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CHAPTER THREE

INFORMATION, DEFORMATION AND DESIRE

Its Case

In Chapter One above, the nature of information has already been considered; but here further probing survey is provided, to enhance understanding, and preclude irrelevance.

Information is a formation within something, visible or invisible, despatched or not, which is conceptual in character - slave transmitters being a mere means of dissemination: containing grammatically governed, semantically meaningful interpretive or directive features and allied functions. It may classify, interpret, direct, correct, overcome resistance, construct or demolish in the mode of implicit command, with relevant associated modes. Its variety of application, and its means, should not be confused with what it is, readily discerned by imagining its removal from a system with modes and applications, encoding potential and the like, abstracted, but at the ready.

It IS the transmissible agency of meaning, susceptible to code, directing or interpreting action, conjoined to any means of expression, so that its assessive or directive overview and perspective may be applicable to designable results, parallel to purpose, and indistinguishable from it, since the concept-code-perspective-correlation-resultant modality is the essence of all that purpose is - in action. If you could ask purpose to show itself without engaging in inter-subjective directed speech TO you, this would represent for it, a definitive path.

Thus, the organisation of empirical means for display is not to be confused with what is ON display; for information itself is the work and the working of mind to secure these means for its linguistically expressible co-ordinated control, with correlative outcome. Work has co-ordinated control with correlative outcome in the transfer of meaning. Work has to be done to subject a situation to such codable control, and it is the definitive work of mind

Its Kind

Mind ? First, empirically this is the ONLY KNOWN broad source of such labour. Secondly, the type of work is the correlative of cognition, forming vehicles for expression, governing their modes, conforming their capacities to review and change of input, enfolding these features in a conceptually articulated consequence.

In encoded or constructive commands, it becomes a meaning-method mode of outputting designable change, whether to create or to confirm, modify or to negate, exhibited in result, itemised in method, systematisable in signifying contrivances, the latter themselves integrated as needed, with all relevant action. What commands is itself subjectible to command, that it MAY be commanded, correlated and relevant to receivable action and direction.

Not command, but consequence is the domain of matter; not conceptualisation but reception of ordering control is its relevant feature. It is wholly contrary to what is here found. Some prefer to imagine that nothing must be considered on its functional and characterisable data, that empirical data are to be usurped of their kindred conceptual neighbours, and hence lost a discriminating understanding because of discriminatory prejudice. Original adaptation to empirical fact, however, requires not arcane and merely imaginary source, but what is confined to the basics in view.

Materialism^*1itself a self-contradictory theory, founded on the prior integrity and operation of mind, is merely a non-germane thrust into such events. The nature of matter in its uncontrolled state is not thus. It does not conform to the criteria just outlined. It is never found creating what are the characterisable ingredients which pertain to information, nor does it show in itself, the means to produce these, being thus two decisive steps backward from even relevance. The criterion of understanding and testable hypothesis is not the ringing of the bell of a pet theory, adopted on religious preference, so that all might be subsumed to its call, as did the early Greeks, using water, or air, or fire, or continual change, or no change, as methods, a sort of omnivorous appetite for the whole of ordered reality to have some one ingredient the mother or father or meaning or all of this, for all. Skin has in its cells, the plan for all, but the plan is not skin. Brain cells have in their articulation of billions in functional marvels of materials for disposition by purpose; but they are not purpose.

The ONE that is back of all the varied functional and diverse components of the plan of operation of the human being's body, is not some one aspect of the result, given anti-empirical priority, as if by a child outwitted, and guessing in grave delight, prodigious oddities. It is the capacious originating entity sufficient for all, enabling all, co-ordinating all, and not limited to any one aspect of its result. Rather is it capacious enough to engender each and every feature, and all the components of content, including in the case of man, the laws for matter, the concepts for the laws, the agility to create being, and not only ascribe to each element of it, whether thought or purpose or creativity or logic, what it is to be, but actually create it into existence so that non-existence is replaced by existence. Nothing comes for or from nothing.

That is the criterion. Ideally you then work out expected consequences in every realm conceivable, and see if these do or do not clash with the hypothesis. If they do, then it is wrong. If they do not, then it is verified. Where logic and verification cohere (cf. SMR, TMR, then stability becomes the securement of science. Its mobile character is ready for anything further testable, but at this level, laws apply, such as that of the Conservation of Matter and Energy (implying that things do not NOW exhibit power to create themselves, merely to operate in situ, in type).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely that "in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state," has its own tidying office. Thus things in a given system, where for example the energy of contributing intelligence does not now operate, these do not increment their energy status and specificity, but increase in entropy: and this is the normal and natural case. Such is indeed observable where creative function does not operate. What is, has been done; it may vary somewhat, but it is founded and furnished, and apart from retrogression from its potential energy, does not do what is needed to have it come in the first place. Rather it does the opposite, declining instead of arising. Nature does not cause nature.

The nature of causation requires more. It requires what accounts for it.

The various machines that are inherent in biological life, such as those for folding protein, as with all machines, are dependent on information. Matter in itself has neither the specifications nor the power to exhibit the formation of such machines - and if it had, it would be pertinent to exhibit it!

Mind does precisely such work, and there is no known other means, or attestation of it, to do this. To ignore this is not the assimilation of reliable knowledge by waiting either upon what happens, or what in itself displays means for it, but a converse operation. It is this: a matter of imagining what is never seen, and conceiving what never displays itself in the regular operations of nature, whether in sufficiency for action, or actual action as the inherent cause of it (cf. Causes1, SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill Section 4).

The laws and life of nature cry out against it, and the experimental finding is at war with it, even to the point of a threat to man's very survival. Yet like the dream of the drinker, man becomes too drunk to hear, and too morose in his distemper to yield. Pink elephants CAN waltz, he cries, as he remembers what he was taught in infant-school in some literary romp. But man now in many lands has been taught it for so long, with such mean dictation, such a gallop against reality that the sheer and blinding folly of it has taken hold like moss, on which man readily slips, lurching.

The reductionist fantasy seeking component-creation, something from nothing then all from a bit^*^1A, so that all might begin to come before it was in order to do anything, ultimately is thus anti-scientific, scientistic and irrational, as any dream (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!). What is in the entire system outside intelligence, does not create the type of thing that is found in it. Abortion does not create children, and fantasy does not create universes. You need something with relevant power, in existence before what has to come, if it is ever to come; and it has come, as is observable. It has its laws, once come, and its ways, once invented and brought into being ( cf. TMR Ch. 1 as marked). Function of any kind requires what it takes to cause it to be. It has to be there eternally, since nothing could never produce it, by definition, if it ever were not!

Indeed, the features and power of the creative mind thus displayed, in the institution of nature, far exceeds the information-reliant power of man's creativity. It far surpasses his ability and facility to conceive and enact such a result as what he himself possesses inherently, that is in his body, so that it might even exist. Eternal mind with creative power, is the causal necessity for any mind.

However, we must analytically go further. Definition of mind to include the phase of desire and intent is to combine needlessly what is analytically diverse; and there is an analytical resultant.

It is this. The term "spirit" is used to designate the higher order features of contemplative overview in the arena of desire, which is closely associated with purpose as touching its observable and distinctive ways.

Its Labour

We have so far diversely considered information potential, actualisation and use in creative-command situations and universe modes. Its underlying kind has been specified.

In so doing, we have found aspects of, and elements in information, as in this universe, so beginning to see the work, the labour, the specialised features of mind, intimate and inimitable that command information into existence, that create it, in the realm of unified, interpretable and conceptually expressive result (such as mankind, which was not always extant). Man is alive, not wholly, but in physical format, by information. With this, there is the correlative purpose and planning which is the labour of spirit. Mind is in an invisible realm, whatever the equipment appended, and its modes are its own, with its heights inclusive of conceptualisation, logical review, utilisation of modes by ingenuity and the like, flashes of imagination, coherent pursuit of purpose and estimation of the same from other sources, for example. The term "mind" is sometimes used more comprehensively, but this tends to leave issues of weight ignored.

In addition to the more processive features, the term "mind" often includes such notations as purpose, imagination, overview, discrimination, probing for validity, appetite for verification, conceptual analysis, aspiration, concentration by patience, and all the paraphernalia of the exhibition of spirit's domain. The mind might SLAVE for decades ONLY because of a dream, desire, aspiration, conspiracy, fearful ambition, fearless commitment and so forth, given to it by the spirit of man, governing it, managing it, using it. These are ingredients in the broader use of "mind", at least when we come to the comparative height of mankind. These may appear inextricably conjoined, spirit and mind, and in operation they often are.

However, in analytical reality they are far apart, though certainly not further than brother and sister, except in this, that spirit is the elder brother, whose desire mind is to implement. If the mind rebels as in broken personality, it may do so for good reason, and this may disturb potential harmony, ruining results, disturbing or distorting them; and because of man's notorious sinfulness, in hiding or abiding in fraud and falsity, this is common. It is a major portion of psychiatry as one may see for example, in Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

Yet the smooth working in sympathy, of these diverse elements is far from rare, and has a certain beautiful cohesion, as physically, shown in the smooth co-operation of physical elements, legs, arms, head, lithe and agile, in an athlete. So spirit and mind may cohere with a harmony both deep and intense. Such a thing combining these entities with such adroitness, does not need to happen, though it provides a sense of the grace of normality, not statistically defined, but operationally for a maximum performance. Mind can have many diseases as does the body; but when it is to a large extent liberated from these, there is a certain sense of significance, as in the correlation of components in a unified task, gifted in the first place in potential, now seen in accomplishment. It may indeed, as in the younger stages of some dictators-to-be, seem to be of such an order, and only later is it found to be a merely meretricious, indeed factitious substitute, being like a flush of a TB patient, a false picture with a looming portent. Yet there is a marvellous combination with grace and efficacy to be found in this sphere.

There are also depths of functionality for mind, and spirit. There is available a whole summit of symmetry, a combination of possibles, which leaves the more minor ingredients as midgets in significance, by comparison. Thus, for example, scrap codes in a dilatory mind, information reticules, show the kind of thing in view, but not its height. In man, there is exhibited far more. Here is a vastly more comprehensive code than any scrap, with self-generation over the generations which it induces, and inclusive in each new generation, of an overall physical regeneration of the original KIND. Such is observable, just as its ground was noted biblically from the first (cf. Genesis 1-10, Proverbs 8, Hebrews 11, Colossians 1, with The WIt and Wisdom of the Word of God: the Bible True to Test).

The felicity of programmataic information, to be sure, is likely to be a little less perfect, in each generation, as the work of Professor Sanford of Cornell University^*2so dramatically shows, the articulation being subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics^*3, in its movement towards entropy, downgrading and not uplifting. This an observable reality contrary to the yearning mystical and lawless imaginations of evolutionary hypothesis^*4, founded on nothing, and wanting things to move upwards in this domain, but in vain (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming, esp. Chs. 4-6, The Lord of Longsuffering ... Ch.2, *2).

Because of the non-mystical labour involved in setting up code format, code re-interpretation on the receiving end, code conservation such as is found and is crucial, code conceptualisation potential, to transmit conceptualisable and operative data, and hence the significance in finding even scrap codes, scraps of scripts, bit and pieces with enough form and formalisation to imply the type of background and basis required, themselves. These have the mark of mind, the criteria of its operative facility. It is like a gun shot: evidence leading tor the impact in the flesh of one assaulted, and nature of the bullet, for the propellant and its adaptation to the shot, for the fitting of bullet to a type of equipment, to its manufactured facility aligned with its aerial facility, for its marks of manufacture and the like: in little there is much meaning. Its depths are great, but so must be the rigours of rational analysis in pursuit of these aspects of information. .

When however, you are not concerned with a single shot, the micro-case, but with the macro, as with an artillery barrage which results in the systematic annihilation of a city, starting with its the demolition of its supply depots, armour concentration and electric generators, then there are far more integrable elements, which do not relate to the wafting of winds or the normal careers of chemicals. They bear the marks of design and purpose; and it is not different, but decidedly more apparent (if it be possible!), when we come to the incomparably more complicatedly unified and multivariantly constrained work of the DNA in the human body.

Just as scraps of language indicate mind, so comprehensive codes, self-generating from a prepared base, self-replicative, signify the cohesion of purpose and decision, like an intricate military campaign, with successive results, and intelligent provisions for countering contrary features, moving to a discernible, designate and interpretable end. Such are merely confirmed by the captured papers back of it, should they be found. This provides more indications, but the outcomes and their mode already show much of the type of intelligence implied.

Notice now the LABOUR in all this. Suppose now you are going to find some information. Let us take a most generic approach. You wish to find certain facts in a particular realm, and you do not yet know if you could understand them, if you found them. Yet you do not know that you would recognise their relevance to your search, since your interest is founded on a highly specialised need which you wish to fulfil. In equipment (and without it, you would have first to make it, and of course to BE there, in order to gain it, and have the nous to make it, if you lacked it, and this too requires its source, nothing coming from nothing, in actuality or in potentiality).

Coming meekly but with determination to your informative task, you have many options depending on the case. Let us take indicative types. You may have to wait many days to try to detect regularities in what you wish to investigate, to try to determine some pattern, so that whether it be in science or in crime, you can see evidence of plan, program or both. You may have to make correlative research, in order to UNDERSTAND the TYPE of regularities involved, since otherwise you might be incapable of recognising them, or perceiving the subtleties of their kind. You may need to use libraries, scour rare books, find old newspaper articles, find earlier ramifications in earlier suspicions, or schools of thoughts, in order to subject these to critical examination. This done, you may need to examine geographical areas for variations and links, whether, once again, the issue be scientific or one of international crime.

When, and at such time as all this research is fulfilled, to which information gathering is in type subject, as a rigorous discipline (if you really seek to be informed, and not merely culturally or prejudicially deformed), then you need be a person, so that your motives be comprehended and your objectives being subjectible to insightful review, you might have performed the preliminaries, and then grasping with imagination and enterprise, secure the pattern, or the complications which will be resolvable as you seek for it, or for a motivational aspect, a psychological component or a clarification of an obscurity, if not indeed, a detectoin of false information which being researched, you must be able to recognise on the basis of its defects, so preventing your own subversion through the clever antics or blind unreason of another.

TO GAIN INFORMATION THERE MUST BE LABOUR. If it is already available, then you merely use the work of another; but the WORK HAS TO BE DONE. This however is merely a beginning. Next you need to HAVE or gain a linguistic, a grammatically inclined mode of regularisation, a receptacle for what you are seeking. You may have the potential information in you mind, as a thought in that invisible marvel of the human mind, kept under seal, like a dead body, but ready for instant resurrection, since you have 'held it in mind.'

If however it is to be completed as information, it must not merely have a formulable potential associated with it, but be formulated. If it is understood well enough, it may be subjectible to code, whether as in the sale case noted above, where a large part of the communication is by perceived or agreed convention, or it be expressed in full. Formulability or form must be there. It must be possible to subject it to this, by whatever means it is forwarded. It must be operative, and actionable, to be information, whether the action to be should be wise or foolish.

It must further be such a system of formulability, with such a sophisticated use of it, a functional and operative use, that it both available, understood in use, and deployed by a person with purpose and outcome linked, directing the work to its appointed, planned and so informational end. There must, for this to be effective, be an agreement whether traditional or personal or a realisation of a program which is prepared to facilitate this without the need to invent it, as in language, such that the ideas of information that you have, in its last formulation, so coincide with those of your information target, that they do not flap as the ends of a torn sheet in the wind, but actuate in the receptor precisely what is intended. Whether there be short cuts from tradition, or not, it all HAS TO BE DONE.

Information gathering is without all kinds of prepared preliminaries, an enormous task, and all of these have to be done by someone competent in all the phases of the need, and the psychological, logical and data storing components of both need and feed, the gaining and the transmission.

Ignoring reality has been a high-water mark of evolutionary imaginings, which can never be ilustrated in practice, since they never are made visible. All kinds of attempts to juggle the jiggles of variation within kind are made; but there is frank admission that the little is not the large, and the variability itself is now found to organised on an extremely brilliant mathematical and structural basis^*5.

Only an adequate base for all the components of information actualities, not merely gaining but instituting in the first place, is logically relevant. But what of the reality ? Gould held^{*4 (4)} that some 90% of the basic designs of earlier times had been lost, and appeared to wonder rather catastrophically how on earth you have a theory accounting for what does not happen. Indeed, on that basis, it is the reverse. It is quite simple. As with the early Greeks, people want a short-cut, which admittedly seems rather like slap-stick philosophy on review, but this tends to grip people, who tend to feel sophisticated by ignoring the work needed to do all that is in view, and that simplistic formulations do not at all provide for this, but resemble the work of magicians, but deceit, blindness to the empirical, or imaginations of automation, of trends for this, when these are never found. Nature myths are only a substitute for logic.

Information dabbles tend to resemble this, in that they form a vulnerable path for the institution and replication of mere reductionism, sloppy assumptions, unattested movements of forces, without reason, or with irrelevant formulation, not covering all the data, omitting huge chunks of what is requisite, and so resulting in anti-verification. One of the most obvious is the complete lack of evidence of the vast numbers of moron-minded (that is a compliment to 'chance') no-gos, failed functions and failed types of living creatures, where the elements of the mathematics of DNA, for example, were constantly wrong, not on song, and things did not go, and resulted in horrors of misconception, or their correlatives, strewn like Autumn leaves across the fossils of time. Such is the expectation of mindless creativity, itself a contradiction in terms at the outset. The opposite, rigorously and immovably, is the finding, in the vast trends in this domain^*4.

On the contrary, as Denton points out in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, even the most simple cell is without place in a litany of loss, a mass of steps, but as with types, comes with a certain éclat, provision of marvels of organisational complexity and functionality. Indeed, on the basis of evidence and review, he declares that continuity (the very idea that things make themselves from simple to complex types from scratch, from an austere beginning - forgetting how that came for the moment, the final puncture) exists not in nature. Such a continuity of processive types, moving upward from one to the other, is found only in the mind of man, he observes. The concept is an illusion; and in the micro-biological realm, it is shown as a total misfit for the hierarchical and mathematically precise facts as illustrated in this research.

In all these realms, and in information most specifically, WORK HAS TO BE DONE, correlative to consequences, and done by what can form, formulate and fashion adequately. Life is not magic. Words may become little more, and theories even less, being transparently mere figments of unfactual musing. To move into logical array, even into scientific method, you need to move in the realm of empirical observation and what is best and most nearly allied to meeting its demands. The three basic laws of science^*6show the sort of thing, and the organic evolutionary figment is a maestro of contradiction as well as being itself lawless, in mode, as it moves amongst the myriad laws which somehow manage from nowhere to come into regularity and dynamism of being.

These broader points are noted, simply because the reason for the blindness often found in considering information at basic levels, even by some brilliant people, should have some sort of accounting in itself; and this delusive dynamic is a type of thing most broadly found in this area, not requiring any special explanation, since the generic is found on all sides. Moreover, the Bible, which notes the logical case with care, one which fits the empirical facts with ease, the cessation of advance resulting from the stated cessation of the work of the Creator in creation, also gives reason for delusion.

There is an alienation from God. It is rather like a divorce. It becomes hard for those in this condition, whether by cultural manipulation, traditional imbuement or from similar motives or results, to see past the propaganda. Ephesians 4:17-19 specifies the condition, and it is merely a part of the broader process noted in Romans 1:17ff., where man is shown in a condition of oppressive obfuscation^*7 of the facts, through his wrestling to avoid truth. It has indeed a final outcome (cf. II Thessalonians 2:4-10). The human race with increasing boldness savours the 'nose' of its intoxication, like the flavour, esteems the dissavour, while propaganda intensifies, and they are being caught in a reticulation of rebellion from logic, moving fast to this predicted end phase as in Thessalonians and Revelation 19:19.

Having spread out research because of the relevance of the broader exhibition of the cult of the forbidden^*8, the cultural movement to avoid the paramount realities back of life, let us now return more specifically to the illustration of information.

Endeavours to reduce

fastidiously wrought,

multiply and massively composed codes,

with subsidiary variable facilities of mathematically astute character,

allowing variation within limits in some features,

themselves only the holistically erected means,

meaningless in themselves in any part or phase,

however well-organised,

as mere mentally irrelevant, originatively ineffectual output -

when declaring a unitary and interpretable consequence:

these conform to the definition of reductionism.

To cover a case, you need elegant and sensitive, perceptive and exhaustive attention to ALL detail, and ALL results, at EVERY level, and in particular, to provide integrally satisfactory basis for integral results, and the more so the more myriads of SUCH results appear.

Failure to do this, efforts to force what does not observably or demonstrably do ALL of what is before you, is precisely reductionism, reducing the problem to give arrogant or listless aid to unabashed indolence of mind. Science gained its standing not like that, but by the opposite, which very often dumped systematically now for centuries, in the field of initiation and religion, has become a mere propaganda tool, in the hands of many, both in tertiary education and government, leading necessarily on to the sort of vileness in life, moral perspective and confused conflict which superficiality breeds.

When discipline is applied, we are not interpreting by means NOT found competent for the result, or trying to account for their non-achievement empirically in this type of field, though one might imagine it were so, but for the words suggesting something better. Rather, scientifically and logically one is looking for those means found competent both in principle and in practice, for the original input and eventual result. We look for means, both in output and input, in their capacity as originators of components, addressable by command, and operative by comprehensive direction, from overall command.

Ponder the problem now by illustration. Similarly, it might be nice to imagine that troops have that natural capacity to organise into platoons, brigades, and emit officers for each level, each and all equipped with relevant and properly stratified controls to get results in harmony and with agility; but this is not found. Work is needed, planning work, dispositional dynamic, movable items, information, direction and results in accountable interaction in due order and concourse.

There are in this universe some things provided, and some things not. Some things do marvels, being encoded orders, enlisted laws, each produced by competent and relevant means. Men for example, before and apart from being organisable into platoons and brigades, divisions or categories of aviation workers, like pilots and mechanics, DO breathe. This does not require human work of organisation, since it is entirely covered, though you can MAKE it go wrong. There are layers of organisation, supinely taken for granted, but in need of systematic installation in a superior series of systematics, so that the whole works as one. Many are taken for granted in many an expedition of explanation; but none is logically orphanable.

What is given, has a relevant source capable for all that is found both as items, and integrated roles, organisational abilities and scheduling facilities. What is added by man for example, works via an equally given intelligence, which like muscles may be somewhat developed, but is of a given type. What is done well is not observationally potentiated or competent to construct supermen, for "nature" does not so provide. Instead, observable are operational results which, as for those who work among mankind, have their source in whatever it takes. Nothing being a perfect source of its own continuance, by necessity, since something with potential is not nothing, and something without it has no future, what is required is what does all that is to be done, and shows attestation of its works, by what is found (cf. LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST, WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS).

The intelligence and conceptionalisation, the programmatic power and the dynamic to dower matter and mind and spirit being required, are assigned from what exists and is competent for this. Information is one of the products of mind in this, whether of initiating mind or initiated mind.

When it comes to the sub-type of information embraced in command-construction of vastly-integrated wholes, and the DNA and its associates which CAN and DO command, and when that command (in type), with those commandments (in detail), includes in the overall situation a provision not only for WHAT is to be done but HOW it is to be ordered so that word and deed correspond, moving in successive series, to information and reception, reception and performance, performance and synthesis of performances in intricate mutual moves, then what ? When all this is found to reify into existence, to come to be, reminding one of a dance, but far more complex, and this applies both to what is proximate in process (as in the womb) and what is eventual (such as birth): then the one totality speaks (not only figuratively, but in this case vocally!). What does it say ?

The whole series of powers,

	architectural,
	mathematical,
	engineering,
	cogitational,
	conceptual,
	organisational,
	vitality-engendering,
	purposeful,
	program-engendering,
	spirit assigning,
	mind consigning,
	exercised options implanting:

these provide for the final result. These must precede. The One concerned is called God and more on this is seen in *3 as below, as in SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10.

Communication is not really a marvel - GIVEN the marvel of mind back of it. Organisation is not such a wonder - GIVEN the intelligence and conceptualisation, the assessive capacity and the roving creativity involved. Mind is like that. Spirit is like that. This is one of the things which it selectively and operationally and naturally does, being well within its ambit. Moreover, it is without operational parallel, except derivatively, when one is using in one way or another, what is first provided as base and source.

Its Essence

Moving then to the germ of information, and unharassed by fuzzy questions,not left in lordly limbo, but consistently confronted, and having now extradicted such, one may ask - What is the essence of the thing, this information ?

Information is stylistically prepared, conferrable knowledge, susceptible to impartation, command or both. Its transfer may involve code, or direct inter-personal realisation for which intimation may be in a situation so pregnant with preliminary understanding structure or both, that it constitutes unwritten language, such as the raising of an eye-brow to advise a seller of your willingness to bid higher. Information is always linguistically expressible, but not always so expressed. Its presence, though not its fulfilment, may be stored in proto-coded form, summonable and dirigible at will, since it is thinkable. It is potentiable for performance and may be activated by challenge to character, need, error, or enticement, or many another purpose.

Its ultimate mode is thought, its inseparable criterion is meaning and its frequent utilisation is by code, whether or not specifically formulable as a commonly learnable language, as in the inter-personal case; while in storage it may be consigned to second and third generation, prompt-signals, encased in thought, relayable according to the conditions in view, or correlatively programmed to situations foreplanned.

Ultimately, apart from utilisation modes adopted as suitable, information is transferable thought, subjectible to codes, modes and methods as broadly imaginative as the mind of the thinker and the spirit of the conceiver, dirigible to purpose at any level, however far may be the mode from its origination, and however impersonal the procedures, once the production itself is complete. The information may be temporal or eternal, depending on the mind and the spirit concerned in its formulation, its forwarding and its fashioning.

Whether a lie should be called information is perhaps a moot point; but if it it be included, it means that part of the purpose of the thinker/spirit, the person who has it, is to distort fact, prior to formulation for transmission. Information may be deceptive, constructive or distortive. As transferred knowledge, it may be conditioned in definition to factual knowledge, correct knowledge, or knowledge improperly so-called, but transmitted anyway. Indeed, if you are INFORMED about a matter, you may through deception be misinformed, but you have the information, misleading or ignorant in part as it may be. In essence, it might be put that information is the forwardable and fashioned realm of thought, ideas, ideals, actualities, data designated and designed for outward motion, in the case of need.

It must be said that one might garner information ONLY so that one might oneself be informed; but in this case, the work still has to be done as if for another, technical sub-questions apart; and it is still not only to be transmissible, but actually transmitted. In this case, it is to one's own mind, which must grip and grasp it.

Knowledge and information

Knowledge is information only insofar as it is transferable to the target (person, surface, situation), and this effectually. Where this is not done, but the provisions are in place, it is potential information, information in type. If the provisions for the procedures are not in place, but they may readily be appointed, then it is in principle information. Information is always addressable to a target, and relates to reality or its confused misapprehension or deliberate distortion. Information does not have to be true, but presentable as such; or if about imaginary things as a vogue or type, it needs to be capable of conveying the data in view so that it may be viewed.

Knowledge, on the other hand, may cover whole realms of deception or confusion, but is conceived as relating to what is there, so that being known, it achieves this status. Thus one may KNOW of deceptions and absurdities, being informed, or a person might actually be duped by them. In the former case, it is knowledge; in the other error. Information may convey either, with the spirit and purpose of good or evil, being a medium and a means.

The pre-occupation on the part of some, with transmissive technicalities - like checking data on the minutiae of pigmentation in paint, and brush droplet dynamics, when the point in view is the change in a wall cover, and all that this means, is relevant but superficial to the essence. The directive to point is a concerted enterprise of many parts, with a prelude of thought about whether there should be change (the means utilised or not), and what is its comparative cost in directed labour and substance, by this means, or that, and in what way this will solve or salve the impact of some motivation, or realise a thrust of purpose. With such things at all levels of thought resolved, and a desire for transmission, information to this end is producible. Of course, you could have information about stages in this process, but then these would need to be clear and conformed enough to actuality, to make sense for the transmissee. Information must inform, or lose its lease.

Information to fund a target mind, to mislead or educate it, or both in part, to achieve a results, as with a baby, is deployed by means correlative to the receptive means, and the achievable results. For the baby is the breast, and the connection is by the mouth, the mans and the method intimately correlative. Such is the nature of transfer, and in this case, of nurture.

In inter-personal, direct information, as in the case of the sale and the eyebrow, noted above, we are dealing with a known situation with its various parameters and confines, so that little may be sufficient to impart a directive for crucial action, even a command. This, written in code or in full could occupy a paragraph or even page; but it is still information.

Analysis

As to information, then, It is more comprehensive and subjectible to overview and understanding, to start with the necessary source in understanding, than with the form of coded concepts and commands, used in the thrust of desire. Better for perception of its nature is this, than in trying to thread one's way through whole series of largely extraneous considerations, based on the merely technical modes of its transmission.

It is certainly proper to study language, and the resources of a playwright than what his enacted drama is to convey; but when your object is not in itself in the sphere of the means, but in the matrix, the result, the product, then you move from the particularities of transference to the gist of the performance, entering at the level of the totality, its mood and substance, more than its mode. To be sure, the mode may ALSO have its OWN information, concerning the mind of the author, his use of language a clue; but in command and directive, this is a subsidiary if most engaging consideration. Such a consideration is the more appealing, when the language used has a vast historical background of its own, which bespeaks much in the large array of options visible as available.

Thus there is the portent, the content and the conveyal, with information. The modes and means for information are there; as is the knowledge basis, and purpose to impart, screenable in result by such sophisticated systematic means. There is the nature of the information, including the always relevant ultimate configuration for it, the target for all of this, the selected assemblage of what is tapped in output, and the cogitative or correlative input resulting, involving the relationship to the exporter and the receptive capacities of the target and so on.

Many are the methods; one is the substance; all the features and foci of knowledge are the background, creation or use of the channels of communication of information are the means, with proof against misinterpretation, mauling and dispersal, the challenge, a provision either IN the message, its manner of formulation, or in procedures co-opted to prevent accidental loss or contamination. These relate to conservation devices, but are not the information, which may be false or true, and designedly one or the other, according to the nature of the project in view, and the spirit of the sender.

Put differently: seen in the view of the various and necessary powers of the investigatory, formulative and expressive aspects of information, which has to be gathered by productive labour, as to character, and impacted with thought as to its intrinsic species of evidencing itself, and rendered both expressible and receivable by the chosen target: there are realms of action and being. There is the essential on the one hand, and the merely methodical on the other, each readily discernible apart, and in concert. There are the means and what these are directed to fulfil, these being analytically different. They can be studied separately.

Only one of these actually is the information, as noted above, thus facilitating focus on what each is. Moreover, there is WHAT is the topic, what the mode of expression in itself, the style, the procedure for thought, the introduction to idea or thought or command, and then the type of expressive technicalities in their systematic side, for transmission and the correlation of this with the capacities, whether personal or made programmatic, in the target. How is the data treated in its initial discovery, form and formulation, and indeed in what spirit is it so made ? these are questions always relevant to information, but not always positive, since it may omit some of these considerations. They feature, however, within its scope.

At the outset is the simple point: How is the information to be gained, how stored, how processed, how ordered, how organised, in what mode, command, warning, order, suggestion, sharing and so forth, is it to be implanted, while the whole realm must be faced of what is the expected impact, personal or other in any recipient, and the result if it be initially impersonal, but then found by persons and realised for its ultimately personal origin. As with architecture, so programs tend not to hide, but to reveal something of the one who formulates and forms it.

Much lies about information; but in itself, it is organised data, programmatic in potential, codable in kind, linguistically expressible, sent by chosen means, by repetitive program or direct interchange, inspectable where information about how to reach the information is at hand, with various levels of comprehensibility inherent, according to the point of the gaining and sending in the first place.

It is like a rocket. It has a purpose to penetrate, a correlative and inspectable power to do so and an effectuality or otherwise, to achieve the purpose. Rocketing requires first the ability to conceive and capture in reality, what a rocket is. Then it needs to be made. Then its content must be chosen and matched to its carrying power. It is only then that how it may reach its target becomes a separable follow-on question. It requires knowledge for such high and integrated systematics, and so conception. To be sure, if this were not possible to form it for such effectual work, rocketing would be a term implying rather too much. If it fails, how is anything rocketed ? If it fizzles, what has the target to do with it!

In the analysis of the actuality, rocketing aside, for information and its potential for transmission, we need to concentrate on the sendable item itself, its nature and content, as the criterion to convey. The next step may be multiple and have endless seeming episodes sequentially provided for its success; but just as the rocket itself is the base, so is the content contained the capital consideration. What is the nature, formulation, kind, character and content of the information ? If we are to be informed, of what is it ?

For all that, the sending in its due application, and its success, is what distinguishes it for functional definition, making it distinct from being an account of frustrated drive, ineffectual conceptualisation, inadequately articulated desire, or an account of enfeebled foozling.

NOTES

See It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, with Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

*1A

See on bits and its bittern philosophy, for example:

Message of the Words of God ... Chs.   5, 4,

Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 2,

The gods of naturalism have no go! 14

Evidence and Reality   Chs. 2, 5, 6, 7

Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch. 3,

Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch.    1,

The Kingdoms of This World, and the Kingdom of Christ Ch.     8,

The Holocaust of Morality Ch.    3,

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness. Ch. 1,

God's Gift of Grace in Christ Jesus Ch.      7,

History, Review and Overview ... Ch.     5,

It Bubbles ... Ch. 9

Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch.    4,

Repent or Perish Ch.   7,

Possess Your Possessions Volume    3, 3, esp. *2, *3.

See Waiting for Wonder, Appendix.

See The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God ... Ch. 7

In particular let us excerpt this element from that Chapter. This has been revised from the original.

How often does this lordly air of superabundant geometrical art, aesthetic plenitude, profusion of the seemingly delicate, delight to the eye and joy to the mind arise in the world of botany, to be supplemented by clouds in their intensity of glow, originality of design, beautiful in proportion, light and colour in an immense canvas that is not made of materials but mere vapours and gases, lit by the sun, moulded into forms and formats, rushing in splendour, bulking in gravity, with tendrils in grace, so that the art work that is presented makes little of some of the greatest of our artists by comparison.

Mix this with the floral superabundance that evokes the most intense aesthetic response because of its numerical felicity, its order-constraining programs, its subtlety of design, and variety, and the sheer wonder of the trees, vast in strength, or with the lemon-scented eucalypts, slender with proportion like a dancer, delicate pinks in their new bark like a painting and variety within this, like a dress designer's flair, and what do you discover ? It is this: that you have a joy to the most intellectual of minds, a delight to the most artistic, a wonder to the most avidly researching and a result which none can surpass.

In all of this there is that combination of elements with a unique individuality of totality, and a face which presents the integral reality of what is there. It is enough to elicit or indeed solicit the response of mind to its uttermost recesses, and has no bearing on anything less, since it has the very zenith of superabundance. For all mean purpose, it seems like overplay and otiose; but for the mind of man, it satiates with its very liberality, depicting not merely the cover of need, but the mind of the Maker, like an architect who, however lowly his task, has his hand revealed in each building, from the sheer spirit and esprit of the thing.

In the end, the reason for design, depends on the purpose of the Designer. It is quite useless and a simple waste of time to seek to argue that 'nature' is some unseen person with unseen motives or pseudo-motives, or teleological desires, which beckon like spectres from the future, or propel with brilliant inventiveness of sub-moronic mental powers, the works which ONLY MAN can fully appreciate. Man was not choosing between flowers, selecting on beauty, and so enabling them to come to be, at some time before his own advent! Rather does what is now there preveniently meet the mind of man to come, from the hand of the architect of the floral and the engineer of man.

In fact, the magnificence and magnitude of design is NOT something which we FIND 'nature' enabled to produce. All that we find able to produce it, from the elements available for design, is the Designer Himself. His designs are not auto-evocative, autonomous creators, except where logic and imagination enable thought, capacity to deploy power enables its visitation into matter, to make whatever product man may have the felicity to construct. Man the last, is not at all responsible for the first or any part of the way to him!

Other than he, the mere conceptual capacity, the inventive spirit, the imaginative mind with the facility for abstract thought and invention, it is not there. Even with him, it is not adequate for all we are. 'Nature' is dead to the production claimsof those who worship it, directly or indirectly, alive to the products which it constitutes. Naturalism is febrile myth, tedious toying with what disappears like the smile on the Cheshire cat in Wonderland, as you inspect it. Cars do not make cars, books to not write books, and life merely keeps to its kinds; it is man who makes what is within his parameters, and God who makes the parameters by which man is guided.

Naturalism is as dead as spontaneous generation, autonomous information generation and decreasing designs over time: it has no go. It is mere contra-factual invention, contrary to the discovery of the methods used, the results obtainable and the nature of the case. 'Nature' or if you want to become scientific instead of flirting with fantasy, non-living objects do not show ANY power to INVENT forms of law. They show merely the power to FOLLOW them.

LIVING objects show no power to invent information; they only show the power to conserve it, and gradually lose it, but in any case, not engender it. Information being coded, comprehensible, communicable report, it HAS to be suitable for mind by being MADE so. The power to engender conceptually coded and comprehensible report is not part of matter. The power to CONTINUE such information is indeed in the DNA, by reproductive devices, with room for variations which NEVER show any power to invent new kinds, because new information has no source, and hence no result.

The MEANS of variation within kind are numerous, including such features and foci as diet, transfer of information, damage to genes or to the pleiotropic parcel covering control units, and so forth. Knowledge grows, but things do not change their kinds, while we learn more of the editing which controls, the leverage systems and the parameters of programs.

For that matter, and to be complete, we might add that imaginary 'spectres' as with Hoyle, himself far more realistic in facing facts and implications than most! or organisational powers with teleological foundation, as with Denton, when unhappily he leaves the facts at which he showed such promise, to fall into the ditch of philosophy and imaginary, non-causally, non-empirically attested fantasy: these do not attest themselves.

Any CHILD may imagine anything with significant freedom. Knowledge however requires that it attest itself. It may do so directly or indirectly, but IMAGINATION is NOT the bridge. It is not thinking about what might be if things only were what they attest themselves not to be; it is the use of imagination to procure the principles for thought and institute the logic for mind which is relevant.

It is reason based on evidence, and requiring validation as to its own premisses (as noted in It Bubbles Ch. 9, *1A, and exhibited in some depth in such sites as TMR Ch. 5, The Wit ... Ch. 2, *2, The Bright Light ... Ch. 7) that is required for orderly thought and valid operations. Matter is not imaginative. He who has the necessary prime priorities in the case is God.

What has any CURRENTLY OPERATIVE, imagined 'spectre' calling the present to the glorious future, in some sort of idealistic depiction to do with reality which does not GO currently in any such direction, and does not SHOW any such attestation! Rather in the second law of thermodynamics we find an OBSERVATIONAL reality that such things do NOT happen now, and in the degeneration aspect of information, a second attestation in the same direction, while in terms of necessary causation, precisely this had to be so without adequate systematic and trans-systematic powers at work. It is useless to imagine what accounts for facts that are not there. The CURRENT is the nature of the hypothesis and the current excludes, by data available, and the aetiological constraints, the need for such an otiose theory.

Why are your children crying, Matilda ? asks her friend. It may be that there has been a significant emotional deprivation, or there may have been some emotive excitation, based on an ontological questing which is being frustrated ... Matilda, who is rich in imaginative resources, but empirically blind does not know. .

Oh my dear, says her friend Diana, who had just posed the question, how blind you are! They are not crying at all. I was just trying to see whether you are as blind at home as in your teleological theories at work!

Explanations are not required to explain mysteries which do not attest themselves. As to the past, as the Bible states, an adequate causation came from the Causative Creator, who created the material of causation with the manner of an author who calls into being by his power to do so, his design-creative, imaginatively-conceptual, felicitously-organisational flair and capacity to encode, what he conceives and so contrives. It may be a book, be it novel or other.

There is ALWAYS the requirement for this, whether it be held to happen at this time or that, or from some futuristically conceived pseudo-being, or other. It is just when you conceive of it from the perspective of an imaginary being calling things into being from an advance post in the future, you really need to be seeing it happen in order to delve into imagination for its existence. Moreover, what is the nature of such a pseudo-being ? Does it have the above type of cause-inducing and utilising power or not ? If it does have it, then it is not a pseudo-being but a being. If it does not have it, the hypothesis is just words, self-denying of any function and hence bumble-words that buzz and are irrelevant.

As to this calling into being, were it to occur, on the part of a being necessarily so equipped, in fact God, beyond nature and able to endue it with all it takes to be what it is conceptually, mathematically, organisationally, in terms of exegesis of designs and correlation of the same, the texture of mutually-reliant synthesis and so forth: then the Being would have to have a perfect understanding of the mathematics and logic of the case, to induce a model which goes, into being.

What then would a comprehensive basis have to embrace, in order to be able to conceive as in the future, and looking back, incite the present to grow into some unobserved increment in organisation or destiny or magnificence or splendour or development of artistry or engineering, such as are null in observation ? It is not to a future drawing the present to itself, that we must look, for that is simply to place a need for current uplift where it does not occur.

But what would be needed, by what engendered dependent being at the first, and the kinds which continue, amid the variation introduced in the brilliance of the genetic structure, without compromising the types. What of this eternal basis, purposeful, profound, cogitative, perceptive of the personal: what would it need ? It would need in addition to that vast knowledge which NOT ONLY knows enough to make and relate all the stuff, so that it is not stuff, and the power to invent it, so that it is what is needed, but that additional power to adjust, with knowledge, all that is, in terms of what is (desired) to be, so that it might come into being, multipartite in felicitous facilities, transformed, informed and cohesive in language, concept and correlative execution, with reciprocal inbuilt power in field, so that communication may occur, information arise and be sent, and co-ordination become massive.

That, as with efforts to rebuild a partly demolished and partly stranding structure, is a nightmare for a designer! You require something beyond mere class and any type of hype for such performance, and for liberty in particular, to reject what you will and taunt or vaunt or worship folly, or even seek the truth! The natural scene does not do it on its own, any more than it performed its first construction, before it was there!

The thought of having to add components to an existing status quo, is merely a method of envisagement of the creation. There is however a reality which there indeed applies.

Thus when mankind falls, as it has done, as the only verifiable and validated book attributed to God, in existence, attests, then the powers of creation are able to reconstruct the broken mind, fallen spirit, polluted consciousness, and the personal perception in His coverage of all He has made, even enabling pardon with peace to be promulgated (Isaiah 52:7ff.); and we have also been given the information in the same book of the Lord (Isaiah 34:16), that not a superman from nature's nurture, but the living Word of God has been incarnated to bear man's penalty for as many as receive Him, man being given an essential liberty in such matters, and the Lord establishing past all deceit or human imagination who are His own (John 1:12, Ephesians 1:4). None can fail to be re-created, saved, pardoned except by his or her own fault, valiant for folly in the midst of truth (Colossians 1:19ff., II Peter 3:9).

Vast, then, are the uses of information. But as to its invention of itself, procurement of its own powers, marshalling its resources in preparation, and applying them in formation,, and for that matter, gaining and organising them in the first place, and as to its deposition in programs and provision of a body for man, that is asking rather a lot of what would have to have made itself from the first, prior to its own existence. Nature making nature ...

It is just that such does not evidence itself; but the requirement of logic makes it necessary for the Being to have all it takes whether it be fecklessly misconstrued in terms which are anti-observational and futuristic or as attested by a NOT ongoing creation, complete in type. The latter, empirically, in our case is a matter of the past as attested by the deposit of creation, of which we are all part through action very much in the past. To this the First Law, that of the Conservation of Mass and Energy gives elegant testimony (cf. TMR Ch. 1 as marked).

The First and Second Laws concern what the universe is found to be; its mass-energy is a given; and its entropy, lowering of the available energy available, is a testimony. As with things made, taking a total or isolated system, what it is, as to mass-energy stays, and it then tends to decline from the specialised nature of its being. These laws with precision and elegance reflect the biblical reflection.

The CURRENT situation is that whatever provided mass and energy overall, is not now doing so. Yet it is here. Hence the current situation is not its source, but its result. It is the same with design: it is not currently naturally advancing in type. There is no known law of decrease of entropy, so that surges of splendour grip the earth as its natural and innate lore, sending it ever upwards. Such are not found. They are imagined as property rites, but are not found as property rights.

Karl Popper is right: there IS NO LAW of evolution (cf. SMR p. 145). Hence whatever provided the upbuilding of competence and function, is not now doing so, but has done it in the past. As in Genesis, these things having being done, stayed put; and to be able to achieve extant status, they were put there by what is competent for the entire result, matter, design and designation, command, kind and purpose. How many more unenactable postulates and flat contradictions does the scientism which wants nature out of nature, without ground for either or anything, require ? Biblically God started it and finished it, as authors do; being sufficient for it from eternity, and the results have their laws, which do not fit with intrinsic creation, but extrinsic. Logically, a sufficient source was eternally available, since nothing has bo base, no result, power or potential. Once introduce it as the base level for all, and nothing will be the same for ever. Eternity is necessary for temporality.

Again, as we HAVE already seen, the brute hard work, then, which in fact is a toil of precision, and hence CAN be and is done already, is not measured in fantasy about futures, but observable result contained from the past. it is illogical to try to make things natural come from what does not show any current operation in such creation, let alone from what would exist in futuristic drawing ever onward, starting and stopping for no assignable reason, dragging things up, in reflective or retrospective operational mode, making such things happen which never now are seen to happen. Where amid the ruins of types, the old generics, are new scripts being seen written, as nature is smitten! Does it arise from the grave ? Is the tomb a womb ?

It can never be too strongly emphasised that accounting for what does not happen is a work of confusion, bordering on delusion. Even Professor Stephen Jay Gould felt it (cf. Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6), when faced with a finding of substantial decrease in major designs over time; and Professor J.C. Sandford now brings the whole point of the decline in the human genome, continual and increasingly perilous, to light (cf. Waiting for Wonder Appendix). . How does decrease induce superman, or any such motion! The imagination of many loves it; the observation of all finds no sustainable testimony in that direction. Adaptation is no more creation than turning on the air-conditioner is the signal that a new car is being created. Such scripts are not written by 'nature'. It does not have what it takes, shows not exposure of the same, gains no testimony of its operation, or rationale for its presence.

In such false visions, facts are here superfluous; fiction is requisite.

The requirement of logic is to FIND what DID it, not imagine what might do it, and is doing it, when what happens shows nothing of the sort, and would in any case be the work of the same God of creation as is necessarily implied in the creation, which is ALREADY HERE (cf. News 57).

In fact, such teleological diversions are a monument to the unscientific nostrums of our Age, so that efforts are made to imagine what is loth to show itself, explain what does not evince itself, hypothesise what is null in self-exhibition, and to do so in the very face of what has already evinced itself (since we are), and ceased (since the upward surge is not evinced and would require the same Causative Adequacy, if it were). This, being ignored, as if by the ultimate of the blind and the thankless, is left like a cheque for a million dollars in your bank, used but never traced as to source, while you hypothesise on what might come next, which however does not arrive.

See for example

1) News 57,

2) SMR pp. 145ff.,

3) SMR Chs. 1 - 2, with

4) Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming, esp. Chs. 4-6, and

The Lord of Longsuffering ... Ch.2, *2.

See for example, Waiting for Wonder, Appendix.

See for instance, SMR pp. 330-331 (at number 249), TMR Ch. 1 at this site.

A good example is found in the work of David Hume. This is treated in SMR Ch. 3 and The Bright Light ... Ch. 7, for example, the latter containing references. As Encyclopedia Britannica notes, "he concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience." His preoccupation with series made him impervious to the question of who forms a theory about what series are and are not, what they signify or what they do not, and in what way they are to be conceived, as bits or as significations of a scenario shown by its products, initial provision and logical requirements. A critic of the meaning of series is not a series, or else he could not conceive outside the serial, to find its place in the scheme of things, be this to deny one or to affirm one. Opinions about series are not series, for if they were, they could not assess them positively or negatively, being outside and beyond them in order to become their observers, judges and critique producers.

Evacuating reality from sequences, Hume did far more than BE one, and hence his confusion is apparent. For more detail see the references above, where Hume is given substantial treatment.

Interesting in this connection is a citation from Christianity for Skeptics, a recent work from Drs Kumar and Sarfati. It notes Hume's Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion, and the words, "A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it."

In that Hume's basic and characteristic, inadequate and vacuous system on the meaning of causation is precisely an example of what he above rejects as an absurd system, simply forgetting his own part in making up that system, he here intrudes where on his own basis, he can have no part. He has literally forgotten himself. In his recasting of causality in such terms, and then using it in explication and grounding, we have here a contradiction, in more senses than one, a self-contradiction. If cause in operation cannot guide you to bases and grounds, being simply a name for the serial, then it is being forgetful of oneself then to act as if one could use that very stripped down entity meaningfully to account for things, or point out the obviousness of them!

Francis Schaeffer is at pains to show a plan for review concerning such things, with the factual in a lower segment, and the visionary or non-rational in another, so that the hardest or most negating things may be said in the other, and the most elevated in the other (cf. his Escape from Reason).

Here, then, Hume participates in the realm in which lies the condition of the system of Immanuel Kant, where the REAL and underlying actuality is denied access, as a hidden knowledgeability that cannot be known, as if sheltering behind the curtains of the play we are watching. Kant too tries to dismiss the stringently logical movement from causality to Creator, by the device this time of making man the operational creator of causality, so that his very mind presents what he may mistakenly conceive as objective causation.

However, this similarly to the case of Hume, is merely to assume what he denies. It is one more case of obstructive obfuscation when you causally move to the direct knowledge of God and His testable and verifiable revelation. If, then, man is to be seen in a Kantian knowledge trip, as the CAUSE of CAUSATION, his mind making it up, imposing it, a sort of glasses imposing its own terms on the data, then he is simply USING causation to EXPLAIN it, the simplest case of begging the question.

All these things have been shown in detail in the various references given. Here they are merely noted in that they enable easy recall for our present purpose regarding the sort of obfuscation with which philosophies so often and for so long have harassed the human race. Small wonder then that Paul in his writings in the Book of the Lord, the Bible, has this to say:

"Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit,
according to the tradition of men,
according to the basic principles of the world,
and not according to Christ..." (Colossians 2:8).

Christ is, precisely, the revealing, not the concealing word of the everlasting God, who not satisfied with providing the obvious (Romans 1:17ff.), which man in teeming multitudes to his enormous loss and inherited judgment tends to suppress, sent Him in human form, so that in this way becoming His only begotten Son, He was God as man on earth (as shown in Luke 1:35, Hebrews 1-2). Here He was visible, audible, operative from realm beyond the created one in which we dwell, to this our own.

Where confused and self-contradictory thought clung to idols whether of wood, or ideas in the heart (as in Ezekiel 14), like someone on a ship in turbulent waters, clinging to the railing when about to vomit, God on the other side went so far as to SEND not simply words verifiable, but His only begotten Son, carrying from eternity not only the signals but the substance of reality. This, it was His own life in this format (Romans 8:1-3), so that experimentally one could see Him operate DIRECT, meeting every test with a facility which agony did not abort (Hebrews 5:7), and simultaneously providing eternal atonement for any who received Him in person! (John 1:1-14, 5:19ff., 10:9,27-28, Hebrews 1-2, 9).

For the cult of the forbidden, see for example SMR pp. 150 -151, 330-331 (at number 249).