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There is an interesting exposure in the article by Henry Morris in Creation, Oct.-Nov. 2001. That date is one which already seems quite a long way away, so fast is this earth moving to its conclusion for this Age, the return of Christ and the assizes to come. These would make the Nuremberg War Crimes Commission look small and insignificant by comparison, for coming are those of Divine Commission. Meanwhile, the reference to evolutionary 'play' may cast a light on some darkness!

A game! says one of the evolutionary pundits, is what they are playing. Surely you may be right, he says to the creationist, but yours is religion, ours is science. We must see how far we can push our theories: how far can we go in terms of physics and chemistry without invoking the supernatural!

Naturalistic causes are to be found, as if this is science! Science in fact in its own method should not be so concerned with the source of the impact, as its results, its verificatory aspects and its relationship to all other knowledge, firstly of an empirical character, and then of structural, logical validity.

Actually, if one looks back to the "cult of the forbidden", the entire failure in rational perspective inherent in such an approach is exhibited. EXCLUSION ZONES appear, like some sort of philosophic apartheid, and surely this is one quite as gross as any other, as profitless and perilous.

It will prove advantageous first to consider what has been presented before, then to address this gammy 'game approach' further.
 
 

1) SMR pp. 149-151. For preceding data for this excerpt in the SMR text, click here, and for the antecedents, read from the outset of Ch. 2.
 
 

Failure in prediction, retrodiction, disagreement on what happened, lack of verification and anti-verification - these are the death sentence on the theory. If it can be changed, let it be. In any case, it has fallen. This raises the last essential point in method: for we are simply taking a fascinating example of the violation of scientific method by a theory oddly referred to by some (but not, as we see, by all) of its followers as scientific.

As to method, you would be expected to start with what you observe, and then try to explain it. Here, we start with what is hoped (*31) to be seen, with theories about what may have happened, and then look for facts. These refuse to arrive in the very area of observation of what is happening - the crux of any science. Darwin himself acknowledged that there simply was not the verification and confirmation of his theory in the evidence (i. e. for transmutation); and, better oriented than many Darwinists, he also admitted that to try to derive the 'eye' by his methods bore the marks of being ridiculous.

Work in micro-biology as shown by Denton, in his Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, merely underlines the complexity, the control, the programming (*32), the language employed in the cells and the billions of co-ordinated elements, complete with editorial correction facilities for reproduction of genes. For one cell it is so; let alone millions of them in some super-integrated series of such cells. RELEVANT OBSERVATION WAS NOT THE START OF THE THEORY. METHOD HAS HERE ALSO BEEN VIOLATED. FAILURE TO FIND SUCH OBSERVATION MERELY EXPOSES THE METHOD MORE.

What we are observing merely makes the unscientific also uproarious.

Making it simple

We see therefore, putting it slightly differently:

Organic evolution fails:

i) to be based on relevant observation (cf. pp. 161, 234, 251-252G infra).

ii) in having no citable law available for normal scientific testing.

iii) in not being verified in terms of prediction from a scientific law.

iv) to provide sound agreement, even in retrodiction.

v) to agree with current observation of what does happen, even in broadest terms.

vi) as contrary in tenor to known scientific law, such as entropy, equally to common sense.

vii) to have the discipline of science, either in past imaginings or present happenings.

viii) more monumentally the more microbiology reveals the human body as the design paragon.

ix) in confronting the intricate patterns of a profound language as a contribution from chaos (the language of life, which is one, in cells) ... Professor Murray Eden relates here.

x) in having two systems (genetic and behavioural-surviving and so on), not systematically related, yet expected to construct what is here (Schützenberger).
 

Creation Prevails.

CREATION, LIKE EVOLUTION, IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC STATEMENT. AS WITH EVOLUTION, IT IS NOT BASED ON OBSERVATION OF EVENTS HAPPENING. BROADER TREATMENT OF BOTH IS THUS NEEDED. HOWEVER, UNLIKE THE CASE WITH EVOLUTION, WHEN THIS IS DONE, CREATION DOES MEET ALL THE LOGICAL CRITERIA (cf. p. 161 infra).

i) It does not claim that the process is continuing. In this, it is confirmed by all available means. That is verification.

ii) It is susceptible to disproof ( in its Biblical formulation) by simply showing that the process from which creatures have come in fact is continuing. In this, it is verified, for this is not seen.
iii) It does provide logical ground for the language of life.

iv) It avoids the non-systematic relationship of two systems as a ground.

v) Its clear cut retrodiction is not met with contradiction,and it could have have been. This too is verification.

vi) It is in precise accord with known scientific law, such as the second law of thermodynamics; and entropy is another formulation of what the Bible SAYS, ( e.g. Isaiah 51:6), and implies ( Romans 8:20-22 ) in that area of formulation!

vii) The nature of mutation verifies it - variation but not transmutation (kinds).

viii) The numerous evolutionary theories (provided to meet even distant facts) by their disagreement, the one with the other, and by their incredible character - creation arriving incognito as in 'quantum' evolution, or the so-called 'hopeful monster' concept - are in a predictable situation. These unsatisfactory theories show what one would expect: multiplication without solution. This is verification of the creation concept, Biblically invariant. That is, it is unchanging because it is Biblically defined; and because what is Biblically defined, does not need to be confined or refined. It stays in the form, function and rightness given. This case simply verifies that. That is what it had to be; that is what it is.

ix) In the Biblical formulation, this situation is also explained psychologically, and indeed spiritually. There it is declared that man is alienated from the life of God and is systematically dimensionally ignorant (Ephesians 4:18-19). Romans 1 even traces the process. This ability to account for the activity of the evolutionary thrust, personally, is also verification.

x) What contains in its ambit most areas, covers them most categorically and elegantly is deemed the desideratum: this is verification at its acme. In general, the more broadly a presentation covers all known facts, explains all relevant data and the more readily it does so, the more it is deemed to confirm itself.

This excursion into scientific theory and its nature, scientific method and its formulation, and current controversy and its analysis is presented to stimulate you into thought. Culture is not a sufficient condition for thought and acute analysis is always in order. It is what can make certain responses more incisive, sharp, clear and arresting. It helps remove confusion. Further, discoveries can the more readily be made when the cult of the forbidden is not followed. Evidence must be pondered and conclusions subjected to the discipline of reality in such a sphere.

The wrong-headed trend to reject culturally, as at one tertiary institution in this State, at which I taught, because it is not convenient, and not because it is wrong, without indeed giving it due rational interaction with those who present it, is in essence a form of cult.
Is not what is culturally dictated in the dereliction of duty towards reason and evidence, a cult ? And in how many universities does one find evidence from Staff or students, of this deplorable cultic phenomenon: creation, or the grand issues of reality are forbidden.

What however is the 'cult of the forbidden' ? It is that cultural negativity, fear or subtlety (depending on motive) whereby certain matters are (ostensibly) ruled in advance of all evidence, 'out of court' - the court of culture. Whether it be deemed to be politics, religion or other field, the result is a mental crimping that too readily becomes downright dishonesty if not, indeed, hypocrisy. Certain things are out of cultural bounds, being inconsistent with desire, ethos, illusion or delusion; irrespective of their truth.

With religion, it may involve the detestable folly of pretending that evidential procedures are irrelevant, and, worse still, that it is illegal to be logical and alert with evidence and reason, lest emotions be roused. This subordinates truth to convenience and not for long may one justifiably expect the continuance of such folly, or of any society where it distinctively rules.

Reality is a dangerous enemy with whom to trifle by such policy and contempt. By this means, irrelevant irrationalities and absurdities - such as is organic evolution in terms of scientific method - may be 'allowed', in that by a mythical oversight, their merely mythical powers are ignored; whereas the more scientifically oriented view of creation is 'excluded' as 'religious'. (Cf. pp. 211-222, 226-234, 330-334 infra.) Christianity with open heart and incisive mind is quite freely available for 'inspection' - and meets any intelligently administered critical test with overwhelming results, that are as unified as they are unique; and it alone systematically meets logical requirements of consistency and rationality (Refer Chapters 1, 3 and 10).

Thus this cult of the forbidden has become an anti-logical discriminatory device, protective of irrationalisms and, in educational circles, often excluding the only logical answer even from consideration!

Irrationalist bifurcation

The irrationalistic bifurcation of the issues into natural and supernatural, at the level of causation, as if the highly distinct and distinctive sources - indirect and direct - were in some way a subject for gamesmanship, not intellectual valour and mental integrity, is typical of our times.

Certainly if God acts, that is very different from the case when man does. However to the point at issue, there IS a common element. It is the domain of the consequence. Whether a wind or a mind does something, indirect natural cause or direct personal one, there IS a cause. There IS a consequence. In our own ordinary lives, and this may readily be seen, as when on a camping expedition, one finds the tent flattened by the wind, or re-erected by muscles in response to the directly purposive intentions of a mind, the function of a person with a will!

If God invents the universe, He is the cause. This, actually, is demonstrably the case, without any question about the rational integrity of the fact (cf. SMR Ch. 1 where it is demonstrated cf. Repent or Perish Chs.  2 and  7). It is necessary, logically indispensable; and the supernatural invents nature so giving it what it takes.

If God then judges the universe, this too is external to it, in the sense that it is not a merely operative condition or criterion of its extant techniques. If God allows the natural system to judge itself, as when man's virtually insane spiritual self-advocacies lead to idolatries of himself, of his culture, his nation, his ideologies or whatever else blows him up in heart and body, in very different senses however: so be it. That is a HUMAN cause allowed by a divine Creator.

It is ALL however cause and effect. On this see also - if you want further exploration, SMR Ch. 5 and Causes. For still more, see Predestination and Freewill Part IV, Barbs, Arrows and Balms  6 and  7, with Repent or Perish Ch. 7.

There are different SORTS of causes to be sure. The personal, the limited, the sacred, the profane, the Almighty, the man, the natural, the supernatural, the fiscal, the physical and so forth: but they have their various introits and executions, powers and channels of operation. They have results.

In fact, then, it should not be a question of a 'game' to see if you can fit in the theory that dragons were the playthings of children in Venus, who had a perverted, elongated or prodigious sense of fun, or that they were the results of processes never verified on earth, rather than this, that in the abundantly verified Bible, the word of God, necessary and solely valid (cf. That Magnificent Rock Chs. 5, 7, SMR Chs. 1, 3, 9, 10, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming ... Ch. 2, Repent or Perish Chs. 2,  7), we find God wanted to make huge creatures. He is capable, they exhibit cogent, cognitive capacity in their reams of codes, instructions and operational felicities, product conditions; and the creation of such things not lying in their operational codes, to make them, but rather a conservation apparatus, one looks for what is adequate, and correlative confirmation of what this is found to be.

This requires no fantasy. It fits all facts. It coheres with the other statements in the book about power and prediction, allied with verification which is at the highest conceivable level (cf. SMR Chs. 8  -  9 and see Bible - prophecy, and prophecy in Indexes). It does not involve irrational odysseys into wonderlands which prohibit evidential causation, pervert natural systems as they reveal themselves to be, or insist on ignoring the evidence that is, in favour of the evidence that is not. Endeavour to limit the cause of the visible to the visible domain is like trying to limit the cause of inspiration to the motion of uninspired atoms, proceeding on their programmatic way, or seeking the reason for mathematical order in chaos, even if such a thing were at all meaningful in the first place!^*1A

The adequate systematiser, comprehensively attested, acted. So be it. If His architectural desires for man, in terms of biological constructions, and for whatever other audience or participants may have had access to the thing, were such; just as his astronomical majesties were such as to evoke admiration and awe (cf. Psalm 8), and His personal decisions and determinations were to make a potentially rational being (though the opting for the irrational is one of the results of man having a spirit, a personality which can wilfully err): if this be so, what of that ? Is it necessary to TRY to be absurd instead of noting the coherence of the concepts, the purity of the perspective and the uniqueness of the total CAUSATIVE system involved, indeed the causative regions!

Is it a game to suppose that the prodigies of system, the wonderlands of admirable designs (cf. SMR p. 211, 113, 252Eff.), the exquisite cohesion of parts, the integral marvels of operational units, from bees to humming birds, from the more amazing than fantasy migration abilities of birds, the will of man, the purpose of mind and its correlation with the proclivities of matter for being treated purposively, and all the other considerations evoked as in Repent or Perish Ch. 7: that these came from an inadequate cause ? Is it the normal proclivity of science to assess the IN-adequate as the INPUT for the result to be assessed! This is not merely bad scientific method, however, indeed its converse: it is rational indolence. Law from chance is not merely disparate; it is contrary. It is not merely inadequate; it is irrelevant.

Is it some kind of an adventure to consider whether matter is the source of what contradicts its slavishness, and transcends its operational characteristics ? The source of its sentence is not sentenced by its structure, having made it, so that it is there.

Is it a game to look at the spirit of man, hating in many cases to be confined, anti-systematic to the uttermost as his 'adventures' in organic evolution, seeking from the definably inadequate the definitives of divergence, and to consider whether it came from nowhere at all ?

A sandal on the beach comes from some purposive mind, equipped with musculature, or better. A man does not come from what is programmatically controlled, systematically restricted to material combinations and ordered to do what it has to do. Man is manifestly NOT in favour of being ordered to do very much at all, in millions of cases, and readily becomes almost pathological about it; and yet, in the heights of irony, he is now transfixed like a pierced fly with the ludicrous nostrum of naturalism!

Does a book write a book ? Does a desire to hear on the part of what is not yet there, make an
ear ? How often do we hear this manifest absurdity, that 'Nature' (capitalised into a prototype idol) saw the need for this or that; or the statement or implication that the lack of something produced its presence^*1 . The beggars do not find it so. Need does not prescribe their feed, even when they CAN visualise it. You need a sufficient cause to PRODUCE!

In this, man is a beggar: in his naturalistic pathology, he imagines that all you need to get things INTO universe format, is nothing at all, or nothing that meets the case at all; and the more ludicrous the omissions, the more palpably pleased he appears to be.

Is it a game to lose^*2A ?

Is it a contest to fail ?

Is ruminative irrationality abundantly confirmed by his ruinous failure to copy, to create by imitation; and this, even with the program before him, and the spirit within him - he is still not sufficient to make what he is! If he were, it would attest the power of the Creator who made man so capable; but this omission, in the power to create spirit, is as far beyond man as is the control of his own spirit, for which he cannot even create rest, far less peace. Pace he creates, and face with which to confront in arduous blasphemy; but not peace! Man continues in impotence because the seat of power is divorced in his life, and discarded wilfully from his mind, by a cultural convention which breaches scientific method, ignores law and dismisses reason, even while using it.

Is it irksome to think then! Is it simply TOO irksome to think of God! And hence of sin! and hence of the need of forgiveness and fortitude, rectitude and righteousness, the love of God and the real discovery, rational in relating to what is indicated: HOW TO KNOW GOD!

As for the barbarous pre-occupations with the superficial matrix that neither produces nor has principles by which to produce: it is a goal missed. There is no score. This is a no-way situation, into which, like teaming 'teen-agers, millions of the mature scurry futile in hope, hapless in drive and misplaced in energy.

Life is simply not like that. Nowhere do you find demonstrable cases of doings which proceed from nowhere at all, for no reason at all. The very concept of the systems in which such things may be postulated, is the source. This is itself a rational, criterion governed thinking and willing, imaging and imagining design, synthetic in power, reflective in disposition, but hapless in itself, for itself, having come from what it does not even acknowledge with such magnificent power, that it is even able to invent such nullities, prefer such confusions. And of course pay. Reality DOES exact in the end. It may forgive, say rather He, who is the Creator; but on His own terms. Imagination neither with man nor God, presents the path to pardon. It is ONLY from the one who is to forgive, that this can come!

It is all governed. The ignorance in the minute is not the absence in the macro-systems which result. (Cf. SMR pp. 420ff..) What cannot be traced, still evinces itself systematically and the evaporation of causality itself, is an irrational excresence, in the first place (cf. Causes, SMR pp. 284ff., 264ff., It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 1, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium16).

The breach of the atom, the manufacture of damaged parts of this and that by high-power collisions and the like is nothing to do with the ULTIMATE. This is merely twiddling the dials. The PRESENCE of the dials, and the presence of their relationship^*2B with the things which can be made to collide, THIS is the point. There is codification and linguistic equivalent, there are orders and there are programs, there is continuity of the creations made, discontinuity in the designs rendered, by no means removed by comparisons such as our own works, each separate, illustrate.

As Dr Denton so well puts it, discontinuity is what we find in the array of creation; it is discrete: continuity is found concerning this, ONLY in the mind of man (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1). Imagination is its host; myth^*2 is its boast, but it has not read the writing on the flag. Indeed, another continual thing is man's revolt both against reason and reality, against his own best results and his Creator, who in so enabling personality has dwarfed all program, though much of it is subordinated to this liberty! (cf. Predestination and Freewill).

Meanwhile, what is required is found to operate with its requisite and apposite powers and procedures, and the ascription from WHATEVER SOURCE,  of evidentially supported concepts of cause, suitably verified, THIS IS SCIENCE. It is NOT imagining that it is otherwise, and inventing invalid concepts minus causation, as the cause, or minus adequate causation as a plausible substitute, in a whirl of self-contradictory mental ague.

In fact, then, what is needed is simple. What is being provided for the mastication of the masses, is not. It heats the system, upsets the nerves, evokes disaster, ministers to the macho, makes machines of men and then ignores the thoughts which being unmechanical, mess up the concepts of the machine by evidencing personal error of a purposive kind, in the process!

Do not machines err ^*3A? Not at all. It is the mind of the maker of such things, which errs. If the maker imagines that he can do something with a machine, and it does not do it, then the machine is exonerated entirely, and the maker implicated. That is BECAUSE machines have no options.

With man, however,  it is far otherwise, the pondering of the will illustrating this as guilt or greatness considers its coming way.

The break-down of the man-made machine is DEFINED to be its failure to follow the directions of its maker. And why ? It is BECAUSE he erred in the construction, or its systematic direction was spoiled by contraries, which comes to very much the same thing, the difference merely being the degree of the inadequacy. IF there were no person, ERROR would be meaningless. Happenings would be what they were, purpose being absent.

In fact, however, error is a large part of science, thinking it, doing it, and trying to eliminate it. Error is systematically caused in man, and is not dismissible as meaningless. It is MOST meaningful, and its overcoming is MOST impressive, occasioning millions and billions of hours of human research in a dynamic, directed, cohesive, causal complex, to make it quit. Man and error, man and fervour, man and mental fever, man and idols, man and the squirming desire to thwart his Maker, to reduce or seduce Him to the level of man, induces much of the pulsing passion of the dark places of history.

The spirit of man (SMR pp. 348ff., It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls... Ch. 9) is provocative, and the evidence is evocative. To major on the first and ignore the second is the issue before us. This is the domain of organic evolution, Islam, Nazism, Communism, the sects, Freudianism, Darwinism and the like as often shown^*3.

When soberly we proceed to the causative requirements, the evidential results, the necessary adequacies, the verificatory investigations for any proposed hypothesis, the whole domain of the testimonies available to reason: there is in this enterprise, only one answer. There is no room for options. Logical validity and verificatory virtue are in total and comprehensive agreement; and nothing else can stand in either domain, let alone both simultaneously, but the Bible as the source of PERSPECTIVE and the place of unmitigated PRECISION in the domain of stated and indeed supernatural PURPOSE. It is required by reason (SMR Ch. 1), and it alone satisfies it a posteriori.
This admittedly is to divorce from the divorce from reason, from itself and from its domains. This finds truth where absolute reality is self-expressive, where it is, and alone can be a valid enterprise, and where it is self-verificatory, an empirical delight in scope, time and depth.
 

The alternative however is mere self-contradiction, for if reason is to be invoked for a decision, a mode, then to disenable it in advance is merely to exclude yourself from the 'game'. In other words, it is a withdrawal. ONLY the Biblical perspective remains, with increasingly catastrophic results in its ignoring, no, more, its passionate dismissal by the objectively invalid, the demonstrably irrational and the totally futile. It is time to stop playing; even cricket is no more cricket! It is necessary to follow reason, for one, to find the realities, not to try irrationally to propose some use of it which dispatches it at the outset.
 

The Cult of the Forbidden, Truth under Taboo

There is NO DOMAIN of the forbidden rationally; only socially. The CULT OF THE FORBIDDEN is no more than that. You MUST not look beyond the nature of nature for its creation. It does not matter how dumb it is for such purposes; like trhing to make your latest Rolls Royce build another. It quite simply is not so made, and the most elementary knowledge of it stresses this more and more; and the further one understands, the more obvious is the ludicrous effort to induce it to create. It IS created. That is its NATURE. That is the nature of nature. It GOES. When it was made, it was made to go; and so it goes; and it is continuing to go, and to decline in energy availability, in designs currently listed for view and in genes as these are marred, slowly moving further from the designing power of the mind who made them, the ability which produced them, the purpose which construed them, and the Judge which assesses them.

This Cult of the Forbidden, this bounding of 'answers' by what is to be answered and automatic exclusion of what in fact does answer, whether in thought or that substitute for education so often found, mere alienated indoctrination: this  is high in the list of the  most destructive of many odysseys of the human spirit which appears to enjoy nothing more than this, to set out on an abandoned hulk, like the fastidiously mesmeric concepts of naturalism, or the sinking skiffs of irrationality, and decree its righteousness or argue for its own validity. Arguments from unreason and validation from invalidity, this is surely the greatest of the duplicities; and from what does it come ? From pride, from vanity, from rebellion and from that great archetype of evil, the Adversary. The universe is not merely far more than matter; it is far more than mind; and it is far more than the delegated, decreed, created spirit of man.

There is war in the very domain of spirit, and man can become a pawn, in the world beyond his knowledge, when he leaves the God of his creation; or a son of God, bought at a price, and desiring his Father with all his heart (I Corinthians 6:19-20, Matthew 20:28). If however, he wishes to remain plodding in the primary school fallacies of telling the truth, when removing its very possibility from sight (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6   -7), then so be it. He is stuck, and his recourse gauge is stuck on empty.

Full however of evil is the result; and our present most knowledgeable world not only verifies in its increasingly desperate degradations,such a case, for it is being prodded by such mischievous ideas to the ultimate degree; it also verifies the Bible yet once more in doing so, for its pangs, pains and derelictions are all predicted (cf. SMR Ch. 8). It is even so in detail!

The old saying, SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS, so goes the tyrant, is never more aptly employed than towards the HUMANISM of a spiritually soaring, but mentally diving humanity, aloft in the clouds of contradiction, hating God very often because of the results of so inane an expedition, and clamouring for something else, as it rebels, and inherits the fruits of its futile toil. It moves into psychology, into sociology, into physics, into society, into sexuality like a radioactive mist. It fails in each, never satisfied, never effective, always roaming, contriving at some level, and arriving at another (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.   1 - 3, and *1 below).

Passionate for power, pride or place, for control or domain, dominion on his own, inflated by opportunity, renegade to reality, mankind in masses is brought to the bathos of the ludicrous, becoming a mechanic of contrivance, a prince of delinquency, a philosopher of puniness, imprisoned in his own negations, and self-contradictory in his own assertions. Does he know it all ? without the absolute truth there is nothing to know; without God, there is nowhere to find it. Yet he, he knows, and tells his children so till they madden in sheer frustration and help to give birth to this generation, that of the dispossessed (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix 1).

Alas that man should so abandon increasingly the next generation to degeneration, teaching them what he does not know, and not knowing what he does. Yet the future, it arrives; and the judgment, it will sit.
 
 

A solution seems to appear for those so cramped by evidence. No, they say, we want many explosive (or other) bounces about in the universe, a sort of banging-about universe. For us, there must be great swellings and contractions... (the sort that no evidence could contradict in terms of any assertion we might care to make about the age of the earth, they might add). Now Popper might agree on the wisdom of such an approach, to defend a philosophy (if all else fails): but he would certainly condemn it as unscientific, simply because it is so drafted that no test could well determine the matter... if we apply what he asserts in his books. It is then, after all, philosophy and not a scientific approach on that basis.

We must go further, for there is much more to say on this. First, the evidence is rather usually applied, in questions of science. When this appears helpful, it seems, some turn to it. Then what of the case when it does not appear helpful, as frankly it well may not, to any concept of the 'long age of earth' proponents now ? Is it then to be dismissed in favour of mere mental meanderings, the evidence for which does not have the helpfulness to exist. In fact, this evidence must be faced, the sort that is; and as such, scientific theories must rest on it. The massive universe 'breathings' concept, in this respect is per se irrelevant.

As already noted, moreover, it does nothing in reality, even to help, when it comes to the matter of the institution of matter; for the necessity of a non-material source remains as unmoved as ever, by what may recklessly be imagined as having happened, after its institution. (See also EXTENSION on BIOLOGY AND BUILDING, pp. 81-88.)

What we do know, is that the wound-up, the springy or energy-available nature of the universe is running down, and that no method of reversing the trend has ever appeared outside miracles, which being a direct interposition of personal power, do not instruct us as to the natural dimensions of power, but rather as to the creative power of God; which in turn is the only available way for the creation to occur. You do not create the things by just talking about them. You need what it takes: power, precision and penetration, construction, constraints and contrivances.

To hypothesise that at one time, matter, duly first created according to the necessities shown, may have had different, divergent, indeed contradictory properties, so that it actually wound itself up, increased its available energy, fought off its entropy, increased specialisation and so on, drafted advantageous design programs, instituted means for their retention, homogenised the whole (and far worse to imagine - it started off by inventing itself when it was not there, the brain child of nothing): this is simply to perform a feat of ignoring.

It reminds one of the way parents may sometimes affect to ignore naughty children; and for those who do not want God, the world is a very naughty world!

It ignores, this sort of hypothesis:

i) the evidence that matter does not possess this quality;

ii) that indications that it ever did possess it are lacking;

iii) that means by which, if it did, it could have done so, are lacking;

iv) that such a postulation contradicts all that is known of matter.

It equally aborts the laws of logic and sufficient conditions, by (implicitly) assuming the means necessary without acknowledging them; or it smuggles them in by semantic athletics and sputterings. If however it aborts these laws of life, logic and language - then its proponents thereby forfeit the power, in consistency, to use them in argument, indeed, so much as to present the... viewpoint at all! (Cf. Ch.s 3 and 10 infra, 'anti-philosophy' in the Glossary, p. 321 infra, and pp. 348-350.)

These hideous exercises in inconsistency, question begging, in denying the conditions of one's own discourse, in a word, of vanity, need not detain us. They do however review for us, a procedure for subtracting myths even when they are multiplied. For those mathematically inclined, it may remind of the laws for subtracting and multiplying matrices.

Returning from this misdirected metaphysical contortion, we come back to the laws of logic, to the evidence, to the application of relevant scientific principles on the evidence, to verificatory tests; and find that the age of the earth is not known. It is not available outside revelation, but many indications suggest, as Paul Ackerman so well shows, that anything other than a young earth must fly in the face of oppressive evidence to the contrary.

This does not at all alter the fact that the possibility is by no means removed, that the pervasive seeming radiation which dealt so severely with the constant creation dream, like so much other waking evidence, may after all relate to a birth pang of the universe situation. The 'child' may simply have left this physical deposit of its creation, its full-formed arrival, however young it assuredly appears to be; such may be part of the universe's swaddling clothes. This is so even though any naturalistic follow-through has been rightly and severely dealt with, not only in this work, but in numbers of areas, such as the excellent, specialised and technical monograph of Dr Harold S. Slusher, The Origin of the Universe.

In this monograph, considerations such as those of the 'missing mass', and the galactic cohesion and spiralling anomalies appear, as earlier noted; while the 'great galaxy wall' of recent discovery also opposes as does so much else, the concept of automated self-development, without a developer. (Cf. Extension O pp. 252G ff..)

And this self-development ? It reminds one of children who have learned to play with 'magic' drawings which are so marvellous that you need only to put water on blank pages and there! a beautiful picture appears. While the child may be excused for not reflecting on origins, this is scarcely so when we come to those who have discovered cause and effect!

In general, the fascination with process seems to have joined with the desire to have the Creator 'get lost' to the point that what is needed for creation, something we know in our own ardours and work all too well, is wilfully set aside. From nothing you get nothing, and for what you have, you need what it takes... from yourself or whomever else has it. Otherwise, it simply doesn't come, in thought, in fact, in matter or in mind. Argument with mind to deny mind is perhaps the best nursery myth of all.

Reverting to the evidence of material things: all the evidence merely confronts those who are weary of their Creator, and this at every turn. It is merciless, unyielding.

Only by yielding to this confrontation does man have hope of finding the Creator who is merciful, and able to redeem.
 
 

COMMENT TO OUR PRESENT POINT

Evidential stringencies are just that. Ignoring them is CONTRARY to the method of science. Following them to their logical conclusion is IN ACCORD with scientific method. It is NOT in accord with the squirming endeavours to avoid the obvious, often as above seen illustrated, by seeking to invest what manifestly lacks what is required, with what is desired.

Properly, in terms of correct method, one simply addresses the minimal requirements and seeks a source attested by confirmatory evidence. There is no rational limit on the nature of the source, provided it merely evidences itself by its actions. This devious dichotomy that is found in so much, including naturalism in general and organic evolution in particular, and the political philosophies of rule by violence, by means of force not reality, is one of the self-imposed scourges of the mentality of man. As his mind tends to solicit his spirit, and his body tends to obey both, wars and hatreds, with all the other ulcerous contrivances to which flesh fired amiss is heir, are  the 21st Century specialty.

That too, by the way is verification. It is no game. It is a gammy spirit if not body, which results from such irrationalist and rampaging romancing. Dreams do not sustain. If you live by them, you are likely to die with them. Deity who created, does sustain. If you live by Him, you will live as He does. The message is not hidden (cf. Isaiah 45:9,18-19). It has been here for a very long time, required by reason as noted above, verified by history, unchanging in its tenor, effective in its performance. It is distorted and contorted by the aspiration of man who would often be quite pleased to have a pet god like a pet dog; but it remains as it is. Everything remains as it is, except for sin which brings increasing judgment, judgment which brings increasing ruin, knowledge without truth, which brings increasing calamity and even remorse (as with Einstein) and grace which continues to secure its own persons from the pollution and its own deliverances from the ruins.

Ruins! they say. Alas but it is what it is all coming to, and that quickly; as it would if any other children, being without the knowledge of their parents, and living in a hi-tech house, should presume to be potentates and seek to acquire the property through the murder of their progenitors.

Christ was murdered. It is necessary to repent of sin, and accept, not reject that sacrifice. Murder is the name of the game for millions now, all over  the world. If it cannot be through the murder of the sacrifice, Jesus Christ, then it will be in the end, in one way or another, their own decease, Lonely at the controls, sits moden man, visionary without virtue, adrift in a field not known, before the God to whom he will not come, that He might have mercy upon him.
 

 

EXCERPT III
from SMR pp. 85ff.

To see this excerpt in context, click here for *18.

You get out of the order of what you put in, or what was put in and what was an earlier input. A sufficient cause is needed for each result. When it comes to buildings, we need no education, because we do it, and know it, and the sort of thing Schützenberger put so well in the Wistar international symposium on mathematical and biological sciences, obviously applies. Systems do not naturally inter-connect with fruitful advance, if they actually are wholly chaotic, unprogrammed, unsystematised in their inter-connections.

That is what he found; and small wonder, in his computer work with artificial intelligence that he did find it. The genetic base does not gain from the consequences to the adults who precede. There is removal not gain. The two systems of coming-to-be and departing this life are not inter-connected systematically, any more than the removal of building demolition by-products is systematically connected to the arrival of new bricks.

In the case of buildings, this realisation is stimulated by the ludicrous anti-nature character of any hypothesis to the contrary. It is not hard to see that even if you got the steel girders, suitably made of stainless steel, or steel appropriate to endurance, and even if you had them keep that way while you 'managed' without system to have the cement come and mix itself, and the wiring 'arrive' and untangle itself, and so on, you would not in fact keep things in this inter-relatable condition for long, because of the wear-and-tear, the dissipative effects of natural forces.

Intelligence, effort, thought and purpose are all needed, with knowledge and planning of rather a high order, to keep these miraculously arrived things in condition to be used and so forth. We dismiss as magical nonsense unsystematic systems, indeed as a contradiction in terms.

Such however is the mystique, the sense of the nebulous invented by generations of misty thought, wishful thinking, vague philosophising and other inventions of escapist imagination, that the application of such general principles to the particular area of life, is treated as if it could somehow be avoided...

These principles are however of general application in every phase of observable reality, part of human affairs, ramification of logic (see Chapter 3 infra, and chapter ten, for development here in more detail; also Chapter 4).

To imagine that logic lapses in biology, that reason departs in physiology, that causation suffers accident and expires in genetics, that mind is irrelevant in microbiology is not merely contrary to the way scientists actually are obliged to act, always using mind... even philosophers employing the same in all their squirmings (you can't invalidate mind with the assumption that yours is quite sound as it seeks to do so!): this is a species of magic.

Certainly it is the very stuff of much evolutionary 'thought'. (A modish example occurs in (*28) of Ch. 2 infra.) Yet this modish trend does less than nothing to alter the fact. This is mere breach of thought, observation and of scientific method, which starts which the observation (however it may be found - by movement from one observation through instrumental means, or more directly) and proceeds to the accounting process, seeking to discover its ground.

Thus when we come to vital things, to biological things, to physiological affairs, to genetic structures, we are merely moving into a field with its own special features, but not into something which gives something for nothing, any more (or less) than is the case with any other field. Nor are we such babes in physiology that it resembles an advance to the surface of the moon (which, incidentally, keeps just the same laws as is the case elsewhere, such that, for example, the extremely thin layer of moon dust, contrary to some evolutionary time-measured concepts, is at variance with projections some had held for so 'old' a body in such circumstances).

Physiology has for generations been studied like any other field and the existence of magic is not observable, the suspension of reason is not a subject of accredited research, the dismissal of causation is not found here any more (or less) than is the case anywhere.

COMMENT TO OUR PRESENT POINT

It was Lord Kelvin who specialised in showing the relevance of all aspects to every field. Thus there is not some rationally unintegrated biological, physiological,  or chemical arena. Where matter is found, its features relate, in whatever synthesis with programmed purposes it may be found. It is what it is, in whatever way it may be utilised.

What is to be utilised does not disappear, any more than the singing disappears when the sound is incorporated symbolically on magnetic tape. It is merely contained by a mode which has its own ways which can be utilised purposively for personal objectives. (Cf. SMR pp. 316D-G with 422E-W, which latter reference sets the philosophic putsches into their own perspective in terms of the reason to which in the end, they must all appeal, or cease to have the facility to argue for their own positions. See  That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, pp. 10ff..)

To be sure, the physiological will have the integrated advent of the bodily related programming of the DNA, USING the material (but not magically, rather according to order and causal signification). To go further, the psychological will have the mental domain for its interstices; but this will not alter the material mode employed any more than the song of the singer disdains the material tape which responds to purpose which adapts its qualities to the performance of conservation of another domain entirely.

The spirit above and the material below, each has its limits for man in himself; and the staggeringly contrived trilogy of man, mind with matter and spirit (cf. Repent or Perish
Ch.  7, Extension 1). Each level has a domain and mode of operational involvement, causally enabled, with the other.

That it should be some kind of a GAME to ignore this, or to ignore the sources of each domain and the design of the whole, is a folly so broadly practised, though it is not always put in those terms, that the demise of scientific method which is incidental to it, does not appear to be noticed. You do NOT use the pre-conceived as a theoretical model to command; you use the FOUND to act as a stimulus to find what WORKS in the milieu, being adequate in conception, in integration with the other known operative causes and in verification once applied.

This is not a game but a plane of research.

Certainly, one must not lightly postulate a divine intervention in any particular case, by error, when it may be a mode of creation which has enabled the interaction with which one may at some be concerned. The necessity that God is does not mean the necessity that in any given case, He has acted directly, or not done so. He acts at will, and uses His systems, heightened in man, at His own discretion.

The divine creation is multiform and exceedingly complex in artifice, though simple in structural meaning once this is realised (see Repent or Perish Ch. 7), and extraneous preferences are removed. Thus for the given case or episode, divine intervention is not something lightly to be included; nor lightly excluded.  One must weigh or weight the evidence objectively (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5).

As to the creation itself however, 'nothing' is inadequate source, and 'nothing much' is imprecise. The inadequacy to account for all cannot be the thing that is ground for the explanation, since its inventive powers are not shown in that domain. As we see on pp. 79-80 of SMR, already quoted, but again relevant, and ready for expansion:
 

To hypothesise that at one time, matter, duly first created according to the necessities shown, may have had different, divergent, indeed contradictory properties, so that it actually wound itself up, increased its available energy, fought off its entropy, increased specialisation and so on, drafted advantageous design programs, instituted means for their retention, homogenised the whole (and far worse to imagine - it started off by inventing itself when it was not there, the brain child of nothing): this is simply to perform a feat of ignoring.

It reminds one of the way parents may sometimes affect to ignore naughty children; and for those who do not want God, the world is a very naughty world!

It ignores, this sort of hypothesis:

i) the evidence that matter does not possess this quality;

ii) that indications that it ever did possess it are lacking;

iii) that means by which, if it did, it could have done so, are lacking;

iv) that such a postulation contradicts all that is known of matter.

It equally aborts the laws of logic and sufficient conditions, by (implicitly) assuming the means necessary without acknowledging them; or it smuggles them in by semantic athletics and sputterings. If however it aborts these laws of life, logic and language - then its proponents thereby forfeit the power, in consistency, to use them in argument, indeed, so much as to present the... viewpoint at all! (Cf. Ch.'s 3 and 10 infra, 'anti-philosophy' in the Glossary, p. 321 infra, and pp. 348-350.)

These hideous exercises in inconsistency, question begging, in denying the conditions of one's own discourse, in a word, of vanity, need not detain us. They do however review for us, a procedure for subtracting myths even when they are multiplied. For those mathematically inclined, it may remind of the laws for subtracting and multiplying matrices.

Returning from this misdirected metaphysical contortion, we come back to the laws of logic ... (End of extract. Cf. SMR pp. 307-313.)
 

It is never possible by stages to invent domains, from what lacks the nature they possess, and the planes of creativity they require. Building blocks create heights and contours; not building blocks. Biological programs invent proteins, not matter. It all uses what it is given, and by imposition of power and concept, of ordering structures and things to be ordered, exquisitely designed, it proceeds.

In each case, you need what it takes; and if the domain were conferred with this and that power, so that it could then develop a potential implanted; so be it. It would be highly complex. We can do that when we make a drawings to come alive by putting water onto them, to take a simple case. The more such potentials we invent, the more complex our initial design, and the more inventive capacity and knowledge it takes at the outset, for the creator to make it.

In fact, the nearest evidentially we come to this is in the limited capacity to develop within 'KIND', which is so brilliant an exhibition of the individualisation of the general which the Creator has invented (as noted in Genesis 1). This however is a combination of intensively programmed procedures, gradually being discovered, imperiously imposed limits and modes of interaction with stimulus, at times rather reminiscent of turning on and off switches in one's car, for convenience. This does not of course create the switches or the domains to which they refer, by prior design and diligent provision. In this connection it is of interest to note in Creation Sept. - Nov. 2001, a news item from Science, May 25, 2001, p. 1481.

Very much à la Gould, in his findings of the vastly greater design exhibition in the Cambrian rocks than now residual on this earth (cf. Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Chs.  6, 13) - the entire opposite of the idea of the gradual, and merely to the extent it is scientifically interpreted, showing the enormous creative power required AT ONCE -  this article in Science shows that

"when palaeontologists carefully went back over all the fossil-bearing rocks documented throughout the world
over the past 180 years,
they did not find the 'ever-upward' trend in species diversity that they expected

Instead, life has long been on a plateau,

with 'evolutionary innovations'
unable to break through
'some set ceiling on diversity'."

(Line breaks added for clarity).

That is the finding NOW, that Gould made then, in his Burgess shale (cf. SMR pp. 234).

That is a very fascinating confirmation on an EVIDENTIAL basis, of the 'KIND' or category dictum in Genesis. It is KIND, and the kinds are larger categories as their specification in Genesis attests; and that is a LIMIT. So it is written; so it is found.

The KIND is produced with editorial works to limit change, and although there are switches to turn off and on, and various devices of individuality, it IS individuality, not creation which is at work. Information does not increase; though as we find, it DOES decrease given time (cf. SMR pp. 252Aff..)

Decrease, however,  as a method of creation
is not really very scientifically apt!

In perfect parallel, as we have been at pains even with iteration, to impress, self-augmentation programs for increasing information, ex-programmer, are the stuff of dreams, and NEVER that of laboratory. They are merely a verbal ploy or pawn to substitute for mind power, matter manipulation and concept imprint, with order scenario and word direction. What we find is written; what is not written is not found. No writer is found: in the book, the book of life, the DNA and other ingredients of the programmatic and the other members of the trilogy called man, for example. As usual, we find the writer in his own domain. If a car manufacturer, he is not normally found living in his car; let alone as part of it!

Dreams for deity and disorganisation for creation are the nadir of reality opposed to the crest of creation. Dreams do NOT invent. They ARE themselves an invention. For an invention, you need what that takes, not dreams about it.

It is not merely that it is CONTRARY  to scientific method to take what is not available for verification, in terms of information increase, and make this your nominee; or for that matter, to take the same thing which IS found, in terms of its actual decrease: it is rather this. To use in science the EXACT opposite of what is required abundantly and persistently attested, as an hypothesis; and then to add this, the lack of available means attestable to do it if they WOULD; and this, the presence of the contrary trend as a law of science, with this, the invalidation of logic which decries the utterance of truth from grounds which a priori exclude its attainment; and finally this, the presence of what answers ALL questions of validity and attestation in numerous testable fields, excluded with scorn from the hypothesis allowable list: what is it ?

 

Alas, it is a perversity so profound that anti-science appears a most apt and just description. The Biblical term deployed concerning abuse of knowledge, science falsely so-called, is just in this sphere (I Timothy 6:20). It is not just that it is not scientific in method; it is not alone this, that it is a parody of it, nor this, that it acts in reverse, insisting on the most excluded and excluding the wholly attested: rather it is a dramatic defiance of its alleged methodology, leaving out no impertinence, giving dignity to mere drollery and a post in a logical beauty contest to the grotesqueries of unreason.

That such a contrary and jejune approach is in this field touted as science, and that with portentous solemnity, borders on farce. The results of the anti-scientific delusion, however, these wallow in tragedy as proud flesh ceaselessly tries to show its superiorities in order to be top, and foremost, and the cutting edge. It is alas only the ground under their feet that they cut.
 
 

EXCERPT IV
from SMR pp. 330-331, at "249 - bathos" in the glossary
for the source in SMR click here, and see also  for p. 314, proclivity,  in the same glossary, subsequently to this excerpt.

As Professor Thomas Barnes of El Paso University (famed physics researcher) put it in Scientific Studies in Special Creation, Ed. Lammerts, pp. 330 ff.:

''No laws of science are more firmly established than these three laws ...'' Which? He referred to: ''the First Law of Thermodynamics, the Law of Biogenesis and the Second law of Thermodynamics'' - p. 331. The first (''also known as the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy''), implies that despite different forms (''including mass''), ''total energy remains constant.'' The second means that in a self-contained system, processes have ''an irreversible tendency ... to go toward lower order'' - to degrade - decay and disorder increasing. The third ''states that life comes from life.''

Obviously a static lump of energy-mass (1), a life for life procedure - not non-life for life (3), and a decay liability (2), these are the observable material or visible facts to be expected, if creation happened, and stopped. That is virtually an identity statement. It is this which is observable, and that is a creation verification with which evolution cannot for its part compete.

We are in the maintenance phase. The thing to be maintained is in the finished phase. What is maintained, miracles like the bodily resurrection apart, tends to wear out. This is scientific and also a matter of common observation. That is distinctive, detailed verification of the Bible.

Why then, in the full scope of the evidence and the concepts already seen, is creationism not taken as the only 'theory' which can currently be considered scientifically, rather than the only one that cannot! (See pp. 129, 135-144, 149-151, 158-159, 202-203, 208-209, 213, 252A-C, 284-290, 315C-316A supra; cf. Ch. 2 Suppl., and pp. 332E-G, 421ff. infra.) The rules are broken in this, that it is not so received. There is a metaphysical paralysis of thought which has made the many consider this: that if PROCESS be not ASSUMED to be the author of process... in the sense that the CURRENT is not the father of what is current; or if PRESENTLY OBSERVABLE THINGS or a CURRENT CONTEMPORARY REGIMEN are not the source of living things, then this is unscientific.

THAT however has nothing to do with science.

To LIMIT and REDUCE the scope of hypothesis to some preferred sanctum, some sanctuary hidden free from reality: this is precisely what science is not, what scientific method forbids. It is what begs the question a priori, and sets mere philosophy in state at the head of science, with prejudice for its queen by its side. From this its place, it mocks science. (Cf. pp. 252I supra, and 332E-G infra.)

The source however should be conceived especially in terms of its product, the hypothesis should be esteemed in accord with its power to cover the data, the case - to work to meet specifications of test in neutral and fair play. WHATEVER theory works, which is uniquely verified, is relatable well to other effective theories, the one suffering no loss to any test for verification: THIS in science has superiority. What fails verification in adequate test, even one, is already excluded; what knows no verification is not included.

Thus to refuse a 'theory' on the basis of its source... is like academic racism; "Give us an answer from an 'accepted' source, or its merit will be entirely disregarded!" - so goes the philosophy of alienated prejudice (which, as we have seen - is also the metaphysics of irresolvable antinomy in this case, cf. references above). This is the 'word' of this discriminatory metaphysics masquerading as science.

Let it! it has nothing to do with science. When it also 'accepts' what tests of verification in fact exclude, it is merely comedy.

What the Bible states however - finished creation which is wearing out (e.g. Isaiah 51:6, 49:26, 45:12, 48:12-13, Colossians 1 - the first declaring: ''The earth will grow old as a garment''), and what is basic scientific law are in entire and absolute agreement.

What disagrees is undisciplined imagination! evacuated of verification, parachuting bathetic follies of irrational creeds, evolutionism, dispelled by logic, is humbling science by force-feeding it with these deceptive and hallucinatory dreams. Now what is there? ... the wonder of creation, and the folly of such delusive dissertation, doctrine, decrees - and in that ? you have bathos to perfection.
 
 

COMMENT ON EXCERPT IV

The wearing out is exactly as predicted, and it is as scientific law and practical observation, and logic likewise attest of a created thing in an environment not always conducive to its welfare, as is the case in this fallen creation (cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 7, Beyond the Curse). Even in a most carefully controlled environment, as in a scientific laboratory, there is no cessation of wear and tear. Things made, do in fact, in this universe show a universal tendency to wear out, even if in some cases, their longevity is amazing. Indeed, there is no necessity that the Lord should NOT make formulated things that do not wear out; and in fact,  He is committed to doing just that - II Corinthians 5:1-5, in His own time.

It is just that in this universe that is not the way of it.

So far from its components inventing themselves magically, they proceed systematically; and to  the extent to which these products are arraigned by contrary events, they may do so even more quickly. The Bible makes it very clear that not only are there contrary events, but that these have a very distinct and decisive REASON for their being what they are! (cf. The Biblical Workman Ch. 7, and News 87, and note Revelation 9, Jeremiah 5 and Romans 8:18ff.).

When in His own time, and after His own plan calls for it, God Almighty  makes or presents things in bodily terms, for a realm where they will not wear out, dwellings adapted for the realms of eternity, where His people are fitted out for this in individual bodily terms as He declares: then these will not wear out because they will be in a milieu, and so made that this is not one of their proclivities. Here in this domain, our world, however, in things material, or involved in material action, the tendency is far otherwise, enshrined in an observationally based and theoretically confirmed Law of science, as noted above.

At all times, it is with God, not in games that we are  dealing. In that with which we have to deal, it is necessary to see what is, in action and in writing, and to consider the case as it comes, not fly off in the vanities of undisciplined imagination, delving into the mindless meaninglessness with the minds of meaning, into the irrational with the reasons of thought, and wondering why there is perpetual confusion and collision of theory and practice, hope and happening.

When the opposite number is God Almighty, the sooner man stops playing, the better ! It is foolish, and unwise. To oppose Him, is in the end, not merely to oppose reason and evidence, validity and truth, but your own self, its source and its salvation (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 2, That Magnificent Rock Chs.  2 -  3, with SMR Ch. 1). If that is a game, a wild-eyed Russian roulette, so be it. Such a plan is provided for in your construction with a SPIRIT, which so far from being programmed, or necessarily impelled, can roguishly and with a poignant and monumental folly, proceed disastrously with mental ruin and spiritual dynamism to its non-resting place.
 
 

 

NOTES

*1A Cf. SMR Ch. 3, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 13, Divine AgendaCh. 1, News 68,  97, 122, 132, 158, 166, It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls ... Ch. 9 .

 

EXCURSION ON CHAOS and its ANTIQUE RESTORATIONS

First let us turn to the plight of education, with impelling philosophies like churlish children seeking attention, and most very badly behaved, the case is easily solved by simply following fashion, and if logic must die to do it, then this is part of the naughty nineties philosophy approach. Actually, it has been going for decades, but it is coming to consummation as the Age approaches its end, with what in another respect is "the end", at least of rational thought.

 This excerpt is from

Ch. 1 of Lead us Not into Educational Temptation

So in education funds are to be sent and spent with some new sort of freedom; but on what?  Create it, and soon.

But on what philosophical basis? with what agreed consensus of the results of scientific method? with what … dare one say it, program for man-in-the-making (merely an educative slogan) is one to proceed?  Ask Dean Meiklejohn in his Education between Two Worlds and he will tell you, before the boom quite burst, that there is none.  And for all the similarity in some postulates or most of the works quoted so far, there is much thought of another kind.  Without in the least accepting it, one can note the virulent propositions of a Dooyeweerd as well as the sad realism of a Meiklejohn, the passionate pleas with some of the sharpest logic seen in this century it may be, of a C.S. Lewis in his collected essays (such as Christian Reflections and God In the Dock),  the claims of the Creation Research Society and the approach of the American Scientific Affiliation, writers like Dr Francis Schaeffer in his voluminous expositions of philosophy and the thought development of our times: one can note all this and know there is small agreement.

The postulates are diverse; the differentials are profound. They always have been; though statistical proportions vary.  They go back in one phase to Parmenides and Heracleitus - the radically contained and in one sense, conservative - and the radically uncontained end meaningless. They go back beyond that to paganism and Christianity.  They move too in another stream through Plato with ‘the wise’, never so wise. and never so obscure to those outside their class; for who can know them?  And through this, one moves to various idealisms, ideals without rational basis, absolute idealism, absolute empiricism in Hume, who does not even leave a meaningful personality and mind to deliver his empirical propositions and so defeats himself at the outset; one moves through Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul with its hanging gardens of mystic archetypes and strange libido moving he knows not objectively where or for what, but moving with unseen dynamic and unpropositionalised basis through happily systematic Psychological Types.

One peeks at the God Is dead movement with Its Altizer bravely speaking from the outmoding of reality to the announcement of whatever-it-is that can be found out without having to have anything of veridical vision from which one could find out - propositionalising with all the happy industry of a Kant^*7 from the noumena and the unknown, with frightening inconsistency,  from a merely logical point of view.  One considers the unspeakable ground of being of a Tillich, and marvels how articulate It seems to become through such a spokesmen though it in safely interred ever since Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason), and rejoices in the theological come-back of a Barth, who is able with equal facility - for they all seem virtuosos - to make the absolutely unknown absolutely clear as to what it Is not, and sometimes even as to what it is, though it cannot be it - lest It rupture Its splendid isolation.

This last is a delightful member of the neo-Aristotelian drama, in which the happily thinking supreme being - say first mover - is far too pure to touch this world, and so must just contemplate. This in fine, except that It is a marvel he could be found out, since he has no mind for it.

Even Physics can seek in its Heisenberg uncertainty principle to escape too much rigour; for is it not impossible by known techniques to ascertain both location and velocity of an electron - for does not the measurement displace what is to be measured?  Perhaps - but does this fumbling with a thread in too fine a needle alter the nature of the task?  It does not appear^*8. That which technique conserves from knowledge is not systematically affected.  Even the delightful struggle between wave and corpuscular theory in the doctrine - is that the word? - of light in no exception.  For if reflection and refraction follow designable lines and quantities (if you will excuse the quantitative bent for the nonce), they are yet scarcely free because statistics is the tool currently most apposite to consider their movement.

The very tension of the wave-corpuscle theories each offering comprehensibility in measure^*8, argues the likelihood of a need for a theoretical break-through even in conceptualisation,  let alone questions of measurement.  Planck in fact uses wave theory to resolve the reflection-refraction problem for a single particle.  And they do, these waves-corpuscles, follow (one was nearly going to say - party-line) the expected line.

Now this extreme flexibility and conflict in the history of ideas and in those of philosophy which as applied philosophies can appear in educational philosophy: this variability is not the same as identity.

These age-old conflicts between personality types and modes of construction, between rationalism and empiricism, between agnosticism and theology, between the purist and the pragmatic, between the believer and the cynic - are not found merely outside these blessed days of scientific method.  Much of the area of dispute is as much outside the techniques which make scientific method unique as is the ground work for the theory of organic evolution^*9. (And even that has in its Nillson - Synthetische Artbildung; in the splendid review of ideational mutation from  Norman Macbeth - Darwin Retried, as well as in the particular cases of quantum evolution - George Gaylord Simpson, 'Macro-evolution';  and in the 'hopeful monster' - Goldsmith, and in other breakaways: a morass of its own,  a subspecies of the larger genus we have briefly reviewed.)

Where then are we?  Who will program whom?  What is so extremely obvious that we need only more of them in education and don't you know,  utopia In so much the nearer?  Let individuals and groups merely rush on like so many unserviced cars desperately driven by steadfast drivers lacking road maps and sometimes road rules! Surely there is a quasi-agnosticised-messianism in some of our antiphilosophies of the present day.

Take for example the Russell Report (the Report of the Committee on Religious Education - Victoria - 1973).  Is not the way there disarmingly clear?  Should we not then at once implement it?

After all, we must never forget the pathological side (remember, dare one ask, our medical parallel); the intense multiple deprivation of so many - enough to stir the empirical to empiricise the rationalist, the purist to purify the pragmatist, the Heracleitan- (with modifications) Marxist to socialise (it is not, one hears, politic to say communise) the Parmenidean conservative, and the relativist to relativise - if possible agreeably - the absolutist ...  and all the other things that go back so far to the dawn of intellectual history.

And to do this will of course, be modern (nothing not modern is permitted: that is a modern rule).  It cannot be wrong.  It should be expedited.  Reactionary forces (whose actual name may depend partly on who is happily giving us the benefit of his model) will of course object; these unfortunate bigots are sometimes liquified; but they may in more civilised and less absolutist countries (such as those who do not give credence to the total relativism of Marxism, which yet is to be absolute), simply be nullified. (Pardon the paradox, it is partly the result in due irony,  of the misuse of terminology by some relativists and absolutists and the insistence on the part of some who are one thing, on bringing in some of the vocabulary of the other - this is a wide development and a cornerstone of neo-orthodoxy in theology in particular^*10.)

Clearly then the report - the Report, the Russell Report in Victoria in this year 1977 - should be implemented.  Would not any sound party-line zeitgeist robot say so without more ado, or thought!

What if it has many an ungrounded presupposition?-  how unproductive to follow In Lady Macbeth's footsteps and say: tout damned presupposition?  What if it does have an implicit creed?  Is that not more a matter of twentieth century politesse and presumed agnosticism (especially where we know only that we cannot know - oh, and what other people must not say they know, this too we know; though, say they, to be sure, we have no knowledge! - for we are so often so benignantly humble in so much of our relativism)?  What if the Commonwealth Constitution does have a statement about freedom of religion?  What if history laughs to tears and its controversies of culture refuse to believe it:  yet implement it!
For are they not honourable philosophies which implemented it?  Honourable all.  (By the way, which were they?  We'd better look at these gentlemanly gyrations of thought back of the Report - infra.)

Pardon this lapse into empathetic semblance in the promotion phase, After all,  this writer in his REASON FOR FAITH^*10A has himself argued, and claims that the work is cogent, for the Biblical position.  Should he criticise?  Yes,  but in that work, the grounds are explicit, the reasoning addresses itself to the situation at the outset, and the result is announced.  Oh yes, and there is no endeavour to implement the Christian Biblical faith through it,  in the 'community' with State funds; and with Commonwealth funds ... yes,  there's the rub; in the face of the Commonwealth Constitution.  Oh yes:  and there is no endeavour in that work of this author, to indicate that this specifically RELIGIOUS set of data is yet in some way secular!

 

There follows an excerpt from

Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming, Epilogue.

From the early Greeks on, this combination of fixity and motion has been absorbing. Parmenides thought all was fixed and conserved, Heracleitus, all in motion and change. Neither is correct. There is the flow of change, and there are the fixed principles without which it would have no course to follow, no road to travel, no time to traverse. Dynamic and immobility are a pair. Action is WITHIN bounds, and forces are DIRECTED by powers beyond them, which give them form, meaning and limits. It is like a train set: there is motion, and at times commotion is with it; but there is a track, and there are, with due care, ways to follow it which are absorbing (to those who love these things, and they are not all children), precise, timely, allowing passing of trains over bridges while others go below, and a whole dance of meaning.

This is delightful because it is so suggestive. There is ORDER and there is OPPORTUNITY to find its meat and to participate in it. That was so too with Hitler youth.

Order itself, then, is not the awesome thing; it CAN be revolting, soul-assaulting, making time have leaden feet.

It is the FREEDOM to participate in DELIGHTFUL order and BEAUTIFUL GRANDEUR which is so arresting. It is the THOUGHT that there is a WAY to come from immense densities to airy realities, which for all their difficulties, far outweigh, and indeed, give the soul's desire amid the mere matters of physical motion, commotion and oceanic disturbances in the sea of life.

WHY is this so delightful ? The world is not delightful. It has many delightful features, available in this and that way, as by entering a superbly maintained orchid, and largely disposed, ferny garden amid stately trees in the midst of Summer, a subduing of forces to wonderful ends, a USE of marvels of creation in SEEDS to astonishing performances of composition and delight.

WHERE then is the KEY to this garden. WHAT is the way to this wise and wonderful reality which lurks so near, seems to some, so far and is yet beckoning, beckoning...
 

4. THE PARABLE

The surfing tube then, mathematically is an expression of what is genuinely awesome, in an engineering and controlled way. It is not in itself but in its message, that the appeal is final. It is there that it lies. Thus in a car, the  feeling of speed is arresting; it is however the fact which is effectual. The feeling without the fact does not travel!

This stasis amid dynamics, form amid turbulence, maintenance of position amid vast material forces, this aspect of location amid translocation, fixity amidst mobility, SPEAKS.

Of what then is this a parable ?

 What does the story SAY ? wherein lies its appeal ?

There are a number of features which one will now list.
 

·       1) Life is dangerous, and there is a way out of this.

·       2) Life has commotion but there is a meaning to the way of achieving peace.

·       3) Life seems at times impersonal, but there is a personal place for those who are entering its domains in the right way, in timely fashion.

·       4) When you do this, effectively, then what had seemed turbulent tumultuousness, becomes assessable in a very different light.

·       5) YOU come to have a place which is beautifully contrived, even when such a thing seemed IMPOSSIBLE.

·       6) This may all occur amidst a smiling grandeur, which nevertheless has the potential to be devastatingly destructive. It requires understanding and effort; and yet with that, there is a place prepared with powers wholly beyond oneself. Into this one must go.

 

When one leaves the wilting leaves of the torn-up shrub of convenient fashion, in thought, and returns to the searing heat of truth, the things that are dead and dying have no appeal. Thus in the Heracleitan parody of truth, all is change, motion, nothing is constant, fixed. How absurd! How could there be change asserted as the basis of this world without a basis for it, a plateau on which it could be observed, postulated and thought! For there to be change, at this level, as criterion, or call it flux or call it chaos with the Babylonians if you want to be yet more archaic in your confusions with ancient myths and obsessive evasiveness, there have to be many criteria to enable even the thought. After that, there is a further set, to enable the relevance (if any) to reality.

In the first set, you need something to have enough consistency in kind to enable change in it to be observed. If a wind changes, so does movement of AIR, if a heart changes, so does the nature of the mind-set and aspiration of the PERSON, if a physical world changes, so does the nature of the SYSTEM on which it operates. Thus it must have TIME, or else change would not be capable of occurring, and space for place to change. Otherwise what is it all to do ? Whirl without capacity or move without time in which to do it ?

Time and space become then neighbours to what is to move. There must be some kind of substance, be it conceived or imagined, for movement. Nothing does not move, for it has nothing with which to do it, or place in which to do it, and all concerning it must be negated as soon as thought, for its definition to be applied, and words to have any meaning. So far then we need at least as a minimum, substance, time and space. That is quite a system we are generating for Heracleitus, for his modern derivatives of flux and chaos. With chaos, moreover, you need not only something, but something which COULD be envisaged as orderly. Otherwise the assertion of disorder would be meaningless, like saying that whatever it is is not very orderly. You need to know WHAT it is that is so.

In the case of absolute disorder, not only could you have neither time nor space nor substance, for each of these is not only orderly but ultra-systematic in order for the confusion to be able to operate, but you need not less, an observational order inherent to enable inspection, whether in thought or in fact. What is FOUND to have such a condition must be discernible as such, and hence subject to the mental categories of thought, which without logic is not thought, but vacuity of expression, without characterisability of definable terms.

A universe of time, space and substance, relevance to the orderly processes of thought inherent in inspection and categorisation and expression, this is already a VERY orderly one, far-fling from the subversive regalites of chaos.

What then more is needed ? It is the RELEVANCE of the postulated to the practical.

In OUR universe, you have as Planck points out, constancies and laws, and our modern world is finding more and more of them, even Einstein being massively impressed with them and merely inventing more aspects of their operation, and at that, very aware of his lack of a rational basis for his rational observation, a fact readily remedied (cf. SMR pp. 299ff.).

You have delicacies of DNA, astute and fundamental magnificences of system, both mathematical and engineering in the very body (cf. SMR pp. 114ff.) which uses its tongue to devise theories concerning it, on which the entire power of both speech and ideation depend (cf. SMR pp. 252Iff., Manifesto of Deity Ch. 9); and logic inherent in the mind, on which the entire assessability as to very meaning, in thought depends. You have crafted geometrical wonders in the body, as it grows, from womb to their physical loss at the tomb, declaring the onset intrinsic in type, of the élan vital, indeed more than that, the requisite constructive creativity in integral meaning and far-flung inter-systematic conception which is the tissue of life (cf. Life, what is it ? and Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

Indeed, you need the entire series of systems even in thought, and implicit in our very operation, shown in that very Ch. 7.

Thus it is entirely irrelevant, having made a system which is inconceivable and contrary to its own terms, to seek to make this monstrosity of self-contradiction to apply not to day-dream, when its criteria might in reveries monstrous be met, but to life in the vast plenitudes of practical inter-connections and causal dynamics, intimate in association, precise in timing, statuesque in consequence in our very own beings, to relate to its production. You might as well ask an erratic alarm-clock to measure time in atomic clock variation experiments. It is applying conceptual nonsense in the most entire ineptitude to the search for what is adequate to account not only for the logical ground of what is to be seen, but for logic itself.

As to the former, you need a SUFFICIENT CONDITION. As to the latter, obviously you cannot go outside it to find its basis, for then you would be using its laws and procedures to find how, according to these very criteria, it came to be, and so merely begging the question, just as people do when they try to account for causality. It is a condition of thought and its absence gives anyone seeking to argue, no ground in his own model, to be heard. If it does not apply, why use it ? If you insist, then your model is defunct.

It is when reason IS used, and sufficient causation is applied that one finds first God and then the Bible, as SMR shows in detail, and its applications and verifications abound as LIGHT DWELLS with THE LORD's CHRIST attests. Thus reason, when used, has reason to confirm it, and when abused has nothing to do. The biblical validation of verification is the groundwork of consistency, and the unique one, nothing else avoiding the antinomies and antilogies, even in the absurd level, such as the one which we have been observing above.

What in fact occurs in this world in ways that do not depend on nullities of thought and postulation, is a double creation, the one positive and the other, in measure, negative, with voluntary and in principle, necessary components.

On the one hand, there is the complete identification of realities in terms of the definition of design (cf. Section 2 above), with a profundity past the ability of man, given matter and his own mind, to duplicate. He plays about with life, but has no facility to make things like man with his absurdities based on the liberty to abuse thought, mind and spirit at will, without creating anything different, except ... confusion (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9).

Thus there is confusion, as with an ulcer, a sort of parody of production, a disruption of order, a disease in short. It is relative to profusion in this, that it has it disordered. Cancer is a classic case of an intricate system of billions of parts, coming to grief through some part failing to obey stop and go signals, while the signals and their significations continue in the main, to be amazing.

You do not consider a manufacturer of tyres non-existence if you have a puncture. You consider what was on the road, or whether the system of production failed at some point, the machinery growing old. The evidence of the object itself however is not one to be dismissed because endurance forever is not an intrinsic part of it!

With our human liberties, even to shut the eye to guilt as when one has with inordinate pride sought to confront an enemy without adequate preparation, there is of course a payment box. To be free to abuse is linked to be free to receipt its results. The system is consistent. The nature of liberty, without which no error could occur, such as that attributed by each of two warring persons in an argument, each of whom may deliberately ignore errors quite plain even to themselves, in the exercise of the said liberty, is such that error MUST be costly (cf. The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God Ch. 7, Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 9, incl. End-note 1). When wrong, you combat reality; but it does not budge for you.

This world as we demonstrated in SMR, is incontestably founded on what has what it takes to make it, and that as we have shown repeatedly, involves nothing less than God whose word, the Bible,  is out and not hidden, uniquely testable, uniquely verified and in control of history (cf. Isaiah 45:19ff., 486ff.). To subject His created systems to error means to stress them, and if you act contrary to design then there may be consequences, as when, at the merely physical level, you kick stones with your shoes. How severely and how soon these results may accrue depends partly in that case, on the leather and on how hard you kick, and how often, and in what conditions (as for example, in a desert, on hot stones when the air is dry, and sand particles bite).

That is one aspect.

Then there is judgment. If you try to steal drugs from a doctor's office, or by lying to him about your needs, then in time he may distrust you. Then the availability may be lost. God is wiser than any doctor, and has created wisdom and logic, including arguability with respect to truth, which is one of its products in a categorisable and hence ordered world. What He decides to do with you, and mankind, and the world in which in time and space this race is placed, this is another aspect. When He is disregarded, His actions of remedy are ignored, His power is derided, obviously there are consequences. Fail to take your boot to the boot-maker when you abuse it, and the case is even worse than before. Fail to obey your doctor when you have cancer, and your loss is the more sure.

If however you offend the law repeatedly, even man (even in these libertine days) may condemn you. There may be sanctions, losses of liberty in prison, fines to reduce your power to act, shame.

This world abounds in consequences, and these are in some ways direct products of those who live and abuse life, which is now becoming almost a universal plaything, living it up, making your own rules and so forth, and in other ways in arrogant misalignment with the ambit of the Author. You see it in novels: the impositions of various powers on a situation where what was wrong has started but not completed the entire series of unmagnificent events which brings down the castle tumbling.

You see it in life.

The only chaos in life, and the term is merely figurative in such a case, as it must be, is that when exquisite order is abused, when glorious and lovely things are debased, when insolence attacks beauty of heart, when depravity exercises its non-exquisite forces against goodness, when greed grabs necessities to make want, and so on in that unlovely parody of life abundant to which our design is susceptible, which is sin's part and in its heart.

Sincerity does not obliterate sin. Dealing aptly with design and the Designer does not even do it; but it does cancel its consequences of guilt, when you receive what He has to offer in this second creation, the re-generation of man at the heart; and it does mutate its reckless disregard of law, into pardon, and so bring in the power of remedy, the new relationships of proper imbuement with the divine power with which, and in which man is made, and made to be operative.

 

 

*1
Cf. SMR pp. 210-214 at *28, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming... Ch. 6, Joyful Jottings  3; SMR 252Eff..
 

*2A EXTENSION

Is it a ‘game’ to ignore unchanging ‘success’, for every biblically based creation dictum that is testable, and failure, now detailed, now generic, for every evolutionary ordinance, expectation and dictum! (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming … Chs. 4,  5,  6, Stepping Out for Christ, Chs. 2, 6-10, Spiritual Refreshings …
Chs. 6 , 13). It is ludicrous. There is no contest. It is black and white. There is 100% verification for what as written from some 3500 years ago, and 100% failure for what was written 150 years ago - admitting its defects at the time from Darwin, who acknowledged the lack in paleontology (and these abundantly confirmed since by the famed Dr W.R. Thompson cf. SMR pp. 199ff., and p. 127 above).

The illicit prejudicial pre-screening of hypotheses is a last resort, but is rather more foul than kicking a boxing opponent’s bowels. That is below the belt. This is below the horizon.

Even the survival of the fittest tag is irrelevant. The issue is not, nor was it, ever, how to maintain a line. It was this: How to GET one! The information on information self-production is not available! (cf. SMR pp. 252Aff., Beauty of Holiness Ch. 4, Little Things Ch. 3, Ancient Words, Modern DeedsCh. 4, TMR Ch. 1).

Truly as an example in scientific method, organic evolution started with an extravaganza of extraneous extrapolation (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3), continued with a collision s with basic LAWS of science (cf. TMR Chs. 1 and 8), and is perfected by an array, indeed an arsenal of converging concepts, energised by orders, which include correctives against ultra-typical variation.

Everything always reflects the speech of wisdom, the codes of knowledge, the procedures of intelligence, the pathways of controlled imagination.  Nothing ever declares these things in ‘Nature ‘ - only their deposit, and this is declared by their continuance; and their inability to arise from themselves, empirically determined, is rationally confirmed (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7).

What was deposited continues, and it is gradually being used up.

The 3 major laws of science merely sum it all up, the scientific reformulation in fact, of what applies to this field in the Bible (cf. TMR Ch. 8).

It started as being meaningless; it stayed as being perilous (cf. SMR p. 125ff., p. 123 above), and it ends as being ludicrous - a sort of Taliban that won’t surrender. This ? though its name is foul, its principles corrupt before all men, its defences non-existent, its vision destruction, its hope the noose or the chair, and its guide an understanding divorced from all truth, principial, empirical: it fails in scientific methodology,  and moral probity (cf. SMR pp. 125ff., 179ff., TMR Ch. 6), alike. As it lives, the race dies. It is only one of its bêtes noires, but unlike most others of this genre, it is zealously protected by its victims.
 
 
 

*2B Cf. Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Ch.  13 , With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Ch.  10 (incl. ref. to early Greek thought), Galloping Events Ch.  7, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.   9, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming ...  Epilogue, Divine Agenda Chs.   1, 4
 

*2
Cf. SMR pp. 378-385, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3, 9, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 13, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Chs.  6,  13,  16, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Chs.  4,  5,  Stepping Out for Christ Chs. 7-10.

*3A

See SMR pp. 23ff..

*3

Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Ch. 30, More Marvels ... Ch. 4, Things Old and New including Appendix, SMR pp. 925ff., 127ff. That Magnificent Rock Chs. 1 ,  8, Lord of Life Ch. 5, pp. 98ff. with Light of Dawn Ch. 5, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Ch. 16, and see Indexes).