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EXTENSION 2

On the Forcefulness With Which Force Excludes Itself

ln all this, it is absolutely imperative that the reader should divorce the mind from any feeling or flair for force in this area. Not only is force contrary to the condition of the case, as we saw (pp. 50, 30-36 supra, and consider also at timely points - e.g. pp. 978, 1176-1185, 1186A-C: see Index 'Force'). It is also contrary relative to conversion, the obtaining of salvation, as to method: to the revelation of Christ as Saviour.

The revealed Christ is contrary to such an instrument as force, for coming to Him. Alien to it also here is the nature of man as scripturally revealed in God's image, and in terms of his divinely donated dignity, however misused. Both from his cause in Christ, his creation, and in its result in himself, man is contrary to the use of mere power for the determination of his heart, affections and decisions.

God 'strives' in exhortation, inculcation, reasoning with man (Isaiah 1:18 and cf. Appendix B infra); and hence is history the often harrowing thing that it is, without any guilt on the part of God, but always on that of man. Without this, God would be 'guilty' of misusing His programs, not man with 'refusing God's counsel' (Proverbs 1:24 ff.), as the Bible so clearly and continually teaches: and that in the face of a divine disposition towards man's deliverance from the sin that destroys, and to the salvation which delivers (Ezekiel 33:11, Timothy 2:1-4, Matthew 23:37, Appendix B infra).

As it is: man is guilty, and doubly so, failing to live righteously and in multitudinous masses, to accept the redemption supplied. Alas, one might be indeed unfeeling if the pathos of the masses so often thrust pitiably together, in war, did not cause a pang of recognition. That so well illustrates the noble folly of man, rather racked than repentant, misplacing his dignity and desire: as if return to his Creator were not the completion of his life, its meaning and its wonder; as if the wars of illusion, or against God, or those often (but not always) for little more than what is illusory, against man, were not the horror of misplaced realism.

But it is redemption and not force which is in view: ''Come unto me,'' says Christ, and not, Get there! Therefore pastors need patience and often feel the extremities of grief at the wayward, who continue in the face of the love of God towards the world.

Christ Himself crucified no man, and never used force to brush, rush or crush anyone into salvation. While judgments may in moral splendour rebuke sin, they are not a matter of violence as the converting medium: that is the Holy Spirit (John 16:8 ff.). The Holy Spirit is not a matter of force, but is God (II Corinthians 3:17), and where He is, there is "liberty" in the heart, not compulsion. That is what is taught, what is in principle the nature of our position, the moral beauty of God in His patience which lacks neither power nor propriety.

What then of that whole idea of worldly rule in which - as with the Moslem and Roman Catholic religions so often in the past, and in principle as we expound in detail (e.g. Ch. 9, pp. 885-972, 977-994; Ch. 10, pp. 1035 ff.) - salvation becomes a concept in which force operates as a ground...? It is not merely contrary to the Bible, to the nature and precepts of Christ, to the nature of God in His appeals and protestations, His tenderness and solicitations throughout the prophets in multiplied cases: it is related to Christianity only as blasphemy.

Such an error, however, does teach us something.

It does highlight this amazing restraint of the God of all patience and comfort, that He so restrains Himself, not from eventual judgment, but from the use of force as the criterion of conversion: while both the Moslem and the Roman religions have systematically so used force. It is the obvious thing to do. Mercifully God does not here do the... obvious.

Christianity, clearly designated in the scriptures so categorically accepted by the church in the New Testament, and by the Jews as those to whom these Old Testament oracles were given (Romans 9-10), is at once separated from Rome and the Moslem religion alike, by this consistent and applied criterion of voluntary conversion. Here the apologetic necessities which revelation and reason alike teach, are met.

This is one of the essential criteria which plays its part in identifying the truth, as it also exhibits itself so massively in the truth which is found. The Bible teaches that God is love, not force, and in love died that we might live; not at all did He make us devotees of craven fear or compromised conscience, or disassembled affection. God is a Spirit, we read in John, and He desires those who worship Him, in spirit to do so. The Bible exhibits and protests this with molten beauty, giving no place to the religions that, defying reason, produce blasphemy as well in this area. And how well, alas, has this blasphemy shown itself in the torture of men, in fires, propagandas, subversions misnamed conversions. (To this, we have later occasion to look in some more detail - see 'violence' in index.)

Thus Jesus Christ (to pursue the evidence for non-violence relative to salvation in the Christian faith, according to the Bible) - actually divulged that He did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32). While there are consequences in reality from non-repentance, repentance is not forced on, but given to the soul of man (Acts 11:18). God has disposition and desire for all to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:3-4), but does not direct force to subdue all. That is not His way, His wish or His work.

Indeed, Jesus Christ as Saviour, prior to the time of judgment towards which He waits ("not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance" - II Peter 3:9), neither seeks nor uses mere worldly office. It is no great play to grasp for the formal rule of what you made. Instead He offers Himself without spot, continuing in charity and compassion.

It is the hearts of men for which He seeks, seeking that which was lost, to bring it to reality and righteousness in peace and truth. Indeed, just as God long waited for the judgment of Canaan after the time of Abraham, since at that time its 'cup' was 'not yet full', so Christ "is not slack - as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance..." (II Peter 3:9).

Thus Jesus Christ stated with vigour and dispassion together, His great principle. "My Kingdom is not of this world!" He declared: "If my Kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight!" (John 18:36). Indeed, He continued to address Pilate: ''But now is my kingdom not of this world!'' It could not be clearer: force is not used since that is a usage and emblem of a kingdom of a type different from His own.

When therefore Rome indicates, as we shall see, that to it is the prerogative, at its own disposition, both using it, as against the Waldensians, and inciting as to its use, as amid the crowns of Europe: it is showing itself a kingdom of a type not that of Christ. He for His part refused all the kingdoms: Rome considers that they are its right for rule. (See Index: Unam Sanctam.)

The misuse of the name of Christ for worldly rule is one phase of a worldly complex, in which the Moslem religion, the Roman and in one respect the Jewish all fail: for with the Jews as a people, though as we see, their Old Testament is indeed identified as the word of God, their Christ was dispensed with... by force also!

It is, if we might so put it, the genius of history, the marvel of the construction of our universe, that it is possible for man to flout the kingdom of Christ - which, He said, is within us who believe - misusing his will, and through this to hurt both himself and his neighbours, and yet... not at all dislocate the planned paths of God.

In its place (see Index, will, predestination), we shall consider the extreme reasonableness of this marvel, in terms of what God has chosen to reveal of it, and its unique power to avoid the clashes and contradictions of human reason otherwise always found in this field: but in the meantime, we emphasise and repeat the underlying significance of freedom (relative to salvation, to God, to sin), however torn, tainted and misused; and the Bible's categorical assertion of it (II Corinthians 3:17).

We proceed now to the relevant summary for our purpose and procedure (REVIEW, p. 70 infra); but first to an extension on the special kind of force which concerns us: the force of evidence!

Extension 3:

On Force of Arms and Force of Evidence

The three

In the case of the Koran, we noted that at the conversion level, force was present and ought to be absent. We saw too a remedy was absent and one ought to be present. As to life, one looked for a favourable credit balance at the end, all things considered, this and that.

A mere 'moral' continuance in good works and good deeds and good prayers and hope, as far as may be, moreover, an approach with infinite consequences depending on margins of balance, is not a remedy for the contradictions of God inherent in man. In remedy however, the Bible abounds, so that man and man alone is responsible for any and every breach of morals, while as for his Maker, His own divine righteousness is already vindicated in the Gospel (cf. Romans 3:21-26), itself predicted and adumbrated from the first.

As for Judaism also, force was used - this time against Christ. That too is not an avenue to truth - especially as it merely fulfils the indictment of scripture against those concerned. Indeed, this is one more place where scripture verifies its self-confirming predictions, focussing on a Christ nationally rejected by the Jews and the noted events thereafter, caused to happen, to order. Scripture, being the word of God, has the power to make happen what it says. Behind it, is its speaker!

Here also, not only does the Bible abound in remedy and verification in volumes; fulfil the logical need, hence being clearly the truth. It fulfils this need par excellence. Thus, archeology also, the force of evidence being in view, continually abounds nowadays as science makes it so effective, in confirmation of the Bible. Perhaps the most remarkable find in recent years is that at EBLA where the very early Old Testament names, places and customs are staggeringly verified in a civilisation going back to around 1000 years before Moses, as Dr Clifford Wilson of Monash University indicates in his work, The Impact of Ebla... (1977, p. 24).

Tablets around 2300 B.C. appear in the midst of a thriving, erudite-seeming civilisation. This in addition to the case of Hammurabi of Babylon, somewhat later, shows the quite ridiculous error of unbelief committed by such scholarly romanticists as Welhausen, whose irrational tyranny worked so long in theological circles, more related to temporary popularity than to abiding logic... or faith!

The contention was that in the writings of Moses, there was far too much development of literature, thought, complexity and sacrificial system for the times of Moses; and they therefore assaulted these books, challenging their authenticity, despite the Jewish clear title to their own history, and the continued and consistent claims. After all, with the death sentence for false prophecy and a theocratic government, there is no room to manoeuvre! It was rather like saying that Hadrian's Wall really couldn't be genuine in Britain; only much more vituperative and dogmatic, against far more reason.

Now we see, from archeology, not only was there such development as this by Moses' time, linguistically and legally, and in terms of literature, but such developments were in place nearly 1000 years before Moses' day. So far from culture being alien to the Bible statements, it supported them, when the facts were known.

In fact, this is just one more verification in the everlasting seeming stream, of the factuality and reality of the Old Testament: theories, made in ignorance to attack the Bible, retreat like the Russian junta of August 1991, before the evidence (as the junta retreated before the people). Indeed, we even see an intimate correlation socially, in names and designations, with the culture assumed Biblically (in Genesis) for Abraham, and we see it as an historically traceable background. The Biblical picture, in other words, in the background to Abraham, is in fact a marvel of accuracy, as one might expect from an author living at that time, as confirmed by modern archeology and in particular, by the diggings of Ebla. Once more, the evidence does not trickle in, as it were, reluctantly, but has rather all the stout indifference to challenge, of the truth.

We now even have, at Serabit el-Khadim, near Moses' Mt Sinai, evidence indicative of ordinary labourers being well able to read and write in religious and commercial matters, and this in their own language, a variety of Canaanite close to Hebrew! The site in view was an Egyptian mine for opals and the find is indeed one more gem of comedy, against the ponderous follies of pouting, doubting and aggressive unbelief. (See Professor Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia, p. 52.)

One of the most intensely humorous elements of the Bible's constant triumph over attack, useful here because the rebuttals are constant verifications, comes in the form of the Hittite nation. Once regarded by armchair critics as an error in the scripture, through a former failure to 'dig up' evidence of such a race, the Hittite nation has now been rediscovered in secular history, through archeology. Kitchen in his excellent work, Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, even notes this morsel on p. 25:

The valid and close parallels to the social customs of the Patriarchs come from documents of the nineteenth to fifteenth centuries BC (agreeing with early-second millenium origin for this material in Genesis), and not from Assyro-Babylonian data of the tenth to sixth centuries BC... Likewise for Genesis 23, the closest parallel comes from the Hittite law which passed into oblivion with the fall of the Hittite empire about 1200 BC.
The delightful point here is that the nation once held to show the Bible wrong - when archeology gets to work as now - becomes the nation which shows the closest of parallels in custom to a section of Genesis! This is what fact does relative to the Bible, when fiction ceases for a while, from the clever-seeming but ultimately ignorant contrivances of man's imagination. Kitchen's interesting point is that knowledge of the surrounding cultures, relative to these early Biblical records, shows the authenticity of these records in historical terms; and that although much stress was laid on just this historical point, in hostile attitudes to the Bible in former times: it is ignorance which has made all the clamour, an ignorance in exact contradiction of the facts.

Knowledge confirms continually the correctness; while premature attacks merely show the state of the minds so engaged... and the impregnable character of the word of God. It is rather like tennis: the more attacks you successfully overcome, the more obvious it is that you are a champion.

To revert to the recent pinnacle of confirmation, Ebla, Wilson in his Impact of Ebla, p. 37, notes an interesting aspect. Professor Pettinato, a major participant in the work, acknowledged that there was a creation tablet in the Ebla find. Dr Wilson observes concerning Pettinato:

He stated that the record appeared to be remarkably like that found in the first verses of Genesis - "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
This is how Wilson ponders the data: he states, p. 92, that the theory rejecting Moses as author of Genesis 1:1 (inter alia) is now facing the simple fact that 'a somewhat similar account must be dated to approximately 2,000 years earlier than that time. The "oral tradition" apparently was written after all.' (That is, the date is about 2000 years before the imagined time, wrongheadedly proposed for part of the books of Moses!)

This is a marvellous fall for a theory hostile to the Bible, which in lordly style set that part of Moses as written nearly 1000 years after his time. Now the objection finds, in archeological exhibit, something similar nearly 2000 years before they thought; and long before Moses. That in turn fits with Wiseman's evidentially based reasonings that early Genesis shows clear evidence that it relates to or utilises written records extending back to the earlier phases of history (New Discoveries in Babylonia about Genesis - is the title of his work). There is, a topic we are about to consider, a stringent sort of humour about this rebuff of the 'mighty', in their assault on the word of the Almighty!

What one must note is that these antagonistic theories, based on wishes and imaginations, rather than scientifically constructed from facts, do not last very long, but what they attack, the word of God, has no failures to find! Perhaps it is that which so stirs some of those who cannot stand a sovereign ultimately beyond them, whose word is unfalsifiable! But in truth, the presence of perfection is a stimulus to attainment, and a thrill to wonder.

Incidentally, the longevity of this Bible, under assault for so long, is just one more of its attestations to itself, that it is the word of God. It simply constitutes one more verification, heightened in significance by the fact that the assaults are so continual, so acrid often, and so much lauded and praised in the world, till, quite consistently, they fail. That further verifies the word of God, for this reason: the vigour, and sometimes the venom, indeed, of these attacks fully accords with its analysis of the heart of fallen man, towards God (cf. Ephesians 4:18-19).

This remorseless persistence of assault, in the face of irresistible truth attests in general, a chronic removal from the divinely provided way: to repent. This is reminiscent of Amos (4:6 ff.), where this failing is almost humorously exposed, though the humour is not so much presented as implicit: a grim and almost ghoulish persistence that repeatedly ignores even the provisions for correction, like some cartoon figure that will not learn! Yet the pathos of this pathology is terrible, a remorseless rejection of truth. Does it not however serve God by showing the remorseless truth of His word; so does the wrath of man serve Him (Psalm 76:10 - "Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee"). Predictions, like archeology, make a fascinating study of fulfilment; and a large presentation is available on the topic of prophecy in this work (Chapters 8-9 infra, passim, esp. 712 ff., 755 ff., 965 ff.).

The fulfilment which is crucial to Christians is that of the personal promises which they find to operate in their lives continually - just as one might expect from an association with one's Creator in a world set on fire, like this one. These make available the force of verification internally, as fulfilled prophecies to the present and archeology for the past, do externally. You would expect just that. It verifies.

Review

Let us review our argument.

Thus the Bible (*26) alone has the remedy which is necessary for a world still left in place and form, yet acting like this one. That remedy is Jesus Christ. God in love sending the everlasting expression of Himself, His Son, allowed this magnificent Person, full of grace and truth and power, willingly to die and act as a sacrifice for sin. Sin, the departure from the will and mind of God, from His way: sin kills, it kicks the source of life; and justice does not wink at it; and Christ offers Himself to bear it. Say rather: Offered Himself (Hebrews 9:25-28):

Nor was it that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the holy place year by year with blood not his own. Otherwise, He would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now once at the consummation, He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And in that it is appointed for men to die once, and after this comes judgment; so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to those who eagerly await Him, for salvation .
For those who accept Christ, Jesus Christ as their Saviour, their Sacrifice (see Isaiah 53:10), He is their Saviour, the Remedy, the Redeemer who buys back their lost place with God (Ephesians 1:7, Romans 3:23). For them He becomes the life, the way and the truth (John 14:6) - as indeed He is, being of the nature of God Himself, whether He be taken or not: but it is to those who receive Him that He gives power to become the children of God (John 1:12); and these find out for themselves the meaning of these provisions. It is this Jesus Christ, the remedy, who leads back to God from whom He came and in whom He is (Philippians 2, Acts 3:19-21). It is this Jesus Christ, God made manifest in flesh, who brings a man to truth... non-violently.

What however of those who reject Him ? Rejecting an operation for cancer, when you have it, becomes the worse fault, assuring you of death when for life, the chance arose (if it was a fatal and terminal kind); just so is it fatal to finish by rejecting Christ. The fatal fault, He indicates, is not believing in Him. That prevents operation and operation is essential (Luke 13:1-3). Those who reject Him, like it or not, are in effect acting as if to send God to a lunatic asylum for allowing a world like this, when He has the power to stop it: for they act as if He had not spoken, declaring remedy, when in fact they have not accepted what He says... what of these fastidious people ? The Bible states that God's wrath abides on them (John 3:36).

After all, He has made immense provision for them at immense cost; and they mock or ignore, or in any case 'tough it out'. They bypass Creator, Sacrifice, Service, Forgiveness and Love, in God Himself. Using their freedom to drive, as it were, themselves like unserviced vehicles into the middle of the lake of life, they rust and are to be destroyed... cast out into anguish. That is the pity... the everlasting pity of it.

End-notes to Chapter 1
(Other than to the FIRST EXTENSION)

1 See DIALOGUE, this Chapter, pp. 3-10 Chapters 3 and 6 infra may also be consulted here.

2 See Chapter 4, Section 3 infra; also pp. 262-267, 284-288, 412-422P.

3 See later pp. 21-22 infra, as also pages cited above.

4 One would need to be beyond oneself to conceive in the dimension to create one's creativity, rather than merely be an operative of oneself (i. e. of initial given equipment).

Whatever creativity one has, must be transcended to be conceptually originated and caused to be, or created. Creativity itself must be caused from an adequate basis. The 'exception' to this is that entire self-sufficiency which knows no 'data' in that it knows neither commencement nor origination: the eternal God, without whom no basis exists for our limiting and limited datum-type existence, with or without creativity.

Systematically exempt from this stringency, then, is God Himself and none else. Man per se is systematically bound to it: one reason why philosophy without God never gets anywhere, and indeed, that it is always the subject of gyration in the generations, and dismissal over time. (History too, though not truly cyclical, has aspects which at times suggest this, as humanity refuses to learn the truth and thus dooms itself to various variants of the unworkable, depending on the gullibility of the confused, the daring of the misled and the arrogance or direness of the spiritual autonomy of the 'princes of this world', as they change face from time to time, basic ideas less often.)

To revert to philosophy, so closely allied with history: the present mood of anti-philosophy is therefore completely understandable, although in terms of the logical avenue available to God, entirely wilful. (See Glossary under anti-philosophy.) It is indeed, one more verification of man's status, his folly and censure, Biblically defined (cf. Proverbs 1:31, II Timothy 3:7).

As God is needed to create the contemplative, man, the cognitive analyst, yet more is He needed to bring to be, with this, man the imaginative, creative artist and analyst, one who erects novel thought in seeking to make theories about new facts (new to him), or who expresses discerning interpretations. Indeed, the analytically disciplined imagination, a synthetic creativity of man in one aspect, is something again, calling for yet more in its fashioning, formation, creation. What supernal masterpiece of divine creativity creates human creativity - like this!

Man's continual aspiration for wings beyond all things, though atheistically merely ludicrous, is not wholly insane in that case. It is, not least, the reflection of the fact that man is a person, instituted by God in terms of fellowship potential with Himself, the One who indeed has no limits.

Confusion of capacity for fellowship with such a (Creator) Being, with the capacity to emulate all His works, while inexcusable and mere folly, has the appearance of wild self-assertion, rather than simple unfettered insanity. This base makes it understandable, in a way which does not simply contradict man's powers of composed and rational analysis in other directions. That in turn is one more powerful verification of the status of man as a created being.

It is not, then, merely that man has taken leave of his senses through intoxication with powers he manifestly does not possess, contradicting the evidence with a sort of heady self-affirmation that would forget the limitations which are his. Simply a perversion of his potential for fellowship with him who is indeed divine, it leaves man like a carriage which, falling from the engine which had dragged it to the crest, careers downhill under the illusion of having no need of motor support, until of course, it comes to the bottom of the incline to which the engine first had taken it, finding there its just and due end!

In this area also, then, this is verification, this limitless aspiration which drags man down, as is the very texture of the way it happens.

Haunted by this sense, as often also harassed by those who deploy the captious dream politically, man loses himself logically when atheistic, for there is no place to hide.

In more ways than one, then, does man tend to become "unmindful of the Rock which begot you" - Deuteronomy 32:18.

5 See the topic of WILL: Ch. 5, pp. 423-431, and Ch. 8, pp. 633-643.

6 See p. 40 infra.

7 It should carefully be considered here what the Biblical teaching is not (and this disjunction will be made clear in this work). It is not that man is a mere evacuee from God; unregenerate man is not such that when converted to Jesus Christ, he becomes an exotic entity not in the image of God... that is, not correlatable in spirit with God - God is a Spirit. That is not what is then created. Man is re-created "in righteousness and true holiness" (Ephesians 4:24), indeed "after the image of Him who created him" (Colossians 3:10).

What is created at conversion is a re-natured person out of a de-natured person. The original tuning to God is restored.

As we shall see, refusal of this change, personally, is a matter of preference. It is in fact a preference which, negatively, may be asserted by man with appropriately profound results. (See p. 109 infra, also pp. 189-193, 200-202, Appendix B et al..)

8 See Chapter 4, Part 3, infra, pp. 396 ff., 413ff., 419ff..

9 Cf. Chapter 3, Section 4 infra, esp. pp. 299-303.

10 ... as sufficient.

11 Nor has it potential; for then it would constitute something-with-potential.

12 The notable thing about these data was this. They related to what John Horgan in Scientific American, September 1987 (pp. 18-20) called: 'faint microwave radiation that pervades the universe', and as Jastrow pointed out: 'In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Telephone laboratories discovered that the earth is bathed in a faint glow of radiation coming from every direction in the heavens. The measurements showed that the Earth itself could not be the origin of this radiation, nor could the radiation come from the direction of the Moon, the Sun or any other particular object in the sky. The entire universe seemed to be the source.' That in itself made impact; but what made much more was this concept: 'The radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson has exactly the pattern of wavelengths expected for the light and heat produced in a great explosion.' It is this precision which then seemed to bear almost the force of a pronouncement, or at least to be particularly evocative.

Now Horgan reviews critical positions on this topic in the noted September article. He notes Arp (of Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories) who has some observational evidence which suggests the 'red shift', or movement in spectral properties of light propagated from a distance, does not in fact, as normally held, warrant the view that we have here a case of proportion. He argues that the Hubble relationship between red shift (shift, that is of the light towards the red end of the spectrum in such cases) and distance does not show that objects 'outside our galaxy are receding from the earth at speeds proportional to their distance.' This is one of the elements of the Big Bang view, forwarded as above by Jastrow. In certain cases, Arp holds, this does not apply, and his observations present such a possibility.

Emil Wolf of Rochester University holds that 'certain forms of coherent light, in which the waves travel in step with one another, can shift as the light propagates through space.' Arp put the view that something else was the cause of the red shift- something not the recession noted.

Such views, Horgan observes, are not generally held by astronomers. Krauss of Yale University noted that such criticisms have attacked parts of the big-bang model, but offer no comprehensive alternative; and the model itself 'explains everything very well,' he observes. That is, it was deemed to allow credibly for an explosion of power beyond which, as states Jastrow, you cannot by material means probe, such was its cataclysmic character; as also the precise micro-wave radiation, and for the red shift, for example. However, lack of credible alternative depends on what is credited, and if God is excluded by the Cult of the Forbidden (pp. 330ff. infra - that anti-logical and anti-scientific insistence that the natural world must come of itself, from nowhere, for nothing, based either on nothing gradually turning into something or something coming or being, both dependent and delimited, and yet without cause, another nothing item), then nothing could ever be credible!

In fact, as we see in TMR Chs. 1 and 6-7, not only is the impact of creation as it arrives and manifests all the ingredients emplanted by the Eternal God credible, every other concept at the very empirical level of science fails utterly to allow for anything else.

Let us however revert to Krauss. In so saying, he was also referring to a view of Alfvén, a former Nobel prize winner in Physics. He holds that long filaments of plasma (electrons and positively charged ions) spread throughout space, and that interaction breeds the energy which gives the universe the energy with which to expand, and a general type of microwave radiation,  can result.

Whatever radiations may result, however, one thing remains clear. If such a view were to degenerate into energy production as a means of getting more from no adequate basis, then its end is sure. It becomes the something from nothing aberration which always as in perpetual motion, attracts the facile.

In fact. if this as so often is the case, becomes a brand of seeking to find from energic realities a generation from nowhere of work power, which in fact involves not only capacity to work, but direction in the performance of the same (explosion is work), then it is mere magic. Science always comes in the end to finding adequate cause for every consequence, and merely vacillates until this is done. Once causeless consequences are imagined, magic propensities which come from what is not adequate for their production, it is mere confusion and as in the case of spontaneous generation of life, or perpetual motion, in the end merely looks a quaint phase of scientific progress, hideously ignorant of the reality.

These critical views, where not soaring into the non-sublimities of pure imagination and extrapolation,  may have something to contribute in the long run, but presently it appears that Alfvén has not the observational base needed for his theory, relative to the plasma, merely noting some correlation between the radiation IF this were so, and what is found; whilst Arp's view may, it is held, be statistically explainable, and Wolf's theory is a particular case, whereas the phenomena are general.

It may, for example, come that the new views envisage a less rapidly expanding universe of far lesser scale, with various sources of radiation, whilst an initial spectrum of microwave continues to match exactly the cataclysmic model. The point is that at present there is inadequate observational evidence to give compelling challenge to the radiation testimony to a fiat beginning; but developments in these spheres remind us once again of the evanescent character of much in the way of scientific theory. It is sounder to build with the logical instruments which do not depend on particular spreads of recent hypotheses, but underlie and undergird the very method of such work at all times. That is the procedure adopted in this book.

Jastrow's point has reflected a phase of contemporary science, within its own limits, and it dwells on the cataclysmic implications of the observed radiation glow and the predicted wavelength pattern for such cataclysm, and the precision of the match. The character of cataclysm is less dependent on theory based on untested hypotheses and hence of more impact. His point is that such a cataclysm as has appeared to be so precisely verified, matches well with creation in scope.

Though the antithesis of catastrophe, it has the mark of magnitude and generality. (Cf. *13 infra.) That in itself is of no kind of challenge to creation, merely a possible confirmation of the explosive mode of its happening. Now there is a large element of incertitude even on this front, as various theories combat and evanescent concepts match each other concerning the first light of creation. Hartnett's 2005 work, Dismantling the Big Bang is a very good example of this (on which topics, see The Divine Drama Ch.  3, Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch.   9, Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch.  6, Divine Agenda Ch. 1, Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch 9, Calibrating Myths, Machining Dreams and Keeping Faith. Ch. 1, The Defining Drama Ch. 3  and Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 6, TMR  7, as marked).

Indeed,  as to that aspect of 'Big Bang' theory which seeks to make a sudden beginning a designation of various gross lapses in logic and contrarieties to empirical fact, it is in hideous collapse. Hartnett's work is merely one of almost innumerable scientific attestations of that fact (cf. TMR Ch. 7 as marked). Indeed, this last chapter cited attests this fact in summary exhibits of a numerous technical character. The magnitude on the one hand, and the almost precise uniformity of this radiation, on the other, are certainly in keeping with ONE massive event, and have found no rational explanation outside creationism.

Whether or not the evidence is ever found to be susceptible to another explanation,  regarding the background radiation as such, Ostriker of Princeton University at one time pointed out that there is theoretical provision sufficient to account for any observed and apparent anomaly. Yet Hartnett more recently  has dealt with the realm of factors too readily brought into the case, without evidential warrant or even credibility. The creation basis alone provides coherence, meaning, basis and confirmation, while all forms of the 'big bang' suffer from multiple collision with facts, at almost every level, the painful concentrations of allegedly ancient massifs of formed structure being not least (cf. TMR Ch. 7).

These explicatory endeavours with all the cosmos of conception in view, are now involved in the turmoils of debate (see references above). Anomaly has now, however,  become the name of the game, and chaos in concept is the result of having tried to force a force-based concept into a design exhibiting universe. Certainly the concept of continuation of some dynamic drive in an amorphous and non-divine fashion is as contradicted empirically as it is logically as ludicrous rationally, being merely one species of seeking to gain, at once or in stages, something from nothing, cosmoi of operations of diverse kinds arriving like children on holidays, from some base.

That is as if to make a lolly-pop the base for rationality, or a seed of wheat the meaning and ground of aesthetics. It resembles at the intellectual level, compulsive obsession, time in the negative towards rationality and in the positive to now this, now that type of idol for impartation of what it simply lacks the potency, position and basis to produce, while attesting this fact as often as ... asked experimentally (cf. TMR Chs. 1, 6, 7, Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, Secular Myth or Sacred Truth). Such conduct is merely one more verification of the biblical analysis of the position of man spiritually, and this gives not only the prediction of the fact, but the grounds for its occurrence (Romans 1:17ff., II Timothy 4:1-4), at once solving a human enigma and verifying itself in time (cf. pp. 150-151 infra).

It is always important to distinguish between what could generate a result, and what is known to do so, when the thing that could is itself not established as to its very existence. When its existence is found, then what it does perform in the sites in view, being testable, would enter into the less peripheral elements of scientific method for which observation is a crucial element of discipline.

It is interesting to note that Jastrow emphasised this: the sheer magnitude of the cataclysm which appeared attested by the coherent conceptions and observations of interlocking scientific theories appears to be such that any material procedure to peer beyond it would be prevented. If this interpretation of base radiation should stand, then it leads to an end of observation, and fits precisely with a beginning of the observable. So far from giving ground for unfolding, however, its place was to give the mere fact of impact at the first. Not HOW it came but that it came is the simple outcome.  What however does come beyond the veil of actual creation, can assuredly be tested, with that watchful alertness, lest natural assumptions be intruded into the actual creation, which is different in kind from all maintenance and continuity considerations. To create and to continue are different not only in kind and in mind, but in essence and purpose. Within this limit, however, currently being probed with some measure of care, only creationism finds any explicatory power, and this in multiple domains.

This must be clearly distinguished from the scenario of Big Bang theorists, some of whom imagine that a fiat beginning to the universe, to creation, or if they wish to put it that way, to what is called into being and equipped with designations that fit the definition of design,  gives some kind of warrant to various nebulous imaginations about the MANNER, source, drive, basis, background and cause both of its being and being produced and induced into explosive beginning. The case is the contrary (cf. Dig Deeper, Higher Soar, Divine Glory Delights the More Ch. 2, - from myth to divine testimony in logical steps, from the divine to design, from design to designation and information with more on designating a definition for design, together with Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny Ch. 3 with Ch. 2). It is reason and not dream which is required for every scheme, schema, production, being and dynamic, development and correlation.

It is as if a sunrise being found, the nature of the construction of the sun were to be deducible; or as if a vast unleashing of energy and form is the same as its being empty of wonder and formulations to match the form, or as if a genius who constructed a new engine suddenly were to be 'deduced' to have done so by mere savage impulsion of force. None of these things follow, except the designations of illusion; and all the evidence in all parts is quite simply that new information does NOT arrive without intelligence. The most these things show, if they were ever to be finally confirmed in the realm of radiation, is the fiat feature. That is a creation scenario part one. Such a result does not have to be shown as creation has its own modes, as any author or engineer knows; but it is in line with it.

The rest is information. The fiat however by and of itself is precisely what creation attests and irreducible complexity in life, integrality of design in mutually reliant features and meaning in overall totality, requires.

This of course, is beyond and above all the all but incredible confutations and confusions of modern science in these arenas, as human will and desire impact on fact and reality, and mere hope and presumption attain to ever new levels of arrogance. Construction is always subject to the profound principles of logic on which discussion appears, in which method of science inheres and on account of which argumentation itself can have any validity (cf. TMR Ch. 5, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer).

Moreover, having what is not make what is, what is not equipped to make what is, what lacks purpose to make purposively integral units of complex artifice and ingenious manoeuvre, what is insensitive make what is, what is unaesthetic construct what finds and applies exquisite evaluation and rational indices of assessment, what is illogical make logic, what is incapable make capacity and what is not or else is magic which itself then has to have supernatural powers in order to act, the basis: all this is merely an exercise in pedantic obfuscation.

It is not magic but method; not irrelevance but reason; not form from chaos but fact from feature which is in view. The reason for the inane and urbane departure from scientific method by some kind of compulsion to avoid non-nature (in earthly terms) as the source of nature, even though such an enterprise is contra-indicated and laboriously negated on all sides, 'nature' unwilling or too witless to conform in any single case to the necessary antics of creation (cf. TMR Ch. 1), what is it ?

It is one of the hall-marks of the degeneration in modern society, the love of the irrational (cf. Ch. 3 infra), often argued for by reason in a wonderland of eccentricity which makes of man an exhibit of rebellion, reason being merely one step on the self-made grave which endless war abundantly attests. Does a book write ? and even if it did, does it do so by being written ? Is effect cause ? Is consequence inconsequential ? A visit to reason in itself is first necessary before reasoning, especially when the models of delinquent desire start with the disenablement of reason itself, crushed in such an apparatus to have nothing of  absolute truth available! (cf. Ch. 3 infra, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6    -7, The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7, Light Dwells... op. cit.  Ch. 8).

The arduous use of rationality, however,  leads only to the Bible which is self-verifying as has earlier been shown in this volume, and will be shown further in later chapters of it. There is the validation that all else lacks in a cohesive complex of implication and validation, verification and mutual harmony of concept. Here is the culmination of rationality, in that as created, it has the Creator's attestation in its ultimate outcome, the exposure of the Bible with its verifications and logical harmony on all fronts.

It is this in which is clearly declared what none has ever voided, what in fact happened: yes, and why! ALL cosmoi must be investigated, the rational, the ideational, the conceptual, the physical, the spiritual, the moral, the psychic, the architectural, the bio-physical, the conscious, the verificatory, the sources of validity, and ONLY when ALL are satisfied (as attested in Light Dwells .... op. cit. for example) is the result of the slightest significance. Reductionist fantasies are mere fairy tales for adults. Each cosmos needs its indent for origination logically, in every phase and inter-phase; and all need their ground of synthesis in man.

Thus in the end, though the method, though not the fact, of the institution of matter, remains scientifically veiled, what logic requires, observation coheres with, with an elegant and beautiful harmony as we see further in TMR Ch. 1 and Light Dwells ...). It is however the logic which is behind science, and indeed on which it depends - which requires the institution of matter; and science can merely attest the consequences (cf. Scientific Method, Satanic Method, and the Model of Salvation).

This it does, in terms of its elemental principles of the conservation of matter and energy, the second law of thermodynamics and other elements which are in fact, the procedures which follow upon a finished creation. In this, it does nothing to show how it could have come, but everything to confirm that its origin is not a process of the present. As instituted, it works, and it works with laws which it has no observable, verified or rationally supported power to institute. Moreover, as seen in TMR (loc. cit.) the cohesive correlation of Biblical proposition and scientific verification is vast and continuous, merely distorted by desire, but ineluctable for thought (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!). Verification and validation, revelation and reality on earth thus have a framework in which the questions asked and the answers given are both adequate and rational, rather than the alternative, neither rational nor valid (cf. What is the Chaff to the Wheat Chs. 3-4).

In fact, the FINDING of the revelation of the Bible, REQUIRED by reason as shown in this present volume, is the verification par excellence; for without it, no validity could attach to ANYTHING. This is the reductio ad absurdum which the discovery of the Bible avoids, the final logical confrontation to man from God!

For truth to be findable, it must first exist; and for it to exist the absolute must be there first, in order by knowledge and perspective, to be beyond the containing relativities which bring reaction but not reality. If God were not both there AND KNOWN, the Bible giving the testable path for the latter, argumentation would be an exercise in infantility, when truth is sought. But then, so would be the concept that there is no truth, for such is as much an affirmation as any other view; and yet since this could not even logically be made, were the truth not first affirmed, and God as its source, argument on this basis becomes an exercise as much in futility as in antinomy. Validity demands God; the Bible verifies the validity of reason which demands such a revelation. Those who seek to avoid the point become BOTH irrational and invalid! (cf. It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 9, TMR Ch. 5,The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy).

What then ? Science attests what it observes: a working which does not incorporate the procedures of institution. It shows, as it were, how the car works, but it has no snapshots of the factory where it was made. That is all it could attest, except for data harmonious with this institution, such as may be be found in this case, and such as its undergirding laws reflect so elegantly, being built on the existence of structure, and its tendency to reduce its specifics (or increase its entropy) over time. This last point of course is also true of man's own creations; and in his case, there is the joy of creation, while in the universe's case, while it cannot be seen happening (just as the Bible states - it is finished), yet we have the compensation that it so greatly outstrips any production of our own. These matters will be further explored in the specific field of life, in Chapter 2.

As to this distinction between the method of institution of matter, and the the fact of its existence, it is instructive to make an analogy for simpler hold by the imagination. Thus it is rather like the case of authorship of a poem: it comes from another order (the person), and its own (created) order is simply instituted from beyond it, however rigorous it may be once it is there. Pen meets paper in a way that, should it continue without guidance, plan and care, would disturb, disrupt or even destroy the system (i.e. of the writing as first written).

Thus the facts of orthography, the character of the script and so on, do not show how thoughts came to become discrete words. That action, thought to words, is prior to the observable words themselves. These attest not how but that it was written.

It is interesting that no one would ever question whether a book had not been written. Perhaps it is because it is so obvious that such as work has a character, and a content, and a code on the one hand, and that it would be corrupted speedily on the other, if bits were left around; and that all the elements of conservation of its creation are in it and none of the elements of dispersion of order appear relative to the time span of the phenomenon, so that a contrary assumption would contravene all the data and explain none, as well as being contrary to all known evidence.

The consistency of the phenomenon of the book relative to personality, and its entire inconsistency with the opposite, would leave efforts to account for it differently, in its original composition, facing the massive wall of the inability of any element to conform to the non-intelligent-production theory. Where not one datum abides by a theory, and every datum abides by another, it is not merely entirely unscientific to choose such a theory, but, all its components being systematically contradicted, it becomes an exercise in random thought.

Science would never do this, in terms of scientific method, though many scientists and others do it with the universe, which contains billions of 'books' in magnificent order after long periods, systematically reproducing themselves as if they were a publishing house... the cells of the body. While these cells are not perfect, their trillions per body have an amazingly near approach to it over the generations of auto-reproduction.


As noted initially, the attribution of law production to chance is merely self-contradiction; it is in fact, a simple misuse of terminology. Systematic, integrated continuation of correlated actions in terms of coherent order structures on cohesive conceptual formulations is law; and to make 'chance' responsible for it does not really deserve even the name of a rational hypothesis; it has nothing to offer- but contradiction.

The writer of the book of the human body is not an option; He is a necessity, and this not on one or two grounds, but as we see, continually.

13 Extension on The Irruptive Concept In Creation:

Creation makes impact, when God declares matter and space: a matter of clarifying confusion about matter.

Of course the concept that the Big Bang, if such be indicated, is in itself a rationalistic substitute for creation needs setting to rest.

It is not a question of some Descartes-style 'working out' of how it all produced itself. This has been set to rest logically already. What is in view is the question of whether certain background radiation does or does not subsist, which is indicative of an enormous institution of the universe. Whether or not there is some other ground for it, something being considered acutely, the implication of the radiation would be simply that the echoes of the commencement remain. It would not at all indicate that there was no commencement; quite the contrary. It is not a question, moreover, of some necessity for this radiation to be there; for man is not so omniscient as to be able to determine what must be over time, in so complex a universe as this one. All the variables and circumstances are simply not known, to allow such ruthless certainty.

A phenomenon consistent with and heavily correlative with a dynamic institution of the universe is not necessary to prove it, for the proof is independent of it. It would merely constitute a rather interesting verification of the obvious.

The very institution in itself is scarcely a non-institution; or a description of a non-creation. Its place is then purely verificatory and it lends no grounds to gradualism in any form; except perhaps to remind us of the manifest fact that even if there had been something gradual, you still need a sufficient cause for the laws and order and form of it all, and that their institution is no more miraculous if sudden than if not.

After all, 'nothing' has no future, and something sufficient must always be there; nor can this be matter, which is itself in need of a basis for its criteria. Whether the creation, necessarily performed by the necessarily self-sufficient God, has this extraordinary attestation or not, is merely a matter of the writhings of contemporary science. It is not then a necessary attestation; it is an interesting field.

More recently an article, 'Big Bang' may be a fizzer! in the magazine Creation (pp. 50ff., September-November 1990) provides material on the strangely 'smooth' background radiation in the universe, raising questions as to why there had not been some variation and irregularity arising. These are technical questions dependent on matters at the cutting edge of modern science. Minute variations (1992) may reflect divine fiats in the flush of creation (cf. pp. 422B-C infra). However, only when, quite irrelevantly (though by no means impossibly such being the mania of man to escape God), efforts are made to institute from these wispish data some sort of necessary program of the institution of the universe, ex-God, is it pertinent for us to notice (as in the article) that the universe has enormous structures, the 'Great wall' of galaxies, and now a series of such walls, which ill-accord with any concept of self-development, however magical the concept is and must be, as if time were imagination, duration were dynamic and extent and explanation of what is IN time WITH duration so that it HAS extent.

Deposition dynamics having any kind of explosive impact, these are one thing; imagination that deposition involves in some way the origination of the position is as logical as imagining that the way in which a load of carrots is deposited on the shed floor is indicative of the way they were grown, their seeds created or these conceived! It is a ludicrous collision of reality with assumption, and assumption with magic. The fact of institution is as far from its logical necessities and imaginative background as the placement of a sum in a bank. That it comes by this or that electronic means does not indicate how the purchasing power was generated. This is its mere transference.

Pre-occupation with modes in the genesis of what is, from elements in its constitution, of its institution from its self-attestation is always perilously close to the pursuit of assumption. Neither the indictment of a poem, the genesis of the imagination and intellection and perception and tenderness, nor the creativity inherent is at all indicated in any examination of the print over time. Even if it were by pen and nib, you could only see some evidence of the various pressures which accompanied its physical translation into observable print, not the psychic dynamic behind its construction prior to the display mode, which merely makes it readable. Nor is the universe or any other creation different. If on the one hand, you wish to find the nature of its origin, how it acts does not instruct you; if on the other, you wish to assume it always was, then the eclipse of the causality on which your thought ABOUT origins at all depends, makes of your thought an antithetical exercise in logical antinomy (cf. Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny Ch. 8).

Slusher, long ago in his monograph, The Origin of the Universe (Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, 1978) showed the painful unrealities of the rationalistic mode, the similarity of spectra of supposedly most ancient and relatively recent stars - a matter to which we shall revert - the highly extraordinary and inexplicable continuity of the spirals of the galaxies on any ancient concept of the universe, the total inadequacy of a generic 'explosion' to account for the differentiae of the universe which we find, inconsistencies indeed in the Doppler effect concept of an ancient and massively receding universe and so on. Further, Slusher indicates; "If it takes as long to form such a simple object as an interstellar grain as the calculations indicate under the most hopeful conditions (that do not actually exist at all), how can the notion of huge ages for the stars and galaxies have any credibility and be taken seriously ? Effects such as evaporation, sputtering, and vapor pressure would seem to destroy any grains that might be formed"- (p. 46).

Dealing with the age of the universe, he also observes that the accelerating universe concept, with increasing speeds at further points for galaxies, relative to those at nearer points, leads to a reduced time scale, resistant (p. 10) to the time requirements of nature-myth evolutionists. That is, Slusher observes that "on face value", the velocity of recession of objects distant from the earth, increases "as galaxies reach greater distances". This "accelerating universe" concept, if correct in its geometry and in its picture, shortens time required from origin to current location. The time scale that results provides a universe 'age', one which is less than evolutionists claim even for 'our own galaxy'. This is the type of picture which results from 'orthodox' interpretation of the 'red shift' of light coming from afar; but what, asks Slusher of the cases of 'blue shift' which, on this basis of interpretation, would indicate 'approach rather than recession' for the astronomical objects displaying this ?

Similarly negative effect on the time scale often assumed comes from the existence of theoretically 'recent' cases which yet incorporate allegedly ancient, developmental materials in stars; and this despite the theoretically vast differences between the ages of the stars, on a scenario hostile to a young universe. Citing similar spectra for many stars which, on evolutionary assumptions should be among the oldest and the youngest, and considering the supposed trend for 'various heavier chemical elements' which on that basis, 'should be formed in the stars', Slusher contrasts this with the facts, noting indeed that stars that might be deemed the 'oldest' show 'abundance of the elements from carbon to barium' two magnitudes less than is the case for 'younger' stars, such as the sun, when theoretically they should be greater.

Speaking of the phenomenon of the 'missing mass', to which we shall shortly refer, and surrounded by multiplied anomalies and inconsistencies in the evolutionary concepts applied to the astral picture, Slusher notes a view of Margon (p. 43), that "we have reached an impasse, almost to the point Thomas Kuhn has called a scientific revolution." This comes from the difficulty which philosophers who happen to be scientists have, when they come into collision with the data. Indeed, Slusher (p. 48) refers to the superabundance of illusory or even contra-evidential hypotheses in terms of a fascinating quotation from Professor R. Benton, who was speaking on the imagined 'black holes'.

Slusher felt this quotation could aptly be applied to the big-bang cosmogony, that entire materialistic, naturalistic, gradualistic, guessing game in which all that is needed to get the results is what is not1 found: "theoretical astrophysicists - some of the more renowned ones - are staring into a black box from which any number of assumptions can be made on the existence of things they envision from the nothingness they see." (Rod Burnitt's article on this phenomenon in TJ Vol. 16(1), 2002 cf. Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 6, is of interest here.)

Indeed, if taken at all seriously, amusing results come from frequently held gradualistic hypotheses on the universe. Thus (p. 8), Slusher speaks of the 'instantaneous snapshot' of the universe which the present situation presents. But, depending on actual distances, and the speed of light (the former with its models - p. 78 infra; the latter with a history in fact under enormous controversy, and affecting 'brave' time and age estimates dramatically), we are seeing events occurring in distant yesterdays, different object distances giving different 'times' to 'view'! What DID happen ? Because of entropy, the law based on observation and found in related theories of many kinds, it is not possible to reconstruct the past on this sort of information. All that can be said is that it was far more complex and highly organised then than now. Perhaps as illustration, one could conceive of trying (without other present examples to 'go by') : what a functioning appendix looked like some thousands of years before it is first seen or dug up.

 'Reconstruction' into projected former times from the degenerative and rotted, disintegrated and dispersed back to the constructed and operational, when theoretically you cannot (to revert to the actual case) see what it was, becomes an exercise in imagination. If it also rejects current realities of entropy, it is a contra-evidential piece of fantasy, not even remotely related to science, or to any data from this universe. In all fairness, that is precisely what science fiction is. The impact on such considerations on logic, and vice versa is considered elsewhere...

Yet more amusing is the fact, as noted by Slusher (p. 9), that the observed appearance of thinning out of galaxies as one proceeds outward from the earth, in all directions, something contrary to any uniform conceptions, together with an apparent velocity of recession of galaxies from the earth, increasing with distance in all directions, would seem, on usual uniformitarian assumptions, to imply that the earth is firstly, 'at the very centre of the highest concentration of matter in the universe', and secondly, 'at the original centre of the universe'. While such possible implications of the data are not necessary in any sense to the concept of creation or to the Biblical statement, they form a very droll consequence in the midst of uniformitarian postulates, being considered in order to exhibit their inadequacy and inconsistency.

Cosmic dust calculations also lead to massive inputs of nickel per year to the ocean which, combined with that from terrestrial sources, as a rate, would indicate an earth of merely several thousand years. To gain current oceanic nickel concentration, that is what it would take. Moon dust calculations, mentioned elsewhere, likewise give a very young age for the system (Slusher: Age of the Cosmos, pp. 39 ff.).

Similarly, while employing such considerations as the questionably high rate of energy production assumed for qasars if they are as distant as common theory would make them, and Riemann geometry as one of various options for a young universe, as a model, a geometry which reduces the extent of space vastly: Slusher exposes the fact that overall options are considerable and argues for a coherent approach covering all the evidence. One of the main elements and most consistently called for, is a young earth. (See Origin of the Universe, pp. 19ff., Age of the Cosmos, pp. 35-37. For further data and aspects re dating, 'Big Bang', time, process, change: see Extensions to Ch. 2, esp. D, N, pp. 159-179, 252E ff.; *13 on pp. 882 ff.; pp. 971-972; 422B-C; 173 - cf. 76, and Index, infra.)

In particular, Dr Slusher points out the impact of environment on rates of radioactive decay, and citing Dudley on the radioactive atom as a 'linear resonant system, subject to parametric excitation', he notes the inability of the fixed rate of radioactive decay concept to provide reliable rates, in any case (cf. more recent and startling work as shown in The gods of naturalism have no go! Ch. 16 where marked). Further, when the contemplated events stressed by Cuvier, Agassiz, Nilsson, Velikovsky et al. include a richly varied array of cataclysmic happenings, the effects might not be small in the scale, but of great magnitude; not near the in scope what is experimentally tested, but far surpassing it!

Such considerations are reinforced by the so-called 'missing mass', an enormous discrepancy between calculated mass of certain galaxies and that deemed necessary for their sustained cohesion. Fast disintegration therefore appears in order, again greatly limiting the age of the universe... for spiral they still are. Indeed (Origin of the Universe pp. 39-40), random and enormous speeds of divergent parts of galaxies inhibit any spiral cohesion at all. Time, p. 27, 28/78/94, notes the missing mass remains missing! . . . (Cf. p. S27 infra.) This, for all its vaunted hubris, the Hubble Space Telescope merely confirms.

All the phenomena confirm the concept of the second law of thermodynamics: that order and specificity do not increase over time, but attenuate, fail, fall, diminish because of the contrary forces, and that there are limits to the endurance of special features, in any merely natural system.

The point however for us is this: while the 'big bang' hypothesis is indeed, as Slusher calls it in the process of his negative analysis, 'a nature myth' without observational support either in detail or in general, and as a basis for what we have ex-God, it does not even give coherent or rational account, even granted the 'arrival' of the initial 'system': yet we may exclude the slanted phrasing and return to the initial impact of the prediction of Gamow, concerning the background radiation in the universe. Whether or not this particular interpretation of radiation ultimately stands, the abstraction from an effect of sudden deposition to the continuities of imagination was never relevant logically, a distortion of a creative impact into a tainted text-book on an imaginary progression, consistently anti-verified in empirics as in the basic of rationality.

Call it instead, if you will, design dynamics and relate this putative  'hiss' to the materially evidenced 'cradle' of design, and if so be, the impact of its formation in radiation results. Then what we do have ? Then this piece of the history of Hoyle's abandonment of the contra-evidential 'steady state' theory (which, as Slusher points out, cannot account for this radiation) in favour of the now much more emphasised (and long taught) sudden institution by intelligence of life, retains its interest. Even the concepts of and surrounding the  'hiss' or radiation continue to be a hotly debated topic (cf. Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 6), illustrative of the Slusher point of the amazing confidence that some have put in the maze of assumptions which lead now to this, now to that 'interpretation' of the physical format associated with the institution of the universe, one which by no means has any capacity to show the mode of creation. It merely attests elements of its arrival, if and when these have not been so distorted, deleted, compromised or relegated by the post-institution criteria as to be meaningful at all. 

The ludicrous imaginings of competence to find institution's mode from constitution's detail continues to find rebuke in simple empirical fact, as in supernovas and a cloud of considerations from the velocity of light to the presence of the great wall phenomenon in space,  "Galaxies ... gathered together in great chains and walls which curl around vast regions of empty space known as 'voids" and present near the imaginary beginnings ... (Supernova data and a number of other elements discordant to the 'big bang' rationale being  itemised in The gods of naturalism have no go! Ch. 16 from the point marked).

As we have shown, that intelligence, logically, is forced to the place of God. Though never more, as indicated, than an interesting addition to the necessity of creation, something which has no need of it; and while certainly subject to enquiry and question as to its actual basis, this 'background radiation' has stirred some of the density of philosophical 'science' into new desperations, not least an increasing awareness of the folly of the idea that gradually laws could arise, gradually intensely and immensely intricate correlations and mutually necessary laws and forms arise... that gradually anything could come, over however long a period, from what is quite simply inadequate to produce it. As to speed ? this simply dramatises the requirements of logic, on which we have dwelt.

Page 79 continued in the next section


Footnotes:

1. See p. 40, footnote supra. Here metaphysics and epistemology meet.

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