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Chapter One

DIVINE AGENDA

News 134

A Recent Look at the Heavens:
their significance, their ways, their source
and their consummation

Arp and Astronomy
Back to the Bible
Coming to the Creator


Two articles in the Technical Journal associated with  Creation magazine, deal with developments of thought in the astronomer Arp. They are found in the latest Volume 14 (No. 3) 2000. The first, entitled "Doppler toppler", is a review of Arp's Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science. The second, pp. 46ff., is titled "A different view of the universe", authored by Bill J. Worraker and Andrew C. McIntosh. This sets forth a review of two works, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies by Arp, and the second, Arp's above noted work in the first article.

From these reviews some interesting facets of Arp's contribution appear, and their relevance to Christian Apologetics can now be considered, and all this in the light of the divine agenda, out for some millenia, but far too little known!

HURRY ALONG

Here we see, notably,  a concept of high-speed no-mass primordial propulsion, slowing to 'achieve' mass*1. Such thoughts cannot of course solve the energy-mass achievement as to its origin, for energy is already a capacity to do work, which must reside in that which is not nothing, so that it can HAVE the capacity.

Thus how there arrive mass-energy results is simply a shifting of the question, how the system acquires itself, in order to host the same; and how the compound variable, mass-energy, so volatile in format, so secure in being, so rigorous in formulae, is instituted remains open to logical analysis, as it always must be.

In all questions of beginnings, it is a deadly human facility to ignore the structure into which some imagined or actual item of thought or observation appears, next to ignore the causal componency, the labour entities and their cause, so that everything arises in ways which frankly make ANY science seem extraordinarily sober, and any fairy tale seem amazingly near. Things 'happen' in ways never illustrated; causes do not bother to operate in ways unexemplified in all confirmed science, interfaces are not in vogue and the mental correlates of system and code remain as far removed from sight, as Dad's University training, from the eyes of a rebellious 'teen-ager.
 
 

THE DIVINE DRAMA AND THE HUMAN DRAMATIST

Thus, to take a causal analogy in the area where real things are observable with logical concatenation, however long you may envisage Shakespeare's plays to have taken to be thought, you still need Shakespeare to write them. Time does not sanction, nor does system cohere. They are inserted by symbols arising from what the symbols so elegantly express, thought, which is a function of mind, as is the capability of interpreting, creating and rendering practically operative, the symbolic systems from which meaning is eventually derived by the reader. Time is merely a variable of the magnitude of the undertaking, the capabilities of the creator, and his preference, his will and the deployment of suitable imagination, in the interstices of adequate, and duly organised data, together with such other elements as emotional perception, moral sensibility, human understanding, orientation to the divine, synthetic capabilities, dramatic knowledgeability, and so on and on. These are all aspects of a mind, in the correlative role to spirit, which is that beautiful blend, in potential, with which humans have been invested, and of which past all comparison, man's creator is possessed.

But Shakespeare in the realm of the observable creation ? Whether he blew on his pen nib, or secured expensive parchment, whether he could write fast or more slowly in terms of manual dexterity, whether he first cut a string about the paper or not, these are material considerations, certainly relevant, but not in the matrix of the event. They are in fact in such a case, mere peripherals. They may, to be sure, give some slight indication of some of the characteristics of the playwright who did all this; but it is in the signifying symbols, the words themselves, in the thought they betoken and the principles they evoke, that the purpose and purport actually lie.

Thus with whatever craft you write, you still need the sufficient literary cause for the compilation of even one drama. Since thus adequacy must be total for any of the plays to 'arise' with their various spiritual, moral, intellectual, literary, emotional, personal, social and political tones and overtones, orientations and operations, the other questions are all but immaterial. IN this way, the material side of the universe is nearer to immaterial to the purpose and meaning of all its synthetically brilliant correlations, codes, symbols and language.

It is not entirely so; the way God may have scanned forth energy or matter, or the units He may have used in the creation (parallel to Shakespeare's ink), it is all very interesting, even if frankly in much unknowable because of the infinitude of His knowledge, wisdom and power, so that it is rather like a child trying to see how Daddy does his accounting work, when but 7 years of age. There may be clues, and these are certain to be rather evanescent as the scope of the maker and the capacity of the reviewers are so different, and the means of securing results open to so much, that in fact of course, there are endless theories about whether this or that was the way it was done.

You would expect that. It is the nature of the case, and constitutes a verification of it. Indeed, and further, when many try to omit the author of the universe, rugged rebuttals are predictable and unco-operative data are certain, leading to forseeable controversy amongst those who rebel from reality. Things do not arise; they are caused. From this, there is no logical escape, and all efforts can, do and must, only fail (cf. SMR Ch.3, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 11).

It was done. That is the first and foremost point. It took what it takes,  to do it.
 
 

TOYS FOR PLAY AND LAWS THAT WORK

Toying with means and inventing steps, therefore, will do nothing to reduce the intensity and scope of the power and intelligence needed for scenario construction and consummation. In particular, the concept of things coming (by a nothing process) from nothing (a nothing thing)*2 is rather like saying, 'The answer is a lemon!' which, however satisfying to the frustrated and the negative missionary of anti-method, is merely logically irrelevant, psychologically inviting though it may be. That, however, is not our present interest!

Whether, then, the reversal of the (never verified as wrong) Second Law of Thermodynamics in a myriad of inter-related dances of certain rhythm and beat is one anguish of distorted imagination, whether it be dreamed of by this means or that. Creation ex nihilo is STILL the requisition for all the players in the routine imagined.  Whether something is seen as coming from nothing in one vast leap of non-means producing by non-production (since production is something and could not be there on this theory), Aladdin's Lamp type results (by HE had the LAMP! and the djinns!), or whether there are imagined, in Arp style, centres of proliferation: this is from the causal point of view, in the ultimate, not relevant. Many small centres from nothing, producing by non-production, products of note, is not different from ONE large centre (of nothing, so that it could not in fact be the centre, nothing having no spaces for any centre to find itself) doing the same.

It is all EX NIHILO quite explicitly, quite self-contradictorily, quite immediately. The moment ANY non-nothing arises, it is instantaneous. Compared with that, many or few non-spaces for non-events to have their non-interaction in order to become events, in an environment, and products in place, is quite beside the point.
 

  • It is rather like asking whether you would rather become a billionaire by beating the air once or a thousand times, given that the air is not there, you are not there and beating is thus a verbal irrelevance.

 

This is by no means to undervalue the work of Arp, whose non-conformist mentality is well able to see in other systems, such as the Big Bang, the sheer futility and ludicrousness that they in such cases possess. His efforts to make observation have SOME bearing is refreshing. The pith of it however is not too different from what he criticises, for the moment you HAVE the many centres, you merely have to duplicate the entire ex nihilo production many times, FIRST; and nothing is logically altered at all. You merely ignore the start, instead of having it all at once from nowhere in no time, since nothing does not have any time, and if something did, that could not be nothing, since something with time is transparently, NOT NOTHING!

On the positive side, however, it is interesting that Arp also dismisses all emphasis on dark matter, confirming  earlier indications of its evidential drought, and to complete the debacle of pompous authority, the priests of humanistic science, he speaks for his disposition of things, of "white holes" rather than "black holes" (cf. p. 48, Technical Journal - TJ -  named). Active galactic nuclei are envisaged as providing this mode of production. There are of course, at the purely technical level, some parallels here with Humphreys' work, as noted in That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, Part E. Thus the swings of emphasis proceed, sometimes supported by tenuous observations, usually supplied with titanic suggestions, routinely countermanded by lack of facts, new facts, and a sadly deficient sense of logical structure, whereby means are placed where they are inadequate, and portentously and indeed solemnly spoken of, as if preoccupation with the undoubted fact of the stage of production at which wheels occurred, in some ways explains 'cars'. It is the more amazing when the factory is not observed, merely various movements of labourers from time to time, among the cars.

Arp of course himself does some fascinating work as an iconoclast. His assaults on the Big Bang theory are tireless, his findings of various intricate relationships and orderly phenomena in the universe as he has studied its ways astronomically, and codified the findings is the opposite of what such a casual theory would require. This has of course often been shown before (as in That Magnificent Rock -  TMR - loc. cit. ), but these additions continue to confirm the juvenility of the concept which he so justly attacks.

Thus we find attested this datum: that structure and form is constantly being seen more imperviously in the astronomical realm, as earlier in the biological and the physical. Thus Arp declares (p. 47 in TJ): "It is a curious and exciting property of the universe that a great deal of extragalactic matter appears to be arranged in linear formations." Other stridently striking geometrical structures were noted in TMR  Ch. 7, pp. 180Jff., 180Nff.. Again, Arp considers the more Newtonian space-time situation may be correct after all, in that 'curved space' may be a misnomer.

Similarly Arp points out that the figure for universal background radiation - 2.7 -  was closely related to one derived from the tired light theory (i.e. 2.8, a theory not, he feels, to be ruled out, p. 42 op. cit.).
That in turn fits perfectly into a creation-deterioration situation. Again (p. 48 op.cit.), he finds in particular,  we read, little or no evidence for the existence of the 'dark matter' which 'is supposed to dominate the mass content of the universe'. In this, he removes the hypothetical ties that would bind the spiralling galaxies, still inspired with their spirals, like a necklace of glory. This - with the wholly unevidenced production of the mass-energy continuum, which physics finds at the material level, as elementary - leaves galaxies fitting tidily into a far earlier creation than materialists like to envisage, very much as in Slusher (q.v. Index, and SMR Chs.1-2).

The retention of such intricately beautiful form - indicative of adequate constraint to form in remarkable geometrical structure, in the first place, is no mate to the current concept of the age of the universe. This bespeaks youth, not crabbed, far less chaotic age, in things astronomical. The facts are never happy with fiction, and continue to bite the bellicosities of unbelief.
 
 

THE MENTALITY AND THE CHATTER OF THE MIND
THAT IS MASTERED BY MATTER

It is timely here to notice that materialism*3 is wholly logically at an impasse, since it makes use of a theory depending on independent logical, mental validity, as a matter of right wrong, when if its basis were right, this would not merely be irrelevant but unattainable. When things merely happen, the concept of right and wrong, such as MUST apply to materialism or contrary theories or approaches, is simply perfectly inapplicable. It is however wholly utilised as basic to the presentation.

This is what is known as a contradiction in terms, and precedes logically, the simple reductionism with which materialism obsessively surrounds itself, lacking all interface and every correlation with what is to be 'explained'. It is the humanist correlate of Freud's sex obsession and  Darwin's survival compulsion, and as absurd, for survival can only succeed arrival, sex merely creates kids and various mental states or expresses certain spiritual meanings, and does not encapsulate what it symbolises, while with Marx, you have the same reductionism in politico-economic spheres, as if making things generated justice, as if happening made order, or lawlessness made law. All these things are not only sub-scientific, systematically lacking the logic, the grounds, the principles and the verifications required, but anti-scientific, not proceeding from ordered evidence to adequate formulations in explanation, but from an idea to the impasse in un-cooperative attestation which merely laughs at the folly and pride.

It is the sheer majesty of utterance on the one hand (as observed in Psalm 8), the utter diversity amongst itself of academic doctrine on the other, the erratic wandering and wavering in astronomy which arrests the most casual observer, who is at all willing to think things through. The GROUNDS for such conduct and the IMPULSION for such short-circuiting of method have been considered from their scriptural and empirical attestations before this (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Repent or Perish Ch. 7), and often lashed in terms of the observable RESULTS of it, by highly reputable figures such as Lord Zuckerman, and Professor LØvtrup, Cambridge Professor Sir Fred Hoyle,  Dr W.R. Thompson in their erudite works (cf. SMR Ch. 2, and SMR Index). Now to these is added Halton Arp. It is all part of the restlessness that can find no rest, because it will not rest where reality is to be found, and tries to found it where it is not to be found, and so is confounded (Isaiah 57:20, 28:12, 30:15-18 cf. Repent or Perish Chs. 2,  5, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 8).

Before however we proceed to this denunciatory material from Arp, we should consider the beauty of the spiralling galaxies, just as that of flowers and oceans, lakes and waterfalls in their leafy setting so often, of rocks and arbours, colour and sparkling, dappled or shimmering light effects (cf. SMR Ch. 5, pp. 431ff.). The sheer majesty, the intricate beauty of such wonders, small or great,  is just as 'real' a phenomenon as that of flowers, and the technical floral underlay  parallels the procedural structure. Such magnificences of might in minimal or maximal forms, are not the basis but the structure for beauty,  itself as demanding of adequate cause as the means towards it.

Beauty remains a superimposition on the vast and solemn magnitudes that attest the majesty of the Creator. Again, as Wilder Smith pointed out, the MEANING is superimposed on directive nucleic structures (cf. SMR pp. 209-210), which bear it and apply it. In accounting for things, it is always unwise to assume that some theory you may hold (such as that of material things) is what is 'real', while the validity of the mind that holds such things, is peripheral. If the latter is not 'real', then the former is DOUBLY UNREAL. It stands on another realm logically, from the first.
 

Not only, then,  is matter a product, molecules sharp with attachability potential, combinatorial qualities, power to co-sponsor wonderful associations in their myriads, called compounds, in the pre-arranged systematics of the whole, but its macro-astronomical graces parallel its micro-attributes.

Far from evenly distributed in space, as the pseudo-Aristotelian blind assumptions would have had it and as Slusher exposes so well (SMR Ch.2), it has decided features in its spatial arrangements, fascinating in kind, vastly removed from scatter. Like all things in the field, its flow is down, its past was up, and it levels down apart from stabilising controls, as the thrust towards entropy propels it to its rest. People like Arp are forever finding marvellous new ways in which, like perpetual motion, the impossible can come; but it never comes any more than does life on Mars or increase in information without intervention in biology - or super-man. The holocaust was one of the chief features of the last studied attempt to 'arrive', with Nietzsche and race, at super-man.

Man, however, with strikingly and stridently obvious attestation, does not go up though he may progressively use his talents and capacities, except by outside power and intelligence; and it is only the Creator who brings him up to where he should have stayed, but with vast added stablisers, through redemption (Ephesians 4:24). His main claim to fame in going up, is the once envisaged scientific possibility that he would manage, through atomic power, to rip off the earth's atmosphere! We may say that children, too, are creative when they saw up the furniture; and in a way they are: but it is not really the same as making it.

In nature, what is made is made by an active causation not now operative, and the time to envisage the opposite, is when it is found, not imagined. What is found is this, and ONLY this, ALWAYS this, ENTIRELY this. The law corrals the cattle of circumstance, and only intelligence can abort its action, by COUNTER-MEASURES adequate to cancel its effects, but not its operation.

Eternity only, it is which holds the undamaged power simply to remain: this universe is subjected as the Bible says, to vanity, and the vanity is not merely that of creation in toils and turmoils, but of man mentally in much the same, ever trying to avoid, never succeeding, as soon as lost in one game, starting another, while the resources wear out and the logic laughs at the misdirected ingenuities, blindly brilliant, and brilliantly obfuscatory of facts.
 
 

ARP'S OWN MANIFESTO AGAINST
THE STURDY SANCTIONS
OF IMPULSIVE SCIENCE
AT WAR WITH RIGHT METHOD
AND MODEST OBSERVATIONAL DISCIPLINE

1.  Arp's first point is this. Assumptions have power not only to guide research but to become 'facts'. He cites conventional astronomers, at war with his observationally based findings on space structuring, and in particular concerning the alternate understanding of red-shift:

  • ' "This violates proven physics [i.e. their assumptions] and therefore must be invalid." ... The establishment always confuses data with theories.' (Michael J. Oard's citation, op.cit. p. 43).

Here (here italicised) is his dramatic summary of a common response.

 

This of course is PRECISELY what has been claimed in biology by Thompson, Zuckerman and LØvtrup, and in astronomy and indeed intelligence, by Hoyle.
 

2.  'The greatest mistake in my opinion, and the one we continually make, is to let the theory guide the model.  After a ridiculously long time it has finally dawned on me that establishment scientists actually proceed on belief that theories tell you what is true and what is not true' (loc.cit. from Oard's review).

The evolutionary model as shown in detail in TMR Chs. 1 and  8, does precisely this, in exact confrontation with anti-verification at levels which do not cease, but grow, with logic, with experiment and with its results. Here we have specialists in various scientific fields, excoriating the SAME evils, the same framing of fictitious frame-works and the dispersion of facts, like garbage, while, as LØvtrup shows and Thompson implies,  research funds flow quite selectively, like wanton princes in favour of establishment alogisms... the preferred non-options. It is not surprising that one of this genre has mourned the huge, even colossal waste in pursuing entrenched propaganda preferences, and so consuming much of the resources of a generation on what simply does not work.

3.  Becoming particular on red-shift interpretation, of astronomical wave-lengths, he declares:
"Regardless of how scientists think they do it, they start with a theory - actually worse - a simplistic and counter-indicated assumption that extragalactic redshifts only mean velocity. Then they only accept observations which can be interpreted in terms of this assumption" (Oard's review, loc. cit).

When we remember that Arp was staff astronomer at the Mt Wilson and Palomar Observatories in California for 29 years, and made extensive observations with great zeal and acumen, these particular points bear thought, and demand attention. To be sure, he commits in some ways the very errors he attacks, but at least there is a much clearer line between the actual observations and what they do NOT allow in inference, and his own naturalistic proclivities.

 

4. The perversity of pronounced methods and pronounced distortions of the same arrests Arp.
'One of the most self-evident principles which I heard voiced along the way is that in science "You can't vote on the truth". No matter how many people believe something, if the observations prove it is wrong, it is wrong. But as is often the case with humans it turns out that a lot of scientists actually believe exactly the opposite ... When it turns out that a large number of renegade specialists and amateurs believe contrary to the most prestigious experts, the latter say, well science is not democratic, it is what the people who know the most say - that is what counts.'

In other words, it is a self-validating phenomenon when it reaches this philosophic level, which is pervasive in the fields of biology, politico-economics, psychology and astronomy; but the 'self' tends not to be true of the proper sense, that is, showing itself to be true by what is found, but in the egotistic sense, BEING ACCEPTED on the basis of the authority of those who parade themselves as the criterion. If however man is the criterion, where is method! As has been noted so often on this site, scientific method is PRECISELY what is NOT operative in such fields as those noted, at the metaphysical level. Horrible philosophy, incredible logic and vast excursions into the irrational are the very matrix of the humanist-naturalistic fallacy, which is preached with a monotony which scarcely any church, however vague and liberal, has ever reached. Its 'bible' is desire, its evidence is anti-evidence and its insistence is poisonous.

Arp then is one more testimony to the false method which allows this.

It is not what might be called cussedness in the simply obstinate sense; it is if you will, rather a cursedness properly so-called, that in the broad and most popular/populous way, MAN CANNOT ABIDE GOD in His objective, propositional aspect, where you are TOLD the way, the gospel, of the grace, of the mercy, of the laws and of the righteousness of the Lord our Maker (cf. Matthew 7:13-14). 'At NO cost can this be tolerated' - is the almost programmatic response of many in, and out of science.  This is what we find. It is what the Bible spelled out thousands of years before Arp or that famous Chancellor of Glasgow University*4, or Thompson or Denton or Zuckerman or indeed the whole choir of dissent which, each in its place, exposes the pure folly and conceit in the old-fashioned meaning, of the negative folies of mankind, when he invades science with his philosophies, as often likewise, vagrantly flamboyant religions, and vices.

Education itself, quite apart from the dogmatic farce of indoctrination in such impositions of what is now mere tradition (cf. TMR Chs. 1, 8), in invaded by many more such evils than this one, as we will plan to illustrate in a later news item. One of these, the concept of the pure untainted glory of youth, so that discipline of thought and logic, spelling and grammar are deemed all but obscene in their intrusion, has had its dramatic effects in many countries, not least this one; so that the very means of exhibiting liberty, are seduced.

It scarcely increases the office of liberty, however, to scamp its implements; or of knowledge in its service, to evacuate its depth. In fact, the author in one of his tertiary works, was in this very field, subjected to the arcanely anomalous remonstration: "How could you possibly expect anyone to know all this!" The work in question was addressed to UNIVERSITY STAFF!

Philosophy has her wards and the universities can even deny their own name in research and knowledgeability, in the interests of the fashion parade which, to be sure, is now a ballet of humanism, secularism, reductionism, spiritual dilettantism, scholastic agnosticism and synthetic social algorithms, except in one thing: WE WILL NOT HAVE THIS MAN TO RULE OVER US! addressed to Christ.

Surely there may be residual religious universities; this however is not the point. The generic is now forging a new type, and many of its ways are precisely as Arp, and Hoyle and Denton and Zuckerman have indicated. Past this, is the higher generic, the spiritual, which in the arena of absolute truth is departed from by mankind, when without his articulate and confirmed Maker.

On this, he is not merely like those magnificently unco-operative sheep which find ANY way rather than the way the dog so strenuously indicates, but now more and more, do so with a zeal that is religious in kind, irreligious in content, except where the religion STARTS with the omission of the living God. In this regard, vague oddities and erraticisms of thought are quite welcome, since they have too little to offer, to form competition with the ... program which is arising, as we have seen in some detail in Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming... in Stepping out for Christ, and Tender Times for Timely Truths.

What then does Christ say: "Enter in at the strait (constricted) gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there are who go in there: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads to life, and few there be who find it. Beware of false prophets..."

What is here involved ?

This anti-observational, anti-empirical, irrationalist, relativistic and in its absolute self-assurance, self-contradictory spate of spurious propositions, placed on science like a pimple on the nose, includes such enormities as these:

1) READING THE PAST PRODUCTION SCENARIOS
FROM THE PRESENT PERFORMANCE OF THE CONSTRUCTION,

AND

2) HAVING BOOKS WRITE THEMSELVES,
FOR IT SAVES THE COST OF AUTHORS


Books however do not write themselves; nor do creations occur from nothing; nor does the way any creation, car or man, works - its rates and modes, represent a description of the factory, or the thought constraints of the builder.

Nor does wilful ignorance of the Creator augur well for the sentient creation, any more than any other theft, far less when the only rationally indicated manual is or becomes a subject for scorn, indifference or (attempted) seduction. The latter is the seminary method, so often met by the author from studenthood onward, and so unscrupulously used by the agents of destruction, whatever their subjectivistic equations might be, as they fight the objective truth with all the passion of earlier crusades, irrationalists appealing vainly to reason for their credentials, or to subjectivity when this will pass, anti-ministers in ministerial clothing : or to use Christ's own depiction, wolves in sheep's clothing (a title found, interestedly enough, in the Sermon on the Mount - Matthew 5-7).

Since Satan's ministers, says Paul in II Corinthians 11, can transform themselves into angels of light, there is by no means any assurance that such people REALISE their vulpine character. They too may be deceived, not least about themselves. That is but one reason why, in things medical or spiritual, it is best to find the objective facts, and not to confuse these with the merely hopeful aspirations of ignorance. (Cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5, Repent or Perish Ch. 2.)
 

ASSOCIATED ARTICLES AND COVERAGES:
 

  • For more in this field, in areas such as

   cosmology, chronology, physics, law
and the whole realm of the visible in terms of the invisible background and basis
(as in Hebrews 11:1-4), see:
 

·       SMR Chapter 2 Extension on Cosmology, Ch. 4, pp. 422Eff.,

·       Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium (REF) Ch. 13,

·       Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Chs.  4,  5,  6,  7, Epilogue,

·       Stepping Out for Christ, Chs 2,  7,  8 ,  9, 10 ;

·       and relative to an intimate correlation of the visible and the invisible in ACTION and observable correlation intimately,

 On the logical correlation, see 

  • Repent or Perish Ch. 7, That Magnificent Rock (TMR)  Ch. 5 , Barbs, Arrows and Balms  6, and 7, and

·       SMR Ch.3. On foundations, see SMR Ch.1.

·       On associated scientific method, see  TMR Chs. 1 and  8, SMR pp. 140ff., 931ff.. These of course are merely selections for convenient survey, and the Indexes can readily augment them.


  

NOTES and EXCURSION

*1
It is merely typical of this sort of logically errant, Don Quixote sort of position, that it does not even work theoretically in its own setting, merely a verification of its logical remissness.

Thus Michael J. Oard notes on p. 45 (op.cit.) that "physics laboratories show that photons transform into both matter and antimatter, and they do not form low-mass electrons that gain mass with time (p. 234)." This 'big problem' for Arp is merely a reflection in the material realm of the irrationality of trying to make it its own mother.

The young galaxies, ex dark-matter, remain young. Youth is so invigorating and old theories of old magics are so aged. It is the power behind youth which is beautiful, whether in man or matter. Its liberties to man, including that of false and foolish theorising, rise like Everest when man, not landing on the (mere) moon, but in the territory of the kingdom of heaven, belonging to the One who MADE space, not some mere object in it, "sits in the heavenlies" that are personal, not merely spatial (Ephesians 2:6).

  • "And has raised us up and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace you are saved through faith; and that is not of yourselves: it is the gift  of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them."

The beauty of this is that just as God created the universe and in turn the mind and the spirit of man, with the relish of a measure of reciprocity with Himself, without asking permission or seeking our aid, so He procures office for us in the heavenly arena, not of matter - an intelligence made yet not intelligent product - but spiritually. It is this which is not only personal, but individual and localised. Meanwhile, even in material things, there is present an aura of beauty, which the curse itself does not tame, though it compromises it sadly.

The structure and the inferior regions of creation, though damaged, are not destroyed. Man for his part however is derelict, and needs vital life from his source, which mercifully, like someone coming in a helicopter to a distressed yachtsman at sea, arrives on the scene without our aid or contribution, to draw us out of deep waters, which overflow.
 

  • Thus:


"Great is the mystery of godliness, for God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory" - I Timothy 3:16. While we are on 3:16 verses, look too at II Timothy 3:16, which gives the lead to the directions in the case: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness".

 

God, unlike barren reductionist theorists, makes provision that is all-encompassing, having encompassed in the first case, all that is, so that all that is to be received, is provided for from funds of truth and mercy, not only adequate, but apt and all-sufficient.
 
 

*2
Excursion

The Niceties of Nothing and
the Necessities of Something Operative and Adequate

A.
GO DOWNWARDS AS FAR AS YOU LIKE,
AND YOU STILL WILL NOT GET NOTHING
IT IS IN A REALM OF THOUGHT, WHICH IS SOMETHING

Apart from its ineptitude technically, as at *2 above, there is a far more important aspect of all the nice little nothings in the world. Even if it were so, a high-speed no-mass energy happily 'arising', to slow surefootedly as mass ... comes into being, cannot solve the energy-activity gusher which so miraculously comes sans base, sans basis, sans power, sans anything. Really, it is quite ridiculous to have miracles without anyone to do them! This atavism of philosophy should stop its ludicrous abasement to the abyss, and realise its predicament, using a parent it has 'slain' in its own mind!

To produce IN a system, what FOR that system requires mass-energy correlation, itemisation, concatenation, in fact RESULTS, merely is to shift the immediate to the mediate. The whole structure becomes a production unit (nothing comes by definition from nothing) where, just like babes from embryos, ordered, highly empowered magnificences proceed on their assigned and arranged courses. Babes, however, quite apart from their minds and spirits, are intensively and synthetically coded and called into being by command merely requiring activation. If it is so for an aspect, in their lives, much more so is it for the total in which they inhere!

However long, and indeed, with whatever crafts, were the production of Shakespeare's plays to be secured, you do, as we have noted in the text, still need Shakespeare to write them.  Since such adequacy must be total for the plays to 'arise' (indeed the slightest significant slip from his standards and style, conceptions and perspective, overview and orientation heights would remove the play from consideration), thus steps are irrelevant. Out-sourcing arrangements themselves have to be MADE and even if they were made, the spirit and heights of his mind have to be present, synthetically imprinting the end. Pen, paper, muscles... these do not 'explain' the plays. They are merely the media of manufacture, after the mental, moral and spiritual have resolved WHAT is to be produced. (Cf. SMR pp. 316Dff..)

Toying with means and inventing steps will do nothing to reduce the intensity and scope of the power and intelligence needed for scenario construction and consummation.

The reversal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (cf. Index) in a myriad of inter-related dances of certain rhythm and heat is one, whether it be dreamed of by this means or that. EX NIHILO ('from nothing' in terms of 'nature' which derives its determinate nature from the Naturalist who made it, and so gave it causally reputable existence) is STILL the requisition for all the players in the routine imagined. Anything coming from nothing is necessarily instantaneous - and all the 'container units', envisaged by Arp, imply is mere transport. It is the product which is important, relevant and necessary, assembled on board or before, by these means or those, but always not by mere travel.
 

  • It is travail not travel which is to the point in construction.

Indeed, Arp's (as usual in such cases) disingenuous ideas, have all the air of desperation just as did Gould's and LØvtrup's, neither of whom do more than more about the scenario with words, without causal force or observational conclusiveness. For that matter, the same applies to Darwin as Denton so elegantly shows, and Gould so distressed, reveals (cf. SMR Ch. 2, and see Index). How CAN you conclude anything from what does not happen, CANNOT happen and accordingly declines to be seen! (Cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 11.)

Not only is this so, for Arp's own genesis is subject to just the criticisms in KIND that he makes of those erring traditionalists in science, towards whom his wrath he not unexpectedly deploys! It is theory without fact, without observation, contrary to observation, stylised and power-brokered, inept, inelegant, illogical, as sure-footed as an infant on a rock wall, with crampons, but without any strength in the feet. It does not go.

In the end, despite scorching and largely successful iconoclasm amid his erring companions, with their misplaced humanistic intolerance and authoritarian revelries, Arp merely invents one more of the ruins, logically demolished, and spiritually, awaiting demolition. It is always sad when someone, some Sir Fred Hoyle or Arp, or Zuckerman, awakes through the most grievous misuse of data by his secularist opponents, and then, having justly cast aside such intellectual rubbish, and such hideous anomalies of and departures from scientific method, then goes on the same old basis, though it is doubly wrong: not merely anti-observational, but categorically causally crushed from the outset, on pain of denial of thought itself, so removing it from ANY consideration (cf. SMR Ch. 3).

What then ? With his own theory no advance in ultimate terms, on what it is designed to replace, and just as crude in this aspect, for all its imaginary internal pyrotechnics, themselves as at *2 above, falling short ALSO even at that level, Arp thus leaves for the receivers, a young universe with unscrolled galaxies not otherwise explained. The appearance of youth remains the testimony of its actuality, like the helium concentration, the magnetic field reduction rate, certain concentrations of compounds reaching the ocean and moon rock deformations, as explained in TMR Ch. 7, Section E.

This does not however mean either of two things. It does not minimise in the least his excellent devotion to detail, relative to the big bang demolition, and the red shift strictures, in which he declines to equate that latter phenomenon with distance, with a propriety delightful to behold! Nor does it alter his fascinating additions on ACTUALLY OBSERVABLE and theoretically consistent materials, concerning the intricacy and structural intensity to be found in our universe. Structure and form, he is exhibiting, is constantly being seen more imperiously and imperviously in the astronomical, as earlier in the biological and the physical. Thus Arp declares (p. 47): "It is a curious and exciting property of the universe that a great deal of extragalactic matter appears to be arranged in linear formations", as we saw. Similarly, Arp points out that the 2.7 universal radiation figure was derived from the 'tired light' theory, which itself is a pleasantly straightforward attestation of the second law of dynamics, that irreducible combination of the empirical and the logical, relative to design placed in a world not comforting to it, and exposed to its not so gentle forces (cf. Stepping Out for Christ).

Matter as Arp shows and we have seen in That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, is gloriously and often most elegantly arranged in space, in the macro- as in the micro-dimensions, which have led to chemistry and propelled physics for so long, until now it is often unfortunately unduly preoccupied with trying to split smaller and smaller the units it has been accorded, like someone trying to find MORE significance rather than less, in parts of letters of the alphabet, by seeking some one common unit from which they are all built. To be sure, you could in some fonts at least, be likely to find a straight line, however small, in some of them; but this proves ... ?

It is really proof of little more than this, that people who WILL not find comprehension where comprehensibility lies, can waste time in seeking it where it is not to be found.

·       It is not in the interstices of things, at the most ultimate level

·       (and of course man MUST outrun his powers of using things to locate things, as the things grow too small to serve in this capacity... and DOES, and so theorises grandly without knowledge, as he so often has done and loves to do cf. SMR pp. 421ff., TMR Ch. 7):

·       it is not there that the issue lies. It is not, for that matter, entirely uninteresting what happens at such levels.

  • It is just that the SORT of knowledge being sought at this level, is not there available.

 

Ø  Matter does not make itself, and has no such equipment. Finding out HOW it was made is NOT the same as finding out with what it is made.

 

Its flow is down, its past is up, but the mode of invention of its past is in the mind of the maker, whose legal knowledge rendered legal principles so natural an expression of His supernatural and adequate power, whose intricate and dazzlingly splendid analytical triumph made the machinations that manufactured matter so dignified an expression of brilliance, so integral in kind, scheduling from atoms to DNA with its one language. Not corrupted by chance, this is protected by design (cf. SMR pp. 211ff., 118ff., 121, 128ff.), rather like copyright, and created by what specifies meaning and mode for the coded systems of symbols, mentality, not bound, as if it were itself a manufacture, but free. Being without spiritual subservience, the Creator makes spirits such as our own, and is eternal in significance, signifying power and liberty unthinkable to man, since the sky is NOT the limit, when you come to the ONE who made it!

What then is the 'hope' of showing the mode of origination from the present performance of our system, our logically valid and validly logical universe, where no part bucks the program, except what has programming abilities, namely man, and such rationally competent created beings ? There is NO hope of doing more than perhaps uncovering here or there some element which remained in the production as in the product. There might be NONE. There is NEED for none. It is a matter of the craftsperson's choice. (THAT, incidentally, is not a concession to feminism, no more attractive than the failed follies of masculinism for its own sake, but to the theological realities that God is a SPIRIT, who is personal).

However there is no possibility, as Slusher so well shows (cf. SMR Ch. 2, esp. p. 77), of constructing an unknown beginning from known ends. They may suggest this or that, to some degree or extent  or other, but the genesis impacts proceed without the very system which is created, and hence are not susceptible to systematic address. You cannot follow in what was not there, the evidences of its arrival, though you may perhaps find this or that CONSEQUENCE of its having come, a very much more limited phenomenon! Indeed you CAN assign minimal power and prerogative for the FACT of its construction (cf. Romans 1:17ff.), and can find some testimony to what did not happen. This however is far from assigning the power flux, mental method, design modes present in the ACT of creation.

That is ONE reason why the play-makers, the scenario-speechifiers in physics agree not at all; except for times of authoritarian splendour in the place of scientific method, such as Howe, Thompson, Arp, Denton and others have so well exposed, and with such prodigious scientific knowledge. HOW could you agree about what CANNOT be known! The implements of majesty are not His mind; and the creation wrought by the Maker is not inscribed as to method, in the operation of what is made.

It is inscribed in one place ONLY, the Bible, which, as with any creator, tells from the creator what he wishes to tell you about what he did or how or when. C.S. Lewis has some delightful debunking of efforts to 'assess' why and how this or that book, a creation of HIS OWN came to be, or why; and indicates that NEVER did ANYONE find a correct analysis in trying to do the job on him.

With God, who is infinitely above us, it is infinitely more difficult from His product, to determine either His procedure or His provisions of providence beyond it; for it is not only impossible in principle, and the more so the less the person is predictable, but it is ill-adapted in practice, and this the more so, the more the componency is itself created, devised and delivered from the source of the power in view, for purposes which simply grasp the result, with the means deemed appropriate.  With a dynamic as far beyond our estimation as is the universe beyond a speck of dust, He works; and yes it is further, for the dust is PART but the Maker makes ALL parts!

Thus it is that physical theories vie endlessly as uncertainties of date and detail rankle and with the more authoritarian in science, there is from time to time a humbling of the proud which points to the far greater productivity of seeing the unfolding of the future. It is not the stage but the actors; it is man who is in eminent need of review - indeed, repentance and return to the Lord, the Creator and only Redeemer.
He has vindicated His justice and wisdom in ONE PLACE ONLY, in Christ and in the Bible, each attesting the other intimately, constantly, and right to our own time,  in intermingled contemporaneity (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9, Answers to Questions Ch. 5).

For more in the physical aspects, see Chapter 4 below.
 
 

B.

GO UP AS FAR AS YOU LIKE, AND YOU STILL WILL NOT GET THE CREATOR HANGING ON A CLOUD: HE IS IN A DOMAIN OF DYNAMIC WHICH MAKES TIME AND SPACE - NOT A FULL STOP IN A POEM WHICH HE WROTE!

Let us now change the emphasis somewhat.

Whatever geometries of space, the intensive care compilation of law inscribed in matter, the scope and energy effectiveness, the conceptual counterparts of construction, the methodologies of mentality and the procedures of all but epicurean precision, with aesthetic facility and ingenuity which allows our greatest scientists, like Einstein, to formulate so much in various superficially simple formulae: whatever all these things and concepts are  to come from (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), there is one point that makes no real difference.

Whether they be assigned with logical necessity to the Adequate One, or to Him and to derivative design tools, it is immaterial. That is one feature of matter which is quite immaterial! Imagine if you will or must, or if you feel  limited to our current modes in considering HOW they arrived by adequate causation from where their whole ordered being did not exist, some way station, some space platform for construction (after of course space itself had been made!), yes imagine a glorious scenario of compilation, and it is matter immaterial to the issue.
 
 

SILLY and SUPERFICIAL FLIRTATIONS WITH SYSTEMS

Systems adequate to produce a play or a playwright, each require the some base, except that the latter requires MORE, for its own internal ingenuities for production are now added to the result. MAKE the way station and then the result. You have two constructions to account for, and the final one is JUST THE SAME.

Man has not really proved much good at making the bound matter-energy particle production scene

·       1) WITH the result staring him in the face, as a working stimulus to imagine in trying to do the same!

·       2) with the mental means of release gratuitously accorded him, circling in his mind;

·       3) with the desire pulsing in his motivational breast; and

·       4) with a constructed, already legal universe eagerly obeying laws, already to hand for service!

It is not impressive, but what would you! THIS is the work of someone else, and our own limping efforts are a credit to Him, that we can do even a (comparative) little, with what He did so much!

Getting all - or in fact, ANY of this from nothing, it is a flat contradiction in terms. The EX NHILO formulation is brief, but its meaning is large. It is from NOTHING IN NATURE that nature comes; most assuredly not from nothing, since that is reduced to excess verbiage as soon as it is, becomes or produces anything; for then it is something which could, or would, or did, or might produce something, assuredly NOT nothing. Acquiring a system of matter-energy, contrived creators set up in a space-time situations as receptacle, this is merely a way-station aof thought, preparatory to the realisation of God, and as the more pathological becomes more normal, it is more broadly desired.

Nothing does not do these things; something adequate, as shown step by step in SMR Ch. 1, and retrospectively in Repent or Perish Ch. 7, is God and is eternal.

Interestingly, then, this becomes one more deviation from logic, as if it were deployed to divert the mind from the birth of the babe of understanding, and annul the awareness of the existence of God from the thought of man. Make it come by stages and maybe, although you do not actually FIND the stages, ever, but maybe, the good propagandist might argue in his solace meetings with his ilk, you will make them forget that the capacity to HAVE stages requires the existence of mind and method, while the stages themselves require the insertion of every item of being and law, all the interstices of synthesis and the whole conceptual arena, whether sooner or later, from self-sufficient adequacy. It is in man that this terrible misuse of his own limits and facilities gives this prodigy of arrogance.

Because HE, man,  who is an object as far beyond his own power to produce as is the universe of things beyond a mite, is used to trying in a limited way in vast abodes of energy and form, he imagines that anyone else who made him must have been stage oriented, in the sense that what WAS is part of what IS. How COULD it be if it was not there by definition, since nothing can do nothing, and hence something not coded or controlled by ANYTHING, must ultimatedly be found, for the production of any system, any thought and any correlative capacitation. Beyond all, He, the Creator must be, if anything is to be; always there and always adequate: beyond the limits of ordered time, must be He who is both unlimited and eternal, insusceptible to direction, unmade, Maker of all.

Let us consider this indomitable fact further.

Take the concept of STAGES. Consider:

  • 1) Systems of gods (infinite regress, this one from that one, and only the series sequence precedes in its dynamic);  or
  • 2) systems of conceptually accurate, geometrically endowed, imaginatively procured, legally endued specialised M-E (matter-energy) producers, in a scenario-plus-system-plus-space-plus production facilities, plus scenario controllers and so on: these may likewise be considered ad infinitum.

THIS system led to that and that to the other, and so on. ONLY the dynamic and drive of the system precedes it, and all that it is to contain, in germ, program, propulsive adequacy, conceptual sufficiency and so on.

Both have the same constraint.

  • Who made the system
  • in which the systems unwind, unravel, interact in communicative or correlative adequacy,
  • the language of action or direction or in the actual case, BOTH ?

  • In other words, who made the means of personal and impersonal communication OR interaction,
  • who made it unitary and so heavily endowed,
  • and whence came the gust of creative energy
  • illuminated by a power, precision and methodology denied to man,
  • who can only fiddle with
  • and extract from what already IS, what exists,
  • and is bright with created light,
  • not only materially,
  • but mentally, spatially, legally, synthetically, conceptually, codally (to mint a word long overdue, itself, for creative production) ?

 

Who, adequate for all,  endowed what is endued ? Who caused it to be imbued and inspissated from the mist of mental adequacy!

Whence was the adequacy of system creativity and structural construction, IN WHICH ALL these things, all these means (to do the dictates of visible design) and ends or objectives, were to be fulfilled ? Think of them irrationally if you will; ignore all that is empirical if you feel inclined; turn your back on the laws of science if fever possesses you: but it will, even at that,  not alter the requisition of BOTH the interim, space-platform type background and its systematics for action, AND the final resultant with its ultimate specifications.

It is not actually surprising that with a Creator of such power as to contrive us with minds, spirits and matter in a synthetic triplicate which is not mere repetition, but compilation and comprehensively construed, there is no sign of the method of creation, except in the stature of the result.

You would not expect any author to leave material exhibitions of his endeavours to create, unless they were of the same kind, namely symbols on paper in various drafts. They would not be expected to be something in which wood pulp is finding its place in his brain, or saw dust in his mind. That would be so ridiculous that were it not to argue against God, one would despise as comedians out of place, the very suggestion! would one not ?

Creation is mental and spiritual, and it is exhibited in matter. This is the state of the evidence and the requirement of logic. Matter IS a product and its production is of the type of the programmed. The type of the programmer is what produces this sort of thing, on a scale and with a degree of sophistication which relates to the stature of the creator. Would you fly into the novelist's mind with a set-square, or a hammer, to seek out the ways of his thought ? Would you expect a few letters here and there so show their symbolic selves, ex-comprehension, as you probed with electrical currents; and if you could get some symbol containing unit to spew out something, would you really expect the slightest relevance to the orientation and majesty of the creation from the mind, even of man! The domains are diverse, one is an end-producer, the other an end-receiver, and a means.

What then ? System is not nothing. It requires thought when nothing is the quasi-paper on which it is to be written. Matter's system is not its product, but its parameter; it is bound, but does not bind. It can constitute limits only as a buffer, to the limits of free imagination. It is itself bound. Matter is found, not found to found itself. It displays the performance means to follow, not the facilities to produce its programs. That, it is our own domain - but we do not rise to that level, at the universe level, being ourselves products with this distinction, that we may know the Producer.
 
 

SUBSTANTIAL CONCERNS WITH SYSTEMATISATION

Moral, mental, spiritual, material, aesthetic or conceptual criteria, for the production of these things do not, then,  alter because ingeniously fabricated MEANS for any part are imagined (cf. SMR pp. 316Dff.). On the contrary, the total failure fro the governed to produce the (relatively) ungoverned minds and spirits of man, is merely predictable from its dimensions of design. Matter's lot is a humble one, however convenient it may be, and is, as a recipient of meaning - via symbols, in order - all unknowing, to transfer thoughts from one exponent, to another, the receiver.

Let us then summarise and extend a little.

This unalterability is quite simply because:

Ø     1) Adequate cause for ex nihilo (as defined) construction must always be present, for from nothing or anything inadequate, it cannot logically come. Thus it must for ever be there, and eternally resident in its own majesty, to make time itself, a systematic component towering above nothing (cf. time in Indexes). The time which as with us, LIMITS, this must arise when the unlimited invents it. Endeavours to read the time of its invention, are really a contradiction in terms.

They assume that it is inherent, when it is extraneous.

They often show an all but infantile (but more accurately blind) effort to extrapolate on process now as if it could POSSIBLY indicate the commencement of rate or date or process, when the processing of time is itself part of the process with which we are confronted, in ourselves and our own universe! This has led to some conflicts of evidence, when the extrapolation moves from observable action within time, to efforts to work out its action and relevance DURING the initial creation!

It is rather like trying to make out the means by which an embryo came into being, in terms of the way in which it goes now, and grows now. It is in fact of course a wholly different reality, the production and the growth, the creation into being (in this case from an ordered assemblage of genetic materials in a highly complex pad); constituting one sort of thing, and the subsequent behaviour, another. The creation in fact  in this case is a matter of minutes, in its initial complex synthesis and embryonic or zygotic installation, equipped with information, sustained with orders, blessed with means as minutely capable and capacitated as imaginable, and perhaps still, beyond imagination.

Its growth after this deposition, is a vastly different thing, as slow as that was fast. The information preceded, in fact; the execution of the demands, dictates, the the design did NOT!

It has to happen; that had been fully co-ordinated and presented, in essence, already. Combinations are not by any means the same as eventuations of the whole result. They merely are adaptations at the start, for the particular specification desired.

That, it is always the result of assuming what is there, with  how it came, or that the construction of system is the same as its modes of action when it is once there! Hence dating is a date with dilemma for the secularist, the humanist, for many data require a short date for the earth as seen in TMR Ch. 7, and only extrapolations based on unknowns or assumed components, as if present at the outset, give their (at that) mutually contradictory results. When these assumptions are removed, and only clearly known operational data are expressed in the sums, then an early earth is clearly indicated. It does, to be sure, take a while to make a baby COME, when you are assuming it came by the way it goes! It goes WHEN it is constructed, the WAY it is constructed; but as for the construction of the way, that is another matter, in a wholly different time dimension.

With the creation here our concern, that of the universe, itself from an eternally adequate cause, then the disparity is far more profound; for now it is not only
 

  • A) the difference between institution and performance of something, as to rate, but
  • B) the gulf between ABSOLUTE institution and performance IN a system when created, which concerns us.

That is precisely why you have amusingly, comically divergent dating results from different methods on their various unseen assumptions, and DNA supposedly available from millions of years ago, when its durability suggests only thousands possible. You will and must get dilemmas when you insist on ignoring the parameters of your thought, and just plough ahead, like a drunken sea captain , or one apparently indifferent to the coast (and recently, it may be, such a case did actually occur!).
 

You need then adequate cause for ex nihilo construction, 1) as above, but also -

Ø     2) Adequate action to institute any imagined means for any phase imagined.

This merely aggrandises (if it were possible) the requirements, the logical requisitions, for now both the furbishings AND the furnisher-factories are to be accounted for, not merely the result.
 

It is, indeed, a marvellous added testimony to the Creator's inter-personal skills, that He has made imagination so febrile in capacity, thought so persistent in inclination, and will so intractable in capacity (to the assigned and sad limit), that these varied attempts at, or provisions for evasion of logic, stud the history of philosophy like black and backward stars.

It does nothing to reduce this posturing caricature of reason that in calibre these 'stars' rather resemble black drawfs, than beneficial luminaries. After all, you cannot desecrate (logically) the Creator by assigning Him imaginary pens and pencils for writing. (See Romans 1:17ff. for the diagnosis of cause and effect in this human pathology, here. The later verses, in exposing an advanced condition of this  syndrome, read rather like tomorrow's newspaper (as current trends go!).

Of course, even at the technical level, apart from the alogisms involved, it is always heavily conjectural as Slushier has indicated, to try to piece together, envisage, encapsulate in the mind and align in the thought, the early stages of invention. This is so even where, unlike the present case, it comes within an already existing system. A vast explosion does not disclose, without some prior knowledge, the form, features of its pre-explosive situation. A creative explosion is far more difficult. The more mobile, complex and unknown the initial condition, the more invasive and indeed evanescent the reconstruction. If this is so in reconstruction of what already was, it is far more so in the envisagement of what was before our system came to be, in various imaginary preludes.

However, there is nothing unseemly in effort humbly to go back a little, without obsessive fixations on rates and limits, true now in the universe, as if the finished or advanced product delimited the conditions of its creation, or even revealed its mode. One of the features, in a fascinating interplay of the spiritual and the scientific,  of truly great science, is modesty. Indeed, pure science cannot  dispense with this, for the flair that is self-willed, and not evidentially based, verified, and consistently constrained past any alternative option, is merely the beginning of the pig-headedness which so regularly sets in in the fields of virtual scientific incompetence, where it cannot, because it knows not, and cannot discern. This has so often seized large sections of science, from time to time, waylaid it and made its way foolish, reactionary, hidebound, traditionalised in vital aspects, that it can repeatedly be found moving it in such realms into near oblivion.

It is, then, where such intruders and intrusion is tolerated, and more particularly, socially enforced by a ruling junta of glory and position, that science (not then properly so called) comes to parallel traditionally derived religion, be it Buddhist or Roman Catholic opinings, and inadequately founded, founders.

Such a thing has happened with Aristotle in his evolutionary thought, although this was heavily laced with definitive principles and a final thrust into determinate form, so that conception ruled; and in general, his concept of experiment, though present, was inadequately thrust into practice. Hence came the need to show by DROPPING a ball from a tower, that heavier bodies do not fall faster than lighter ones, in proportion to the weight, as Aristotle had taught from mental principles of his own. In this instance, the corrective  job was done at the tower of Pisa, by Galileo, who was passionate on experiment  ....

Thus, despite some excellent work by Aristotle, in specific areas of biology where his theories were less expansively loose in the main, and where his dissections and drawings were admirable, that ancient allowed some leading ideas to promote  lapse from actuality, and to lead philosophic sheep astray in a mystical substitute for science. Such error could endure unchallenged for millenia, even when experiment was by no means excluded, simply because top-heavy assurance and adulation, premises of philosophy and convenient convention dictated it. It fitted with ... the world view in vogue!
 
 

DELIVERANCE FROM DEFECTIVE DEVICES IN METHOD

Such defective matters were aided to a wonderful deliverance in scientific method coming especially from a source now justly famed, in Sir Francis Bacon, whose formulations tended to be so just on this topic that it constituted a primer on method in science. The threefold approach of evidentially oriented, acutely testing and imaginatively propounding in unison, in Bacon came from a consistent Christian, just as so many other leading edge scientists contributed at the highest level, men like Sir Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler, Michael Faraday, John Ray, William Whiston, John Dalton, James Joule, William Herschel, Maxwell, Boyle, Charles Babbage, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Kelvin, Georges Cuvier, John Ambrose Fleming and Wernher von Braun. Their overall coverage is like a spectrum of light. It penetrates and virtually permeates science.

This is not accident, for when the truth is basic, and is not to be invented, but already known, and when the evidence is a friend, since God made it who made the universe, there is little concern to invent what He has already invented; but much to find what He did, what are the results of this action, and how He makes it now to go. It was not the 'science', not properly so-called, of obsessive compulsion to exclude God, but of rational relish of His works, seeking to find HOW they worked.

Aristotle was not the only one to fail in such an area, but he did qualify in this fault, especially in intrusive ideas moved into physics and life, in the spontaneous generation concept, and his  developmental concept, though far beyond that of Darwin in much, was not evidentially sustainable; while  Darwin, now widely and justly exposed from many diverse scientific sources (as Denton, Thompson,  LØvtrup, Cuvier, Kelvin and in measure, Gould q.v.), Freud exposed by Carl Jung for example (cf. SMR Ch. 4), Marx exposed by an army (and the loss of one... cf. Index), all claimed to be scientific; but in method all breached the elementary canons (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, That Magnificent Rock, Chs. 1,  8, SMR Chs. 4, 7, 9, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 30).

Modesty was replaced in science in all these caes, by a brashness which, if brave, was fatally flawed by assumption and presumption, despite negative verifications, rising like Everest, which does not move away.

Millions, quite inexcusably fawning on the British paradigm (Industrial Revolution without too much mercy before the Christian statesman the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Darwin codifying cruelty as creator within his scheme of non-visible, non-verified creation), despite the advances in scientific method,  following the follies they so often saw in man's immoral mentality in his own preferred ways. These included the horror of invasive slavery in Africa, which the Christian Wilberforce spent so much so sacrificially to eradicate.

Many of the public were infatuated; and with sad justice, soon enough this would lead to public horror and distress, when some of Europe put these abysmal principles into pitiable practice. Soon it would lead in Germany, per courtesy of such philosophers as Hegel and Nietzsche, to millions going to war, to blood, to years of trench horror, in pursuit of glory, dominion, power, praise and that superiority which it was felt by many deluded with false doctrine, was the source of man! Before long, Hitler would essentialise yet more clearly, as a criterion, his own endorsement of this spurious principle of survival of the fittest, that deadly subterfuge fitted into creation like an elephant into a thimble, but with less precision. Thus his judgment became an impulsion to power, an incitation to murder on a scale which Stalin had adequately exhibited beforehand, a forerunner, in the Communist dalliance with Darwin. It closed in on the witlessly wandering world program like a mist, of potassium cyanide.

Man's source! It has come nearer to being his extinction! and as the environment begins to object to the horrendous misuses of war and science, without much restraint, in the interests of pleasure, power and prestige, that is being threatened more and more, just as influenza threatened and killed more than the war had done, in 1919.

They got the glory at Verdun, at Passchendaele, and later in SIberia,  at Stalingrad, where cannibalism set in, where they could thank their evolution tainted mentors, like Nietzsche, Hegel, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, for the wonder of it all, as they lay, thick with blood, butchered for beliefs which were mere pretence, defiant of truth, mocking empirical reality, adrift from scientific law.

It is indeed important for life that it be modest. It is only in God that one may safely and wisely, truthfully and soundly glory; and His name is sacrificial spirituality rather than assertive superiority, for He, though He was rich, became poor for our sakes, "that we through His poverty might become rich" (II Corinthians 8:9).

  • The current bombast about man, his thoughts as in science -
  • in which some but by no means all scientists are involved,
  • which journalists ape as if hypnotised and communications networks employ in myriads of ways, like slightly crazed anti-missionaries -

·       is a form of intoxication which has, as it has had, a very high price.

·       It is an intellectual and spiritual drug, brought in not in vans, or crates, but through mouths and words, to minds and ears, flicked like a flick knife at unsuspecting young.


Scientific method has only one result in attesting Biblical accuracy as in this field, attested in That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1. There is no contest, when the matter is systematically examined. Whether in the science of mind, politico-economics, of life, there is only one view consistently, persistently and insistently verified, that of the Bible, much of SMR, following proof of the Bible,  being to the point of this assertion. The reductionist options unverified, and illusory, without rational base or confirmation, like scattered like bomb craters. Still they send them, the deluded new generation, and still the unsuspecting have spiritual or mental arms or legs blown off, as they stray into them.

As these lethal plants explode, like those left in South Vietnam, however, they cause much damage to man, to life and to quality of life, debasing what is high to depths of thought, and then deeds, both arbitrary and depraved, dysfunctional and inflammatory (cf. SMR Ch. 5).

The so-mythical, non-eventuating organic evolution carries like other myths, a high cost of production, reproduction and distortion. In combinations with Communist expectations and Roman pronunciamentos, with New Age airiness, free to every impulse and pushing whatever it will, endorsing man in his imaginary greatness, it grips the earth, unwilling to let it rest, which rests on the created realities which gave it birth, with no placenta left. Its mindless force begets the like, merely breaking the finesse with which man is gifted, in finalities for millions, on this earth, torture for more, a vast weariness of folly for swarming butts of surging intoxications. The morning after is now, and now is not much longer. Drunkenness has an end, whatever its type.
 
 

CREATION IS SO ULTIMATE,
INCOMPARABLE AND
WORTHY OF STUDY

Brilliance without wisdom is no substitute for truth.

Reaching back, one may, then, indeed look for assembly points if evidence can demonstrate that this is possible, and entertain hypotheses with vigorous and inflexible application of scientific method, ready to test, to re-formulate, and to relate to any alternative options, within any actual processive field, in its environmental dimensions. However, even with this, must be the reserve, which the 'explosion' merely illustrates to be necessary. Not only is reconstruction of a current system from what are possible preliminaries, a matter of necessarily limited conjecture.

There is more.

As Humprheys' work so dramatically  illustrates, entire dimensions that can alter the total concept of the construction process, and transform or even transfigure the concepts on strictly scientific grounds, await the humble! As Arp shows, in his more limited if wonderfully innovative way, this, even at the speculative level, can involve change quantitatively, of the order of 10,000 fold.

Beyond that, when one goes to the very institution of material system at all, speculation readily turns into a species of philosophy, and philosophy into a species of dawn age fairy tale, the parameters themselves being instituted, and hence inoperative, let alone synthetically applicable when the very structure of system is in the womb of deliverance.

Past all this, there is of course the most beautifully simple fact.

  • It is that ANY creator has his methods, when this author writes, or that artist paints, and then the past rate of production does not determine the present one.

 

A book might take 2 weeks or ten years. A poem might be 14 years in the mill, vastly reconsidered as was Grey's elegy. Mature strength does not dictate either. Creation has amazing ways of its own, EVEN for mere men. The author wrote some 9 volumes of around 1 million words in his 72nd year and - as finished books or even books at all, NONE till the age of 34, perhaps one from 35 to 49, one then, none from 50-60, dozens thereafter.

Creation is NOT the same as productive power. Nor is it a derivative of exuberance or necessity per se. Its way are personal, spiritual and may be constrained at another level.

Divine creation, of which all the elements and the synthetic reality of our creativity is a product, has towering facilities and a whole domain of the autonomous and spontaneous that drawfs our own, just as we, His product, drawf our own creative products (like aircraft, cares) in the wonder of the creation which we comprise. Its inventions and inventories are NOT the same in preparation OR production, as their products. The creative explosion: splash, effulgence is NOT remotely aligned to the method operative IN the result. Methods of creation vary and one of the LEAST predictable things about creation is its method. The higher its power, the less predictable its method. Often, it is the relatively unconfined powers of creativity which produce the highly constrained consequences of its creative choices, by contrast, in its product.

Hence and a fortiori, is it merely vain to seek to derive the way a book is written from the rate at which its pages yellow, or other attributes of decay AFTER it was written.

Methods of operation and interaction of parts do not REMOTELY approach the methods known in part or at all, of creation. In this sense, to show what MIGHT happen may be useful, in removing intrusive and arrogant pretension, as Humphreys does so well; but there is no way of being sure!

To think differently in this is not merely presumption, and arbitrariness in wedlock; it grows to divorce both from reality and from reason.
 

 There is no way of being sure ? unless the CREATOR TELLS YOU. Then of course it is a very different matter when you examine the evidence. You have the construction, configuration or mode explained and may be able to confirm it, depending on the method and the speaker. When the speaker is truth, as in the Bible, then of course at once we can confirm from present evidence, both the nature of the beginning and of the end. Hence we are able with simple certainty in clear propositions to list some of the divine agendea (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Chs. 8 - 9, and pp. 502ff.).

  • a) Creation of the universe happened in ways not now to be found.
  • b) It has stopped and nothing approaching it is now found.
  • c) Nature does not produce nature.
  • d) Man can produce a combination of horror and judgment when he forgets God and His ways.
  • e) Man will produce far more of this combination, as his very ordered system wilts under the wrath of God, amidst plagues, famines, earthquakes, wars, rumours of wars, evil wars, devastated morals, hypocritical substitutes for Christianity, false prophets, increasing unification of the world around a secular, humanist but religious basis.
  • f) Mockery of the flood and the devastations of divine judgment of yore... these will abound (as they already in fact do!).
  • g) Powerless religion will surge ... (as it does).
  • h) Merely formal religion... will limp in squadrons of deformity (likewise obstructively visible, like sign-board festering by a road).
  • i) Travesties of truth, robed like a dragon with a lamb's coat, will proliferate.  (Cf. SMR Chs 2,  4, and TMR Ch. 7, II Timothy 4:2ff., 3:1ff., II Peter 2:1ff., Matthew 11-12, 24:24, II Thessalonians 2: 3-12, in which last is seen the final, fatal delusion of having truth obscured by delusion, like seeing with astigmatic eyes).
     
  • j) Children will become notably disobedient to parents and presumption, arrogance and implacability generally will become common (II Timothy 3). It is planned to cover further on this, beyond earlier references, in News 135, DV, where some earlier references may be collated. Recent events in NSW give a cardinal illustration.
  • k) Moreover, there is forecast in Daniel with Revelation, a primacy for the place of power to come in Europe, the move to which is traced already in SMR pp. 904-931, 955-959 and is planned to be updated in News 136, following latest developments from last week.
  • l) Detestation of the very concept of creation will be evidenced, as seen in constant impasses in astronomy, politico-economics, biology and psychology, where misguided secular hope fails in vain repetition,  anew, with meltings of the wings of sun-smitten Icarus ever on the agenda, and
  • m) this amongst the very paradigm of devastation.

 

After all this of course, as Isaiah 51:6 and II Peter 3 show, following the return of the Creator, this time in role of King, as before that of Saviour, and His work so that "the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Habakkuk 2:14), there is something as unlike all this concatenation of physical, moral, spiritual and educational devastation, as a snow-drop to a rubbish dump. The scope is removed, the tent of the universe is taken down, the show is over, and although to be sure, it departs with a splendour that is match to the inherent realities it offered (II Peter 3:9-13), though they were scorned and scoffed at in the vainglory of earth's so often squalid history (Romans 1:17ff.), it is replaced.
 

  • That ? It is a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, abides, lives, is seen, is perfected, where curse is unknown, where peace is endemic, where the inhabitants are all righteous, where reality is not subjectible to distortion, truth to contortion, the child to abortion, for there is no longer marriage, and eternity is found in the love of God, who is holy, and has known, of course, the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10). What an end! (Revelation 21-22). It is worthy of the beginning and bought by the mediation of the Redeemer who, let us recall, has ALREADY come with the solution to the spiritual and moral pathology, which has had, is having and for a little while, will continue to have such tempestuous effects, as the ultimate experiments of rebellion pursue to the end, their vandalising works in the hearts of men.


AND THAT ? It is all part of the DIVINE AGENDA.
 
 

*3
On this topic, see SMR pp. 422E-T, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix I,
and Naturalism in The Index for The Rest, Materialism in SMR Index. See also Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 11.

 

*4

Sir Malcolm Muggeridge.