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Contents
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Chapter 3
The Immutability of the Glorious God
To Focus on the Thrust to Matters Impending
as the Immutable God deals with
Perverse Mutations that
Erupt by Will
for the Thrill
This follows from the two preceding Chapters.
This worn-out world has worn out philosophies which in witless ways, wander about, tired and perishing. Redundant regurgitation, they foul the very ground that receives them.
Like the way of the old contest between the ideas of Parmenides and Heracleitus, they roll about, grounded, confounded, but as ideas, they merely wrestle with air.
There is in fixity, as Parmenides saw, but it is not the whole; there is variation, which mesmerised Heracleitus, but it is not the whole. Principles, types of procedures, kinds, human psyches of standard logical technique and alignment, animal ectypes (cf. Little Things, Ch. 6, End-note 1), continue to the point that the contrary concept is mere anti-empirical absurdity, as shown in the text above (cf. SMR pp. 307ff., and see What is Life ?). Yet beyond this is imagination, human by gift and divine by nature, that perquisite of liberty itself (cf. Little Things Ch. 5, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Licence for Liberty), and for man that derivative from God, that divine essential given to the common clay of man, in the presence of spirit, man's key.
Imagination ? Derivative, first, it then becomes that deliverance from God from the clammy clutch of endless containment in reactionary responses of provided equipment, via the human spirit in the first place, and through God Himself, who IS spirit, on whom all creation depends for power, program and personality (q.v. Index).
This provides for what in fact man is, as shown by what he does. How does he so often proceed, this race apt for reality, but seldom prizing it ? Restless sometimes almost as if inebriated, towering in searches for truth, often without light, despondent, exultant, seeking, hoping, finding, carousing in philosophy, drunk without God, killing, reeling, stealing truth and polluting it, funding fiascos of thought with hard-earned monies, flinging restraint aside in idiocies of innovation, finding in rational profundity, grand new elements in the design which is anything but drunk, sobering into new powers, misusing them in new dunce-cap self-elevations, it continues itself. Apart from pollution, it is distressingly unchanged.
Man imagines and it is good; he imagines himself great, and it is bad; for he is not great without God, but merely grates in the barrel of reality, like dregs of friction. Then he wonders how he will survive, so he spews violence, or imbibes fear, until in the end, he becomes unlivable, unworkable, a residue in flight from reason itself, as in so many of the modern irrationalisms: and it is so because he is in flight from God, to which reason pushes him; and which he resists.
Spirit can be misused, but it is the essence of the nature of man (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9). Because it is currently profoundly misused, with false prophets two a penny, man can now hardly bear man, killing by compulsion, and seeking antidote for his own design (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 5), as if to become in autonomy God Himself, while in fact merely killing his pattern and destroying his own peace.
By spirit, however, unbound to the material aspect of the universe (cf. Let God be God! Ch. 2), man can surpass all merely social boundaries, the philosophic past and the historical 'necessities' that many deviously imagine (cf. SMR pp. 925ff.); and he is constantly doing so to the chagrin of reductionist political philosophies and dictators alike, that is, of the arrant and erratic thinkers and the CEO's of their wares. Such ideological and political dictators are never really happy with man's non-conformity, wanting to play God; but in the end, they find before God that they are mere clay, their spirits set for judgment by reality, not by dream but by truth.
This is because, acting as subversives against spirit, they mock their own spirit, by which alone they do it, by no means programmatic in their propaganda acts and purposes pushes, putsches and passions; and they mock God who gave them their spirits, the very source of imagination, and at the same time, of truth, alone making it even possible, so that ANY philosophy could be so much as stated.
As to God, at the same time, He is the end, terminus and judge, not only of all philosophies, but of any thought; for as the truth, the eternal source that makes nothing of nothing and something of creation, it is He Himself who is the criterion, so that anything can be known or meaningfully asserted as truth. After all, if objective and absolute truth is not there, no one can find it, the noose of all reactionary irrationalism.
By imagination, man can stray, or stumble on the very threshold of light, and in his imagination, he can rush headlong from it, with imaginary fears and reckless maledictions.
Thus, within the fixed structure shown so aptly in man, that of mind, matter and spirit (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10, and pp. 384ff.), there is a vast scope for thought, purpose and action,, good in accord with God the examiner and the giver of the power to do it; as likewise of wrong, in collision with God, in collapse before reality. Following such ways, now like a great aeroplane trembling on the brink of a cliff, at the end of an overrun runway, man awaits what is coming, and does not get out, but continues with rueful passion and trembling folly to play about with the controls. Anything but God, man is nevertheless tremendously inclined in many of his leaders and rulers, philosophers and pundits, to try to play that part with all the aptitude of a baby elephant trying to give milk to a sparrow.
Imagining that liberty is autonomy, or in passion, seeking for this obvious faux pas as the very delight of destiny, many vomit their wilfulness onto the path of life, sometimes thereby creating slime for others; and many fall on it. They do not respect gender, morals or truth (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 5); nor loyalty to the love of God (cf. News 100). Estranged with feckless substitutes, they contradict all of these things, sometimes these, sometimes those, as did the Nazis (Hitler q.v.), the Communists (q.v.). So now does al Qaeda with a demonstrably man-made religion (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff., 50 -65), the new crisis of violence, seeking to man-handle faith, as if terror would as quickly turn faith or its failure, into legs, as did the recent election in Spain (2004, March). Such litters of the loveless indulgence of such persecutory agencies, in strictest parallel to Rome in the Inquisition (q.v.), come as the deluded wave their malignant wands, and leave loitering remains for a time on the earth, till a new passion grips the sons of the demented, the deranged, the debased or the delinquent among men.
But God does not change, nor does judgment move. His imagination sparkles in the endless variety within the kind, keeping their composure in the type - just as there was abundance in the multiplicity of original kinds, the massive myriads of which are noted in Genesis and detailed well in Stephen Jay Gould's 'Wonderful Life'. In this, that author likewise observes how some 90% of these original designs are now gone: for they are a fascinating attestation of the breadth of that uncontradicted Second Law of Thermodynamics, being as much as an exercise in the obvious as in scientific discipline.
Having been instituted, the designs, confined to type but endued with variability within it, both features empirically attested without limit or end, they tend to wear away. It is in their institution, that a perfect prodigy of imagination is visible which in any other realm would not occasion even a moment's thought at anything other than the pure magnificence of the engineering-conceptual wonders exhibited (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming ... Chs. 4 - 5). A single, simple sandal speaks more to some, if found on the beach, that the greatest of programmatic, symbolically directed, vitally constructed, conceptually integrated design the world has ever seen. Such is the woe of prejudice when its spreads its jaundiced disease to the human imagination, and cripples it, even paralysing some.
Nor can the testimony of type and design be circumvented, for chance is mere nomenclature for the workings of a system uninvaded by new purpose (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs. 9 and 13); and the INITIAL system*1 to produce design needs the ingredients first of all, of imagination, then of engineering and then of composure of concepts.
Needs do not create abilities; and possibilities do not create performance; nor does the book write its own literary DNA; nor does cogitation in absentia provide thought, nor thoughtlessness provide its own antidote. You do not create what is needed and what shows its calibre by TALKING about what specifically lacks it, and adding a word or two. This is the most extraordinarily UN-scientific way of proceeding that it would be possible to imagine. Supposedly, in this method, one looks first for what most aptly covers the case, in relationship, with interface apt to the point, with power indicated, whatever the thrust of actuality will lead you to formulate in order to be sufficient in your thought, not ludicrous in its absence. The interface of inward thrust of the contrived, of output in symbolic logic, is creation by mind, not magic by unfocussed power, blind and of witless proportions.
As for the idiotic concept that new designs come out of the womb of nothing at all to the point, perhaps caressing the past and contriving to emulate it, information theory teaches to the contrary: Information is what DECREASES when unpampered by care, not increases. It needs its INGRESS, and adequate means for the same, and then, without care, surrounded by unfriendly forces, it gradually makes its exit. It is not just
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a
matter of the ingress, the arrival of the relevant jumps in
design, |
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as even GOULD*2
acknowledged, as so far from being present in the testimony |
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it is that their production is symbolically bound, and symbols
are meaningless |
Directions that enslave matter to perform the tasks of mind, as in a CD-writer, are just that*3; and matter has no manner of ability to think, contrive and create the symbols, the situations and the sense which is to be first created, then interpreted. To be sure, it can be SHOWN the way, by being created into forms to convey the thought; but the modes of thought are not to be found by the most patient search, amongst any of its ingredients. To list them there is dishonest, nothing more, to scientific method.
The sheer spectacle of such unscientific ruminations, where sufficient interfaces lack, where means lack, and where co-ordinates for co-operation are neither present nor relevant to the system which is material, becomes the nightmare of man in the twenty first century, oblivious of reason, a denizen of irrationality, yet paradoxically and with eminent self-contradiction, seeking by reason to establish himself beyond it. Let us not however be either amused or bemused by this spectacle of intellectual nakedness, as mind is prostituted to straying imagination. Paradoxical ? this, it may be when children burn down the home of their father; but it is mere rebellion accompanied by what would appear a measure of juvenile insanity.
The builder is patient; but He also is God.
Nothing increases God, nor does anything decrease. He is without limit logically from the first; for if limit, then some other lord; but if God, no Lord but Himself, the final ground of all things. Thus there is no new state to imagine for Him, as though to enshrine Him in some imaginary system; there is none superior, since with Him as ultimate, eternal cause, always existent and never having to come from nowhere: knowledge has no limit, so that He has it all. Nor is there time with God, since patience is not required or any other limit, and all things being known, nothing changes, for there is nothing new, not known.
What a privilege to have such a Father without whom thought descends to useless alogisms, as we have constantly seen on this site. In particular, we even find many even using reason for its own invalidation, to remove its validity. This is a continual self-contradiction of those who ignore the logical necessities impossible to evade, for mind, matter and spirit, each with its function and potency, in man synthesised without subordination of spirit, though with provision for voluntary submissions of such a kind. With garlands not received, but even GIVEN to nothing or to nothing sufficient, according to the mood, they alight from their airplanes at the Hawaii of vacation from reason, and are intoxicated. Thus is liberty become its own monument, and licence its own ruin.
Liberty in man is as monumental as the fallen Twin Towers in New York; yet its falling is not by rogue destroyers, but by man's own consent!
God, then, from all time, and before He made time (in itself, it would be a harassment to power, and a limit to the Lord - a contradiction in terms), IS: I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:14). What is there revealed, has never been concealed (cf. Romans 1:17ff.).
Unconstricted, unconstrained, uninvadable, existing as all else subsists, He knows all, exists as He wishes to be, not susceptible to growth in being or in ideas, for that is a potentiating imposition from without, from outside, from a system which would be His maker, hence merely a contradiction in logical terms. There is no-one and nothing to impose on God, or to provide for Him. If there were, at once a system requiring its maker is in view. 'God' + all the rest then itself requires a sufficient cause, so that this is merely an irrational way-station for removal upon analysis. The eternal Being, NOT in someone else's system, but the causal basis of all being, is logically necessary; and what contradicts the implications is not necessarily blind, but certainly wilful. Logic however never flourishes on subordination to will. Reality is not disclosed to tantrums.
The causal ground of all system, logic and its relevant applications, He is what He is and any endeavour to get beyond Him always comes up against the fact that you've just giving a new name for God, without changing anything but the clarity of your own thought.
Accordingly, God does not face options: HE makes them. He does not face change - that is a plurality that He made for the pluralities, part of the composition for what is composed. He does not change, for then time would be beyond Him; but He made time, our time with its limits co-ordinate to subsistence.
Thoughts do not astonish Him - for He does not have to wait for them to come to fruition, or for events to come to their own fruition. Their fruitage is known to Him, who made the bases; and our freedoms are mere liberties within bounds - and as far as sin demolishes them, within bonds.
The Lord knows what all are, and freedom, His invention holds no mysteries for Him: He, its Inventor for creation, does not require its usage to comprehend its way; but understands its operation; and as to those who operate it, having made them from His own infinite understanding, He is aware of all their antics, time neither limit nor control for Him.
All knowledge is His, and He alone makes truth possible, without which no reasoning is valid, and no proposition of philosophy could even be meaningful, when presented moreover. Fancy telling us the truth about what is not there, or the truth when it is absent! How inane can philosophy become in the turmoils of rebellions against the truth! It is, moreover, precisely as the word of God depicts it in I Corinthians 1. By knowledge man has not known God (I Cor. 1:21). Here in Corinthians as empirically in life, we find that so far from not covering metaphysics or epistemology before the superior assessments of man, God rebukes man's devious delusive misuses of the same, marking their products as mere negatives in assessment, vain profusions of the ridiculous.
By rebellion man in his earthy ways and flighty vanities alike, has missed Him. By mercy He may however be found, and this involves coming back from a vacation from logic, and a holiday from holiness, to those same shores from which the enquiring barque of licence left, before (I Corinthians 1:24).
In this is to be seen much of the whole history of our race, very like that of one person, of a kind:
It is given much, it aborts much, it resorts to much, it rebels much, it suffers much, it is told much, it returns in part, it is redeemed in part, it riots the more when it is not redeemed, and the rebellious seek to haunt, like the Nazi, like the Communist, like the Inquisition, like al Qaeda: what remains.
It is however God who remains (Zechariah 9:7), with immutability not logically disputable, intense in His perfection, author of all that changes, and able for all, as subjectible by none. Change ? "I will change their glory into shame!" (Hosea 4:7), He declares with that inveterate imperviousness to alteration which marks both His word and His Person (cf. Hebrews 13:8, Matthew 4:4, 5:17-20). His word does not change BECAUSE He does not change, nor needs He any revision.
Indeed, and in accord with this, for man to be adhering to His unchanging word is a mark of great divine esteem (Matthew 5:19-20). Those given to change are not to be regaled in the ranks of the blessed (Proverbs 24:21), and those whose gods are variable oddments, coming popping up from the ground of human thought, these are merely tiresome supplanters of total futility, or vanity as the Bible deems them (Deuteronomy 32:17). Of these newly outfitted fiascos, God does not speak well!
Hence He also, the Christ, has an UNCHANGING PRIESTHOOD, since He who does not change, having revealed Himself, remains the same today, forever, yes and from yesterday (Hebrews 7:24). No change ? No there is NO VARIATION, and indeed not even a SHADOW of turning in Him with whom we have to do (James 1:17), so that His word endures for ever (I Peter 1:24-25). Unlike the word of those who aspire to the fire, and are burnt with their own wild incompetence without the Maker whom they abuse, whether in pseudo-science or masquerading philosophy, which changes like day and night, exposed by man and God alike.
Let us however return to base. God does not grow in understanding that He might prefer to be different, or have dissatisfaction with the present for Himself (relative to a desired future): for as to creation, it is His product, not His master, and the offers of what is not, to what is, is merely the disposition of creation, as if a book wanted to become part of the author, as if it were not his creation. How would He grow, for whom growth is a product in a system which He has made! Only if it were not He; yet as is so common in man's rebellious thought, the word is immersed in the creation, only to be brought up dripping with its modes and manners, a painter immersed in his paints, coming up red. Yet He is no more available for the bloody throng (as once He was by gracious sacrificial advent - Isaiah 52:13-53:12); and the exercise of fangs, philosophic or other, on God, to change Him, no more than attests the unchanged unruliness of the rebellious heart of man.
God does not develop - that hideous anthropomorphism - for what donated nature, the concept built on the growth patterns of men, is this which releases its conferred potential! And who is it then who CONFERRED it! It is mere contradiction in terms.
When will man cease making thoughts of God, whose eternity and divine nature even reason attests (Romans 1:17ff.), while He Himself in His inveterate and ineradicable word, exhibits and declares His inward nature. He reveals, for none can stampede into Him, or inveigle, as if to detach from Him His innermost thoughts. Before all time, to form it, and in it, to inform it, He declares I AM (Psalm 90, John 8:48, Exodus 3:14).
Reason, in attesting Him, in no way limits His freedom, but merely exhibits His power (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7). Footsteps of an elephant do not make the enquiring observer comparable with that creature! Yet as to His freedom, seeing something as 'better' for Himself, more desirable, would merely show the prior limit to His knowledge, which does not and cannot exist, and seeks to submerge Him, Himself, in the time which He made, a mere aspect of creation.
That is MODEL TWITCHING and MODEL SWITCHING.
This world, it changes, but says the word of God, HE is the same (Psalm 102, Hebrews 1). Reason demands it, that contrivance without which our arguments are nil in validity, and null in force; revelation demands it, that word which nothing changes from the God who declares, of Himself and His word alike, NO CHANGE HERE.
We too, being human in our own KIND, as all history attests, are the same by any evidence that is to be found, in our functions*4. In nature as a race, we do not grow; we merely know more when we have time to put it all together, before some new devastation from philosophy or false religion and matter in vainglorious combination, strikes or strips the race. Man grumbles at the catastrophes which afflict a globe in the grip of religious lunacy (Hosea 9:7), striking at God as if some boxer, intoxicated with revenge, were smashing into a boxing ball, in destructive passion. It is a marvel of patience that God sustains it at all (Malachi 3:6 attests this, and Psalm 50, at the end, implies it).
Judgment is often delayed, for God is very patient; but it comes (cf. The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet Ch. 4). The challenges, charges, open doors and reproofs, they are all part of the action of God, appealing and congealing, working and seeking as you see in great profusion in Jeremiah for instance, as likewise in the poignant realism of II Chronicles 36. God tries, He tests and He so knows before He puts these probes into history, yet He even, and in great detail, in advance portrays the results (as most notably in Isaiah 44-45 concerning Cyrus, concerning the Jewish rejection of Christ, concerning the piercing in reprobation of all mercy and truth, of the Messiah, concerning the date of His death, the Gospel to follow His resurrection, the resurrection itself, the Gentile reception, the latter day falling away and so on - cf. SMR Ch. 9 with Answers to Questions Ch. 5 and Highway of Holiness Ch. 4).
He further DECLARES the thing in principle (Isaiah 46:10), that He knows the end from the beginning, just as empirically it is prodigiously verified without any comparison from any source in all time. Further, He declares that this is the nature of the comparison: NOTHING is comparable, and only rebellion ignores the fact and the testimony. It was then, and it is now.
Theorising that ignores the facts is mere air. Into time comes the author's word, that author who having been involved before time in His own supernal way, has the answer before the problem arising, thus providing reference to the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8), in word after it, as before it by a thousand years in detail (Psalm*5 2, 16, 22, 40, 102, Isaiah 2, 4, 12, 22, 32, 40, 42, 49, 50-55 and so on*6) .
Known to the unchanging God, such things can be forecast ONLY because He does not change. Were He other, His word would not stand, but fall under new management, the product of change. Changeless He, His word is the same. Were He other, His grace would be variable, and man, confronted with something less than love without measure, would long ago have been subject to termination. That of course is the force inherent in Malachi 3:6 (cf. II Peter 3:9).
Were He subject to change, then in a system of which He is only part, or a personality which is not mature, or is subject to learning and hence within a milieu like fish-water for fish, there would be no truth, His person subordinated to actuality. Hence no philosophy would be even relevant, nor any cynicism, a variety of philosophy (cf. SMR Ch. 3).
Accordingly, for as many reasons as there are aspects of reality, immutable He, is the basis and the deliverance for man; and only irrationality with rebellion is ready to pout at His bounty.
Aspects of foreknowledge and freedom are reviewed in some depth in Predestination and Freewill. There it is shown that it is ONLY because there is a clear mode of being different in person, for a human being, that freedom consists, only because God the Creator can actually re-create by restoration (Colossians 3:10) of the vital image of God without being contained by man's sin or littleness. It is only because HE can do this without being limited by man, while not violating man, in His image, that freedom can be.
It is seen that it is only because God is there that this is possible, and only because of the Gospel of grace that it is practical; so that the liberty for liberality of God consists with the responsibility of man, and the knowledge of God with the certainties for man. In just the same way, is prophecy not only POSSIBLE, but it derives from that inherent power which is correlative to the goodness of God, His very Being and His disposition of events without quality loss or principial contradiction. For man, He cares to speak; in His own quality and standards He speaks: His unchanging word for man results.
He does not deny His own works, or words, as if dependent on them for immaturity, and hence a mere demiurge; but He does judge them. His changelessness alone gives meaning to liberty, since only then is the liberty to reality, not a system of unknowable kind. You are not free, if it is a mere matter of to merge or surge in some mutable demi-urge. It is only because God does not change that truth is possible, for a sub-system denizen makes system king, and this has no personality, being a programmatic and deposited entity of rules and confines, requiring God. It is not then that God is not there, but is sought where He is not, like seeking bananas in a bank, or water in a furnace.
Immutable, all-comprending, unamendable, God is Himself, and not to be composed for man's imagination.
What makes prophecy possible is thus what makes freedom real; and both are to be experienced empirically. But what of those dissonant and contrary in this ? The truth with which some like to protest a lack of liberty, in principle is merely the assurance that powers control the mind which are not truth, but mere constraint; so that if such a theory were right, it must then be wrong. As it is uttered, it destroys itself.
Liberty, in fact, is part of the very meaning of man, as is the truth inseparable from it, alone available in the absolute and unchanging God; and no logical coherence is possible without it. Further, it is only because God is changeless, His word truth, His nature impartative of truth and liberty, that man can find liberty: he needs One who can go beyond his own discernment, yet do so in integrity, who can apprise him of truth and yet not let it be filtered by folly so that it could not be known, can interpret man beyond man's own capacity, yet without anything arbitrary or contrary to Himself, the ultimate reality and truth, whose word constitutes truth, and whose deeds do not deny Himself.
Man needs one who seeks truth for him and him for truth, and yet does not divest him of liberty, but rather by these very grandeurs, invests him with it, and gives it certainty. SEEK the Lord while He may be found, says Isaiah 55, let the wicked forsake his way. You have to FORSAKE ALL to follow Christ (Luke 14:27ff.), and those who wish to detach Him from the unchanging truth, which He IS (John 8:58, 14:6, 12:48-50), are like those who wish the better to see by having an operation to detach the retina!
As then, to the divine creation and divine word, the divine prophecy and the divine judgment according to truth: Nothing else can produce this result, namely human liberty and the written word of prediction never failing; for nothing else has these powers in what for us who believe, is simply the truth, but for others, the model, the one which in fact works in coherence and coverage, in this alone. Further, since the book of the Lord containing the Gospel is the sole attestation of these things in all history and in all empirical investigation, it is the goodness and the love of God which is anterior at all times to the facts of life.
As to the judgment of God, then, in view of His love and His patience, it is often delayed, but devastating can it be, when man in his inveterate rebellion going beyond all limits, it comes. The Lamentations of Jeremiah is a book of testimony enough of that! When then the judgment comes, after all the divine protestations, this too is a change of state, not a changes of fate, a just assessment by the unchanging God, now made manifest. You will never change Him (Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8, Psalm 102), accordingly; but HE will change you.
Each man or woman is changed into the form of man as he should and could be (in two stages, by regeneration and resurrection - Titus 3:5-8, I Corinthians 15), or else into the residue of rebellion. More than die for sin, rise in death breach, demonstrate on earth His power and compassion, manifest Himself in word and deed, in book and Person, God does not do; for He does not invade the liberties he created. Yet He does ensure that in His sovereign hand, they are justly depicted and truth is the mode of judgment. If in the end, man prefers darkness, it is God who knows past the mind of man, in the very brilliant light of truth. There are no mistakes (II Timothy 2:19 cf. Romans 8:28ff.).
In such grandeur, God could and does predict results long before the whole apparatus of history works to the point at issue:
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as with Babylon in Isaiah 14, |
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with Cyrus in Isaiah 44-45, |
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the judgment on Canaan in Genesis 15, |
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and the
person and work of Christ, the Messiah in Isaiah and Daniel, in the Psalms, |
He also predicted
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the return of Israel |
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in triumph to its land |
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after so long a time, |
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and its victorious wars, |
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with continuing pain until the change of heart comes (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 10). |
He changes the assertive heart into one of humble acuity, the foolish rusher into one of peace (cf. Isaiah 28:1-4,16). It is as in II Corinthians 3:18, following the initial change to the converted sinner, that transmutation of personality back to its unsmashed original (Colossians 3:10), there is the deep imbuing with humility and the clean fear of the Lord (as in Isaiah 66:2, Psalm 51). This points to the perfection to come, in the moulding in the contemporary work on the Christian, where neither pride nor pouting, false dreams or foolish hopes compete with reality, but where in unfused magnificence and incalculable exuberance, life continues unchanging in nature, with that loveliness where change is folly and wisdom is unalterable, man looking upon the very face of God. Even now, the waters of vitality and the flow of exuberance reminds one of the power of His freshness and the freshness of His power (cf. Isaiah 40:27-31).
It is thus in Christ, the unchanging and living Word (Hebrews 13:8) of the unchanging God (Psalm 102), always the same in the midst of wonders of wisdom and grandeurs of grace, He whose word to man therefore does not change, whose witness does not change, whose Gospel does not change (Galatians 1:6-9), the very person of Jesus Christ, God in the flesh that one moves as a Christian; or else, defying the Maker, it is for man far otherwise.
Then, alas, man's movement is in the end as that of one whose maleficent preference for darkness in the very face of attested light, is averse to the glorious brilliance of divine light (John 3:19). It is to that deadly change from hope to hopelessness, to the caress of light to its blight, so well attested in the way Christ was so marred more than any man, when available for torture in the flesh (Isaiah 52:13ff), that divine judgment comes. Unchanged in its attitude to darkness, it does not pretend. The divine judgment is according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.), than which nothing is more fearful for those who live the lie (I John 2:22).
Sad, indeed tragic is the waywardness of man, who collides with the truth by misused might, that function of the glorious gift of spirit, and the prodigy which is this earth.
Yet, for all this, triumph is the keynote, truth is the orchestra, and God and His Son are power and reality as they bring many saints, many children, to the music of life. This rings with majesty, yet as a zephyr He blesses the weary and uplifts the challenged. In this highly structured universe, filled with laws of subtlety and devices of splendour, the mathematics of the maestro which reason but follows, with rebukes and reproaches, hope and approaches, amidst the inscribed words of creation, that DNA which scrolls into shape from the very word of God, much of the physical format which life so well attests (cf. Psalm 29:3-11, Genesis 3:20-21, 3:26-28), there move the repentant and redeemed children of the Father, brothers of the Lord.
In their pilgrimage of purpose, they proceed till they come to the last station on its line. Each one so comes, and the spirit returns to God who made it; and this is the way until the end of the line comes likewise the end to the age of the Church, that purveyor of the blessed Gospel of Christ, at the Resurrection platform.
At this, in the train of truth, its Driver the Lord Himself, they change more fully to resemble Him (II Peter 3:18), and alighting at the end (II Corinthians 5:1ff.), they see God (Revelation 22:4).
This universe, in its time (Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:35) comes and it goes; but God remains. He does not pass, for He is no passenger but Maker of the track, where truth lies, and His passengers, this whole feature and focus of history, having served in the great day, come from the place of His abiding power, kept in it by His mercy (I Peter 1:5).Now they come to the full manifestation of that heaven for particular persons, those whom He knows (Ephesians 1:4, John 14:1ff., II Timothy 2:19, John 10:27-28), and to His vast glory of virtue and truth.
Thus, Lord of the resurrection, in love He brings every individual who has believed and loved Jesus Christ, to His enduring home (John 14:1ff.). These come with everlasting joy upon their heads (Isaiah 51:11), not in fantasy of spirit subjecting Him to change, as if to make a god, in frustration and impotence, but realising His changeless beauty which does not age, the light of the world, that a man might not walk in darkness. His salvation does not change (Isaiah 51:6,8), His righteousness is not abolished, and those who love Him, find in the peace of immutable serenity, the wonder of serving Him whom they see face to face (Revelation 22), a face in Christ once disfigured by sin, by now in glory, transfigured in love, patience and purity, victory, triumph and blessing.
NOTE
*1 On this, see SMR pp. 252Eff., an extract provided below.
46 EXTENSION N - THE QUALITY OF INTELLIGENCE: CODES, CONCEPTS AND CHAOS.
i) The Quality of Intelligence
Intelligence must not be confused with wisdom, or even rationality when it comes to man's ascertaining and verifying his own source, his own life. Even on the visible side, life in fact - as is the case with many complex, semi-automated, man-made designs - though wonderfully responsive to demands, is active on a rigorous, conceptual, logical and linguistic foundation.
Many thinkers - wilfully without such a base when they direct their normally rational thoughts to this area, in their own voided thought world - idly fantasise life, like little children looking at the work of their parents, yet without understanding. Not in innocence, however, does such ignorance persist to adulthood: casuistry replacing causality, and magic, the work of mind. (Cf. pp. 88, 112-113, 117-169 - esp. pp. 138-141, 202-203, 208-214; 621; Ch. 1 supra; Ch. 3 infra.) It is still logically insufferable to estrange the necessary and sufficient criteria of intelligence from the arena for the play of the word; and vice versa. (Cf. pp. 113-116, 141, 210-211, 251-252G, this work.)
ii) Codes, Concepts and Chaos
As to various sequences, credited with various powers: if in the given case, intelligence confers them, that is well. It is not the case in point in this: that we do not SEE that happen. We act on what is already credited to our life accounts; we simply proceed.
If, then, intelligence seizing upon an ordered system with conceptual implications, with inherent conceptualisable laws, formulable codes, explicable in terms of concepts, wishes to address conceptualised considerations to it, from the case in point, it differs in this. We see it happen, are spectators.
Thus if one is writing, then one could talk of certain sequences of print dots which make up certain letters, and certain sequences of letters which make up certain words, and certain sequences of words which make up certain sentences, and certain sentences which make up certain paragraphs, and certain paragraphs which make up certain monographs, and start all over again on certain sequences of dots... and so on, which in the end make up certain words which make up the bibliography.
Again, as readers, we search it for the underlying defining intelligence; as writers there are underlying items which are managed to the point for our purpose by intelligence, using concepts which are researchable in Ph.D. theses or by Central Intelligence codal specialists, to show what they are; and then these are verified or otherwise and so on. Mind is searching for its prototype, or its parallel, as the case may be; its co-ordinative correlatives in matter. In the process, it often errs, which matter abhors, since it merely does - and error is irrelevant to it.
All this is well, but it is wholly beside the point if it or anything even remotely like it were surveyed in intellectual oblivion, and effort were made to 'explain' or ignore with simplistic reductionism the fact that in the actual case, product required thought and understanding and correlated concepts in ways which are not in the evidenced domain of matter; though matter can modally be manipulated to interpret chatter with the form intelligence chooses to give. In general, the confusion of such things and the facile failure to allow for the purpose-product, analysis-action, method-means distinctions are not really very heartening as an exercise in analysis.
It is the nature of apt means to be manipulable to ends; but they neither create the ends nor imply any, per se; only as instruments... Of what ? of intelligence which moves in the domain of thought where error and imagination alike can work outside the reference point of matter... which, in any case, is known only (or assumed) because of mind. This is what we habitually do; and to fail to note these distinctions in looking at other products is a failure which, though perhaps 'self-forgetful', is scarcely dutifully inclined to the whole field of the known. (Cf. p. 80 supra.)
iii) Products
Products ? For a moment, let us pursue that. Areas, then, of functionality, conceptualisability, integral and synthetic codal or procedural sequences in form or act, with symbolic outcomes of their results: this would seem near the norm for the term. To dispense with the term 'product', while observing the ingredients of what it is... is odd categorisation. If these human lives be not products, the world does not know any; for here is the acme of invention. The world however very well knows plenty of them; it has a certain... reluctance to talk about these in the terms the ingredients provide for definition. It knows precisely what it is to have products slowly slip from their high estate by the second law (hence law) of thermodynamics and to have to re-create them as a consequence. It does not know, find or observe non-products with the insignia of products, or how to provide formal logic by the movements of particles; only through them, from mind employing it, or having deployed it, expressing it in symbols.
To revert to the 'whole field of the known', to which we came before 'products'... if all the things which don't (I speak as a scientist, not a dreamer) happen, did happen, then the world would not be what it is. If the collocation of particles induced thought, it would be of much interest: both in terms of the nature of things and of our observations. However, it is the other way around. Thought can produce collocations of particles, and it is per thought that mind does so, using codes very often to symbolise what is in mind.
Thoughtless references to what contains systematic, articulable, symbolic, integrated, correlated and activated codes and their means of implementation, as if it were simply a matter of sequences, suggest blindness.
What is not seen is that neither do such codes arrive in practice (we speak of observation, that old hall-mark of science), nor does the machinery for its operation; nor as Professor Murray Eden of MIT points out, do we perceive anything linguistic capable even of enduring in time when subjected to chance, which (somehow or other) is currently a code. Code presupposes concept. Concept implies mind, and explains system. ( Cf. pp. 137-138, 140-145, 252B supra; 285-308 infra.)
In Chapter 3, the underlying principles of these delusive confusions are exposed as a case of 'Emperor's clothes', and are 'dismantled' with due rigour. Thus, just as we have found blindness to divine building involves cataracts for matters of definition, so in Ch. 3 we see further requisites to cater to this analgesic blindness: namely the dispersal of the undergirding principles of rationality that concern series, subjects and affirmation. This is shown to be the case, not merely generically, as often expressed in this work, but calamitously in this specialised field in particular.
It may be well to shroud this in a slightly earlier noted at SMR pp. 252a, as below.
43 EXTENSION M: ON WITNESS TO WONDER
Professor Søren Løvtrup of the University of Umea, Sweden, gives some useful summary, relative to his own review of the evidence. Thus he declares in his Darwinism:theRefutation of a Myth (p. 352): "I have already shown... that there are now considerable numbers of empirical facts which do not fit the theory." Professor Nilsson, somewhat earlier, demonstrated much the same: Gould, Hoyle, Grassé, Denton, Thompson Schützenberger, and Eden (q.v.) likewise sharply decry its agèd elements.
Again, p. 351, Løvtrup relays the design point that "neither in Nature nor under experimental conditions have any substantial effects ever been obtained through systematic accumulation of micromutations." Even man-the-manipulator seems significantly harassed in the mere task of engineering from pre-made vital parts! That experienced author is constrained to conclude that (p. 352) "only one possibility remains: the Darwinian theory of natural selection, whether or not coupled with Mendelism, is false." These statements may with advantage be compared with pp. 145-162, 82-88, 109-110 supra, and in particular with Popper's acknowledgement (p. 145; cf. pp. 150 supra, 199-232, 311-312 infra).
Indeed Cambridge physicist, Professor Fred Hoyle (q.v. and cf. *46), observing an ''intelligent universe'', inveighs against theories not reckoning with the inability of ''natural processes'' to ''generate'' the vast ''information content of even the simplest living systems'' ... which the data show; and sometimes uses a form of academic mockery to match the fantasy he deplores in gradualism, and impersonalism. (The Intelligent Universe is in fact a title of his.)
Hoyle, like many before him, stresses the total integrative, mutually meaningful, separately ludicrous character of many "all or nothing" components in highly specialised living equipment, without which items, effectiveness as well as functionality itself, alike are missing. One does of course need to point out that however and whatever the way-stations might be, the end is the same; in the beginning what was sufficient was present or in the end what is the result simply... will not be obtained.
In fact, systems - not least living ones - are operative integrally, and man has yet to make more fascinatingly brilliant ones than he carries with him from birth. They so operate in unity, unison, character: whether in symbolic logic in cell language, correlation of parts in mechanical system, formation of parts in cell construction sites, information cohesion in language style, member-units and controlling operational concepts, execution of administrative control direction, co-operation of parts so gained, storage of information, duplication of information, re-creation of control-executive agents and agencies, co-ordination of specialised cell types, as of organic structure specialities, or adaptation of the whole to coherent total meaning or unitary performance in varying test situations.
Further the semantics as well as the structure of the language are both operational realities necessary as precursors to effective "speech", and so action.
It is then that the meanings which sound semantics, inbuilt into the cell, transmitted, can reveal themselves. It is then that this meaning can be set forth, live and act; it is then it may demonstrate no hidden plan or project, but rather one which is visible in its performance criteria. It is not suppositious or surreptitious, but in action - as one brilliantly dazzling whole. Layer on layer, cell components, molecular sub-units, atomic sub-units, fragmentary sub-units of these; and going upwards, organic components; organic correlations; overseeing control in nervous systems; overseeing thought using the same; and on and on it arises till man in his own conscious cognitive capacity, and arbitrary potential, albeit one that is self-disciplinary in scope, may be seen. Then spirit surveys the operations of Spirit, and with the glorious freedom given, may do so with asinine oblivion or with contemplative enthralment at the constructive powers shown: powers so great, that in the case of man, even wilful misconstruction is made a meaningful outcome, code-named rebellion.
In another perspective, nearly half a century ago, Professor R.B. Goldschmidt, who served as a Professor at the University of California (cited by Gish) pursued his theme with similar anguish at folly. He noted and listed various high technical marvels of life ARRIVING UNHERALDED AND ABRUPTLY, and posed well the absurdity of gradualism in yet a third perspective. In this he is not unlike Professor Gould of Harvard today; for Professor Goldschmidt cries (it. added):
The facts of greatest general importance are the following. When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (*48) (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear (*49) suddenly and without any apparent transitions ... American Scientist, 40:97 (1952).
Indeed, in a growing swathe of scientists now, with famous examples, he was weary of pretence, exposing those: ''who claim that the facts found on the subspecific level must apply also to the higher categories''. He pursued the point in a way many have yet to heed:
Incessant repetition of this unproved claim, glossing lightly over the difficulties, and the assumption of an arrogant attitude towards those who are not so easily swayed by fashions in science, are considered to afford scientific proof of the doctrine. It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation. It is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutations ... American Scientist, 40:94 (1952) (*50).
And as to the selector, man, he ... is intelligent (*46).
Whether therefore it be in the mathematical- technical texture of life, its logical-linguistic expressions, or in its abrupt appearance, the former in the least of it, the last in its dispensations: or rather in the stultifying refusal of the laboratory to co-operate in any rational test, either biological or in computing schematisation, as noted at the Wistar Symposium ... what do we find? It is this: a highly justified near delirium of dismay is besetting leaders in thought who face data and not God.
Let us however return to Professor Løvtrup. Continuing in lament, he asks of the theory, "so why has it not been abandoned?" ... noting they -'follow Darwin's example - they refuse to accept falsifying evidence." This topic in our present work is extensively reviewed.
Assuredly evolutionism, the dream-time of much of the Western world - in whatever organic model - has a lavish share of what myths require. (Thus its construction is not buttressed by any observed operational data and it is contrary to all known operational laws for its support.) As roué and habitué of thousands of Classrooms, mythicised and mystified, it has served its generation with the required... delusion (II Thessalonians 2:10).
Cf. SMR pp. 315Aff.
Cf. pp. 316Dff..
Cf. SMR pp. 1026ff..
Cf. SMR pp. 204ff..
Cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25.