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21 See my PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL, M.A. Thesis, 1964, University of Melbourne, Baillieu Library. It is also available from Covenant Theological Seminary (Presbyterian) and Concordia Seminary (Lutheran), both in St Louis. The relevant pages in this work are: pp. 207-249,esp. pp. 222 ff..

For a briefer treatment of some of the hopeless inconsistencies of Kant, which logically invalidate his system and hence his criticism based on it, as well as showing, by contrast the unruffled serenity of available, rational unKantianised waters, viewed from Christian-Theism: see for example pp. 111 ff. supra, Appendices B and D, pp. 396-397, Chapter 5, pp. 424-427 and Chapter 9, pp. 857-864 infra. Not only may here be seen exposed the Kantian error and its failure to meet the requirements of logic, but the perfect consistency and adequacy of the Biblical perspective in this area. The work PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL specialises in this matter.

22 EXTENSION H: ON FOSTERING FRIENDSHIP WITH FACTS.

Exactly the same is said, in the 1984 edition of Encyclopedia Americana, by Pulgrum of the University of Michigan, when the area of observation moves from the topic of cells to that of language. The identity of result in this relevant respect in the domain of engineering and architecture, in cybernetics, and in that of linguistics and verbal architecture, commands the attention of the ready mind...

First, notice that these are observational areas, traditionally and properly a domain for science and scientific method, applied with the appropriate restraints and constraints. To these areas, add the force of Professor Thompson's note on the relevant observational facts of palaeontology (p. 199 infra), to the point that:

"If we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing a gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond in a true time-sequence" ...

well: but -

"This is certainly what Darwin would have liked to report but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory... The position is not notably different today." (Cf. S.J. Gould, 234-235 infra.)

The abrupt and sophisticated contrivances of cells, of language, of arrivals without notice in the macro-level, likewise find fitting company in the similar observational fact of mutations. Of these, we find (p. 202 infra) Pierre-Paul Grassé, past-President of the French Academy of Sciences, states: ''No matter how numerous they be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution'' (cited from Evolution in Living Organisms, p. 88).

In the same work cited (p. 202 infra, his page l03), he declares that gradualism demands that 'miracles become the rule'; and that of course, is precisely what creation constitutes, if miracle be defined as the explicit work of the supernatural; and this, as has been demonstrated in Ch.l (supra) is comprised by one God, and His agents.

One is tempted to replace 'numerous' in the quotation, with 'humorous': either way, the observational fact, relative to schematic, design-complexity-upgrade in mutations, the relevant fact, is negative like all the rest have observed. The fallen imagination - the model of magical, mutational, metamorphosis - is dead.

Thus we have the cells, the languages (of them and of ourselves), the arrivals palaeontological and cybernetic, the means of arrival in chorus, saying, No! to the desire for the non-predictive theory of organic evolution, in its varied implicatory supports. It is de-confirmed with the rigour of a government which cannot attain a vote of confidence from its members; friends desert it and only fever remains.

Spiritually as observationally, that fever is not mere neutral withholding of support, but rank rebellion in the arena of observation and logical method.

At further levels of implication, Denton and Schützenberger (cf. Sir Fred Hoyle, infra pp. 224-225) consider the criteria of mathematics and methodology in the fields of artificial intelligence and creative systems of thought, with a similarly resounding negative (see supra, EXTENSION ON INTELLIGENCE. - pp. 128 ff.; also *43, *46 infra); while Professor Murray Eden of M.I.T., at an international symposium along with Schützenberger, finds intolerable strains for any such theory, this time in the field of language and its power to survive chance 'mutations'. A fortiori, if it cannot manage survival, it is further subjected to fiasco in the problems of arrival (p. 132 infra)!

Both Professors just noted focus and feature observational data, as we see in situ. Neither hold to creation; both are constrained by evidence in these points.

All of these observational data are not only alike, but virtually identical in this: they contradict the only dimension of verification available to the theory of organic evolution, a non-predictive theory: that of implication, generic expectation and method. In collision with known laws, in its uncongenial emplacement in the marginal field of metaphysics to which it must be consigned, it rests on irrationality, even for hope (see pp. 211 ff. infra).

Let us recapitulate (cf. pp. 252H, 1028, 1031C infra). Neither is there suitable transition in language complexity, going up over time, on a graded fluid basis; nor is it the case in cell technology; nor in palaeontology, nor in the mathematical correlatives of the cell: nor is there anything in kind different to be said re observed mutational advance (even when, as in the case of the fruitfly Drosophila, the generations and the mutations were both numerous, and the latter large and varied).

Language, though it varies, no more presents a primitive-to-superior gradation correlative with the idea of tribes-to-modern-man, than does cell technology in minor organisms to major ones; mutations do not exhibit, but rather obstruct any living sight of the flow to the watchful eye, as does palaeontology to the retrospective onlooker. The failures of flow on the one hand, a procedural rebuff, and the fact of language and cell initial and pervasive sophistication on the other, a generic contradiction, are merely two of the total non-verifications of organic evolution. The mathematical minutiae of cells, their administrative 'genius' and magnificent miniaturisation, similarly attest that we are dealing with a prodigious mind in its deployment of words and works - the language of cells being reflective, our own introspective: not with some self-developmental sequence where that-which-is-not invents itself from non-existence by clever contrivings.

To all this the noted Professor A.E. Wilder Smith adds a fascinating datum: the cell not only has its molecular system (the materials on site in right proportions), and the apt spatial arrangement of the same, such as isomers exhibit (this is a variable); but on this basis there is to be "superimposed" a "sequential code" in living genes and derived proteins. This super-imposition of conceptual considerations, as a constraint on prior or more basic concepts, this infusion, enforcement, emplacement of code is:

l) A conceptual work.
2) Exactly the function of mind.
3) Facilitated exactly in proportion as all the concepts can proceed from the resources of the one mind, being congenial to the style, system, parameters or powers of its thought (as words to paper, thoughts into words, vision into thoughts).
4) The definitional heart of what we call "design". (Cf. pp. 114-116 supra, 211, 252E-J infra.) That it has here an invisible agent is scarcely surprising, when it is considered that, as shown in Ch.l supra, matter is a design, of necessity a product of a law-maker who is necessarily not material.

To revert: Wilder Smith (p. 53 cf. p. 82 in his work: Creation of Life) emphasises at the technical level that in his experience, a true biological cell is virtually one great code, a code complex, a collation of codes, a code matrix. In terms of this magnificent furniture, made resident like a star boarder in the cell, or "superimposed" on its apt and ready structures: energy becomes "converted" (p. 122 op. cit.) into idea-exhibits. We of course do this with a system of thought on other systems, all the time, having the ability to think, of which this is the specific outcome.

What then ? Observationally, the evidence caresses creation and rebuffs any alternative option, with single-minded intensity denying gradualism. It negates it for language, for cells and for relic transitions, whilst exhibiting the paraphernalia of mind with that exuberance in the living methodology of cybernetics, that we mini-creators with teeming cells at our disposal, habitually deploy in our own language gifts.

The positive and negative criteria, alike, act in symphonic unison to acclaim creation in any contest (cf. Image, and p. 1031C); while the systematic, and sudden methods found in language and gene alike, correlate with the legal force of intransigent matter, to make a concept of mindlessness, a mindless one, ridiculing the facts.

THAT-WHICH-IS-NOT never was nor could be; it is I-AM-WHO-I-AM who both is, must be, and always must have been; and here we see the thoroughly consistent, co-ordinate and correlative working of His mind.

23 EXTENSION ON INTELLIGENCE, pp. 128-140 infra.

24 EXTENSION ON LIFE, pp. 140-145 infra.

25 It is necessary to point out that it matters not at all where the information input - the directions for operation, the practical provisions for implementation of the directions (plans do not create factories: you need both, and a mind for either in this world), the data banks, the codes, the linguistic provisions for intelligible computation, interaction between parts and hence the intelligence - where, and indeed when this is inserted.

You can build as you will, put down your money when it is acceptable to the builders, have the machinations at will: but it is all to be done.

If it is done in miniature (as in the cell codes in the human body), then this takes more input, it is harder. If it is done in spectacular and unexampled miniaturisation, as in the cells of this same body, that takes the more. If moreover, it is done embryonically, no matter: it is merely the more intensive that the application of intelligence must be. Commanding, symbolic control is not meaningless motion. A coherent, managing code in a cohesive managed circuit in an integrated, collaborative whole of billions of parts (each cell), multiplied by billions (each body) - is not the easiest to manage, as it is forming itself and containing the lively data for growth, the while.

None of us can manage it. Its technology leaves us for dead, as Dr Denton points out, by orders of magnitude that seem astronomical. Thus while its manner of the introduction of this prodigy is of much interest, and the point is clearly addressed, yet it is the fact of its introduction, like a payment into a schoolboy's bank account, which should not be forgotten, with concern about the method, however legitimate this subsidiary question may be.

As also shown in this chapter, the implications of the startling method of introduction of this machination, and origination of this equipment are of such a character - that this element also is of prodigious importance.

Let us however, not forget the fact of the amount deposited. We have nothing which by observation can match for intelligence, by results can equal for its manifestation, the equipment with which on earth we think, and move and have our being. If the source were not intelligent, contrary as we see and shall see, to all reason, then our greatest works should be denied the attribute of intelligence. However, we experience the intelligence as we proceed in our works; and perceive it is profoundly surpassed in the works which make our working possible: the construction of our bodies, minds and spirits, and of the world which is their visible habitat.

That is of course the definitional dilemma always faced by unbelief: if you are going to be consistent, and define what it is that intelligence is by what it does, then the essential characteristics and criteria are surpassed in what we are, as evidence of its working, relative to anything we do. Yet intelligence is by definition attributed to us in terms of performance. Alas for the atheist, we are monumentally outperformed. See further: Chapter 3, esp. pp. 262-263, 290 infra.

26 See p. 154 and endnote 43 infra.

27 See EXTENSION: DATES, DYNAMIC AND PREDICTIONS pp. 159-179 infra. For update on dating, see companion volume, That Magnificent Rock, esp. Ch. 7 as marked. In particular, see progressive further updating in endnotes to that Chapter, especially *4, which is extensive, and the latest sector, 2008.

See also pp. 76 ff. supra; and Ch. 8, pp. 691-697 infra, for EXTENSION ON PRIMARY, SECONDARY AND TERTIARY POLLUTION ON EARTH, for man-induced environmental changes, a mounting voluntary variation in conditions, the scale of which may soon come to mimic that of natural catastrophes of the past, like an ironic comment on the myth of gradualism and uniformitarianism. Esp. see Ch. 8, p. 680 infra.

28 Reference was made to Popper's point that organic evolution is not even a matter of verifiable law. It is worse. It not only breaks observable law, logic re law, but also brings in detailed needs which shock available design-data repeatedly... or more precisely, negatively impact with these and shock experts dealing with them.

Thus Dr. S.E. Aw, in his Chemical Evolution (1982) on p. 192 cites R.E. Dickerson, Sci.Am. 239, 62: The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models hence we can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts.

The methodology of the speculation causes logical shock. There is no limit; no constraints of having to make it work are allowed: very pleasant it is, like a school excursion! We catch a sense of the pure illusory fantasy involved.

The trifling with teleology is also often met. This is expounded by E.B. Chain (1971- Perspect. Biol. Med. 14, 347) and noted by Aw on p. 168. 'Survival of the fittest' as 'entirely a consequence of chance mutations' or the concept that 'nature... carries out experiments' seems to involve a 'hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. The hypothesis wilfully neglects the principle of teleological purpose which stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks...'

Wilder Smith in his Man's Origin, Man's Destiny (1975) on p. 20 similarly provides scalpel-like words, this time from Dr Erwin Chargaff of Columbia University in The Origin of Life on Earth (Oparin, pp. 288-289).

Dr Chargaff considers: "Our time is probably the first in which mythology has penetrated to the molecular level."

Chargaff for his part, cites a 'distinguished biologist' who desired to avoid God in His creation, and so proposed a 'macromolecule'... but what is this but fixation on a phrase instead of a finding of the cause; and patriarchal molecules lack what patriarchs themselves cannot use to create matter. Commenting, Chargaff notes that for this man, it has come down to this concept of 'macromolecule' and asks what has been gained in that word...

If poetry has suffered, precision has not gained. For we may ask ourselves whether a model that merely provides for one cell constituent continually to make itself, can teach us much about life and its origins. We may also ask whether the postulation of a hierarchy of cellular constituents, in which the nucleic acids are elevated to a patriarchal role in the creation of living matter, is justified.
The 'poetry' that is involved, is that of logic; and the truth is set forth sublimely: but this modern madness is rightly castigated by this genteel enquiry. When words are said, let the things signified be contemplated in all their smuggled pseudo- glory.

Here then we see the magic of 'patriarchal' molecules fraught with engendering potentials, literally out of this world. All these things... patriarchal, striving, providing, a need-meeting 'nature' going about 'her' business, 'finding a way' and the like are a brilliant testimony to the imagination of man, and to his circumvention of the implications of personality and intelligence, rationality and power.

Even if literature is not so studied by so many so well as once it was, at least the aspiring 'scientist' can use it as a cover for illegitimate use of what is not acknowledged, replacing the God who is with the words which 'use' Him, without acknowledgement ... a sort of figure of speech that figures all too well with self-deception.

Why it is too simple: personify matter and then have it work as a Person; and give it imagination, purpose and power, while merely avoiding the use of the word 'God'. These things are merely an illustration of the smuggler's cove approach by which intelligent creativity is presupposed but not acknowledged: planted in caves and coves on the beaches of thought, and activated under the darkness of meeting the dilemma. How else live with the wealth of material that is there, than steal it by night, with dark designs, claiming the while - Who me ? I know nothing of it at all!

Aw (p. 168), in this context interestingly, notes D.H. Kenyon's use of the concept of 'looking aheadness' in Nature (p. 207 of the work: The Origin of Life and Evolutionary Biochemistry -1974).

Thus we often hear of 'Nature's' striving or meeting a need as if this personification, through its terms, conferred its power on the realities - a matter of a verbal 'slip' useful for creating illusion on the one hand, and revelatory of the workings in darkness of the unbelieving mind, on the other. (Cf. p. 845 infra.)

Aw (p. 150) also quotes from Ponnamperuma, Origins of Life, p. 102, where there is provided a beautifully apt under-statement re imaginary construction activities happily working away, though never seen, validated or defined so as to allow prediction, and contrary to all that is known of Nature's laws. Speaking of cell- construction, he says:

the leap from morphology to function is fraught with danger especially when we consider entities of several billion years ago.

The 'leap' to 'several billion years ago' itself is 'fraught with danger' (a point made most clear by Professor E.W. Andrews, as noted in our Dating Extension - see his Chapter 6 et al..)

If only our humour could stretch a little further, we might learn to relish these 'blithe spirit' concessions in constructing an imaginary time for an imaginary activity according to imaginary powers with imaginary processes which actually men cannot really define, duplicate or activate by intelligent effort, no, not with with the most advanced method and time-subduing repetitive equipment, even though this would break the conditions imagined to be in view!

The Bible says the fool has forgotten God: it is time the world learned to 'quit fooling' if it wishes to continue at all. Illusion, whether with drugs, mirages in the desert, or irrational rioting is no sound basis for anything that wishes to endure. Reality can seem quite unkind to chronic fooling, after its season is over... (Cf. Ecclesiastes 11:9-10- and this can occur with a nation as well as with a youth.)

Aw also quotes Bonner (1972, Exobiology, Ponnamperuma C. (ed.), Amsterdam, London, p. 170) on p. 102 of his work, as follows: The origins of optical activity# present problems to the hypothesis of chemical evolution that are at present insoluble. One is reminded of the prodigal son (Luke 15) who somewhat similarly found sharing fodder with pigs to present insoluble problems. How intense may be the affinity of the 'fool' with the words of the Miltonic Satan whose view is held with implacable resolve:

...What though the field be lost ?
All is not lost - the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield...
That glory never shall His wrath or might
Extort from me...
that proud being seeking
Whatever reinforcements we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair...
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven (Paradise Lost, Book 1)...
yet the irresolvable facts refuse to yield.

They are not yielding the evidences of creative law and creative mind, discreetly operative in the form of mindless, law-obeying fragments. God is no more found in His creation, as a mere part, than am I in this work, as a full stop. Efforts to make it appear that I would, lack... a certain discretion.

Would one then expect it ? A smuggler might, but it is time men stopped smuggling God and calling it matter, equipped with latent systematic powers of upward propulsion into intensive design, subordinating itself the while to the work of originating laws with a freedom its own conformity does not exhibit.

But what of the completed cell, that maxi-marvel of modern sublimity from unbowing antiquity which shows no half-measures, half-masts or preliminary canters:

"How they can continue to operate so reliably in a disorderly environment, to the physicist appears as a deep enigma."

This is from Pattee in Towards a Theoretical Biology, p. 282, quoted by Aw, p. 128. It referred specifically to the genes.

One is reminded of Samson and Delilah. After she had betrayed him many times, he too might have pondered his continued trust in her as a deep enigma! Only passion provided a clear answer: but logically that was irrelevant. There was no ground for trust, and the evidence flatly, repeatedly and systematically denied it.

The result was contrary both to reason and - symbolically here - to Samson's very sight. There is a species of optical activity which is spiritual and can rob the mind of that benign destiny to which it is, when clear, more happily pointed.

Jesus said:

"For judgment I am come into this world, that those who do not see might see; and that those who see might be made blind... If you were blind, you would not have sin: but now you say, We see - therefore your sin remains." (John 9:39,41.)
Ignoring reason and revelation both is a sad affair:
I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believes on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and does not believe, I do not judge him: for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. He who rejects me, and does not receive my words has one who judges him: the word that I have spoken, the same will judge him in the last day. For I have not spoken of myself, but the Father who sent me, He gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said to me, so I speak - John 9:46-50. (See Ch. 6 infra, et al..)
# There follows an explanatory note on OPTICAL ACTIVITY, the term used above.

Optical activity in biology here refers to the power of some materials to deflect polarised light. It was discovered by the Frenchman D.F. Arago, who in 1811 found that a beam of plane-polarised light was rotated as it passed through a crystal. Certain chemicals dissolved in water, it was found, will also twist a beam of light. Pasteur found that when living things were the basis for the action, the light would turn only to the left, never to the right. Other materials may turn this way or that.

It is part of the consistently found character of life, that there is operative only one of what Francis Crick calls 'two mirror possibilities' in living protein.

Light accordingly, in such a case, is deflected only to the left, in life.

This is carried out to a fascinating extent. James F. Coppedge (pp. 62-64 of his Evolution: Possible or Impossible ?) speaks of this in some detail, and notes a finding of Professor Dennis Englin. This covers the following point. What happens if a living body receives into it a non-living protein, one optically active to the right ? He finds that, say with a bacterium, it proceeds to take apart the 'wrong' kind of structure and may rebuild it to specifications such that it now deflects à la mode, to the left.

Style and address continually characterise life, verifying constantly what its base in one mind would imply. Thus one language, as stated, is found in the codal formats of life, physically, in one suitable genetic base with modes and methods illustrative, as Denton notes, of brilliance, ingenuity and awesome conceptualisation.

This is technical. As we shall see in considering beauty (Chapter 5), there is a similarity, in nature; there is much of style and composure, awesome aesthetic attainment, that not even a cursed condition of sinning man manages to mask.

EXTENSION ON CHANGE This Extension covers endnotes, *29 and *30.

29 CHANGE A case of survival value in one respect, sickle-celled anemia in humans, arises from the fact that this helps immunity against malaria from mosquitoes. Its resultant potential for loss of vitality and adaptability because of design damage - on departure from the normal body program - prevents it from being 'advanced' or having clear advantage. It is disease. A hole in the roof in a dry climate may help airiness, but in the long run in varying conditions, is a more than dubious... advantage.

In general, larger changes reduce vigour- fertility, in fact facing the rigour of the genetic 'editor'; and smaller changes still fail to cover the integral character of the cell code-language, sited in the cell programs, or the reticulating effects of change in one area of a centrally controlled and highly inter- active system - cf. points iv and vii below, and also *30. (Dr Carl Wieland in Creation Technical Journal 1994(2), pp. 5 ff.: itemises medical cases of such increased bacterial resistance through defect, observes altered DNA through viral infection or mating of bacteria and notes research showing pre-existence - from 1845 - of bacterial 'resistance' to anti-biotics.)

Departures face stringent mechanisms; work is done by system to destroy error, but not to construct more advanced fashioning, engineering. The normal procedure in student education seems to be to ignore the first point, so heavily stressed by Dr Kouznetsov from his researches, and to pretend the other. For some reason, this is sometimes said to be 'rational'; but this term should not be applied to confrontation with reason, but rather to its implementation. Such a usage is merely a substitute for the reality to which it refers, the lip-service of lassitude.

Lester and Bohlin in their work, The Natural Limits of Biological Change p. 103, note the case of 'resistance' in bacteria faced with antibiotics with the point that enzyme production at low level is stimulated, not commenced, metabolism is varied, not initiated. As elsewhere noted, even 'basic' cells are anything but simple, and the potential to vary the emphasis of their industries in such cases is merely a function of their construction. Thus resistance capacity is activated by stimulus, not innovated by need. Dr Gary Parker, Creation The Facts of Life, p. 64 makes a similar point on the discovery that using cultures that are routinely kept for long periods of time, they found out that bacteria were resistant to antibiotics, even before the antibiotics were "invented".

Genetic variability was "built right into" the bacteria... Resistant forms were already present.
This is the genetic capacity to be activated by design, noted elsewhere, and resembling our air- conditioning in cars, as illustration. Life is filled with the capacity to draw on resources, to activate equipment which is already fully available, as need arises. This is part of its creative construction, the very sort of thing which makes some sports cars appeal to people.

Dr Tinkle in his Heredity similarly notes the production of pure strains of farm plants and animals, from elements pre-existing, not created, leading to limits in 'development' of a stringent kind - Heredity, pp. 73 ff..

"Actually," he says on p. 79, "this significant improvement involves no change in genes, but results from (human) sorting among them and placing the best ones in germ cells in such a way as to stimulate each other." This comes from multiple crossings.

While, then, some variation around the norm occurs, and indeed on occasion faulty mechanisms can also develop over thousands of years, and there can be variations from dominance, attrition, switching on and off of genes and provision for programmed response, within the design, to stimuli: the case is still simple. More sophisticated and developed engineering does not find a place in the world of observation of living creatures, except by the more recent operation of intelligence such as "genetic engineering". This of course is not only intelligence, a point at issue, but is also merely using pre-existing material. Even fulfilling potentials is not creating what has them.

Increasing populations of variants of some radioactively bombarded species, such as fruit flies, succoured in laboratory or controlled conditions, still leave: these elements.

i) The point that this is not a natural environment: it is one artificially sustained, and abstracted from the world of nature, which is in operation here (as Russian Dr Kouznetsov, a Russian researcher with triple doctorates in biosciences, pointed out, asking indeed of any imagined 'advantage' to mutant flies: "an advantage to you or to the fly ?")

ii) It does not therefore exhibit a relevant advantage.

iii) The disadvantages are not tested by the variety of events that can 'find out' departures from the norm, of which unrestricted competition with many species and creatures is only one.

iv) The artificial removal, say by radiation, of flies with lower resistance to mutation may, percentage- wise, increase hardiness in the residue who live, without changing them, as also reproduction; for this selects rather than creates, altering, not fashioning (a point of Lester and Bohlin, loc. cit.).

v) Even if population growth were stimulated in a variant type of experimental fly, compared with a control group, this is multiplication, not advance in kind, the point at issue.

vi) The impact of the fact that high- level advance meets strong editorial consequences actively inhibiting or attacking it.

vii) The consideration that pleiotropic genes (those with effects on a variety of organ systems - as Denton notes, p. 149, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis) being most common in 'higher organisms', 'change' in one gene can mar, as well as possibly facilitate in some limited ad hoc way, in selected circumstances: as with our sickly sickle celled anemia case. This means that not only are different varieties of genes frequently needed to change with mutual order, to effect a design change of any kind - as indeed is the case with any complex functional equipment; but any change is liable both to receive editorial 'interference' from the cells' programmed editors, and itself to interfere with the efficiency of other systems, in the creature concerned.

In far simpler terms than those required: even the 'romance' of installing new plumbing equipment implies much consideration of changed measurement units, brands of clamps, types of design, connections, adaptors, approaches in solving problems and so on, ramifying works which spread out to the factories and suppliers, to various tradesmen in amazing degree. Simply transmute that simple situation into the brain with trillions of variables and start re-designing it; without intelligence. It is harassment itself, even with it, at our level. Now do it against a programmed obstruction, subtly and cleverly active in preventing your changes; then keep active and wholly functional as you go.

Just to conclude: be sure to survive while you are about it; for of course, you should be greatly advantaged, like a householder in rain with the tiles off, while the new plumbing is being put it. Absurdity personified could scarcely devise better, or perform worse. This is prescription for failure, not thought to cover the case. It is aptly dubbed anti-science, like the 'anti-philosophy' which does not adorn our Age, being the verbosity of defeat.

viii) Change that is an advance in kind (indisputable vertical movement in genetic structure and information content) is in fact simply never seen, in terms of objective criteria. The case simply collapses in practice, scientifically speaking. The Biblical statement that the creatures bore offspring or new generations 'after their kind' is not only a statistical, historical and structural procedure, but also a programmed and even editorially conditioned event. Observation, at the heart of science, as the century progresses, simply confirms, and this with amazing intricacies, the reality of 'kinds' in theory, in program, as well as in fact, verifying this Biblical statement as design-conditioned, gene-directed, as well as historically evident.

As to the historical macro-overview, it fits to perfection with the dynamisms of cell-life as now being investigated in micro-biology, leading alike to a highly mutant format for evolutionary theory, as Denton puts it, itself in crisis, and to frustration with an unco-operative fossil record.

Thus we meet not only the palaeontological data such as are indicated in this work (e.g. pp. 105, 111, 153, EXTENSION D, *18 and pp. 204 infra, and pp. 308 ff., Chapter 7, Section 10 infra), but fascinating exhibitions of unintimidated evidence such as are cited by Gish (Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record, pp. 235-236, 244).

The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for change... (Stephen Jay Gould, in Natural History, vol. 6, pp. 22-30 - 1977) and this: Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so... (Sir Edmund Leach, Nature, 293:19, 1981- to add to the words of Nilsson, Goldschmidt, Løvtrup, Thompson and Simpson - q.v..)

Dr Colin Patterson (senior Palaeontologist, British Museum of Natural History, in his Keynote Address at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981) adds this:

"Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true ? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, "I do know one thing - it ought not to be taught in high school."

The genetic and logical realities are so well reflected, but from the standpoint of observational data (which match to perfection, in total synthetic verification), we have this also quite clear from Stephen Jay Gould in Paleobiology, vol. 6 (1), January 1980, p. 127:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.
You get different designs of some similarity but no apparent transition: this is the normal product from a creative mind. Yet while we find this commonly, normatively, continually, both readily understandable and observable; and while the means for the magical myth of instituting self-design by some unthinking, non-conceptualising, non-programming system, are unobservable and the concept is wholly alien to the result: this is proposed. (Refer pp. 252A-J infra.)

What a brilliant theory, merely bombarding the ingredients without thought, provision or ground-plan: while the means are simply lacking on the secular world-view, the results are perversely desired, without warrant because without God. Bombarding perverse plumbing might seem emotionally satisfying to uncontrolled persons, but as with other rambunctious adolescent conduct, it is not conducive to results; and in time, the situation worsens under such treatment. The fitter results of such energies... would reduce the repair bill, not resurrect the water reticulation. If they could live, they would not be improved; though they would undoubtably suffer much. Who would shuffle mindlessly the words of an exam! Let us return from organic evolution to science therefore. You will recall that here there is, ostensibly, interest in what happens.

The changes we see in mutations are within the flexibility of complex design provisions, within the flow of stimulus and response, allied to the 'novelties' to which we are all accustomed in car accidents. Here the odd 'usefulness' within special cases is of no relevance to car-construction, development or improvement, duly co-ordinated to sophisticated concepts and technology to implement them.

This is all as it should be, the order of one system not 'developing' the conceptual apparatus sufficient for the integral programming of another, but simply fulfilling what was in it, in the first place. From nothing you get nothing; from a level of thought, you get the impact of that thought, in application, and from a new level, you get that.

To imagine, however, you create that special order + organisation + correlation + synthetic thought + language + engineering-to-match (in order to implement the language's commands) + mathematical input + originality of concept: to imagine you do this by its absence is ? What shall we say ? It is the contradiction of logic, and in this case, of observation in history, in cells, in programming (ask Schützenberger!); it is to ignore successive non-verifications such as the Cambrian saga of vast, original and varied creation at or near the outset (on that normal evolutionary approach! indeed) with a simplicity which is not only non-scientific. It is quite literally anti-scientific: the price of avoiding God, as if He were a... debt-collector.

Organic chemistry is not non-rational; but it is rather a masterpiece of pure system; it does not repudiate means, frown on rationality or defy reason... because it is so systematic. The contrary is the case, and science fiction has already had too much licence in the field of cultural biology. Is this to become the century of television science in this area, with a lift-off from reality the better to flirt with death, using the power of order and the spice of irrationality, imported from the fantasies of philosophy for a comic relief that is far from laughable, or likely to induce mirth ?

30 THE RELEVANCE OF CHANGE

Relevant points here relating to gene change include the following. First, as distinguished Russian bioscientist, Dr Kouznetsov pointed out in his lecture at Adelaide University on September 6, 1991, there is the conservative facility which operates. This involves active work to prevent change, directed from within the cell. Second, there is the linguistic limit, as he also noted. The code elements coming in functional triplets are not summarily alterable without loss of intelligibility, or code meaning, very much after the style of removing elements of a literary sentence.

In other words, removal of one sequence which is included in a total format of meaning is destructive of significance, just as in other chance intrusion into a language. It is in this connection that Professor Murray Eden of MIT made the statement that no known language can tolerate chance change and sustain intelligibility, as a system.

Compared with our own language, the inanimate code case can be far worse in many cases; because removing an element of code from the DNA chain could change the meaning of all the rest, more after the manner of 'yes' versus 'no', or as one sees in computer code, turning say a command to restore something lost into an order to capitalise everything! The slightest error can produce such consequences, even with intelligence (cf. *46). On the other hand, much of our language can be more personal, interpretable through many parameters, governed by numerous inputs, intelligently assessed by listeners, by means not limited to the purely processive part of semantics. Wit and irony, nuance and inflection, circumstances and expression all can help. There is the person to person soft-landing. Not so with code to the inanimate. This consideration, a fortiori, enhances the point of Dr Kouznetsov.

Third, the actual and observed changes do not incorporate, in full accord with these aspects, any design increment in complexity. Bacteria remain just that, as does all else. Certainly, certain changes may facilitate some sort of existence of damaged systems, in that defects may suit certain constraints - less enzyme or more enzyme production in a situation where it would normally reduce total result, may yet suit some onset of poisons and so on. This sort of point is made by Lester and Bohlin in their Natural Limits to Biological Change, pp. 103 ff.. This of course is not relevant to design increment, merely to survival of what is already implemented, of damaged or varied systems: just as, for example, a hyper-active kindergarten teacher might be preferred by some schools for some children!

Thus the fact that no change in design of the teacher has occurred, merely a defect in her thyroid function, would not alter:
i) the fact that she might get the job above others in special circumstances; and
ii) the fact that this is irrelevant to the question of creating human beings. It relates merely to sustaining them. Simply, damage of design can occasion results in selective circumstances, with yet no progress whatever in design complexity or elevation, the question at issue in creation... our topic.

Fourth, any reconstructive changes which occur, on top of linguistic constraints, conservative mechanisms and non-advance of design, have to establish themselves in the midst of non-nurturing, non-change items, tending to be lost in the negative impact of 'chance' circumstances by no means necessarily favourable to life. Indeed, rarity in peril does not tend to expand... Thus it is one thing to make some cover of a broken roof from storm damage, during a tempest, and brace up what is left; but it is another thing to seek to turn the 'reconstructive' effort into a third storey, or a design integrative re-styling. Such thought matches the facts of what does not happen in mutation.

However if some trait is established, some special feature, such as a blacker pigmentation for moths, in the case so often cited for industrialised England, then this selection of the feature (preferentially) neither creates it, nor represents in any case, relevant change for the production of moths per se as a design. It merely, again, shows the advantages of some of the gene pool in some circumstances; it does not create the pool. What is created is responding to the environment into which it is put.

It would be vain to imagine that diversification on a created basis is the same case as the achievement of existence on another; so that we put the flighty conundrum, the wingless butterfly of the imagination, back into its swamp of circumstances as they are, and not as they are imagined with the normal smuggling in of creation as a basis.

This is in principle somewhat similar to Lester and Bohlin's case (already noted) of resistance 'developed' by bacteria attacked by antibiotics. Leaving aside the question- begging language, the fact is that results such as variation of enzyme production and so on do not equate with the invention of (advanced) production facilities. That as always is the criterion. Similarly, if a slight leak in a petrol feed pipe to an engine with too lean a mixture should develop, it might be conceivable that the fault in the operation of the design would compensate in some circumstances for some special problem.

However, the design is the same, merely damaged; its form, information quota and purpose able to limp along, or even meet the case well, through damage. It is emphatically not being created as a system, has less robustness indeed; but in some areas, it can still work, and in specialised circumstances may do, for a time, quite well. In this way, the work of intelligence institutes what the work of deterioration enables to continue through a special, limited situation. We see the continuance of reduced design, working.

In analogy, in terms of system, it may be like a wounded soldier managing rather well, without his water bag, and even drinking from pools on the way, rejoicing that his burden is reduced. His total design provision for the basic facts of fighting, however, is not advanced. He is more vulnerable. Some bacteria, to revert to our earlier case, may even survive better in some circumstances, their losses being less than their (special) gains, if poisons occur.

This however is not even relevant to the development of the biota, the bacterial assemblage as a recognisable unit, merely relating to the modes of adaptation as a design assemblage. We too can adapt in various ways, such as growing callouses on hands, or in other desensitising or acutely sensitising functions within the provisions of our design... We may even be provided with genetic 'change' such as results in recessive chins and so on.

Now if (to take a humorous case in order to see the point more readily) recessive chins helped employment by paranoid bosses, well, yet we have not objectively increased the design, merely shown that some genetic damage can be useful for a pre- existent entity - for what is there already, and operative. We have not shown how chins were made by code: merely what can happen when the code is randomly altered, relative to environmental prosperity. If this were creation, it would be relevant; but it is, in fact, adaptation of what is already instituted in codal format. Chins may be adapted and fit a situation; but while horizontal susceptibility to damage can be useful, chins they were (already) and chins they are.

Potential inherent for usableness is not to be confused with creation of the thing to be used: here with the creation of the concept of a chin, the format or the program which has, before and after, this facility for adaptation, or damage, as part of it. Chin damage is not chin styling in its creation, and its potential for useful service notwithstanding its spoiling, is not in the area of terms of creation, but rather of utilisation... if not of wit. (Damage of course may reduce adaptability potential, but this is a negative result relative to the point in view! Overall, there is loss of function.)

Such uncohesive, amorphous change does not begin to explain, from current events, the institution of the language system, the programming, the synthesis or the internal systematics of 'cell cities'. Bombardment affects cities, but it does not build them.

What we do have observable, in the field of happenings, includes this: that we ourselves can spoil, destroy or cripple; but we can also create, welding and wedding concepts, conditions, formats, functions, purposes, plans, efficiencies of complex combinations. Creation is not only invisible; its works are seen continually, with the same unmonotonous regularity as are the absences of genetic increments of complexity in naturally occurring life. The hypothesis of organic evolution ignores the one and imagines the other, in defiance of observation, principle, logic, and in neglect of creation constantly at work by man, through use of his faculties. It even performs the supreme irony of employing (misused) creativity in 'deleting' creativity from the world of creation, in the creation of the world.

Such paradoxes, readily understood, populate a rebellious earth, often more interested in musing on mixed motives than fulfilling consistent ones that are rational, reflective and not involving confrontation with their designs (not to mention their Designer). They may be seen not merely in the destruction of lives, cities and nations, races, health and happiness, tired tyrannies of the inveterately and wilfully blind, but in the misuse even of academic thought and authority.

Much has here been presented in this direction, in illustration; but Dr Kouznetsov held out some further illustrations of recklessness, mental riot towards the realities with which we must live; and with which some of us are delighted to live, since the Designer made them, and is available for consultation and collaboration, through Jesus Christ, amidst them- a magnificent consummation, that the design has spirit and can consult the Designer on the same, and on the design in which it operates. Let us however return to Dr Kouznetsov.

The Russian bioscientist criticised non- scientific generalities, such as might appear when one kind of enzyme, chemical activator, is considered without due reference to its specialised use; and he made comparison by a simple illustration.

Consider on the one hand a machine gun bullet, he invited his audience, and on the other, a pen; and think of each of these as potential projectiles, to be fitted into the mouth of a gun. Both are metal, shaped, and throwable.

The difference is in the fashioning, the specialised setting.

As a matter of fact, to pursue and apply here the point of Carl Jung against Freud, we might point out that science is in no small degree a matter of interfaces, of structured, stylised, heavily organised, systematically functional inter-relations, by which one sort of thing articulates with and affects another. Let us then resume the thought of Dr Kouznetsov, aware of its perspicuity in this field.

Combinations and biological context may be crucial, but theorists may analyse out one feature which, by itself, is almost meaningless for function in many cases. His stress: competent, realistic, aware experimental probing, with mathematical, statistical and apt models for comparison, contrast, consideration and realistic assessment of actual utility in the biota we study.

He distinguished carefully between hoped-for and imagined advantages in varieties of life and realistic scenarios built by knowledge and accompanied by systematic thought; and indicated the crucial distinction between subtle, subjectively construed variations on an original theme and actual, objective, functionally demonstrated advance. The latter he does not find, observe in researching life, but finds instead, the conservative mechanisms of order at work, both subtle and sophisticated, calling the cells to order through apparent assessment of changes in such things as molecular weight, rather like a foreman watching a car assembly crew.

How this assessing, editing oversight is effected is not yet clear; that it occurs, is established. It does of course beautifully illustrate the 'kind' constraints of Genesis 1, amidst the response of various design-ingredients to stimuli, performing along the ambit and scope of their construction. One might ponder as analogy the use of a gas fire, set in place permanently, in Winter; this activation does not invent the type of design, merely implements its provisions.

Actual advance of an objective kind, involving design increment (upgrading of code perhaps), he indicated, is contrary to all his observations, and the principles he finds underlying them. Emphasising the syntactical significance of different nucleotides which are set in line in triads, and juxtaposed so that they make something like a sentence, he stressed the counter-productiveness of jumble, the extreme interference - like moving something in a letter which one has been sent. In this, he is fully in line, through his biological experiments, with those of Schützenberger in artificial intelligence and computing, and Eden in his language analysis. Conceptual advance without a Conceiver at work is not to be expected; nor is it found.

Since God states in the Bible that His creation is finished, verification is synthetic and profound. (Cf. Hebrews 4:3, Genesis 1, 2:1-4, Revelation 4:11, Exodus 20:11.) The record of nature and of revelation accord with each other; and reason evinces the one and points to the other. Man is excellently provided for; it is his misuse which is his problem. Like the misuse of a Jaguar motor car, rather than that of a Morris Minor, the penalties are graver as the power increases; but so are the wonders more marvellous.

Responsibility remains, despite the aspirations of some governments, both Communist and other, to act as if they would take over from God. How far that has got them, is getting them and will get them, is even worse than in the dogmatic area of evolution. There it gets man to passion, pride irrationality, to guile and guilt; here however, it fixes the practical man on the power of other men, for his normal life. Nor will that evolve for the better, while governments imagine great things of themselves; or while they do not. What will increase is not design complexity, but human perplexity. Indeed, this Jesus Christ predicted; and it is being abundantly fulfilled; but for this further aspect of verification, relative to the 'progress' of history, we must await chapter eight.

Page 221 continued in the next section

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