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CHAPTER 2
PRINCIPLES OF ENQUIRY AND
DOMAINS OF DISCOVERY
THE SCHOLASTIC DRAMA and the SPIRITUAL SOLUTION
PRINCIPLES of ENQUIRY
As we ponder the wail of the world, dervish-like massing its misery as it wanders through the space of time, with millions hungry, millions greedy, millions hating and warring, millions revenging and hating and warring, millions misled and caricaturising their domain, and hence despoiling it, delusions rampant, fraudulent christs aplenty, without works, millions displaced from the truth, taught by tricksters, denying salvation by grace, ignoring the gift of God with spurious claims to anything as dissimilar as tongues in the head, whirring without explanation, or effrontery in making false claims for themselves, based on nothing, amounting to nothing, with millions following, often with guns, exuding bits of children as they become very religious, and desecrating God's world with their own witlessness, it is as in Romans 1, in the later verses.
In the Romans 1:17ff., however, we see the problem. The God who made us is ignored or displaced from the mind by will, while His attestation is departed from as if some child wanted a thrill, with all the ignorant excitement of gaining importance, that some needy adolescent might feel, as he takes off in someone else's car, destined in short order for some lamp-post, some other car, some carcass in the making, at his own hands, perhaps in addition to his own.
It behoves us then to consider some of the ways in which we think out and discover, and to place these together in their overwhelming testimony, here simply structurally, to the truth.
Such ways include the following categories:
1) CAUSATIVE
2) HEURISTIC
3) STRUCTURAL
4) RATIOCINATIVE
5) PRAGMATIC
6) SCIENTIFIC
7) MAIEUTIC
8) PERSONAL
As to the first, the CAUSATIVE, it is an inescapable pre-condition of thought, such that even those who wish to argue against it, use it in their grammatical formulations, conceptual interaction and speech-depiction, in communication and argumentation. In order to invalidate it rationally, you have to become irrational therefore, and hence exclude yourself from effectual argument. See SMR pp. 3ff., 17ff., 81ff., 1113ff., the indexes on causation, and Causes 1.
Reason relishes causation, and irrationality in the muck of incoherence, eschews it futilely.
As to the second method of seeking, the HEURISTIC, it involves the act and attitude of keenly seeking out, eliciting, even soliciting, finding by watching, discovering by looking, considering by estimating and involvement in the world of the empirical, not necessarily material or immaterial, but without bias: whatever has effects.
The third, the STRUCTURAL, goes beyond this. It seeks for the apportionments, the appointments, the structure, in what the coherence consists and has its being.
The fourth, the RATIOCINATIVE, refers to something slightly different from the rational, but inclusive of it, practical with it. It means that you look for the reasonable associations, the inferential, the implicative, the course of procedure: in a way, it is rather like the distinction between structure and function, this being the function aspect.
The PRAGMATIC refers to an attitude in discovery which looks for the results as they impact on oneself, one's tribe, nation, society or fellowship, with perhaps scant regard as to WHY this is so, and with maximal concern THAT it is so. Explanation, in this attitude, can wait until eventuation occurs, is made to occur, or is conserved and activated for the purpose in hand.
The SCIENTIFIC is a structured approach, but not only to the structural. Its view and concern is this: that one STARTS with what occurs, and then in an orderly domain of reasoning, PROCEEDS to WHY this might be so, working in the meantime with due care on systematisation of data, depiction of developments and various devices to help highlight aspects of occurrence, in order to facilitate the operation of reason in seeking an explanation. It now also involves the structural intercourse, intercommunion of past findings with present ones, and all with reason. Not satisfied with this approach yet, it insists on finding what are the implications, the results, the projected consequences of the explanation (called an hypothesis initially) which it makes, and then checking these where the thing is testable (and it normally insists that it BE testable, though at times in prejudice against its own approach, refuses this or that SORT of test).
It then finds the explanation verified, since the thing happens, or not verified, if it refuses to do so.
IF it is unverified, and the projection from the hypothesis is clear, then the theory is wrong, abandoned on site, and another invented, preferably with more data carefully exhumed first, ordered, classified and prepared for thought. In this case, it is always possible that the classification of the data will be based on a theory, and so make one blind to some of it, or it may even lead to falsification, either purposely or through a blind spot in the desire-reason duo.
This is what SCIENTIFIC METHOD ostensibly is, but in practice, as in organic evolution (cf. SMR Ch. 2, TMR Chs. 1, 8, Earth Spasm... 1, 7, Secular Myths ... Chs. 7, 8, Spiritual Refreshings 6, 13, 16), repeated anti-verifications, where the projected not only does NOT appear, but the opposite, or something wholly dissimilar, may come to be disregarded. This has NOTHING to do with science, and is mere myth, the insistence on a robust desire enshrined in the emotional structures of the mind, without credibility ACCORDING TO THE METHOD.
However, such intrusive vexation of the Method,
which is itself a good one as far as it goes, a worthy contribution to thought, while it can and often does so debase science as to make it a laughing stock at which not so many join, since this failing is usually mystically covered up,
should, and need not do so.
It is not the method but the meddling which brings ill-repute to those ensnared in this cultural invasion of science.
In such cases, it is not scientific method*1 which errs, but the anti-methodologists who import their naturalistic religious desire into the realm which excludes it, by anti-verification. It is this which becomes a cult of the forbidden, an irrational desire to exclude the explicatory force of one particular arena of investigation, because of a hallowed religious desire, vested in prejudice, unannounced, irrelevant to truth, except as its enemy. What is true needs no such apartheid, but values competition in open field. Why should it worry: it will win because it has the facts. That however is the trouble: those who disesteem the facts for religious reasons, however repressed these may be in some cases, because of philosophic pets, cannot find.
What, says Proverbs, is the good of money in the hand of fool for wisdom since he has no heart for it. In the Bible, the 'fool' is the foolish one who ignores or rejects God (Psalm 53, cf. Proverbs 17:16).
Quite to the contrary, some of the most famous names in science have used this method duly and truly, men like Maxwell, Boyle, Newton, van Braun, Faraday, Babbage, and in so doing, have contributed vast advance by their invasive ingenuity, in discovery. Their reasonable expectation has become a valued consummation, as they find what they sought, believing that reason has its place where reason dwells, in this universe, that there is reason for this affinity of reason to this other phase of creation, and using it with all diligence, they have found and discovered with a buoyancy bred of well-grounded desire.
Next we come to a somewhat different method, one nevertheless worthy of some esteem.
This is the MAIEUTIC METHOD, roughly that of Socrates as exhibited in Plato, and it has an appealing variation from the above, because it is so different; and yet still it relates to one aspect of the reality to be investigated. It is a matter, here, of eliciting from the mind of the one in conversation, this and that principle of procedure, assumption, inference, and so engineering the discussion that it becomes virtually unavoidable to make certain admissions, and to proceed with these as a basis, to certain consequences. There is with this, at least in the historical case of Socrates from Plato, a trend to seek to establish vast currents of thought, making inconsistencies of principle a butt in the process, if by any means some construction which endures may be found, immune to dismissal, and soundly based. As a contributor, such a method has a place.
Lastly, there is the PERSONAL METHOD. In this case, man as a person acts in the integrality (not by any means always the same as 'integrity'!) of his being, and finds what he may. Matter of course is a mere theory of mind, depending for its validity on the latter, while mind is in some ways a dependency of spirit, that power to dismiss its findings, or on the other hand, to endorse them and demand further esprit in a tour de force of some kind or other. In this case, there are intimations, illuminations, realisations, events at the level of individual personality per se: there are conscience, mental and psychic dynamics, disarrays, remedies and the like, for the entire being of man as a personality. What it portends can be considered rationally, and what it does not may be excluded.
These human methods of discovery are not to be confused however, with the domains into which they may proceed. Let us then now list some of the latter.
DOMAINS OF DISCOVERY
This, then, is as distinct from FUNCTIONS of REALITY. This is where it is, not what it is, except for the measure of meaningful designation. Here we have a surprisingly long list.
There are some 16 of these readily apparent, and these we shall seek to arrange in an acronymic format, to aid memory.
First let us simply look for them
There is such a list as this.
1. PSYCHIC
2. PHYSICAL
3. INTERPERSONAL (including friendship, hostility, and the political, social, economic)
4. RATIONAL
5. EMPIRICAL
6. AESTHETIC
7. MORAL
8. SPIRITUAL
9. EMOTIONAL
10. NOETIC and INTELLIGENT
10. ASPIRATIONAL
12. IMAGINATIVE (including both the creative and creativity itself)
13. METAPHYSICAL
14. DESIGN DOMAIN
15. MEMORY FIELD
16. DIVINE
The order of the listing above is in some ways a functional one,
enabling one to trace the more readily a series of actions leading to results.
Putting this in the form of a menomic acronym, we gain SPEARS' NAMED, in the following way.
SPIRITUAL PSYCHIC EMOTIONAL AESTHETIC RATIONAL IMAGINATIVE (for the apostrophe, a converted 'i') SOCIAL NOETIC ASPIRATIONAL MORAL EMPIRICAL DIVINE.
First, we are to be considered,
ourselves the obviously active agency of discovery: the PSYCHIC.
Soon we find that there is another entity, which we can only partly manipulate,
the PHYSICAL. It is unlike ourselves, does not speak, and seems sub-stratum to
some things.
Some entities are able, however, to return our speech, and where this is at our level, these are often found to be like ourselves, and are personal, so that we readily move into the realm of the INTERPERSONAL.
All this may occasion thought, description, depiction, reflection, and we soon find that we possess an instrument of thought, which has its own ways, its own fallacies where logic speaks, and is RATIONAL.
We begin to formulate. Now we find that we are able simply to see what happens, especially where it is visible to the eye which is set below our forehead, and that this provides one species of vision. We look at the EMPIRICAL. It is not limited to that kind of eye, but to the observation of occurrence. It does not have to be measurable, the very proposition that the real is measurable, being unscientific in that it presupposes a material measurement, so delimiting to one field, the enquiry into all. Put differently, the proposition that all is measurable is itself not measurable, and hence if what is not measurable is not real, neither is the theory to that effect.
For these and similar reasons, the empirical is best regarded as what is able to be shown to occur, as distinct from what thought constructs. Then of course, one may say this: Thought occurs. This is true, and to that extent, can be subjected to empirical research; but that is to regard thought as an object, whereas the crucial consideration is rather what it SHOWS. Thus a car can be investigated as an object, or used to get places. Both aspects are valid. When however your interest is in this, what the car IS, this is not the same as where the car will take you. The empirical as such is not designed as a mode of research into the nature of things, but merely as contributing what happens.
Next there is the sense of the beautiful, which includes ethical assessments as well as those of form, depending ON the ethics which the person, psychically and rationally, discovers or simply endorses. This is the realm of the AESTHETIC.
The MORAL field is soon found, for here there arise questions of what really IS beautiful and ugly, ethically or physically, or indeed for that matter, rationally, in terms of INTERPERSONAL relations and one's own use of one's equipment, and this sends out signals for further rational work. What is really good, and good for what and why good: what is right and why it is so, and how this differs from what is merely desired by this or that party, this is the arena of morals. Thus if you found a method that works empirically, in aligning information, this does not make it morally right, merely procedurally useful. In fact, it could be found that this method injured people, for example, and then the moral question would arise.
What ought to be done, what shines with that summit of reasonable acceptance, indeed of utter purity, goodness. Obviously, without God it could not be, since there would be no compelling design, only compelling desire, no legislation from this or that party or resource, opinion or desire, everything would depend ... That in turn would provoke the difficulty that the human recognition of goodness so far transcends the merely useful, that it would make madmen out of the race; but not all have lost their reason! When you come to know God, then you see the basis of the design, the basis of our hopes, the basis of our judgment, and it is comprehensive of all things for the simple reason that this is the purvey of His creation, and it is from one mind. What however of those who do not like God ? Does this make a moral disapprobation of God to have some validity ? Not at all, for if there were no God, as often shown, neither is there ground for absolute truth, so only in ignorance would the protester be able to protest; and ignorant protest is invalid where wisdom is the objective.
Further, there is no available ground for dissatisfaction with the God of the Bible, since firstly, creation is a gift which we inherit, sin is a disease that ruins, from which we are given ground for escape, compulsion is not the way of it, at that, any more than is the offer of service by a life-saver, and past all that, God is able to know beyond our moods, our mode and where we may justly be brought, this is done without our contribution, except of negation. If we reject Him, we have the opportunity to show what happens, both here and hereafter, and it is perfectly clear why this is, for if you are free to dispel reality from your mind and life, is it unjust that it should not be there, in the end ? Time, it must be recalled, is a temporary construction for life, but destiny has its own rules.
Now comes the SPIRITUAL, for one discovers that there is by no means a correlation with things material, in this, that one may disapprove of what does in fact happen, or even wish to prevent it from doing so, or to help it to do so still further, for the reason of desire, delight, morality and various other formulations or informations which come to the psychic being. The spirit of man moves with very considerable freedom, both as to the facts (as shown in the intense proclivity for lying in the race), and as to desire, and it may do this with or against its own design. This, as far from material programming as air is from treacle, looks back on material things with their limits and laws, with amazement. Gratitude for this elevation however is not always present; but when it is, then the point of showing it by using the other gift, that of eternal life, becomes apparent.
Now as to the spirit of a man, what of his various thoughts and desires, models and choices, purposes and intentions, thoughts and their harvest ? These may occasion repugnance or rhapsody, and much in-between, so that we arrive at the EMOTIONAL, the work of feeling and innate, inward response, with or without reason, a psychic threshold to the innermost being.
Hard on the step of this enterprise, we approach the NOETIC, the polished performance of the intellect in seeking out with zeal, not reeling, an intellectual activity which is more than reason as such, but less than purely spiritual, for it relies heavily on reason, but on more besides in its constructions, and is in fact a hybrid of imagination and rationality, with a feel for aspiration. Further, it involves and indeed requires INTELLIGENCE which is able to act with mental vigour, ceasing from things, or teasing things, seeking what they do in various ways, in which aspect some people specialise, now here and now there. Through this, taken in disproportion, many are so specialised that rather like owls by day, they work but little in some of the fields and see little of them, their flights becoming more and more in the dark.
In fact, the ASPIRATIONAL is next in line, and refers to the innate human desire, especially with the young but not lost in many who are quite old, to find what is the best, not merely for this or that society or person or family, but in fact and in reality, and why this is so, seeking likewise to discover how it is knowable that this is so, and what the case would be if it were not. While some violate logic in this field, and others feeling: yet neither is necessary as we shall plan to present, since all fit in one only perfect model.
Realisation that this is so, as far as man by himself is concerned, undoubtedly requires the IMAGINATIVE, as does likewise all development in science, as is universally acknowledged, for if you cannot, like Einstein, like Newton, develop the inspirational, the visionary, yes even the perspective which commands, how can you find what is not of itself visible! Understanding is neither quantifiable nor visible, measurable nor prone to such management. Yet it is sought and found, and in this imagination, stirred by many correlative findings or prohibitions of reason, excels.
Next we find ourselves in the realm of the METAPHYSICAL, for here, outside mere slavish material formulations, expressed in visible action, and some of its inferential side-kicks, there comes an approach to the non-visible
(such as continually moves each one of us, in purpose, courage, vision, desire, will, inspiration, truth relish or other and so on, none of which has any quantifiable or even form-moulded nature (cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 9),
and the visible, to the spiritual and the emotional, to the nature of man and of the universe, to its construction and its ground, to its cause and its consequence.
Before long, we objectively find that DESIGN (cf. SMR pp. 211ff., 224ff.) is a necessary ingredient of our thought, and indeed logic itself is a kind of design of words and correlation with that to which they refer, enabling coherent thought. Whence is it, why is it, what is it and what does it do, and indeed, how may it be formed and to what extent is this within our own powers, and why is it beyond our own powers in the very action and structure of those powers with which, astoundingly, we meanwhile investigate at all! (cf. SMR pp. 114ff.)... We find, moreover, that design is not merely statically what IS to be found, but something which one can formulate in terms of purpose, and that one's very purposes can constitute a species of design. This brings on further thought on the spiritual, that psychic height, that domain of will and purpose, beyond the mere analysis and cognition of mind.
But how is all this to be conceived together, and how are all these fields and indeed, these methods of discovery to be integrated, resolved in their total impact, found out in their overall constitution and construction ? It will require MEMORY, that fabulous cohesive constraint which enables the very ground of the mind to consider many things either simultaneously, or nearly so, as the eye can do with distances and areas so swiftly, and to compare them all without losing the clarity of any. How is this found, why does it work, and what is the constitutive basis of its operations, so imbued with the personal, yet in some ways so aloof from our own persons, providing for them both exhilaration and inspiration in the process ? This is the domain.
Finally, all these things being considered, and the spirit of man itself being integrally and in a specialised way operative, just as reason, emotion and memory can operate, there is the realm of the DIVINE, that causative adequacy, that design sufficiency, that dynamic of institution - vastly beyond our own limits, that ground, cause and origin, that cause of order and system, of spirit and creativity, that provener of sequence and meaning, of multitudinous and myriad diversity in integration, of integration into operation, of thought into comprehension, of perspective into conformity to reality, that provider of solution to mystery and user of words to confirm His mind, beyond all human contrivance or power to produce, that prophet of history and organiser of the power to realise the same, in man, that instituting and organising dynamic and mind, thinker and proposer, whether of the one or of all. (Cf, SMR.)
How does this Being consist, WHY does he make others exist, and what is the PURPOSE of his planning, so conspicuous in its detail, that one is almost blown as by a typhoon's sheer elemental power and force, into oblivion by the light which shines. That nothing ever was, is obvious, since it is has no future, and we are future to the past. That what is adequate always was, is necessarily so, or again, we would not be. That it did not develop is obvious, since then we are merely missing the point of the creation of all, in looking at a way-station. What does He desire ? This brings us to biblical studies, in terms of biblical apologetics, through reason. What reason there finds is revelation. ALL THIS is in the realm of the spiritual, since God IS a spirit and man HAS a spirit.
This then is the initial look at the METHODS OF WORKING and the FIELDS OF DISCOVERY.
Now let us consider a little their totality, their joint concurrent testimony and where they lead us. This becomes for our own Age, as for millions in it, a voyage of discovery vastly more vital than that of Cook for the British Empire. Indeed, for nation or individual, for rich or peasant, this is the most exciting and essential outcome of any discovery at all. One of my relatives has cited his desire as WHAT I WANT, as MUCH AS I WANT, WHEN I WANT IT, HOW IT WANT IT, and so on, and has in some domains gone far to obtain this, in others scarcely appearing to move at all.
For my own part, I found early in University life, that there was such a confusion, a clamour, such undignified folly, such irrational presumption, such reductionist madness, such almost inebriated lust in the realm of scholarship, that though ardently besought by the Professor of Philosophy to make a career of this field, I decided not even to seek Honours in it, lest I should become a superficially brilliant fool; and sought rather to respond to a divine invitation to find the truth and honour it, indeed simply to accept it in Christ Jesus.
His embrace of all truth is more than this: it is not as His child, but as His very own Person that He is empirically found to be: all of it is found assembled and meaningful, harmonious and exhibited in Him. This is found personally, in understanding, propositionally in logic, historically in prophecy, morally in operation and consistency, and meaning, in beauty, which starts as the beauty of His holiness and ends in all kinds of displays of elements in His creation which show His imaginative design. Sin is the opposite, and mars anything, excluding beauty, but not glitter, glamour and deception. Metaphysics before Him becomes childishly simple; ontology finds it start and finish, design its sufficiency, love its domain, courage its reason, creation its resource, personality its height, and shame its warrant.
Quite as important is this empirical finding, that there is NO QUESTION, there is NO AREA, NO ARENA, NO PROBLEM that He does not answer, intellectually, morally, factually, in realisation, in understanding, in harmonious relationship of all parts, and utter coverage of all elements.
This has become so amazing, so astounding, as all things attest Him in every domain, in every method of discovery, that not so share something of this would be churlish. It is for this reason that the Gospel of the word of God is so thoroughly promoted by so many. To do otherwise would be like being a life-saver watching someone drown, out of shyness.
At the simply personal level, to be sure, much later in life, for purely religious reasons,the author took an M.A. Honours, and was awarded a Th.D., for work that had been of interest, but the honours part of the M.A. was merely a result, and the topic was Predestination and Freewill, biblically conceived with rational issuance. This in itself (see the work of this name, linked above, now part of a trilogy on this topic) proved able to answer a vast problem where philosophy has long shown itself powerless, one more example of the supervening power of the truth as it is in Christ Jesus and expressed in the Bible.
Such was the oppression and furore then surrounding my ministry, that this research M.A. appeared a needful step for its prevailing continuance. It is the the truth which has been valued beyond all reward, acknowlegment or recognition, and it is infinitely worth any such sacrifice, since as we shall see, it - rather He, is alive and to know Him makes the knowledge of His creation, startling and delightful though it is in its brilliance, a mere detonator for the explosion of wonder to come when HE Himself is found.
SIGNIFICANCE
At what then are we looking ? In the PRINCIPLES OF ENQUIRY, we are considering HOW we search. In the DOMAINS OF DISCOVERY, it is a question of WHERE we work. Similarly, in the coverage in SMR pp. 332G -H, we were conceiving WHAT WE FIND. Before we add this other list, it is well to consider some of the consequences of the two listings above.
First there is the entirely unitary character of the functionalities, in terms of coalescing, compatibility, and more than this, united, inter-active operation. Whether it be the beautiful or the noetic, the imaginative or the physical, the psychic or other field of operation, not merely do these elements, aspects, fields, domains and modes of enquiry correlative to them interact with meaning: they do so with a logical compulsion to their source in energy, intelligence and power, which meets answer only there, there altogether and there always.
If it be OUR design, or our POWER
to design, the work of our minds on matter, or on our own minds, the surging for
understanding of the minute and material, the biological or the theological,
there is always the explanation which being one, is overpowering in such a
simplicity, that it makes the subsidiary mathematical model for part of the
universe's own operation, E=MC2,
look a minor specialty by comparison.
GOD = the source of intelligence, imagination, aesthetics, morals, material design, coded designations, live and mind, spirit and matter in their respective fields, each designated, each diverse, all integrable to thought and for operation, the unifying basis, which 'achieves' such a unity simply because it is all His, just as our Boeing 737s are our production in the human race, their multiplied manners and mannerisms, whether electronic or broadcasting, weather-finding or financial funding being all the work of one mind, or in our more limited case, many minds integrated by a device called organisation, which is itself just one more of the integrated multiplicity of our activities.
That this is IN PRINCIPLE a sufficiency of cause for this product in our own human case, merely illustrates the KIND of causative requirement; and just as our own in inadequate for our own institution, so what is not inadequate transcends our own contribution, but is not outside the domain of thought, just because it has created our thinking apparatus. On the contrary, this is the more reason for the affinity which permits understanding in such a realm.
It is so usual to consider all this for granted:
the pure marvel of integration of the disparate,
mutual dynamics
in fields so diverse as to be divergent, yet so harmonious in interaction
that one logic is evidently over all, fitting them into one integrity,
and one imagination over this,
with one handling of the visible and the invisible domains,
our own spiritual seekings and perceptions and our limited but refined handling of the modes
soaring to comprehension when sin does not bind to the earth,
while beneath our own powers of perception and action,
but not beyond them
lie areas such as the material and the physiological.
It is usual not to conceive of the multiplied MODES of investigation, and their SINGULAR METHOD of coherence into one picture, one program, one universe of discourse, with the imagination always able to refine this in terms mutually satisfactory and eloquently built on just one model, that it needs to be realised afresh, that this marvel of engineering, this medley of synthesis, this miracle of a monolith called man, in his wonder of a universe, with grades and modes of operation stretched beneath his own level of power and prowess like some canon that astounds, and yet is still investigable, is yet a colossus in miniature, a centre of operations which neither his own understanding nor his function despoils. Such colossae do not invent themselves; neither does a sandal make far less construe itself. For all this, the cause is competent, must be eternal, and have knowledgeable relationship to every component, all composition and every contingency, since nothing is, but what depends on it, for its glorious reality on never having traded with nothing. If nothing had been, you would not be.
Indeed, if God were not there, the proposition would be meaningless, since truth would not be there, so that the attempt falls into its own antinomy*2 before the voyage, like that of criminals to penal posts in Australia in the 18th century, begins.
Cohesion, rationallity, coherence, unanswerability, prediction and verification, testability and logical necessity all inhere alike, in just one being, God, and just one declaration, the Bible, which not only admits testing, but enthusiastically REQUIRES IT. God is not seeking demented nongs, but people who repent of their unreason, their unreasonableness, their ludicrous aspirations to autonomy, their devaluation of their own spirits by nestling them where they do not fit, of sinners in a word.
That He is so willing, on such terms, is a marvel to make all the others seem in principle, but small. Here is not the workman on the station, it is the owner; and He is not possessive to the point that the world can go where it is going; but He will not go with it, but rather simply came to it, and offered Himself. And this ? It was no politician's gambit, but the sacrifice which to justice, mercy is willing to give, and that, not to make workers but children of God. If you seek righteousness, here is its acme (cf. Romans 3:23ff.), if love, this is the reason why that delightful entity so much as exists. It has a SUFFICIENT SOURCE, yes this also.
As shown in SMR, TMR and elsewhere, not once, but many times, there is simply NO realm which troubles, when the fact that the ONE source for the ONE mesh of marvels, integrated with a simplicity of action which belies its astute and unexampled sophistication of program and method to enable this, is realised and applied (cf. SMR Ch. 5). There is nothing which is an antinomy (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Section IV), and the thoughts to this effect are always based on misconception, so that their initial breach of logical and scientific method makes this result predictable. Indeed, the constant antinomies of secularism are one of the verifications of its error, confirmations of truth and declarations of the independence of God from the pathological naturalistic dependencies of man!
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There COULD not be a failure to have
antinomies, rational rebuffs, insoluble mysteries, |
|
|
As shown, for example in Earth Spasm,
Conscience Chasm... Chs. 1,
7 as in Secular Myths ..., |
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On naturalistic bases, |
|
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It is anti-scientific in
ignoring the scope of the interfaced surfaces, in advance. It is irrational in
|
The results are competing naturalistic theories of such magnificent disregard both of their mutual relations and the grounds for them, and of the evidence which they ignore with a degree of blindness which can only remind one of the perilous position in a car, the blind spot, systematically present and needing to be overcome, that there is no rest. They cannot explain what they do not even conceive; nor conceive what explains that with which they make, in the first place, their own conceptions.
Here however, avoiding these simplistic and solipsistic side-tracks, we find that our multiplied methods of investigation receive their balm, discovering that what explains one, explains all, and what validates any, validates all. No more is man metaphysically involved in short-circuit, so that by his presuppositions he removes all possibility of truth itself, calling for the articulated without any ground, the systematised without any reason, and making all things relative to one another, with no basis in reality that binds them, to which appeal may be made to find their absolute and actual nature and relationship. No more is he to be making absolute depositions of doctrine about himself, the universe and the nature of all things, on the basis that precludes his knowing it. Now he can make statements based on the Maker of all things, who lends them integration as we do to our own products, as intelligence does by its nature, and as personal imagination does for all its works - except when it is sick or presumptuous and exceeds its power, or has a malaise, and despises its function.
Morals are no more a delusion of the idiots which men would have to be, to be taken in by such a folly as equating the oppressive desires of some for the absolutely desirable, or esteeming that good and valid and sound and moral, which is merely enforced by deceit or delusion. Such beings would not be worth listening to! even in telling us that we are not worth listening to! Their model rubs out their relevance to reality, whether in affirming or denying it.
Likewise, when we use the domains in view, instead of using reductionism to dismiss their validity before telling us by their means what is valid in one of the most abjectly miserable highway robberies of mankind, that has ever been! It is not his possessions but himself which is here stolen.
No more is his intellect telling us what we are, while it likewise aborts this possibility by making us a part of a 'nature' which does not think, cannot know; and no more does the heuristic become divorced from the noetic, and both from the spiritual in which we work, and which gives us our unique power to think and imagine, conceive and consider, make models and test them, and then seeking truth, declare to all what it is. This MAY BE disavowed by some, in the name of science, as if they merely propose suggestions at best; but it is, in fact, and for centuries now, in that very name that the many are being compulsorarily educated in many realms, with anomalous asininity, as if the ONE THING which MUST NOT be considered is the ONLY ONE to be AUTOMATICALLY REMOVED from consideration for the sake of science! Nature must somehow beget itself, and nothing is the chosen source, or else it is all self-invented minus both inventor and invention, in a sort of verbal quibble which ignores causality and begging all questions, puts in its answer sheet with as robust a mysticism as ever deluded this earth.
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Why is there so obsessively
excluded the only valid answer,
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where all avenues verify it,
and no irrationality plagues it, |
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where alone validity and
rationality mix, the empirical, the heuristic and the noetic, |
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with perfect harmony and total
adequacy of method and result ? |
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It is because, in further
verification of the Biblical model (Romans 1:17ff.), |
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or what would be if this were
a scientific hypothesis instead of the declaration of God |
This exclusion, this academic apartheid of the only possible answer to all these modes of enquiry and realms, we have termed the cult of the forbidden, earlier ! (Cf. SMR pp. 150, 330-331, 838.)
It is not too much to call it so. It is a specifically religious orientation which forcibly excludes from factual consideration the only answer which has logical validity, operability in all fields, meshes all fields logically just as they are already meshed operationally before we make our advent in thought and building in any form at all. In those religious gatherings where Lecturers, ostensibly dealing with academic subjects, and teachers, in ostensibly scholarly institutions, act with a measure of emotion and arbitrary exclusion, to which those who ever suffered from apartheid can readily relate, since it is the same blemish in the works of man without the living God, which brings both readily to pass.
It is an exclusivism, whether of race, or of the God who made the race. It is an assumed superiority, whether in academic pretension, or in debasement of its source, its sole explicatory provision, which is there before being found, like a 'teenager on drugs, in a massive park, equipped with a tree saw. It operates in despite of its fields, before and after they pause in their probe; and it has all the ingredients of spurious religion.
What are these ? Firstly, there is the irrational arbitrariness which always distinguishes this type of religion. It uses force, social, military, academic, educational, it breaches all the rules of academic discipline, it repeats its claims nauseatingly, it feeds of the fever of the creation, ignores the Creator, and makes out of what is merely created, various deities, acknowledged or merely implicit. 'Mother' Nature has a shrine erected to her, from her comes mind, spirit, anything you like, from her resourceful and strangely fashioned womb, arising from nothing, comes all that intelligence could wish, rationality could imagine, logic could envision, power could provide and design could designate; and this with NO reason, and NO relative ability WHATSOEVER.
This figurehead is one of many such, and is not in principle different from the Greek and Romans gods and goddesses of this or that, or some of the Hindu forces and features, which relate to this or that in a ramifying mythology, without source, without basis, meandering through history like a novel. The Western novel is in this no better or other than the Eastern variety (cf. SMR Ch. 10). It is intellectual escapism, for which there is no escape. They never agree; they cannot. There is no possible ground on which to meet. Even the Western dream harrows itself with unthinkable nightmares of change and mutation, in their evolutions and naturalisms, detesting each the blindness of the other, with considerable justice in many cases. (Cf. SMR pp. 422E ff., 419ff., 378ff., 315A ff., 252Eff., 202ff., 252Aff., Spiritual Refreshings ... Chs. 6, 13, TMR Chs. 1, 8, Earth Spasm... Ch. 1.)
It never meets reason, cannot, but insists and uses force and demotion, demolition of name or status, to secure its wants. It calls these 'standards' but they are a standard fare of corruption.
So is it in numerous spheres, whether the biological, the psychological (cf. SMR Chs. 1-2, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, End-note 1), the sociological (SMR Ch. 4), or the quasi-theological, which will have ANYTHING and is constantly making SOMETHING. Such makeshift neo-theological dives, are nowadays always tittivating, twittering, never rational, never valid, always built on air, dreams, not on logic and necessity as we have shown in SMR, TMR and other works: they fall because they cannot stand, and they fail to stand since they are not built on God who is the actual source and ground of our logic which insists on Him, just as He insists on it (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3; and see also SMR pp. 671ff., 686ff., 1042ff., News 100).
These misalliances with irrationalism, flirtations with naturalism, hybrids with existentialism, are found making affirmation meaningful because it affirms, moving like ravenous hounds in the chase, always after their prey, and not praying to Him who gave them what here becomes perverted, their desire and thrust for truth.
Now the errant fashion is neo-orthodox, redefining biblical terms coyly, now liberal, interposing man's mind to regulate the word of God, man making himself indeterminate, excluded by his own exclusions of the absolute, making now this pretty theory, which archeology demolishes, as with Welhausen (cf. SMR pp. 67ff.), now that. Here a mere vacuity overturns (as with Barth's frippery, flippantly redefining terms which make a new understanding of what ? It is of what is predetermined by his own model, to be unascertainable, and that, it is the same fault as demolished Kant cf. Predestination and Freewill, Section IV); and there, on some other fitful excursion is one making some model suppressive of spirituality in the interests of some social concern, as in Liberation Theology, likewise redefining terms, and using the name and compassion of Christ to emasculate the Gospel, evaluate the word of God on autonomous and alien premises, and tell Him what to say, while still using His name.
They argue and wrangle, for each in turn removes any POSSIBILITY of truth by the removal of God, of the articculate supernatural, of the revealing absolute, or of available contact with Him: trying to become spokespersons for the reality, they first remove all access, as if clowning not scholarship were the object.
All this, also, it fits with the area of error (one of the domains of what is found, in the listing below), and in this case, with spiritual error, for this simply means that it is at the top level of man, where is spirit and invisible dreams, desires, defalcations or rebellions, repressions or deviations can occur, just as it is likewise, rather like an analogy for the body itself, the place where vast courage, kindness, aspiration and cogitation may validly occur. As with many mighty things, the spirit of man is as readily used for oppression of truth, as for its expression. This in turn is the result of one of the most prodigious wonders of all time, the creation of liberty.
In vain can computer persons seek to make a personality; it is only the outer rubric they can imitate. The seeking soul, the one not programmed in significant ways, at the uttermost level, and yet still capable of making programs, this is man, man in his body, with his cute little piece of cranial apparatus, so small, yet a work-station for soaring. After all, this too has its analogy in the aircraft, so small, so capable of soaring, and in so doing, having a most magnificent overview of what is then far below, while provided with readily usable devices for crashing.
So too is there found from freedom, the iniquity that is patent in the human race, this grasping for another's inventions, to make money out of a neighbour's work, to despoil his name in an effort to protect one's own professional rump and so on; and likewise looms the far more devilish desire to enchain what is free with the bondage of naturalistic contempt, metaphysical nightmares, masquerading as religion, or philosophy, or politics or some combination. When is this unearthly but wholly undivine desire seen in worse clothes, than when academics and politicians in wry array, seek to infiltrate the soul of youth with these desultory doctrines, these irrationalist pretensions, and even make escape all but impossible, from hours of indoctrination that is as arbitrary, as self-contradictory, as evidentially void as obsessively pretentious. (Cf. TMR Ch. 8.)
This too is the result of that liberty which nature CANNOT give, since it is not personal, and which God DOES give, since He is, and which is the basis for the entire 'mystery' of man.
Is it however mysterious ? In principle, it is so only to those who mystify themselves by ignoring the premises of actual exquisite design (if man is not a design, then in all observation, nothing else could meet conditions which this one does not, in order to qualify, since it leaves all the others nowhere near its unity, sophistication, correlative motion in methods and operation in the vastly diverse with magnificent harmony of the whole for assignable, integral purposes, in co-ordination with and for the entire unit). There is nothing in the least mysterious about a free being, a derivative of the omnipotent spirit, of whom our own spirits are a created expression or image, that is 'man', who, using this liberty for licence, and this gift for gall, makes of himself an odium and a contrivance which in his rebellion from his Maker, becomes his own coffin, both literally and metaphorically!
When this coffin however is voided, and man arises free from its funereal bonds, then ALL is covered with a sway and a sovereignty of application which is like that of the maestro in a concert, conducting the highly varied gifts of an orchestra, with such a panache, an enthusiasm, a sufficiency and a hand over all, that the product is at once understandable and a marvel for comprehension to follow with relish.
Ah! they say, that, it is Berlioz, or whatever other magician of a baton wielder they may have in mind. THAT explains it! Explains what ? It explains how a diversity can be a unity, how a unity can as one unit express a totality, how a totality in the creator of the music in the first place, can become a presentation, how the spirit of the one can affect the spirits of the others, now playing the creation in the orchestra, and how in their own invisible spirits, all of these who diversely but not divergently play, can convey what all alike conceive, but somewhat diversely because of massive individuation: which yet does not extinguish fellowship and co-operation.
Thus the concert-goers listen, and they understand; their spirits are not vexed at the performance, for its functional ingredients of creation (of the music), creation (of the interpretation), creation (of the sound) and creation (of the unity of atmosphere and spirit in the sound) is to be applauded, not regarded as a basis for ghost worship, or some intimation that the concrete is in some way performing a musical oscillation...
To God's creation, we listen. It answers all, and does so uniquely, but in this chapter it has been our desire to consider more closely the harmony of METHODS and the SITES of operation, as well as, what follows, the OPERATIONS themselves.
In all these three dimensions, the method, the realm and the action: there is but one answer, on operation, one mutuality, one need, one result, over all, sufficient for all, and most magnificently displayed for any in His book, the Bible with all its vast challenges to test it, a test always 100% verified despite the millenia that pass since He wrote it, and the diverse people He used to write it for Him (cf. TMR, Ch. 3, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17).
There is likewise but one Saviour from the sin which constitutes the 'mystery' of man, in fact mere rebellion and its correlates carried on down the generations, mixed with manifest and often biblically predicted judgments, and of course the curse, which degenerates what God generated, and mocks man for his pride and folly by surrounding him with a nature defiled, just as he is (Romans 8:18ff., cf. I Corinthians 15, Genesis 3, Beyond the Curse). The sin then reaches its final, dread estate when man, having tampered with himself, and then sought to tamper with the Saviour, seeks to tamper with the salvation, and now enchaining it with Inquisition, now misrepresenting it in sect or marital squalor, erects himself and his culturally derivative religions as the master for man (cf. SMR pp. 65ff., 1074ff., Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 2). Such mastery is well represented in the world today, in its squalid selfishness, dynamic disorder and massive treacheries. It is equivalent to zero.
HOW ? WHERE ? and now WHAT ?
We have, then, looked at modes of enquiry, at avenues and regions for it, at deformities in method and twisting of region; and now we concern ourselves more with what occurs in these regions, in terms of their intrinsic nature and their mutual operations.
To our earlier work, in terms of WHAT we find in areas of operation, as they move and occur, we now turn, to create this mini-trilogy of method, in approaching reality, and finding the Lord.
Let us add this other list now, from SMR. Appropriately, this is now inset,and likewise somewhat adapted, and with what follows, extended for the present purpose.
315A: A PATTERN OF MAN - For Survey and Simple Mnemonics - A Summary Structure (PSC). This is envisaged as a skyscraper, and may be conceived upwards or construed downwards. (See pp. 140-145 supra, and cf. Repent or Perish Ch.7, Endnote 1,
where there is further development on this theme.)
THE ELSEWHERE-EARNED EDIFICE,
WITH OPTIONS PROVIDED FOR MAN
(View as one skyscraper: floors are in general in order of their management significance,
though this may vary.)1. Principal (top floor)
2. spirit
3. perspective
4-6. personality-imagination-expression (PIE)
7. principles
8-10. priorities, penchants, affections (PPA)
11. purpose and purposes
12-15. comprehension-analysis-intelligence-mind (CAIM)
16. proposals
17. corporicity
18. procedure
19. principial error
20. plan
21. performance error
22. program
23. unsuccess
24. significance
25. semantics
26. syntax
27. signification
28. symbols
29. cells (equipped as per 24-28, the 5 S - Words)
30. system
31. sequence
32. series
33. singularity
34. subsistence (ground floor)Added to these, further functionalities could be noted, such as:
CREATIVITY, INTER-PERSONAL CONSTRUING; LOGIC, MEMORY, SYNTHESIS, SYSTEMS, DISCIPLINED-IMAGINATIVE-CONSTRUCTION; SURVEY - WITHIN AND WITHOUT.
While these extend our sight of the donated territories accorded to man, they can be understood in such terms as: mind, spirit and their intimate inter-relation. Here we see not only worlds within worlds in the construction called man -a multiplicity of cosmoi, but a disparity of components,
duly combined and correlated to work as one unit:
that is the art and essence of creation.
The splendour of the architecture that creates, together with the wonder of the elements in man, themselves creations - the legally inert substructure, the vitally informed, the alert, the discerning, the comprehending, the volitionally directive, the spiritually profound, soaring inexorably: these in their display and their unison attest and verify at work... the sublimity of divinity.
SURVEYING THE SCINTILLATING SCENE OF THE UNITARY SKYSCRAPER
Now let us look from the top storey down.
At the top, the spirit (q.v.) of man, as active but non-autonomous, and derivative (2), is subsumed beneath its principal (properly God, but it may be opted for or yielded to as the devil, self, self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction, self-fulfilment, ideological activism, existential angst...), whatever it may be (1); just as perspective (3), in turn, is set below spirit.
Then is seen the personality as functional upon this, with its principles, priorities and purpose, all functions of it, proceeding in turn to utilise the whole realm of the mental and engaging the physical, with all the errors which in practice may divorce purpose from results.
The structure in its course then moves through the purely programmed to the anatomy of matter and the singularities of what subsists (ground floor). As to the principal, on top, this may be subjective, merely existential; or the upward gateway to reality.
The control room is in the top floor; and the merely existential per se lacks what life requires. The reality incomparably and immovably attested, is the Lord Jesus Christ who, the only begotten Son of God, the Word of God, achieved the building and offers to restore the mismanaged to the designed holiness: at cost to Him, by sacrifice once made, and power, epochally shown in His bodily resurrection. This restoration comes through personal faith and repentance, including His actual top-level reception, where He belongs; and His free acceptance of the purpose-deflections and other errors, sins at any level, unburdened to Him and His waste management.
- For a convenient grouping of these and other features
of the co-ordination of disparates in the universe,
- we shall now here import with some addition and slight variation, from one of our initial preliminary surveys, connected with the Home Page. Part of it will be still more meaningful when Chapters 5 and 8-9 of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock have been studied, and the scriptures they present. Now however is a good time to consider some of the other features grouped below.
AMID ALL THIS TRAFFIC SURGING AROUND MANKIND,
LET US BE BOOKED
A Preliminary Overview of an Intriguing Aspect, in Some More Detail
At the outset in our site, we have first noted and then examined two "books" - and it is very close to LITERALLY two books. They are both exceptionally well-known,1) the Bible for the mind and the heart of man, and
2) the DNA for his structure. Each is inscribed with efficiency, profound symbolic coherence and cohesion, intimate capacity for correlation with command, system to the finest point, and just that combination of meaning and symbolic method which constitutes design, direction and communication. If this is not communication, nothing could be.
In our Home Page, we had a link to Preliminary Perspective which traced these two books, but added a third, that of history, which follows the prescriptions of prophecy with admirable, multiplied and meek precision (see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chs.8-9). For our present purpose, we shall merely note that this is a branch line in precision, although on a parallel line as it is, it does present a further intermeshing in dimensions, the word-work dimension of deity.
Returning however to our pursuits here, we move beyond these two books, and the paralleling mesh of history-prophecy, to our own lives. Thus we are not only showing meshes within meshes as we proceed, but a parallel mesh of history, past present and future like a chronological parallel to the operational activities we are about to trace.
There are then in our present, personal operational library the two books noted. This however is not all. There are two additional books, somewhat more figurative, but not in the least imaginary. The FUNCTIONS to which EACH OF THESE EXTRA 'BOOKS' REFERS is as real as any between two covers in our ambit and purvey of scholars.
3) The third then, or the first of the two extra books is this: the co-ordination of mental world and physical world, auditory reception and command execution, between the man whose bodily equipment is programmed, and the world which has its physical and botanical, biological equipment programmed. The programs intermesh well; their symbolic sub-structures are unitary in kind, so that the efforts of the one, avail in the other, the impacts of the one are understood in the other, and (cf. Predestination and Freewill, Part 4), there are no alogisms to be found: the logic is unitary.
More, the mind of man, using programmed sub-structures for its ultra-programmatic progressions and pursuits, can understand the products that surround him.
4) There is therefore, and this is the fourth book, this second unit in our second series: and this is the comprehension-combination that transcends, going far beyond the mere structural logical cohesion and synthesis. To emit and receive in terms of a common system is one thing, extremely magnificent though this created product undoubtedly is; but to be so prepared in spirit and mind, so that the raw materials, themselves coherent and cohesive between the two systems, within and without, are able to be grasped, intuited, subjected to imaginative incursions, brought into the scope of thought and will and analysis, yes of understanding for action by the non-material, purpose-proposing, imaginative dimension of the being called man, his spirit, this is the next generation of marvel. (Cf. SMR pp. 348ff..)
5) Yet it would seem indeed scapegrace in gratitude to God who performed this production with the necessary linguistic, mathematical, comprehensive, analytical skill to manufacture symbols and significances (symbol targets), intimations and executions, thought sub-structures in logic and meaning, and interaction with a subject also formed, if we did not notice a fifth book. This is the power to ruminate concerning the Maker Himself. This naturally is the copestone, to which the imaginary relationship of Pinocchio to his craftsman corresponds in reality. Right through to the inward realisation of the thrust of the logic, the communality of the communication, the direction of the design, the strategy of the construction, man can peer toward the God who made him.
He can do more. It is not necessary in this field to speak of a 5th book, although it would be perfectly meaningful. One prefers not to do so, as at the level we have now reached, the affair is inter-personal to such an extent that the term 'book', so fitting earlier, is somewhat distanced. Rather this is the intimacy-provision for creator and creature when that creature is man. This is what book No. 1 provides for (the Bible), book No.2 is sub-structured to enable (the cells DNA and allied phenomena, atomic parameters and provisions), book No. 3 ascends to substantiate, book No. 4 arises to confirm. We shall however give it a name: there is in this fifth dimension, a correlation that is spiritual in kind, so that it may be termed scope for spiritual communication, and for concord. We are moving from the concept of 'book' to that of 'look', or inter-personal interchange.
This allows testing of promises, assimilation of pronouncements, reaction to orders, comprehension of commands, in a SETTING of illumination of conspectus, like a search-light revealing from the nose of an aeroplane, the configuration of the land far below, and something of the ways of those who live there. This is an ultra-programmatic conspectus, and an inter-personal opening. It is a vista on the divine.
It is complicated by just one vital feature, which is equally a vital failure, such as one may get in a damaged automobile, or TV. There is a perverse streak which surfaces in man, so that the more the promises of God in the Bible are fulfilled, and objectively they all are always found to be of this kind, the less they are wanted; the more the prophecies are brought into history, like obedient little lambs in a fenced paddock, the more is the distaste; the more the disciplines for folly, the more the folly, or the less the concern. While this is not like rectilinear motion, a mere reciprocity, and is complicated by the resilience and capacity granted to the immaterial spirit of man, happily able to divorce itself in imagination and purposes proposed for itself, from almost anything real, at will: it nevertheless is a thrust, an historical trend.
It is one reaching high points at fairly regular stages of our history, as first one philosopher and then another, proposes some folly such as is shown in Chs. 2,3, and 10 of SMR. Many follow. It is modish to follow. Tomorrow, few follow, and there is a new modishness.
That occurs on one side of the actualities, the human.
On the other, there is a vastly different attestation, and we find this.
- The word of God, in simple, plain actuality and fact, does not do this.
- It stays so fixed that the fixed stars almost seem variable by comparison.
- It does not yield a micro-unit in its style, its proposals, its propositions, its claims and its results.
- Like a great tennis player in a tournament in good form, it covers every contingency, all assault, and seems not at all to be fazed by any fiasco, however impudent,
- whether that of the goddess of reason in the French Revolution, which did not seem to bequeath too many goodies,
- or the god of forces in those so different systems, each devoid of reality,
- such as those of Nazism and Communism.
As we have shown in great detail, the irrational inanities of organic evolution, an imaginary third force system for what far transcends it, like those of inalienable subjectivism, a sort of intellectual schizophrenia, these cannot even stand up to routine rational enquiry. (Cf. A Spiritual Potpourri, Chs. 1-9, That Magnificent Rock, Chs. 1,8, SMR Chs. 1-2 etc.; and for the 'subjectivism', SMR Ch.3 and Barbs, Arrows and Balms, Item 7, for example.)
Yet this febrile fiasco continues (cf. detailed developments in SMR Ch.2), with parallels for other aspects of life, this phase readily being replaced with almost knee-jerk reactionary relish, by that, one soon to be junked option dismissed while some other fabrication is knocked up, and then in turn destroyed, so that generations pass and are sown in the muck, by the million ... on a regrettable error like Darwinism, which is contra-factual, and its many maids in waiting, hoping when mature to replace it; or Freudianism (cf. SMR Ch.4, Section I), which is rationally not possible and its replacements.
Meanwhile, both and all failing, the next generation pays what the last did not.
The price of high philosophic fashion
is low rotting in war, folly begetting and formalising folly,
pride enhancing pride,
ignorance replacing knowledge,
hope replacing evidence,
survival replacing spirit,
self-service being preached in place of self-sacrifice,
as if to survive were some bright idea,
and dead-hearted relics of humanity were the new anti-heroic heroes, neither knowing nor understanding life, and grabbing land or money or provinces or power, or lusting for other territories or nations, in endless confusion, war
and perversely necessary strife about what is less than life. Alas many devotees meet the sod somewhat too early in illustration of the fanciful character of the mischiefs fashionably followed; and others are caught in their turmoil.
This quite naturally is the other side of being made in the image of God, that is, with a degree of capacity to formulate, postulate, propose, propound, create imaginary pathways and bypass God in mind, though not in destiny. It is necessarily so if we are to have something of that power, for nothing "determines" God. We cannot be like Him in this, that we are not increate, eternal from the beginning - but on the contrary, creatures, products; but we can in the realm of designated inter-change, of spiritual arousing and dousing, arrival and departure, make furrows which when it rains, become a quagmire, into which the race habitually descends. Nor is it merely an ideational matter; that is one facet. It is also behavioural, cultural, political and so forth, as different specialised consequences accrue, and then in turn, make their contributions to the disastrous melee.
This then merely illustrates the ACCURACY of that particular Biblical dictum concerning our meaning, position and, for that matter and as a result, our plight as mankind. This is for example found formulated in Ephesians 4:18-19, 2:1-10, John 1, Jeremiah 17:9, with the corresponding advice of Jeremiah 9:23-24 - cf. The Biblical Workman Ch. 4, on the one side; and fashioned in history, on the other. The third feature is that it is also reaching crescendo proportions of a specified dimension, in history, within the historical framework portrayed for this occurrence (namely now, in this generation - cf. SMR Ch.8).
The next phase of this 5th., this inter-personal dimension, after the inter-relation of the book from the mind of one to the mind of the other, from the life of one, the Creator, to the fallen life of the other, is this. BECAUSE that which has been divinely enabled in the grandest invention of freedom (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri, Ch. 16, The Flashing Falls of Freedom), can maul and malign life, trivialising and abusing it, it is the necessity that there be removal or remedy as shown so often earlier and elsewhere in this site (e.g. SMR Ch.1, Repent or Perish Ch.2).
The mess of spiritual, mental, moral and physical folly, directed at God or man, or environment, or all, can be spared for a time without contradiction of the Maker (cf. SMR Ch.1, pp. 30ff.), provided there be a rescue package, a remedial opportunity, so that this is not a sanctified and accepted folly, this world's ways, but an site for seeking and a place for remedy, even if but few seize it. What is this remedy ? What enables God's own self-sufficiency, His own creation and His own presentation of His own ways and will, to meet with man's grasping and grabbing, defiling and defaulting, warring on the God who makes facts, by denying facts and so lying, spoiling the inter-relationships of His conceptual items, wrought into existence and permitting some measure of mutuality ?
As to that, there is a read-out. It is better than a riot act rendering. It is infinitely superior. It involves the use of our image-bearing status before God, as a ground for His taking the same, showing how it is to be used, bearing the penalties for misuse, and channeling the merits so obtained and the pardon so available to those who WANT this, Himself the longsuffering base, but also the eventual Judge, just as He has already judged much in history, which comes shortly to its predicted culmination, in strict accord in all points, with His magnificently prepared routines and chronological sequences provided in biblical prophecy for millenia (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
That is called the Gospel. That, itself, in turn was predicted thousands of years ago, and many centuries before its basis in the excursion of God, the Son, into this world occurred (cf. The Everlasting Gospel, Item 17, Barbs, Arrows and Balms). In this, He made a platform for retrieval, in that the public defamation and physical anguish, the legal penalty of death and the social dismissal were all precisely what mankind's misuse of his equipment, all 5 grand phases of it, merited. The platform the Gospel gives is Christ, the Messiah beyond all criticism, the grace beyond all comparison, the sacrifice which cancelled the doom of sin, by bearing it, for all who receive this provision (John 1:12, Matthew 20:28).
Catching up with this in sound style, redeeming spiritually, in justice, in judgment, in destiny, in doom, for this is no machine but an inter-personal reality (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch.5) , God has sounded the death of death (cf. Hosea 13:14, Hebrews 2, Acts 2, I Corinthians 15, Philippians 3:20-21). He has PERSONALLY met it for His people; and all are frankly called to come. This He has done while providing equally the remedy for quarantine, exclusion, being Himself set apart in death, scorned, dumped like refuse (cf. Isaiah 53, Matthew 26ff.).
"Death," He says, "I will be your plagues" - Hosea 13:14, and this He has now long since done, having wrought it by first vicariously dying, and then victoriously breaking death and rising, all this for man, such as will receive it (John 1:12ff., Isaiah 53:4-6).
This He did by actually bearing the disasters and disrepute of man in the physical format of a man, the scoffing and satire of the religious officials being most useful for the purpose as planned. This format was something made easier by that God who always knows the end from the beginning, through His being Himself a plurality in One, existing in persons
- as Speaker and Spoken,
- Father, Son and Spirit,
- Lover, Loved and Love, so that the despatch,
like the problem, being foreseen, could readily be executed. This was duly done in its predicted time, resulting in the foretold execution of the Son. (Cf. Predestination and Freewill, SMR Ch.8, initial pages, and Ch.1).Naturally, the Son being innocent, and all-powerful, although the vulnerability He assumed in the form of a man spoke for sin, allowing it to make penal impact, did not avoid the object of His coming, the guilt of those who make with Him the transaction of receiving Him as Lord, Saviour and satisfaction for sin; yet the triumph which followed spoke of His increate character, so that even in justice, no judgment could cling to Him, merely to His format. Thus He died, but He rose (cf. SMR Ch.6, Biblical Blessings, Appendix IV, The Magnificence of the Messiah).
He went, but His spirit went immediately back to His Father.
That is phase and stage 1, or if you will, stage 2, the prophecy of it all being stage 1, the performance the second. Stage 3 is the return of this Royalty to His throne on earth, not like a tyrant, seizing with mere power what He aspires to gain, but as Saviour, having seized what ALONE can make man governable, the grace of God as His dynamic, and left His claim in the demolition of what claims us, and will damn all who refuse Him, because of the truth (Romans 2).
6) Now we move to our next arena.
This is the 6th dimension, the inter-personal donation which follows from and is culmination of the interpersonal-exchange. Here is the remedial, the divine to the human, the transformatory in spirit and in heart, in destiny and in significance; and as it is personal in its process, so it is personal in its consequence. From this, an indissoluble union on a specialised basis occurs, open to one and one, not to many en masse, so that a person among mankind can become a member of the kingdom of heaven, the commonwealth of grace through the purchase, the grace and the favour of Jesus Christ, the Lord.
THE CONTEXT COMBINED,
THE LIFE REVEALED,
THE MEANING THAT BECKONS
Let us then consider this excerpt in our new context.
So all of it is covered, the initiation and the desecration, the marvel with the wonder, and the marring with the woe, the origination and the consummation, the incarnation and the evacuation for sin, the compassion and the kindness, and the judgment to come, the rebellion and the relief for renegacy, the devilishness within man so readily apparent, far beyond mere lust and ravishing, and the angelic chords which are often struck, but then frequently mocked, the aspiration and the desperation, the remedy and the restoration, the explanation of his intellectual redundancies, in the very face of his brilliance, and the information concerning both his source and meaning (cf. SMR Chs. 5, 3, 10). Nothing is omitted, all is covered, nothing is difficult once the basis is seen, and all things in the interstices of the model made verbally from God, meet the model in the interstices of man, his history, his variability, his heights and his depths, his irresolvably ungoverned follies, and their ready resolution, both in word and indeed, in the Gospel of remedy.
To be sure, without the word of the living God, and His gospel of remedy in particular, what is found in this world ? it does not mean, it does not work, it is not valid, it is filled with antinomies for the mind and antagonisms for the spirit, murder and mayhem, for man without God. What would you expect of a superior aircraft always flying, and always denying that it is made, asking some part of itself to heal other parts, and always therefore, in the sheer inanity of such a procedure, crashing. What would you think if it THEN had the audacity, the sheer hide, effrontery, arrogant pretension and dimness of wit, all combined and rolled up into one like cake with raisins, and ginger, cheese and strawberries alike, to COMPLAIN!
What would
you think of the Lord who having done all, in His own Person, then waits till
the time is ripe, and has waited these two thousands of years (II Peter 3:9),
because He is longsuffering, and gives man what He has always given him, every
opportunity, just as He has given such a variety of nodes, of methods of
enquiry, and domains of discovery, yes and platforms of action! Is it surprising
that you hear the dull whining of the crescendo coming, that it is intensively
cacophonic, that blood is beginning to cover the earth like some expensive
fertiliser, that man brutalises himself, and seeking to explain himself in
violent terms, abuses his intricate nature with rude hands and dim wit, spoiling
his soul, despoiling his environment, waylaying his very new generation, the
youth, with shameless shambles of pretentious pretences, or that God Himself has
from the first, made clear the judgment, which now comes
at the last ?
Could it possibly surprise you that in love, He who came left His visiting card, the Bible, and relaying His own words of millenia, relayed for the millenia to come, what it would become ? and that HE would come when the game was up ? and no game, but mayhem of soul, mind and spirit, mixed with pride and spiritual languor ? Is it at all surprising, then, that judgment will be according to truth (Romans 2) ? What IS surprising, and delightfully so, is this, that in patience HE STILL RECEIVES the penitent, still hears the cry of faith, still holds open the arms which Israel despised, and yes, still does so to Israel, as well as to all the Gentile nations, even to those who oppress the Jew, yes and the Gentile likewise!
NOW is the day of salvation (I Corinthians 6:1-2). Exult, and exalt Him, for still the dawn of the inferno is not rising above the horizon, and still the final delusion is not yet in the throne of temporary power, and still He awaits, and still the call goes on, which neither millenia nor folly itself can stifle, till the Judgment sits. Come then! and having come, walk in the Spirit of Him whose love invented freedom, to enjoy the freedom of His love (cf. Revelation 22:17, Matthew 11:28ff., John 6:37, 10:9,27-28).
Here is the defining drama, of liberty for love, and of lust for hate, of judgment for all, and of mercy in the drama which met its crescendo at the appointed time (cf. SMR pp. 886ff.), and comes to its culmination shortly (Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
On this topic, and in this theme, see also Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and Christ, the Wisdom of God and the Power of God Ch. 7.
NOTES
Of interest here is the actual verbalisation of the romance of pseudo-science. It is found cited in Creation magazine, Sept. - Nov. 2007, p. 27. In the way in which both politicians and some academics like to avoid the issue, there is reference to the actualities of the case of 'naϊve' views. You can in exact parallel speak of someone as having a scare campaign, when he brings up the simple factual realities, and points out the implications and possibilities in due perspective.
Such is not merely illegitimate in logic, but inane in method. Phrases instead of facts may appeal, but it is not by this method that science has either earned or deserved respect. In fact, it is only one form of human knowledge, and when there is abandonment of the concept of examining evidence and formulating hypotheses and devising tests for them, so that one abides by the results, and of comparing these with other cognate hypotheses and considering concurrence and the harmonious whole, so that one may prefer this either to dissonant and mutually contradictory concepts, which merely make thought invalid, or to frank anti-verification of a categorical character, however much the cultural appeal may be: then science is just suggestion, either auto-suggestion or propaganda, depending on the audience.
This becomes not only metaphysics but bad metaphysics. It is founded on desire, flavoured with ignorance carefully bought, and moves by an intuitive grasp of principles neither coherent nor possible - which is one reason why the results are so rigorously contrary to such evolutionary theories that such nonsense as abandoning the rigours of scientific method for the asininities of desire might even reach the surface. On this, see Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13 and Secular Myths or Sacred Truth.
Thus, having rejected the concept of the 'standard' scientific method, for such matters as concern them, they speak of the actual one. It is quite an admission. It is no matter of making predictions to be verified, but ... what ? Well first of all, there must BE no test, or if there is, you must not be too concerned about it, and may even disregard its teaching.
If you are presenting, either by insurance or for holiday fare or for politics, something which is false, a fad, then it is imperative to avoid the facts. They would show you up, and if you want people to show up, then you suppress them. That appears to be the imperil method. One way to do this is to evidence distaste for the facts, make them appear unimportant, and put forward some appealing matrix of imagination only.
This appears to be the case here. In contrast, then, to the evidential-hypothetical-verificatory approach, we are told this: "In contrast, the work of many evolutionists involves the reconstruction of the past. The methods they use do not conform to the standard view of "The Scientific Method" ... (This quotation is taken from R.A. Cooper's "The goal of evolutionary instruction, belief or literacy ?" and the pith of the point is what is here pursued, as a principle thus enunciated.)
What then is the pith ? By such methods, scientists may relax from former stringencies. They are neither constrained by endless failures of their hypotheses, endless confirmations of creation in the 'standard', that is the evidential method, the logically insistent way of checking what you say with what is done, and what you think with its validity and verification and confirmation mutually. It does not matter. We have seen this in simple format in SMR pp. 140ff., so that where there is not even a case to answer, evidentially and in terms of scientific method, creation alone meeting the arenas of contest as to fact and verification, yet the opposite is deemed apposite and the outrageous animus of evolutionary jargon is preferred: not however by the truth! It continues past all romancing.
We have considered such acrid anomalies in detail, in the case of ludicrous and unverified and even irrational theories which some evolutionists then justly criticise, one camp of them pointing out the errors of the other, in such sites as Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4, 5, 6. Now it is presented in principal. Do not worry about the thing you say not being the thing you see, the thing that happens, that thing that verifies, and do not be aghast if the predictions of your principles fade into mockery! It is 'naϊve' so to do.
This is the message to consider, or rather the mental massage. You reconstruct the past on the basis of absurd and impossible theological (or rather anti-theological) principles, in mindless metaphysics and mindless perception (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 10 and Ch. 8 below).
That is, there are two phases of the mindless involved. Firstly, it is assumed that the mindless makes the marvels of mind which are seen both in man's use of it and in the evidences of its intelligence criteria in what has been made, not by man (cf. SMR pp. 211ff.), so that we have a cosmos of magic, which is not even a cosmos, so we start with a pseudo-cosmos which in mindless fashion makes the mentalities of man and the mental marvels of nature. Then, as if this is not enough, we are mindless of the results of our particular premises as they work out in verificatory areas of the arena of test. We invent what is irrational and then confirm it by what declines verification. What kind of status does the doubly mindless have as a criterion for mind, and what kind of relevance does mindlessness as a model have to mental assessment and argument! To say that it has none, is to flatter it. It is an imposture.
The double mindless, indeed, unlike the double negative in mathematics, does not cancel out the mindless. It merely makes it a logical disaster and an absurd effrontery to dare to present mere ungoverned, irrational prejudice to minds that evaluate by criteria which match the milieu of mere magic and uncontrolled dreams. Yes, the methods of many evolutionists are thus, and they are not standard scientific method in THIS field. The reason is simple to find: how can you indent science to serve your irrational irreligion if you are going to fuss with facts! Speak in the grand manner, and with a 'big picture' dazzle your students into a submission which your marking and examination techniques will make all the easier for them to ... imbibe.
This is "the lie" of which Romans 1: speaks. It does not speak amiss (Romans 1:25).
It is important to abstract out a central principle of such teaching, as we have done here, irrespective of adornments, so that the nature of the case can be construed. It is so no less with creation, which we do continually, because it fits with a completeness which makes its beauty irresistible, like some magnificent prodigy of an aircraft, tellingly delivering on every side of expectation and verification in flight. Filght ? that is verification, and it DOES matter, as any passenger will tell you. We are all passengers in this world; and it is even more important to avoid precipitancy which leads to crash. One of the best ways to ensure this, is to be so intoxicated with fancy, that fact is no longer a constraint.
The mind of God moreover, to the contrary of all this, is precise as is His brilliance of method in the technique of living beings, and He has foretold in His word, the Bible, that man will, in his teaching and approach to things, turn aside to fables (II Timothy 4:4). A fable ? an inventive story about things which has no possible conception of causal continuity or adequacy, but lets imagination reflect oddly in ways pleasing to dream or for impishness to detect. Such is precisely the case with the extraction of everything, either all at once, or in stages, or in divisions and diversions, from nothing, or having anything for no reason, with its specifications, causeless come in casuistry (cf. Causes).
It is not just for children's enjoyment, however, at this level; it is for their defilement: and these, they grow to be men and women. Now this in Paul's word to Timothy, is for the period that reaches to ultimacy, and here people just will not be able to compose themselves, but with 'itching ears' will 'heap to themselves teachers' of this kind; and in context, it is quite clear that this will occur not least in what call themselves, despite their departure from the faith, 'churches'. Thus we see not only the notable and diffusely spreading case cited in Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3, but many seminaries, and leaders, wilfully siding with evolutionists as in the notorious case noted in Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 8, concerning the British Bishop siding with the benighted and belligerent views of the secularist.
Thus the scope of secularism and the uninhibited unholiness of making a new religion while remaining in what is called a church is precisely as biblically predicted, and predicated of the advanced part of our present Age (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8).
What would you expect, when God makes His will and way so clear (cf. Amos 3:7, II Peter 1:19-20)! God is happy for man to test performance (Isaiah 41, 43, 48, John 20 with Thomas!), even when for good reason and frequently bad motive, man is not! Truth loves light; darkness trembles at it.
In fact, it is because man loves to sheer off from his grounds for comprehension, the inviolably diverse provisions in his own being, that he ends not merely with the just impact of the meaningless, his personal hell which is a mere preliminary in this, that it is not so, whereas judgment for such unconscionable omission as that of his own soul, is something that is so, in the very domain of truth and justice itself. It is because of this likewise that his truncated version of what he must investigate leads to something which not only is not, but COULD not be true. How can a part be true of the whole, let alone that which omits its own powers of estimation and spirit!
On the other hand, it is the constant verification of man's error in this, as of the truth for its own part by brilliant contrast, that not only does it leave no antinomy, no contradiction, just as it makes no omission, but where it leads is where independent verification also exists, in both the Bible and in Christ. Like an inoperable cancer, the ways of unreason, like those of disfaith (q.v.) lead only to enlargement of what is not desired, and failure in what is needed.
