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CHAPTER THREE
SCHEDULED CREATION,
SIGNIFICANT DESECRATION
DEPLETING DESIGN
AND THE SCURRY TO AVOID
RESOLUTION, SOLUTION AND SALVATION ...
MAN SPECIAL!
It is all SCHEDULED. There are order, constriction, construction, mathematical enhancements of directed and dedicated features, information in code to cover the type of use to be made of information, in the human body whose fingers write, whose mind construes, whose eyes see. There is engineering of a sophistication and utility never matched by man, found in man, to make him able to go.
There is also provision for variation about a theme, there are entities used or correlated in this or that feature, deployed in the encyclopedia of life, precisely as an engineer might utilise one triumph, emerging by collateral thinking, in another project. There is, thirdly, deterioration over time, and not all the tedious trivialisation or expostulation of Professor Stephen Jay Gould can hide it (cf. Wake Up World Ch. 6, Agitation, Cogitation, Aspiration and Conclusion Ch. 2), nor supply the GO, the creative artistry, integumental integrality and systematic coding moving in the domain of conceptualisation and application as is the nature of the systematically mathematical, into consistent embarkation into the world of fact and act. What was produced, was empowered, what was conceptualised (and now conceptualisable as a result in the DNA), was nullified in thought, and the ancient rubbish baskets of endless preliminary failures are not to be found. What does it take!
Is evidence now to be irrelevant! Is consistent construction, agile enactment, involving a crusade of articulted means to ensure continuity of much for millenia, with no failure attestation in the inward nature on which the construction depends, to be regarded as one more weary groan from a pseudo-scientific segment of the scientists, so that others may yawn with them, or have the same frustrations, as the case may be, depending on the depth of the drowsiness ? Methods of construction bespeak powers to construct, and modes in production attest methods of achieving them, domains of dynamic attest use of the said domains, and use with such results, conceptual and practical capacity.
Intelligence flares, brilliance rockets, results fall, man inspects and says,
Ah yes vitality of life, living forms, this fell from heaven, or some heaven or other, or at any rate from something that was not really there, and what was there fell too, before that, from something that was not there, and frankly, it is better to say this, because otherwise, there is no end to where we end. Even, it proceeds, if we cannot be logical about all this, look there is a universe for grabbing, so let's grab and not undermine our case for becoming gods. It is hard enough already.
While by no means all so enter into this realm of incoherent babble, result of spiritual delusion, which like any other pathology (Ephesians 4:17-19), can hammer health and assail wisdom, the thrust is the same.
From the misery of mystery it comes, there being as in war-time letters on occasion, a censoring out of the logical basis of the rambling and tangling with ideas, weak ones which have no power to translate into practice, nor evidence of ever having managed to do so progressively, in the past, which provides merely results of receptively. But it declines, says Gould, in richness and diversity of basic designs; and it declines, says Professor Sanford of Cornell, in its genome for man, so that he is under stress and heading for duress, not astounding new things. What IS declines; and so where is all this about its ascent, which on all sides, in essence and character, declines.
So decline is the way the system works which built itself, like the self-congratulating millionaire, up from nothing. The deterioration is just as is normal in the site of our lives on this earth: the impact of forces and circumstances, events and congealing calamities upon organised equipment, over time. You design, build up something, with exquisite care, seek to ensure its continuance, but find over time, that what is not carved for its continuity, may wear it out. Not supermen but people genomically failing is the empirical case, the actuality, and just as the super- part is conspicuously missing, so has Professor Sanford of Cornell University shown the presence of degradation in the human genome to be reaching perilous proportions (Waiting for Wonder, Appendix). This is the drift. This is the shift.
The decline is not surprising. It would be amazing, unique in kind, if it did not happen to such a vulnerability to the slings and arrows, as our DNA constitutes, in the way the Second Law of Thermodynamics generically indicates. (Otherwise, why call it law!). Yet the robustness of our created systems of information, in the DNA, this has enabled its substantial continuity, even with automatically contrived scope for procreation, however personal the participation. It has endured, even while slowly for a time, it deteriorates, like a giant aircraft with miles of wiring, which still can fly*1.
It has done so for thousands of years. That is no mean performance, but man has taken it meanly and tried to insert his so noble authority into the plan and purpose, so making havoc through quite simple, unadulterated pride of race, which is part of human racism, by far the worst of all. The pride of an entire race, the human type, can be just as perilous as any personal variety!
By pride of race, human racism, man can ignore his humble derivation from divine intelligence, spurn or even spit on His laws, exhibited sometimes with stunning obviousness and clarity, as in human reproductive equipment, in its twofold intricacy and diversity and relevant protections, and decide that other things can be done with this segment of his functionality. His hands, too, can as as readily be applied to the violent torture, slaughter and assault, ensuring application of some system of thought, so that its acceptance be forced on people, on pain of death, just as creative approaches to reproduction can insist on acceptance on pain of persecution by law! as foreshadowed in the final verses of Romans 1.
These are but symptoms of alienation from actuality, children being taught in our schools, systematic denial of reason in nature myths, never seen to wave the wand to bring themselves into visible existence, never seen to occur, meeting as Gould so keenly insists, no help from visible reality. HOW, he asks, can you say the better and more sophisticated self-selected; for he continues, he can see nothing to indicate this between what continued and what did not!
Men squirm. The facts do not (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!)
It is not so hard to find the spiritual basis of the spiritual pathology of man, by looking at the verifiable facts and the observable acts of man, in mind and body, organisation and authorisation! (cf. SMR Ch.3, Ch. 4 Extension). Deliberate denudation of reality is another form of rebellion in which man excels, seeking to slant tertiary results on the basis of myth, just as at lower levels, he with increasing system, puts his children through the fires of mythological education, where philosophy controls authority concerning science which, departing from scientific method*2, has become as a totality in governmental control, just as ludicrously tilted and tainted in matters of design, as in those of climate projections. Scheming and demeaning occur freely. As Lord Zuckerman pointed out (Beyond the Ivory Tower), white coats do not make white hearts.
This is the cultural infection, leading to the educational pandemic; and this with the natural work of sin, is shown in thousands of ways, both in intellectual and moral matters, in political and in cultural, till mankind begins to resemble a grinning ogre, where the grin wears thin at last. This is all the more clearly outlined in the face of what gives due cause for happiness, evidentially based (cf. Joyful Jottings). Nevertheless, this pathology continues, despite the wonders and the majesty, the grace and the goodness of God, itself increasingly a subject of cultural banishment. Meanwhile, misled deforming ardour, misnamed reform, becomes the content of the traumatising test-tube in which the culture of man is immersed. It begins to resemble that produced when an infected particle is set in a solution to see if a mould of some type will form. In this case. Here, it does.
Man is stricken, and beginning more and more catastrophically to sicken, weaken, has increasingly lost the thread, though wound tight. His zeal the more mounts up the dead, indisregard all decency, all law, making mirages the basis for water, and pretension the background for policy.
In his turmoils, mankind through the dynamics of power, will seek more authority to HANDLE more things centrally, in desperation, as if Hitler and Mao and Stalin had not already shown from disparate but basically similarly distorted viewpoints, how trustworthy is man when he vaunts himself, as if he were in charge of the race! With those tyrants, it was partial. Now, the aspiration is total.
It is war on God. Israel has given a wonderful, empirical outline of the nature of such case, with all its pathological and pathetic elements in the long past; but in their case there is a future (Jeremiah 29:11-13, Micah 7, Luke 21:24, Romans 11:25ff.*3) , which however will involve going back to where they were and repenting (as in Zechariah 12-13). When the world has a go at it, the results will be on a larger scale, and without a program for restoration, except in the Gospel (Acts4:11-12), to which, after all, Israel is to come back (cf. Zechariah 1-13:1).Thus, any who will return will do so to Jesus Christ, not a centralised government or supermarket, though the government when He returns to this earth (Acts 17:31, Isaiah 11, Psalm 72, Revelation 19), will indeed be both personalised and unified in Him only. With Him will be mandate, mission and commission, this time to rule till the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (cf. Habakkuk 2:14, Isaiah 11). The temporising follies will be swallowed up in truth.
Not sufficient is the Form of the Good in Plato. This is a tracking down conceptually and in intellection aspects of unity and unification, correlation and kind. There are indeed concepts which unify, and modes which typify, and terms which characterise what is typified in fact. However, Plato's conception here lacks etiological basis. The consequences of conceptualisation require a cause; but this is not the stopping place. THAT fact, the thought and placement facility, joined to the actuality, WHAT it finds and places in concepts, requires its own basis. Neither concepts nor conceptualisation power comes from nowhere. Both require, if not magical escapism, logical basis.
Thoughts do not emplace themselves in nothing and work themselves out like spent rockets till, without source, without unifying and actualising basis, they are gone (cf. SMR Ch. 3). They require a medium for their enterprise, cohesion and continuance, and that in turn demands its own basis.
In the Timaeus you find, not without pleasure, Plato at last going beyond 'what is the good of a thing' as in his Republic, to what is the source of the same, good included.
In fact, capacity must be there, and the mind of the ultimate is by no means like ours, in that these are derived and contrived, while that original and causative source is of necessity eternal, without which nothing would forever be all. If you want to have causative bits and means and modes and plans and integrality for functionality and so forth, then of course you need the causative management to have it all as required, and to have it all constructive in a constitutive manner, for it must work. By then, you are simply inventing things for the Almighty to use in constructing Himself, which is redundant and absurd, since He is logically needed, to be there to do it with your playthings, at the outset.
When you are dealing with ultimates, there is no logical wiggling room.
Now at last, even in that part of Plato, the Almighty begins to enter in, and His watchfulness. Plato's reason is no longer so truncated, and his ceiling begins to have a skylight.
The wonder has a source, THE ORIGINAL MAGNIFICENCE; the curse has a source and a cure; the follies have an outcome and the 'stop the world, I want to get off" cry has a better resolution. You do not get off just yet, but get on the ground, the rock which is Jesus Christ, the foundation, where truth, life and direction are to be found, not in scurvy deprivations, confusions and countermanding of obvious divine deeds, as those needlessly deprived, but in solidity and security, empirically confirmed, vigorously validated, gloriously perpetuated. For man there is a resolution, a solution and a salvation. There is available an EVENTUAL magnificence in the knowledge of the God of creation and redemption.
He needs it. He has the ingredients of a magnificent creation waiting to be delivered (Romans 8:17ff,) in the consummation which follows all this desecration of the contemporary world, a delight already provided for in the Gospel and the divine action which it attests. Mercifully, it is in this Gospel provision for the abuse of man's privileges for which payment is required, and a love and mercy to receive the penitent and empower the regenerated (John 3, Titus 2-3), a pardon (Isaiah 55, Micah 7:18ff.), which neither dither nor empty dynamic can replace.
NOTES
Though time wears design, in the normal careers of this earth, it is still there (cf. Deity and Design ...). it is therefore good to find that the Salvation Army in Australia and a significant section of the Labour Party have now both come out in rejection of the appalling abuse of the marital reality, of weddings not procreatively conformed to what we have, law or no law, in our bodies. 'Same sex marriage,' they say, is not acceptable. Neither for that matter is the irrational mythology of organic evolution, which underlies it in the classroom and menacingly, in proposals for incoming law! The fact that such delusions were predicted for the days as the world prepares for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5) does nothing to mitigate their gravity and their corruption of childhood in enforced teachings.
See Scientific Method.
Cf. The Original and Eventual Magnificence Ch. 1.