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Chapter 5
Invalidity and Irrationalism
Good and Evil, Truth and Error, Pollution and Penalty
The Wisdom of Truth and the Wiles of Waywardness
From what has gone before, it seems now a good time to focus and concentrate on a couple of concepts, and in particular those of irrationalism and invalidity.
The naturalistic model is irrational at the outset, since it declines and refuses in the minds of its creators to follow reason to the uttermost. This it does by executing truth, not by implementing it but by debarring it, whether by philosophical declaration or by necessary implication.
All models which merely erect what is called truth, without ground, or even contrary to it as with naturalism, are in the same position; for if the former kind, the naturalistic, is wilful, this latter type, being man-confined in mere insistence, is confused as well. You have to get beyond man in order to find truth, since man is in himself neither the truth, being an advent, nor capable of finding it in himself alone, since he is not the absolute, but a dependency. You need reason, rigour and confirmation; you need a model which does not contradict validity and which is willing to follow reason to its end. Where you abort these features on the way, you imagine, as do children; but it does not amount to anything to be called truth.
Putting thought into the realm of truth, be it visionary or other, without ground in reason, is mere imagination; and that is precisely the same situation as that which confronts naturalism, the mere assumption of what in itself cannot have truth, being modelled out of existence for the perspective of the artificer of thought.
In fact, imagination without discipline is no better than repudiation with it. In either case, you lack the necessary ingredients for truth.
However, let us here concentrate on the naturalistic fallacy in this connection. One has looked at this over four volumes already (The gods of naturalism have no go!); but in this present volume, we may now concentrate a little more on these features, in our present context of the incomparability and indomitability of Jesus Christ, the only Lord and Saviour for man, for any man, woman or child on the planet, and indeed, for any anywhere (Colossians 1:19ff.).
Thus the refusal of reason in the model of naturalism, in that relativity absolutely prevents truth absolutely, and even in STATING that the case is one of total relativity there is immediate self-contradiction: this is one crucial part of irrationalism. It is the father of naturalism.
Shutting the eyes in perfect symmetry, is one crucial part of blindness. It need not be; but it is there when you shut them. So with naturalism: it is blind. It need not be, if reason were in fact followed to its outcome, instead of murdered in the model; but it is short-circuited by its presuppositions.
The refusal of reason, whether by distinct act of will or the implications of its action, is then irrational, and in the heart of irrationalism, just as the sting-ray's awful dart was in the heart of Steve Irwin. If the thing is repugnant, let us face it. What lacks just parameters by whatever duress, desire or depiction is mere yapping when it sets itself outside reason's findings.
It is likewise invalid; for where truth is excluded, whatever the motive, invalidity is automatic, like the result of pulling the trigger on a gun aimed accurately at your head, and relevant to explosive impact thereon ... or through!
The grounds of the model are non-existent, the devices of Immanuel Kant (that other and delusive Immanuel) being self-destructive (cf. SMR Ch. 5 and Predestination and Freewill Section 4), as are ALL efforts to distance causality from truth; for you need it, that very thing, to account for your exclusion. Imagine trying to say WHY you cannot know the ultimate truth, and making causality a mere human projection. In that case, your derivation situation actuallly ASSUMES what you preclude, the operation of causality. CAUSING causality is obviously USING it; and the more you try to avoid it, the more you implicate it.
In other words, as soon as you DERIVE your model from sources and causes, whatever might be their character, you imply the PRIOR validity of the very causative power you seek to resist. It is useless to try to distance or delete available truth by relying on reason to do the job for you; for in using it, you assume its validity. If it were not valid, your 'proof' would not be extant any more! It would rely on the nugatory, the denied. Causality is a pre-condition of any reasoning; and an inexorable line to God (SMR Ch. 1).
No efforts to disguise desire to distance absolute truth can ever work; for they pre-suppose that very truth both in process and in the model of the result, in order to achieve the presentation of the model *1.
Invalidity is the status, irrationality is the dynamic of naturalism. This, and indeed all philosophies that use such methods, be they religious or other, cannot stand because they fall by self-contradiction. Antilogy is their name, antinomy is their result.
Biblical Christian Theism, by ultimate and extreme contrast, excludes reason from nothing, contradicts its created force nowhere, indulges in no irrationalism, nor is it rationalistic; for what it uses, it does not worship, but pursues with scientific rigour and just consistency to its outcome*2, as in SMR and TMR Chs. 1, 5, 6, 7. There it rests in resultant in the Bible, as shown in detail.
Here is the coherent cohesion of the divine creation vindicated; for reason is what man uses, even to speak *3, and in God's image, he uses it to find the truth, which then confirms itself as gold does, when you find it by pursuing certain evidence to achieve that result.
God thus validates reason's integrity when it is not truncated by irrationalism or denied by antilogy, as likewise His creation of integrity in man, and correlation of his powers with Himself; for in finding the Bible, as reason requires, man may find its substantial remedy for both himself and his racial predicament *4. There He finds a self-revealing absolute truth, which does not depend on man's composing powers, or interpretive capacities; for it is given, to be taken or left, and to be tested in any way whatsoever.
It is in that sense, and to that extent, a heuristic religion, before faith comes. It is that religion which not only tolerates, survives and acknowledges scientific method, but insists on its use, on testing and comparing, on considering and watching, on uniformity of results with causes, the most when God as a cause of things, makes results as He states, in detail, and in perspective.
This is not at all to indulge in that rather shallow concept of God as first cause. That tends to imply the system ready for action, and then add one God, move slightly, and ponder what happens: a recipe in which God participates and man is the author. In fact, God's existence in not in our realm of causation, where patience and schema are conditions; for if He were, this would be beyond Him, originated on its own without sufficient cause, a magical maestro of environment, set up with all the grounds for God, but without Him, a lapse from aetiology, a drowned rat of irrationalism.
God instead has His own UNLIMITED mode of existence, which nothing can or could condition, without becoming God, and if a meagre one, a mere irrational irrelevance. Causality as we know it is thus a mode within creation, one of the numerous criteria of NOT being absolute, which it is our lot as creatures in a created world, to experience. He invents our mode of world, its mode of causality, and the time-space criteria, the mental-ideation facilitators, the spirit-survey opportunities in one inter-related but wholly distinct panorama of function. To be sure, He is the logical basis of our existence, the reason; but to be so, He does not have the limitations of our creation-bounded causal system. One of the results of His intelligent power IS that system.
Grounds, reasons and cause in its essence, what is the basis and dynamic of result, these are always present. It is just that their limitations within our system are not CONDITIONS within God, since He has no limits. They are EXPRESSIONS, not limits, of His power. Our causality is merely the impact of His grounds and originating power, unlimited but nonetheless actualising for that, but rather the more so. As the Ground, Governor, Exemplar and King of our causality, He works the origination of the temporal from the eternal, so that what is within systems and dependencies, can have a species and measure of independence, at its height: one called liberty. Liberty ? yes, but not autonomy, since law itself is a limit, and the consequences of its breach where liberty dwells, this is ... another!
The reason why, in entire consistency with these things, our causality CANNOT be removed without first assuming it, is simple. It is part of the creation, one of the under-pinnings and conditions of it, and an entry point for His power to institute such modalities as we enjoy. To be sure, many find them excessively limiting, desiring to be God; but they are too late for that, since they began in time, and His is eternity.
If it were not so, then He would have to 'arise' and this would simply make the necessity to go beyond the word 'God' as used, to the actual God, who would then have the title not in vain. The necessary source is not distanced by devices; His rational necessity is not to be removed by alien and contra-perspective assumptions, brought in as if for a holiday from where they belong.
This is merely one more verification of the truth, that it is incapable of being excluded, and the more you try, the more it judges you!
Many among men, perhaps a minority as far as the most general concept of 'God' is concerned, love to seek to exclude the way to God, and God Himself, as if man could become self-derivative (but he was not there to do it, before he was, and so depends of necessity on what is not man in order to arrive), or his correlated functionalities, including the finding of testable truth were in some way a derivative of non-thought, non-system, non-understanding, non-ideation and nonentity. It is rather too much for nonentity itself, since nothing is the source by definition of something very precisely and at all times: NOTHING! It is rather too much to seek, in similar vein, to have critical analysis of matter with its servitude, to become a product of its determinate and limited ways, for a frog might as well become a queen.
It is rather too much to seek, indeed, to have the spiritual powers of man to defy or acknowledge God, and to work for or against Him, to arrive from the desultory differentiae of material dynamics. There is no inter-face, no ground for causation; and involvement in details merely confirms what rationality insists upon from the outset. If you WANT something in scientific method, you MUST seek where its image, its imaginary correlatives, its causal sequences are manifest, in ideation, in test and in verification: NOT where their entire lack is the very ground of the enquiry!
The synthesis of the systems of mind, matter and spirit in man, it is rather more even than that. It is not a mere set of correlative co-respondents. It is purposively operative, imaginatively integral, functionally transcendent over all parts.
It is person: a unitary overviewing, oversight in analytical review phase, where rationality and intimation, imagination and intuition, thrust and parry of thought relative to the other domains and indeed to his own! is a function of one operative. It is not a system which works. It is systems which are USED. What works the systems in entire over-sight of the functionalities they permit through being available to the officer in charge, man himself, this is person, agency, and indeed, an agency of great originative powers.
These however, as noted above, do not because they cannot extend to his own origination. He loves however in essence and in aspiration to ignore this fact. He lusts as did Eve, to become god, more god and most god, a god-getter! What he is and where he came from is the last thing the flag of modern man desires, its international flag-bearers staring with dazed gaze into the future, as if the past were irrelevant. Man is derivative of what is sufficient for him and all else. In his desperation, he loves to treat truth as unobtainable, while discoursing on the absolute fact that it is truly unobtainable with all the relish of a spoiled spirit, like a child in a tantrum, insisting that it is so even when he at the same time insists that it is not so. This is the disease of autonomy, of spurious gods in furious haste laying the universe to waste - as far as able!
While that ultimate racism, human racism, loves to ignore it, its pathology becomes daily more evident*5 and threatens - most justly, man's very existence on this earth. He even tries to exist, calling it survival, while he ditches the means, truth. He even deplores his position, his predicament, while he continues to require it by his spiritual follies and their physical and mental outcomes. It is no coincidence that literal millions visit psychiatrists with various degrees of neurosis, psychosis, depression, bipolarity, schizophrenia, with divided minds and hearts and compressed spirits, the walking wounded of the other war, that of the spirit which is fundamental to the destiny of man.
What is, then, the substantial remedy ? This is God's other action. He made man and man marred himself. What then ? Man's self-marring is rather like Saul falling on his sword. It needs action ... In some 'model', it might have been found absent, so defiling and damaging it to the point of failure. In truth, there is no failure, ever. It is here and has been presented, indeed to use Paul's term, PLACARDED to man over millenia! It is stylised in many forms, it is simple in basic mode, it is applied in numerous presentations, it is ancient in its predictions, modern in its fulfilments, powerful in its transmutations, wrought not to make OTHER beings, but restored beings. Its power is manifest, its truth is indomitable, its presentation by the Prince of life, incomparable, His lectern the Cross, and His demonstration, the incarnation.
Man, atop the physical creation, because in God's image, capable of communication and response personally with Him, is testimony of one creative phase: the institution of the universe with capacity to reach understanding of it, in the presence of God. Salvation is that other great creative phase, accomplished in one respect, similarly to the first, by the word of command of God (cf. John 1:1-4, 3:1-9, II Corinthians 4:6, 5:17ff., Romans 3:23ff., Hebrews 9-10). That is, it is finished in its availability, but not yet in its application; for history has more to come and more to be found (cf. Revelation 6:9-11).
In this phase of salvation, erected like a citadel, a refuge, plain as a rock, the word of God Himself personal, does not just make man, for that is but step one. The second step is more marvellous yet, as befits such a Creator: He becomes man in format, even from the first via the womb, and then as incarnate, both displays God in human form, manifesting His greatness and His power, love and loving-kindness, and pays for the wilful accident of man.
This also was at the outset, for man's history like his nature is deep: reaching for autonomy, to parley with God not as a creature, in worship, but as an equal in lordliness or even disparagement, man became what he is. He has not ceased the seizure, but it moves like a wind on the sails of time in the ship of erratic humanity.
This, his pathological condition, requires remedy no less than man required creation in order to have his moral, spiritual, intellectual and effectual specifications in the first place (cf. SMR Ch. 2, TMR Chs. 1, 5, 6, 7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7).
Its results are an open display continually among the nations, and lead to irremediable conflict, diversity of diversions all but inconceivable in their intensity, their passion and their folly. Like a spiritual form for schizophrenia, it divides the race, no more able to be one, with periodic endeavours to force it to some ideational folly or political pollution, in vain, amid the destruct ion of what makes man himself. It is a SIW, and like many others of that kind, fatal, whether so intended or not.
Thus the eternal Word of God, God Himself in status, is sent for man as man (Isaiah 48:16, John 8:58, Psalm 40, Luke 1:35). Ruin is the price of sin, and He pays it; death is the price and He has paid it (Colossians 1:19-22, Hebrews 2:14-18, 6:18-20), completely and for ever (Hebrews 9:12,23-28, 10:10-14). God is vindicated in this remedial provision, our sin with cover and correction available, His abhorrence of it displayed to the uttermost, reason validated, reality verified, while an abstractly possible vacancy is gloriously filled, and the ultimate test meets not failure, but a presence equipped with ultimatum, where God exposed to the uttermost, secures salvation's ground with glory (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 2).
This is the second major part of the remedy: its declaration in the Bible is the first, together with its verification per se; and its performance the second with its effectuality complete (Galatians 3).
The first showed what would be done; the second does it.
There is, however, a third relevant feature of this validation both of reason and of remedy. It is this. It must be accepted. It must be applied. The greatest of discoveries, unapplied, is knowledgeable; but useless in outcome.
Only then is its power felt, its nature experienced and its point effected. It is not as in an anti-biotic, THERE and in place, as already injected. It is as with an anti-biotic, however, ready for injection. The arm does not arrive automatically, nor may it be so induced, as might arms of millions for AIDS types of injections, when their condition is realised.
The potential is the same; the willingness is very different!
Yet, as with an anti-biotic, so this supra-biotic requires administration; and it may be refused (Matthew 13:15, John 3:19).
The whole point of suffering is sin: whether direct the suffering be, in consequence of particular sin, or indirect in racial affliction impacting on and straying individuals, or even in certain cases, on exemplary ones (and Job*6 is an excellent example of the latter!).
The whole gamut of PENAL human suffering in this second great act of God, is swallowed up in the Cross of the Lord, Jesus Christ (cf. Isaiah 53:1,6). Hence to rationality and validity we now add remedy. Its very form is divine, as truth is. Its power and place was necessary for validity, since the God who needs nothing, allowing depravity of His creation and not acting is merely a contradiction in terms as we have seen when examining this proposition (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4, SMR Ch. 1, Barbs ... 6 -7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7).
In ignoring, despising in wallowing ruin, the truth itself, man acts as Judas and Pilate, as Caiaphas and Annas, as the Jewish multitude did in demanding the release of a murderer, rather than that of Christ (Luke 23:13ff.). The sin is similar, if less physical today: though the results are often physical as in the carnage of history, repeatedly*7 with Islam, with the Romanist Inquisition, with Communism and all the hatred of race, place and face that afflicts the earth, because man refuses to find his meaning, his nature and his place and his Lord and God, where He may be found (cf. Isaiah 55).
The payment by Christ was huge (Hebrews 5:7, Luke 22:42, Psalm 22) and adequate (I John 2:2), sufficient to cover all, but elegantly impacting on those who believe (Isaiah 53:3-6, Romans 8:32), who believe in Him as He is, as in the Bible. He did not fail to write His thesis, and since He IS the truth, on which all depends, who alone knows all and embraces reality as His own creation in the dependent realm; and it has no competitors in testability, reliability under test and provisions in terms of verifiable promise. The race has one runner. He wins by default.
What then ? The payment of man, in ignoring mercy where he does this, is judgment according to truth. The rejection of truth (as if this could be done by a true statement in a model by rationally execrable antilogy, but it is not for us!) merely makes the results seem inexplicable to those concerned. .
There is nothing inexplicable about it. Take one who rejects the truth and so Christ. You merely make it so to yourself by rejecting truth at the outset, thus becoming a deluded incumbent of 'the lie' (I John 2:21ff., II Thessalonians 2:11). Where truth is excluded, understanding cannot operate, and speech is superfluous, and a fortiori is this so directed speech or instructive speech concerning models and truth! They go by default. Then the result becomes increasingly obvious: it is so now as it was for Israel of old.
Isaiah 8:-9 is impactive here, showing the gloom of delusion in the very face of the light.
"And when they say to you,
'Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,'
should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living?
"To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word,
it is because there is no light in them.
They will pass through it hard pressed and hungry;
and it shall happen, when they are hungry,
that they will be enraged and curse their king and their God, and look upward.
"Then they will look to the earth, and see trouble and darkness,
gloom of anguish; and they will be driven into darkness.
"Nevertheless the gloom will not be upon her who is distressed,
As when at first He lightly esteemed
The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
And afterward more heavily oppressed her,
By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan,
In Galilee of the Gentiles.
"The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined."
Now however the condition operative on a far broader scale than in that of Israel of that ancient day of such foreboding, so richly fulfilled!
In fact, the gloom of anguish escalating for those suffering, and in the minds of many in disquietude and fear as the tide of evil mounts, in things material as in much immaterial but material to destiny: this is becoming massively world-wide. The Gentile is experiencing to the full, the module once apt for Israel; for has it not been exposed to the GOSPEL for two millenia, just as Israel had the promise of Abraham constantly expanded in Moses and the prophets as the testimony covered the world, for two millenia or so, of its own!
The horrible results of horrid despising of the glorious intimations of God's word, indifference, rebellion, acrid assault: these are now independently wrought by the Gentiles. Indeed, in one point they even surpass the errors of ancient Israel as foretold in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32. They have Israel's example as well, to ponder! Yet for all that, they proceed to receive the same dissolution which came to Israel, one from which she is only now beginning to recover, amidst world turmoil as this world acts to emulate the follies of ancient Israel, in intolerant misdeeds, not least of which are its treatment of Israel itself, as if it cannot STAND the example it ignores!
Thus the tornadoes which now multiply themselves, the lashings of storms and the toll of the foretold plethora of devastations, these are not merely physical; they are images of things to come, and display units of the spiritual turmoil, from which they arise like boils on a mistreated skin.
All of this, with such developments, accords with two things.
Firstly, it is rationally to be expected when truth is denied and remedy is excluded on the part of those who in point, meaning, purpose and responsibility are astray from their Source and Sovereign. Secondly, it is as foretold (cf. SMR Ch. 8, Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
It is not without cause! As Proverbs states it, The curse without cause does not come (Proverbs 26:1).
Nor is it without result: judgment. It is this which, with the evangelical impact of the Gospel, is traced by Christ so clearly in John 16:7-11, with 14:30-31.
On the other hand, Biblical Christian theism not only follows reason without extraneous inhibition, or initial self-contradiction as befits idols and is found in them, not least in naturalism; it proceeds with a willing thrust to find, in terms of scientific method carefully applied to the RESULTS of its researches, the Bible, and the testimony of Jesus Christ, a whole feast of functions.
There is the objective fact of the goal of search accomplished with incomparable functionality. It answers all things*8. There is the impactive marvel of the comprehensiveness of the coverage: it meets all things. There is the systematic thrust of the plan exposed in the Bible, and its multi-testable interstices: it is an elegant thing of cogitative aesthetics as well as functional power and demonstrable result. Instead of a double deficiency, therefore, we have here and here alone, a treble sufficiency. Both rationality and validity are attested beyond all measure; and then, in the validity stakes, there is an amplitude, elegance and time-related continuity of millenial testimony, which surpasses all that could be imagined, as well as throwing the light of explication of what is before us.
NOTES
The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7,
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 3,
Barbs 6 -7.
See:
Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 5 at Demonstration, SMR.
First, let us remind ourselves of the nature of language.
The we shall rehearse a little the nature of language in terms of its causal interface.
1
This is taken from SMR pp. 252I ff..
A n E x c u r s i o n
It may be that some will wish an excursion into more detail in this area, and when pp. 316G ff. and 348 ff. have been studied, then what follows may be considered most readily.
In fact, the affair of language is even more ludicrous than this, when it is considered as the recipient of bombardment. Just as the letters of language are no mere objects, but symbols that operate in a world of syntax, unit meaning and formal constraints of their own, so these in turn relate to other worlds of their own. They operate indeed in a universe of meanings which in turn relate to ideas, ideology, ideational syntheses and refinements of inter-relationships, purposes, sectional program, logical developmental structure, inter-active phases and phrases, figures, features, feeling, finesse, aesthetics, formal and operational functions, integrative hierarchy of control, thrust and focus, with cumulative consistency-constraints and sensitivity at all levels to contamination.
This sensitivity item applies at the level of each system and sub-system, and then retro-actively to the ultimate functionality of the whole, which in this way comes to be faced with sectional change of tone, or feeling, or analytical co-ordination or consistency and so on. The destructive efficiency of a medical virus at the control level, is merely one illustration of processive barbarism in the midst of multiply disciplined thought, semantics, signification and significance at all levels.
We have taken the occasion to consider language more generally, but to do so in order the more to conceive the type of situation which it evokes. We do however have before us the result of constructive action - that is, we are operational human beings. We consider simply the function; and with it, the finesse and sensitive webbing of inter-relations behind this. Of this we are avid, astounded learners. Nor should we be so astounded: for as functioning persons, we ourselves are constantly aware of the high wonder of our performance characteristics in thought, feeling, ideas, perspectives, aesthetics, morals, spirituality, mentality and intelligent understanding.
The synthetic, finally unitary, directable, yet prepared concourse of correlated components is like a dream of marvels, that would leave the U.S. national highway system, complete with earth-works and signals, signs and bridges, a silly little joke by comparison. This is provided for one person: but we ? the race... we communicate and may co-operate, each in various groups, so that multiple communication-highway systems have intermittent, intelligible arrangements with each other, formalisable by contract, but equally susceptible to nuance and nicety.
If of all such a relatively simple national highway system, we expose the structure, the form, the features, the functions, the pathways, the signs, their time-tabling and the bridges: all this, to random bombardment - do we still expect it to function after trillions of such uncouth alterations ? Any bureaucrat would be likely wisely to regard a Director who expected success from such operations either as possessed of a rare form of madness, or as an enemy agent - though possibly on drugs, drunk, or seeking stress leave by deceit.
Operationally, this is the principle of the cytological situation. Logic, symbolism, signification, semantics, rules, channels, consistency, direction, control, co-ordination, performance on this basis, integration of performance components, timing and sequence, myriadfold specialties compounded to progressively eminent and functionally exalted conclusions are in place, just as in our example. It is admittedly a poor one. The case surpasses such simplicity as the highway system and all the cars in their goings, to an extreme degree. That however only serves to increase the impact of the facts. (Cf. pp. 332F ff..) The principles in all such cases have been considered therefore; and they apply causatively as has been and is in detail shown (esp. Chs. 3, 5 infra), pervasively.
Linguistically:
At the language area, then, the question arises: How is there to be preserved this myriad-formed concourse of symbolic, syntactical, analysable, semantic, synthetic signals and operational performance... in something creatively effective... ? We need not be concerned in this, at the merely physical level. It is a problem which has been solved for us in the wonder of DNA, and its associates, its editorial controls and the symbolic magnificence that performs such wonders in a kind-preserving work... and indeed, language in its various formulations, installations and evocations, is part of the preservation, in genes as in Genesis, of Kinds.
If however we do not beg this delicious question: How can any language (possessed of the facilities and functions the possessor shows) be fostered, or even preserved, by bombardment ? - the answer is simple. It cannot. Cascades of changes successively fail to conform to, but rather attack, through lack of both understanding and intelligence, the massive constraints operative and required. Invasion is like that: it may serve this or that, here or there; but its nature is unakin to the system it assaults, on which it makes its incursions, to which it comes with small or no regard for the requirements of order, efficiency and operability.
It is indeed a case comparable to that of bulls joining football teams, neither knowing focal constraints, nor caring for the rules or for that matter, the performance - grossly or in finesse - of the game. The game could not go on. The program would be ruined.
In general, and of necessity, massive non-conformity is no answer to the logical requirement of continual, sensitive characterisable, synthetic, symbolic and operational conformity. You can of course attribute an opposite as the cause of what it denies, and indeed of what it attacks - but not with reason; and that after all, is currently our field...
If a language and all the operational features it entails (whether in the conscious arena or not) cannot continue with random incursions into all or any of its system, again let us emphasise, how much less could it thus be built!
What then of man ? The individual is equipped with spirit (q.v. esp. pp. 348 ff. infra), and this has a conscious, cognitive language of its own - with personal powers of creative thought. That is one wonder. That we should also have our pre-prepared, readily utilisable material equipment with its operating system and language, beneath our vital, personal activity, allowing ready and inter-active movement with our physical and vital environment; that our inbuilt cell-language is preserved from unsystematic dissolution (for a fascinating time of function), both by the unit or cell and by inter-connected billions of units in synthesis, and this through magnificent defence and management procedures, written into our physical coding at the cell level: this is simply one characteristic, but here brilliant phase of what creation is always all about.
Adequate power beyond the system, produces in the system, what is beyond the certifiable power of the system to produce. It happens in hats, short-stories, buildings and surgery: what is needed is able to be received as necessary input; but the recipient system is not able to produce it. (Cf. pp. 316G ff..)
Whatever the level of such input, that is the attestation of creation. However, since that is the issue here, it cannot be used unless invoked by name: creationism. If not, then one notes that the power even to preserve language is not effective without its first being formed. You cannot preserve a fortune before you make it. Making it is the point. You must create it first. Each symbolic, and in the cells, directive level and feature must be granted the privilege of existence. For each, the causation must be adequate. As to the features and foci, the functions and systems, the scope and significances, their more extended review here merely extends the requirements of and for that adequacy. The machinations of magic may have their moments, but in the end, there is the answer of reality.
The fact that you could not preserve language by bombardment thereon, is simply an added woe to the something-from-nothing irrationality, which as we see continually in this work (see Chs. 3, 5, 10 and Index - nothing, causality, irrationality) is a mere contradiction in terms. Such a proposition first destroys the validity of the thought from which it comes; and what is destroyed is by its very nature, inoperative. That can do nothing which is itself dead; nor attack anything which first itself fails; nor logically deny anything, which first denies itself.
The supervening, consciously conceptualised, purpose-error structure intimate to our spirits with all their involvements, is then simply one more marvel - greater in freedom and significance than the first - where we are permitted personal involvement. This, with its language conception and control, including the power to break and make rules, issues one more requisition for its causative source. Language in its cognitive and non-cognitive forms issues its own eloquent call for the multiply causative systems maker, and for the causative ground of its integrated character.
Creation is as always emphatically and obtrusively attested in a cumulative and comprehensive way. Its verification never varies. Other paths are built on air; or perhaps in this case more aptly, on the bombardment of guns on what isn't there. Little children in toyland may try to "create" in this way, but they have to mature. Imagination is a wonderful thing; but in the end, the job has to be done.
Indeed, it had to be done. It is time to realise this: As to our world - the pantomime is past; the phantasmagoria of philosophy does not create it. Such flurries are themselves merely a creation of the mind of man, and that ? modelled by the mind and power of God Almighty, it can misuse its capabilities, abort its procedures and forget its Maker.
2
Quite simply, then, this world of symbol specification, code implementation, correlation intimation, this concourse of symbol-signification, signification-action, the precise and the concise, the minute and the powerful, this world of words has to be taken in its own terms.
When anything by symbol is specified, it is necessary for this to differ from nothing, in the first case, and from anything confused, in the second, for specification-execution performance. To do this, the symbol needs definability. In conscious speech, for example, this is a desideratum helped by dictionaries, which themselves symbolise the need for the correlation of comprehensibility and code.
When an item, subject-oriented or object-oriented as the case may be, is specified by that brilliant complex of symbolism called language, then there needs to be something other not only than nothing, but than chaos, not only in the symbolism, but in the referent; and not only that, but in the latter AS SPECIFIED; and not only that, indeed, but in it as specified RELATIVE to itself, not merely in the mind of the speaker.
Without that, your speech fails. It becomes gabble, squawking, trifle-talk.
This is neither the gamut nor the purpose of speech. It is not its function; it is not what it arrives at, its genius, its utility. That substitutes dysfunction for function.
We are however considering function.
Thus the item in view needs to have describability, item-specifiability; and for that, it needs to have an innate nature. It must have a uniformity or conformity or informed matrix such that it differs from other specifiable things. It must in short have character and shed from this characteristics which being observable, when specified, must be true.
Otherwise, it is not specifiable by speech per se. These characteristics need, for speech to work, to be reliable. If it be a will-o'-the-wisp type fantasy object, then either there is uniformity or conformity to pattern in this, making it only apparently so, or it is not specifiable. Characteristics however are a matter of the nature of the object and its environment, however vast, whether material, immaterial, mental, spiritual or God Himself.
They are not magical.
They have a cause.
Remove the cause and you remove the character. We have separately reminded ourselves of the impossibility rationally of removing causality's validity while still being able to speak or present a position, above (cf. also Causes); for you always assume it in trying to reprove it by reason: so that you need causality in order to have character, and the moment you speak, you assume it for your definitions, which rely on it in their referents.
Speech without causality is a contradiction in terms, if it is functional speech, carrying specifications which signify even the action of reality.
Hence you cannot even communicate without causation. Your tongue lies idle, and your mouth speaks but dust. Positions are invalidated before they are stated; and the arguer who seeks to contrive such folly for his foundation, disappears from logical view.
The confines of reason are here as well; but they do not confine when you find its result, and in God the Creator find an amplitude such as a river might find in the ocean of its outlet at length. It is just that your travel in this mode is confining as truth confines from error. To be sure it is limiting, but so then is breath. It is just that if you forbear to use the means provided, you fail to have the life intended; and seeking all, you gain only loss, absolute and final in the end.
This does not mean that reason is the only way to find God, nor does it imply that man in sin by reason will find Him. It is to state that reason unfettered by model contortions and actually followed in its integrity has only one place to end. It is inevitable and compressing.
The actual efforts of man to misuse reason to avoid its implementation (cf. Romans 1:17ff.), are an entirely different topic. In this site, there has been a systematic presentation to delete the standing and validity of such approaches, in general and in particular (cf. the example of Paul as seen in II Corinthians 10:5 and as in Acts, in Jewish synogogues).
This does not mean that reason will be followed, any more than a divorced man or woman, hating his former spouse, will by actual demonstration of the virtues of the other, repent of misjudgment him or her. Emotion and will play enormous roles in mankind; and these are often set by the misalignment of spirit which becomes as resolute as Hamas in its delusion, and as keen on devastation within as they without.
On the other hand, it does not mean that emotional warping or mental contorting is a merely flagrant distortion, making reason useless. The rejection by will of objective reality and method is itself a guilt; and guilt here or elsewhere often is used by God to convict the soul, change the spirit and lead on to faith.
Further, the glory of God requires that reality be attested amidst falsification. The way of error is popular, and its pretension is more important to expose than any wickedness in politics or business. Funny business is best exposed to light, like drains in the murk. It is perilous not only to health, but to destiny for man. Every means is needed, every scripturally defined one indeed (cf. I Peter 3:15).
See also :
The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7,
See:
Dig Deeper, Higher Soar, Divine Glory Delights the More ... Chs. 6, 4, SMR pp. 840ff., for example.
See SMR pp. 92-95 and this link.
See Aviary of Idolatry, Highway to Hell,
More Marvels Ch. 4, Dig ... Ch. 6,
Downfall from Defamation ... Ch. 2, *6,
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds 14,
The Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 1,
See:
Chapter 3 above;
SMR Chs. 3, 5, 10, TMR Chs. 1 and 6-7;
The Bright Light and the Uncomprehending Darkness Ch. 7,
History, Review and Overview Ch. 4, Ch. 5,
Christ's Ineffable Peace... Ch. 5,
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 4,
The Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 2,
Overflight in Christ, Ch. 2, esp. *1,
Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth Ch. 3,
It Bubbles ... Ch. 9,
News 19,
Barbs 6 - 7.