conception and singularity.
The condition of the cosmos then ? Indeed, it is more than appalling, because of man's intentional invention of dissidence from God, from the first, and as in many like Gould it appears, to the last (Romans 5:1-12, 8:17ff.). That is the now natural way of mankind, in the broadest sense, the libidinous, the work of following fancies, as for thousands of years (cf. Isaiah 44:18-20, Ezekiel 14:4-6, Ecclesiastes 7:29, II Timothy 3-4).
Sin, or the penchant to live outside God in theory or practice or both, for whatever reason or lack of it, which latter is always the end of the matter, is like anti-fertiliser, and mob-rule of the civic centres. It does not rule in majesty and peace; but it spoils and soils and ends the entrance to wonder if there is no repentance; and it makes the good soil of the soul resistant to sowing with the seeds of truth, beauty and reason itself. It also tends to make the soil of the soul shallow, so that seeds tend not to thrive.
The only comfort which enters the soul is not from the state of the cosmos, but the wonder of God who has attested Himself with unique certainty (TMR 5, 7 It Bubbles ... 9, esp. *1A, and Index-Mini, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, pp. 152ff.; ROP 2; ). It is He who made the liberty that enables to rebel and revile and misunderstand and bury strong and necessary results of reason (cf. SMR, TMR) in the sands that cover in the storms. Or to love, repent and live abundantly in truth with understanding... The door is open; and the preference is not forced (Colossians 1:19ff.)
This actual God did not, as Gould blindly imagines, take so many years to make the earth that the day of man is like micro-seconds in a long panorama of time (p. 44). Indeed he calls it the "last geological milli-microsecond", in the prodigious way things go in this genre!
This psychological construction concerning man's arrival and its implications, is not compatible with reason, since the ages prescribed and imagined are part of a theory that multiply violates verification and confirmation alike, as the above cited works show (cf. also, The gods of naturalism have no go!). Hence this argument, based on non-fact, failing the fact test at the outset, has no validity.
God in fact, as Bible and data require, if both are not to be flatly contradicted even in their agreement, for no valid reason, affirms that the earth was created not, to be sure in micro-seconds, but in six days of a rotational type, as also there shown. The tendency to human anarchy which obviously offends Gould, so that his words remind of Camus, with the stoic kind of dismissal of an unsatisfactory world, is of his own invention. MUCH is of this kind; but ALL of this burden in the universe is the result not only of the originality of sin, which occurred when dismissal of the fact of God began the evil run (Genesis 3, Romans 5), but on the sins done and sinfulness wrought in a different because already polluted way NOW, on and on. It proceeds apace, galloping, or like a never-ending bonfire. Not yet is the fire total; but it smoulders and flames like sunspots arise higher and higher.
It is not pleasant; nor is its cause. But its cure is more than pleasant. It is not a matter of what Gould seems to consider too superficial, rewards and punishments; and if he deems it so in the Christian, biblical faith, then he merely twists that, as in the tongue-torment often associated with divorce.
The biblical position has all the originality of God who made us, and made us able to be original! Salvation, entire dismissal of sin's account in guilt, is removed in one free step. It is emphatically and even dramatically NOT a reward, but a gift by grace to faith (Romans 3:23, Titus 3:1-7, Ephesians 2). Punishment is received by the Saviour for sin for as many as receive Him (that being no small part of the Gospel - II Corinthians 5:17-21.
To be sure, ONCE you are IN the kingdom of heaven through faith in the Christ and reception of His gift of eternal life, THEN what you do, having base, basis and reality, DOES have susceptibility to evaluation. WE ourselves tend to do it all the time. It is a natural quality in man, and except for its invidious misuse by tyrants and gossips, it has a just and a justifiable place.
LOVE IS at the basis, since it removes the whole horror of rewards and punishments as the controlling agencies for man's status and destiny. There is NO question, as Gould appears to imagine, for this biblical faith, of being in a torment of fear about what is going to happen, here or hereafter, for the Christian. In Christ, it has already happened (John 5:24), and the kingdom is reserved for the believers by gift (I Peter 1:5-8).
While the name of God is thus tediously assailed by such as Gould, as if the Gospel had never penetrated into his mind, so that irrelevancies like the above are spouted as if tea from a large pot were being poured, the realities of what is in the Bible, not only meet his would-be criticisms. They also reach out to all such as he, in readily available mercy. This is held out, despite such cases
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of those who reject the
rigorous necessities of reason |
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of those who depart
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These are not rejected just for their clamour. The apostle Paul went nearly as far in that direction as it is possible to go; and yet was not only received back in the free redemption of the Lord, but became ... a vastly used apostle to the Gentiles.
MANY have done worse than merely malign or distort, and found more than reception by grace with joy. That is one of the features of divine love, which DOES have not a little place in man, though this is often betrayed and rejected. Love is not vindictive. Though judgment will come, yet it is caused to delay in the final outcomes, till mercy has played every possible tune and taken every possible part. God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but calls to man, TURN, TURN, for He delights in mercy, and not only exhorts to its free reception, but invites industriously (as in Matthew 22:10 for example), and laments for the wilfulness that twists and turns but not back to Him (as in Jeremiah 12:12-17, 8:13-14, Matthew 11:25-29, 23:37-38).
Indeed, He not only moves in time to rescue (cf. Hebrews 6:19, Ephesians 1:4, Jeremiah 1:5), but beyond it and before its institution as such to so KNOW where His love is to be, His mercy is to reach, that so far from being insignificant though wrought with deep understanding of many things, man is in a positively wonderful position. The issue is not how much pleasure you can have or manufacture; it is what you are and where you go and why! in the midst of the gloriously available love of God, like an oasis in a desert where atomic bombs are set off to vent feelings, the feelings from the heart of man.
As to heart's desire, like food, it is only a problem when absent; but when present, it fills not the notional need, but the relevant one. When God is concerned, it is like wishing away the heavens, and then pulling a face because everything is so bare, and hard to bear.
It is also, depending on return or otherwise, like a calm, cooling breeze that tempers the heat, rejoices the breathing, enlivens the body and stirs the mind in the midst of a fiery heat. It is like that too with many medicines: blight their very name, and you remain as you were. It is when you task them, that you find results.
See:
LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST
WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES
AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS
Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God
Visit -
The Christian Prescription Ch. 2 for example.
