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CHAPTER  5

The Unholy Variety of Scientism
with its Hapless,  Irreligious Rant:

Contrasted with Valid Science and Rationality

I  THE BINDING BY THE BLIND 

Scientific method is a great thing. It looks at the events,  considers the outcomes, lists, analyses, reviews, conceives connections, parallels, instals principles of conduct from what conducts itself, makes hypotheses of explanation, humbles itself to test verification or its opposite, throws out what is not verified, what is vagrant, since it is not the realm of science to invent what is, but to  record, interpret and organise the understanding of what it is finding, what it is doing, and in what it is based at the level of testability.

If the verification works, it is now more hopeful, and further tests with verifications or the contrary are made. Thus Newton had an enormous confirmation of verification and interweaving of principles and predictions and results; but when certain precise areas were in view, it became clear that this was not the entire explanation. Einstein had a word. His theories had points of increased coverage, and although they had vulnerabilities, they had great capacity.

When however science - and let us remove the personification, as if it thought or did, and talk rather of scientific method, but for our present purpose, of scientism, which is the model of the ways and modes of science more generally: when this moves into the driver's seat,  as so many disciplines like to do, or rather those who deploy their minds into such areas, then it collapses into a farrago of fiction. It fails in this case twice over: first in declining verificatory modelling, and secondly, in imagining its image is the divine, or as near to it as their religion may permit, and ignoring all else beyond its own narrow confines, now corrupted by desire.

How COULD it be so blind ? It ? Again, how could many of its practitioners be so blind  ?

As to that, it is easy. From children, they have been programmed, subjected to didactic putsch, from TV models of hope, as if it were fact, in schools, in universities, even in some 'churches', filled as in the day of Jeremiah with false prophecy, and hardly ever does the Naturalism-bashing top. Incidentally, as in 'bible-bashing', this does not mean attacking it, but deploying it!

It is indeed the new equivalent of what used to be called Bible-bashing. It is an immense, intense, concerted, massive propaganda warfare waged against

1) the young

2) education

3) the populace

4) the thinkers and

5) God.

Posing as a philosophical grandee, it uses superficial considerations to gloss over the domain of logic, and instead of being, as in an orchestra, a not particularly soul-ful, but entirely useful member, it becomes its own king and over the domain it merely touches, it seeks to bear rule.

Again, 'it' ? Yes by this stage, we may so say, since this quasi-science, this pseudo-scientism is equipped with all but unlimited panache and becomes like any other idol, invested with a power which is by means from above, nor inconsiderable. As in all works of deception, it has a basis and a push, and there is a domain into which it fits so snugly, that it is like a seamless robe. The domain of desire to be first, to be all, to rule! It is not a pleasant thing. It would depose reality in its own interests; and that, it is never interesting, whether in the swamps of philosophy or the abyss of political subterfuge.

Someone may ask, however, in the context of Naturalism-bashing and Bible-bashing, so-called:  Is this not then an admission that when in a former Age, there was a great deal of presentation of the Bible, and use politically and culturally of its principles, as also in education, that this was indeed Bible-bashing,  nor better than the current climate of Naturalism-bashing ?

Not at all. Naturalism-bashing, or Nature-bashing is propaganda, not instruction, as is always the case when WHAT you endlessly repeat, is not in accord with construable fact, but with outgunned hope; and it is even more so, when allegedly set on the alleged basis, it is contrary even to that!.

In the case of the Bible, as seen in considerable detail in the pair of volumes, REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER, as in TMR and SMR, neither of these errors occurs in its presentation. In fact, the requirements of logic precisely constrain to the Bible as the basis of all understanding, and sole repository of what reason requires for validity; and what is presented from its pages is indeed creation of an absolute kind! (cf. That Magnificent Rock, Appendix).

Moreover, the very rush of irrationality since Darwin^*1 has been a very saga of sedition of the human spirit, filled with non sequiturs, non verifications, anti-verifications, while creation criteria have been fulfilled with what is, for its opponents, a deplorable consistency, even to the point of magnetic predictions, based on it, being fulfilled while the gradualistic case failed utterly to match the sharpness of the verification. Such was the Dr Russell Humphreys case, in the field of creation, one of no small note. This is merely one research case. There are many more (cf. TMR Ch. 7, Section E esp., and this link).

In this field,  a wild-eyed lust seems to have arisen for the imperious imposition of the jejune conceptions of evolutionism, in some sort of imperial manner, fitting to the Empire which no longer is, and to remove whatever is left of sanity and balance from the cultural closets of Europe as well from many of those in the Orient. In vain do many scientists, as seen in TMR, SMR, indicate their complete disgust with the antics of those who push this or that evolutionary theory, deploring such follies, each with his expertise; for in some eccentric and cultic manner, the thing continues like a rooster with its head severed, to kick even when dead.

Indeed, Gould laughed till he almost cried, at the gradualistic follies in his Wonderful Life, finding the tenure of such nonsense, 'literally incomprehensible'.

Then he proposes a non-engine ground for the construction of engines, and a no-go method of going to get them, even all the billions of little cells so surpassing all our engineering, filled with wisdom of method and integration of concepts, to the point that it is awe-inspiring.

What he asks IN HEAVEN'S NAME is going on! (Wonderful Life, p. 227, cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming Ch. 6, at Credo).

His distress at the gradualism of Darwinism is just; but the comedy of his own invention being as barren as desert, and a fitting member of the deluded family, matches it as if the llibretto works were labouring overtime in some comic opera. To this, we shall shortly attend.

Man is becoming overdetermined in his views, conceives Gould, and of course he is in this right, except that the over-determination is one of will as well! and there is an excess of determination NOT to have things determined, decreed or designed by what is adequate for the purpose.

It is in the face of the facts, as he here so glaringly perceives. From far more designs to far less, over time, from super-abundance to sparsity, is this development! No, Mr Gould, it is not. Accounting for this regress, as if it were progress, it is not wise, not at all; for you might as well account for the riches of the billionaire, by methods of marvel, when he is in fact a pauper. It is worse then irrelevance; for it is perversity so to adorn simplicity with seductive speech.

The determination is indeed overdone when it is attributed to Darwin's or anyone else's inadequacy, mumbling unknowns about knowns, as if this had anything to do with either science or explanation. Examiners marking student papers, and showing the errors, and grading them, do not actually MAKE the papers by the grading. You have to WRITE those!

Where the power lies to achieve the multi-disciplinary result and integral synthesis, as in any other construction, is in what is adequate for its construction. The invisible is in fact in purpose, courage, enterprise, conception and various other invisible respects, the constrainer of mere matter, and its formulator by design for function (cf. Little Things Ch. 5, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9). Systems lacking these ingredients do not suddenly achieve them, because someone uses the word 'chance', as if this mere token that no current purpose is operative in the system, means that it has what it has not (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds, Chs.   9,   13).

Why then is Gould concerned about overdetermination ? Alas for him, he had many reasons, and the non-performance of the existing and much used grounds of gradualism was one of the chief. He had to root about and wonder what to do, and this verbal construction was one product.

It is in the face of the facts, as he here so glaringly perceives, that the idea of slow accumulations presents its outmoded and always deformed machinations. From far more designs to far less, over time, and from super-abundance to sparsity, is this development! Is this what naturalism could explain ? No, Mr Gould, it is not. It explains what it does not find, and finds what it does not explain.

As to Gould, the shock of the savant was all to palpable, and this is one from which his theorising never recovered as we shall more fully see.

2  THE BIND OF THE BLIND

In Wake Up World! ...Ch. 6, we note this:

Indeed, Gould draws attention to Darwin's belief that you cannot logically expect PROGRESS from the changes in view by any inherent propulsion, citing a letter  to Apheus Hyatt, Dec. 4, 1872:

"After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists."

That of course led to Schützenburger's impasse (SMR pp. 128 ff., 157ff.). We shall soon see in the CREDO of Gould, more saltations of thought, as in Nilsson and Davies.

The Gould reference is in his book, Wonderful Life, p. 257. Gould cannot find any either. Indeed, he declares this: "Instead of a narrow beginning and constantly expanding upward range, multicellular life reaches its maximal scope at the start, while later decimation laves only a few surviving designs" (op.cit. p. 233). Indeed, he not only notes the mockery which facts achieve of the developmental design by gradual propulsion concept of Darwin, but goes far further. On p. 236, he propounds this: "But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that we have no evidence whatsoever - not a shred - that losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those which survived," and on p. 239, he adds:

"... we have no evidence that the winners enjoyed adaptive superiority, or that a contemporary handicapper could have designated the survivors. All that we have learned from the finest and most detailed anatomical monographs in twentieth-century paleontology portrays the Burgess losers as adequately specialized and eminently capable."

The  "decimation" is his term signifying the vast lost of biota, of design, from Burgess time till now, that ultimate parody of the developing marvel concept, proliferating its productions: for here the marvel is first, together with its proliferation, and then it dies down, up and out. On p. 236, he warming to his task, announces as if under hypnosis to his 'cause', "the mere pattern of life and death  offers no evidence that survivors directly vanquished the losers". Even a postiori, looking back on what was and what is, he is stumped; and that is the ultimate, when you cannot even 'explain' when you see what is the 'result', by the principles which supposedly require it.

So far from their being any inherent power to create design types, we find then that there is an inherent process to remove them, and just as the mechanisms are deemed incredible by Gould, since much is expected and little is gained, in gradualism, in order that the compleat angler should arrive and be capable of function, and we might add, since the evidence of the efforts on the way is so conspicuously lacking in all the myriads that ought to appear, that it is the other side of the impossibility, so that the coin shows both sides at once, which this being all too clownish, is quite fitting. How Alice would have loved it in her wonderland; but in science, of course, it is not a good time to take a course in children's literature, and mix it in!

Small wonder then that Gould is using heaven's name, explicitly, in his apostrophe, like Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes, as we saw in Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6:

HOW, he asks, presuming to do so "in heaven's name" - seemingly in the grip of growing frustration and desperation, like that of Nilsson and Paul Davies in his nothing approach (certainly radical, even if radically irrational)
 

·       "HOW ... COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE SO QUICKLY"*^1A (op.cit. p. 227). The Burgess time provided what he calls a "Burgess maximum in organic disparity" (loc.cit.). The Chinese fossil case cited is reputedly similar (p. 226). "HOW," he continues, "IN HEAVEN'S NAME COULD SUCH DISPARITY ARISE IN THE FIRST PLACE, WHATEVER THE LATER FORTUNES OF ITS EXEMPLARS?" (Cf. Questions and Answers 2, End-note 1.)

·       It is of course far easier to go to heaven in word, than in fact; just as it is far easier to have continuity in nature through the power of phrases, than in the power of evident construction.

The intense and literally immense irony is this: that while Gould's words invoke a heaven of whose power no indication in his words appears that he is aware, in the antics or cavortings of his desperation, it is precisely where he invokes this name, that the answer he seeks is not only present: it is blatantly so. However, how many, how often are themselves amazed in due course, at what they did not see, and as we shall see in our Chapter 7 to follow: the sense of irony is not lost on God ! (as in Proverbs 1, 8).

The conundrum, it is most easy to answer. The bewilderment of Gould, it is simple to understand in this matter, just as his own conception of punctuated equilibrium is no more than a nomenclature with which to clad what is not there, a cause for conception, creation, institution, decrease over time rather than increase, beginnings like a splash, and endings like death. At last we find someone so fascinated by the facts, that he actually begins to state them.

The withered world of captured academia, as it largely is in this field, has much for which to thank Mr Gould, even if his own creative contribution did more justice to imagination than to logic, to verbal facility than to cogent scientific method. After all, when you are in the grip of error, as Nilsson exhibited, and Lord Zuckerman attested (in his Beyond the Ivory Tower), what do facts matter! Small wonder in South Australia for so long the DECS, a kind of education department, seems to have squibbed debate in open forum on its dictatorial role in insisting on keeping on with its fallacies in organic evolution, and absolutely excluding from science what alone fits the facts (cf. SMR pp.  140-150).

Repeatedly over years has the Government of this State been challenged, in word and in writing, to Minister and to Premier, but no answer appears, no recognition of the opportunity appears, no bird chirrups nor is any voice to be heard.

While such atrocities continue, we find the case does not bother to conform to their eccentricities, as for example one finds in Denton's Evolution, A Theory on Crisis:

"The concept of continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature. In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism, and contrary to what is widely assumed by by evolutionary bologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach " - pp. 353-354.

As for taxonomy, Denton (op.cit. Ch.6) deals with this in grand manner, with considerable depth of analysis, noting :

"It has only been over the past two decades, with the adoption of new methodologies
which have subsequently revitalized and popularized the science of classification,
that the conflict between hierarchy and evolution has re-emerged and come to the attention
of significant numbers of biologists. The reemergence of the conflict is evidenced today
not only in the increasing scepticism being expressed by some of the more radical cladists
over many aspects of evolution theory, but also in the increasing resemblance that is
developing between the modern cladistic framework and the non-evolutionary perception
of pre-Darwinian biology."

Indeed, the "antagonism" between evolutionary biology and cladistics is "only the latest manifestation of the inherent contradiction between taxonomy with its distinct divisions and ordered hierarchy" and what evolutionary biology requires, "the demonstration of sequence in nature" (op.cit. pp. 139-140). At the micro-biological level, the molecular, similarly (op. cit. p. 294), there is an "incredibly orderliness", with variety inside a group, but distinctive categories from group to group. In gross structure, order and hierarchy, in minute structure, order and distinctive divisions. Further (p. 290), "At a molecular level, no organism is "ancestral" or "primitive" or "advanced" compared with its relatives. It is to the non-evolutionary pattern that nature conforms, Denton observes.

The micro-biological findings show nothing transitional, revolving about a group, with clear division from the rest, resisting like every other phase of the matter, any concept of the plastic, but attesting every facet and feature of the ordered, controlled, contained and contrived, the created and the kept. Moreover, the criterion is creation-specific, not transition controlled, a dedicated decisiveness and distinctiveness of feature and focus, without regard to comparative form. Thus there is the illustrative case of frogs and mammals. Each body of creatures has a similar degree of molecular divergence among itself, within its own ranks, though the frog group is close in form, one to the other, while the mammalian group is vastly diversified. Modes of control are in view, as in all creation, not slitherings into comparable formats and formulations.

Distinctiveness within each group is the focus, with its varied and determined modes and means, as each receives it; and while this or that, form or function, may be similar at a basic level, vast may be the difference in the results. Things, as in all creation, may be USED in various styles and formulae, to achieve diversities by understanding. It is not a question of things securing this or that by inherent power, but of things being assigned to this and that, WITH this and that, by inherent disposing design, as when a captain sets out the cricket field by design, using this or that means, having a variety of understood means, and a clearly related objective and method, which yet, nevertheless, is not predictable nor entirely containable, being intelligently devised.

Again, just as a composer may have a genre, and move in waltz, symphony, lyric and the like, for a time, so there are varieties of protein type, each highly distinct and dispositionally distinctive, which may be associated with other elements of order, such as the morphological (cf. Denton, op.cit. p. 178).

The mammalian diversity does not require the molecular diversity beyond that of frogs among themselves! It is a matter of imposition of what is requisitioned, as to type, not formation of what is innately self-deriving. Components are grouped, combined in this way or that (the octopus' eye is a fine example of diversification, specification and intervention, because of its amazingly high technical development). Fascinating features are found in assemblages of distinctive individuality, while modes, such as ONE LANGUAGE for living directions, and specifiable proteins types, attest the economy of method together with the grandeur of flamboyant results (cf. "deliberative design", SMR pp. 252Hff., and specifically  252L-N)).

Further, while the means have an authoritarian flavour, imposed not derived, defined not sequential, even proteins being highly distinct, isolated in sub-class (Denton op.cit. p. 278) and "unambiguously assigned", there is flair and the attainment of mighty heights, as in the tail of the peacock, enough to challenge the aesthete among philosophers fully to appreciate it, as far past mere practical serviceability as is orchid beautification (cf. Earth Spasm ... Ch. 7).

It is a case of the specific, the specialised and the diverse, matched with order, distinctiveness and continuity of kind. In fact,  this is at the level in view, as at every other, almost a micro-biological definition of the biblical “kind”, what pulsates with individuality, and yet is configured as to type by adequate means! (cf. The Defining Drama Ch.   10).

There is, says Denton (op.cit. p. 293-294), and "incredible orderliness" at the biochemical level, in particular, that of protein. That this provides a masterpiece of folding speed and method, which computers merely limp to follow,  in itself, merely conveys the concept the more notably! Prodigy is the name of this wonder which is life.

Accordingly, while variation may occur within a group, yet from that group to some other more distant, it appears that there is the same divergence from the one set to the other. There is a mathematical precision that is quite the opposite of minor motions, and altogether that of conceptual assignment to cover a case, by specification and will, intelligence and direction.

Thus, again,  where there is a fast breeding species and a very slow one, yet both may have ancient exhibits very like those of the present, despite the imagined time for the one to develop basic innovations at a vastly faster rate. Quite to the contrary, order is the signature, kind^*2  is the concept (Denton op. cit. pp. 289ff.).

Similarly, if you go to the integral element, at the smaller level, the cells, the finding is in parallel to all the above. No CELLS show such developments, all being complex ab initio from evidence, just as advanced methodologies, in what are deemed most ancient times, flush  from the heavens with all the teeming inability to be restrained that is the normal attribute of creation. Principles, moreover, do not create; they merely form the criteria within which such events occur, just as grammar does not write, and scientific laws do not invent matter (cf. News 57).

Thus while the requirements of reason are antecedently decisive (cf. SMR Ch. 1), the provisions of the empirical are all but stunningly conformable, almost as if we were in a class, with a lecturer using not the black-board, but the creation to make the matters clear, pointing now to this, now to that in the whole realm of the visible and living phenomenal order.

Empiricism has no problems; it is only philosophy which, intruding into science with vexatious passion and impenitent determination, foresees what it does not find, and builds on what is not there, to described it. The result is like the scrabbling in the beard of King David when he pretended, for safety's sake, to be insane in the presence of a king, when he was being sought by his own monarch, to be killed. That we can understand; but what is the motive in this scrabbling in the beard of science ? Is it not likewise to escape from a king, the King, the Creator; but in this case, it is not one who would like to kill, but to deliver.

But let us return to Mr Gould. What in heaven's name, he asks. It seems that he has at least some regard for heaven, in that its name is apparently to be regarded as something critical to the case. It would seem better however if it had been carried out more consistently.

What is it that so troubles him as to lead to this verbal appeal to heaven ? It is the clash between the concept of gradualism,  to instal new, more advanced design DATA and INFORMATION, as generations proceed, and the fact that this is NEVER seen, while the installation of more precedes the residue of less, over time.

We then might ask another, a further question. What, in heaven's name is the point of dismissing heaven when earth does not do it, shows no inclination to do it, has not the equipment located to do it, has massive equipment in editing and confirming, to prevent the assumption of the powers of heaven in creation, even it even if it COULD do it, and lacks all machinery to do it, rather possessing what excludes.

3.   SYMPATHY WITHOUT EMPATHY

One can sympathise with this not so much self-exculpatory as cathartic call of Mr Gould. After all, it is ludicrous. So, in terms of the universe,  what is NEVER found is the method by which what IS found is to be accounted for ? Brilliant.

What even contradicts the imaginary mechanism which is never seen to produce the design development in practical observation, and which has no inherent capacity, talking of design, to do it, and what would if it did, contradict the empirical and theoretical findings of modern information science as shown by Professor Werner Gitt in his outstanding contribution to that field: this is proposed, as was its preceding operatic work, Origin of Species. Instead of unintelligence producing intelligence slowly, as it is not found to do, nor could it, it is to do it quickly. Not satisfied with such a grotesque parody of reality as found in the evolutionary paradigm of Darwin, Gould constructs one where, if possible, the sheer comic splendour is more obvious.

On the other side of things, the universe, not satisfied with making a mockery of Darwin's vacuous suggestions, which ignore invention in order to obtain it, has now the comedy of Gould's idea to exhibit. Gould has to produce the things quickly, using verbal means, unarticulated with any realm of visible reality, or causal adequacy, like a widow at the funeral of a friend, finding herself without means of support and declaring that this is the way she will live, yes and do so luxuriantly. 

Is it satisfied however with this double comedy, the field which confronts both of these naturalists ? Not at all: it goes further, as Gould's exposure would show it, by anticipating the designs and then losing them, as if it forgot the order of events, and got mixed up, while not presenting us with the results of its trials and failures on the way. A whole series of PHYLA just go, says Gould, like CEO, at a dismal deficit meeting. They never arrive any more, he adds equally mournfully. You would think he might see he needs a new sales staff and approach; but no! He proceeds anyway, on borrowed time.

Small wonder Professor Fred Hoyle of Cambridge called the concept substituting for design, "nonsense of a high order," that Gould himself finds the gyrations of gradualism "literally incomprehensible" and Darwin laments that the concept of an eye by these means is "seems ... absurd in the highest degree" while he also kindly admitted that the intermediate links his theories required, paleontology did not supply, indeed it "does not reveal" them (Origin of Species, his italics, chapters 'Difficulties with the Theory', and 'On The Imperfection of the Geologic Record,' respectively).

They laugh as they cry, and weep as they glory. There is a certain bipolar appearance to the phenomenon of these disastrous philosophies and their directors. It is not in the mind, but in what they do not meet, that destabilising world of fact.

Professor W.R. Thompson, former Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Research,  equally kindly confirms in our own day (cf. Gould, op.cit. pp. 227, 271, SMR pp. 199ff.), that this lack of fossil transitional evidence to which Darwin referred, shows no significant difference today from the position in that of Darwin, a point made by Denton with no small aplomb (loc.cit. and p.194). Indeed, Denton notes the absenteeism in fossils, for gradualism, is what Gould calls "the trade secret of paleontology".

The theories of gradualism show no capacity to become a basis for prediction even if you assume the method, and then try to work out how ... this is the EXPLANATION! It explains what is not there to explain with what is not there to explain it, and then watches as what is there contradicts it with such apparent passion that one might be excused for thinking one was watching an opera of Mediterranean glamour!

The plot, relative to the result, is about as near as such operas sometimes are, being a mixture of fantasy and unrealism, which some might desire for relaxation! Giving fast birth to complex creations by phraseology is no improvement, the genesis of the generation being present in no way, but in saying so. Man, not being God, does not have the facility merely to speak, but must provide the attestation, the means and the coverage at every level to secure the existence of the dream in his mind. Opera sings, phrases utter it, but power and precision, concept and control, orders and collocations are needed to do it ... actually!

Mr Gould, in fact,  would undoubtedly have done far better than use heaven's name for his frustration and fuming at this 'literally incomprehensible' foozle (op. cit. p. 260)  in Darwinian 'science', and all gradualism, if instead of creating a concept which uses a phrase to do the job, a punctuation which has no text (cf. SMR pp. 315Aff.), a punctuated equilibrium which has no ground for dynamism, he had turned to the God of creation and observed the entire comprehensibility and coherence, consistency and verification available on EVERY side in both this matter and all others!

What then do we find instead ?

That, you see, is pseudo-scientism, a component of that "knowledge falsely so-called" which Paul warns about, current in his own day from the early Greek thinkers, many of them as full of empty bombast as modern naturalism, and just as exempted from all reference to actual experiment (cf.  Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13). 

Gould, Harvard Professor and of course staunch and wholly irrational evolutionist, had in the volume quoted, a purge, it would seem, almost a catharsis, a confession, even a tremulous horror at the pure madness of gradualism. Of course he would want to pay homage to the gods of naturalism, but in that work, he simply could not overcome his talented and vast attraction to the world of facts, as he explored rocks deemed near the first, in the Cambrian Burgess shale deposits of Canada.

4   SHEER BRILLIANCE:

THE THEORY OF PROGRESS
TO ACCOUNT FOR REGRESS

What do you call it ? Non-science, nonsense or knowledge falsely so-called ?

Call it what you will,  it does not cease to have the sheer brilliance

which does not bother to explain with explanation,

or to verify with reality.

It is, and it says, and that is that.

Unlike the Lord, however, it does not create anything but confusion,

basking in its tech-know-how,

as it abuses scientific method with all the irreparable seeming rampaging

of the very young, feeling very old, before their time.

What then of his question ? HOW in the realm of the asininities of academia in this field for so long (cf. TMR Ch. 1, SMR Ch. 2), can gradualism as a mode of progress in evidential, verificatory reality ACHIEVE a vast regress ? What sort of 'science' is this ?

This, it is easy to answer.  What is going on, is that man is going off God, and is uncleanly surmising what nature does not do, in answer to the question of how it comes to be there; and invents nature in the first place, so that it can do what it does not do. In empirical fact,  no, not even on ONE SINGLE OCCASION of observation does a new, more developed design arise with new information! It is something so dead that to continue to USE it to achieve the mental equivalent of creation, has nothing whatsoever to do with science. It is philosophy, and bad philosophy at that.  It is anti-causal, anti-empirical, and irrational as well.

What is the good, the use of using Hume and Kant to adorn an escapade of unreason ?

Hume, apart from the ludicrous character of omitting the viewer from his thought, for if it too were a series without substance, then he could not have theorised at all (cf. SMR pp. 257ff.), was in a sense bringing on (but not with that intention!) the results of failing to see that 'science', that is what is using scientific method as its approach to discovering truth, is merely one of various modes of discovery.

It is interested (in actual scientism, not pseudo-scientism, one of the children of his way) in finding what happens, in what MANNER it happens, and so analysing various ASPECTS of what happens, and then finding what accounts for it. In so doing, it is using other knowledge of other principles, laws and procedures already discovered, as a basis for inspiration of imagination, as to what may be occurring; or it deploys the concepts involved or procedures imparted in what is based on analogies to such things, or what has at least the causal constraints which would account for anything if you found it, and especially anything relevant. It acts, in other words, on the unspoken hypothesis that there is analogy, coherence, integrability and correlative intimacy in operations, and that what is already known will not be alien, but rather a key to what is not.

That is precisely what one ought to do for a mind that is rational which finds by experience as well as by logic, that the effective collaboration of what is there to be found, and what is here to find it, that is in man, is alike the product of mind personally aware of the means to make all these things cohere, and hence of the nature of all of them. It is not surprising that some of the greatest of the minds of scientists have belonged to people who were Christians, like Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Boyle, von Braun, Kelvin and so forth; nor is it that minds like that of Humphreys today, are inventing hypotheses which provide exceptional verificatory power, in the astronomical field.

What next then, does scientific method proceed to do ?

After this, it tests the intellectual or empirical results and finds if these are conformable to fact. Do the things that WOULD follow, in fact follow ? If not, that is that. It is not science. If so, then so far, so good, we might be onto something.

Some would like to abandon this, but not while the rocket is approaching space! When in the minds of some, science becomes no longer concerned that its explanations explain, or that its criteria relate to the field, such will be more than alienated, as in our present topic many already are in the pandemic of the quasi-science invasion. The scientism of such will become not merely quasi-philosophy, but derelict philosophy alone, dabbling in science from time to time.

Science properly so-called, however, even this is limited, and it is in disdaining limits that pride usually manages to accomplish its famous falls. Grabbing answers from such fields, without much thought and in summary, autonomous style, does not really adorn science, but rather disadorns it, is in fact delinquency of thought. The rationality with which empirical science proceeds has to be examined, verified and validated no less than the fields to which it applies (cf. TMR). That validation is unique to the Bible^*2A is of the utmost importance, just as the empirical must rest in its domain with precision, and draw up its explanations with fidelity.

Empirical science per se does not look to the ultimate grounds of the entire conspectus, because it is looking at what is current or subject to current confirmation. What is not current, or not found to confirm the relevance of what is current to its beginning, and the above observations about the extraordinary reluctance of new data in new designs 'arising' in the contemporary world is merely an illustration, requires a broader pursuit, in which logic takes a focal place. It is this same logic which forces us to God on the one hand, and the Bible on the other in its validation (cf. SMR).

In fact, this consideration takes us to the conspectus of the creation of kinds. The fact that the cessation of new KINDS is of such concern to Gould, whatever his mode of finding this out, and that there was once a deluge of creation of kinds,  this is PRECISELY what the Bible indicates. That brute fact however seems to mean nothing to the victims of methodological hypnotism in two waves, first, failing to follow the scientific method in fact when this realm is reached (in the smaller regards, as noted), and secondly, philosophising away the limits of their method, as if what is not THUS found is not! Abusing the reality of causality makes a third for a trio of some notoriety. Its apparently drunken state, which so shocked Gould, is no confirmation or commendation of its mode.

This triple breach of logic and scientific method is fatal for truth, which is presumably one reason for the brilliant victories of creationist debaters on campuses in the USA (such as Drs. Phillip E. Johnson and Duane Gish).

5. THE SCIENCE OF COMEDY OR THE COMEDY OF PSEUDO-SCIENTISM

It is however far more than mere breach of logic that is involved in the scampering of Gould. It is not just operatic in the simplistic emotionalism of his evolutionary passion, pitted against fact and exploding onto Darwinism in various mouthings, that is involved.

That he so explodes is no without the utmost ground. He does this, however,  without providing any substitute for the vacuous irrelevancies of that Darwinian prophet of doom who, indulging the expansive desires of the passionately political not to say industrial themes of his time, was seized with perfervid passion, though even admitting from time to time some part of the folly of his meaningless machinations.

Both with Darwin and Gould, but more especially the latter, there is a hideous comedy about it all. First, as to Darwin, imagine a prophet pronouncing like this of his work:

"After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists."

"He recognised," says Gould on this p. 257 (op.cit.), "that this basic theory of evolutionary mechanism - natural selection - makes no statement about progress." Gould however explains it all for us. Why, says he, Darwin was in a cultural milieu which demanded that there be progress, and progress it was going to be. "Imperial expansion and industrial triumph" required it in the popular mind of the day. "Darwin," proceeds Gould, "could not abjure such a central and attractive notion."

Where however is the biological component in this ? Is science then to be swallowed up by pseudo-scientism entirely whenever principles of truth arise, which affect man and his place
in life ? Overwhelmed, we gather from Gould, by sheer cultural dynamics, ideological passions abounding in the seas of his life, Darwin therefore felt a double allegiance (p. 258).

Now after Hiroshima, says Gould, we tend to take comfort in mere adaptation, forget the 'progress'. In other words, the explanation of creative implementation, soaring like space above the tiny abilities of man,  is that there is no explanation. With man, there is always explanation, this and that productivity, function, phase, discipline, application, soaring machination of thought, cordial aspiration, prolonged dedication and so forth; with creation from all known sources, this is it. When however it becomes FAR greater than this, the explanatory modes are irrelevant, the causal requisitions are dismissed if not damned, and the fertile mind of man continues to use reason, inseparable even from speech, while discounting its application, necessity and validity.

How very exceptionally clever! The scientific explanation of it all is that progress has come because there is no reason for it. That has no more to do with the exigencies of scientific method than it does with logical validity. Discount your means and you discount your achievement; what is inapplicable does not bind. What is deceased, does not live. What is irrational cannot present reason as its ground, or grounds as its base. It is merely defeat admitted by irrationalism. Continuing however with reason, we see that this is what is popularly called a 'cop-out', a failure in contest in a drab manner, by which the implications are apparent, but the admission is not.

Admitted, however, or not, the removal of due cause is the removal of the power of speech, explanation and relevance. That done, the 'noises' made are not to the point, and logical presentations proceed in the absence of such noise-making.

Again, social dynamics are seen as filtering and fashioning thought. If this were really so, how could you think beyond them in order to know this, however! Or more broadly, how could you know the reality of your reasoning about what you present, if reason is defiled, its means dismissed and your mere vocables left to resound witlessly! Without truth, you cannot speak it, without reason you cannot formulate it; and without these things, there is mere silence, interspersed with vapidity.

The cultural mode of Gould, then, is far from being any excuse or defence for Darwin, and would inundate his own words with the same irrelevance.

It fails to provide truth with which even to announce that it is true.

Nor does it either excuse or validate Darwin or Gould, to place them in what is after all, only ONE COMPONENT of culture; for those who decried slavery were not part of the triumphalism, and those who sought industrial kindness, like Wilberforce on the one hand, and Shaftesbury on the other, were not mere photons of current philosophy, bouncing about.

On the contrary, they had other stanchions, another pilot, and a wisdom which oversees culture because it is from the source of man, not from his squalid little moments of tripping about, and tripping and trapping others. Their approach could have validity since the truth they found empirically was part of a whole in the use of reason which led them to the truth of God, who being there makes no submission to temporary expediences and expeditions of the irrational, the irrelevant and the necessarily self-contradictory.

However, let us return to Gould's presentation on Darwin. The pertinent point is the presence or absence of grounds of PROGRESS in his approach. He has said that he can see no such grounds, intrinsically, in what is working. Strange though it seems, it is nevertheless true, though contrary to his 'explanation'. There is none. You may cut out what is limping, but you do not thereby create what is athletic.

Thus we are left with a Darwinsm in Darwin which is wholly unscientific as to origins, as the base level, a cultural accommodation, investing that little thing called an explanation and perspective for biology, with what it actually did not have at all, no, not in the least! It is good to realise in this context that as far as Darwin himself is concerned, as we may now recall from 3, above, the concept of an eye arising by his method and means was in the highest degree absurd, while the just ground for dismissing his theories was that the paleontological record did not confirm or show the transitions.

What hideous helpfulness when neither the capacity nor the cullings of time could be deemed other than delinquent, as far as verification of the Darwinian theory was concerned, and when the other little matter of progress is defunct as well. How could this be put together in a thesis presentation ? Perhaps like this.

"Gentlemen, I have a little theory which is fantastic for explaining how things come into being. Far be it from me to push this, for I am but a little biologist and others before me have shown the whole concept of survival of the fittest, but I do wish to show its wonders.

"I have found some slight variations among birds, for example, and although this is not so very definitive, nevertheless it is challenging. Confessedly, it is entirely absurd, as it would seem to me at least, to have a thing like the human eye, that masterpiece of designation (I do not say design, since I don't quite like the idea, you see), and things ARE designated in it, you realise, in myriads of inter-disciplinary ways which stagger the mind and delight the intellect: to have it, I say at all, by the means I suggest, submit or envisage in my theories.

"Since however this is the idea I have, that is the way it is going to be. Again, and here you may agree with me on the admirable challenge we face, the paleontological record is decidedly, distinctly, and perhaps I might almost say, perversely contrary to my concepts, not providing the plethora of transitions in the dirt, which would illustrate the dynamic of progress.

"Now this brings up another point, which makes our challenge really exquisite. I am sure that many of you will agree with me that progress is the thing, and it is amazing how it is occurring in our little old Empire; but the simple fact is that I do really believe that there is no such thing as progress, or if you like progressiveness, the power or push to develop things in a progressive manner, in the least degree in matter and all that.

"All these things being so, I feel confident you will see the classy nature of my original - well, rather original, well in some ways different - idea, and that this is where science must go. Look, if we do not take the opportunity to push, science may be left behind. Clutching our cultural skirts (I speak here a word for the ladies), and gathering up the tails of our coats, with the learned tales of my presentation, let us fight the facts on the beaches. We will never give in."

Now one would be the first to decide that anachronism, though it has its place in comedy and in the manufacture of perspective, so that one may see things in proportion, cannot too readily be placed in a given context. This, however, is not too readily: after all, if Churchill was trying, amongst certain other things, to save the British Empire, over which he had no desire to preside while watching its dissolution, and fought, so Darwin, having no desire to see his ideas thrown to the wolves, even if only marginally were they his, would also fight, against overwhelming odds, so that what he wanted could be obtained.

One must say, however, that the contrast with the intention of Churchill is considerable. He was seeking for something he conceived to have intrinsic value, not compromised by a relevant degree of contradiction, whilst Darwin was fighting the contradictions themselves, for they were at the heart and base of his theory. Hence the comedy of seeing both together, the one despite difficulties, and the other with them, does occasion a degree of insight which makes it worthy of action!

The passion, the prancing, dancing and lancing, associated with this vile and evil theory is as great as ever appeared in any recent war; it is fought with as great a disregard of simple factuality and as profound a passion in the face of reality, as Hitler or Mussolini, or Hirohito, or Mao ever contrived for their respective ideological children. It is as ruthless as the ghettoes, to which it consigns to students as it pummels the cities of their lives with the bombs of illusion. It cannot be over-stated; its comedy is allied with tragedy, a tragic disregard of truth, misdirecting minds and intimidating courage by its sheer leaflet dropping scope. It bombs from the TV, from the radio, from the lectern, even from the pulpit, till the witless become immersed, and the cultural captives become bemused, until the generation to come washes in industrial waste, and towels down with reckless haste, with discarded blankets, a fog blanketing the whole dismal scene of human waste.

If however Darwin, even in his own day, even in his own statement, quite apart from the realities which have so often been reviewed on this site, in reason and empirical fact, is a classic comedy, what of Gould's performance ? Why, Gould, so very much more delightful than Darwin, because he evidently FEELS the facts, even if he does not conform, having shown the folly of Darwin's in such little things as those noted above, proceeds to tell us his own secret.

What then, Mr Gould, if there is no progress in the Darwinian set-up, in the Darwinian theory, how will you remedy this little deficiency ?

“Ah says Gould,” it is like this, you see.”

('You see,' seems to be one of the modes of inducing, or seeking to induce, a measure of agreement from those who otherwise might find not the slightest ground for agreement!).

"I am completely," he might continue, "and utterly of the view that progress is simply not on. Look, I REFUSE the obviously mythical idea that there could have been all these extra PHYLA, note you, in the Cambrian, deposited almost without bounds, with a sort of zooming and booming enthusiasm, if you will excuse the personification, in a system, a set-up, a situation, call it what you will (people often find it hard to know what to call things when they have lost the plot), where NO further phyla appear in ages forthcoming.

"That is not even possible; it makes ludicrous the whole concept of continuity, it is like depositing a million in the bank, never doing so again, and yet, having no other outlet for funds, to be deemed just the same enthusiastic, effective man of business as ever. If you want it better, it is like having no other site for funds but the bank, being eminently successful, the very same person, no change in the kind at all, and never again putting in one dollar!

"There HAS to be another explanation. Dear old Darwin messed it up: the fact is that there will have been entirely different things, another show altogether in the Cambrian period. Don't ask ME, how I know, what is the mode of its working, its chemistry, its DNA or other ridiculously pertinent questions like that. Pertinence here is to be im-pertinent. Oh no, I am not being personal, but relevance here is to be irrelevance, if you take my meaning. If we knew in the least degree what on earth I am talking about, I would not be talking, do you see ?

"No," he continues, here quoting from his own book, "Wonderful Life", in fact at p. 230,

" 'I just can't accept that if organisms always have the potential for diversification of this kind - while only the odd ecology of the Lower Cambrian ever permitted its realization - never, not even once, has a new phylum arisen since Burgess times ... I have to believe that organisms as well as environments were different in Cambrian times, that the explosion and later quiescence owes as much to a change in organic potential as to an altered ecological status.' "

Warming to his task, our 'Gould' continues, again citing his own book, this time p. 231-2:

" 'Of course, life needed the external push of ecological opportunity, but its ability to respond may have marked a shared genetic heritage, now dissipated.' "

Could you make that clearer ? someone in the audience might reasonably respond.

Perhaps our 'Gould' could reply as follows.

"By all means. Since what we find CANNOT be so spectacularly different from what was once, and since the divergence is total, utter, what am I to say ? It is as if an aeroplane once used to have kittens, or at least other aeroplanes as it stood there, just shedding them off, all types, you know, Cessnas and Tiger Moths, Boeing 727s all coming from a Wright Brothers sort of craft, as if they liked nothing better than to have this sort of issue, shall we say, and then, after a relatively short time doing this sort of thing, they suddenly stop.

"I cannot and will not accept such a thing.  There must have been an entirely different - you see, HAVING this sort of utterly different offspring is not a little thing, it is the WHOLE POINT! - an entirely different sort of genetic structure, phylogenetic genius or some such thing. It is difficult to describe it, but it must have been there. There is no current evidence for it whatsoever, but it must have been there."

Gould speaks of a gun, which we might call GOULD'S GUN (op.cit. p. 234), and it has a barrel which is so useful, don't you see, in discharging shot, which is so useful when it fits the gun, and when the gun has someone to hold and direct its discharge, and the more so when the discharge in ingeniousness of an unlimited kind, which does not destroy but create. It is, to be sure, rather an odd sort of a gun, and it discharges, as Gould insists, ONLY ONCE. Quite a creative sort of gun is it not, and when you come to think about it, it has all the power and imagination, intelligence and creativity of the Lord! Some gun!

Fired once only! Never seen again. That is the scenario.

It becomes, actually, rather reminiscent of that delightful little cartoon sometimes displayed on TV. There was once a frog. It was a spectacular frog. In its heyday, it put on a top hat, and spats and 'thats' if you want to preserve the sense of near idiocy in which the cartoon abounds, and it took up a baton, and it danced and sang with a bounce to the ounce which even for a frog was mighty. Its glance, its wave, its rave, its performance was mighty, sure to bring the crowds roaring for more.

However, in the course of events, it becomes entombed, and lies low for centuries, below a pillar. Liberated, it puts on its act, but the mean profit-seeking entrepreneur who observes this, has a difficulty. When he goes to the theatre to display for profit this mighty frog, the wretched thing sits there, looking slightly disconsolate, and says, 'croak, croak,' and even that in a swampish sort of a style, and nothing more.

Nothing whatsoever. The theories croak in the light of reality, their limbs creak, their voices are a nightmare, the light of day makes darkness out of their light; and as Christ indicated, when your light is darkness, how great is that darkness!

You can imagine the embarrassment, not to say gloom of the entrepreneur. Like Gould in real life, relative to his ‘creation’ he finds nothing whatsoever to fulfil the dream, and dreaming more, only stricken phrases about the good old days! So, in the story, the frog finds its way back to more entombment for more centuries, and so on. The idea seems irresistible but facts do not operate that way. Consider the maker and trainer of the frog, and the sheer facility of the creature!

In fairy stories, perhaps in operas, this is great. In life, alas, not so. It is simply not an option. Neither frogs nor frenzies can be frog-marched into such a dazzlement. There is the working of time; the implantation, production and resurrection of such life of brio, inventive brilliance and imagination (which is the point!), its initial genius contrary to type and productive-eruptive dazzling capacity or both; the full play of potential, the deviousness or drabness or sadness or unwillingness to be exploited, whatever: all of this is in full play, in the opera, so that our clever frog can be, operate, produce, impact and does not deteriorate before or during his creation, while the loss of centuries does nothing to diminish his wit.

In real life, there is death, and there is life, and there is nothing which naturally opens and shuts like that, or opens only to shut with the powers of creation distilled into its tiny skull, or brain, since it is not the nature of things natural to do that, even man having the profoundest of limits to his instituted, constituted and enabled operation, which he finds, but does not create, as all the rest is found. The ‘frog’ thing: it does not come, it does not go, nor do its little works of nature, have their bow. It cannot shoot, being absent, and cannot be present, being ultra-natural. If in the story, it departs to arise, this merely accentuates the issue: of arising at all!

But the case for Gould is worse. Ludicrous, is it for realism to find  the frog arising in his little way, with interspersing centuries; far worse is it when it does not arise at all, but all the glamour and the rest of it, continues WITHOUT HIM, not with anything new, but with all the old flair simply playing over and over again. After all, nothing natural does it at all, in time’s thrall or once only. Indeed, it lacks the investigable means for such a power divine, the inspectable structure, the power of thought, the address, and the commanding of the control to make the address. (Cf. SMR pp. 296ff., 307ff., 79ff., Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3, Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, Swift Witness Ch. 6.)

ALL that is known in nature is the means to be what it is, varying about kind, the means to transmit the copy of the profundity installed, and a notable creative power in the last thing produced, man, which relates to, but is grandly surpassed by the standard of the installation process that is attested in him, so that his body might so much as be.

That observable thing noted, then, is the KIND of thing which the biblical KINDS in fact do.

Having, in the naturalistic implications for the matter in hand,  magical marvels which enshrine all the ultra-genius of creation somehow incorporated in some sort of system which in some sort of way has all the originality of design (q.v.), all the brilliance of conception, all the wonder of co-ordination, all the sheer dazzling marvel of integration about a meaning and an entity, all the control of language in that coded miniaturisation which is the DNA, all the power to invent the interface between language with its concepts, and performance and its entente cordiale with the meaning of the symbols, all the appointing power to put purpose-built programs into play which command, so that symbol and significance has but one kind of interplay, though the methods within it are myriad: this is not really science. It is opera.

The attestation of their powers is nothing to do with anything natural that is  known, conceivable, or constructable. ONLY intelligence (with imagination, supernal power, executive capacity, integrating facility ... and so on)  is relevant in all empirical, logical consideration. This is what it does. It is not what contained and constrained matter does, can be made to do, or shows the means or matrix to do. In fact, it is in the realm of intelligent imagination, and hence not of what is intelligently imagined, but not equipped with the imagination part with the correlative executive power and institutive capacity.

Ludicrous is it for Gould to imagine that imagination could 'arise' and work, when what it minimally requires is personal being, purposive intelligence that can bring contained form, legislated control, using for this, entrepreneurial ability past all we have any sight of perceiving, so that plan becomes operation and operation triumph; and it is then only more of the same obfuscatory to pretend that it is to be 'inserted' without ground or grounds of any kind, from somewhere or other in 'nature', simply because he insists on the material. The frog is a better choice, however comic.

Yet as mascot or memo, it is irrelevant. It is not so bad for frogs in operas; but out of them, it is fried earth, not pizza, a wordy scenario without one whit of work to validate, verify, indicate, focus or find it. Accordingly it meets epistemology likewise, like a fly before a fly swat, and is a work from start to finish, of creation by imagination, and procedure by assumption. When these features are arcane substitutes in a logical bind, for the actual kind, one considers the additional versatility of man, to take 'the children' into the hill, as in the Pied Piper. It is then wise to consider not the most contrary, but the most logical for the bill. Whence then all this ?

What does this sort of thing is at least in capacity to cover, the sort of thing that man is; and what COULD do it is like man, in being equipped with all these features and qualities by its ontological heights and wonders, in a degree far past that of man. It has to be SUFFICIENTLY equipped for man to 'arise' from its causal action. It has to be beyond the mere world of causative constraints, since otherwise these have no explanation, which is like saying that the 'lines of force' associated with magnetism show why it works, without looking into the little matter of WHY there are such 'lines'.

You cannot stop if you wish to be logical and you are thus forced into the eternal existence of what is not constrained, to explain the temporal existence of what is and bears in itself all the signals and symbols, features and functions of the constrained, as shown in detail in SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10.

Gould therefore has forgotten something. It is the thing whose name he invoked, when he expostulated against the sheer impact of the Cambrian designs, in the face of theories to 'explain' them. What, said he, in heaven's name do we have here, this contradiction, this incredible, this inconceivable contrast and contradiction between expectation and observation!

Sheering off Darwinian instrumentality, as having nothing of progress in it, he looks to this mystic past, and smuggles in God with various long words which in the end mean just this: We haven't the slightest idea how it could have happened, but really, you see, the sheer gaps of what was not there simply beckoned to the sheer opportunity for matter, the engineer, do you see, to simply make, construct, put into being all the sorts of things which the obvious vacuum would allow, and so the ecological barrel would transmit this shot of life. Great isn't it!

No, Mr Gould, it is not great. No barrel explains the energy, the power, the relevance, the intricacy, the symbolic-order, substantial result correlation. It is only an image, a magical image, an analogical intrusion with words. What you need is the POWER, the INVENTIVENESS, the THOUGHT capacity to SEE the gap, the power to fill it ... ah yes, that of course is the WHOLE point. Creation, is it not. What you need is ... CREATION, and what creates, it is a CREATOR, since that is 'one who creates'. Creation is what you need, do not see, cannot account for, so you smuggle in your frog, and he dances and prances to distraction, but alas, when you show him to us, he says only 'croak, croak', and refuses to be frog-marched into being at all.

There is of course a basis for all of this. Earlier philosophers had tried to avoid the presence and knowledge of the true and carefully revealed God of creation in their own ways. Mr Gould was in no small manner, the victim of their ploys; and let us be clear, one can admire Gould as one cannot admire the desultory irrelevances of Darwin. At least Gould admitted the problem, and tried however inanely, to verbalise a solution. Darwin merely worked in a vacuum of relevance, to turn variety of kind into inception of creation.

6.   SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENTISM

Let us, then, consider it further, concerning the preceding philosophers before this double debacle, and there are of course many mini-debacles as well (such as those of Goldschmidt, Løvtrup and Nilsson cf. SMR pp. 108ff., 202ff., 252Aff.), hopeful monsters as a base for the very epitome of precision, or ontogenetic marvels for the imaginary engendering of the acme of accuracy. Smuggling was always popular, but understandably, never achieved legality. It does not actually PRODUCE the goods, merely sells them.

What then of the philosophical prelilminaries to the comedy of the 19th., the tragedy of the 20th., and the catastrophe of the 21st centuries, the occult confusion which invaded science.

SINCE by the nature of the case, the Humian reductio ad absurdum brings the impossible result which excludes the thinker, it is appropriate not to follow i (cf. SMR Ch. 3). Though Hume did not intend to pillory the misuse of such concepts as mere series, he succeeded. Nothing is 'mere'; all requires cause, even the logic inherent in definitions which are inherent in language which is necessary for speech! (cf. Causes). The cause of series, with their various additive properties (cf. Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9 with Repent or Perish Ch. 7) of correlation, intimate progression, pervasive interaction or internal relevance of parts and programs, integration of language used (ONE only) and so on, is what is adequate for such a production. The reality of logic does not in fact fade when problems grow bigger, only the will to use it!

WHEN it is used, as we have seen, all philosophic quagmires depart (cf. SMR Chs.  3, and 5, TMR)^*2A. 

Mistaking one method of checking and finding correlation of principles and applications of paradigms, usable concepts and evidences of controlling causal connections, scientism, which properly used is a very respectable form of enquiry, becomes an idolatrous and even bizarre piece of proud flesh in the body of understanding. It is VERY limited, and when used within its limits, very good!

It is by nature processive, and that is no ground of contempt. What is contemptible is this: that what is by nature from the imaginative heart of man, a method of checking some facets of things becomes the method of finding truth! It leads not only to reductio ad absurda^*3 as in Hume, but in Kant as well, for its whole assumption is not divorcible from presumption. Whatever seeks to give a basis for what is merely partial, as if it were all, has to find obstruction, since it is untrue.

With Kant, the surrealistic concept what of an unknowable about which he knew so much that he could articulate its relationships to the knowable and its office and function. Such ludicrous self-contradiction has as an appendage his own methodological self-contradiction. This arises for example when he includes the OPERATION of causality in reaching the concept of causality - that is, he imagines it in function, while denying it in fact, since it is needed to ACCOUNT for the arising of causality: and that, it is because he insists on giving a REASON for it. This is treated in some detail in Predestination and Freewill, Appendix on Kant, and briefly in SMR Ch. 5.

You cannot exclude the use of reason by arbitrary flicks of a methodological switch, because you want to preserve a part of the modes of thought, and ignore the rest, deify a segment of reality, and expunge all else. This is a philosophic tantrum, and unworthy of thought; and that is why, since one large tantrum has been oppressing much of Western culture, to mention but one phase, for centuries. It has not of course been total; but it has been sufficiently virulent, like any other pandemic, to slay many, and the children become infected as they contact the givers of confusion academically, and find their feelies in TV, where it is made more intimate, as in the Brave New World movies.

When, therefore, you make two reformations, you begin to do justice to the truth. First, you actually USE the observations, such as those which Gould so dramatises, in his verbal appeal to heaven's name. You do not blink and think no more. You do not say, Theory commands that observations be ignored. That is not science. You do not add, Theory demands that we base ourselves on what we think SHOULD happen or MIGHT happen. No, not at all.

That, it is not science. You are instead to be committed in this discipline, to reasoning on what DOES happen. You do not say, Ah, but in some incognito way, actually all is doing this or that, and so all is verified. What hideous and hapless nonsense! and how common. Instead you say, What is found, and what is not found, this is the basis for theory. It is not that theory is the basis, by way of hope, for more theory. Bleary, weary theory has been the enfant terrible of a whole century of nonsensical non-science IN THIS FIELD! Like the smack of a wave in your face, facts, data, are to help awaken you from slumber, not evoke an imaginary picture of some sea where there are no waves.

Leave that to the novelist; in science we study the waves! What then ? You consider what you find, and do not make a foundling of facts. Why did Nilsson, why did Gould why did Løvtrup, why did Lord Kelvin, why did they cry out at the folly of it all, in this or that area, or more broadly, when thundering against illicit convention! It was not, as SMR Ch. 2 and TMR Ch. 1 show, because they were blind, but because the facts rankled and they were not keen to have them overruled (cf. SMR 203, 234, 251, 226ff., 208ff.).

Why did Professor W.R. Thompson in his Biological Institute cry out at the towers resting on fragile towers of unverified aspiration, showing Darwin as defunct now as then in support from empirical
realms ? The facts grate, like a flat tyre as you summarily speed on, despite it. Sparks, creasing, scraping: it is like a raping of the road; and so too, is this of science. But what is scientific method were to be followed even in this realm, where not contentious clamour but incredibly clear and continually mutually harmonising fact i the regiment ? What then!

First then, have respect to all the facts, and to no additives from the aspiring fraudulence of intrusive imagination, you seek carefully and watch acutely what is found, and stop the delusive substitute of illicit dreams. You order, organise and examine them, considering confluences of order, organisation, intimate correlative aspects with other principles, procedures and laws already discovered, envisage verificatory means. In the process, you need to consider what might, in this milieu, closely relate to the facts, thus rehearsed and ordered.

Then you seek what explains them, not what ignores them: what has the ability, causally conceived, to produce them, not what does not, let alone what is categorically without the very matrices of the findings, such as in the case of man, where there are incorporated body, mind and spirit (cf. SMR Ch. 1). You look for what may be seen to relate, to have causative force, procedural relevance, what attests itself as capable, having a sufficiency in its input, for such an output.

You do not for example say, Oh, non-law, that will explain law; or non-form, that will explain form; or nonsense, that will explain reason.

Thus, you do not, for example, seek for a cash balance in a debtor's prison, or for the cause of liberty in place of  law, or of order in its absence, or that of symbolic logic in its applications, amid mindlessness.

There has to be some slight relevance. You do not simply cast your thoughts to the winds and wonder what the dust might blow in. This may be fun, or cathartic; but it is not relevant.

Further, in seeking the answer, you do not know it in advance, as in crypto-anti-religious scientism. You seek it where it best answers the question set, meets the data given and verifies itself, not in antinomies (cf. Predestination and Freewill, loc.cit., and SMR loc. cit.), but in logical cohesion and predictive power. If you are a biblical Christian, of course you will confidently EXPECT to find what reflects the Biblical picture; and if you have long been a Christian, you will not only by faith, but by experience know just how assured this is. Yet, instead of following the fragile and furtive dreams of those who look for the answer where nothing shows it, either logically or empirically, and all attests the opposite, you follow the facts in precisely the ordered and methodological fashion which science demands.

To be sure, you may entertain on the basis of experience, some answers first, so that you do not waste time; but with immovable certainty, you TEST objectively and AWAIT the result.

It is hi-sigh science which refuses to look, by prejudicial preconception, and thus fails to find, by obfuscatory oblivion to reality (cf. Trappings for Potpourri at Scientific Method, and Cult of the Forbidden). Truth - and Jesus Christ in a statement never paralleled, or at least exceeded in the annals of time, declared this: I AM ... the truth ... (John 14:6): it is not AFRAID to test. It loves to do it, when there is ground as here, for it is an assured result, and glorifies God.

Reason's plea is answered at once; experiment's requirements, in checking the implications of whatever is presented, are met with glee. It is not just that one was not born yesterday, and so knows the expectation with security, but that already one sees confirmation on every side, and the stringencies of new tests are in a milieu which it would be impossible to ignore, where fantasy did not possess pride of place, the human opera the singer and the Operatic Program read, before any singing is ever heard.

Reason is a friend of truth, since God made our reason, and is the truth. Its assiduity is merely one of the endless testimonies to God (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5, 8, 9-10).

Irrationalism always dies because it uses what it defames in order to seek to establish itself (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 10).

7.    THE ENTIRE CONSPECTUS IS
A MASSIVE PORTRAIT
OF THE WORKS OF DIVINE MAGNIFICENCE

A.   Revelations of Irrevelance from the god who is not there

Returning however to reason, of which scientific method is one exemplification, but not the apotheosis, you come as in SMR Ch. 1 to what has what it takes to get what you've got, and then to what is the required verification of that; and finding this is so positive as to be in excess of requirements, you note the fact that this is so. It works! Through relevant hypothesis and its competitive verification. That is, not only does the other option fail in verification, with a kind of negative exuberance and dedication to the task, but the reality of creation attests itself with an unmoving glee,  yielding at no point, covering more points than one might have imagined at the outset, not only getting if you will, First Class Hnours, but the Exhibition, and if there were such a thing, the Universal Exhibition for all academic places everywhere over all time.

Scientific method can contribute this amount, by exposing it in each area, arena and operation. In its field, it so denotes, so exhibits the result (SMR pp.  140-150, TMR Ch. 1, Wake Up! ... Chs. 4-6).

As noted frequently on this site, in simple fact, that is what is called creationism, but it simply means that the One who had it all, gave what it took, and thus it has it. It is CREATION.

Its testimony does not increase in design specifications advancing, because He is not now operative, as He has said in the Bible, the verifiable text which puts itself in place for the purpose of TEST not least (Isaiah 42, 43, 48). It loves test; it pleads for it, demands it, constrains for it, challenges with vitality, and adds concern with its protestations, for those who make the tests.

NEVER is this design increment found as time passes. The time for it is past. If now this author whose words you now are reading, were suddenly to cease writing, what would be the result ? Would his words continue and mutate (yes, only if there were some bad printing errors, or viruses in the electronics were introduced)! Of course not! Would there be new designs flowing unconscionably into his conceptions ? How could they ? If he were not there, or operative, how would he contribute them ? and since the field is the creation deriving from the one who has what it takes to present his particular contribution, it wsould be a contradiction in terms if such things did happen. It is ridiculous to imagine them.

So much for the analogy, to make the point at issue clear. Now let us return to the actual matter before us, the Creator, as distinct from creative work on the part of any of the millions of creators who work away on this earth, each at his field and in his task. The Creator's work has, like that of any other, a distinctive style and power, conspectus and quality specific to Himself. It is not that of any other, nor does it greatly resemble. To be sure, the fact that we are as He has said in His verified and validated text, the Bible, that we are made, as a race, in HIS IMAGE, since He is not spatial but made space (ALL things - John 1:1-3, Romans 8:33ff., Colossians 1:15), obviously this means in the sort of image that is relevant to a Being who is Spirit (John 4).

In other words, there is a certain consonance, we are in another analogy, like an echo, a resonance, far dimmer, not the original, a derivative, but still, closely related. Again, He is infinite, having no constraints, since there is none to constrain when you come to the eternal basis for everything; and we are decidedly not so. Despite the greatest flows of inspiration, each man begins as a babe, indeed has to be carried about in what in abortion is a tomb, but in good cases is a womb, in someone else, who nurtures; and each body ends, till the Lord comes, and with the exceptions of Elijah and Enoch, as a corpse. If that does not make the point, what then could!

Thus having duly noted the obvious, which is one of the chief things in this field to be ignored, we come to the other manifest fact. Our creativity is beyond all law and chance, beyond all containment. It is not limited by genes, which merely provide equipment, not inspiration, nor is it under the control of culture, which it may criticise to the death, and frequently does. It has an analogue status to that of God, despite its limited to infinite correlation, which is not a good start for comparison! It is able to savour and appreciate the works of the divine mind, and while not at all being able to contain them, it can muse on its splendour, marvel at its aptitude and ponder its depth.

We are, as He said, in His image. Our works are frequently wrought in oblivion of His presence - one speaks of the human race - and without reference to His majesty. This of course makes them vain follies, since we are derivatives, and when divorced from or alienated towards His grandeur and reality, it follows with complete and absolute necessity that we will be disorientated. If the CHIEF aspect of anything is missing, you can forget any thought of mere inaccuracy in the result! It will be prodigious, and if not at first apparent as such, it will at last fit the case! The 21st century is in this respect a MOST fitting example, since it is as unfit as anyone could wish for human life; and here again, Christ's own words are coming home to roost: UNLESS those days, in the midst of the final writhing of this world's fallen condition, unless they were shortened, then NO FLESH, no human beings in particular, could be spared! (Matthew 24:21-22).

It follows that Christians, those who know God and believe His words (John 5:24, 1:1-3, Matthew 5:17-20, John 12:48-50), have cause for rejoicing. If the world is to scamper about, touting and pouting and louting (why not ? what louts do!), blowing itself up, and people are going to send little parts of their flesh flailing through the air as bombs, enhanced by bits of metal and the like, and imagine that harems in heaven will greet their infamous acts, if rulers are all but routinely to dip in the till, expropriate, instal accounts private from flows public and the like, if deceit and deviousness, ingratitude such as that of Europe in many ways towards the US, if the seizure of children from the families of others, in order to disgrace the name of the human race by seeking forcibly to use them religiously or sexually for debased and selfish purposes, because some vision says so in its irrational emptiness: if these and such things are occurring, is it any wonder!

What in the world would anyone expect when the Creator is so treated, when the Redeemer who IS the answer is dismissed...

So on all sides the flow of fulfilment, verification, expectation, consummation continues.

But what then of the seditious misnomer of evolutionism compared to creation!

NEVER are its 'means' seen to be operative. NOWHERE are the efforts seen from the past, in countless mirages of endless efforts, seen in partial constructions innumerable, coming from some imaginary source. Their absence is like a sermon from silence, their failure from Darwin to now, is like an oration on absenteeism. Their ludicrous omission from the diet of history is like the case of a baby fed on straw, with no milk. It is a monument to exclusion, a testimony to untruth. Nor is this all. 

ALWAYS, the design specifications meet what is called 'design' and nothing counts to make a new semantics necessary, so that we can deem 'design' what lacks the requirements of the term, or not-design, what has them. They refuse to go away. 'Junk' DNA awakes to show its teeth, and its testimony as knowledge increases, is growing fast in various oversight roles^*3A. Recapitulation becomes a child's bogey man. It has fallen heavily on its face. Blood supplies, for example, and divergent developmental aspects of organs are merely two of the reasons for the categorical dismissal of the whole idiotism (if it was not a word, it is now - the practice which conforms to that of an idiot, without requiring that the agent actually BE one). Its simplistic haste as in the case of Ernst Haeckel, its deceptive manipulation, are a testimony in type, to hype. He was not so very earnest after all.

Brilliance in methodology is a simple cellular, genetic, physiological fact as Denton has so clearly explained, a technical marvel on the analogy of our own works, but transcendent; which of course is precisely what you would ... expect, when man is a derivative in the image of his Creator.

B.   Revelations of Revelance from the God who IS

It is design, creation, that scientific method attests, since all implications are met, and the alternative has all not met, even to the point, as we have seen, of hilarity, as if there were some drunken spree, intoxicated writhing instead of arriving. They say, Hey it is explained; and it does not explain until the case becomes odious in repetitiveness, nauseous in pretension and calamitous in method. They say for 150 years or so, Look, removal is the explanation of arrival! It was good that Schützenberger in the famed Wistar Conference (SMR pp. 128-137, 157ff.), majored on this point. He was of course merely one of many. How ludicrous, that what is to remove weakness, produces strength. If you could extract sour milk from a cup of tea, would that produce the tea, would that be the way you gained the brew in the first place, if you started with water!

How much does it take before people will realise that inane substitutes for thought do not compose themselves into actuality, simply because LIFE is in view.

Life is indeed wonderful; but its wonder is investigable by reason, as is the rest of the creation. It is not that reason attains to it, but responds to it, like a horse to a rider. As Lord Kelvin emphasised, there is an order in all things, a causative reality operative in every field (cf. TMR, Ch. 1).

As there noted -

Indeed, of Lord Kelvin, the Encyclopedia Britannica makes the point:
"He brought together disparate areas of physics - heat, thermodynamics, mechanics, hydrodynamics, magnetism and electricity - and thus played a principal role in the ... synthesis of 19th century science, which viewed all physical change as energy-related phenomena."

In his own domain, he synthesised the concepts, already primary by themselves, in applications of great variety and prodigious force, moving with similar aptitude to geological matters, such as the time for the cooling of the relatively recent earth to the thermodynamics for which he is so famous. While knowledge increases, the methods do not. It is only in God that the knowledge for man has the final saltation, by being rejoined to its institutive basis. It is for this reason that as shown in endless seeming fields on this site, there is no problem of philosophy which the divine perspective and provision does not resolve;
while the omission of this ultimacy leaves but a burnt stump, or roasted rump of disease or decease^*2A.

As Denton so well exposes in almost endless sub-themes in the biological and micro-biological realms, rationality and order, grounds and modes, methods and intellectually discernible programs and provisions abound in life.

It was always obvious that the greatest of the productions would not achieve the pinnacles present in man by a deficiency of equipment, a denudation of dynamic or an omission of concept. The more you move to the greater product, the more is required. FOR what is given much, MUCH is required! Reason is not baffled by life, by wallows in it, like a horse frothing and covered with foam, given a beautiful massage and rub down to its steaming flanks.

The writhing contortions of misplaced concepts, irrational metaphysics, recalcitrant empirics, foozled strokes of 'genius', like the anguished remains of human bodies, mangled on the battle fields so germane to the other assaults on the works of God, show the deceits of flesh in its outcomes: much ado, no do; and what is done, not well done.

Aspiration to glory becomes consummation of shame. Desire for some pet dynamic becomes idolatry with its burnt offerings, in academia and the domain of politics and war alike. We will SHOW them! becomes no show at all, but a film re-run. Science is merely one run where the rush of rioting flesh asserts itself. Like the rest, there is the authentic, and good is its name, and many have been the geniuses who have adorned the ranks of realistic science, even some of the most distinguished amongst them. Science has had good measure of such brilliant practitioners; but there is in this quasi-scientism, as unamenable to fact as any adolescent, and as little disposed to listen to reason, just such a spirit of irrational rebellion as is often found in the miscreant young.

It is all of one piece, like many coats from one cloth, if not integumentally, then in pattern.

What is this 'science' which finds 'test' irrelevant, success a miscreant, and failure a triumph! How well is realised further this word from that same self-verifying text, as the centuries pass for the laboratory to show it.

What word ? one may ask, what word is that ? It is this, to be found in Romans 1:21ff.. Let us cite a little:

"... when they knew God they did not glorify Him as God,
nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts,
and their foolish hearts were darkened.

"Professing to wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God
into an image .... who exchanged the truth of God for the lie,
and worshipped and served the creation more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever."

Let us however proceed with our enquiry concerning abuse of scientific method, as we ponder its requirements and requisitions. We have reached the use of imagination to find what WORKS, and is VERIFIED, and it is then related to other principles and findings and constructions, to see if all may have that integral operational and conceptual unity which the actual field displays, as it works as one sphere of observation. So far it is not at all difficult. Nor in this case is there even the slightest rational impediment in specifying creation as what meets the case without competition. All this has been seen in detail on very numerous occasions on this site (cf. TMR 1, 5, 6, 7).

But what next ? This is not all, but merely the contribution of scientific method at the outset in the specialised field of the commencement of what produced what is here.

Then, next,  you need to realise that reason has demands of its own, past scientific method. That 'scientific method'  is merely one of its multitudinous forms and fashions, as we explored somewhat in Repent or Perish Ch. 7 and pondered in SMR Ch. 3. The final understanding  requires internal consistency for all concepts for any explanation; for otherwise, quite simply, it does not explain but provides a self-contradiction in an effort to understand, which is merely like spilling your tea on your program notes. It needs this for each level of conception used. There must not be self-contradiction, lest your word is yea and nay, and in the end, an incomprehensible muddle of faulty towers of Whirled Trade.

Truth is immune to the terror of irrationality, incoherence, inconsistency, inconstancy, inadequacy. One of the chief immunities is this: that it does not by assumed absence make an idiotism of the claim to be speaking it! Biblical truth as we have seen is precisely of this immunity, and this alone^*2A.

What then ? To show yourself in collision, is not to show understanding of what is to be explained. If you contradict yourself, why should anyone else bother to do so!

Thus, if that  is your effort, you fail. All irrationalism and relativism shatters on this rock.

Here however, in the constraints of the rigours of scientific method and reasoned enquiry, when you seek to fulfil every rational requirement in each discipline as with discipline, you examine and consider the evidence, constructing for examination what works, and agreeing with the discernible events, agencies and dynamisms, and meeting every demand, functions as one: then you find each one is verified. The more you ask, the more you get; and each time you ask, you get even more than you required! This divinely originated exuberance rewards faith, congratulates reason which after all is but one of the creations, rejoices with imagination, which finds fact its ally and reality its friend.

Indeed,  when  spreading abroad for test, all concepts used in the presence of all empirical findings achieved,  you proceed to harmonise on all sides:

then you do not fail.

Assiduity is rewarded.

Your rational approach now reaches the necessities of validity. What reason points to, evidence confirms (cf. TMR Ch. 5), Barbs ... 6  -7. Every level and variety of test being met, every implication of procedure pondered and tested, you reach a conclusion. It is not hidden. It flouts its graces like daphne, but it does not flaunt. It has irresistible appeal because it is of its own genre, beyond comparison. Proceeding to the God of creation, with the reason He invented, we find on all sides this spectacle of the spectacular.

By now, the explanation and the coverage is empirical, rational, ontological and metaphysical, aesthetic, moral and epistemological. When all is harmonious and mutually supportive, both in the invisible fields of reason and the visible, and in all the fields of investigation, without intrusion but with careful distinguishing of the evidence of every variety of reality in view, then you find a broader result. In fact, as shown before, there is only one such result. The case is simplicity itself (Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host). The site of arrival is not simple: it is profundity itself, but the nature of the site and the wonder of its singularity, this is as 'simple' as seeing the moon by night, and the sun by day, in the skies. They declare themselves. You do not need a magnifying glass; they are great already.

This, then,  is so not because thought is cheap, but because God is obvious;  and at this level, not only is there no competition, but the presentation from His deeds and testable words is so intensely and immensely, overpoweringly sufficient for every test, that it is like comparing the words of a donkey with those of a superlative genius. Comparison is ludicrous; there is nothing near. However,  comparison is not omitted, for that reason, for truth rejoices in boldness, having nothing to hide, and all to reveal!

In the above work, the exposure of these things is made, in alliance with similar emphases with other foci, which are to be seen in such works as The gods of naturalism have no go! and Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer.

Here, in this present chapter,  our chief concern is overview, review and seeing the disposition of things, with special reference to the field of scientific method. Indeed, DV, this will form one of the chapters in a coming compilation on that topic.

There is consistency and not self-contradiction in the use of reason, in that it satisfies its own validity with verification on all sides, and finds its own place in God, where the cause is found, sufficient for its own basis, eternal and uncontrived. It does not move to territories alien to its operation, but explicatory of it. In God this is the case, and in the Bible, the practical, persistent, unvarying verification is found. Reason and action accord.

Epistemology, metaphysics, empirical science, aesthetic, metaphysics of aesthetic, morality, ontology, semantics, love, truth, pathology of mind, body and spirit: all here found met the requirements both for their own meaningfulness, and operational reality, and for their inter-connection in one, as in the case of mankind^*2A.

These things which in coverage and overview, we rehearse here, are the case, since what reason requires is sufficient for both the existence of these things and their correlation. There is no self-contradiction. There is no ultimate self-contradiction, such as is found in proceeding to declare what is true, while denying there so much as exists anything which either is or could be absolute truth, in terms of some Humian field, or could consistently be known, as in the Kantian cut-down system: or in any other of this philosophic band of reductionistic unreality and indeed, surreality.

In so insisting on coherence of concepts, within the reason which we use in scientific method, for example, we are neither dealing with the arbitrary series of Hume, nor the 'unknowable' but (by self-contradiction) so well sketched-out profundities of Kant. We are dealing with all that is before us, and with the field of reason, and where it leads. As the Bible says, the realities of God are manifest (Romans 1:17), and it is when painstaking steps are taken to avoid Him in bizarre presumptions, and their kind, that you reach those irrationalistic occlusions which have frequently blighted man's secular culture for centuries, and now increasingly, its possibility so much as to exist. It is like all wrong answers: in the end you pay.

C.   Intimations of Pseudo-Scientism
from the Flight to Fantasy of Autonomous Man

Anguish on Legs

Thus 'science', in its philosophic back-rooms, which so often control the speech of many of its exponents, becomes pseudo-scientism, and being such, has long sought to operate in this ludicrous and affected pose, substituting arrogance for acuity. Dictators often do this, and the case, being vended by human beings, is not other here. In the case of scientific philosophy, which embraces the god or gods of naturalism in the main, we have that same prancing, dancing which is noted repeatedly and with set purpose, on this site, of the enemies of God.

This they do, whether such virtual or invented 'gods' be treated as actual and apparent, or covert, perhaps merely using daggers of desire in selected dark places, as if such deeds had never happened, while life is extinguished where it matters most, in the heart of man. By such means, this is made subject to the coquetries of fancy and the emptiness of invalidity. It is, indeed,  the militant attitude of Psalm 2 which is being considered, in contrast with that of receiving the truth of God, and the God of truth, as there shown. It is like a statue to death, with continual highlighting spotlights trained upon it, even in the night. And the night comes, and then the morning! (cf. Isaiah 21:11-12). The case is now so advanced that the day is about spent (John 9:4). It has had a very extended opportunity (II Cor. 6:1-2).

There have been many hours in the night, and many minutes, with various events in many places. Let us take one of its obfuscations.

The prancing of Darwinism, so very dead ^*5and the dancing of Gould^*5, so very programmed, alike, never get anywhere. Darwinism lacks the power and creativity, Gould's punctuation lacks the same and though it provides a a phraseological attempt to cover the case, this is a case where words alone build nothing. It is not enough to stop; you need the 'go'. It is not enough to punctuate; you need to write.

Whether  then it be sound and fury, or bound, bond and guru, it gets to the same place in its appointed role: it all in that field, explains nothing, predicts nothing, assaults fact and is assaulted by it. Naturalism with its ally, the little gods that are not there, this is merely a shroud for Designer ignorance, like those who expect to find how a coat made itself, and ignore the label.

In the mode of Gilbert and Sullivan, it is the very model of a modern major-general in crypto-religious scientism. It will tell you anything that does not relate, in a most impressive manner.

When however you return to reason, to rationality, to verifiability and verification, to one and to all, and receive the empirical realities, the rational investigability and the necessary results, you have no further difficulties of method whatever. The empirical facts are PREDICTED in kind, and VERIFY in type. The demands of consistent reason are met with consistent verification. Man's method is then not self-contradictory, but being divinely given, ends where it began, with the demonstration of God, of the Bible, and in turn then, of creation.

This itself, that book, that divine presentation, that authenticity that invites examination and rewards assiduity, like some great painting, the very joy of the art experts: it then verifies itself all over again empirically in meeting every test, whereas in amazing sullen failure, organic evolutionism grates, and grinds to a halt in fact, while being given accelerated promotion apparently as a counter-weight to non-performance (cf. SMR pp. 140-150, TMR Ch. 1).

How in heaven's name, in all but total apoplexy, Gould demands, CAN you have what we find, if what we say, or rather what the gradualists say, is correct (op. cit. pp. 227-233, cf.  Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6, loc. cit.); and how is a broad base and narrow result in design, moving from the early to the late attestations, how is this to be found by what slowly INVENTS it! or how is such prolific start to be found in a process which is supposedly moving slowly by tortuous steps to create and concatenate fantastic design, when this empirical stuff in the Cambrian descends like rain, and rushes into the earth, only to decline over time. Such is Gould's writhing, and in some aspects, his anguish does him credit. Not so however his own conclusion, which merely smuggles in the dignity of deity, by some UNKNOWN and UNIMAGINABLE 'way' which somehow did what divine power is needed to do, at some time, for some reason which unfortunately does not have the joy of being articulable.

Is science to be a concern of parody ? Is it to invent methods which are a mockery ? is this operatic singing, or rather does it have some relationship other than contrariety, to what it affects to explain!

The living designs, they are after all, like any other design in this: that in an environment which has its trials, they gradually fade! It is useless to use philosophy to change the definition of design (cf. SMR pp. 211ff.). What has symbolic and empirical correlation of myriads of parts with a unitary result, a common basis in code and the attainment of the realities of intimate cohesion IS a design.

It is like saying, Oh, when you are a millionaire, it is not really money at all, it is just some sort of paper. The 'paper' however is a code for what is wealth. It is not to be ignored because the code is seen operating every time the cheque book is used, as if this disproved it. Empirically, this is it, what it is. Procedurally, this is a matter of order and meaning, organisation and assignation, leading to action in the presence of power, by interpreted symbols.

An explanation of the phenomenon begins with what is the name for this sort of thing, not with what is not the name. It begins with what is found for that sort of result, not with what is not found.

If the capital of the millionaire gradually dissipates, we do not look in 'explanation' for a 'method' which explains how it increases. Yet this is precisely the evolutionary myth. It is literally, no science, but non-science; and if it be deemed anti-science, the phrase is just, for it misuses the august name of science in order to pullulate the flesh, and intimidate the minds, so that men might be converted to unreason, by a 'reason' which inverts its theories to 'meet' the facts.

                     D.   Return to Reason, Severance of Seduction
 

What then is the answer ? It is to lay waste this waste, and return to reason and scientific method, properly so-called, the one sensitive to facts, building with watchful and alert mind from them, and considering the validity of all method, the verification of all claim, and the virtue of all conception.

The answer ? Heaven's name, to use Gould's apostrophe as noted above, it is assuredly this which is the answer. The invisible realities which govern man, such as love, faith, hope, courage, these are indeed in the field of the government OF man.

The visible, which is by nature, contrived, conceived and controlled, being so constituted, and causally, therefore, instituted, is important. It is however no more important than the tape-recording for the opera singer. It is a most satisfactory way of RENDERING invisible reality, emotion, meaning, sentiment, purpose, interpretation, things not visible but discerned, and this in many regards;  but the taped waves are quite meaningless without that invisible reality which they simply convey. As a conveyance, they are adequate and blind; watching the waves, however, rather than finding what is signified, is inadequate and just as blind. They are blind because they lack sight; but when man is blind because he chooses to close his eyes, small wonder he invents blinds for the better preservation of the dark.

Let us however work with open eyes.

What is the visible equipment for, in this case ? OUR equipment is to render desire, perform purpose, achieve desiderata, control by method for a designated outcome. This the tape-recorder simply illustrates. We are purposive beings, and use what is fitting for such 'slavery' to perform our will.

The visible equipment is FOR the rendering of it, and it DOES render it (cf. SMR pp.  316Dff.). It has what it takes, and it does it. It is part of the design. It is what meets the meaning of that term with the need to do such a task. It is FOR the codification and amplification, or presentation of what is personal to persons, by means of what is impersonal but correlative to them at a level fitted for conveying their products to other persons. Such is the nature of equipment, organically contrived or other, in the realm of mental agility, creative facility and personal imagination.

Accordingly, looking for conveying contrivances, set up and formed, formulated and despatched to describable service, for the meaning, is like looking at the cover of the book^*4 for its content. The very nature of such contrivances is to perform relative to what is not of that kind, and it attests the kind of mind which it can be used to convey, in an impersonal manner. Ignoring their rational requirements for existence is like seeking to place a fairy on a beam balance, in chemistry. All requires cause, and this no less.

Fairies however are flirtations in fancy, and are never seen to work, nor is their constitution known, nor are their results to be seen. What is required for each species and level of existence, is what it has, what it uses, what it is fitted to perform. Nothing is inadequate. Something less than what includes the necessities for production is rationally parsimonious, and irrelevant.

What is adequate for the threefold world of mind, matter and spirit is not less than any, but adequate for all. What is adequate for all, is adequate for the construction of all, and to imagine that it has to be a slow production is to imagine that one knows the illimitable: what is required to exist always so that anything might exist ever. Otherwise, causality, so far from being a willing servant of the rational mind, becomes the fancy-free blind spot of the careless driver. As SOON as you abandon it, your own thought is worthless, for its definitions require the operation of dynamics attached to form, or function, in order to allow characterisability and operability at all. If you do that, then your speech being invalid, is of no consequence.

On the other hand, if you follow causation, you find the adequate and eternal God. When you find His works in existence and not in current production, you find that this is what the independently attested Bible affirms (cf. SMR Ch. 1, Swift Witness   6). Despite this, and in despite of himself,  depositing scientific method, and then reason, in suitable waste containers, modern man is in millions bent on that grand debacle of rationality which leads to the ignoring of revelation and the wastage of this world, as it speeds to its day, again set by that same hand which provided creation^*2A, the day assessment; for we were not made able to assess, in order to be unassessable. Nor were we constituted able to think, in order not to be thought of, or able to lie, in order to avoid the truth, or able to reason in order to be free of its violation, or to seek in order that we might, by disinclination, be not guilty for not finding!

Without any doubt, there is a pathos and even some poignancy here, even for those molested and sequestered by this bane, this blight, this abuse of words and ways, in defilement of the terms of scientific method, and of reason in terms of its rational discourse. This thing is gross, arrogant, philosophical philandering, dilettantism relative to deity, reality, and even observation: indeed,  it is obfuscatory, since its use is to screen the facts, but such is the hold of culture that some at least do not realise what they are doing; and how they are being 'done'!

Far is this from questioning the integrity of organic evolutionary scientists. That is to ignore the biblical analysis, and to trespass on the premisses being used. It is, rather,  a COMMON consequence as Romans 1 shows, in association with Ephesians 4:17-19, of a movement from the living God. It does not ultimately matter, the Bible indicates, what you choose to call 'god' or 'nature' or anything else, in this respect. Error is multitudinous, and its end is one.

It is whether or not you come to the living and actual God and work on that basis.

If you do not, and instead invent or use gods or crypto-gods which do the stuff but are disallowed to appear or be named (like a theatre organist, in the pits), then there is an obliterative result (cf. Jeremiah 23, and as below, vv. 16-30).

The case indeed is so like that of today, except that only some of those responsible actually call themselves "prophets". For all that, their words rate with the best of the former ones of the false prophets of biblical definition, depiction and exposure.

Consider Jeremiah 2:11-13:

                           And hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water.

                  "Thus says the Lord of hosts:

"Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you.

They make you worthless;

They speak a vision of their own heart,

Not from the mouth of the Lord.

 

"They continually say to those who despise Me,

‘The Lord has said, "You shall have peace" ’;

And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart,
they say,

‘No evil shall come upon you.’ "

 

"For who has stood in the counsel of the Lord,

And has perceived and heard His word?

Who has marked His word and heard it?

Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord has gone forth in fury—

A violent whirlwind!

It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.

The anger of the Lord will not turn back

Until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart.

 

"In the latter days you will understand it perfectly."

Do we not then, as predicted, find this very phenomenon in modern dress, but with the same underlying flesh of deception, beneath! Ostensible sincerity is not to the point: it is rightness. And what a point that is! for self-deception was never in more vogue, and its fruits never more obvious at any time in world history; for confusion is in force, delusion is found on all sides, different varieties competing in blood, blasts and diseases unspeakable.

"The latter days", it is a biblical word in such ultimate contexts,  for the end of the Age before the rule of God more directly in this fettered world, when the Messiah having come in His saving work, the obliterative machinations of man storm and thunder. This they do, before the arrival of the King (cf. the events of Micah 4, 7, Isaiah 2:2, 11, 24, 32, 59, 66, Daniel 7,9, Jeremiah 23:5ff.). It is therefore, as the criteria of Christ and the prophets attest quite simply, NOW (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8). The "latter days" have come lately!

How near the actual coming, return of Jesus Christ, looms is unknown, since it is His desire to protect that information (Acts 1); but that it is NEAR is known, since the criteria for such an approximation are stated, and the term 'near' is used of them (Luke 21, esp. 21:30).

The return of Israel to possess Jerusalem is the most distinctive and epochal signal, since it has occurred once since its destruction, also predicted (in Matthew 24, Luke 19:41ff.), once in nearly two millenia. As to that, it has been in our own Age (to be precise in 1948 with fulfilment complete since 1967). That, it is as singular as Big Ben, or the Sydney Opera House; but vastly more so. There is a paramount signal. All the rest chime in like a carillon of bells in splendid excitement, and stark sound.

What then is this which is seen in Jeremiah's day, but which in its essence is to populate our own day, to so exquisitely horrible an extent ?

Let us listen to Jeremiah who, in speaking of that coming in ruling power of the Messiah (as in Psalm 2*⁶, Isaiah 9:6-7,  59, 66, 11, II Thessalonians 1, Matthew 24-25, Revelation 19, Micah 7, Joel 3, Jeremiah 23:5-6, 16:19-20, Zechariah 14:5 and so on), of that divine arrival which is ultimate and regal in manifest majesty and dominion, declares the consistent wonder of the Gospel. This, he says: "this is the name by which  He will be called: 'The LORD our righteousness' ", so forecasting similarly the Gospel emphasis on grace and gift of righteousness as in Psalm 71's attribution by David.

 

"I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran.

I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied.

But if they had stood in My counsel,

And had caused My people to hear My words,

Then they would have turned them from their evil way

And from the evil of their doings.

 

"Am I a God near at hand," says the Lord,

And not a God afar off?

Can anyone hide himself in secret places,

So I shall not see him?" says the Lord;

"Do I not fill heaven and earth?" says the Lord.

Again, although, as noted, the false prophets do not always actually SAY they get their stuff from the Lord, they get it from no valid source, and still pronounce with all the pomp and circumstance of annunciation, rather than mere enunciation. Thus the parallel, although more cryptic, is still complete.

Let us however see the extreme extent of the parallel. Let us look now in Jeremiah 2:27-28:

"Saying to a stock, You art my father; and to a stone, You hast brought me forth: for they have turned their back to Me, and not their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us. But where are your gods that you hast made ? let them arise, if they can save you in the time of thy trouble:
for according to the number of your cities are your gods, O Judah."

So according to the philosophers of mirth, evolutionary marvels with words barren of signification to what acts, so are these: according to their cities.

Here is Gould's gun and Darwin's no progress progressive! It has another name, a better name which relates to performance and verification, not to non-performance; but here, that is the the name that really applies. It does not apply even in theory, and as to empirical fact, non-arrival which is scarcely a good omen for any theory. Heaven's name gives, on the other hand, both the basis and the prediction, verifiable and verified.

Imagine telling passengers that the boat they take has no power to get anywhere. Who would board it ? You do need power to get anywhere. We are not in a vacuum which needs nothing to achieve anything. Naming principles or referring to laws which are verbalisations of what has been installed with power to perform according to precise and integrally related specifications is not the same as having the power to instal, or to make the installation of orders correlate with actions, so that anything is DONE!

Jeremiah in his day, as many must in our own, showed up the difference between this doctored do-little concept, and the truth of prodigious might, performance and verification on the part of the living God, where all reason is fulfilled and all validity is found, and there alone (*2A). That singularity also, not only in degree but in kind, it is precisely what you would expect, just as are the precise micro-biological and chemical phenomena on which Denton dwells so much.

God's words need to be exposed, since they happen, and have ground, both! We find this in Jeremiah 23:25-28:

"I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ 

"How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies?

"Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells his neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.

 

 "The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream;

And he who has My word, let him speak My word faithfully.

What is the chaff to the wheat? says the Lord."

Such was the case then, and so it is now.

It amounts to delusion. It is independent of the brilliance of the mind, and even of the conscious purpose. It is in its results that the condition is seen, and the cause is spiritual. That is the biblical teaching, and again, it fits the evidence (cf. TMR Ch. 1, which teases out the elements with some care).

This is the income concerned; but what of the outcomes of the delusion of organic evolution ? of that thing of which Gould seemed to conceive such problems as an inability even to conceive the ordered production or character of the  'steps',  far less in gradual manner - quite apart from the retrogressive rather than progressive overall result, that bane and diminution that he attributes to the movement from Cambrian to current (cf. Wake Up World! .. Ch. 5, *2, Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1,  and cf. Gould, op.cit. pp. 227-239). What is literally incomprehensible slowly, is now to happen much faster, the comprehensibility evidently being found in the speed! as if one could not find how one could drive a car at 10 mph, but could readily see how it could move at 200 mph!

Speed covers all; but alas, you need the ground in causation of what happens faster, far more! If the slow was ludicrous, the fast is fantasy.

                              8.   OUTCOMES OF FANTASY

But what are the outcomes of this delusion ? that of organic evolution, fast or slow, anti-causal and corrupt in concept as it is ?

Hideous are its outcomes in racial pride, basing itself now on more than empirical possibilities at a given time in a given land, but rather on genesis of modes of grandeur, now on the hidden crypto-marvels at some other time, and pride has its little ways. Thus bolstered in its oblivion to reality, by pseudo-scientism's fallacies and grave comedies, it has of course its due results. Only mercy can intervene, and when this too is despised, the thing runs its course.

Naturally there have come, in such a milieu, sanguinary wars based on such conceptions, as notably World War II, at least as far as that little man, Adolf Hitler was concerned, who, many will recall, had something to do with it ... and his concepts of racial grandeur and superiority in strife for life, are not hidden.

To be sure, the concept of grasping has not started with philosophic fiction of this kind; but it has sought to justify its peremptory strikes and grossly delusive conceptions of dynamics, by such means! It rejoices in means in which it rejoices, grasping these as it grasps what is its aim.

The fantasies of pseudo-scientism moreover give glamour to folly, and provide folly to function. This realm breeds deceit as a means of survival and is an antidote to trust in the Lord, where with love, humanity belongs. It duly if sadly finds out, here as in the other empirical fields, that this is so by the enormous payments it makes for the opposite, such as the rebuilding of much of Europe after World War II, as a result of which NOT LEAST, the USA is now in debt to trillions.

That little debt, incidentally, it MUST and perhaps will reduce the capacity of that land, with a significant and even substantial Christian ingredients in it, to intervene another time. It has done so twice; but it is being sapped. The enemy of man's life is not so vainly stupid as to fail to see that twice is enough.

The Bible makes it plain that towards the end, there will be a political-military overcoming of the power of the saints (not to BE saints, but to achieve some kind of presence in the world, as happened for all its faults, in the British Empire for example, and to some  extent in the USA in its prime). You see this in Revelation 13 and explicitly in Daniel 7:25, in that prophet's  signally verified eschatological coverage. This éclat of the awful, it  is part of the furore of force which eats up the goodness done, and applies it to evil.

God however is not mocked, and this satanic procedure will reach its end. It is better to reach one's end now, than then; to find the truth now, then in judgment, to repent now, than to wait until the 'culture' changes ... It is better to forsake all and follow the Christ than to forsake the Christ and follow culture in its idiosyncrasies and idiocies, or its idiotisms which grip it from time to time. It is perhaps worst of all to linger in the dungeons of god-creation, where man in chains seeks to make gods of liberty, and to gain permission while awaiting the gallows, to attend the 'churches' of desire. These are they which compromise with untruth, vamp the Bible, stamp out the parts they do not desire, add what they do, distort what they don't, call evil good and good evil all in the name of the Lord and then congratulate themselves.

That, it is the chariot of the Iscariot. It is best left alone.

NOTES

*1

See for example:

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Chs.   4,    3,

with Spiritual Refreshings Chs. 13, 16 and Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6, for example,

with SMR pp. 140ff..,

Secular Myths and Sacred Truth Ch. 7,  

Earth Spasm ... Chs.  7;   1.

*1A

Darwin held that characteristics gained during a life-time could be inherited, and that the sky was the limit - not the actual constructive God of creation, but 'Nature'. Yet the sky however is not sufficiently constructive, nor is anything under its blank regard.

Moreover,  the vitalised was vacuous, a dribbled blob of thought on the scroll of frustration, just as the mechanical was merely mesmeric: indeed,  while Gould later dabbled in phrases to haul in help, and Darwin used phases to enable it, both referred to nothing but imagination.

While not a Larmarckian, Darwin in dabbling in the concept of inherited characteristics (cf. Wilder-Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny p. 205) et alia, had this initial similarity, with the thought that the better would 'arrive', the gratification of irrelevance, wishful thinking and begging the question in a combination of delusion. He had a further element of comparison. He did a pre-Gould dabble into the delusions of Lamarck, alike in this, that phrases not functions were the contribution. To all appearance, this being far later than his ‘Origin …’, and following some challenge, this was out of sheer desperation.

Imagination however while present in creation, has to be present in the Creator, not in man, a part of it all; since he came too late, and has too little for the job, nor do phrases from the mouth of man have the power to do the job. If he were God, they would; since he is not, they don’t, and the epidemic of verbal construction instead of scientific thought continues in this field like acne in some youths.

On this topic and its elements of development, see Ch. 6 below,  Excursion on Allied Magics, Defiled in Defiant Defeat in Drab Delusions:

 

*2

The Defining Drama Ch.   10, and in particular, this reference. See also TMR Appendix.

*2A

See also:

      SMR, esp. Chs. 5, 10,

the trilogy,

The gods of naturalism have no go!

the pair of volumes,

REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER,

and especially,

CELESTIAL HARMONY FOR THE TERRESTRIAL HOST;

also see THE MEANING OF LIBERTY AND THE MESSAGE OF REMEDY).

 

*3

It is entirely possible that some would argue that 'reductio ad absurdum' is so entrenched in English vocabulary and even style, that it is unthinkable to change to Latin ending from -um to -a. One has every sympathy with such an approach, but does not share it. We have reached the point where one finds some conceive that 'data' is so entrenched into English style and acceptance, that it is to be used as a singular!

For one's own part, however, the prostitution of origins for the service of simplistic concepts is not attractive, nor anything which moves significantly in that direction. There is room for reasonableness about needs, but these are many. Thus there is need for some stay on the endeavour to make the contemporary the best, or the user-concept mandatory.

English had an enormous emphasis on correctness in terms of origins at one stage, and has not suffered unduly, granted the need to avoid merely precious pre-occupation. Some reference to the past becomes highly desirable as sky-scraper-itis, the desire for the most with the least, begins to take over.

Hence, in the face of many, -a! here. The principle is worthy of impact, and this may achieve that!

*3A

An account of this development is to be found in the Technical Journal of Creation ex Nihilo, Volume 14, No. 2, 2000. New roles found in the designating work of what was precipitously misnamed 'junk DNA'  include genome  structure, gene regulation and rapid speciation. Like the unknown southern continent in early exploration, these unknowns are now settling down to productive territories and the sweeping follies of what was mere ignorance, are themselves turning to junk!

One is reminded, not being a Video buff, of the numerous 'junk' capacities of our Video recorder, for all sorts of highly technical and advanced tasks, which would rarely arise in our own case. Actually, they are activated when required for purposes as they arise. If they were ignored and their uses not seen, as was once the pre-emptive approach to tonsils (which this author would much like to have back), then foolish and peremptory theory merely interferes with the study of acute and complex design provided with options, opportunities to meet crises and difficulties, and to expand function as required.

It is this sort of situation, where rapidly increasing awareness of various new controls displaces peremptory pretension with knowledge. This makes small joy for those adverse to finding, and more content in some cases with non-discovery, since all the discoveries perpetually are releasing new data realising results from schematic controls and enormous supervisory roles.

However, when the issue is WHAT DO THEY DO ? not SEE HOW USELESS THEY ARE!  then there obtains a better milieu for discovery. In fact, there are so many things to do in programmatic controls, as computer advances show, and enable, that it is surprising that anyone was ever bold enough to imagine 'junk'. It was the same in the vestigial organs, which in general as in SMR Ch. 2, p.  103, are now seen to be much the same: far from vestigial, they are complex provisions for a brilliant total which continually anoints the minds of researchers with more of its wonders, installations and procedures.

It was in both these cases, the call of ignorance allied with hostility, which met with empirical devastation at the hands of knowledge over time, with such clues as abundant blood supply for imagined non-use organs, strange for anything not really functional, in the one case, and complex controls for genome action, in the other, sustaining in detail, as all else does in substance, the reality of brilliant design. The details come from research, not lurch, and as the blade of knowledge disturbs the secret wonders of construction, more marvels of matrix and function add to the staggering earlier arrival of the datum that one cell in a human body (it has billions of them), can contain the information, coded for action, controlling and correlative to action from orders, sufficient to fill perhaps 1000 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

The publishers would be quick to inform you that it does not relate well to junk, and that the correlation of codes, data and orders, as in the Computer Edition, the Electronic one, of the encyclopedia possesses, was actually an exceedingly expensive work by many minds with acute intelligence, given vast scope for the exercise of patience as the items were composed into the layers of order and orders required, by the selection of symbols, and the assignment of significance.

That is the way it is when a lesser level is used for a higher one, when a purpose is deployed in the field of ingredients requiring control, and permitting it. Magic does not replace logic in life.

*4

Extension on

CRITERIA OF CREATION

The concept of a book is very useful in considering the fact that the human DNA has been compared, as to extent,  to the contents of 1000 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. Much is systematically similar in kind, including parallel criteria.

There is the same inscription in code which signifies not by intrinsic reference to contents, but by assignment, specification imparted in this, that the code brings the requisite to which it refers, its referent. Again, the code in a book is FOR eyes, which are ABLE to decode it, and execute, stir or secure in the mind the recall or advent of connotation, concept or content, or all three. The code works in situ, and it works in alliance and conjunction with a whole host of other dynamics, chemical, physical, bio-chemical, neurological, in the flair which it has, for imparting the controlling dynamic, directive or impact, for what is to be.

The principles implicit are not too difficult to discern. They are symbol-meaning assignment, milieu of operation, command content in code, executive ability in its active correlates, synthetic participation in a whole army of code principles, applications and usages, in the midst of a counter army of dynamic reactors, reagents and conveyers, in the realm of chemistry, communication, inter-relation, sequence and series and the like. Where there is automation, or exclusion of further participation by the organising dynamic, the imagining developer, the creator, then there is more, not less; and we proceed back to origination as distinct from implementation.

We can therefore contentedly pursue the point about books, since in effect this has many of the ingredients of our current concern, and the ESSENTIAL ingredient of symbol-feature assignment correlation in a milieu designate for action, intimate, sequential, cumulative and with total oversight.

What then ? You don't start looking at the pages in the book you have in your hand, and saying -

They wrote it!

You would be regarded as rather to the left side of mentally disabled if you did, and also expected this  to be taken seriously at all! This would be so, because it was not, and could not have been, those remarkably continuing repositories of impact and imprint, that wrote it, intimately connected with the creation of the printed material as they might have been. They very simply never show, nor even specifiably have, what it takes to do so. What it takes ? As to that, it is as far from a bit of paper (remarkably complex and interesting as it derivation might have been, and was), and repetitive impact of print keys as assigned,  as the Eiffel Tower is from a pit dug under the Dead Sea; or rather, it is further, since that is mere distance, displacement in space, whereas this is logical distance, displacement in the mode and type of dynamic required.

The page ? It was created in association with mentality and verbal ability, ideational power and conceptual control in the person, capable of such a collocation of capacities in conjunction with BEING personal, so that they could be advisedly directed for the purpose in hand (the meaningful page).

Its creation, this page, it cannot be less than the criteria it contains. These are the STUFF of which it is made, the INK which resides on it (or other equivalent), the productive means to secure the correct alignment and sequence of letters, on the one hand; and WHAT, being created, is to be inscribed, together with the entire meaningful, command structure, to enable what is to be wrought in symbolic language, to be there in order to be executed by the means and in the format required.

SAYING it, or WRITING it, is not the same as MAKING it, creating it, in order to set it down This is the way in which creative powers using symbol-connotation systems, work. The inscription world has to be organised, and the thing to be inscripted has to be organised, and the meaning of the one, shown in the execution product, is the third element: the CREATIVE CONTENT, the PRODUCTION SYSTEM and the PRODUCTION PROCEDURE are all required.

One does not, then, look at the page and say, Oh page! reveal to me your secret ... (rather like the wicked witch looking in the mirror, and saying, O mirror, tell me, say, who is the fairest of them all!

What does a unit for representation KNOW about such things.

It merely displays what is SET BEFORE IT!

Nor does one look at the pages of a book (or the parallel institutive format in some other creation, its configuration in its own way),  to determine rate of decline, as these pages yellow or blur slightly over time. What in the world does that have to do with the way the subject matter was formed, formulated, created! The page did not participate in that at all. It is the medium, not the maestro.

To the content of the page, the code, that part is entirely irrelevant except to the extent that the creativity back of it CHOSE just such a page as a repository for the code, which was selected for its representative ability, so that it could react with the photons of light and the neurological apparatus in the vision organ, the eye, in the reader, so that this in turn - in systems which appear the more illimitable as you learn more of what happens and of the rate at which more is being found out about it all - could duly be interpreted. And how would this interpretation be achieved? It would be achieved by the spirit in man, and with cognition, then be reviewed logically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally and in as many other facets and fashions as the capacity of the spirit of the man reading it, had at his command. The meaning and the response would then be achieved.  (Cf. SMR pp. 348ff., Ch. 1, Little Things Ch. 5, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, *1A).

No, it is not the pages of the book which would be of concern in considering the RATE of impartation of the code, the words, to it. The creative rate and the impartation rate are wholly distinct.

Nor would it be the rate of yellowing or blurring of the pages over a few centuries (we have a volume from 1688, somewhat yellowed), which would be at all relevant to finding out such a thing as EITHER the rate of creation of the concepts and thought of what is to be conveyed, or the speed, for that matter, with which they were inscribed. These are three different realms.

To know that, you would have to be omniscient; or else, to know the one who wrote it, and he or she would have had to have kept a log, or have an amazingly good memory, and be able to exhibit from what happened during the code creating process, which by coming into existence, enabled the ideational work to be WRITTEN down. The physical thing, the page, is virtually irrelevant to the disposition of ideas and their verbalisation, and secondarily so, when it comes to the rate of deposition.

That is the generic nature of code created to achieve results by designation, ordering, of the meaning in a system where this leads to action suitable to the initial thought which encoded itself for the sake of results, and in doing so, was acting in a form of CREATION. It is creation at its own level, WHOLLY distinct and to be distinguished from the work that is being done by production in imprinting the page, and later, by the environment in slowly degrading the page once it is printed.

NOR do you go looking at the DIFFERENT EDITIONS of the book, the page in which has attracted our attention. Nor is the format especially relevant, except in the interstices of the particular code type chosen. That, it is a matter of means; it is all means.

The editions have no more to do with the creativity back of the entire project than the other elements noted above, concerning paper and inscription means.

Mutations by errors of the Editors, of the Editions, which can assuredly happen, do not really instruct us much at all, on the thought of the writer, except to the extent he or she may have chosen that editor, and that is in itself an entirely cognitive, personal and discursive thing mentally and spiritually, and perhaps morally as well, depending on the case.

A mutation where a particular edition (like an 'edition' of a man, 100 generations down the track from the first one) encountered a false copying mode, might happen to make some sort of 'sense'. Thus if the thought were, 'the dog sat on the mat', and by the copying error (whether from things electronic, mechanical or other is irrelevant to the question of meaning), this became 'the dog sat on the cat', this too has nothing whatever to do with the creativity of the thought about a dog and its mat. It does not determine the VALUE of the thought, or the INTENT. It is error relative to the initial stage of the creation of the content by the logically necessary criteria of that realm, thought, understanding, imagination and cognition, together with desire, purpose and assigning capacity.

If you read the error, concerning the mat and the cat, you would not, for example draw conclusions leading to thought about lodging a complaint with Animal Welfare about the thought patterns of the writer, or his potential conduct, or his lack of sensibility about the order of things in the pet world. You might check some other editions, and see if the result there better conformed to the 'mat' or 'cat' case. You would not expect an improvement, except perhaps, the 'writer' were amongst the most incompetent to be found. In the case of our creation, the technical facility is far beyond that of the most potent genius in the human race. This does not meet the case of the simpleton, in terms of scientific method, being the precise contradiction of that!

Such a mutation, then,  does not bear on any of this, being a mistake in a TRANSMISSION MEDIUM, which merely distorts the thought of the original, in a way, amusing or confusing, or whatever else it might be, because of the vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of the format and field chosen for such transmission.

In this aspect,

	creativity is invention
	by thought
	imagination
	clear-headed comparison
	or light-headed extravaganza, for example,
	which waylays words (or other expressive, controllable media):
	so that in the effective case,
	it consults wisdom,
	excites understanding,
	and goes in its domain, to whatever members of it,
	suitably equipped,
	are desired, or apt to discover it.

The processes of wearing, in the conducting media, are interesting for those whose concern is the creativity of the Creator in making these media, just as one could be exceedingly interested in paper production, quality and endurance relative to a book; but this is outside the point entirely of the nature and rate of the content creation itself.

In this same milieu of relevant operational features in creation, we see that the rate of ageing, mutation and the like, in the creation, is virtually irrelevant to the speed of its deposition. Is it, to revert to the book, by linotype, or computer ? Whichever (and the computer mode enables one to create in book format, say  to perhaps 25,000 words in ONE week! the more assuredly as the Lord whose word is truth, graciously opens one's eyes to it), again, the medium is not here the point. You may use a feather-pen, but this has no bearing at all on creativity's essence. Your liking for media for writing is no expression of the speed in which you created the content to be inscribed.

The creativity chooses the medium, and has its OWN RATE in any case.

A work of creation may be performed rather slowly, say over 7 years of intensive research and so on, or in a few hours of prodigious output, when the mind and heart are long prepared, or in a matter that SEEMS like a few hours, but is perhaps a few days, in staggering and sudden insight, so that the deposition, once made,  may last for centuries, on the chosen medium, compared with an original content compilation in matter of hours.

You simply do not find out ANYTHING about the speed of the creation by looking at the changes in the medium into which it poured itself. It is asking the wrong question. When you consider the infinite case of the Almighty, it is EVEN MORE SO, since there the MEDIA could be created simultaneously with the MATERIAL to be deposited in command and thought, forged in unison, held back for this or that, in the same way that one can in a book, hold back material of a art kind, to this or that point, while having it all ready. (Cf. TMR Ch. 7, *2.)

Indeed, time itself could be created, in our sense of a mode which requires a patient waiting for things, WITH the creation, FOR the creation, IN the creation. It could be set in fixed operation, as one fixes a clock in a working model, when it seems that all is ready for it. There is no limit to what can be done, and for good reason, when the Creator of all, sets a particular creation with a particular modus operandi or order. That is merely ONE reason why the discovery that time might have flowed faster than now to an order of nine magnitudes (some 1,000,000,000 times faster – TMR Chapter 7 E, *4) ... is scarcely surprising.

Knowing it all before it is found out is one of the essential criteria of godless man in his not seldom clueless imaginations, which tend at such times often rather to resemble that of a hostile divorcee, 'evaluating' the work of her former husband, or his former wife! Such episodes can be phenomenal, and this without too much conformity to reason, if those concerned are professional or not. The WORDS may differ; but the motives may well have much in common. 

The 'clueless' characteristic as we have been seeing, is not at all a failure to find clues, but to let them be conveyed by scientific method, without prejudicial preliminary exclusions, where they lead! Alienation from God is a powerful spur, and much blood has flowed from its impacts (cf. Ephesians 4:17ff., Isaiah 5).

It is time humanity, or a significant section of that now benighted by bluster,  grew up again, and forgot the second child-hood of ignoring the obvious. It is not without pity, that they have for generations been hoodwinked on a scale which is in itself one of the criteria (WITHIN THE book, that is verified ALWAYS, the Bible), for the end of the Age. There HAS to be this intolerance of the impact of creation (II Peter 3), its relevance and so on, since there HAS to be a multi-layered intolerance of God (as in II Timothy 3), and a desire to displace Him (as in Romans 1:17ff., I Timothy 4, Jude), and this rushes in like an aircraft landing. THIS airport is very crowded, just now.

It has to be because it is written, and the verified author is God. It is, for the same reason, verified in this instance. This practice over millenia, never varies. Reasons, results, predictions, rehearsals, retrodiction, all are delivered in time, and in word alike; and match as ONLY God can secure, since man is beyond prediction over billions and over millenia, as to what he would make, take and do, and where he would go and why and when, and in terms of what ideational structures desired, forgotten, renewed and so on. God however has no difficulty in plumbing the depths of man, His creation, which HE made!

Let us however return to our topic in its essence, creation and preservation, creation and modules for creation, creation and mode of creation, creation and the creativity per se, and creation and the Creator.

In dealing with the criteria for making the matrix which relates to concept, code, command, execution, in the various and voluminous modes of means employed, one must always reason that these have their own minimal causal characteristics and criteria, just as do the means which are susceptible to manipulation so that they are obliged to convey this meaning, these thoughts, orders or directions. Their speed, facility, agility, reach and scope of understanding are sui generic. We have in this perspective initially,  TWO fields, creativity and creation, continuity and change by default or defilement.

Confusion of the two is one of the most brilliant works of that arch fiend and confounding spirit, the adversary, the ignoring of whose inglorious work is one of his grandest deceptions.

If it provides us with comedy, it is grave humour. The confusion strikes like a dagger to a million hearts, perhaps billions, imposingly misled by an army of educators, desires and cultural idols, though mercifully, not without most considerable exposure of the operatic ludicrousness of the unpleasant plot by the servants of the living God.

Yes, there is a conspiracy, but it is one of the devil (Revelation 12, Matthew 4). Many are those who are taken in train. They, they have perhaps little idea of being USED; but this does not alter the trip they take, or their responsibility for those whom they take with them. Many are the mill-stones, which like anti-prizes disadorn the uncongratulated necks of those who mislead the young in these realms of the Creator and His ways (Matthew 18:6ff.), and this may merely be enhanced as distortion of scientific method is used as a medium for indoctrination, while what that same method without any competition indicates, is divorced from the curriculum! (cf. TMR Ch. 8).

It is only by wilfully dismissing the reality of God, that one can say to a stone, to a natural object, or a natural realm, "You are my father!", in the manner exposed in Jeremiah.

This duping is one of the oldest. Jeremiah has this to say, in Chs. 2 and 3:

                           They will say, ‘Arise and save us.’ "

A little later there is the divine confrontation, where as can be seen from even this small context, the idea of harlotry and love-making is a spiritual genre, meaning being unfaithful to the God who loves. HOW is this unfaithfulness achieved by the culprits in view here ? It is by disposing the vitality of life and the inner meaning to what is NOT GOD! so defiling life.

                            " 'Why do you gad about so much to change your way?' "

Again, a little later he draws the contrast:

                           As you were able."

*5

Psalm 2

This is a piercing Messianic Psalm, as seen when used in the presence of apostles, as recorded in Acts 4, where it was used to characterise the headlong, unreasonable rejection of Christ and persecution of His disciples following His resurrection and ascension (Acts 4:25-26). Rescued from the 'womb' of death, which could not hold Him (Acts 2:24), in accord with Psalm 16's prophecy (cited in Acts 2:25ff.), Christ became in the sense of simple rising, without the intervention of any visible agency, "the firstborn from the dead" (Colossians 1:18), what was interred, rising, unarrestable; for His willingness to be arrested rested not least in this, that in the end, He was incapable of arrest, prone only to die as prescribed (Isaiah 53-55), a sacrifice for sin (Matthew 26:52-54).

See Barbs, Arrows and Balms  17 and Joyful Jottings   25 for background.

                           Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him."