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Chapter 5

SIN AND SALVATION

HYPNOSIS WITHOUT CREATION

    AND THE NECESSITY OF RE-CREATION

SEEING STARS, WHEN  THE IMAGINATION IS VEXED, AS IN AN ACCIDENT,
IS NO GROUND FOR SEEING WHAT GOD HAS TO SAY,
AS IF ONE WERE STILL SEEING
THAT KIND OF STARS

I

The Personal Situation of Man

Man, nowadays, rather more pervasively than with some more blessed former astral objects, becomes a specialist in seeing stars, and this neither from the result of accidents nor from astronomical proclivities. He is finding glory where it cannot come. He is seeing it in tarnished relics of humanity, when the glory which neither changes nor fades is at hand.

How long must the Lord show patience to this earth, when the special time was  announced some  2000 years ago by one, Jesus Christ, who at once went on to show precisely in power and peace and profundity and the presence of God, WHY it was a special time. This, it was the unique opportunity for man to be at peace with his Creator.

It was special too in this, that the Lord had waited over half a millenium since Daniel had foretold the massive advent of what would bring the whole of history to its conclusion on this earth, both for blessing and cursing, and its crucial date (Highway of Holiness Chs.      4,   7, Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2), where in a sorrow to typify and essentialise all sorry, wrought by bearing sin for others, Christ would die. Though the Prince of power, yet there would be nothing for Him. He would be left bereft, even of life. This desolation was to be the source of exuberant spiritual life from Him who made all life. Now that date had come.

Would YOU not be interested in the coming not of some comet, as it does periodically with predictable visits, but the coming at the end of the predicted period of over 500 years, and this, it was announced. It was reported by the One so regal with the reality of God, that He could and did heal multiplied multitudes, never failed in speech or teste either by those tormented by evil, evil spirits or disease, or in terms of the law of God, to which He had come, though God, as man, to seek and to save what was lost.

Would YOU not be zestful to seek Him out, find the wisdom  and the wonder of God, ready for acclaim,  as now they give to some football star who for some passing period manages to show the requisite ferocity, or skill, amid injuries ? Is this not more central  than the use of the body, and in any case does it not include from God, ALL needed to  find and  serve Him whose glory is personal and whose gift includes a friendship surpassing any other!

If not, is it some sin which binds you more than any manacles, is it some pride which calls you more than any fact ?

Here is the RE-CREATION which man needs, for the lack of which he ruins his planet, curses his neighbour, kills the flower of youth in the nations, as if a huge high priesthood to murder were the very religion of this earth! Here is the reminder that we are not the product, in our powers of precision and thought and mind and will and oversight and overview and understanding of what has no basis, for how build a skyscraper on feckless nothings of no sense or substance or meaning or orderly capacity! And that skyscraper is man.

Locked in step, man almost hypnotically, is proceeding more and more like some goose-stepping Nazi youth exuberance, or North Korean parallel, or Chinese flourish of power as it seeks to intimidate or at least intimate or insinuate to the entire Pacific basis that here is hegemony, here is fear, here is one who will take more and more for it costs to resist, and who will lend money wrought from near slavery, and so secure holds over wasteful nations, for future hegemony over them! Yet this is the small end of the stick!

He is locked in worse goose-stepping than this, for it is his very soul, which some nations like to take over, which is coming to be the very Evening Star of aspiration of the rapacious, the false prophets, the false governments,  the false educators, the subverted among mankind. They teach more and more to the young, the follies of naturalism, as if nothing were the name of wonder, and bits were the meaning of understanding, or power came from nowhere, and existence needs no cause, even when multiply dependent on endless, integrated laws, and laws needed no utterance!

Ezekiel in Ch. 18 transmitted the cry for the one who sins against God or man to bear his sin, and not try to pass it on to some cause outside, as if not really a participant. Nor more say, He declares, " The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge.  As I live, 'says the Lord God, 'you will no longer say this proverb in Israel. Behold, all the souls are Mine, the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine: the soul who sins shall die."

This individual responsibility and removal of guilt exits being in place, the Lord proceeds in Ezekiel 33 to indicate a special case for being responsible. It is this: If you see death and disaster looming, then  WARN. If you see it and do not warn, how are you not in terms of inaction a contributor ? Concern is apt and  appropriate and warning is the least to do and the most obvious. Ezekiel is given such a charge. But how in Christian love would any fail to warn as he or she may ? Is not disaster the name of the godless game ? How then could one fail to warn, not continually, since there is a season, but reliably, since there is a need! Speaking to Ezekiel as prototype, in the love and mercy of His name, the Lord proceeds:

"When I say to the wicked,

'O wicked man, you shall surly die!'

and you do not  speak to warn the wicked from his way,
that wicked man shall die in his iniquity;
but his blood I will require at your hand.

'Nevertheless if you warn the wicked to turn from his way,
and he does not turn from his way,
he shall die in his iniquity;
but you have delivered your soul."

Knowing the tendency in man to put off the evil day of facing his own evils and seeking deliverance, and then bemoaning his situation as if he had not rejected mercy itself from God, the Lord proceeds:

"Therefore you, O son of man, tell the house of Israel:

'Thus you say, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us,
and we pine away in them, how can we then live ?

"Tell them,

'As I live, says the Lord God,

'I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,
but that the wicked turn from his way and live.
Turn, turn, from your evil ways!
For why should you die, O house of Israel ?' "

The warning then is not in essence belligerent, any more than is that of a medical man who warns of the results of not stopping smoking carcinogenic fumes; nor is it any less severe, since death is the result of ignoring the warning, with the body, probable, but with the soul, certain!

The warning in this Chapter, then, one from Christian love and concern, in the midst of a calling to this service of Gospel preaching and teaching the word of God, from the Lord, is by no means unfeeling, but the more sympathetic, though not empathetic, any more than does the medical man have empathy with the sensuous pleasures of smoke, for he sees its folly, or does so in increasing numbers. 

Indeed, when it comes to the souls of men, of women, of children, there is a unique pathos and poignancy in seeing the seductions of sin, and the consequences of its hypnotic fixation of the heart on its wares and ways, which in everything lack wisdom, destroy life in its abundance and make mockery of truth. Some being caught, might suspend the mockery, but the sin does not, and its surge is not caused to cease by human effort, since where there is will, where is the way, and where there is the way, where is the humility, and where there is the humility where is the faith which, seeking the Lord, seriously considers His commandments, let alone does them; and where is the love for the Lord with all the heart, soul, mind and strength, for which we are made, though free to dispossess ourselves of it and of His for us!

There is only one way for peace with God, and that is what He has proposed, published and paid for. What is the use of crying to God to be fair and just with you, when you insist on using HIS life which He has given you, YOUR way, as if you were a god, when that is merely a delusion as obvious at your birth as at  your death!

Indeed, God is not only urgent and urging in this matter, but His very life in Christ, the Eternal Word made flesh, has been freely poured out to give grace for your deliverance, so that the coverage is both adequate and relevant, like a wonderful cheque, whether you draw on it or not; and if your name is not on it, it is not from the lack in the love of God, but the surfeit of knowledge, that He has foreknown your refusal. He redeems what is redeemable and sets the charge for rejection where ? It is precisely where man is, for as He told them, shown in John 15, "If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He hwo hates Me hates My Father alos. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin; but now they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father."

There is no use seeking to subvert the sense of it:

THE ULTIMATE GROUND FOR JUDGMENT ON MAN IS FIRSTLY, INFORMED KNOWLEDGE OF THE SALVATION PROVIDED, OR THE EQUIVALENT OF IT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD, AND SECONDLY, THE REJECTION OF IT.

It is just the same in John 3:19, where the universal willingness of God has been stressed in John 3:15-18, as His being loth to judge, as in Ezekiel 33:11. There the criterion of judgment in the face of such universal love from God is stipulated with admirable clarity: " And this is the condemnation that light has come into the world, and men have loved darkness rather than light." Why ? The statement is this: It is "because their deeds were evil." You may protest, Oh, but I am good! So many are self-contented, but this is not the place for self-evaluation. The examiner with the knowledge issues the report, not the student. Self-satisfaction in the face of the glory of God in Christ Jesus is in itself a horror and a holocaust of morality and truth, an ignorance both feckless and futile.

Alas, sin has many channels, and one of the most soporific of the sedatives which come swirling down to this generation is the distaste for creation, the endeavour to say, Sin ? who me a sinner ? You must be joking. I never had an evil thought in my life. Things just happen, don't you know!

In fact, however, the testimony of creation, as of all else in the Bible, can be overthrown only by the irrational, who disclaiming God, want to erect a knowledgeability in the realm of truth, to teach us their nescience. But where is truth to be found, if all is mere reaction without direction ? and again, Where is the mere reaction in a universe of laws so numerous, so inter-active, so majestic, often so formulable mathematically, so precise in the very operations of our own genetic structure, that we even EXIST by them, even as they are denied! Watch me breathe! cries the youngster, who has been charged with having a bad breath! I never drew a breath in my life!

So the sad lunacy for logic transition proceeds; but we, we are not children! Responsibility endures. Pre-occupation with cultural intoxication makes more understandable the folly, as in the case where a young driver was drunk; but it in no way removes the horror of it all.

II

The Conquest of Casuistry

Since we come to the last, let us look at the first.
As with crime, it is frequently a productive method.

Ponder Genesis 1 awhile, and here we revert to what was written in

In a short overview of the text of Genesis at this level, and of some of its implications, we proceed to an excerpt from a former work, The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness, Ch. 9.

 

The Uncomprehending Darkness,

and the Deliciousness of Knowing the Light

John 1 and Genesis 1

Part I

Engendering Friendship with Genesis
 

In Genesis 1:1 we find that in the beginning God created. The first two letters for 'beginning' and 'created' being the same, there is an indisputable pulse of dynamic. The two go together, are wedded: the One who acts, and the Creation which is the act.

We have examined before the exact nature of the text (cf. Gracious Goodness ... Ch. 6) and its context (cf. Dayspring with the preceding reference). We have seen that Genesis 1:1 is not a part of a sequence but a bold, cardinal declaration. In the beginning, God was there and He acted. We then move to the earth which commences the sentence, so divorcing it from any mere bound connotation of a serial character from verse 1. 1:1 is not then an intimation of a sequence but a declaration of illimitable majesty. The Spirit is then seen brooding, hovering, active over the creation.

The right kind of environment is created for what is to follow, organising, ordering and constituting a system of provision. Then the desired kinds are created. Actions from verse 2 on are in sequence not only grammatically, but in the enumeration of the days, designated in ordinal notation, in a way which in the Old Testament only refers to the rotation style days, in our day approximately 24 hours in lenght. Whatever however the exact rotational time, the concept is the same.

Indeed, the numbers, first, second, third ...  are even enfolded in days, real days with evenings and mornings, days that have acute correlation with their initial invention.

Thus, since  light for the universe was created after substance (v. 3 is after v. 2), the first day started with darkness, not with light, so that the phrase, 'the evening and the morning' is born, and becomes the descriptive usage for the rest of the days of creation - each day has light for one part of it, and starts wth the darkness as ordered from the first, before the light came on the scene commenced without it. Thus the ordinal connotation, the nature of the action, its integral relation to the context show us that here the term 'day' is not used to confuse or to confound, but to show us what the term 'day' which we use, has as to its origins, including the sequence of day and night - but no, night and day!

How lose is that exegesis that is nothing but eisegesis miscalled! For 'ages' instead of days, we must distort Hebrew usage in the Old Testament, invent a new scope for the ordinals in such cases, ignore the birth of the phrase in conjunction with the sequence of matter and light, and ignore the fact that the account of the divine creation is showing us HOW we got what we HAVE (which is days - summed up in Genesis 2:4). For such a distortion of meaning, we must also ignore that the text  is using terminology consistently and persistently both here as the book of Genesis develops,  in the frank usage of normalcy, while showing in the terminology of the comprehensible and the structure of the deposition of what we have,  associated with the divine actions and their inter-relationships, which led to these situations to which our common words apply.

It is THUS that the heavens and the earth were created, we read in Genesis 2; it was thus that the days and kinds and light and heavenly bodies were formed; and we do not invent a vocabulary which is other than what we have to express these astronomical happenings and initiations, these botanical, biological, structural, astronomical, illuminative, these stringencies of continuity and commands of creation in their intimate nexus, as if we are free to divorce from the uniform context at arbitrary will.

Rather with discipline we follow the word of God as given, the consistent connotational medium of the text and find out how what we have came to be here. Terms are not magically distorted in order to make a distressed document; but rather they are to be taken in the same sense in each case that the others and the explanatory character of the account require, and the retrospective glance of 2:4 implies.

When the Lord gives an explicit account of the ways, days, devices and order of creation and then proceeds to use the every language of generation applied to the creation in Genesis 2:1-4, repeatedly to cover what follows in the common light of history, 'the generations of' proceeding in historical continuity, as if to create for the creation, a commonality with the information of its institution for the usage of its norms and modes after its arrival into time, with its ongoing life: when this occurs,  it is not some kind of game. It is for a declarative purpose. From such a base,  it is but obfuscation to obliterate the criteria of the context^*1A, both in Genesis 1 and thereafter and to make fanciful 'interpretations' as far from the witness of the text as the heavens from this earth, and further, since though these are far, this abortion of comprehensibility is far into the realm of imagination, an unspeakable distance from the common light of actual, practical day.

Indeed,  such all but execrable eisegesis cannot be in the interests of objective understanding, but only of an intrusive unbelief, making the patronising care of the word of God the object of philosophical henchmen, violating the vigour and the content of the text for purposes various, whether nefarious, obfuscatory, alienative, or merely misled, to reduce Christianity to some kind of cultural pet or composite synthesis with the thought of an aberrant creation as far from following the text, in many cases, as from following the Lord. To be sure, some may capitulate in weakness to the demands of society or the clammy clasp of the hand of culture, as Sampson did to Delilah in his own disloyalty to the word of God; but whatever the case, it is outside the demands of the text, the context and the continuity of Genesis.

We move on, then, to the light of common day, common kinds such as man (not species of man, or species of cattle, but man and cattle in broad open categories, but ones which cannot be broken, which is the testimony of practicality as well as pronouncement). The terms stars, man, kind, light, day, night and water, dry land having been exhibited in this initiation program, we have them all, and they function in just the way they require by their  normal definition. We do not have night and day ages, nor do we have fixed species but fixed kinds, for man himself varies about a norm; nor do we have stars made of confetti, but stars such as we know. We cannot divorce the scope and the sweep of the context from its centre of gravity, by which it is tied to the earth, and originated in heavenly action.

Instead, to be faithful to the text, we proceed on in the very language of generation (2:4), now that of man in his several categories, spiritual, racial; and it is all in the dynamic grasp of divine overview and oversight, whether in institution of the kinds in the first place, including such variations as giants, or segments such as the historical groupings which show us the banal blighting of the evil, the continuation of the upright,  and the eventual calling of Abraham,  from his racial compartment. It is then that we find his use for the deliverance of mankind, as many as would be receptive, since blessing is not always received (cf. Genesis 12)!

It is thus that we find in total correlation the text of Romans 5:1-12, which traces things in precisely this manner from start to finish. Made, man fell; met, man was given a Gospel of grace; restored in this, his is reconciliation and restoration to victorious living in the very presence of God. It happened from one man who well; it is met by One Man who arose to overcome for all who receive Him. The background basics do not move; they are as clear as is Genesis.

It is thus that we find in total correlation the text of Romans 5:1-12, which traces things in precisely this manner from start to finish.

Only, then,  a determination to dispose of the text or a measure of anaesthesia towards its content, like one drifting through beautiful countryside and too engaged in talk to see it,  can well ignore the total integration of language, purpose and result in the text. Only thus can the make-believe clusters of componencies of the imagination strive or even seek to overturn the objects and objectives of the text, to inform of the generation of these things, heaven and earth and what followed, taking us from the spectacular beginnings to the ongoing results. When however this is done, this lapse is lord, this painful aberration from the rigours of reality is made, then it is no longer the word of God; for it then becomes the word of man, exactly as in Mark 7:7ff..

Indeed, as in Mark 7:9, the grievous consequence is this:

"All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition."

This chapter 1 of Genesis, like what follows, is intense in descriptive factuality, consistently explicatory, sequentially intense, correlative in all aspects and bluntly practical.  We are not expected to contradict the author when He declares, "Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were completed", claiming that it was not so, that it was not evening and morning with the revelation of light source in its time, but instead it was Age and transition, as if night and day, so that an Age came between the declaration of light to come, and its arrival, always starting in darkness, a bleak beginning indeed; or that it was not light which was created, but the light of understanding, or that it was not the case that God so acted, but that there was actually in the beginning a lot of other stuff around, and He just happened to find it, or any other variant to intrude man into the word of God.

The text however simply announces that the beginning shows us God, and shows us creation, and setting forth the order and the implementation of divine strategy for the incremental arrival of the objects of structure and life, leads us in the language of day, to the effects of history. In overview, Ch. 2 then tells us that THIS was the way of the creation of the heavens and the earth, all the host. If it had been otherwise, it would have said so; if there had been other primary sources, it would have said so.

On the contrary, as to the creation, this is how it happened; and since creation is in the Hebrew term, largely as in the Greek of Colossians 1, a term which implies the work of power rather than the matter of means, and is wholly distinct from 'formation', we are being told that the entire institution of what is, came from the source revealed, and in the way stated.

The entirety of origin is as declared. There are no cards under the table, or up the sleeve. Creation is the mode; God is the source; and this is the nature of everything that went into the arrival of all that is.

There were no additional means; there were no additional sources; there was God, here is the universe, that is what happened to bring the second from the first.

Above, the statement was made that we are not expected to contradict the author when He declares (as in Genesis 2:4)... ? Let us clarify that.

We are not expected so to act,  IF we mean to understand His word, to do such things; though known to God for all time is the rebellion, riot or decline of man who will not accept the word of God, using either direct rejection or subtle overtones of intrusion, AS IF to accept it, while actually re-writing it in part, as required by desire.

In fact, not only does usage preclude any of these amazing inventions of innovative theology, grammatical usage, but the summation of the action in Genesis 2 and the usage of terms throughout Genesis with a consistency of normal usage, together with the fact that this is telling us HOW the creation occurred, not how it did not do so. THUS ...!

 

AVOIDING ALIENATION FROM CULTURAL ACCLIVITIES

Let us reflect a little from Dayspring.

CALL IT A DAY!

See That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7, Section E, pp. 174ff. A short except from this, adapted for our present purpose, is provided below.

The singular, sovereign, staccato dispersal of power, in creation matching the overpowering wonder of the Creator, is what is recorded, and as shown in these passages and similar ones,

• "DAY" does not mean DAZE, but is repetitively specified after light comes, evening and morning, with a literal force verging on the science note- book kind of fact-event notation;

• "KIND" is the eventive outcome to continue, and

• historic reality is the scene to which this scenario imposingly comes.

A measure of poetry, it may indeed contain; but poetry designed, as in great music, to hallow the event; nor is it poetical in any pre-emptive sense, it being rather the magnitude of the events, in parallel with the simplicity of the style, which evokes a sense of the poetic. In fact, the language has a certain precision and economy of style, like that of a King to his commanders. In one clear sense, its lack of substantial simile and vague if evocative assertions is about as far from the poetic as Sydney Harbour Bridge. Certainly, there are lines ... but their matrix is unpoetic!

That these are the "generations" of heaven and earth, the originative activities, the accounts, records and reports of the way

• from who was and what was,
• to what is,
   

is made even clearer by the DECLARATION in Genesis 2:1-4 to that EXACT effect. "Thus" it was done, thus "finished", "all the host of them", "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." "Generations" is likewise the term which continues to be used, of other historically specific events, such as descendants from parents. As in Luke 3, so here, the genealogical accounts proceed from the historic to the historic, and in Luke's case, from Adam to Jesus Christ. What the Bible means is not in the least doubt; and the reader is referred to the relevant SMR pages  (e.g. pp. 179-196, 226ff., 482ff.), for more detail.

As in the Bible, so in other earthly history, relatively short time is repeatedly indicated by specialties remaining and rates relating to observation, here in a deftly made and acutely clear delineation of events, their basis, their development and their answer from God: it is such considerations rather than presuppositions, themselves based on the very assumptions which stand in need of support, as shown in the text of this Section, which are apt in textual interpretation. Even if someone should say, in a vague general sort of a way: Suppose God is so great that His days, although in every way to US suggesting what their context imposes, rotational days, in fact has these as thousands of years ? there is nothing to be gained.

In fact, since God IS in fact so great, He is not deficient like some struggling year 12 English student who has not as yet quite grasped the first elements of communication with mature... human beings (whom He created, complete with powers to communicate, supply the equipment and the first in a magnificent synthesis of operative efficiency). He is not deficient in expression: WE are His expression, though subject to sin, and with immense creativity often combined with maleficence of our own making.

If GOD wants to indicate HIS sort of days, to an uninitiated audience, who do not move in the form of God, but in the form of man, He could doubtless do it with a facility which would be just as impressive as the note-fact, act-record sort of depiction found in Genesis 1. However as a teacher-communicator, He CHOSE the form of expression which, for His audience, readers, has this conceptual character, these clear signals, this impelling context, this stage by stage inauguration, this articulation with history. He did not create His announcement so that it would mislead. He did not speak so that it would be ... misunderstood. He did not make so heavily stylised a description so that its every feature would be contrary to His intention.

His utterance is not writhed or contorted (Proverbs 8:6-8). He spoke it because, as in all His utterances, it was and is the truth. Hence what He chose for expression is what we gain for impression from the inspectable vocables, the available phrases, the situational specifications. In the end, this piece of red herring has been left around too long, and its dismissal is accompanied by NO nostalgia, indeed the nose is relieved at it! How time seems to Him is one thing; how it is expressed to us is another. When He wishes to initiate us into some new frame of reference, that is His business. To assume He is doing it by using all our data for specification of something else, however, is to assume Him deceitful or a fool. Either thought is not mere blasphemy; it is logically absurd (SMR Ch.1).

Leave deceit, deviousness, distortion and the lie to the devil; it is his domain and his skills lie there. With God, it is someone who tells us the truth (John 8:26,32,44-45, Psalm 117). Let us leave to the devious and the delinquent, some intrusion misnamed interpretation, by which they express only themselves or their views, while defiling the name of God, in a way wholly suitable for the undoubtedly notable name of Dr Goebbels, who excelled just there. Since God is more intelligent than you or I (like infinitely more, for example), He has no trouble with covering such needs as our minds possess, and in feeding them what they rightly assess from the evidence of His words. If God is more pure than the heavens, then His truth is more settled than they. It is really just a matter in the end, of interpreting what is there (that is, in the Bible), not what is here (in your heart).

When you read your own heart instead of what someone else is saying, you enter into a complicating guessing game of chess and imaginary moves. When your assumptions act on the basis of incompetence or fraud on the part of the communicator, you merely project. This is precisely what is a deplorable waste of time when purity speaks, knowledge articulates and truth divulges itself with infinite teaching skill: when, in short, it is the word of God which we interpret. Even for the word of man, it can become mere presumption. With God, it is imposture.

As to what He said, it is so clear that clarity needs a new name for the case: it is pellucid. Impulsions of creative power created conditions and kinds, and that is the way it is founded, and finished. It may be cursed, and it was so (Genesis 3, Romans 8:18ff);  and it will be finished, for its end in judgment awaits it; but that is the way that it is (Matthew 24:35, Isaiah 51:6).

(For some of the scientific data now available, see the site indicated at the outset in this end-note, in the first hyperlink above. See also That Magnificent Rock pp. 166ff., 181ff. with A  Spiritual Potpourri Ch 4. Updates are  given in TMR Ch. 7)
 

As seen then, in Dayspring as in The Biblical Workman Ch. 7,

 

OVERVIEW FROM THE OVERPASS IN JOHN

How well this illustrates John 1:5.

The power

	of tradition, of culture, of the educative mechanisms man invents,
	of ambition, of generational moulding, traditional thrusts, leading to the great flood of Genesis 6, where the obliterative power of rebelliousness left only devastation for its culmination (Genesis 6:5),
	of such traducing of truth which moved later to the divinely determined destruction of Israel, the deportation of much of Judah and the infestation of the priesthood after the Maccabeans,
	of corruption in its outworkings and invasive motions, to the point that the priests and religious leaders became in the main, the massively mouthing enemies of their own Lord and God, on His arrival as Messiah:

 this entangles itself with the word of God.

It produces tragedies unthinkable, sufferings unspeakable, griefs of passion, devastation of what might have been delightful dynamics and odysseys of wonder; it does not hesitate to assail the Lord when He is available for this purpose, as at Calvary; and even if, as is the case, He turned this with His divine foresight and as He in fact predicted in Isaiah, the Psalms and Zechariah, to the marvel of the Gospel, so that their murder became His sacrifice for sin: yet the thrust of lust loves to avoid all containment.

It rushes on like a frightened stallion, trampling under foot as it may, till frothing and foaming, it lags exhausted. He who made them in the beginning ... says Christ (Matthew 19), in correlation with "in the beginning" as the tonal note for Genesis 1. Yet man no more likes to keep the bounds of the text than of moral life, so eliciting from the Saviour this rebuke (Matthew 19:1-6).

The light shines, and it became flesh in Jesus Christ. It shines, has shone and will shine, ineradicable but alienable to those who prefer the darkness against which He so direly warned (John 3:16-19,36); and whether some good person is carried away in some section of its ways, like Lot in an alien culture, or whether those who err would even assault angels direct, the uncomprehending darkness has its devious and finds injurious the day, skulking in shadows in the very presence of the bright light. It pouts, it shouts, for much may be done in the cover of darkness; and it even changes the vocabulary of truth to call itself light, but it remains a dark light, a mystic dynamic, deadly from the first, without understanding, without solution, without validity, without reason and without blessings^*1.

Its proponents cover the earth with their preaching^*2; but it changes^*3, since it never works, and its gospel is one of human glory or its facades, foci or delusive directors or directives, which being most inglorious (cf. News 82, Tender Times ... Ch. 8), and injurious, never ceases to bring tragedy out of the open highway of triumph, by simply bypassing it in the tangles of trouble, unseeing in its own lack of light.

The light shines and the darkness did not apprehend it, cognise it, gather it to itself, overcome it, receive it with that acceptance which opens the mind to a given light, so that its shining is understood, applied and internalised. Such is the declaration of John 1:3. Such is likewise the disposition of a fallen world, but the light remains and remains to this day as available as ever. As a system it is as certain of doom as the pre-flood civilisation, and glimmers of light from the Lord depart from it more and more as it enhances its escape route and glowering with dull rays, finds its last place (cf. Matthew 24:35).

It reminds one of Jeremiah 4:22-28:

"For My people are foolish,

They have not known Me.

They are sottish children,

And they have no understanding.

They are wise to do evil,

But to do good they have no knowledge."

 

I beheld the earth, and indeed it was without form, and void;

And the heavens, they had no light.

I beheld the mountains, and indeed they trembled,

And all the hills moved back and forth.

 

"I beheld, and indeed there was no man,

And all the birds of the heavens had fled.

I beheld, and indeed the fruitful land was a wilderness,

And all its cities were broken down

At the presence of the Lord,

By His fierce anger.

 

                           "For thus says the Lord:

'The whole land shall be desolate;

Yet I will not make a full end.

For this shall the earth mourn,

And the heavens above be black,

Because I have spoken.

I have purposed and will not relent,

                           Nor will I turn back from it.' "

 

Thus there is a sense of cinders and shame that must come, whether in John 1 or in Jeremiah 4, when the light is denied, the very eternal light of God, and even more so, the light that is sent and meant for man, disposed for his aid and necessary for his life, since it is derived from that same source, God Himself, from the increate and eternal God who was not only present FROM the beginning but IN the beginning.

The light of God, divine and delightful, explaining all, encompassing all that would receive it, arranging all, overseeing all, filled with solutions, effective with remedy: it  is not apprehended, it is not realised for what it is, it is not embraced, taken on board, taken hold of, and it is - though infinitely intimate - yet infamously taken as alien. You see a similar verb in John 1:11, where it states of Christ, the light of the world, the world did not know Him. Here however in John 1:3 there is a sense of awe as the light (present tense) proceeds to its continuous shining, it SHINES; but the darkness in historical response to this eternal reality, one now expressed, DID not receive it into the heart, embrace it with the understanding, find its impact acceptable.

In the dénouement, the always shining light came in definitive mode as Jesus Christ, and in decisive fashion man DID not accept Him, as witness the death and the manner of it, even though this eternal life trashed the grave, as prophecy attested and evidence insisted.

(cf. SMR Ch. 6, Great Execrations ...Ch.   7;
Biblical Blessings Ch. 15, Extended Endnote 2,
Acme, Alpha and Omega Ch.  11, With Heart ... Ch.  3,     
The Magnificence of the Messiah, Endnote 1, 
Dastardly Dynamics ... Ch.  11).

 

 Indeed, with that majesty which divinity has, the Lord of the Bible even engaged in predicting even the DAY, the ordinal day on which this event of resurrection from the grave would occur, as if to laugh at, mock and deride those who imagine that the God of creation cannot handle mathematics, though his creation shows more of it than man can master or muster (cf. SMR pp. 114ff.); for whether it be in prophecy or in the observable and investigable nature of man's marvels of bodily format, and micro-biological panache, it is all one. He does what He says, and we are are of an order of product which we cannot nearly match (cf. SMR p. 211).

The Light had no shadows. Darkness without it, this was the enveloping negative aura of gloom; and despite the continuous shining of the light, the world in its darkness since the fall from the presence of God at the earliest time, found no affinity for this light when it came, incandescent in purity, yet for the better ability of human sight, expressed in human form, incarnate in unique marvel, once to live and once to die on earth, the light incapable of being held in the darkness of death, expelling it as all darkness in the other unique marvel, the resurrection, direct in the dynamic thrust of the Trinity, and with no human intervention.

The world however was not interested. Light ? What did it want with light! It could shine as it would, but received it would not be.

It was as if the Light were immiscible with the world, like an Officer among the men, other, irrelevant to many. Yet He came and they went, perturbed but not involved; for His light was intrusive of their lostness, or appeared starkly competitive with the ambitions of their lives, which they wanted to 'save' for their own use, contradistinct from the aspirations, autonomous pretension and drab desires of this world and its milling occupants. It was as if their spirits were spilled upon the earth like shed blood, lost and loving to be lost, though ruined in the program they chose, spoiled therefore, yet not being able for such a result, being incorporeal, merely vested in flesh: then were they made vapid in meaningless victories and insensate in immeasurable defeats ... The world slumbered and could not awake, like one in a coma.

Its King came and acted as prescribed, and only good was to be seen or found; but they were up to no good, and the world still claps its hands at such a prospect.

 

Various basic elements of the matter of creation and truth are covered to the point, in such sites as those listed below. These bear directly or indirectly on the nature of the divine, His inscriptions, His prescriptions, His decisive thrust and inimitable sovereignty, whether to  create in the beginning, or to re-create, not in woeful  parentheses, but directly by His Spirit,  as in the present day. With God there is no alloy in method, in morality, in compromise, in casuistry of speech or of action. As it is written, consistently, so it is, and to move from this in subjugation to world views of those who have jettisoned logical necessity is as unwise as unproductive. It just does not work that way: that is why there are so many approaches, as listed in Poythress's work noted below. The word of the Lord however is clear in itself (Proverbs 8:8), and by no means is a facilitator of thrusting multitudes of ideas. To this we shall turn in this instance, in due deference to His majesty and declarations.

What then ? It is as in Psalm 106:46:

"Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from among the Gentiles,
to give thanks to Your holy name, to triumph in Your praise." Amen.

Why indeed should the Gentiles say, "So where is their God!" (Psalm 115:2). Let  alone should this be so when He is exceedingly present, excellently clearly, and has spoken not in contrived speech, but as He declares, clearly for understanding. Why stand benevolently poised over many mismatches with the text and its setting when the seamless robe of divine directness has merely to be taken up, amid the roaring and derisory crowds that like to watch the cross, and used as a clear testimony.

As to the related areas noted above, some of these matters are  further explored in Possess Your Possessions Volume 8, Appendix, and in particular *5A within that.

For the list in view, see for example, the following:

The Bible, Not the Declamations of Distillations of Man,
But the Doctrine of Deity Ch. 6,

Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Chs. 1    and 2,

Deity and Design ... esp. 2    and   8, 

TMR Ch. 5 and Barbs ... 6   -7, 

Repent or Perish Ch. 2,

Jesus Christ, Defaced, Undefiled  ...  Ch. 4,

 It Bubbles ... Ch. 9,

Stepping Out for Christ Chs. 9  -10,

History, Review and Overview Ch. 5,

Repent or Perish Ch. 7,

Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2,

Dizzy Dashes, Head Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 6,

The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy,

the earlier chapters of The Bible, Not the Declamations ...,

Predestination and Freewill and the surrounding heptad,
On Predestination and Foreknowledge,
Liberty and Necessity, Responsibility, Duty and Creativity,

with
Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ
providing an evidential, verificatory summary and exposé,

and

The gods of naturalism have no go!

 

For an  earlier treatment, in SMR, pp. 170ff., see Appendix I below, together with the updates  especially of TMR Ch. 7 and such topics as are found in Lively Lessons ... Ch. 5
and Defining Drama Ch. 3.

III

A GAP WHICH AGAPE MUST CROSS

BECAUSE OF THE LOVE OF THE TRUTH

I Cor. 13:6

This brings us to see any relevance to our immediate point in a work, Redeeming Science, by Professor Vern S. Poythress. It is a work of considerable knowledge and zeal, but for all that, and  however much one may admire the scope of the coverage, there is work to be done for the full justice to be done to the word of the Lord, in its perspicuity, message and challenge. One  dare not omit this, for we are  all to  "rejoice with trembling" (Psalm 2:11), and the word of the Lord written, the Bible, is of incalculable importance to us all. Moreover, what Presbyterian Minister in any ostensibly orthodox denomination has not undertaken on ordination, to be zealous to  seek the purity of the Church, and to which is not the charge given to be faithful to the word of God, the infallible testimony of His truth, consistent in all its parts. When I was licensed to preach in the Presbyterian Church of Australia, and ordained in the PC of N.Z. in 1966, it was not for anything less.

What then ?

While the tenor of work, Redeeming Science, is far more accommodating and reasonable than that found in the writing of the PC in the USA^*1, which appeared both pompous in ungrounded self-assurance as shown,  and imprecise, as if to strangle or wrangle, to tangle and not to discover what is there, and written,  there are yet some points  which need application for the integrity of the word of God.

In this work of Professor Poythress, there are some very sound criticisms of various approaches to Genesis 1-2, but the final assessment declares that all the approaches have something good to offer. While it can certainly be found that even an  error can be wrought in a conspectus which brings some nudge or calls attention  to some danger, yet this summary given by Poythress tends to leave things, in fact,  available for more rotund  dismissal, still on  the table.

Much of the point is simply this: If there is one understanding which has no flaws, meets aptly all the dimensions, near and far, explicit and implicit, of the text in the total context of the Bible, which does not add imagination of things unprovable from the text, or subtract that which is, what is the problem ? It is there looking at you in the most earnest and direct fashion. If however you begin to hear the wolf calls of the multitude, howling their disdain and hurling their intellectual detritus and emotional taint, what is that ? Is that not precisely the point of the Lord who suffered such at the Cross, and declared this" (John 15:24-16:4):

"If I had not done among them the works that no other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.

^"But this comes to pass, so that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.

     "But when the Comforter has come, whom I will send to you from the Father,
even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father,
He shall testify of me:
and you also shall bear witness,
because you have been with me from the beginning.

 

"These things have I spoken to you,
that you should not be offended.
They shall put you out of the synagogues:
yes, the time is coming,
that whoever kills you will think that he is doing God service. ³

      "And these things will they do to you,
because they have not known the Father, nor Me. ⁴

"But these things I have told you,
so that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them.

     "And these things I did not say to you at the beginning, because I was with you."

 

There is resistance as irrational as assured, and it must be met without pause, or diffidence, and with that honour to the Sender, whose word is both clear and truth.

After all, in the  exposition of the word of God, it is no part of love to leave the clarity God gives under a cloud of goodwill, as if these were options when the trust is especially clear.  People invent things to the point of having a 'not' put in or out, as in the case of perverted sex, in some denominations for  example, this is effectually what is done by 'interpretations' as lucid as the sky when there is a foggy night, with pollution added. 

As in medicine, however, so here: goodwill can best be  occupied in faithful  diligence to  clear things up, fearless, unafraid, restrained  only the evidence, unaffected by fatuity, often  a product of the uncongenial character of the word of God to rebels who seethe against it.

 As  Paul  says regarding warning in his letter to Timothy, there is such a thing as being a faithful minister (I Timothy 4:6). It is not necessary to be quarrelsome in order to reason decisively as Paul did repeatedly, the thing of which he spoke in II  Cor. 10:5ff.. We may be accused of this or that, even of being dictatorial if we keep to the word of God; but then we who serve Him, as I have had to remind detractors,  we did not write it! Faithfulness is not self-assertion but the placarding of Christ (Galatians 3:1ff.). We have a duty to present the meaning, and if a culture, ecclesiastical or other, confuses or converts it to something else, it is part of fidelity to  correct it.

Secondly, there is need for review on the point made by Professor Poythress, in the matter of what is termed 24 hour days in Genesis 1.  It is of course quite correct to point out that nowhere  does the Bible state  that this was the case in the days of creation specified. The number of day-hours is there, as normally with us, not noted. It is not an issue for either of us, for those who hear the term used univocally of creation and creatures created, of exposure of the creation work of God on the one hand,  or living within it on the other. There is a continuity in the narration. Yet for all that, let us investigate further.

What the Bible in Genesis does state, as the author of Redeeming Science well recognises,  is that the repositioning, the placement, the presentation of the heavens in form  for time and other duties, is wrought as seen in vv. 14ff.. That is not the last of the 6 working days.

What then follows from this ? It is not unclear. Machinery, astronomical or other, legal and substantive, organisational and directive work is done on day four,  so that what follows is what we have. That is this sector of the works, here presented and done. Now on with the next.

Hence at  least the next two must be in this thematic, developed, and statedly functional state, in terms of a creation from nothing to what we have,  the record covering steps on the way, and numbering them, with their parts, evening and morning, in an elaborate arithmetrical series, where steps are enormously emphasised, both as to their distinctness and to their order, in the effectual creation of what works, what we have now.

What then for day five and day six  ? This involves the routine functionalising of earth and heavens, in the way shown for earth in1:1-13 and then in  series, for the heavens in 1:14-19; hence  rotational chronometry is here in view. It is not something else, other, fictional,  factitive, a procedure fricative with normal  organisation. It has arrived  and is now in its operational uniform, having been given its ordinate controls and provisions for the purposes stated. We are now in a very distinct field indeed. Lack of clarity here can have only one source: eisegesis, the intrusion of the human mind into the diction of God, for whatever reason.

To say that this is presumptuous is the least of it. It is deviating, and creating deviation, and alas, begins to move almost into the realm of Luke 11:52:  though not here precisely in salvation, yet it is part of the whole and of inestimable worth. How precious is the word of God, who undertakes that it is clear to understanding. Let us then seek it remorselessly, and not pause on the way.

How  fast were the rotations of the earth at that time, day four done ? It is true that we are  not told. It is securely quite true. Of what KIND, however were they ? If we do not know the speed precisely, what is the category of the rotations ?

Why they are of the kind now in operation, since we are told  of functions  to be fulfilled and action to make it so, and notified when this is done, in the midst of the action in Genesis 1, in fulfilment of 1:1. Since moreover the same term, 'day' is used in  all cases in what is presented as steps to creation's operation in the norm we now have (cf. Genesis 2:1ff.), not only is it necessary to conceive the style of the  discourse, the use of successive ordinal numbers, or the evening and morning  notations, not found elsewhere of fiction or imaginative enterprise in  time in the Bible, but this definitional constancy also.

Not only would this normally be the case in clear discourse, unless the context WARRANTED otherwise,  but in this case, the whole point is telling us that SO was the creation done, the works were finished. It was not otherwise says Genesis 2: it was SO! To be sure, it is a simple grammatical usage, but it carries an  emphasis of the sense of continuity, consequence in the narrative. So it was done and the Lord finished it. Indeed the NKJV translates as "so" in the last sentence in Genesis 1:31.

There is this sense of declaring the first action, noting the earth sector, then the heavenly sector, tidily, even arithmetically, the successive steps most articulately and with emphasis set down as to ORDER, and the whole employs the usual straight narrative 'and so' construction. It is all about action and result, order and sequence, even that of evening and morning, and the labour involved, and the relationship of what went before in various steps to the resulting need and action to meet it in the next ones (as  in vv. 2-7 for example). It is the logic of the Lord set down in the sequence mode known to man. Its cohesion is emphasised in number as in content, then.

Thus the steps are exceedingly sure in kind, just as the definitional dilemma is removed, by simply showing the self-discipline not to want to blow out days into ages, which certainly presents biological difficulties, which in its way, is a verification of what is written. The God of order, appealing to reason (II Corinthians 10:5, I Peter 3:15) is in no way being lax in His modes of emphasis and discourse.

If you ask your wife HOW did you create this clean house, and she says, Well first I did these things, that's the downstairs bit, and then I addressed myself to the upper story; and in the former, first I did this, that's for the first hour of the morning, and then in the second hour I did that: and you replied, 'Yes, but in what order did you do them ?" she might, depending on your nature, wonder if you were mocking or mentally disturbed, and this, not without reason! Is she to be assumed a simpleton, a waster of words.

Will you wonder if she REALLY meant that the maid did it, and in some other order, or that she was REALLY delivering you a sermon on morality in some dimension, for example about the way she rested for a while to catch her breath, or release that grip on things from pre-occupying her mind, after it was over ? or perhaps that as in a paper-chase her REAL meaning was only this, that there are phases in things, and she did various things, not necessarily what she had just spelt out, and that the important part is what she meant, some message conveyed surreptitiously in imperceptible fine print, available to rampant imagination, and able to mean anything ?

It cannot be admitted that such could be the case. Now when God speaks to man, as made in His image, and tells us that not a jot or tittle of all of this will fail till all is fulfilled (and there is retrospective fulfilment confirming the past as well as prospective, outlining the future, verified when it happens), does He REALLY mean that He romances considerably, has all types of surreptitious little puzzles without means to solve them in HIs words to man about creation or salvation, so that people could quarrel about what they were or were not, and indeed, as to whether they were there at all ? 

This would NOT be clear to the one who understands. It could not be. There is neither beginning nor end to so treating a discourse about the generation of the earth and the heavens, followed without interruption by the continuity of accounts of the generation of this or that among the mankind so created. It is all generation; it is all history: God does His, and we do ours, and it is all narrated with the reliability of record, His because we COULD NOT otherwise know it, though we could have many evidences, and ours to show the impregnable continuity of action, creation and procreation, in the entirety of creation and resultant program'.

It is not only so. In between comes the testimony of man in his first test, when Satan tries to make him (or initially her, the female part of the race at that time, Eve) testy about having an authority, just as some now become testy or certainly casual about what authority there is even in the record of the creation itself. But it all has authority, proceeds to state what it means unless giving certifiable evidence of something else, in the fanciful category, and just as Eve jibbed at the divine diction, misled by Satan, so now many jib at the testimony of what God did and then what man did, on various days, numbered and clear, or for various periods, numbered and clear.

However it is impossible for this to present serious question. How COULD it be clear to the one who understands unless it provided adequate constraints to ensure that if such a one did NOT understand, it was not because understanding was left uninformed, but because it was left for the sake of virtual duplicity, inventing as it read, and reading as it invented, something else. God and I created the heavens and the earth, it might go, and this is how I nutted out how we did it. Or else: God and nature created nature! But this does not happen to be what it says. IN THE BEGINNING, there is nothing before that to the point at issue, that is creation, GOD created.

Of God, we learn in Isaiah 43-45 in the most emphatic conceivable way, with vast protestation, there is ONE. True He has three Persons (Isaiah 48:16), but the entity is ONE, and there is no other. What He says is the truth, and when God the Sent came to earth, He defined the matter directly, "I am  ... the truth." Without Him, no universe, no construction. Did He 'clarify' Genesis on arrival ? Not at all. It is most clear already, precise, brief, categorical (cf. Chapter 4 above, *5A where the issue is expanded and applied to the point at issue)!

He simply used it on the assumption that what it said was so, exactly as stated. There was nothing flowery about creation, any more than there is about adultery (cf. Matthew 19:1ff.).

 Then we have the coherence of the record to consider. What has been, in the run of events, presented with a singular and continuous terminology is not to be conceived,  without contextual support,  to  partake of wholly different or complete diverse features. Clarity in writing is something to which the Lord is committed (Proverbs 8:8).

In this total  functional  context, moreover, the continuity of 'evening and morning' notation throughout gives ground, with this  development in verses 14ff., for the concept that whatever was to come in questions of time,  had now come already. Perhaps initially it was without the rigour and total functionality later to be presented, in the work of day 4, when the attention is turned from the terrestrial in 2-13, to the celestial, in 14-19, before life comes into focus, in vv. 20ff.. Yet it is a formative work which is done in vv. 14ff., not one of creation as such in notation, this being stated categorically of the whole in 1:1. There is not the slightest ground for any concept of problem in this^*2. This is given in some detail in the hyperlinked material. What then is to follow ?

 If in the beginning the light basis was such in the CREATION of heaven and earth, to allow evening and morning, the same nomenclature as after day 4 being used, then well. The precision  honing was to come, but it was enough for this very basic action. There is no question of congestion about the matter. That may well have been so, and there is no slightest reason to think otherwise, a point present in the very level-headed Matthew Poole's excellent work of commentary.

The concept, then, that in the midst of these diverse acts of creation, information, formation, successive development force, functional objectives, there is in fact  a desire  to  present something of a structure other than that actually stated, is obtrusively intrusive. It is of the nature of impertinence in the essential sense. That is mere, wilful intrusion into the presentation,  so that the declaration is obscured,  "Thus the heavens and the earth,  and  all the host of them, were  finished." God then rests.

There is no scope for revision of the terse, staccato, action-briefing just  made in Chapter 1 of Genesis, and in the summary to  follow in 2:1, for making it a story, an imagination, a teaching episode. It may have many useful features in application, but it has nothing to offer to gainsayers. This is the way it is, and is the way it was. That is the instruction. So far  from there being any appearance of licence for flights of imagination  to change the mode or order or meaning or action in any way, in this case that would amount to a know-all instructing the Creator: NO, it was rather this that you had in  mind.

However  He did not say so; but rather indicated that this is how it was created. Indeed, the rough-house treatment often given to these  clear, organised, logically successive and orderly statements in Genesis 1, almost suffice to make one wonder why they have not with a similar apparent nonchalance suggested that when Christ healed a multitude, before evening, of course, what it REALLY meant was that He spent a few years on site, built a hospital and waiting while nature effected a gradual healing, with some saying the people were REALLY well first, for the order is not important, and become sick later. There would be the same apparent indifference both to simplicity, explanation and logical constraints and system, the same apparent eisegetical compulsion.

But what of man's scribal interference ? How would he, mere man, made in the operation so that he could have any being, know! It is better not to contest the knowledgeable with the unknowing. Small wonder there are then so many vistas of Sadducaic thought patterns now so erratically presented. But these relate to man, not to God. HE has spoken in the most precise and distinct manner, contradistinct from rovings of the imagination in a delicately divine utterance, in which what He did is followed by what we did, after He had made us, and the whole thing is a matter of generation, of God, then of man, and in man, of his situation..

However, an idea arises and needs treatment, from the work of Poythress, who for his part shows more restraint than some.

The point is made that in that case, reading it as it comes, the Lord would have worked for 6 days and rested, not just for one more, to make up seven, but ever since; and where is the sense in that ? How could that later be used as a ground for resting one day in seven on our part, as is done (Exodus 20) ? Such is the question.

However such a formulation would be misleading.  If one works in a creative surge and writes an entire book in one week, and then on the next  day rests, there is no confusion possible if one is aware of what a man is, to take our own case, being made in His image.

It would not OF COURSE mean that  my lungs or heart had stopped working, since it is KNOWN that this is part of my being alive;  and that in any case, the rest is from the labours in view, in their cessation, in a certain abstraction from their  intensity and all the channelling of resources which was implied,  so that no more did those particular dynamics have to operate. These ceased. I rested.  How could it possibly be unclear! Even the Sadducees would have a problem insatiable, with such talk, in such a format.

Let us continue with the illustration of writing a book in six days. On the following day, the new situation would arise, if one day were sufficient in this case for the rest,  and its labours. This  would arise quite naturally and without occasioning the very  slightest question:  the rest  from the work of creation being by then  complete, we turn as to a new thing to what follows. That first and entire episode is now over, its 6 day work and its rest, stipulated as having been on the 7th. day.

There is really quite a lot to do, not only with maintenance, but with man, who has proved a very difficult child, thought some have been restored by grace through not the redemption of science, but of man, and this not by some indifferent or additional work merely, as the Seventh Day Adventists seem to forget, but by far the greatest work of all, and of all time, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Son of God, when as in  Genesis 3:15 presaged, He came and did it. From that particular day, the resurrection that completed the attestation (Romans 1:4), we engage in a memorial rest, just as God STATEDLY in the series of defined days, rested in a memorable rest.

It does not state that it was longer or shorter. What does it take to have our race realise that when God speaks, He means it. He stated the usage of days, with their characterising components, night and day in all their naturalness, He stated the completed format for their total functional purpose, and this was finished on day 4, He states that on the day after this, He rested, and people wonder what He meant ? How ? Only by the assumption, it would seem, that God is not really quite up to our level of consistent and careful, comprehensible expression: He the maker of our very minds!

What then of our day of rest ?

Thus the application for teaching would be that we, having a conspectus,  an array of a particular sum for a week, would creatively, with much application,  apply ourselves to  all of its requisitions and interpositions and plays and byplays in all the phases of our living, and then FROM ALL  OF THIS, what is  livelihood related, six SUCCESSIVE days of it, we rest for one  day, just as God did when His discipline of action and  application was over,  at HIS level. THUS was the  creation of the universe, both terrestrial  and  celestial, both living and human in its components.

There is a perfect application, once one  considers the case in its setting. Not only is there no difficulty in the interpretation that God in stipulating the creation, information and formation of man  and the universe, was telling us what was the case, in the series, steps, dynamic and order that is factual, and seeing the entirety as one whole (just as the result is one whole,  readily characterisable, heaven and earth with life and mankind in God's image within it). The case is far beyond that. Its  clarity except for infusion of outside ideas, is so categorical that it would render vain the work of confusion by a whole battery of lawyers to make it appear otherwise.

Thus God acts. He does it on 6 days. He rests the next from it.

So one finds that  from this vast  focus, that God having so acted as to create and then form what He had formulated, in concrete successive detailed steps, then  withdraws from it. He rests from it. Is it surprising ? abstruse ? odd !Thus for a time comparable with any one of the major steps, in  concept, He rests FROM these labours. This in turn makes it clear how very much co-ordinate they are one with the other, and how intensely important is the fact that it was 6 and not 7, or figurative stages that He used for the consummation of this creation. We ARE part of it; THIS is how He did it, in that number in series, and THIS is how we are to follow on in our quasi-creative ways.

By this, I am  much instructed, and as with an  author resting from his now complete work, for the next day, I would find it virtually impossible to  concoct or construct some kind of ambiguity or problem in the text. If I had not been made in the image of God, and if I were not willing to learn from Him, of course I could make up anything and talk all but endlessly about the variable combinations of my added thoughts and his stated account. However, neither of these things being the case, it is both natural and refreshing, interesting and stimulating so to learn, and so to reflect with reverence and joy on the work of the Creator, and the privilege in my own little way, not only in following suit, but doing do in a way parallel, though derivative to His. It gives if possible, an increased sense of kinship. Problems are as near as is a point infinitely distant; only further yet, since there is no such point.

It appears  so obvious that one wonders where such thoughts can  find themselves an origin. There are of course conceivable reasons; but they have nothing whatever to do with the text of the Bible.

Such issues have been dealt with at some length (cf. SMR  pp. 170 -179), but this will suffice to look for a moment at the arrival of a more genteel approach than is often found, in the case of Redeeming Science, and one which goes some way to bringing mere irrelevant bagatelles of obstructionism out of their often  found place. Yet for all that, it is a treatment which requires  a more decisive result, and a more complete removal of the slightest suggestion that in the text itself, there is any room for making one thing into another, one  statement of what has happened, into another. As to the days, Dr Sarfati, himself of the Jewish race,  gives a good overall treatment of the chronological and technical verbal points, in his work, Refuting Compromise, Ch. 2.

It is good to rest from one labours in this field,  and not to be perpetually inventing new universes, with new gods, doing new things (as Israel so often did - Deuteronomy 32:15-21), with such painful results, bringing such strenuous rebuke from the Lord! To engage in such activity,  while using the very name of the Lord  to present things He never states Himself to have done, makes of it an imposition both grievous and hard to bear. When, further,  what He does state is not only in a line of GENERATIONS of heaven and earth, followed by GENERATIONS of  various families, all historical, but in a terminological continuity with history and creation, which both instructs and  explains, and informs and divulges, the realm of dissidence become one of mere invention.

When God speaks, and gives no clue to meaning something abstruse, odd, ironic, hidden, then far be it from me to pretend that it is not I rather than God who speaks, if I vary at all from it. Yet I neither do nor could imagine how one  could do soberly do so. This must be avoided in faithfulness to the word of God. It is realm for warning. Such self-restriction, this is one of the minimal duties in any faithful treatment of anyone's dicta, presentations and explanations.

Warning is the special case when it is the word of the living God which is in view. As wtih the guidance systems of a ship, warnings are both more necessary and more dire the higher up you go, in muddling or mischievously mismanaging that system.

The situation is given a considerable, and many-sided review in the two Appendices, which relate specifically to this Chapter: Appendix I and Appendix II. While they are in fact a part of this Chapter, because of length, it seems better to have them set apart at the end,  separately.

 

IV

MAN WORSHIP IS

A DISTANT DISTORTION

OF THE WORSHIP OF HIS MAKER

Knowledge without its basis, wisdom without its criterion, man as in charge of the Grand Central  Station of Sovereign Certainty, even when he elects to be certain of only one thing, that he is uncertain of all things except that nothing is certain, of which he is certain because of his worship of uncertainty, which being uncertain and uncertified, makes of him a self-appointed fool, obliterating all hope of knowledge with a blithe belligerence against the only way in which to obtain it: this is the peak and substance of his appalling horror. It leads to a liaison that readily becomes one of eternal consequence, and to a result fitting for that company.

And that ? It is initially, man-worship, without his being God, man-reliance with having God, and man-brandishing, increasingly swiping with fiery brands at everything divine, be it beauty, or vision, or truth, of which he acts as if the owner when attacking God, and the enemy when not doing so. In this, the evil one finds delicious attraction; but even without him, it is a lurid scene (I Peter 5).

In particular, one of his idols amid the Pantheon of Spiritual Pollution, his temple, is Science worship, with the provision by temple management that it must be Human Science worship, since the only One whose knowledge is sufficient to make such an entity as man, a person with provision with orientation ascertainment and development, truth invention in the field of nescience and other marvels of human imagination, is outré. That is, He is forbidden to the Pantheon, by order of the Nescience Affirmation Squad, whose job is to ensure that no actual knowledge ever comes except this, that God either does not exist, or any invention of a god must be such that it is entirely and safely under the control of human culture, which in turn is prescribed to be entirely and  safely under the auspices and jurisdiction of Vacuists, whose job is to ensure that nobody and nothing but man is permitted to know anything, and even that only in the prescribed absence of all non-controlled gods.

You even get nowadays, those who like science, human knowledge no more to be verified, just to be conformist to cultural prohibitions, inhibitions and jurisdictions, asserting that in the beginning, materialism was made by man, and from it came the heavens and the earth, so that man might come and inhabit them and find materialism. Such is the dream, and while it begins with a concept and an idea, it nevertheless hates consistency, because it inhibits unreason, and so its authoritarian posturing is beginning to look for the robes of majesty, that man might be installed, and his ideas which are invisible and immaterial, might become more basic than ever. Long live the ideas of matter, which not being matter, will contradict for ever the chatter about monism.

It is as in Hosea 9:7, that the spiritual scientist (for it is exclusively a spiritual matter, with matter  merely the stooge for the personality cult which starts with its own ideas, be they what they may be, so long as they are irrational and without any control, and man's is autonomy in a white coat. This fits the biblical diagnosis,  since there it is specifically the "spiritual man" who is insane, and this with a spiritual insanity (Hosea 9:7). Moreover the priests of this particular pantheon have a large clientele, all of who chant, Long  live the spiritual papacy of human knowledge! or Down with any god but our god, who lives alone and will rule maybe! for it is the god of Uncertainty, whose majestic goings include hopes of access to the stars, in case a space ship should ever be necessary for evacuation of an earth which obviously detests the Pantheon Populace Idolatry, and will not co-operate, like a dog faithful to its own  master.

It is for this reason that the more terrible the awe in which man regards his knowledge, and his senior savantry,  the more certain it is that having no self-control, but vacating reason for cause-free  process, he will in the end of the ventures, be a systematic and chronic failure, where dreams and reality meet like two oceans, and a vortex pulls to the botti.

Not only must cause be forgotten, or results assumed by smuggling them in at the outset without acknowledgement, but also to be ignored is, by a sort of obsessive compulsion, the necessary  reality for reconstruction, so Christ if accepted at all, must be a newly created one, retaining for some reason, the name. So does cut-off man proceed,  while wearing a reduced fig-leaf of protection for his privacy, which must never be investigated or give reason for its own invention, lest it be embarrassed. Again the more terrible the awe he has, and misplaces into logical muddle, the more shocking is the incompetence of his credo, which being incredible, is given every credence, the better to battle with quasi-beatific belligerence against the Maker of the power to make such distortions.

In this way, hatred toward God can become more explicit, and the prohibition on any god who can actually DO anything, becomes a death sentence all over again on the Lord and God of Christians, whose actual knowledge and power and wisdom and effectuality is precisely the opposite, He being omnipotent. Man hopes,  but God does can do whatever He pleases,  all depending on Him who made it and sustains it. In this, He is the opposite to what man intends and would portend, for that universe which he is seeking to make his own. As to man in revolt against the God of all power, he notes for the universe what are its  workings where convenient; but he does not like to consider its arrival, like a wealthy aristocrat who does not deign to consider the source of his funds.

This is no more science than is babbling; but it works. In what does it work ? It makes for the grandest production of myths since the early Greeks, the most profound reductionism since the days of all things from one thing, or element, when in the magical relays of 'thought',  any chosen element could be the source of all things, or any imagined motion, or chosen situation, such as always all the same, or never anything the same. So it sent, and so it goes to this day in the monistic forces; and it appears satisfied, so long as rationality was excluded, and a kind of impromptu malaise of mind is elevated to the stature of the Very Latest Thing.

It makes for the easiest prey for the Awesome Ideationists, who desire not only the earth, and the universe, but if anything more than this, the souls of men. Since  a large body of senior scientists, including many of the most famous innovators in mathematics, physics and chemistry, yes and astronomy of all time, do not like this worship, and prefer rationality and in awe to place their worship where it belongs, in the One who generated the power and precision and law concerned in their very existence, there is a fundamental division about religion in science, and a rejection of the scientistic by many scientists, who prefer the scientific with its acute testing methodology, and power to reject any theory which does not tally with fact in any field, dimension or performance. They prefer to follow the lines of enquiry to results (cf.  SMR pp. 140ff.), and to leave for worship what has the creative capacity correlative to the creation of their own, indeed, to provide for the creation of existence and spirit and mind, along with a material stuff for moulding.

Ignoring this necessity creates is a problem for the Awesome Ideationists who prefer the title Materialist Monitor, or something of this kind, even though in fact they are putting mind first before matter, but having it all rely on mind, even to know,  even if they could access the truth, which on their model, it not even available. Simply, then,  they put mind first by imagining it.

How can they control the creationists, and more particularly, stop the Christians who hold fast to the word of God, the Bible, the necessities of Creator for creation and logician for the joint and matching eventuation of logical mode in their own minds, and in 'nature' which with such minds they investigate, finding law assimilable by mind, within it ? It is not easy. Reason and evidence is against them. The creationists have all the logical guns.

Thus it is important for them, who reject causal necessities, for logic and intelligibility, for existence and law, to have a sort of universal mantra series, No God but Ourselves, and No Reason but our Ideas, and No Employment Except when it is at Our Shrine^*2A, the last being one increasingly popular with the Awesome Ideationists, their ideas arising from nowhere to account for nothing, which is not there to test. They even begin to generate a type of call to prayer in the form of praise for the mental malaise,  and this may be made at any time. Those who reject these irrational mantras, are available for  dismissal, for such  submissions are as things required,  as was worship at the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar.

Worship must be discernible, complete divestment of divergence, at least in public; and woe to the logician who insists it is otherwise,  when due praise is not heard or recognised. Occasionally, though the practice is growing, a condition is that the Recognition Song must be sung. It goes something like this:  We are the people, and will be the people, nor is there any like us, who with our own minds have made the universe and man and everything that is, world without end, at least so we hope. We consider this most material to our purposes.

In some subtle seeming way, their hope becomes fact, even though you never see any type of result for it, since even if they 'created' the universe by formulating its laws, it is mere fairy-talk, and obviously you need cause for the laws which are there, and the laws of logic which can successfully forge them out of their matrix in matter, and set down what was put in: law.

While this desire and idea is of course in the realm of the Not Actually Material, and so is not really materialism, yet this point is immaterial, since it is the victory cry, in essence,  the Heil Man! mantra, and it is important that only things impossible should be believed, in case anyone should have faith, which is a terrifying thing when it is associated with Reason on the one hand, and with Reality on the other. This is growing for them quite perilous,  lest it lead to the Bible and the God who made everything and therefore has right to it; but worst of all, as you see in the writings of Stephen  Gould, you must be careful to avoid the realm of love, which is like atomic radiation, an appalling thing. Though many people love to be appalled by it, yet their 'love' must be made different, lest they be convicted of realism, an effrontery unthinkable.

So out it is and has been frequently for those who prefer rationality, reality, God and truth,  testimony of evidential character of views subject to negation and affirmation, with interfaces with their various sources,  direct and indirect! Your creationism stays ? you go. It is SO very simple.

What do people's careers matter, so long as man has it all, is it all, gains control of it all, and rules man; well, so long as the Idea rules, and the Dream of Autonomy is made as steadfast as mutability, with bondage to belligerence as a right of employment statute.

In this world of the Idea, even though be in self-contradiction, that of materialism or its various more ornamented allies, like absolute idealism or ghostly teleology, all foregoing or obliterating any base for their givens, there must be utter freedom  to endorse the Idea. Indeed, you are totally free as long as you do. There must of course preferably be a total faithfulness to the Worship of the Idea, and to the acknowledgment of its Pious Priesthood; and little is more shocking than not to recognise their Ideal Papacy; and it is necessary to use the press and the internet (they are working on this now) in such a way that people will be reminded constantly of their worship of the Idea, and never dare to criticise it, lest they be forbidden to express rationality, and so mislead many, far less to attest reality, in case they should lead any to the God of creation, the Maker of information and the Redeemer of Humanity, as many as receive Him, whose name is Jesus Christ. There have, on the other hand, been certain liberalisations.

You may keep your job/place/salary/recognition provided that any god you may have does not interfere, by creating anything, or providing you with any type of morals; for this is contrary to the Worship of Man, and the Pride of Life, which like all pride, insists that dream proceed before all things, lest anybody wake up. You have seen the same sort of pathological devotion precisely, with Hitler,  Mao, Stalin and the grandest of murderous regimes; but these, while interested in the ruin of the human soul, were not able to invent it, and so to control it, and so failed. As the world shrinks because of intelligence-made information, and procedures for prohibition of ideas and financial operations increase, as foretold in Daniel and Revelation, the junta is becoming increasingly hopeful that the Dream will become real, by force, by manipulation, by the control of man's trend to worship, resulting from his Creation, and its re-direction to himself. Irrationality then becomes King and they will try to give reasons for it, since we are so made that we reason, and the habit can persist long after its official demise. The absurd becomes common, and the unthinkable becomes obligatory.

Thus it is important to reject anything clear, and sure and certain, and to make theologians in particular find that ever there the Idea must penetrate, and none must be permitted to articulate the simple statements of the Bible, let alone in their inter-connective tissue of truth. Man must purr his religion, and not proclaim it, and the only shouting is to be from the Idea.

Unless, therefore, at the sound of all kinds of music from the lyres of what the Bible calls 'the lie' (in Romans 1:25,  and II Thessalonians 2:10-11, I John 2:22,  cf. Daniel 3), there be prostration, when the small must be submerged and the great merged, and prominent leadership must emerge, as with Communism, with all the panache of former kings, woe is in place to punish or expel from this world; for this is nice for them, and will be said to be good,  imposing and important. Thus all resistance must cease through Thought Control police, whether in seminary or in the secular field, until the whole world - this is the design, and the only design which they design to tolerate - acclaims,  Great is the Beast which is Best (Revelation 13:13-15).

Also, they may chant,  Hallowed be the Name of Man, and the Idea. They must worship the beast, and the religious dragon must ensure that they do.

That is the prediction, and the above gives something of the spirit and path of the processes observable and to come, so that one may see not only the folly of this irrationality, but the perils of its forthcoming little dog's day. Short ? Certainly (Revelation 17:9-18), but snappy, and much is it that like former dictators, it will attempt to snap.

While it may be thought by some that the Idea is only doing all this so that God may be glorified when He finally confronts as predicted, this false worship, and destroys its pretences, yet this does not even begin to justify the massacres in the name of false religions which contribute to the mutilation of reality by mutilating man's body (cf. John 16:2, Revelation 6). Despite its advanced norm in dictatorial dilapidation of mankind, it seeks to overthrow the popular reaction to such senseless violence, by spiritual hypnosis, fear and myth (as in II Timothy 4), until the whole world can cry of the New Idea: Great is the Religion or our Lord (who is it again ? ah yes), our Lord, Man, and the Control Unit which shows us how to do the worship thing in the prescribed manner (Revelation 13:15).

Communism is only a beginning. It gives the autonomy to some, so that they may ostensibly at least,  control all, in the name of the State. Now, however,  the idea of religion must come back into things, an advance on communism, since it is clear it will do so anyway, so that in the name of the manufactured religion (MR), must this be proclaimed.

TO be sure this is precisely as in Revelation 13, where the religious beast comes into being, the one to make mankind worship the normal one - the one which controls diplomacy and finance and industry and thought as far a might be. But still, though it is already beginning closely to parallel the biblical prediction, it is not as if this were the intention of those involved. It is not as if they wanted to forward the stated plan of exposure of evil by God: it is just something that they are doing, while refusing to realise this.

As to that divine exposure, that is coming supernaturally, and will  operate like a planned operation on the body; but this time it will be on the body of this world, and its antagonistic forces, which know no rest, or reason, but with treason to truth, imperiously seek their own way. So it will continue until the day dawns and the shadows flee away, when God in Christ comes back, and many to God man turn, while the machinations of evil go the way of the Panzer divisions of Hitler, equipped to invade and to dominate the lives of man: they go to the dust from which they came, having despised the Lord of glory, and His creation.

 REALM OF THE APPENDIX FOR CHAPTER FIVE

APPENDIX I

DAZE AND WILL WORSHIP

From SMR pp. 170ff., we commence with these considerations (written 1992).

What however may be said of any observable evidences concerning the age of the earth ? While all process-deduction runs some risk in extrapolation, certain processes are better within the field of tested knowledge and observation, for man, by their very nature: so that it is proper to give them greater credence, in proportion as this is so. Now let us review and extend somewhat.

Such evidences range from the long observed and accurately predicted deterioration rate¹ of the earth's magnetic field (again relating to the rapid decline of the exponential rate), and evidence that does nothing to show innate ground, in our continuing world, either for the electrical currents that indeed seem involved, or for their maintenance (Barnes: Origin and Destiny of the Earth's Magnetic Field ); to the rates of solution of minerals in the ocean, brought to it from the earth, and the extrapolation from these rates to possible time for this to occur; to theoretical stringencies affecting particle formation in space (Slusher: The Origin of the Universe), as well as the need for far less time than what is commonly lavishly... provided, for the annihilation of our comets on the one hand, and for the unspiralling of the galaxy formation on the other (Slusher: Age of the Cosmos).

Add topics such as heat loss drastically curtailing age calculations for the earth (Slusher: The Age of the Earth: A Study of the Cooling of the Earth Under the Influence of Radioactive Heart Sources), together with the quite unexpectedly small depth of moon dust (and the implications of confidently held earlier theories on the time span to produce this slender moon margin  cf. p. 86 supra), and the strongly evidentially attested and mathematically supported concept of the loss of light velocity, which affects in turn crucial other rates so grossly: And what do you find ?

You find evidential indications most numerous and synthetic in their impact for a relatively young earth, perhaps very young: and these harmonise perfectly with the scope and sovereignty of creation which is so Biblically evident. Indeed, Biblically as rationally, the two in harmony, the creation is attested as monergistic, majestic, speaking of mental and material operations which inspire language... but which also use it. Employ it, outside the oral and literary attestations of man ? Yes indeed; one such locale being the coded genetic system, which is nothing less than language.

All this evidences the biological institution of life and man: sudden, encapsulative and short has it come, as with the construction of a space-craft. Yet it is a work showing far more power and mentality than we mere men can muster. The language of thought and the thought of language appear... passim, in the book of the universe of which the readable genetic code is merely a part.

Defined and determinate from the outset comes man. With such bases, he works with a spirit and imagination, as lively as a pilot in a jet; but he needs to remember what got him off the ground, as an operative ensemble. Even while he writes, much of his basic equipment... is written. What is not, invokes a liquid and moving thought, a roving articulation, that writes, and also speaks, a masterpiece of vision and vocabulary, that flaws itself by the sombre sullenness of misused powers, as if the flight had no ground. Alas that what is so eminently visible, should be disregarded in the thrill of the flight. The delightfulness of the human dynamic can also be deadly, when man forgets the source of his power.

The time when...

When it happened is neither Biblically stated nor rationally deducible.

Without this creation, nothing fits, except pure undaunted imagination; while with it, all the requirements of evidence are satisfied - if not sated; and only undisciplined imagination can really make plausible suggestions any more. Indeed, what Pierre Grassé, past President of the French Academy has stated of one of the ingredients of the delusive system, bears emphasis (cf. p. 208 infra):

There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not engage in it.
(Evolution of Living Organisms, Academic Press, N.Y., 1977, p. 88.)

On p. 8 of the same book, he speaks of the need for biologists to be encouraged to think about the weaknesses and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit, says he... is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies of what they hold; indeed, the 'falsity'. The process is quite obvious, and has bases as broad as man's dislike of God, His word, His will and the witness of His creation. As such we have been tracing it, with its richly operative spiritual ingredients.

It is indeed, for example, almost dizzying just to list the follies of the dedicated secularist, where primordial dates are concerned. What do we find ? Dates spun from theories; evidence disregarded; constraints dismissed; assumptions made in order to secure 'proofs'; 'initial' states of things guessed in a sort of hypnotic time game; gradualism posited where fixity in fact appears; creative chemical action assumed where experiments on 'life' even with intelligence behind them in the human laboratory, and with the judicious removal of waste products, destructive of results if allowed to remain, before their eyes, do not produce this result or anything remotely like it! (See Gish, for example: Speculations and Experiments Related to Theories on the Origin of Life, pp. 17-31.) No functionally effective cell-membrane, no mitochondria, no DNA blueprints, no RNA 'executives', no life-proteins as such, indeed appear. (Analogically: no car, no manufacturing plant, no car makers' steel present themselves!) Moreover, time is given the task of being the creator, in terms of the postulate of an already created, instituted universe: making for the system, what that system never shows itself to possess in capability. Yet after all, it is merely part of it.

All this, meanwhile is done in stark contravention of the laws of decay, of entropy, of actual observation and observed trends, of leftward slanted chemical equilibrium situations (Wilder-Smith: Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, cf. pp. 13-109): as if time were the means to change law, and chance the method to make law. If this produces the utmost admiration for the untempered audacity of the proponents, the instillers of these dreams: it does not do so, in the area of science. To this, it is antithetical in method. (Cf. pp. 148 ff., 135 supra.)

Such things compose the buoyant extravaganza of irrelevant irrationality. These incoherent concepts fail to meet the realities of causation and observation; and the explosive myth of time, since it merely secures what was implicit in the nature of the system, whatever the source, is as futile as is the delusive intrusion of creative power into the interstices of a universe which, in itself as it works, simply does not show such power as part of its system. No amount of time is the same as creativity; and the 'greater' the system, the greater the call on its systematiser.

Disfaith is a disease when, as here, it not merely disbelieves in logic, in causation, in settling with observation humbly and unpossessively, but makes laws the opposite of what is and turns the observation of degeneration into the myth of generation, self-generation of a universe over time from the 'days' when, uncaused, it had no self with which to do the generating to, or for the time when, today, it exhibits no power to do so even with the self it now has.

Man remains in as much a fix logically blustering without God, without creation, without evidence, contrary to observation, as on the other hand, his own form has been lustrously fixed. As Lord Zuckerman, we have seen, put it of the evidence: if man came from an ape-like creature, it is an act performed 'without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation' (Beyond The Ivory Tower, p. 64). It is good for scientists to turn to the evidence, from time to time, even in such a field as this!

On the contrary to such trends as Zuckerman rightly criticises in his own special field of comparative morphology and human fossil remains: when one makes assumptions, one should not use them as grounds of argumentation; and when one notes careful observations, one should humbly follow, them rather than bypass them in favour of thoughts in precise contradiction to those things which are clear and confirmed.

The trouble to find experimental evidence: of life formation without the use of intelligence (for that is the hypothesis, if we want observable science in its special field); of man construction (or some parody or prodigy of man, dreamed to come) without intervention of intelligence; of geological formation before our eyes - as noted in the creation- confirming illustrations cited here, but covering the uniformitarian case; to find evidence conformable to continuation of spiralling galaxies over such times spans as are assumed, or the sustaining of such magnetic fields as are observed over the time reference in view - it is prodigious!

This trouble, it is as prodigious as is the initial failure to provide logical basis for the initial components of the system, the complex and profound interactions of which even yet do not play God to outward observation. Thus they do not create new systems and more advanced designs; but play instead the game they were given by God. They play it, these components, with 'ruthless' disregard for discrepant imaginations. The gossamer constructions of philosophically flirtatious fancies do nothing to subdue the facts. The facts do nothing to support the theories.

It is man who is dissatisfied, on the one hand, with the fixity of much and, on the other, the degeneration of more! It seems no amount of time will suffice to disabuse him as a race of the desire to play the part of God... which, alas, he is as far from fitted to perform, as is the evidence unwilling to permit the proposition... even in his imagination!

This leads to frustration and contradiction in his thoughts, as appears even in the area of dating and rock formation, as if energy had no form, form no law, law no base, synthesis no spirit, mind no author, character no creator and all no point except this: to grab and gain like a spiritual Mafia, the heart of the universe and exploit it.

Environmentalists protest, but their cry is too low; psychologists and sociologists make demands, but their subjects are too often drugged with philosophic hypotheses, trussed short in irresponsibility; politicians sometimes seem almost to desire purposeful discipline, but often simply seem to slump into mere amassing of national debt, as if primary economics appalled them, while their Education Departments teach self-fulfilment in a wicked world where strife... has created their souls - should they 'happen' to have any. Neither in logic, learning, law, science or life is there any outlet for what denies its inlet.

The 'outlet' into drugs, drink, stark and rampant perversity and all its appalling psychological and spiritual, not to say physical consequences; into gambling, abuse of power, of responsibility and of any sense of trust: all this is virtually predictable from the deprived, mistaught and depraved spirits which drink of this poison. They also eat of this putridity; and our mounting statistics of crime attest well the weight this type of confusion can produce, and where it bulges.

In sum then, we are obliged to say this. The fact of creation is logically demonstrable just as the Bible indicates ( Romans 1:17- 20). As for any 'contest' from evolution: it is not even science and, by scientific method, it would fall if it were; even as godless philosophy, it fails categorically.

But what of the day of creation ? To seek for the time when it occurred - that is, how long ago our time sequence began: this is a properly humbling experience.

No man on earth can tell. Yet from pleochroic halos (*40) - rock traces of radio-active particle emission in the past - suggestive (Dr Gentry in Scott Huse's The Collapse of Evolution - 41) of virtually instantaneous creation... to decaying forces and fields, both skeletal and galactic form, and actual, geological observations of forces at work: the testimony is strong. And to what effect ? It is that this vast impact of divine power was accompanied by a far greater splash* of initial energy, than we now see as nature erodes; and that it occurred possibly not only far more recently than brash, thoughtless and uninformed extrapolation once was taken by many to suggest, but perhaps even in the very backyard of history.

Man is frequently, and perhaps all but habitually on earth, very slow to acknowledge the effects of his sins; just as frequently he is fast to minimise them when he does: and this case appears no exception. So often indeed he wants more time to play God and just to see... just to see what would happen.

Increasingly he is seeing, but afraid of the sight. Indeed, in one salient respect the whole pathos and pitiability of man is this: that that he (as Biblically pronounced and predicted) is wilfully blind (cf. Matthew 13:15) as well as blindly wilful. The compassion of Jesus Christ in such a setting is like the snip of a surgeon's scissors severing a tumour... careful, exact and beautifully done.

We referred to the divine splash of creative energy (asterisked - see p. 173): let us then look at the understanding of the days in Genesis, to understand what is taught.

Structure and precision: the matter of days... the day of creation

As to the nature of the 'days' in Genesis 1, there is an obvious disposition to create a concept in which the criteria are those of 'day' as we know it diurnally. There is evening and morning, and there is work between them, and the Bible uses this in the presentation of the ten commandments, indeed, relating God's rest after 6 days, to our own weekly rest (Exodus 20).

Of course, it could be urged that His majesty is such that our pittance of time should not be literally compared to His grand spaces of it; but this is scarcely the point. He uses what words and deeds He will, and in so doing makes a grand splash of divine energy wholly diverse from anything we can do. That in itself meets this point. Grandeur is not inseparably annexed to slowness; and if so grand, can accomplish in its greatness what we take time to produce in our littleness, surpassing us with consummate superiority. He in His days does prodigiously and suitably beyond what we do: He creates the system; we use it, in so doing, developing our little selves. His speech alone will determine what He chose: as far as His greatness is concerned, He can as well do what appears a thousand years' worth in a day, as extend a day as a unit, to a thousand years. There is no limitation with God; He does as He pleases.

What He chose as the parameters is, then, as noted quite clear. If, again, it were intended to be in some way divorced from the time notations expressly given, it could scarcely make it less clear that this is so. In verse 18, for example, the sun and moon are caused to appear in order to rule over our time as we know it: this is the testimony. We are being given terms in our own usage, with the institution of time as we use it, the difference being the institution; but upon the institution, this is the situation.

There is some legitimate question before this day four event. If, as Gleason Archer presents it, the event in day 4 is the revelation of the sun and moon (possibly hitherto not, as they now are, visible from the earth): if this may be the meaning, then what of the days preceding this clarification ? Simply, the presentation of fruit trees and other natural events in the context of days, suggests at least time in the analogy of what we now know as days. However, here we cannot be so readily assured.

If the sun and moon were doing their stuff, as it were, but under a cloud, or more meteorologically, simply superficially obscured as to their form, then days would not be altered by that fact, only the clarity with which they might be observed. The time processes would grind away irrespective of the relative ease with which the focal points could be seen by any hypothetical individual on earth.

If however they were not; and if in day four, this is in fact a creation of sun and moon, for the clearing is only one possible rendering; and if God used some other method of separating day and night before this event of day four: if these things be so, then our grounds for making days one, two and three at least after the style of our own days (we do not know, in fact, the speed of rotation of the earth at those days): these are reduced.

The fact that evening and morning, however, are announced for these earlier days, without determining this issue, gives good, solid ground for the view that the sun and moon may have been normally operational except for surface clarity (a very important fact, but not then! in that man was not there to utilise the information). If so, then all the days proceeding would be at least after the style of our current ones, the exact time being of course wholly unknown, but revolution-related and hence in a settling situation, days as distinct from ages.

While there is some little question, then, about the length of days 1, 2 and 3, for these various reasons, though no great question, there is real question about the length of day l. In this day, light is created. How soon, in it, we do not know; nor as above, do we know if the sun and moon were day determinants at that time, or not. Only the analogy of the later days has weight, and it is unwise to push analogy too far. In this primordial setting, it is a brave man who insists that the furniture of custom is operating while it is being created! However, the thrust of the total days, and the analogy to our own work days, made in Exodus 20:11, does schematically portray that, apart from this institutional day when the very fact of 'day' is coming to be, a week is in view as the cardinal concept; though its first beginning is not susceptible to too much rigour.

This means that we are facing short, sovereign, dynamically institutional days in days four and on, days which are rotational in kind - not vaguely durational; while the light-darkness ensemble time is, to a point, less specific in days 1, 2 and 3, it being only one possibility that it is very close to that at present. It is not however in any way related to something divorced from day, different in kind from day as we know it. The concept of age is foreign. The events are significant of sovereign, monergistic action without confusion or trial, and we move to our present epoch with the use of the very days we know.

All the kinds are regulated by the language itself to exclude any variation beyond the limitations which bound kind; the concept of variation beyond kind is expressly removed.

All the days are deemed such in a context where the later ones are days as we know them, in type; and this makes it apparent that any move to even operational diversification rationally must make and establish its case. This may not be done except for days 1, 2 and 3, and even there it is merely one possibility; and the generic and consistent usage of the term argues that even here, there is nothing diverse in kind (even if in mechanics).

Indeed, assuming the author is writing to be understood ('nothing wreathed' is in His words - Proverbs 8:8-9 covers the case, for interpretation), a certain common character at least must attach to the 'days': though it would be ourselves who would be to blame, if we forced our current mechanisms onto the early one. Whatever the mechanisms, however, and that they are correlative to our own is undoubtedly indicated by the 'evening and the morning', days 1, 2, 3 may have some diversification in the means of production of the light zones.

In the case of day 1, however, we simply cannot require how much time preceded that phase of the day which allowed for the input of light. What one does not know is not improved by emphasis or contention. It may be that the sovereign overruling power ensured that the kind of day which succeeded was as it were, honoured in the 'day' of the institution of light and darkness separation (day one). It would be most comprehensible if there be so; but it is not determinable by our minds.

As for days 2 and 3, it is conceivable that they had a light darkness movement mechanism wholly different from that now, in that day 4 specifies the institution of the operation of this mechanism, and we are not sure if this involves only its visibility aspect or its whole character. The fact remains, however, that mornings and evenings are operational in uniform linguistic usage with that employed for later 'days', so that the generic character of these aspects is certainly already instituted. The genus, if not the species, of chronological concept is clear on any reading.

(Further, if the terms 'evening and morning' in this uniform context are to be given full scope, then day four would indeed see the uncovering, not the creation of sun and moon, a key and index by the uniformity of the phrase.)

This gives ground for viewing all days initially constituted, irrespective of operation, as similar in constitutional kind, even then; and argument to the contrary is merely to institute conceivable mechanical variants. The maximum input here, for variation, would be this: though the terms employed are the same, and the generic impact must be similar, the exact term of time as we know it, that is involved, cannot be specified to within quotable limits.

For all that, the generic structure of the matter does limit this variability; and it cannot be used as of an 'age' with any logical propriety; for that is divergent in kind. We are as excluded from evolutionary type 'ages' in this simple fact, as from any imagined (transmutational) genetic plasticity in the clear use of the term 'kind', such as occurs in Genesis 1:11, 21, 21 and 25.

As to the pre-life day 1, we repeat, however, such limit is simply not available. only the fact that the ensemble of a 'week' is in view gives plausibility to the concept of a day of limits as strict as those of days 2 and 3. This however is no mean point; it is just that there are no limits to the institutional basis for this day. Presumably it fits happily into the total schema for days to construct the appropriate week for our instruction, the later days being specific in kind; and any vast distortion in initiation would seem wholly questionable.

Despite this, it would be presumption to argue from this, that the initiation activities of day one must be co- ordinate with the time frame of the other days. All one can rightly say without further ado is this: even day one is a day, the term used elsewhere, and hence may not be transmuted into some other type of concept, liberating thought from the text - from the author's thought which has been put into this text. That would not be interpretation, but evasion.

One result of this analysis is simply this: life is given neither the parameters in variability nor in time that relate to the magical hypothesis of evolution; and six co-ordinate-in-kind days constitute the time span of creation, the later members of the creation days becoming wholly those we now know, with current rotational data, as being presumably near to 24 hours in duration. All life comes from determinate designs, dynamically instituted in short order. Animal and human life, specifically, relate stringently to rotational days for the creation actions their mentioned.

Life in particular, in all its specified variety, has a highly specific, totally short, sharp matter of (rotational) days specified for its entire construction, institution and execution: a divine splash of magnificent energy, exquisite craftsmanship and glorious invention.

Spending a little more time on day one - a great day

Finally, let us examine a little more stringently this day 1. It is exceedingly important that even for day 1, evening and morning were the first day (Genesis 1:5). God called the light day and the darkness He called night, and evening and morning day one. That is how it proceeds. After specifying that light in this context is called day, the text then states that evening and morning (in that opposite order) were day one. This order it is which is used in the later days. In other words, it is not just a matter of mere convenience: it is a reversal for a reason. The darkness was the state of the world before God created light, and after light is said to be 'day'; and darkness 'night': we then learn that evening and morning were day one.

It might well and duly be urged that the concept of evening and morning being day one, or two or three, as it is stated to be, comes from this creative fact, that first there was darkness in the world, before light got there... was instituted in the world.

The importance of this consideration from the present viewpoint: it is this. It is in focus that darkness came first. It is stated to be so, and the sequential notation enshrines just this. What (statedly) happened is the same as the notation given.

Darkness at the entry of matter is affirmed; light is a convenience, an asset, an enduement fitting for life. How long then, was that darkness. As Jesus said, "how great is that darkness!", we ask in this case, how long is that darkness?

The answer is beautiful, it is one that people should learn to give rather more freely in some circumstances: We do not know. Simply that.

Before God, when one day is as a thousand years (as he says) and a thousand years is as one day, then in this case of day one, we really do not know. Shall we impertinently advise God how He wished to think about, 'hover' about... as the Spirit brooded over the waters, to put it metaphorically following the text, before He made light! It is suggested that this would be unwise before One whose understanding is infinite.

In the case of day one, even the parallel considerations relative to 6 days (which gives the word in context much call for uniformity of definition, sufficient call to be conclusive as to the nature of the day in view, in the last analysis): there is this difference.

The text states that this is the institution of the day. Part of it is prior to the very institution of light. If the rest of the day one were to be the normal length, then of necessity this would make the 'time' from the institution of matter to the end of day one, longer than is the case for the other six days: except the primordial darkness did not exceed that later darkness, which at that time was in fact to be a separating period between successive days. But was this so ?

Did the primordial darkness, before the very creation of succession of day and night, before there was any day to separate from night indeed: did this in fact equal the night time which later would separate day from day ? There is a distinction between bravery and hardihood, and it appears to be exemplified here. You statedly have a different situation in day one. Its prior darkness is not part of a sequence: it is initial, one aspect of institution in the whole later-to-be-repeated scenario of day and night to which we are now so accustomed, but which then had not even begun; for which then, in the early reaches of day one, there was no example.

Are we justified in retrospectively exporting our evening as a separation from days, to that darkness which had not as yet (we know because we are told when God called the darkness 'night') been called night. Darkness ? yes; night ? not then. Why assume, simply assume that the darkness extending before it was called night, equated in time with the darkness called night, after light ? that the time for the institutive function of darkness equated with that for the separation-of-days function ?

Ultimately, there can be only one reason: it is this. The seven day sequence is expressed in terms of seven days; and would not this stress the coherence on the one hand, terminologically speaking, and the parallel for man, on the other ?

It would not stress the concept for a parallel for man's work as noted in Exodus 20, because the text in Genesis 1 explains that there was first an institution and then a sequence; and the fact that man is not equal with God, is derivative, is part of a creation which is not integral to God, but a result of His creation-thought-and-power-and-purpose, is crucial to the context.

Not to observe this is not to observe the distinction between the finite and the infinite God. When He is doing what is His specific in principle, which by nature we cannot share, that is, instituting both ourselves and our environment, there can be and obviously is no parallel. Setting up the trappings, the equipment for the test is no part of the test. Further, to realise this is part of being godly, that is, realising what you are and are not, and what God is. It is a conceptual part of it.

The six creative days incorporate one distinction we cannot have, a divine distinction. Can we bypass this divine distinctive and equate the initial darkness in which such a thing as matter was made, as if it were inconsequential, irrelevant ? Is the examiner's setting up of the chairs part of the first hour ? we might ask, in a suggestive, but merely illustrative analogy. Since day one incorporates this divine distinctive, we do not well to act as if it did not. What are the environs of that distinctive ? What depicts the environment of terms, the cluster of considerations, the operative schema, for God ?

We do not know. When God, in the form of God, does things in the arena of creation, we do well to put our hands over our mouths rather than know the answers...

This must be said. However, to what extent may we properly attenuate this salient fact, this sovereign fact by the very fact that God in His sovereignty has called the darkness and the light, notwithstanding, day one? That is the question.

To the extent it is called 'day', despite the fact that during the initial darkness light was created, as distinct from given one of its episodic emplacements between a preceding night and a following night, we may urge that it is in essence, just the same. Certainly, it would be put, there would be differences of kind, in that during the course of day one, light is instituted as such, in our universe; but there is no need to postulate any difference of time, in that days are all called days.

Yet they are so called as things instituted in a night to day sequence, not in a setting of day creation within the initial darkness which was (in terms of the duo), at that stage, all of the sequence which was in existence.

Because the context is explicit on this point, there is no real excuse for assuming that its declared specifics, the incorporation of the creation of light, make no difference. They are different and notably such. They are institutional, not constitutional.

How long was the first night ? We do not know; but this we do know, that it is in a style of performance, in a splash of divine energy where omnipotence stoops to no constraints, sovereignty relates to no obfuscation, frustration, where the energy of the text is clear: to God there is His work.

He does it and it is done; indeed, He says it and it is done. Speech is performance; means are assumed. In analogy, it is rather like the executive who picks up the phone and tells them. Yes, I have done that, he tells the meeting. It is done.

Power is no problem; it is assumed. Means are in hand. The action is correlative to no obstruction. While the analogy is imperfect (in our real world), the point is not.

God, to the perfected degree, is in that situation, as shown in Chapter 1. Therefore no suggestion is made, should be made or could logically be made that time had to be long, in terms of constraint for the divinity. Constraints are, as often shown, what He invents. The text indicates that time to institute all life was unquestionably short, in terms of some number of hours: that is certain.

The initial time, in terms of the style of our exhortation in Exodus 20, must harbour no disjunction of style, or of basic correlativity to the other days in the energy and panache, the sovereignty and certainty of the events. Day one cannot be atypical in such a way as to destroy the exhortation. Nor may it be construed with certainty as lacking a divine authority and specificity in the absolute initiation, linked with darkness. It must relate to the whole duration of the sequence so as not to destroy its flow, yet this without presupposing the entire nature of the setting up at the outset.

Therefore, there appears no way in which day one would be a time of a different sort of toil on the part of the divine artisan; except perhaps in its establishment for ongoing purposes. There certainly is neither need to assume it different in duration from the other days; nor warrant to streamline this demonstrably different day into entire conformity with them. It is just that the exact length is simply not known.

The colour, impact, feel, style is correlative with that of the rest; but the pre-sequential time specific is not to be gauged.

For more recent developments, see That Magnificent Rock, Models and Marvels, Section E. In particular, it is  now found that the peculiar placement of the radiohalos does not require creation structure, other cases being found in other types of rock, but that the suddenness of the short-term cooling of the rocks is assured. The convulsive cooling is inescapable, since the halos come from very short life decay products of uranium, so that they must have been carried, it is thought, by warm fluid into place in molten rock, which would have had to cool so rapidly in days, that the radiohalos would imprint on a substance, not simply be carried off in the liquids. This fits catastrophic action of an amazing kind.

It has also been found (Refuting Compromise, Dr Jonathan Sarfati, pp. 362ff.), that further time 'compression' such as concur with accelerated radio-decay rates, is indicated on the field, so making a theoretical-practical collation of evidence.

i) radiohalos in coalified wood show not only radiohalos but elliptical versions, indicating compression of the wood, some having the elliptical superimposed on the more circular halos - double ones! Since the rate of decay at this level in the decay chain, is exceedingly fast, this leaves only quite short times for the compression to occur after the fluids entered the wood, and made their initial halos, a few years at most. These data conform to the view that a huge flood dumped the materials and overlays squashed them; and since such highly specific findings appear in rocks dated on an assumed constant decay basis, with a difference of over 200 million years, and the remarkable events point to the same event, then such millions of years may be the result of false hypotheses. Such an hypothesis is that of a static radioactive decay rate in all times, situations and events.That makes extrapolation perilous, to say no more!

In fact, of course, it has been found by Professor Wanser that in a plasma state, for example, the decay rate can be multiplied by many millions of times, while the value of c, the velocity of light, relevant to decay, can be affected by field strength.

ii) Further, Dr Robert Gentry, with sophisticated, modern equipment checked the residual lead content in the uranium-lead decay situation in coalified wood, and found only small traces of lead, indicative of a relatively short period of decay for the large quantities of uranium present in the wood. Thousands and not millions of years are here indicated, even at CURRENT decay rates.

iii) Again, in south-eastern Australian rocks, such as some at Stone Mountain,  identified as flood specimens, radiohalos have been analysed. Many uranium and thalium complete radiohalos being present, which would take at current decay rates, half-lives in billions of years. Since these are in these recent rocks, indications exist that this time was compressed inordinately, to fit into the geologically determined rock placement. A vastly enhanced decay rate would cover the case.

Thus the multitude of indications of a 'young' earth, are here meeting co-ordinate and not converse data in the radioactive field, and just as the former were always overwhelming, so now the latter are not citable to the contrary, if scientific method is to be honoured.

Indeed, the structuring and categorisation of the heavens, the great wall  of initial galaxies, on current popular theory, join the vast openings concerning new knowledge of variability in radioactive decay rates, growing especially from the researches of the RATE group of scientists. To this must be added further, the obvious nonsense of trying to  read backward in any case from current, already created modes of action in such areas: these things are a mere beginning of address to this volatile situation. Not only are there the unique criteria in the creation process itself, but there are those notably exceptional in times of vast catastrophe or emergence.

It is apparent that in any creation, the action of having it happen, diverges absolutely or at least very considerably from the actions and reactions of its maintenance, whether directly or in any system (such as library storage) where it is placed.

In fact,  the creation must  present matters both outside normal operation, and variable within it, quite  simply, as in any mode of newness and  action, compared with weathering and mere endurance:  as with paint being applied, that increment, and its decay rate after  application, that decrement.  Comparing the two rates would be rather worse than meaningless, and efforts  to USE the latter to work out the former would verge on losing one's mind altogether!

The  enormous variability of theories of the heavens, the total  rebuff of  all  efforts  to account for the cosmos in terms of mere progression for no particular reason from no particular  state on any particular assumption,  and the virtual asininity of assumptions that do not have the favour of being practically applicable, in the realm of geology, has become notorious, as shown in works about dating, as  diverse as that of Steve Austin and Professor E. H. Andrews, a man of vast scientific credentials and practical skills.

The latter has two works, both showing the presumptions available in the various attempts to date the earth, and one showing the vast diversities of results available in efforts to achieve this, so that fossils may be used to date, rather than radioactive data, since so many variables and assumptions make the latter too near to guesswork, the results attesting the theoretical fact. Valuable here are the two works, From Nothing to Nature, and God, Science and Evolution.

The same sort of feature is found to be operative, as Steve Austin has shown so well in his worthwhile volume, Grand Canyon,  Monument to Catastrophe, to which he adds numerous cases where dates from one popular mode of argumentation, simply are denied by the practical refutation of the rocks. Assumptions and on states bring things nearer to an  exposition of philosophy, for distant times, than of knowledge. Moreover much work has been done, especially in carbon 12, which abounds in materials where it should not exist, if the earth were very old, since it does not last so long at current rates. The all but incredible error of assuming the present as the guide to the past, with the minimal and constantly arresting knowledge of man, the results growing so chaotic as he often finds on such assumptions, the impasses found in trying to reach 'explanations' all but consistently arriving, and of course, the vast array of clear processes which would attest a very young earth indeed: these mount and surmount.

St Helen's explosion,  as he has shown, simply confirms the need for realism and verifiability and testability in making theories. Much thought to require myriads of years, can now be seen happening in the experimental realities of current history, in days.

Let us then review in the light of such findings, the radioactive roll call a little, for any who may wish to consider it again in this setting.

It is the same in the matters investigated so famously by Dr Robert Gentry, the orphan radiohalos and their deposition in rocks which had to cool exceedingly fast, and so set to allow radioactive imprints, before the decay products were lost, so that images could be rendered. The last phases of rapid decay were shown in the radiohalos, leaving the question, how did they enter since they decayed so fast ? It is now suggested that this was by rapid thermal transportation into the rock before it set, followed by an extremely accelerated setting of the said rock, in days, to allow there to be sufficient solidity for the new entrants, to leave just the last rings of rapid decay and impact that they did.

The parent stock for these phases of radioactive degeneration had to be near, to decay quickly to leave no trace.  Parent stock does not appear always to be found, and accelerated radioactive decay may have been part of the entire thrust of events in this case also.

Indeed, in further investigation by the RATE group of scientists, who have published widely on the subject, there have been such radiohalos found in what have been identified as flood rocks, of more recent origin. Fully formed U and Th halos, accounting on popular assumptions to a minimum of 100 millions years, are also found in these rocks, indicative of a speeding up, of the rate of radioactive decay of order of thousands, by the means of variable rates of decay. Such rates have been shown theoretically possible, even in our present system, under special conditions (cf. Models and Marvels).

Coalified wood cases have confirmed these indications of fast, catastrophic action, and anomalous provision of products of radioactive decay in abundance, since here there is known recent formation of the setting in view, and in some cases there is hardly any lead found, this the final stage to which the decay proceeds,  so that the case for a long period for decay does not apply, and the results for decay indicate uranium around for only thousands of years, at current rates. Large amounts of the uranium and small amounts of lead lead to small amounts of time for degeneration even at current rates, themselves of course a very open question in the first place.

Moreover, cases of this kind, where there are circular halos and compressed ones overlaid, signify a time constraint requiring only a few years for the entry and decay, with compression, whereas this remarkable type of compression and distortion of the radio circles is found in rocks in different sites, those spanning 200 million years in alleged differences!

With the shorter time overall as above, and the similar and remarkable parallel in different places and rocks of vastly different age, we have readily available a dual solution from one cause. The rate of decay has been variable, and the time for the events has been minute compared with the extravagant claims which confuse major events of creation or flood dynamic, with the more mundane, and seek to equate results in such conditions. The vast discrepancies may result from small times at variable rates, so making the case relatively simple, however objectionable to the philosophic postulates of some.

The RATE scientists have made useful contributions on modes for such changes of rates as Dr Sarfati notes in his "Refuting Compromise", where he also provides a useful summary of much information to the point.

It is the same nearly everywhere we look^*A: current popular theories assuming constancy in catastrophe and creation alike do not fit multitudes of minute and macro evidence. Meanwhile Hartnett and Humphreys are making models, the latter with some verified application to magnetic fields in space, that leave attempts to fathom light transmission in the creation camp in interesting array, whereas no parallel action is available without creation to cover the case of light transmission, in the theoretical time.

This failure outside creation, to account for things on the basis of monistic theories,  is the norm, and the alternative offered to  cover the case if possible,  is always an enormity. This in turn is further verification, for constant inability in a theory specialising in hope and not in field evidence, to meet the data whether on rates of chemical inflow to the sea, or those of magnetic decay, or on fossil findings, or on cell sophistication at all levels, or on the unaccountable helium residues, or the continuation of the continents on the earth, or the continuation of C¹² in specimens far too 'old' to have any left, or of blood in samples by multiple orders of magnitude, past the decay-by date, on popular theories of dating: all these are but a small part of the scenario of dating travesty.

It is however precisely what is predicted when creation is predicated, and is a necessary result of its omission, which is moreover, a fatal logical error, as Dr Jason Lisle^*3 points out in his work,  The Ultimate Proof of Creation, and is made manifest in the works on this site, cited at *4 and *5A in the Appendix to Ch. 4 in this volume.  

As astro-physicist Dr Lisle notes in his work just cited,  there is a constant shuffle to remove non-conformist facts, and there is need for the anti-creationist to become creative in this field. Thus C¹²ⁱs found in diamonds allegedly millions of years old; but its decay rate is such that it cannot last anywhere near that time. Whenever it is found where billions of years seem to apply, it refutes it on the basis of knowledge of decay rates (as they now are). Hence, if verification means nothing, and if assumptions on constant rates mean nothing, then all is well; and yet it is the very assumption about past events in radioactive rates which animates naturalistic necessitarians!

Such matters are examined in their place in this work, but here the point is simply to stress that the imaginary constraints on time, parallel to such as Cardinal Bellarmine was willing to yield to in the case of Galileo and the earth-central system, are irrelevant. The thrust is a matter of  mystification in contradiction to evidence, and presumption contrary to verification. The Cardinal was willing to alter the clear interpretation of the Bible if necessary, which no child of God should consider, since He is vastly more knowledgeably and eternally reliable; but for all that, in the end he became the prosecutor, no more feeling any such restraint in forcing the unfortunate issue with Galileo, making simply one more use of prohibited force in Roman Catholic history, where it is not only inapplicable, but in this case, irrelevant.

The 'need' to violate the word of God in its pellucid teaching on creation is zero, even for the immoral who put man's passing nostrums before God's eternal word. That as so often, is the irony: a whole novel is written on imagination, more often called science by assumptions, and these are often explicit. Indeed, they are often even self-contradictory, as in asserting truth while denying ground for knowing it. Despite this grave comedy,  concurring and as it would almost seem, concussed theologians move witlessly in to discuss the invasion of biblical text by tonic thoughts, as if prescribing for the very folly of misled man, in educating God who speaks. Alas the education has meant millions dead, as the unquestionable contribution of naturalism to being fighting fit and fighting first, national and racial glory, has made its impact, Hitler being a prime example, as Stalin no less.

But let us revert to the text itself, having given a little thought to the forces which have made its distortion seem attractive to some.

Just as there is no ground for imagining that any darkness before the evening and the morning is in any structural or material way related to the 6 day creation format, since in the absence of creation the material is irrelevant, so eternal glory and light, when this creation is as scripturally affirmed, finished (II Peter 2, Revelation 20), is meaningless by our type of current material standards. The former is BEFORE creation of heaven and earth, and the latter is AFTER its destruction. It has no bearing, and argumentation on this basis is otiose.

Any concept such as that in the PC in America writing on the topic, which imagines something like their being eternal light on the first evening-morning situations before creation or in the first three days, and then its parallel at the last when the glory and the end has come, is simply confusing two diverse situations. The first three days are NATURAL items; yet eternal glory is supernatural. The systems are not correlative or even directly connected at all. Moreover, the first three days retain the night-day sequence and the day terminology, proceeding precisely as specified  in the time of the completion of the chronological and formation aspects of the heavenly bodies, at  day four. The dual creation of heavens and earth is first specified; formative modelling proceeds then, first on the already existing earth, and then on the already existing heavens, the creation yielding thus to the formation.

To assume nil natural function, a non-specified non-natural light,  in a text of the invention and formation of the natural agencies, and a strange urge to use the same precise and distinctive terminology for the day and time, what is this then ? It is to add from a different dimension. Only what God does is relevant to the creation situation; what is not given, is not to be imagined. That is, this is so unless one would like to become a latter-day additive to an editorial Staff for the re-creation of Genesis. However, this is leaving it decidedly too late. If even Pilate could say, What I have written, I have written, how much more so is it with God, who says not one jot or tittle will pass from the Law and the Prophets till all is fulfilled (cf. I Corinthians 2:9ff., I Peter 1:10ff., II Peter 1:19ff.). Moreover, God speaks with a knowledge in the case, simply not available to man.

Thus imagination and textual abhorrence seem to be major dynamics in all this wriggling with a perfectly straightforward case, as if man's puny and constantly self-contradicting wisdom, finding what he thought not-there and dispensing with what he had thought there, though it is, were to the point at all. It is, to be sure, amusing to see the disappearance of textual dissipation as new knowledge comes to light, and new refutations of imaginary conditions, new contradictions of absurd extrapolations from the action of creation to the mode of its creation,  appear. It is fun to watch: but the process is lethal for millions, who have chosen this form of dissipation for their funeral lyre. Alas for many, for faith in the word of God must surpass all tests; while at the same  time, it passes every logical criterion uniquely.

This word has been demonstrated totally, as to both its source and reliability, even to amazement; and it continues as this and that challenge comes, making a litany for the dead, who have opposed it. Better believe and live, than listen to the increasingly absurd protestations of ever new diabolical sneers: "Has God said!"

As Isaiah put it, so long ago:

"When the overflowing scourge passes through,

"Then you will be trampled down by it.

As often as it goes out it will take you;

For morning by morning it will pass over,

And by day and by night,

It will be a terror just to understand the report."

The bed, he proceeds to indicate, will be TOO SHORT TO STRETCH OUT ON.

Such is the limitation imposed on man as he seeks to avoid the teaching of the unbridled power of God, in the stipulated mode as history being introduced in Genesis, it starts with the generations from the hands of God and proceeds to the generations through the procreation of man, in one integral history, where nothing is left to the imagination, except where imagery as is normal in any literature, makes its way into the scene by the constraints that call for it: definitively,  not by the thrust of independent desire.

In order for the reader conveniently to survey an array of relevant features concerning the thrust of nescient but presumptively omniscient materialism, reductionism, and their applications in various fields such as dating, moulding and featuring the earth, some elements of The gods of naturalism have no go! are assembled below; but of course that five volume work has its own more total coverage.

Amusingly, a prominent Harvard Professor, Lewontin,  has admitted in advance, much like Gould also of Harvard (Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6 to be read with Chs.   4 and    5) in other gravely hilarious expostulations of inadequacy, the absurdity of their case, perpetrating it in favour of a quaint and impossible philosophy, which has nothing to do with scientific method, called 'materialism' , on the ludicrous irrationalism of which see for example Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and Christ Incomparable Ch. 2, with It Bubbles ... Ch. 9. The very voicing of such a theory itself, contradicts its own tents. It is edifying to note the bankruptcy of their position as cited more fully in Alpha and Omega ... Ch. 1, as follows.

Lewontin, notable figure in the aggressive evolutionary program wrote this: ("Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997, emphasis for clarity):

Our willingness to accept scientific claims against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, onl the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Note that his cut-down version of 'science', which is actually a scientistic abortion, has 'patent absurdity' in parts, exhibits 'failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises,' has liaison with 'unsubstantiated just-so stories', and if this is science, then doggerel is poetry. On scientific method where it has grounds for respect and is historically normative, see Scientific Method.

The interesting thing is this: this exemplar of modern scientific distortion, so popular as have been other variants from science in the past, as in the famed phlogiston case, to which most bowed at the time, admits building on a philosophy with outcome not only irrational and self-contradictory, but ludicrous, and his reference to Kant is itself one to an irrationality basic to his own. It is refuted many times on this site, as in SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill Section 4, and SMR pp. 396ff. (including *2 reference at the outset of this reference).

It has the undistinguished folly of trying somewhat dismissively to 'account' for the presence of causality in logic, and in so doing makes the sophomoric, almost moronic invalidity of USING causality to PROVE that it is not objectively valid, alleging it a mere enforced insistence, blinkers for the mind. If it were any such thing, a distancing device from reality: then so would be the results of its use, even by Kant! as in making Kantianism, surreal and not real at all. In his theory, one would approach the apotheosis of antilogy, find the sleep-walk of self-contradiction and the abyss of absurdity, all conjoined like the wings, the upward thrust in hope, and the crash in fact of Icarus.

Sic temper tyrannus! thus always perish those who tyrannise over man, as if able to dispose like gods, of the divine, and drape the human with their ideas.

There is nothing of the cantabile in this. Kantianism! We are not at all interested in cant, or the concepts of his own forging with neither furnace nor actual force. His unenviable elixir, like sweat, is not to be desired. Hence one prefers to decant it, and follow logic to its results in reality,  and rejoicing in the entire consistency of the matter, arise to the self-revealing and vigorous validity of the word of God, to the very eternity of God as so often shown (cf. Possess Your Possessions Volume 9, Ch. 2, What is the Chaff to the Wheat! Chs. 3  and  4), and for so many millenia exclusively attested as both valid and verified on this earth (cf.  Deity and Design  Ch. 2,  TMR Ch. . 5, Repent or Perish  Ch.   2).

It is this very word, ever speaking clearly, to which history now resounds in its noisier and noisier march to judgment, predicted with considerable detail! (cf. Answers to Questions .Ch. 5).

 

On validity, further see such as:

                  It Bubbles ... He Calls Ch.    9, esp. *1A ,

TMR Chs.     5,   7,

Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming... Ch.  5, 1A,

Repent or Perish Chs. P  2  2 and  7, pp.  152ff.;

Serenity not Serendipity ... Ch. 6;

Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch.  6 ;

Barbs ... 29,  1929,  19; 

SMR   3, Ch. 1 pp . 50 ff.,  
see Cartoons pp. 397, 146, 271, 295, 422C,

Little Things Ch.   5,

TMR 9,  Epilogue,

News 94; 

The  Defining Drama Ch. 4,

Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch. 7,

What is the Chaff to the Wheat! Chs 3, 4.

Let's Be Reasonable For God Is!  Ch. 2.

 

*A

APPENDIX II

Interestingly, as in so much,  the thing falls into a pattern, when it comes to radioactive dating, in overview. This allows a little convenient exploration.

1) Thus when you come to the confusion, confrontation, dissertations and assumptions, you find that there is available a principial basis for variability of dating methods owing to different basics whether as found by the RATE group of scientists, and Professor Wanser, for example,  concerning available adjustments at the basic level of material format, or field or form, such as plasma. Obviously too much has been assumed with too little knowledge, rather as in the case of Newton, with added sophistication from Einstein for certain cases, and as there, extrapolation from one aspect simply does not work. Hence in this instance, with immense warnings ignored,  the anomalies are the work of presumption, and unscientific haste, now readily adjusted.

2)

a) Thus must be faced anomalous results, such as the vast differences found in using different types of radio-dating, different procedures, substances. What varies so amongst itself. for its own variable technical methods founded on its ideas, in  its own chosen theoretical exclusion zone, is already unverified. As you find from both Professor Andrews'  cited work (God, Science and Evolution p. 120), and that of Dr Steve Austin in his work, Grand Canyon, this lapse is systematic (e.g. pp. 120ff., cf. SMR pp. 166ff., TMR Ch. 7, Section E). Different assumptions are made, different results are gained. Some cease to trust such dates, and look for fossil evidence as more normative, while fossil evidence itself is based on assumptions that meet endless problems, negative verifications as Nilsson was at some pains to point out in his Synthetische Artbildung cf. Let's Be Reasonable for God Is!

b) As you see in Austin's highly empirical and geologically investigative FIELD WORK in the Grand Canyon in particular,  (op.cit.), some of the results of radioactive multi-assumption, philosophically based procedures are indeed comic (cf. p. 129). They virtually redraw what is clearly attested, like an absent-minded professor, putting his umbrella into the post-box, instead of his paper, and saying (as in a Punch cartoon): THAT will give the Society something to think about.

It does!

c) In what are called paraconformities, erosible surfaces uneroded where evidences in terms of assumed vast time spans would suggest strong erosion, as frequently found by Austin, over large areas involved MISSING results. Morris in the work, The Genesis Flood noted the same difficulties for assumed order in rocks, with vast disjunctions from assumed order in rock layers, showing no sign of overlay through stress and fracture (cf. pp. 180ff.), but remaining there in vast areas, all the same. Non-verification extends to the point that it is wholly unsurprising, where desire and detail part company. This violates scientific method. You do not CHEW on your view in this arena, but FORGE it from facts. Bible-believers do not fear facts, but love them. This illustrates what appears the near insanity of the Texas decision to disallow the granting of degrees, contrary to the California case, this year, to the Creation Research Graduate School. This had operated for many years with approval in California (cf. Journal of Creation, Vol. 24(3), 2010, pp. 44ff.).

d) In the midst of such confusion, there are to be found likewise, MISSING LOGICAL LINKS. Why do locally or quietly deposited remains appear in vast aggregates, without roots, from many parts of the earth, mixed, tumbled, in vast many metre-deep collections, if the evidence is aligned away from the catastrophic sources, which imply other means and causes of the deposition, which in turn makes up so much of the sedimentary attestation! It is necessary to proceed from what is there to what happened, not from what dream determine should be there, and lash out at harshly treated evidence, far less glorify theory at the expense of thought.

e) It is always difficult to pursue the ramifications of any theory which is founded on assumptions of sufficient knowledge, when there is no basis for this, of constant order when there is in the model in view, no ground for this, of modes of procedure for what is laid down, both altogether and in stages, being comparable to those in its being laid down, the old creation-maintenance dilemma, and in shorter form, the same concerning what is found out, and its own source with resultant remains of earlier action in other realms of operation.

The misfits in particular lack the attestation so strongly shown in Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, of KIND, facilitating the use of hierarchical classification methods. As Dr Gary Parker noted, the apparent procedure in terms of the rock strata concept which is common and popular,  has been not little things building into greater diversities over time, but genera before detail, major classifications before minor differentiations, all contrary to the entire schema of polished assumptions on barbarous bases used for estimates of dating in rocks.

Assume the gradual when the evidence is the variable and the impositional, and whatever your means, your results will attest in comedy or anomaly, your presumption. This is what is found, cause and effect. Manhandle the evidence, and the results will manhandle you, even if you ignore them and proceed to plague those intensively sensitive to them, and even exclude them from teaching (as occurred in effect, in this author's case also).

The kind of thing to be found in 'kind' is similarly disruptive of chaotic conceptions (cf. The Bible ... Ch. 6).

  f) Again, there are missing domain coverages. Thus whether it be in the earth, as above, or in the heavens (cf. Let's Be Reasonable, For God Is! Ch. 5), or in life (cf. TMR Ch. 1 and as above), what is to be expected, is not found, what is projected, is not discovered, and this negative verification comes not once, but repeatedly (cf. SMR pp. 140ff.). In the heavens, you fall into the same thing, as on earth and life: mismatch of philosophical theory, scientistic invasion of science, with active results of investigation: as if lurching drunken from realm to realm, in a dream. This comes whether it be in the great wall of 'early'  galaxies contrary to expectation, supernova numbers or solar system genesis modes, outside creation.

Lacking sufficient causation for anything, naturalism has reductionist, empirical and irrational eruptions from many sides, like the groaning of a harness meant for a filly, used on a master race-horse, before it snaps (the harness, not the horse, since the works of the Lord have their time, purpose and foreknown career, and rebellion its irrationalism's subsidence in confusion (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!, Deity and Design ...    8).

Some data on these topics in particular follows, as illustration, from The gods of naturalism have no go!     7, and with this, some relevant Chapters include:

 Calibrating Myths... Ch. 1, Possess Your Possessions Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Epilogue, Let's Be Reasonable, For God Is! Ch. 1, Alpha and Omega ... Chs.  1,     2,  3,  SMR pp. 208ff., Let's Be Reasonable For God Is! Ch. 6, and on reductionism in note form, this section.

 

NATURE ?

No such are these, our natures, or if you prefer  "Nature"! This world is not such a place.

With exquisitely sure grounds, it deteriorates, the grounds themselves for such action interlocking tested laws in the intellectual objects according to which the results duly accrue (when the former are accurate) in the practical realm. Thus the  thought world that RELATES to practical realities, and the latter itself are interlocked as in a beautiful marriage, where disharmony is in only one direction, and is to be removed at once, by adjusting or removing negatively verified hypotheses.

Reason and reality cohere; like brother and sister. We see THAT it happens, work out why, in thousands of multiplied phases and facets, with multiple expressions of the whole substance, structure form and nature of the matters in hand.
 

·       Now if a fresh-cut pile of pine logs, a system so simple as to be entirely ludicrous in comparison with one cell of living tissue,

·       a system ex-will, ex-life, ex-thought in process, and of limited - indeed, vitally defunct results, ready to accrue - one severed from its relatively simple vital botanical source (i.e. its trees were cut) :

·       if this clashes entirely with expectations, contrary to reality, and would require suspension of law, laws, customs, usage, cosmos construction, to "ARISE" on its own, so that it was stable as such:- then how entirely lordly is the lore that has life thus "arise"! deploying forces in the imagination, not available in the world that stands.

All its specialties need simultaneous protection (the cell membrane to protect its instability being one) from contrary processes, and every part in the evidential cell that is always high grade in design, showing NO development in ANY series at ANY time in ANY creature, wherever found, must be right. As Stephen Jay Gould put it^*1, in one of his admissive moments, adding to Denton's work on individual cells, and their non-gradational character in all known cases:

"Instead of a narrow beginning and a constantly expanding upward range, multicellular life reaches it maximal scope at the start, while later decimation leaves only a few surviving designs" - Wonderful Life, p. 233 (cf. 212).

This of course relates to his personal findings in the Burgess shale. "The main burst" [of vital activity] occurred well done in the Lower Cambrian" - p. 227. He puts it again, "the Burgess maximum in organic disparity" . Again, he says, p. 277, "I just can't accept that if organisms always have the potential for diversification of this kind - while only the odd ecology of the Lower Cambrian ever permitted its realization - never, not even once, has a new phylum arisen since Burgess items." This ? It is said of "the Cambrian explosion" which was "too big, too different, and too exclusive." It relates to the SCALE of the occurrence in which so vast a proportion of all life is suddenly deposited with such enormous variation of structural design, suffusion of varieties, architectural assemblages and the like.

SINCE the rock strata repeatedly give contrary results to fact (like trees standing more or less upright, in multiplied strata, through them, though it is supposed to take millions of years for them to be deposited - something for some other world, perhaps, not this one); contrary dates by different methods; and since the construction of the COLUMN is in vast proportion, in the mind, not with the eye, but rather TRENDS to columnar results are found without explanation for differences, and huge translocations appear, which show no signs of overlay, and the like, and this in vast areas of the earth's surface; and since dating methods give vast differences from assumed rate predictions as shown in SMR (Index Dating), and in That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7;  and since there is so much inexplicable material on the huge degree of sedimentary rock throughout the earth, and the mass graves of fossils such as biologist Nilsson documented with such appalled horror, abandoning Darwinianism on the spot, and all gradualism: it is not surprising if SOME materials are hinted at now, in the pre-Cambrian.

After all, it is ONLY on the gradualistic approach that the column appears to be a dating procedure. In fact, the geological hydraulics would be expected to have a massive TREND in deposition, but one with significant VARIATION for local reasons from place to place, and it is THIS which is found; so much so that it is indicated that in only a small fraction of cases on the earth's surface can the full "column" found (CEN Technical Journal -  Vol. 13, No.2, 1999). Missing is normative; overlay is vast; a trend is all that can be found, with edges often found not easy to relate to gradualism.

One would therefore EXPECT that there might well be exceptions, though perhaps not numerous, where multicellular creations could be found 'low' or simply deeper than the pre-Cambrian norm. The norm however is as spectacular no doubt, as the observer Gould maintains, and it is this point, in the arena of the evolutionary mode of dealing with findings, which has to be accounted for. Gradualism does not do so*^1A; it is aborted on the spot by these findings. They are a MOCKERY of it; it is a child in a school where SILENCE has just been commanded, who instead of complying, has succeeded in bringing out his rock-n'-roll band complete with trumpets, drummers and percussion, and equipped with high-sound broadcasting, while placing the speaker within one inch of the teacher's ear. It is not mere disobedience; it is comedy.

In our own terms, in the case before us, it is the most monstrous exposure, that is not merely an anti-verification: it is a flood! The constructions on earth laugh uproariously at the fallacious constructions in mind, in the little, quaint oddity of organic evolution.

Again from Gould (op.cit. 236-237) "But the mere pattern of life and death offers no evidence that survivors directly vanquished the losers. The sources of victory are as varied and mysterious as the four phenomena proclaimed so wonderful that we know them not (Proverbs 30:19) ... But if we  face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that we have no evidence whatsoever - not a shred - that losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those that survived." Indeed, p. 273, he explodes: "Darwin, making his characteristic (and invalid) conflation  of leisurely, gradual evolution and change by natural selection, rejected the fast transition theory out of hand."

THAT, of course, on Darwin's part, is the exact opposite of scientific method. You reject out of hand what is contrary to your imagination, and admit that the needs of your imagination are so lacking in the facts, that the latter may suffice to remove your theory: and THAT, it is perhaps the truest thing he ever said on the topic.

Gould indicates this point on p. 271: "Darwin ... had publicly fretted that "the case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained." We have noted Director W.R. Thompson's authoritative declaration that the case has not significantly changed SINCE that day (SMR p. 200); and this of course, despite immense and intensive searching by many in many places with many aids! As Parker puts it in this regard (Creation: The Facts of Life, p. 210):
 

• This new concept of evolution is based on the fossils we don't find and on genetic mechanisms that have never been observed. The case for creation is based on thousands of tons of fossils that we have found and on genetic mechanisms (variation within kind) that we do observe and put into practice every day.
  
   

He adds, as a scientist:

• "I'm inclined to prefer a mode that's based on what we do see and can explain (creation), rather than one that's based on what we don't see and cannot explain (evolution)."

Later and rather aptly, Gould notes what is the real problem, in its practical and psychological manifestation: "... the most important message taught by the history of science: the subtle and inevitable hold that theory exerts upon data and observation." The word "inevitable" is too strong: it is sometimes normative, but at times there is that keen edge of untainted desire which is not anti-God, disposed to resist what is, and which hence faces facts with willing glee. It is nevertheless true that the danger is real and to be resisted; and is exhibited nowhere more than in this ludicrously HOLD which gradualism has had on the philosophy of science, leading experts to speak of one another, in their various distresses, with a disparagement or amazement, as if they were school children. Such is the message: INSIST on the irrational and your bedfellows may well include fleas. They bite.

Incidentally, Gould  - p. 226 - speaks of a Chinese parallel to the extreme case of the Burgess shale, and declares: "The Chinese fauna is half a world away from British Columbia - thus establishing the global nature of the Burgess phenomenon. Even more crucially, the new finds seem well dated to a time DEEP in the Lower Cambrian." Of the absent but transitional beings, he indicates it difficult even to IMAGINE what they could be, and that variation is to be seen in twigs^*2, rather than branches of the tree of life. It is a strange map of a country that has minor country lanes, but no highways. It would lead to the conclusion that only the local was understood! ^*3

 

THE WORLD'S GREATEST NON-CONTEST -
for THE BOOK OF RECORDS ?

Thus NOT ONLY, in FACT, is the record of INSTANT cells of sophistication impact, but SUDDEN VARIETY in multicellular records, with a DECREASING information resultant, and a DECREASING variety effect over time;  while there is a massive total contribution of types and stages in an assemblage as if the Headmaster was calling the roll. This is not mere negation: it is mockery.

Clearly we are in the presence of something other than students coming by chance! Let us further review the imagination of transition for major groups:
 

• Even if, however, such structural magnitudes and vast varieties of design were to be imagined,
• coming in the unattested ways, to enable uplift in steps;
   
• and even though they baffle imagination of such a distinguished researcher as Gould, as to WHAT in the world they COULD have been (just as it WELL might if you were considering the development steps between the - ASSUMED - bicycle beginning PHASE  of a space station, and pondered the NATURAL and DEFENSIBLE ways in which the design would be triumphant all the way up, while developing),
   
• IF they were to be imagined,
   
• perhaps stored in some sort of museum ?
   
• where there could lie in wait, all the parts to be required at the end, for otherwise, all specifications being precise, it would be a virtual creation at the last basic stage, in any case -
   
• yet there is worse to follow!

There is still the little point should the imagination work feverishly for hours and invent mythical marvels of design manipulation (which call for greater than ever specifications to enable this highly complex and exceptionally demanding work), and then find a museum for parts storage, you also have to HAVE those parts. Imagination baulks; storage facilities are not found, nor yet caretakers for them; parts lack.

Then again, as to all the "experiments" (to use Gould's term) which would have been made, on the organic evolutionary hypothesis, made of course without an experimenter,  but that is the way with magic, the happenings in code and integral brilliance of ingenuity: these  failures lack. They should sprinkle the surface of the earth, like the beginnings of a snow-storm. They should be present in prodigious numbers, like the work of a Latin student in a stiff exam, when he had neglected his work, only far, far worse. He has SOME intelligence! They lack. For that student whose work so manifested itself, one would rather think SCHOLAR, than DUNCE, let alone, inert!

And the myriads of progressive, made in America, biological success stories ? They should vastly adorn the ancient landscapes. What should ? Things which despite fundamental faults and incredible clumsiness, and being produced without ANY imagination, SOMEHOW or other, chiefly other, managed so much as to exist in the most bizarre and unimaginable sequential modes - not a triumphant posture for SUCCESS  in acrid competition!

As to these, TO SUCCEED, NEVERTHELESS,  IN BEING FOR LONG ENOUGH FOR THE NEXT STAGE, they would HAVE to live for LONG TIMES, and hence have highly stable and visible modes of living. The FACT that these transitions of KIND are NEVER found is merely the requirement of logic, as always, duly found or certainly not contradicted, in the honest laboratory of time. Gould engages in choice language on the lack.

On any level as on all levels, the CAUSE is not present in nature, for it is manifested operationally, neither empirically nor validly at all in logic, at this level (SMR Chs.1,3). The cause ? It is not exhibited in time; it is Biblically stated to be beyond time, and to inject into time, as we onto paper when we write. That is the claim. Paper does not make words, not being equipped for that; it is a receptor. So are we, as may be seen by an examination of our products and powers. We live, we die, we age, our cells have it made, and unmake when their time comes. We are recipients. Matter is so at a much lower level. We have spirit; it doesn't. If it resented something, it couldn't express its displeasure; provoke it and it proceeds as to constructed facilities. The cognition for resentment is not present! It is all here, matter, mind and spirit, in its various natures.

That specific Biblical depiction is what is in PRECISE conformity with the facts, in every respect.
It is verified.  Gradualistic evolution is not. Let us not merely talk of creationism, since

a) the word is being currently increasingly prostituted into ambiguity, and
b) the real issue is the real source, who as such, is not without power.

Let us speak of Biblical Creationism, for that is where ALL the answers ENTIRELY meet ALL the facts, and hence is the preferred procedure, MERELY from a scientific method point of view, just as it is required in the further domains of logic as noted above.

The situation is delightfully simple. The theory of evolutionary naturalism is not relevant to science. Transitions of BASIC TYPE lack. Experiments of ANY kind lack. Logic forbids. Now scientific method precludes, and this multiply: as has been shown. Chaos frowns; logic laughs.
 

NOTES

*1

See Let God Be God! Ch. 12, esp. as  marked. Further rejection of some of the points made will appear in what follows.

*2

From Let God be God! Ch. 12, already referred to, and bearing heavily on the work of our current Chapter, we have this.

Archer, as noted,  states that the Hebrew in Genesis 1:14 may be rendered,

• "Let the luminaries in the firmament of heaven
  be for the purpose of separating between day and night,
  in order that they may be for signs, etc."
  
      (This professor with Laird Harris has produced

     The Theological Word Book of the Old Testament.)

Then verse 15 signifies their basic function as giving light (apart from being seasonal and signalising), once again, a verse on fire with purpose relative to BEING, verse 16 following with the performance, also stipulating purpose with specifics. IN verse 17, we find that

"God appointed them in the firmament of the heaven
to give light on the earth,
and to rule over the day and over the night,
and to divide the light from the darkness..."

WHY ? What is the point in so amazingly, so impactively precise and so strenuously brief a piece of writing, a very celebrity of terseness, in what could appear repetition ?

It is necessary for any view of the Bible which proceeds FROM plenary and immediate inspiration from God, as author to face this matter. If it were a mere matter of making and setting, while giving purpose, why not at least condense vv.15-18 ?

What however if the EMPHASIS and extensive specification coverage, be designed systematically to CLARIFY the situation, so that the DAY-DARKNESS alternation is now

 

	a) given a multiple CALLING (verse 14), in terms of purpose and celestial specifications;
	b) sequential with, but separated from the concept of the basic LIGHT GIVING function,
	c) made distinct from the IMPLEMENTATION ('and it was so') of the matter (verse 15), yet
	d)  embedded in context with verses 16-18!

These  last verses bear the responsibility of focussing interest on the precise WORK DONE IN FASHIONING THEM in the context of THESE 6 STATED PURPOSES, v. 16: while this with vv. 17-18 shows their being set in the framework of RULING, as the overall purpose. That, in turn,  in the amplitude of the constellation of stars as likewise formed, remains relevant to the point of decisive direction  knit with inimitable sovereignty! It is coded in majesty, styled in thrust,  incisive in imprint, flowing in thought, developmental in dynamic.

We move from vast but simple illuminative fluctuation to multi-purpose rule in the domain of light, nothing wasted all meaningful. Thus,  there is correlation with 1:1-3, differentiation, purposive definition and reflective oversight at the end, as of a work sought, wrought and now taught, clear, concise, particular, not to be confused with anything else, sui generis in the domain of forming and purpose for what is there.    

*2A

On the removal of scientists not worshipping at the shrine, something going far beyond mere dogmatically disjunctive dismissal of creationist scientists, as in Ben Stein's Expelled, there is the phenomenon of maniacal seeming  discrimination against even those who seek to have INVESTIGATION of the area.  It seems that these heady belligerents, seeking human embargo against those who do not follow them, contrary to scientific method, which gives to science its good name, by open, fair and incorrigible testing, are fearful that if even scholarly effort is given to this area, arias of creation attestation will proceed. That is, they fear lest investigation of the very themes and subjects will lead to overwhelming rejection of their cant.

This is anti-scientific, and brings a bad name to the captured maiden in distress, scientific method (cf. Scientific Method ... ). It is nothing less than a bold-faced and even farcical coup, take-over bid for the very name of 'science'.

Of course in the long run, so long as political dictatorship is not yet the way of this world (as in Revelation 13,17), this means 'science' loses its good name, like that of an aristocrat who loses castle and fortune by gambling. In the meantime, however, it becomes for the dissidents, a chief method of launching the attack on investigatory fidelity, until more and more tyranny makes restoration of liberty illegal, by physical and financial force more directly. 

This by no means suggests that clear-headedness which sees the way the whirl-pools of truth and deceit are interacting, is present in all who participate in this increasingly obvious coup. As in Germany, many do not find what is happening, or prefer not to think about it. Indeed,  hypnosis whether of Germans against Jews in World War II, or of scientists against reality and creation, in the current scene, either actual or virtual, is a major method of political manipulation. Its repeated mantras and scare tactics, threats, menaces, dismissals, assaults on one's professional name: these things gain time, before even more forceful methods eventuate, as in dictatorships, as they arise.

In fact, of course, absurdity, which Stephen Gould focusses (cf. Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6) and Professor Lewontin  so readily admits (*2 above), as a result of this naturalistic approach, IS made manifest by intellectual enterprise in this area (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! and Deity and Design ... 8 in particular, with SMR pp. 140ff.). Small wonder then, that like the Jews as a raceunder Hitler, those who even raise questions, even for research, as a group of professionals, are intolerable to many and increasingly, their jobs and perhaps their names too, are to be executed!

For the present, It is the mental phase of the god of this world, in his varied holocausts, this one much more selective but exceedingly effective. Here it limits itself mainly to attacking employment and reputation, usability by daft and draconian, if not draculan inroads into conscientious teaching.  No more are these who offend by following demonstrable truth, in the democracies at least, put in irons, but only their incomes, their names, their posts, their teaching opportunities are tortured at a great rate. Then you can cry out:  See how many we are!  To be sure, your extortionate exclusions work well, but not for science!

If now you will engage in scientistic dogmatics for 10 years in schools, then add 3 or more further in universities, in the lordship of naturalistic fantasy, and then dismiss or exclude those who despite all this, have not become irrationalists, so still disbelieving in evolutionary just-so stories, the existence of which in the materialist domain, once more Lewontin confesses, then what is this appeal to numbers of scientists who teach and hold to naturalistic fantasy ?  It is like Hitler again: execute enough Jews and what a tiny nation they now become!

On this point, an excellent introduction is to be found in the International Creation  Ministries site at

http://creation.com/heresy-in-israel-gavriel-avital.

Here, inter alia, is the story of an eminent Israeli scientist dismissed from a high-order educational post, by all evidence, BECAUSE he insisted that investigation should be realistic, and not pre-slanted. In this, we excerpt the following summary:

The following comment also appears (loc.cit.) concerning the termination.:

Lest any think it was because of poor performance that these scientists wanted him sacked, the letter went on to state:

“We view Dr. Avital’s remarks gravely because they undermine the standing and importance of science and take us centuries backward, even as the world celebrates the importance of Charles Darwin’s discoveries and the great contributions he made to human knowledge and scientific development, and is striving to uproot benighted doctrines such as intelligent design.”⁴

I find remarks such as this perplexing. I wonder what the creationists Newton, Kepler, Pasteur, Lister, Maxwell, Joule, Kelvin, Steno, Faraday, etc. would think of such comments. All but three were contemporaries of Darwin, and a number were very public in their criticisms of his work.

His personal doubts about evolution are well known, but what exactly did Avital propose as the educational solution? He said:

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions.”³

He’s not talking about not allowing evolution to be taught—he assumes children will be taught evolution because it’s in the textbooks. Rather he simply wants to give children the right to hear other views. Avital is not the one suppressing alternate views—evolutionists are.

*3 See Let's Be Reasonable,  For God Is! Ch. 3 and

Serenity, Not Serendipity ...Ch. 6.

Dr Lisle's method is considered in the latter work, and positioned among other options, all to the point in proof of the Bible, and demonstration of the reality of God.

His work on the Ultimate Proof of Creation has a useful outline of some common logical errors, often made in this context of monistic attack, where they defile even logic in defying the Almighty.

 This, the Sedation of the Scientistic becomes a special malady for the scientifically inclined as well as disciples, and while many notable scientists, some of vast fame and originality like Sir Isaac Newton, Maxwell, Linnaeus, von Braun, Boyle, Lord Kelvin, and many more, resist this sedative, and speak with specialist knowledge outside its bane, as creationists, yet the secular substitute for spirituality, and the anti-biblical re-write as substitute for the word of God written, has a broad appeal to many. Whether in science or politics, in literature or in commerce, this world has much to offer, and offerings to its worship are not few. On the other side, secular penalties for refusing such worship are substantial, and will undoubtedly increase (cf. John 16). m