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CHAPTER SIX

 CHILDREN IN THE LION'S DEN

Errors and Terrors

II Chronicles 33:3ff.

I

THE MURDEROUS MANASSEH

SUNK IN THE SYNDICATED PASSIONS OF BLIND PRIDE

(until his repentance - 33:12ff.)

News 441

Creation Research News, Vol. 24, No.  2,  2010, p. 6,
News Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 4,  2011

	"For he rebuilt the high places which  Hezekiah his father had broken down,
	he raised up altars for the Balls, and made wooden images, and
	he worshipped all the host of heaven and served them... Also
	he caused his sons to pass through the fire in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom;
	he practised soothsaying, used witchcraft and sorcery,
	and he consulted mediums and spirits.
	He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger.
	He even set a carved image, the idol which he had made, in the house of God ...
	So Manasseh seduced Judah."

The above quotation from Chronicles, with bullets added to make the point that there  are 9 elements in his seductive strategy, shows what Israel had to face.

BECAUSE there are substantial parallels with what is happening in South Australia in particular, and with considerable likeness, in many other places, it seems good to show this in the hope that some at least will realise that the evolutionary enforcement laws now playing like a radioactive spray of water on our children, by official compulsion and Board impulsion, together with ritual and irrational exclusion in the field of science by what is alleged to be in the format of the factual, is a deadly effrontery. It needs to be purged before this land is. Besides, have pity on the children! To see compulsory warping is like watching a Belsen in spirit, one approved by law, enforced by suppression of contention, debate and fair play, while the victims writhe or connive, according to their options. It like insisting they be sprayed with nuclear waste, and not allowed to eat. Why precisely!

Is this Australian ? or is it some new multi-cultural Australia, which has forgotten what is has been, is thankless to God (whom it duly notes with reverential respect in the Preamble to is Constitution) for what it has become, and now plays out this spiritually radioactive water, while itself sinking further into the sea, as if it were some spiritual Japan, acting to pollute it with a taint millions of times greater than that allowable for health. Now Japan suffered a catastrophe, and we can at last begin to understand; but here in this land, authorities in this field, are MAKING one!

How MANY times have I who write this, gone into the passages of Government,  to protest,  to present, to give typed materials,  to  appeal,  to remonstrate, and never once has there been  a practical or even  reasonable answer. Once I was congratulated, but never did response come to the point. Talk about irrelevancies uniformly replaces the central issue. Like Manasseh for so  long, they refuse to heed,  to act, to face the realities.  They do not argue. They have nothing. They are given reasoned challenge,  they omit response to it.
 

INTRODUCTION

As to this Manasseh, the parallel to our present here, his work was of such anti-spiritual virulence that the Lord cited it in the final fixation of devastation and destruction to the Jerusalem that then was, before the first exile. Thus in Jeremiah 15:3-6, there is a stark statement indeed, concerning those evil accomplishment of misplaced authority on the part of Manasseh:

"And I will appoint over them four kinds, says the LORD:
the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear,
and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy. "And I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth,
because of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah,
for that which he did in Jerusalem.

"For who shall have pity upon you, O Jerusalem?
or who shall bemoan thee?
or who shall go aside to ask how you are faring ? 
You have forsaken Me, says the LORD,
you have gone backward:
therefore will I stretch out My hand against you, and destroy you;
I am weary with repenting.

Quite an accomplished fellow, this Manasseh, really, for see how effective he was, that desolation came to his people because of him, through the determinate response at last, of the longsuffering heart of the Lord, by His sure and devastating act. WHEN a civilisation is SO polluted, SO corrupted, so unfeeling, even to the point of scarring and marring its young by direct and inevitable authority, suppressing what they might want,  removing freedom of action and imposing actions of vast guilt, whether it be  Hitler, Mao or Stalin or Australian State, it makes little difference in this, that it is abominable, unnatural, unfeeling and corrupt. It is corruptive and it violates trust. It is an option  to scar the body, the future, the mind or the heart. At least with valuable work and input verboten in science, influence to the detriment of their futures is a most live, and discriminatory option.  And this in a nation where the UN Declaration  against religious and belief discrimination is supposedly law!

Is law made for its rejection ? Is the belief system of some pedants to be allowed free reign while they exclude by name has a far better record, a far more enduring testimony a far better concordance with testable fact than anything they have produced, in their automasted domain of quasi-learning, and theoretical protection, as if they constituted themselves a new arm of the Inquisition. If only they had reason, but they are in contempt of it,  as shown here, and in the references provided.
 

II

THE FORCES AT WORK

That, in modern terms as we shall DV soon see, is what is happening now in a gigantic parallel to the day of Manasseh. It is time to be warned, though this State over some 20 years has been warned several times, for several governments, with this same pastor from this same Church which bears a longer and a shorter name, Australian Bible Church, because of its faith, and The Australian Presbyterian Bible Church, because of its background and general disposition. It has grouped with this or that party in so doing, but the testimony has been there, and at this site is some of it^*1, kept from the time when it was delivered. Speech has been given to people in both Government and opposition, action has been promised, but none has come. There is no lack of guilt.

Rupture from reality was made most plain following the official declamation against creationism in 1988, and much has been written on that (cf. TMR Ch. 8).

In 2010, a further assault was made in an eminently injudicious and dictatorial manner, as will be seen. It told Independent Schools a few things about liberty, scientific method and what were its demands of their teaching content,  contradicting themselves in the process, by DEMANDING (rightly for science), due methods of investigation, but also REQUIRING omission from science of what in fact as is readily shown, best meets those methods (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., and The gods of naturalism have no go!). These things are noted in Section III below.

On what basis is this found ? It is initially found on  two. Firstly, what is officially preferred is an intemperate assault on the biblical teaching that Christ created all things (Colossians 1:15), that God is the creator of all things and of man in particular (Isaiah 44:24-25, 45:12ff., 45:18ff., 46:8-10). If there were any evidence to constrain, there could be a case of collision of authorities; but there is none to be found, except NOT to conform the biblical account of creation, nor to reflect it. To be sure that account is not couched in terms of the devices used by the Lord, His special technical modes when in creation, just as we  may not know, because not told, how an author prepares his work before publication. However,  we do now know that in the DNA for life, in particular, all written is in one programming language, but what is to the point is this, that just as it is all spelt out in this language, so in the Bible it is stated that it was by His word. That is as specific a statement as the DNA is a specifiable language of function to command and to direct. There is language with which that God created life in particular, and we find one repository of just that, passing it on by staggering witty means, acute, masterful, incredibly miniaturised, versatile, meeting problems in advance, editing, re-creating energy sources in new cells and the like.

Construction of a language by a Personal Being is the stated origin. This meets the evidential facts, as an imprint in a murder or a birth, by someone's hand, as nothing else does. It is overwhelmingly apt to investigation. Increasingly,  also there is theoretical presentation concerning some of the things that may have been involved in the institution of the heavens, buyt stretching them out (Isaiah 45:18,  44:24). As we shall shortly see, a Professor Astronomy has built up one theory which better meets the data than others of secular nature, and avoids humbug and special pleading for imagined ideas with no empirical support at all (like dark matter and dark energy, based on mere presuppositions based on what does not meet evidence accurately). What then is the problem except being miffed when your own theory which is based on a denial of causality as it is encountered, fails! What would one expect logically of such a thing (cf. Cause and Deity and Design  Section 8).

Two eminent creationist scientists have given a far better factual match, so far, than any secular ones, who encounter so many confrontations by evidence, with their Big Bang concept, for example, that Perth astronomer, Professor John Hartnett has written a book, with another author, Alex Williams, about this failure (cf. Dismantling the Big Bang - Williams and Hartnett, 2005), while another distinguished research scientist, Dr Robert Humphreys,  has had remarkable empirical success in the field of space magnetism, in marked contrast to secular competitors, something confirmed by recent flight in space. On his postulates of a creationist kind, the results were near to prediction, while on the other side, they were vastly astray. Empirical science DOES matter, and natter about ideas in place of it is close to scientific subversion.

Let us be clear. It is not that either of these two approaches is necessarily the final one by any means^*1A; but the competitive position is markedly in favour of biblical declarations not only here, but in the field of life's  commands, by which it continues to be available in generation after generation,  to its possessors.

Nor is it that current scientific ideas, which are numerous, varied, contrapuntal in some secular cases, mutually at war in that sphere, and a bitter war at that, have legitimate empirical standing. We never find

1) witnessable and assured evolutionary advance in information^*2;

2) evidence of half-botched experimental or miffed thrusts into inglorious nonsense, fit only for the waste-paper basket, such as a mongoloid citizen might produce, and the supposition is less than that measure of intelligence as the source!

3) micro-molecular conformity to imaginary gradualistic change (cf. Denton Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 290-291). Indeed, this researcher declares: " It is now well-established that the pattern of diversity at a molecular level conforms to a highly ordered hierarchic system. Each class at a molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by intermediates... THIS NEW ERA OF COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY ILLUSTRATES JUST HOW ERRONEOUS IS THE ASSUMPTION THAT ADVANCE SIN BIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE ARE CONTINUALLY CONFIRMING THE TRADITIONAL EVOLUTIONARY STORY" (caps. added.)

4) consistent growth in modes and methods of production for any kind of creature, over time, or vast evidence of relevant developing stages of internal manufacture. Thus: Ancient relics as in "amphibia, lungfish, cyclostomes and reptiles manufactured proteins similar to those manufactured by their living relatives today, and if, therefore the isolation of the main divisions of nature was just the same in the past as it is today ... then the whole concept of evolution collapses."

5) concord between the authoritarian rulers of academia, in naturalistic mortar-boards, about HOW it is supposed to have happened, this unseen thing, that leaves no trail where it might be found.

Just one of the wars is that between punctuated equilibrium and Darwinian gradualism, not to mention scientific assaults such as those from Professor Løvtrup and Dr W. R. Thompson, the former a notable Professor and the latter former Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Research, on improper constrictions on approaches and research funds or publication, thus showing evidence of a vile discrimination, as if one football club always changed the rules of play when another particular one was challenging. Again, there are science writers such as astrophysicist, Dr John Lisle (for example in is Ultimate Proof of Creation, a text specialising in logical method), and highly successful university campus debaters such as Dr Duane Gish, and lawyer, Dr Philip Johnson and those who repudiate in detail the offered secularities, such Dr Jonathan Sarfati:  just as there are hundreds of other Ph.D. scientists in these fields, who have been listed, their names given to the Government. A list of some is available here.

Science is emphatically NOT about numbers however^*2A, as if voting, but method.  Scientific method^*3 is crucial, and if it be not followed, science is not in process. It is precisely this that is at fault, apart from confrontation without evidence to the point, by empty verbiage which contradicts itself by asserting the method to be used, and exterminating from scientific place even as a challenge, what overwhelmingly wins in testable areas in both.

There has even been a pronouncement, clad in all the fussy febrile importance of a pronunciamento, a secular version, made by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board last year, which has been noted once more by the recent newsletter from Creation Research (News 2010, No. 2), with its indefatigable warrior, John Mackay, so commonly to be seen on University campuses, not excluding Oxford, and in various countries, by invitation. In that following (2011, No. 1), there is featured one more Ph.D. scientist, Dr Ed Neeland, whose researches in organic chemistry are highly germane to creation and what it takes to have such things! He notes: "On the plus side, all that complex information came from somewhere and again our experience shows that complex information always comes from intelligence. No exceptions^*2 that I can think of. That well of complex information is in the mind of God." 

He is not, he assures us, just poking holes in the secular endeavours. It is more a question "of canyons," he affirms, which coincides with the Hartnett volume mentioned, and many more expositions from qualified scientists. Indeed, in the allied field of astronomy, also equipped with many laws, it is well to provide an excerpt from a recent volume on this site: The Lie has a Limited Shelf-Life... Ch. 4.

Before doing so, however, let us note the conclusion to the equally alienated and intrusive work of the Government of SA in  1988, which has had a long tenure despite informed and never answered protest - that is, answered to the point logically at all. Only authority has answered in its robes of rule. After evaluating the situation, point by point, in Worn-Out World and Coming King Ch. 4, the result is stated in this way.
 

IN SUM

The problems then with this dreadful directive in SA are these.

It is defamatory of religion, the Bible in particular: and it is so in an unscholarly and presumptuous fashion. Its generalisations on religion are contrary to biblical perspective, claim and procedure.

It is suppressive of free speech: in particular, of free, rational debate where the theory is taught, as it often is from my own experience in this State, in schools - in science.

It is distorting to argument, preceding its permission for talk in humanities on this point with assumptions of 'meaning statements' as distinct from providing rational challenge, to the Bible which specialises in facts, factual emphasis and challenge on the topic of fact from first to last (cf. John 3:11,  Acts 4:20, 3:14-16, Isaiah 41:21ff., Mark 2:1-10, John 11, Luke 24:25-26, Matthew 24 and so on).

Pre-empting the floor, however, this authoritarian educational approach in the Circular, simply tells us the presuppositions to be in view, and then applies them, defying facts, inscribing definitions and proceeding with a presumption matched only by the ignorance of the assumptions. It is like saying, Listen! 2 plus 2 is REALLY 5; so this is how we shall educate children. It does not appear necessary or even expedient to do ANYTHING to establish the ghetto-blasting approach to the nature of truth, for this document.

IF in fact, of course, contrary to Christianity, for example, all religion really were not concerned with investigation of fact, quite crucially, and direct statement of reality, and if all were as relative as the document pretends, then the very relativity approach would be impossible, for it is presented as absolute truth in defiance of all self-contradiction. It is difficult to see how Communism in authoritarian dictates unconcerned with reality, ever did worse in education, except for the brute force.

Further, the document is propagandist, using repetition and repression to assist an untenable theory which would require no defence from such autocratic means, if facts spoke for it in the realm of austere and accredited scientific method, in such a way as to make it regular and creditable: they do not.

It is dangerous: diverting free and rational enquiry by mere effrontery, without the semblance of rationally sufficient grounds, so that error in science may be prolonged.

It is authoritarian, determining, by a few lines, matters that scholars toil over.

It replaces science with statistics, consulting what are in fact, personal preferences of some scientists in a quite standard use of the formal logical error of  appeal to authority, as also in the use of the ad hominem error of logic. Those who hold a view of creation are set in a field of matters contrary to what they hold to be the case, quite gratuitously, by mere pretension.

It is pernicious: setting up an example of dictation from bureaucracy in place of determination by logic and scientific enquiry: it is thus unsystematic. In method, it prescribes for scientific method, what it is to find, so aborting it in its name.

It is clandestine in coverage: authoritarian pronouncements are made as if assured, to the total ruin of fair play, and then the Department declined to so much as send its text book writers or teachers to confront Dr Gish*⁴   when he came. If it is true, why not show it? Since it is preferred in this propagandist style, why not defend it? The Department has 'not' taken sides? This is what was claimed at the time, when the debate with Dr Gish was avoided. Not? well, if Hitler did not take sides against the Jews, well then... perhaps. No more one-sided document could well be imagined. The only way in which it does not take sides is this: that the other side is so misrepresented and dismissed in advance, that it is removed from sight altogether. In that way, there is no contest: the removal of the right is simply by fiat.

It is outrageous towards children, oppressed like the victims of industrial mines at tender ages in the Industrial Revolution. These children are not body broken, but brain-washed so nicely, so pleasantly by what in this is their dominating educational 'community', that to ludicrous lore, rather than scientific law they are moved. As Popper pointed out, there no law of evolution; and as the three major laws of science (cf. TMR pp. 226ff.) indicate, the statements of the Bible are, by contrast, exactly applied there! 

Outrageous is this tragi-comic intrusion of the State into the field of religion, dogmatically creating a creed (it is easy to propound one from the Education Department document), without logic or clear ground: a monument to intrusive religious prejudice as to unscientific methodology - erected by the bricks of the broken wall that once stood for freedom!

The grounds appear in the related text in Ch. 4 as noted above. Some of the forms of violation of the Australian-accepted UN Declaration on Discrimination concerning  religion and belief, are found at *5 in that Chapter.

Unable to present or have presented as hypotheses what meets the criteria of scientific method far better than either secular or diversionary doctrines created for the Creator, the children are indeed put in the fires, their researches by contrivance, removed from sight, unaccepted for value, their thoughts rendered sterile by authoritarian exclusion, this providing a shocking example of intolerance in science shouted at them by inference every day, their religious convictions open to  surreptitious assault by implication, even though this negativity in this area is objectively in much contrary to fact by the gauge of scientific method.

This is a gross misuse of the child, an abuse of his or her potential, a squashing of the originality input for the coming generation, if not total then mordant, bitter and as if possessed. If it makes philosophers in science happy at their idol of preference (which has no way to stand either philosophically or scientifically, either in logic^*5 or in the empiricism of the laboratory, and stands past either evidence or logic), then this is a small gain for the generational loss through preference for principles, acclaim for ideas neither sustained nor sustainable.

What dictator ever did worse, except with fists, or their equivalent!

What Lord ever did better than God, made manifest to sight, hearing, reason uniquely in the Lord Jesus Christ (as in SMR), in His ardour with which

instead of culling nearly all as in the flood,

now, having borne that grievous human default yet again, 

	He persevered patiently,
	bore with Israel in its tempestuous lapses (though with delightful exceptions, grand and stirring),
	came to earth to enable investigation scientifically or in any other way, by permitting and encouraging the examination of the evidence under test, and
	never failing in anything attempted,
	whether raising the dead or a paralytic (John 11, Mark 2), so that once to fail is to deny deity to be there! and then
	He died vicariously to cover man's sin, as many as received Him,
	rose physically beyond all death's control and load, and
	He has sent His Spirit, till the time comes at last, for eventual relief and judgment.

He has given His word (cf. SMR Appendix C and  D), He has foretold the events, summarised what is to be, made it happen (cf. Ch. 5 ), to the last point, and still presents truth and righteousness AS A GIFT to faith, to those who receive Him (Romans 6:23, 5:17, 3:23-27,  Titus 3:5-7).

There are as former Harley St. medical specialist, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones expounds so well in the volume of his Evangelical Sermons, a series of pathological humps or exclusion zones in man, so that Christ could even ask of some, HOW CAN you believe, who receive honour of one another! (John 5:44). God has kept on through much time in His lovingkindness (II Peter 3:9), till when it comes, many might wish to curse since it DOES come, who were most prominent in rejecting all evidence, rational, empirical, heuristic, scientific, personal, lest they should what ?

Be numbered with those who lose positions ? lose salaries ? and why ? for not abdicating reason or revelation to grossly deviating authorities ? lose caste ?Is it fear lest one lose control of one's life as if a small god ? Whatever the reason, the result is one, and it has repercussions, as does all departure from truth, which can become as here, a disaster scene even for youth, even in terms of compulsion, removal of scope for argumentation, a closed shop in some of the most precious areas of life. And this, it is education ?  Rather is it a pernicious indoctrination, unsustainable, unverifiable, a casuistry of terms, a mish-mash of opposites, speciously specifying scientific method while in effect, refusing its results.

These conditions  do not grow less. The assaults grow broader, more literally im-pertinent,  all- inclusive, brash.

III

SCREWING THINGS UP

The Painful Mode

In looking at what follows concerning the 2010 scientistic pronunciamento, we will give attention to its self-contradiction in due course.

Some news material from 2010 comes first, with connection as required.

Australian Christian schools will campaign against what they see as the thin end of the wedge - a decision by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board to effectively ban the teaching of creationism.

Under policies published in December, the board said it required ''teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis''.

Christian schools angry over ban on teaching creationism

Malcolm Brown

March 3, 2010

Christian schools are concerned that a South Australian board decision to stop the teaching of creationism as part of science lessons will trigger similar action nationwide.

The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, said a statement by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board was too strident, removing the right to teach "biblical perspectives" as part of science, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

He said the policy set a precedent which might be taken up in other states, including NSW, where the issue had been the subject of intense debate two years ago

Under policies published in December, the board said it required "teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis".

We learn moreover more things on this score.

Australian Christian schools will campaign against what they see as the thin end of the wedge - a decision by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board to effectively ban the teaching of creationism.

Under policies published in December, the board said it required ''teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis''.

The board said it ''does not accept as satisfactory a science curriculum in a non-government school which is based on, espouses or reflects the literal interpretation of a religious text in its treatment of either creationism or intelligent design''.

The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, said the board statement was too strident, removing the right to teach ''biblical perspectives'' as part of science.

He said the policy set a precedent which might be taken up in other states, including NSW, where the issue had been the subject of intense debate two years ago.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Board of Studies, Rebecca Lloyd, said the NSW board had made its policy clear last June that science teaching which was not scientifically or evidence-based would not be part of assessment for the School Certificate or Higher School Certificate.

But the NSW Board of Studies had a policy of not loading so much mandatory work on to schools that there was no time for anything else, and other non-core activities offered to students could include extra religious instruction.

The acting executive director of the NSW Association of Independent Schools, Michael Carr, said: ''Our view is that NSW independent schools must follow the Board of Studies curriculum, which dictates that creationism cannot be taught as science. ''Schools wishing to teach creationism must teach it as part of their religious studies.''

But Mr O'Doherty said a close reading of the South Australian policy indicated it was going a step further and banning teaching of the subject altogether. It was the only such subject singled out, he said.

In NSW courses, there was scope in science courses to include cultural or historical aspects, such as the ''Dreamtime'', the theories of the ancient Greeks, or biblical perspectives on the nature of the universe.

He said if the South Australian policy was taken literally, ''it means you cannot mention the Bible in science classes''.

A spokesman for the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board said it was not banning teaching of creationism full-stop. ''It can be taught in religious studies.''

To this situation, it is time to give specific response, and although this is in some detail provided at  Freedom, The Nation, The Internet and the Next Generation Ch. 3,  this as now presented,  is additional.

Under policies published in December, the board said it required "teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis."

This is correct, and it is why, in terms of scientific method, it is not possible to present evolutionary theory as a successful applicant for such a procedure, but rather creation. Enquiry has no pre-ordained limits, and fruitfulness and rationality only are relevant, the latter in terms defensible rationale and model, and not mere through begging of the question. In science as to method, NO questions are to be begged.  How then can we have on the one hand, and duly and justly, the "teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis," all so very good in scientific method as far as TALK is concerned, and yet exclude what  alone, without philosophical prejudice observably meets these conditions as nothing else does. Let the evidence talk; why silence it in Science classes of all places! ... and yet to do so in the NAME  of science, here is self-contradiction of astral proportions, shining dimly aloft, far from the ways of man and his environment!

It is necessary to distinguish between different rational sources of authority for testing base, and the procedure for testing them. It is one and the same method, open to all. Philosophy, atheistic, materialistic, unable in its own right even to stand logically^*5, may have preferences to PRECEDE scientific method, but these if so, are anti-scientific, and are so blatant, in fact doing PRECISELY what they so falsely accuse all those who hold creation to be doing. WE say, TEST all that is rationally competent in origin, or may be, and abide by the results of your empirical tests. As shown repeatedly, that has only one result, the biblical depiction, comparing source with source, result with result.

Then they say, AH, but you CANNOT, nay MUST NOT have this to test, because outside scientific method entirely we have preferences that MUST NOT be violated. These exclude any source, however open to test, however much as in this case it ASKS for fair test (Isaiah 41, 43, 48), which is not of their nostrum type. This is religion, not science, a concept of absolute and final reality (call it something else, but in the end this is its operational STATUS), which they invoke before excluding a most superior contestant at the EMPIRICAL and TESTABLE level. For while neither creationism nor evolutionism can show it happening, both have MANY testable areas, which could falsify them completely, any one.  ONLY evolutionism (in huge self-contradictory turmoil about very different competing theories, whose proponents often aptly show the follies, each in the other's ideas) fails in this area, and it fails hugely and repeatedly. That is why Dr  Ed Neeland as quoted above,  spoke not of nitpicking, little oddities of error, but of vast surfaces which did not agree between evolutionary theories and factual testable reality: canyons! It is so.

As to the literal interpretation of texts of religion being banned, what has this got to do with science ? It is not a religious or other text which in science is of immediate methodological moment, far less whether the non-scientific and invasive, unempirical preference for non-literal interpretations is to the point, that being a separate issue, requiring hermeneutic skills, which to be scientific,  must have full and impartial  application. The ONLY question is this: Does ANY source of data provide an hypothesis, in scientific terms, which meets the facts better, more germanely, more aptly in terms of allied phenomena and laws, than another ?

The source is not to the point, as to preference for type. If it is an empirical study, that is good, if the hypothetical constraints be then followed. If however it comes from any other source, and dismissal of the Creator is utterly unscientific, like any other mere prejudice of no logical place, then this too has merit ONLY in science, to the extent that it has a credible basis for knowledge, and prevails in any contest of knowledge from other sources. Those are the two relevant questions. Performance criteria are decisive. There can be no favouritism at this level, for type of source, nor exclusion of the empirical, but all sources, duly weighed in terms of their scientific credibility, must have their presentations compared impartially. To pre-judge such questions is scientistic, imperious, irrational and absurd.

To consider biblical approaches, for example, and their tenure in terms of non-falsifiability over millenia, and alternative hypothetical methods, used or misused, falsifiable over one or two centuries by their own philosophical companions, and not to regard as of high authority the former would be quaint and undisciplined.

In the end, however, it is the power

to explain at every level,

not to be non-verified at any level (where this is relevant, and the more testable the better),

to sustain validity at every level, and to show by credible means support for the entire parameters of the assumptions or patterns imported by any from anywhere,

which is the point.

By their fruit you will know them. By their power to explain without embarrassment in terms of outcomes, you judge them. Ad hoc imports are a weakness.  Structural solidarity of hypothesis and application carries more weight.

On the other hand, to be dictatorial know-alls is not the way to go in science. Any religion, whether biblical or irrational, has to be shown by its results, to be apt in the given field, and preferably overall. There are no favourites. If there is  a logical void at the first or the last or the middle, that militates against any theory. Strict capacity to explain the situation at any level, and to meet test, where possible, at any point, this is crucial.

Further, inability to retain for long any form of a given type of hypothesis is strong evidence against it, unless it leads to a new and stable format, and not an endless series of wars. Hermeneutics is a science, and its findings cannot rest any more on preference or presuppositions than can empirical studies. This given impartially, then statements which are disregarded by mere fiat and will,  in the interests of a theory which does NOT explain what is found, or find verification in what is seen or witnessed are in the strictest sense, merely impertinent.

Any government of such narrow views as this, or suffering them to control the education system even in private schools, is guilty of child-molestation at the mental and spiritual level, scientific indiscipline and virtual corruption. Of this, it may or  may not be conscious, but it is inexcusable.

That therefore is the current status of the declaration of the controlling body for independent schools (The South Australian Independent Schools Registration Board). such a statement represents anti-educational prejudice, an apparent fear to test scientifically, what it prefers to exclude. The nature of science is that it must prefer conformity to fact to authority. This says nothing about any authority, except that in this method, it stands or falls by what it has to present. It is for one, for all, for this method, for that, as far as information is concerned. Produce what works, and you are winning, if nothing else does. Obviously the empirical comes in for the test: the basis is not presumptively included or excluded. Here, it is what it can do that matters. It is not like a love affair. It must work.

Science must be fearless, ready to test, to compare, realistic, rational, always testing, always assessing in terms of rationality and defensibility, not in verbal mirages and hope in terms of philosophical penchant, utterly void in scientific method.

When a biblical school acquiesces to such torrid torment as the present pronunciamento provides, it is then also in danger of default. One Principal, in an allied question, told authorities that if they insisted on his conformity to their anti-biblical wishes, they would close the school doors, releasing to the system 500 or so students. He did not yield as far as my information went, over a long period, while he was there.

It must be remembered that this nation is one which adopted the UN declaration on religious discrimination, in particular being against what gives preferential  treatment to some point of view of religious or belief nature, against another. Truth cannot be altered, but provision of teaching is required to be even. This is not different. To seek to banish because it is not deterministic is mere philosophy in scientific clothes.  Determinism is not science, nor is it valid logically (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ  Incomparable ... Ch. 2). You CANNOT get  access  to truth if there is not any, because no standard exists in a given model, and only relativity is permitted. If it is not there, you cannot declare it. Moreover, since evolutionary theory is always hoping, never giving demonstration of its claims in an assessable, visible, sustainable manner, adding philosophy consistently to cover the gaps, it is in principle scientifically void.

When this and that which it has been assuming for generations now,is at last found to occur, and things asserted are at last found to be doable in the system envisaged, and this is given ground in reason for its existence, which in turn is empirically and logically sustainable in competition with all other hypothesis, then is the time to speak with relevance. At the present, what is required is not actually warranted as a scientific approach. What is biblical, in terms of explication of what is present and relates specifically and is testable, has a vast superiority as shown in SMR pp. 140ff.. Biblical creationism lacks logical lapse as well, in marked contrast to the inadequate coverage in causal terms, of militant and exclusivistic evolutionary take-over theory^*6.

In fact,  to fail to cover ALL evidence that is coherent from ALL sources which meet the criteria above, is a woeful pollution of scientific waters, in the ludicrous belief that it is more scientific, not a mere exercise in philosophic prejudice, not only improper, but indefensible logically.

If one thing is to be tested, all must be, and on equal grounds.  If one fails, then it need omission, as its heart is reached. The more basic the error, the most swift the dismissal of the theory.

One reminds readers that the more detailed response to the 2010 School Registration Board pronouncement is found in Freedom, The Nation, The Internet and the Next Generation Ch. 3.

Meanwhile, it is apposite here to consider some of the vague contrivances which appear in aspects of secular nothing-to-everything theories^*7 (where something is assumed without ground, and constrained, this is merely to avoid the issue, begging the question, so that there being no causal ground here, it is treated as nullity: only self-sufficiency in eternity is a logical possibility, elsewhere proven to be so - cf. SMR, TMR).

Accordingly, this comes from a recent Chapter in The Lie has a Limited Shelf-Life ..., namely Ch. 4.
 

CREATION SMILES, GOD LAUGHS AT FOLLY

Even in the creation, the shelf-life of the Lie is short. Thus when man became so wise that it all is said to start with some Big Bang, substantial  reality arriving in phases fast and  slow, from a bloc blocked into a point, from matter compressed to a point, we ask, How can mathematical symbolism about a point be translated into substantial reality, which being substance, has nothing merely ephemeral about it like a mathematical point! This is to confuse conception with reality, as in Communism, atheism and the rest, as if thought, however self-contradictory in what it affirms, could obviate actuality. It is not so, never was, never  will be.

Two domains are not one, and thought is not actuality, but a mental process and particularisation that MAY be susceptible to realisation, and IF so, then not realised until the action is done. The idea may be great; its implementation is another step, as any longing retiree looking for a seaside cottage (so that he might be swamped ? ) might advise you.

After that, the substantial astronomical structures, now discovered near to the space now representing its alleged beginning, are blowing it right out of bounds. This is anti-verification. Thus the structure of the universe interferes again with idle and vagrant thought, be it  called scientific or more correctly in this case, scientistic, the great  lie (cf. Romans 1:17ff.). Further, the supernova count devastates once more the predictions of the theory, and the time on the Big Bang model for a high degree of uniform temperature such is found in space,  is inadequate, while the theories which insist that the earth is near or at the centre of the universe come with more and more scholarly authority. It is not that the Bible required this centrality in space, but that it fits with the conception of particularity very well. This is all as in TMR Ch. 7, and it has recently been extended as shown below^*3A.

The exposure of the dream, the mythical mentality is already effected logically; and empirically it constantly comes nearer and nearer. Thus Dr Russell Humphreys has talked of a white hole, a thrust from within to outward of such force and strength, that time dilation occurs, time being, in his theory,  a changeable item as in Einstein's view, so that clocks at the furthest extension have gone far faster than those on earth, gravity being less obtrusive at distance.  Dr John Hartnett, associate professor in Astronomy in Perth, has a complex mathematical contrivance, intent on prediction, meeting facts, overcoming inconsistencies as in the Big Bang theory, and in this he achieves much also, once more the universe expanding with time dilation, but with the mode and manner different, new  dimensions in space for this effectual result being invoked, in developments from the scholarly theories of Carmeli.

In each case^*4, there is question, as there always MUST be, as to how far either of these theories meets reality, how far it obtrudes into the supernatural creation. It is endemic to creation that what it is doing while it is doing it, is not the same as what is to be found after it has occurred; and this difference may be prodigious. Writing a poem is not savouring it (though in some cases, there may be some measure of simultaneity, it is not necessarily so, different faculties being employed). Creation is sui generis, an exalted action of using what is known, sensed, intuited, discerned in a complex, compound synthesis or  soaring overview, application, integral review, ascent of understanding, or a visionary deployment, that leaves the participating media behind. These are means; the end is above them. Such is creation in itself. You may even love some of the means; but means they are, and vision it is which so uses them.

In its high office, when it is to a good end, creation in general has a  focus and featuring  which is as  far from the ingredients in themselves, as are the  faces of the US past  Presidents from the nature of the rock on which they are hewn in Mount Rushmore, in their meaning and  visionary contribution. The mount is one thing; a means,  elevated, conspicuous, the carving is another, ingenious,  contrived, impressed and imposed; the sense of correlation: geometric carving to meaningful face, this is a third. The relationship of the carving to the image held in the mind of the one carving, to the one whom it represents, this is a fourth. The bond between that image and the actual image in its precision, this is a fifth, and the relationship of that image, however accurate, to the actual face in flesh, is a sixth, while the significance in symbolic presentation in this way, in terms of the life and ways, the vitality and vision of the President in things invisible but having visible results, this is the seventh.

Creation of the rocky images,  to be witnessed by bystanders, therefore, is one thing of one domain and it is deep and rich, with many movements in frames of reference,  symbolic significations and the like; the rocks are comparatively insignificant to the POINT, but useful for the PURPOSE.

In general,  the means and the ends, the methods and the vision, the content and its imposition, and the result, these are related but significance is not substance, means are not ends, performances are not meaning, and  vision is not mode. Moreover, and to our present point, what is and how it is made to  come to be, these are so utterly diverse in the total  realm of reality, that any confusion is  scarcely worthy of a smile.

Hence we are not bound to any such views, when they move into the created-as-is or even as imagined-to-have-been realm. So many things can be done by supernatural action, as in any creation at a higher level; but here it is so exalted in character, God Himself the Creator par excellence, that it can become almost a precious, or suppressive occupation to  work in the already created realm, in seeking the ways of the creation when it was in progress and in process. Yet it is not useless to  meet naturalists with natural things, where these might be involved. It can indeed have its points.

These two, Hartnett and Humphreys, in their models, have efforts to  correlate findings with explanations, and each theory may be modelled with various allowances for process and imposition of divine constraint, so that none is assertable in exclusion of the other. The point is that BOTH provide a structure for exposure at the natural level, of the folly of the Big Bang and, by contrast, of the reality that the supernatural creation which lies back of it all: showing that even at this level, in this model, there is superiority past all  measure on the creation model, to the materialist machinations which neither work nor are even rationally statable as  to their beginnings. You either beg the question with mere assertion without rational ground and contrary to it, or you use concepts which on examination, amount to the same thing. The creationist testimony avoids all these perils, and can even sit steadfastly before examination by logic and empirical challenge in terms of its model.

What then of such scientifically oriented creationist theories ?

You may or you may not find a way for its correct testimony from the CREATIVE PHASES, as you seek  to assess the passing of the period of creation to that of the now made 'natural'. With the natural ensuing, there is room for divine intrusion on the way, indeed there is precisely the divine action^*5 which constitutes the creation in the model. On the other hand, the Lord  is able to take steps, to relate parts of the creation procedure to others in a sequence, as in the 6 days of creation, first doing this and then engaging  with this or that additive (as when the Lord in Genesis 1:9 is specifically seen to be acting to provide dry land as an interventionist act, following the earlier action, as when God MADE the dry land -verse 9); but there is no limit to explanation.

The secular contrivances, on the other hand,   abound in self-contradiction, anti-verification; but here, on the contrary, in facing creation, there is logical peace. There are no problems in style, method in the  creation  mode, none whatsoever. It has  unflinching powers, it has tedious data, it has  ease of action, and the more it is considered, the more its  action-result mode may be discerned, so long as naturalism  does not unconsciously take over!

Be as natural as you will, this solves natural problems in its own model, and it does so without necessary contradiction, let alone spurious suppositions alleged to be all but pervasive things, though never found.  The Big Bang, here met at its own level, does not rise to match this. It is fallacious both in thought, empirically and by comparison with supernatural models. At that, we are not bound to naturalistic modelling; but if such be in view, these are thrown out since the Lie has a limited shelf-life, and the truth endures forever. It laughs, and does not merely smile, as in Psalm 2. Casting off the Creator is not easy; and when it is done, the marks stay on the wrists; for what are attachments of truth and reality in which man is created, so that he might be what he is, become for rebellion,  chains, ruptured and leaving the marring marks on the wrists. This occurs to the full  when being so contained grows irksome, and God in all His glory of love and liberty is thrown out.

IV

BATHING IN THIN AIR

Now that the 2010 appalling horror of diced liberty and exalted error has come, it has been given some deserved attention both above and in the volume, Freedom, The Nation, The Internet and the Next Generation Ch. 3, it seems fitting to see this in the perspective of recent follies observable in the secular substitutes for science and religion, such as, these or those like them, are currently espoused in this State at the educational level (not that it is by any means alone in this solecism, which almost seems to amount to  solipsism, each self declaring its desire).

TMR Ch. 7, Models and Marvels, even in Section E on such topics, is now large. It covers much. This may be pursued here. Below is the latest addition, this year {2011}, alike suitable here and there..

Here, a particular focus is used, in relation to the concept of a point of infinite density as a beginning; though from the outset it misses the point that whatever you invent, it requires a reason, ground, basis or is begging the question. With things material, constraint operate and control, requiring a cause. With what is logically necessary, free existence and power and capacity adequate for all that follows, must always rationally precede; for otherwise nothing at any time would mean nothing for all time. This must be before anything not self-sufficient and eternal by nature, or nothing could only remain. If it were ever all, that would be all. As it is not, since nothing is not all, then what is eternal must have power to invent whatever is to be constrained, or enabled, and the conditions of its composed existence.

Talks about bits or points simply ignore necessities of reason, while reasoning, in a staggering display of irrelevance. However, let us pursue in some detail some modern concepts, and move them into the light of examination.

There has been quite journey in terms of the empirical failure of the Big Bang hypothesis. If it all began as a mathematical point  for entry, then this is a mere  conception, not a material  entity (ten billion of them still have no space), and  irrelevant to actuality. If it had size, then it is more than  a point, a relative matter of how good your perception is, concerning the content of points (as with microdots in letters - science does not know all, only what it sees, when it is science, and what it finds). If much in the 'point'  were merely greatly condensed, what was  condensed ? Why would its expansion  reveal intricate laws and forms, formats and  mathematical constrictions and  constructions ? ONLY,  rationally, if there were grounds for these in the non-mathematical  relative point. You get  out what you put  in. Potential  for  laws is  greater than laws,  for it involves the constructive  facility to make them, just as the factory is greater than the cars, in  terms of  cognitive content.

When the point exploded - as it appears to be thought it did, finished with sitting about, in the approach to beginning which the nothing partisans desire - it did not do so by magic. There had  to be a reason if we are  to be rational,  and not merely perpetrators of a dreamy-eyed irrationality. There must have been in 'the point'  an  enormous pressure coming from many components, where interactions were prodigious. If any element of the point were to be thought of as having room to be in any sense of scope, then this at once must go, because of infinite compression, which would insist on there being no scope for any expressiveness; and turning space and time to nought within it, merely makes it a mathematical point, with no reality and no actuality: a pointer. It is a disappointing pointer.

It must have been very much  more than a point, just  as it must have been  much more than a simple, uniform point, and must have  contained the equivalent of command constraint, in order  to impart these things to what  became  subject  to the same. If anything could at any time become visible, then we should have to have this compressed far more, to prevent this. There is simply no limit.

It is certainly an inventive thing, that, to use the imagination to create the entire universe. Out of nothing, the indeterminate, the undisciplined, the unimaginative, the unstructured, the formless, shapeless, unintelligent, non-ordered (not disordered for that would be something), the non-material (for that is assuredly something), the invisible, comes entity. That in itself is a miracle. Either that,  and you invent entity by imagination, and lurking secretive, do not admit it, or you are taking away all  claim to rationality. Then it has to be out of something; but what sort of a beginning is that, which requires the means for a beginning in order to begin! In factual terms then, you have nothing; and it is not tilted towards being intelligent or material or stupid or inclined to do this or that: NOTHING.

Impossible to produce from that, lest to it must be prescribed potential, very much a something, as any ambitious child knows. Instead the ONLY alternative is to grab something from somewhere, in social terms rather  like grabbing money from a bank, where it is entirely out of bounds to do so; but this is intellectual, where such action is by definition irrational. You ignore reason in giving reason: irrational  twice over.

So you question-beg on your way to your  entity. Now it is to be infinitely compressed entity (cf. Hartnett, Dismantling the Big Bang p. 13), which we have, and it has come, free and gratis, without reason. Remember: If there were reason, then the astonishingly compressed non-object would not start things. In that case, what was the reason for its existence, for its compression, and the infinitude of its density, and the phenomenon of density, and the capacity to expand, and the thrust to make it explode, and so loose all the neatly packed highly differential, mutually coherent entities which are to be released: this would be the start beyond the 'beginning'! Avoid that and you are of necessity irrational. Have it,  and it is as in John 1, the LOGOS was in the beginning with the Creator.

Since this is reputedly the beginning, then it cannot actually  be the beginning and hence it is not only begging the question (precisely like having a new car because you imagine it) but self-contradictory; it is not merely irrational but delusive.

Let us examine that further. In it, infinitely dense, all is compressed, space and time, as if this made it any easier to have grabbed the whole impressive compression out of a space that is not there (because it is all so compressed inside the point which is so convenient as a container unit). All becomes sited  in the nothing from which it came in the first place; for if there is reason, then there were grounds for its being, its compression, its later expression and its ability, despite an infinite power to compress in a space that is not there, all coming from the same source, nowhere, since somewhere is all stitched up inside.

What then ? Ignore the grounds for the imaginary point, for its ardent thrust to change its nature, and its inward cohesion of content for expansive consequences of some note, and you beg the question. Assign them and it is not the beginning. Say they are not there, and you remove the causality which is inherent in logic, which you deploy,  at least in presenting anything which could be confused with argumentation.

The matter develops whichever way you turn. Ignore and pass by these grounds, in order to return to reason, becoming merely obtuse and obfuscatory, and you bypass grounds which must be spectacularly multiple, cohesive and constructive. In doing so, you confront the immovable: you ignore reason, beg the question and perhaps silence will cover your causal nescience and irrational withholding. It should.

In addition, you make it harder by using laws or ideas that may, in some measure,  relate to what is, once it has come to be, and then seeking from this to make what is not yet there, to operate. That is like founding a business on a university degree, before there is a university. You operate according to what is not yet there, and seeing what it does when it is there, you put it there. Not so bright, really, not for an  explanation. You are inventing,  like a romancing detective, what has to be there for your theory, and chucking it in without too much announcement or fanfare. Do for a novel; but not for science, not really.

When you put it there, however, then you make it infinitely dense by compression, which later gives birth to expression, despite its most anomalous and disadvantageous start.

It is certainly a point they make there, but it is not a rational one.

Structure, law and this at macro- and micro-levels, all this was inherent in the point, one of the greatest export-laboratories of  all time, scintillatingly managing to impart order, organisation and containment controls to what for no reason was in it, as contrary to all reason, it exploded into time and space, neatly inherent for the sake of  the spatial and chronological features provided. Having had nowhere to go, it becomes expansive indeed, like some once impoverished Corporal, who becomes the Dictator for the world, no more coiled up.

All these absurdities remind one of a science student, flummoxed in an oral, proceeding to  regale his  examiners  on the  ground that a lot of their abstruse theories are mere question-begging bagatelles, set in front of facts in a convenient way, but never accounted for. Hence he makes up his own, and attempts to  do at any rate, with better logic than their own.

Indeed, with space and time packed into it,  in terms of infinite density, all things within it had neither room nor motion for their pains. There are the things within, insideness and outsideness in terms of which it is conceived, a mode of existence unspecified, force, power, susceptibility to infinite compression, so that space and time equate to the limit of zero. It is good that they are able to become something again with the customary magic of these concepts.

Where was the point ? Nowhere, for space was inside it. Where  could this non-being nonentity be, when site and time for it were compressed so that as to any time you seek to allow ANYTHING for their action, it is too little, infinitely too little. If it were figured as not so, then at once any scope must be reduced by infinity, and when you have compressed still more, then you are left with infinitely more of this impressive force which manifests itself in terms of the point, so making it a point. So with nowhere to be, all being, with nowhere to come from, is constrained by whatever imparts an infinite compression, to have nowhere to go to, since space is infinitely compressed.

Thus there is no time to have for this being so subjected to infinity, to occupy itself, even in any most miniaturised manner, for stark and wonderful though such a thing might be, if it could be done, yet any attempt at any action of any kind being less than a compression beyond bounds, such compression and such density must then always be extended without limit. Just as infinite dispersal would lead to nothing, since if at any time something were yet discernible, infinitely more dispersion must act to make for ever less till its differentiation from nothing is ever unsustainable, as then is the opposite process. Thus with density: make it ever so dense, that it is scarcely conceivable how it could differ from expulsion from existence, then you must make it more dense, until any concept of escaping reduction being removed, there is nothing to reduce. Call it a limit; but it must be pursued to that limit, for if not, the specifications are inaccurate.

It is a fantasy to get something from nowhere, while trying to give account of the beginning. It is a greater one to confine it so. To use the realities of what is already here as the grounds for making it come is beside the point. It assumes what it has to get it here. Such confusion is painful.

Points  do not contain commands, exhibit controls, manage systems, originate areas and arenas susceptible to rational investigation and exhibitive of logical scope for formulations concerning it, in depicting it; but are sites for notation to  fix a location only. It is better not to use the term 'point' if you do not mean that, here, since its ambiguity can hide a slide! The point is just a way of avoiding the point: you need not a physical concept or a mathematical one, but the whole potential for whatever was to come, liable to  logic's probes, susceptible to law, creative of matter, legislative for its forms and functions, acutely contrived, discerning enough to devise language and to organise commands to make generals look like babes by their very ingenuity and complexity, sifting mind into the game, inventing spirit to imagine and call forth from originality.

You need this in a point without space in which to be, for that would be beyond the point, and without time for its being, for that too would be beyond the point, a system in which it would simply, like logic, appear, this being smuggled in in order to have it breach out in a magnificent impulsion not really able to act, since this would be a cause, and that would require rationality to be before the entire structure, that it might so act in it.

Potential involves reason, not a riotous resort to  the realm of little things as if this made the underlying logical omission easier to take (is it not a little one!). With no potential, the point is vacuous. With potential, it has meaning and causality built into it, operative for it, a program in which it inheres, and so far from being a beginning, is in a logical  wrap, happily constraining its conduct, operative regardless of anything else. Indeed, worse yet, just as time is used, coming out of its recess, it must proceed, along with space and logic, as if to make the CONTINUITY of the exercise of these powers, also a given thing. It has to have this character, added to its causal wrap. It has to be able, empirically, to retain in facility of function over such times as cover the universe in its extant condition (as distinct from the imagination).

Here is to arrive, with sufficient potential its base, what is to be the very model of system for man's mind, matter's laws, space's structure, life's code, its additional constraints in epigenesis, life's vitality, reason's applicability (which is not the same as its existence), all to be far more enduring than any projects made by man, and than any man as such. Reason, realisation, continuation, penetrability by reason as well as operation in its terms, spheres of interactive engagement, mind, matter and spirit as empirically active in man, regions of being such as cognition, concept, conceptualisation (it takes work to get the concept, try and see), information, envisagement, all must be the product of potential, or irrationality, like fungus, sets in. No potential ? no result, no you or I is to be found. Potential, then this is a facility which exists in the point and its constraining implicated forces and activity modes. It is not only not nothing, but contains everything adequate for mind, matter, spirit, their synthesis and their sustenance.

Forget the point. You need the potential for all, and if scientific or even rational, you look for what has what it takes to provide it, and in so doing, investigate the results of this potential with quality and cognate features in mind. When you find the least, the minimal background for it, you cite this and apply it, since its denial is irrational, and its affirmation is causal and you have to come to terms with it.

This you do if you are rational. If not, your argumentation is invalid, and the use of rationality is a self-contradiction. 

Consider further.

In fact, it was quite some point, this one! It was smuggling in, as is usual in naturalistic confections, the Creator. But since He was not  recognised (as if a courtier to the throne room of Queen Elizabeth I did not realise that he was in a place, or that  there were a queen, but  just admired the  grounds, while Her Majesty was  talking to his abstracted ear), results of that fact  appear, in no mean  terms. First they are logical: you ignore the need for cause, invent without ground, surround with implied forces and powers, require potential or must deny causality, and if denying it, remove the logical validity to which you appeal in any argumentation.

Let us look a little further now at developing constraints in the universe, and gain a sense of movement over the last few years in some of the lesser featured areas of existence. .

Thus as  Dr  Carl Wieland pointed out in Creation  Magazine, 1996, there was, as astronomers  looked further back  'in  time', as they conceive it, a certain 'lumpiness' about the  structures to be found, instead of the imagined relative consistency from such early developments, without time to grow in greatness, as imaginations of many liked to conceive. In fact, however, near what was deemed the first, there were found to be "structures the size  and shape of the Great Wall" which has been such a dash for uniformity hopefuls, though these were even dozens of times further away.

Developments were perverse, or the theory was. Things progressed for these stubborn theorists, by reverse. In science, you attribute perversity however,  to the unverified theory, and ponder how to change it, since the theory is what is used  to explain, and the data are the material  for explanation, not lamentation.

Wieland proceeds to note the affair of Tift that red shifts (a light phenomena once imagined  always to indicate in this context, speed of recession and hence distance in certain environments of terms) were found to come in packets. They were discovered to exist in quanta, like ladder rungs, specifically  arranged. Interestingly, he compares this RESULT with an imaginary scene in which particles are coming out of an explosion in velocity groups, at 100, or 200 miles per hour. That of course is precisely what an explosion is not, so that such a theory is just what scientific method anti-selects! Indeed, at Oxford, he notes, two astronomers, Napier and Guthrie, massed data to give the same orderly, scaled effect. Napier apparently tried hard to avoid the characterisation that the red shifts were quantized, but could not  do so.  The asinine Big Bang concept was being shown a failure not only in conception, but in expression, empirically. Objectively, if you LIKE an explosion, you cannot have it unless the empirical facts conform to what it is.  Not in science properly so-called...

This was an orderly thing such as above noted in NATURE journal, January 9, 1997, when it published the results of research by an astronomical team led by an Estonian academic: Their conclusion concerning galaxy structures -
 

"The large-scale structure of the cosmos is an orderly rectangular, three-dimensional latticework of clusters and voids." It is found, by report, that 'the lines of concentrated matter appear to be spaced at fairly regular 91 million-light-year intervals'.

Worse was  to follow. Dr John Hartnett, as in his Starlight, Time and the New Physics (2007), not only uses a still more abstruse piece of mathematical construction, extending from Einstein and Carmeli, to seek to cover the data without the abuses found in the theories of the Big Bang idea, relative to them, but in the process removes certain ad hoc hypotheses. These are those about vast quantities of (unobserved, unevidenced, but theoretically needed) 'dark' matter and 'dark' energy', so that such unempirical nostrums being dispensed with, Occam's razor can become operative once again, and the palace of theory can be purged of such settlers.

In this way, on his sphere of thought and mathematical interpretation of the evidence, there is an elimination of the otiose, the needlessly complex and the merely suggestive, of what here is unprompted by knowledge, undiscovered empirically, being merely imagined by hope.

The fact that over 85% of the total matter content of the universe (op. cit. p. 40) on Big Bang notions appeared to be required, incognito, to be this dark matter was rather an impelling ground for seeking an escape from so much, with so little evidence, on such a vast scale, in so many situations, for so long! Hartnett also manages, on his theory, to escape having some 74% of the mass-energy content of the universe to be negative energy, as the secular Big Bang thrusts to obtain for its composure, indeed survival at all.

Hartnett declares (p.  41): "Neither 'dark' matter nor 'dark' energy is known to modern physics, yet it is supposed to be all  round us." Whereas the power of God is perceptible  all round us (cf. TMR, esp.  Ch.1), by its fruits which nature does not noticeably ever manage to compose, and its like is far beyond the reach of the most powerful intellects of man, to make anew as to kind, even with the example long visible and investigable before our very eyes. On the contrary, these dark and indeed mythical inventions of that same mind of man loom as the chaff-like chatter which is needed for a failing theory. What then of the otiose, the unnecessary, the unevidenced and vast concepts like dark energy and dark matter  ? They are simply symptoms of methodological sickness. Their lack of need, on Hartnett's approach,  on a creationist mathematical and astronomical hypothesis is a jar because of which those already facing the facts of the ludicrous nature of the cosmological principle of sameness in the universe (because it is supposed to have had so undistinguished a beginning), are looking for some new physics.

Hartnett points out on p. 74 (op. cit.) that Edwin Hubble, whose telescopic work is so famous, initially concluded that the earth was at the centre of spherically symmetric distribution of galaxies. There was the isotropic phenomenon. On his interpretation, things seemed to be speeding away from him in proportion to their distance. Only by using what was to be an anti-verified hypothesis on uniformity of a type resulting from large time and initial explosion, could he escape. Escape ? Indeed, for his religious orientation, not science, it appeared to him to be called for it, so that he expressly stated that this would give to earth a special position, indeed one unique and in his view,  "Such a favoured position is, of course, intolerable..."

Such appears precisely the sort of intolerability which the Board for Independent Schools in South Australia is experiencing, for no rational ground can be found for their dictum, and indeed, in all fairness, their dictatorial, not to say self-contradictory dictum.

If now the universe is in fact bounded (and there are those who speak of the enormous spread of theories possible - cf. Ellis, cited p. 79), then the fact that this assumption is part of the relatively coherent and competent seeming theory of Hartnett, makes things imagined to the contrary, the unbounded, far more anomalous for logical prowess, scientific accuracy and procedural plausibility. Order, structure, early structure, further distances confirming the further structure even nearer the proposed beginning, in the findings of space probings, all this would never ordinarily be a basis for a theory about an explosion from mindless nothing in one of its transitions which it cannot make, being nothing.

This applies whether beginning with a point (which cannot contain anything because mathematical points do not contain any space, but are designations), or with a smuggler's cover presentation of all sorts of stuff  'there', in a somewhat broader 'point',  one mystically constrained, and containing ever so much for the reasons associated with nothing, that otherwise it constitutes. NO source. It has not only to be the source, but an adequate one. Some point!

Moreover, it must likewise be endowed with power to  apply the contents, for  with no power  to apply it, even if it were there, it is null. It is a half-formed thought masquerading as something. Nothing is like that. What is not there, has no being, is nothing, has no such features, and what is abstracted, cannot act in this intensively ludicrous challenge to sober thought.

If you want something, you simply have to add it:  matter, matter-maker, mind, mind-maker,  spirit,  spirit-maker. It has been apparent since early childhood. Nothing is unproductive; words without relevant power are images of the imagination. We are not imaginary. That is not the point and any 'point' which fails to point this out is pointless.

If you want to import energy at first,  power to do work, then you do the space and time  to be relevant  for the work, and the force which it uses, and the matter and anti-matter components which as with nearly all else in this exotic, imaginative novel-like theory, does not happen to ... appear. Then the energy has to have a cause if you are going to be rational in dealing with your subject matter, rather than resigning from discussion and argument in antithetical confusion. It has to have time and space for its display, and coherent collectedness if it is to produce what is not the domain of MERE energy,  formless in its dynamic.

If then nothing is the source, ever, then nothing is the result, always. That is the logical result have having the entirety so based! Stages of advent from nothing do nothing to mitigate the nullity. Results show causes, the matrix of thought (cf. Causes).

The more by naturalistic preoccupations,  it ought to be amorphous in type, unsystematic in content, uniform in its meaninglessness, and the more to the contrary,  it is SHOWN in  terms of concerted data to be highly special in kind, the more ever more special results proclaim what principle first showed. It is mere empirical confirmation.

This now perhaps is being found even in earth's position, since when you join Hubble's initial read-out concerning earth's centrality to Hartnett's finite and bounded space concept and its use in obtaining so far successful mathematical results, especially insofar as it eliminates need for the mere fill-ins of dark matter and dark energy, fill-ins of such enormous size as virtually to characterise the universe in overview: then what ? Then you have a cohesion of order, organisation, limits and character that aggravates the collision with the initial ideas of the point. Professor Slusher, long ago as noted above, expressed his reasons for the apparent physical need, based on the evidence,  for earth to be around the centre of the universe.

Now even some secular astronomers are beginning to consider at last, the non-application of the cosmological principle, together with a universe with centre, and it is even found that the concept of earth near the centre is being regarded. In Journal of Creation, the first for 2011 - 25 (1), there is discussion of a relatively recently found type 1a supernova, a star which reaches an explosive situation. Viewed without the astoundingly anomalous and merely philosophical cosmological principle, the data from this high-luminosity star in its intense phase has a fit with Hartnett's theory which the author of the Journal article deems,   'incredibly good'.

That in turn involves the elimination of the dark energy and dark matter notions as Hartnett's theory is propounded to do, notions which lack nothing more than evidence and plausibility, being mere stop-gaps, not prompted by data but impelled by philosophical preference. Since tradition by type of preference, a mere philosophic study is in view, then any such choice is in total irrelevance to scientific method, which takes things as they are and seeks to account for them with the neatest, most evidenced, most implied, most cognate means available.

The opposite is this process of having a philosophical concept, especially a self-contradictory one, and using it to insist on what must happen, so that when it does the opposite, you do not relent (as if  subject to scientific method), but make up more ad hoc ideas, to extend the delusion. Such is the path of the merely scientistic, ephemeral, loaded, incumbent of fantasy. It does not wait on facts, data, evidence, the empirical; it rejects negatives and keeps immune, to its ideas, loitering in the corridors of imagination.

What then  ? When even secular scientists, such as Hawking's somewhat dissident fellow worker, George Ellis, want review of the cosmological principle, and look for research in a near central earth situation in the universe, not only is common sense and sensible science taking place, but rule by tradition, and tradition by religious preference, secular in this instance, is being assaulted, and truth given more of its proper place. Another scientist of similar bent is noted, namely Célérier. In this way, we move not only in a cosmic orbit but a little better, at the personal level, out of orbital wobble, in the field of fidelity to fact. Improvement is occurring, even here!

That is the direction of flow. Evidence confirms what logic has always demanded. Now a point is needed in the scope of consideration.

It is important to clarify. Firstly the Bible in no way requires the earth to be conceived as the universe's centre. Nevertheless, if its galaxy is near it, there is a conformity which is striking, to a certain particularity.

 Secondly, the terms of astronomical  reference are vast. It is not the planet earth or associated cosmos which by some,  is being assigned to near centrality in the universe. Rather it is the associated galaxy of which this forms part which is thought to occupy this place. In the hypothesis of Humphreys,  associated with biblical criteria in no small part, as with an excellent prediction concerning magnetic fields in space, confirmed in space exploration, there is for our celestial group of stars, a degree of centrality which though moving somewhat, is nevertheless more than impressive. He discusses this  fascinatingly in an article, Our galaxy is the centre of the universe, ‘quantized’ redshifts, which may be  reached from this hyperlink. In this  article, first published in Creation 16(2), Humphreys cites an earlier claim:

‘In particular, the “quantized” distribution of galactic red shifts,^3,22observed by various astronomers seems to contradict the Copernican principle and all cosmologies founded on it— including the big bang. But the effect seems to have a ready explanation in terms of my new non-Copernican “white hole” cosmology.’⁵³

As things progress indeed, it is fair to state that just as DNA is not a junk issue, for that is a mere junket of those who had no evidence for the concept for much of it, but more and more manifestly shows extraordinary mathematical and structural complexity in its construction, including varieties of consummate complexity of method and singularity of result (such as you and I) , so in astronomical thought, there is some awakening. Thus, as in the life material, so in the realm of space, of  non-life material in the astronomical macrocosm, ultra-cosmos or whatever you wish to call space and its contents, there is this increasingly clear modelling effect and impact. Models once sacrosanct though scarcely sacred, are looking to finish their incumbency with the clouded many,  in what Paul calls "the rudiments of this world," in Colossians 2:8.

"Beware lest any man spoil you
through philosophy
and vain deceit,
after the tradition of men,
after the rudiments of the world,
and not after Christ."

Christ as the LOGOS (John 1) is the source of the reasonableness of our logic, the coherence and consistency of its presentations (cf. Predestination and Freewill), the correlation of its findings with what is available for formulation in the natural order, filled with conceptually expressible laws. They did not come either from a pointless point, or a submerged and secret vehicle in which the conceptual container ship having nothing, is found to abound with the marvels with are what we are, find and live. Smuggling is no better before logic than the law!

Laws and orders agree well with cause and correlativity, so that the cause is not selected as the most distant possible basis for what is found (contrary to scientific method), as has for long been the field of the gradualistic hypotheses concerning the universe:  their theme, start with nothing, or simply assume some delimited object and go slowly to much more for no reason, starting with whatever the thing is, equally for no reason. This is currently the usual professional procedure of the cognoscenti, because of such irreligious proclivities and merely personal if not uncommon preferences,  as Hubble himself quite directly stated. Instead, now there is this commendable move towards the notion of looking at what meets facts more intensively, and to abandon what invents solutions without and contrary to evidence: thus starting fresh revival of objectivity.

Hence there is a move towards scientific method, here even in the midst of the religious occlusion to which so many are tilted from college onward, in the chartered flights of imagination which in this milieu confuse science with the writing of novels: imagination first, events second. Perhaps in some more ways at least, we will return to scientific method, even here, so that hypothesis will be sought in terms of the most correlative observable and implemented activities known, for comparison and application, extension and formulation. This is a great improvement on current widespread practice of taking the most divergent thoughts, and making from them emergent ideas, as if choosing a window would produce a car.

Logic has long held sway with the necessities of God, as shown in this volume and in SMR, and others on this site^*5. Now empirical strictures to confirm the rational strictures injure more and more at every local level, the fancies of naturalistic myth, whether in life or out of it. A limited shelf-life is always the plight of the Lie. Thus is the scriptural notation and the field observation (cf. Romans 1:17ff., II Thessalonians 2),alike. Truth will out, and even the most devout anti-religionist can have no rest; for reality squabbles in the mind, scrabbles in the heart, squirms even professionally with mere personal preference.

Thus,  turbulence of heart moves at least from time to time, into the fields of effrontery in preference to fact, with a pseudo-scientific, a scientistic bouquet. Similarly,  imagination is given illicit title to occupy the seat of thought, before the images from outside are given place, and reach the minds of those who enquire. Indeed, when the heart is averse, there comes a real bottle-neck, rejected realisations crowding at its  door; and here lies some reason for the exceeding ferocity of those who seek to turn aside those who use creation as the optimal resultant of scientific method, with reason, and confronting them, as was the experience of this author, forbid the doctrine, however impervious to assault, which is not their own. To call this science, is to call space time, male female, child adult, zero infinity.

Thus in the arrogantly abused sub-field of science, through this class of philosophical putsch, the employer when met with reason, gives mere prohibition without reason. Treason to reason is a correlative to trading in truth, professional abuse, and the loss of the sense of reality which is one of the trends which works in those who are willing to be seduced by what is definitionally indistinguishable from myth (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth). Alas for them: that some might escape!

   For further on this line of development, see*4 below.

See also in The Lie has a Limited Shelf-Life ... Ch. 4, *5   and  *6.

 

For the parallel with the abuse of the term or concepts of  'bits', inglorious basis of glory, and uninhibited but vain export of integralities of purport and unity see:

Waiting for Wonder Appendix,  and REFLECTIONS  4,  and Index at BITS.

 

As noted in the first of these concerning our universe (and not  some other imaginary one):

This is not the work of origination from systems 'arising' from systems, 'arising' from units, bits, 'arising' from nowhere in particular, 'arising' for want of anything else in view in this model, from nothing. There is nothing in such views, either at the outset, however much of the question of origin is simply and unscientifically begged, or in any of the later phases, imported from the same null source^*8.

NOTES
 

*1 See Government Papers Composite under that name, here.
 

*1A See in this Chapter as marked.
 

*2

See on this, with reference to Dr Werner Gitt, Jesus Christ, Defaced ... Unfazed, Ch. 4.
 

*2A

See The Desire of the Nations and the Crystalline Fire of the Faith,  Ch. 3.

*3

See the volume,  Scientific Method ... See also The gods of naturalism have no go!

*4 On the seemingly triumphant tour of Dr Duane Gish in meeting university students and staff, see From Fish to Gish, by Marvin Lubenow. As with Dr Philip Johnson, debate is not the strong suit, it appears, of the truculent evolutionary authoritarian brigade in universities.

*5

See for example:

Barbs ,... 6-7, Deity and Design ... Section 8,

SMR, TMR esp. Ch. 1,

 Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2...   Repent or Perish Ch. 7,

 Secular Myth and Sacred Truth,

together with

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS.

The  deity, His identification, His communication, His salvation and His commands are all shown to be demonstrable as to being, in these volumes. It is, in any domain, not good enough to identify that there is a king; for operational life you need to know who he is and what are his requirements. BOTH are needed, and given and are demonstrable.

 

*6

Professor Paul Davies gives an interesting aspect for thought here.

Thus he has at one time been fond of the concept of nothing as source; but later revised what could not stand.

See

1)  Nothing doing from Nothing

2) TMR Ch. 7, Models and Marvels, as marked.

3) Sparkling Life in Jesus Christ  Ch. 8.

Once you move to God, there is room to make up, mock-up, manipulate thought into being, and have any sort of goddy thing you want; without the discipline of scientific method, to find the authenticity, validity, empirical sustainability and the like, such as the Bible both provides and demands.

This is a logical disaster, as well as being a ludicrous self-assertion on the part of little man, aspiring to cover all gods with his roving intelligence, to assess all things in what is, on his own model, his so very limited eye, and move into fairy-land with others who want something from nothing, with nil evidence.

As such, these people move well with the atheists, who affirm as truth what does not on that model even exist, all things there being relative with no absolute standards for determination.

If they invent a god who is cruel, or indifferent, or as with Aristotle, not really involved too much, or loves to thrash things into being by having the most atrocious misuse of their created capacities as a method, so that they can go on killing each other till they are all maimed or rammed into the dust, or ruined with radioactivity: if I say, you want one like that, then you may write your novel like anyone else. But it will have nothing to do with the truth.

It is in such divorce from the testable and validatable Bible that it is a combination of what is there called a vanity, a thing of nothing, a god that is not, and an idol, a thing to follow despite its lack of any verification or logical viability (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4). Theistic evolutionists can move with such beings as these, but they have no basis, but the exaltation of the human to divine level, in order to know it; and that, it is more ludicrous than evolution itself. GOD can elevate what He will; but man, it is not his power to translate the temporal to the eternal, or the limited to the unlimited, since his very nature is limited, inept and unfounded, when not grounded in God.

As to the Bible, on such gods see Deuteronomy 32:15ff., and SMR pp. 179ff..

*7

See The gods of naturalism have no go! and Causes along with the treatment of Kant's futile effort to avoid objectivity, Predestination and Freewill  Section 4 and SMR Ch. 5. See also Wake Up World, Your Creator is Coming! Chs. 4, 5,  6.

*8

If ever one could see the acme, the zenith, the most swashbuckling example of I Timothy 6:20, more than in the current  surge of naturalistic 'babblings' , to use Paul's term, it would be staggering to find,  though one  doubts  little that a new zenith will  appear (cf. II Thessalonians 2:4-10).

For the babblings  of knowledge  falsely so called, from which Timothy is to guard himself, little could better qualify than  this which now appears, smashing into class-rooms, given the reverence of an idol in practice, serene from contest in this State in science courses, darting its fingers of dark light in endless TV screen, parading and sunning itself in newspapers, differentially following up the popular, rarely providing its rebuttal.

As to Paul's warning, as pointed out in   Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 3,  the word is 'knowledge', the babblings of this so-called, specious, intrusive, are the topic of his admonition. Relevant is the fact that by the time of Paul, the early Greek atheistic and other romanticists, whose philosophies like radioactive waste, spoke incredible rationalistic nonsense, not near any possible truth, and mystic romanticists had had more than enough time to be famous to  cultures around, for  their slick superficialities and appearance of  'wisdom'.

As noted in the above volume:

"Further, the Eleusinian Mysteries are said to have come from prehistoric times, and this partly from Cretan influence:  this also came to Greece, and this too was one of the features in the ancient world, special knowledge, mixtures of philosophy, hope and myth, religion and rites of various kinds, complex and strange

'Elite esoteric knowledge' then is not limited to the gnostics, manifest in part of the first century AD, and falsely so-called knowledge cannot be limited to them, nor to them and mystery religions. These AND gnosticism, with some influence from the Parsees it is held by some, were long standing elements, and philosophy itself, from the Greeks, this too was long standing, long before Christ came. Indeed, there is a vast array of such falsely knowledgeable things from the follies of the early Greek exponents of naturalism, to the Platonic with its variable surveys of the scene, now touching the name God, now working in principles and ideas far below Him, and not even able to be assembly in a logical continuum^*1; as also to those of Aristotle later again. The Greek philosophers themselves reach back to around half a millenium before Christ.

Thus knowledge falsely so-called, the simple translation of I Tim. 6:20 cannot be limited to some setting of gnosticism, itself seemingly a synthesis of much of mystery and philosophy for hundreds of years before; but likewise it cannot be limited to mystery religion, which is merely one of the examples of the trend. It must include the whole array of what was in vogue, or held appeal, or stretched out arms from the past, contemporary trends and various systems eventually working to compete, in things large or small, with Christianity, with indeed, truth itself.

Thus Paul, indicating in Colossians indeed the contemporary appeals from naturalistic or racy mysticism (cf. Col.  2:8), 'rudiments' of this world', of whatever variety, apostle with the earlier 12 to our Age, is no stranger to the sorts of 'knowledge' which seek to gain adherents in rank and disastrous disjunction from reality, reason and revelation (cf. Romans 1:17ff.). In this regard, in TYPE, what the ancient world had in this, is one with what the pursuers of modern irrationalist evolutionism are prodding into schools, universities and unwary minds.

That the modern  term ''science" is not specifically in view here in Paul

(though  Aristotle at least had much to do with the empirical,  in many of his often excellent, but religiously woeful efforts, with a god who had little involvement with a creation that co-existed, hence giving  small  light to creation and explanation of the status quo with two such dissident entities, and his forms of biological things were all to approach a final distinct type, thus making him much nearer than the fables of Darwin),

is  as clear as that it is not excluded. Knowledge  means neither more nor less than this, and includes all forms of assertion concerning truth, reality and what is there. Certainly the ancient world had been liable to just such myths and miniscule quasi-truths, masquerading as THE truth as is the so very modern world now, with the rationally impossible postulations of the naturalists (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).

Even one of the most acute, Michael Denton, having dealt brilliantly with the irrationalism of evolutionism in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,  at least at the time shortly to come, still felt for something intermediate, like Philo in that respect, something not the ultimate for the action, and in Denton's case, alas, it is here that he moves to the mystic and ill-founded. This shows the strange almost enchantment which seems to pop under once again,  a culture which is beginning to break through to the surface, from swimming below.

Thus from Alpha and Omega ... Ch. 3, we have this (cf. News 57):

To be fair, this phase of Denton's hypothesis is a tad better than Darwin,  since it does not so smudge the initial facts  of the nature of life, but frankly  acknowledges discontinuity, like Nilsson, another brave  fellow. It does at least give actual attention  to the data  at the base of it. It is not, like  that of Darwin, built  on verifiable absentees, in the face of  verifiable presences (cf. SMR pp., 140ff., TMR Ch. 1). Yet in common with that  fault  line in biological philosophy, not  science but a philosophic substitute at this point, it presents what neither evidences itself, nor can be induced to  do  so, nor attests innovation, nor information addition, but is a thing of  regularity and assiduity.

By all  means, let us have unusual types of action, after the  drought which was  Darwin (cf. News  94, Wake Up World! Chs. 5-6, TMR Ch. 1, The gods of naturalism have no go!  25), but let there  be  interface, phase of interaction between the power that does the thing (making up life), and the thing itself. If you are  going to  look to grand-sire it into 'nature' in  some way, then at least show the family tree. In other words, if you want to produce for consideration a theory of life's development, at least  show something testable, investable, with results  which distinguish it from  ANYTHING!

As usual in such cases, this is based on a confusion between performances with elements yet to be fully covered in terms of their systematics of operation (as once to a far greater degree was electricity, electro-magnetism and radioactivity), and something merely imagined,  here closely akin to entelechy, a striving within life to reach certain kinds, degrees, patterns or accomplishments, literally, 'end'. From what ? by what ? with what formulable  expression of itself  ? in what way distinctive  from  guesswork, painfully contrary to existing laws as well, such as the second  law of thermodynamics, and observation, which NEVER finds any identifiable and distinctive correlation  between such a theory and reality as observed.

Entelechy moves one back to Aristotle. While the divinity in view was outside involvement for some odd reason, Aristotle had in matter, or in life, a kind of self-fulfilling, ADVANCING-TO-IMPROVING-DESIGN equivalent, a something moving to an end, to a point in view. How  ? How is an end', óbjective, point of rest to which things move to become kinds, how is this to be for things materially connected and controlled ? At least he got the design and designation part right, the idea being in control.

Not in matter ? then why put it there ? Associated with matter ? then as what associated ? As material things ? then the problem is as before. As  immaterial things ? then what kind of immaterial things. If we are  going to think, let us use reason.  If any is not prepared to use reason, then why argue ? and how defend  ? If it is to be irrational, then just say, blah, blah, blah, for that would be equally effective.

What kind of immaterial things then ? Mind bits, entities floating about in a sea, or other medium that has to be created, as do they themselves  ? this is merely inadequate and unattested thought. Spirit bits,  with vision and uplift floating or soaring or snoring or waking, round  about ? But what is their source and what inter-face in  terms of scientific modalities are to be given for these ?

What then ? We look for what is self-sufficient and eternal, since nothing produces nothing and what is inadequate for results rationally does not produce them. We look then for what is eternally existent, uncontained (for that merely puts the point back to what did the containing), limited by nothing, in need of nothing (for that implies a system in which it inheres, and as before, merely puts the necessity back one, to which one then needs rationally to move, so having THIS as the foundation). This, then, eternal, is present first of all.

As the cause^*1A, it is before, and not afterwards, is there to  do it, and does not arrive postage paid from nowhere^*1B; for when you deal with all, what is not there is nothing. It has outcomes as basis, not incomes, can speak if that is the desire, or not, being unconstrained by any lack of any kind. Systems of mutual dependent causes are its outlay, inherent capacity to  cause is its nature, which is  not given, but a balance of desire and actuality,  all in harmony, nothing pre-determined by any other or diverse entity at the creative level, but everything sure, because knowledge being unlimited, it is foreknown. Indeed,  since the lack of limit to knowledge removes growth and change: if the Eternal  wanted a holiday, to be different in itself, then it would lack and not be unlimited, but delimited, and hence a mere mirage,  and not the Being of whom logic forces us to take account.

You have it; it creates; it stops: it says so. That is the Biblical Model. Empirically, the thing is past, in perfect parallel; but its results remain. Efforts to show otherwise are  spectacularly unsuccessful.

What then of the wanderings, from some of the best and the least, in this phase or that, that embrace what does not and cannot rationally stand ? that baulks at Christ the  Creator-Saviour, unique deposition of deity in text and flesh alike, sent as in Isaiah 48:16, John 3:16, not to temper understanding, but to provide instead of endless errors, the truth ?

Such developments as were in Paul's day and are in our own, remain a marvellously apt source of instruction for all ages, including our own,  for all unrealistic fibrillations of the human imagination, attached without warrant to religion, science and philosophy. The current craze, so abrasive since Darwin, and now having followers who do not follow him in a crude  confusion (cf. SMR Ch. 2, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6), is precisely the SORT of thing against which Paul warns, in a more modern dress. More recent it is, but  without variation from irrationality, self-assurance and total failure to do more than tittivate the desire for truth, and then dash it with disastrous non sequiturs than the older versions, particpating in vain philosophy (Colossians 2:8).

Paul reminds us precisely of the TYPE and STYLE of thing which has been popular for millenia, which  both preceded and followed his ministry, and while his warning is not limited to a special kind of knowledge, undoubtedly it not only included close parallels to the present, but is clear  development in ultimate kind  from rather aged, sonorous errors of multiple naturalistic and mystic kinds. In their romancing irrationalisms and indifferent bases, they are just like those of our own day, now  masquerading as science, and corrupting its method (cf. SCIENTIFIC METHOD...).It is well  to  heed Paul's warning, age-old, God-breathed, and to  avoid dabbling in the most recent examples, though incredibly aged in type, which strut, filled with irrationalism, as if to provide the very height of the meaningful from the meaningless, from no source and for no reason, having no ground even  to walk. Yet it is investigable by reason, which there finds its applications and its formulae. Avoid such particles of nonsense, that is his wisdom; follow him as he Christ!

As to the truth, it remains clear, cogent, singularly rational, validatable uniquely, publicly given for millenia, personally ratified in Jesus Christ, consummated in human history as it follows the prophecies of Christ and the prophets like a household lamb, inimitable, indefeasible, irresistible to piracy, indomitable by any: inviting man to his rest in redemption, and not to more of his heady self-appointed mixtures of sophisticated naïveté and eventual destruction, which now threaten this world yet more obviously: a fate Christ declared from of old (Matthew 24:12,22).