CHAPTER SEVEN

 

MODELS AND MARVELS

How to put it in Perspective
An Introduction to, or
Elaboration of
the Excursions of Edition 2,
The Shadow of a Mighty Rock,

and comprising

A. Mental Chiropractic, with
B. Davies' Dilemma and
C. Nothing and Davies, together with

D. Predestination, Power and Performance in the God of Creation,

E. Antics of Dating and

F. A Space for Space and Time for Time.
   

A. Mental Chiropractic

It all really started long ago. It seems to satisfy a longing in those who really feel that life should be left at it is, for what it is worth, in their own hands, for one thing. Left, that is, until it departs perhaps peremptorily, and perhaps not at all quietly.

There are the two approaches to this aspect of the affairs of life:

1) since it is so readily jeopardised, SEIZE it now, and model it in mind and will as you can: serve it right; or,

2) since it is so amazing, find its creator and examine the specifications for this walking laboratory, this mental marvel, this volitional prodigy.

If you don't like the latter, then exploitation may seem the best way; and if this does not necessarily exhibit itself in inter-personal spills, then at the least - make the most of it mentally, put life in place and sadly consider its gradual departure. That at least seems to cover much of the case, at that dispositional level, though the models can vary for individual specifications.

Manipulation can be physical, as done by chiropractors, or mental. Then in the mental variety, it can be self-manipulation, in which the inward desire is satisfied by some theorem or sum or computation or analysis, which would seem superficially to satisfy what the individual is really after. However it may be social, in which case the one misleads perhaps, the many. Manipulation is frequently desired by those who have dislocations, and such can be irritable because of undue vulnerability, or desperate for much the same reason. Some seem to prefer it, though the question always is - Does it solve or complicate the problem? Mentally however the desire can be based in pathology. The result can be an advance of that condition - or rather, in it!

Naturally we are coming to our topic: that the mind is to accept that IT, all things that be, and all that is, is all REALLY ONE thing. The worlds of obedient matter, error-prone mind and spiritual purpose are to be shuffled into a homogeneously unitary sort of ball. The ancient Greeks from Anaximander and Anaximenes to Democritus, and the moderns from Hawking to Davies seem to have much the same in mind. It is rather like a library, where the desire is to have it all, actually, in just one book: the ONE BOOK LIBRARY, Conceptual Place, Avenue of Imagination.

Of course there would be a certain vacuity in it, since the space given in it to any one of the differing volumes could be contested as disadvantaging to its rivals and to its reality, therefore. Still, the desire is there, it MUST be ONE book, for that is simple, significant, streamlined, subject to ... easier control.

The analogy is not undue; for the worlds of command and purpose, of moral impetus and vision, obedience and law, intelligence and intelligibility, error and conformity are all to be reduced in the very paragon of reductionism, in unscientific desire, to satisfy a model of the manipulative mind. The concept of homogeneity is not an experimental index, but a philosophic panacea.

Hiding from the Creator makes this ONE of the main possible lairs. After all, if everything, despite its irreconcilable non-homogeneities and underivable differentiae, were all there was, a person could be so vacuously masterful. All that loot out there and no one to answer to: the stuff happily making itself and organising its inter-relationships and arranging for its becoming before it was there, and of course after it, and for the coming of reason for no particular reason, and of choice for no special purpose, and of purpose from no actual ground: to so me, it can seem quite a plan.

To be sure, if reason must first go, that might seem a small price for getting control without responsibility; and as to morals, if they similarly arose without interface, inventive base or substantial cause (and such is the idea that people merely dupe themselves in morals, actually moronically meaning just that someone wants something, and it is nice to imagine it is good too) - then that makes it easier still!

If they and all the realities therefore are dismissed, then there it is. Palaces beyond measure, riches beyond dreams. They don't belong to anybody: they just happened to be there. The Jaguar in the driveway doubtless came into being because time was bored with just doing its thing, and wanted to develop engineering magnificence: and so it did. Brilliant!

The irresolvable realities of differentiation however are simply set forth in Chapter 1 of Edition 1 (and 2) of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR), in more systematic detail in Chapter 3; within one of the Sections in Chapter 2; while in Chapter 10, there is the religious approach to consider. The ideas that various beings, created from the mind and spirited excursions of man, did this or that: these become a world of their own. (See in particular, pp. 249-252N, and 329-332H; and Reductionism in Index, SMR.)

This merely stresses the imaginative and specialised character categorically, of man the creator of worlds that are, and yet are not: that HE has (in mind), but which do not of themselves come to be; worlds which at times both cannot and will not do so.

Beyond that, we there look at the attested reality of what we could call metareligion - the doings, speakings and dealings of God Himself with this race, and with its environment and with its history: His declarations and deeds. (Contrast this with man's inventions concerning religion, we might for definitional clarity, call simply 'religion' - cf. SMR 422Qff., 374-386.) The contrasting attestations of reason are considered there, and the unique result is a verification of the position concerning the highly and definitively expressive God of creation, demonstrated earlier. In short, this is the verification in the field of applied religions.

But what is this monistic manipulation, and where does it dwell?

 

The categorical clash

between meaningless action and purposeful action,

developing error as an answer to intention in the case of being thwarted;

between performance on program and making programs including bad ones,

between assessing action and performing it merely, between imagining contrary to creation and creation contrary to imagination,

between personality and impersonality,

between love and mindlessness -

and really, between something and nothing, and

between diverse somethings within their own worlds, and simple somethings within their own,

between the craggy magnificence of a whole order which is neither mandatory at the personal level nor by man dismissible at its own, neither answerable to man nor compulsive to his thoughts, as indeed in this very instance:

these things need not be considered. Such is the view. After all, one can, to be monistic, just be irrational. Just deny reason...

Yes. But then two points:

1) you cannot use it if you deny it. Then you must cease all argumentation. Grounds are then irrelevant. You are simply displaying verbally the situation where you lost the business of giving grounds and accounting for things, and prefer to abide unmolested in the solitary confinement of undisciplined imagination. One can, for a while, to a point; but the world stays on, and reason continues, and its demands are the same.

2) Not only however can you not then use it without self-contradiction: if you do, your own word has determined it invalid in advance. No one else therefore need do so.
In fact, the forsaking of reason neither dismisses it, nor the matters with which it has to do, nor the results it requires. It merely dismisses the speaker from participation with any logical validity, in any discourse on the topic. Reason invalid makes its use ... an error.

Where data and reason are to be applicable however, rather than constituting by their absence an antinomy at the outset, leaving the speaker in irresolvable contradictions (see Ch.3 for more detail), the worlds of reality are of great interest and of wonderful implication.

These realities are considered more closely yet in Edition 2 of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock and the following may be noted as largely additions in that Edition.

1. pp. 251-252N (taken with 208-210, 1031C, and #4 infra).
 

2. Cosmologies and Constancies, pp. S1-S34, at the end of Chapter 2.

3. pp. 315A-316G, 305ff., 284ff. with emphasis on mind, matter and creation, and the categorisation of worlds of realities.

4. pp. 329-332H,including on pp. 332G-H, A  Pattern for Man - The Elsewhere Earned Edifice).

5. pp. 348-349D, where the spirit of man is pondered in its properties.

6. pp. 418-422W, dealing with such things as Great Burials over history, famous ones (metaphysical, spiritual), with Davies' creative but reductionist concepts on creation, and their classification at this level, irrationalism in physics more broadly; and with cultural innovation replacing thought.

See also What is Life For?, which appeared above as Chapter 6 of this present work,That Magnificent Rock.

The wings of thought can loft into the magnificence of confirmed, consistent and verified reality, or collapse into the dreams of the deep: it is when they deny their own validity that the deep becomes an abyss, reached from wing collapse. We are so voluntary that we may elect to go that way; matter, on the other hand, is so constrained that it is sure to hurt.

One should mind however the matter of mindlessness: it does not alter the terrain but rather, surrenders one's distinctive place in it, one's opportunities: and capitulates to captivity. Over (the concepts of) matter one must be mindful of the place of mind, and over error the place of will, and over vision the place of creation, and over it all the place of what is sufficient for it.

There alone in the knowledge of the self-revealing God, with His self-verifying Word, the Bible, with its all-fulfilling Jesus Christ, is there the known base of absolute truth, from which the power to present truth is exclusively derivable. To this we shall return, in Item F a little later - A Space for Space and Time for Time. (See also The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 1-70, 101,315A-H, esp. 316C, and Index, under Remedy; and also Public Divine Communication. Useful here in addition, is Ch.5 C, above: The Classic Analogy.)

Man is not sufficient for himself: it is time to stop grieving and inventing inconsistent paradigms in infantile but intellectual regression, adolescent but intemperate thrust, or plaintive if passionate angst, and to face the reality that is. Reason has no other answer; and this one has no failures.
 
 

B. Davies' Dilemma - Much Ado about Nothing

The remarkable production, 24 Hours, some time ago, in fact August 1992, ran a story on Paul Davies' ideas. It invited comment, but used astonishing editorial indiscretion in manipulating (womanipulating ? it is immaterial) one of the requested responses, with or without cognition, almost beyond recognition. The magazine made a shameless shambles of the distorted letter. It is indeed notable what a few omissions may do, especially when they comprise most of the writing. Perhaps then a little may be considered here.

Paul Davies has some arresting howlers in this article attributed to his pen (or keyboard). Thus:

• "This 'quantum cosmology' provides a loophole for the universe to, so to speak, spring into existence from nothing."
• "The fact that the universe can create itself..."

"If a way can be found to permit the Universe to come into existence from nothing as the result of a quantum fluctuation...', and

• "The argument... that... something or somebody... must have set the universe going initially, has now been well and truly discredited".

These pearls need just a little look. We must realise that it does not matter how brilliant you may be, or even in your own intentions sincere, the Bible mirrors history in its clear statement that when it comes to God, the failure to accept His prescriptions about coming to Him and knowing Him will lead to the magnification of error to degrees spectacular WHERE HE IS CONCERNED... AND He IS CONCERNED A GREAT DEAL! Here however it is explicit. Statements like those of Ephesians 4:18, 2:1,12, Romans 1:18-20, I Corinthians 1:20-21, and in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:22-23, are to the point here. 

 

 

1. Suppose we were to take seriously for one moment the concept of something from nothing: it violates the definition of the term. Nothing has no future, past or present, no potential, demarcation or criteria, no characteristics. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 332Fff., and its Index on Nothing.)



2. If the physical correlative of 'quantum cosmology' were to be in existence, nothing would not. This then becomes either a verbal ploy or a definitional error. If a verbal ploy, we return with the finding: it was not meant. There WAS something. If a definitional error, we return with the finding: use language which signifies what you mean, and so avoid errors which may be 'priceless' for fun, or exquisite for child talk on magicians, but are not so for mature usefulness. For what the 'something was', see Chapter 1, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock.


3. A 'quantum fluctuation' is still a quantum at work, with a fluctuation in process. The terms have meaning, the events relate to objects characterisable, so that we are assigning grounds for what is in view, only exceedingly vague language is being used. We return: use exact language lest you confuse yourself with inchoate concepts mixed with precise processes, and so lose yourself in the mixed milieu. If a fluctuation of an object had no cause, the object would to that extent be uncharacterisable; so that to term it a 'quantum' would be terminological abuse.


All characterisable things interact according to the character in view; where it lacks, there is nothing. The interaction may be purposive, as with humans, or not; it is still interaction according to characterisable features. It may be free from deterministic direction: it is still the act of what is designable in kind - for man, a design which, within the power of provisions of its Maker has access to creative thought and personal will. (See esp. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 258-284-309, esp. 258-265, 284-288 and 299ff.. See also Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29).



  4. In practice, the 'quantum fluctuations' have designable effects when the scale of operations is sufficient to allow wave specifications, so that the inability to inspect the procedures resulting in these patterns is an ignorance which cannot claim ground for dismantling the causal system. Ignorance may be bliss at times; but it is no substitute for knowledge.



  5. On the view of Dr David Bohm, the ignorance is one of mere measurement limits, so that normally conceived rationality is at work. (See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 421-422A). The case, then, is not even one of intellectual tardiness where, as usual in science, it takes time before the 'intellectual object' that works has been adequately grasped. In the interim, in that case, meagre understanding limits levels of precision. Rather it is, on Bohm's approach, more fundamental: inadequacy of the tools of measurement. His concepts are given a vigorous exposition in Scientific American, May 1994.


6. The argument that something or somebody must have set the universe going initially is not even touched by all this.



First, however, Davies seems rather Aristotle-bound here. The 'prime mover' concept to that effect is not Christian as such. The Bible teaches that God INITIATED THE MATERIAL as well as the movement, creating time, space and man to relate to them: just as we initiate a poem in one medium, which was created in thought first. (See Romans 8:38-39, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 11:1-4, Isaiah 45:18-25, 41;43:13, 44:6-8,26, 46:10, 48:13, 51:4-6.)

(See Romans 8:38-39, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 11:1-4, Isaiah 45:18-25, 41;43:13, 44:6-8,26, 46:10, 48:13, 51:4-6.)

The initiation of serial time in our sense is ascribed to God, whose time is such that He is the first and the last, the beginning and the need for all creation. That is the Biblical model.

The scenario we look at in physics is simply the serial model, as in a novel. It is the way the thing proceeds, being there. The time frame is specialised by the mind of the writer, but it is NEVER to be confused with his own personal parameters! HE made the novel with its time. There is a certain consistency in its time-line; but it is not to be confused with the way the maker of such time lives for His own part. Even with the finite novelist the distinction is real; here it is dominant. 

7. Davies seems superabundantly confused on these points, one reason why it is never wise for specialists in technical fields too freely to involve themselves in theology: especially if they are personally unversed in the things to which they refer. See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 31-35, 882-884, 316D-G, 329-332H. At least sufficient needs to be known to travel in the scope of the situation to which address is made, rather than in a cartoon of it.



8. Even St Augustine, who lived quite some time ago on this earth, nearly 16 centuries ago, in fact - dealt with this point. The creation was not so much instituted IN time, as WITH time. Certainly the Bible, as above noted, teaches that time is in our world, a created thing. It came into existence because the Author desired it to do so.


This Augustine, since he is referred to, we may note makes perfectly clear. Indeed, how strange if the little characters tried to tell the Author how to set about his business, or the parameters of his existence, in terms assuming he was bound to his novel. So it goes...

But concerning Augustine, he though mentioned by Davies in already noted article in 24 Hours, certainly did not teach that it is meaningless to ask what happened before time, in the sense that nothing was active and existent. Rather he taught that time was correlative with creatures, so that it is a case of: No creature then NO time.

GOD however, Augustine was quick to declare, existed in a way not subject to the sort of change we know and have, with its limitations and periodicity. (See The City of God, by Augustine, Book XI, sections 5-6.) To bring Augustine in, as Davies did, at this point, is merely misleading. The ancient did not teach anything assimilable to Davies', view; but held an entirely other perspective that by no means defied rationality.


9.  Actually, Augustine could have rather more aptly said this: That time in OUR sense did not exist without the correlative creation of the rest of the universe, for which it was the apt and chosen instrument for its procedure and processes. In what OTHER sense it existed in a different format is a wholly different question. Despite Davies, it is not answered simply by negating TIME as such, outside creation, because it is not a serial thing, where one awaits developments. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Ch.2 Supplement, pp. 31ff..)



10. Indeed, Augustine, far distant though he was in time, said this: "Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." He who created in this simultaneity for the species of creation, both substance and time AS WE KNOW IT, yes and space, and the conceptual correlations that were appropriate for the apparatus in waiting, and soon to come: He was in His own ontological mode, as chosen by Him, without our time because it was part of creation. 'God', as Augustine said, 'in whose eternity is no change at all, is the Creator and ordainer of time.' Let us go beyond those conceptions however and say this.

Yet BECAUSE God was in His own operations and then pursued them in the presence, but - as we constantly point out - not under the conditions of our time, which is His creation not His confinement: it is certainly meaningful to speak of pre-temporal time, or pre-creation time. Thus, although all things were then known to God before any of them came to pass (see Ch.1, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock), so is this the case also now.

The invention of serial time is not the invention of categorisability or displayable time, inspectable time, viewable time before the mind of God. It is simply a delimited and serial mode of time which is instituted, being created modally in the interstices of the universe. Thus, to be aware of the Biblical model rather than to use its presence as if it were absent, and to invent something else to which to relate in its name, let us be clear. Model distortion is not a scientific procedure. In Ephesians 1:4, we are told this: "According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world".

Hence the Biblical picture is not one of writhing antithesis and antinomy, but clarity. BEFORE God created the universe of which Romans 8:37-39 makes it clear, serial time such as we have did not exist in physical fact: THEN God knew who were His own.

Hence we speak not only with logical consistency in speaking of the concept 'BEFORE God created the world', but with Biblical precedent. THAT is the picture the Bible presents.

It is just that OUR type of time did not then exist. What did exist is not there stated: but God did, with His roving ability without creation to know all that it would portend, and to see the end as at the beginning (as He states, Isaiah 46:10, John 8:58, Acts 15:18, Ephesians 1:4, 3:9, I Peter 1:20, II Timothy 1:9; and cf. SMR pp. 30ff., 882-884). THAT is not our time; but its results could be intruded into it, if God so chose, on behalf of the mind of man, on an individual basis.

Prophecy of course often did just that (for experimental verification of Biblical prophecy, see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chapters 8 and 9, as well as in Ch.1). But it is time for us to revert to Davies' 'nothing' and to give space to this super-attenuated basis of his.

We are left with the stripped down nullity that is, to be precise, infinitely divergent from logic, from Augustine, from causative adequacy as from scientific validation, verification, method and any form of reason. Once again, we move from literary history on the one hand, and logical pre-requisites, to the marvellous irony which Paul Davies unwittingly provides on the antics of evolution for two generations.

11. Just as we cannot THINK in non-characterisable terms, or ACCOUNT without using causality, so any endeavour, as here, to wed irrationality and reason is doomed. It violates the ground rules it uses, breaks the universe of its own discourse, and gives causal grounds causally natural, conceived for non-causality. Actually, it is not even possible to THINK of a non-causal area, for this would demand the disappearance of rational characterisability, hence of specifiability, hence either of expression, designation or description. (See references to The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, under A 2 above.

12. Nor is it possible to account for causality per se (i.e. in and of itself, apart from its expression in the form it has in this world). It is not, because the very effort is an exercise IN causality, and endeavour to get beyond it, assumes its operation wherever it goes. goes. (Cf. SMR Ch.5, pp. 424-431, and Predestination and Freewill, Appendix on Kant.)


Christianity very simply indicates the God created OUR type of causal nexus through an ETERNAL operative, creative power, not serially limited, but quite able to create the serial kind if desired. We must not mix the metaphor of authors 'putting themselves into their work', as if this were literal. They merely give something of what they have, to that form. THEY themselves remain as they were, in form and essence. That is the invariably observable nature of creative power in its conceptual directions. It is so here.


13.  It is quite a nice dilemma which Professor Davies has carved for himself in his excursion into theology. Dismiss in terms of a cosmology the very idea of cosmology (self-contradiction, plus the logical fallacy of special pleading), use the form of a term ('nothing'), while changing its connotation (logical slide), and access reason in order to dismiss it by reason (self-invalidation), whether this be intentional or not being not relevant; or else...return with reason to reason, and be absent from nullity.


The beautiful part is this: to the 'insider', the mesmerism of the fiasco of biological evolutionism may make this step to the fantasies or irrationalism, philosophy-of-physics style, seem a small thing. From the first, however, it has in principle been as gross and outrageous an abuse of logic and sufficient causation, as Davies' new-look dedication to nullity as his base, is in practice.

After all, 'nothing' has been a very good description of the evolutionist's powers and findings at the positive level of what it 'theoretically' takes, for extant things in the world of nature, to make what is there. There is nothing to show. Nothing is precisely what has been found for this job. In science, however, nothing to the point is not normally made the ground of a theory, but of its departure.

To actually come out into the open, and to SAY it: NOTHING was its basis, this is, shall we say, merely a verbalising of the actualities of evolutionism for decades. It is the sort of thing a court jester would say in a Shakespearian comedy. It is altogether too correct, and hence holds a poignant comedy.

If then, increasingly and embarrassingly, volumes are written about these facts, is it any wonder that the 'next step' or even 'the final solution' is taken. Extermination of reason, for grounds with irrepressible magnificence of folly, stated - this is just what the empty irrationalities of evolutionism needed to complete its picture - a snapshot in the dark.

The facts in question are such as these:

a) Micromutations do not exhibit macro-invention but abide within the constraints of their own parameters.

(For all these things see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Ch.2, , in this Library, and Lectures on Creation, 1996, which is Ch.1 in the present work.)

b) Logical machinery to secure something (advanced conceptual engineering criteria) from nothing (in the sense of their absence) is not visible.

c) Observation-based laws are fundamental to science and contradict this spree of creation by daydream, in preference to creation by one sufficient for it, hence called the Creator. (Try winning a way by this method of assuming in its testable absence what you need for the result.)

The orders, code-driven commands within the cells that set about construction, do not invent their symbolic logic expressed in their vast and complex language, whether slowly or quickly. Orders do not happen - they arrive from what is, in the end, conceptually competent to produce them.

Current nature therefore in effect has nothing to contribute. In law, in logic, in experiment, in experience, its relevant prowess is nullity. Its fundamental powers of creation of its own being are what they appear: nothing. Creation has been outsourced to produce what lacks its powers. God wrote His own book. We are not entirely ignorant of authorship, being gifted with subsidiary creative powers and prowess ourselves.

d) Cells, like languages, do not have their primitive exemplars. Language, whether encrypted in living cells, or crafted by men with their internal language creating programming facilities, show only specialised and advanced, no sequential development as noted (see reference in a) above.) Not improperly, these things are called gifts.

Yet... from these 'nothings' of natural contribution,
all arises... This however is not even faith: it is
conceptual antinomy at war with facts. It does not vault above them: it puts them into Auschwitz, while miseducating the minds of the young with this torturous substitute for science and knowledge.

(See the Brown-Bannon in this Library. It is not the intention which is in view, but the result quite simply; and equally simply, it will not do.)

It is, so to speak, in the language of fairy tales, The Emperor's New Clothes all over again. They are not merely see-through, but not there - and the royal purse pays the tailor for this masterpiece of the sartorial art: one that none dare acknowledge, though it is not there, lest the vanity of majesty prove dangerous. In drug terms: if that which has happened for so long is like marijuana, then this is heroin. There is a natural if devastating progression; but it is not progress.

Professor Davies' view on this topic, here, is merely the end of the line, the reductio ad absurdum, the result which shows the enormity of the proposed method, by its end appearing in folly. It is used extensively in geometry; but now in physics, which after all is allied: however its result is not here being followed!

If, then, all those things have for generations been taught as if science, and are becoming the subject of increasing rejection by specialists of this and that kind, as shown in our Lectures on Creation 1996 (Ch.1 above) and elsewhere; and if these are NOT being rejected (to the outrage in some deep sense of many scientists, one declaring Darwinism the greatest scientific deceit of all time): then what is the step next in line ?

EITHER these pretentious daydreams are now rejected, each in its line and for the reasons which evidence and logic provide, in terms of duly applicable scientific method: or the habit of lifetimes in this area of pretence becomes a veritable Vanity Fair of triviality, and the last step is taken. The car has failed all tests on the ground so we send it over a cliff with hope that it may fly.

It is not rational; but it is in one sense at any rate, progressive... If 'nothing' has been the power and the testimony on which this myth of evolutionism has been based for over a century, why not go the whole way and make nothing come onto stage, beaming on the cheeks which are not there, acknowledging the plaudits with the hands it does not have, and take the bow! I alone did it, says nothing; but to those who still think about it, it amounts to nothing.

In an examination paper, the score would be similar to the concept.

_{(Note: Some of the above material for this Section appeared in the 2nd Edition of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, but it is included and expanded here for convenience of reference.)}
 

 

C. NOTHING AND DAVIES

We have referred to Davies' refusal to have the universe come from something or somebody and in particular, sufficient for its production. However, if he has dismissed the cosmological argument in favour of just nothing, then he himself invokes it.

After all, if the universe comes into existence as a result of a quantum fluctuation of nothing, absurd and self-contradictory as we have shown such a concept to be, THAT is nonetheless something, whatever elaborate contraption of contradictory words you may use to describe it. It is therefore time to reflect further on these things.

1. Davies has dismissed the cosmological argument, but here invokes it. The only difference is that he has rejected a causally sufficient ground in favour of a causally insufficient one, indeed one chosen by definition to be insufficient.

There is then a causal ground for the universe coming into being after all! This vacillation, fluctuation is wholly typical of God-smugglers who invent systems of thought after first disavowing what they then use; they disavow to rid themselves, it seems, of the competition. Then, without competition, use this to 'establish' what appeals, even when they themselves define it into absurdity. Freud does it with the MIND subject to subterranean invasion (but of course not his own mind) . Marx does it with a SYSTEM from which 'all things flow', likewise using a mind controlled by it, yet quite safe from it in 'telling us it like it is'. Darwin, no less does it with a system where truth is never a criterion nor a possibility; and now Davies in his causeless paradise uses causality to get it, the thing, there! It is truly marvellous how simple are the logical errors pandemic to the conceptual paraphernalias of the would-be God escapees (that is, the God-the-Creator departure corps).

2. Cosmological causality is past, we learn: but OF COURSE, not this one. (For references see Section A, and Section B, points 1-10 above.) Famous! At this rate, the infectious intellectual disease department will be flat-out; the conceptual conquest of truth will be in full tow - as it was in the crucifixion of the One who called Himself the Truth. There OTHER burial means were used, as are common in Communist countries, and increasingly in this one.

3. NOTHING is not actually something with a quantum in order to fluctuate, in that a quantum is after all, something.

4. A FLUCTUATION is actually something which varies in certain ways, and must be there in order to vary... to do it.

5. Hence a quantum fluctuation CANNOT be of nothing: that is a simple contradiction in terms, not permissible, for a physicist or, for that matter, anyone else interested in establishing anything.. It is useless to try to 're-define' nothing (as in the case of those who fail, trying to succeed by 're-defining success'). Such is mere semantics, verbal manipulation, use of terms in a confused or propaganda way, self-contradiction leaving no one in any need of further contradiction: if one contradicts oneself, enough! Self-contradiction will never create the universe.

6. Davies' concept that the 'supernatural' CANNOT invent a system with a time element, component, aspect of its matrix - define it how you will, it is a part of the whole: this is merely a re-defining of his irrational assumption that the God who created our kind of time - serial time in material aspects, though the mind can surpass it in some ways - is not there.

Read: BECAUSE God is not there, THEREFORE God is not there. If you grant the first point, you come to the second; but both are reliant on NOTHING. I t is a simple identity proposition, without the saving grace of having any identity other than... nothing for its assertion. Now nothing, it is not sufficient ground for asserting anything.

7. THAT, it is a REAL nothing! There is no ground for this self-contradictory approach to God. The underlying, gratuitous and anti-model assumption (i.e. one which mauls what it is rejecting, before doing so, twisting it into something else - the old straw-man approach) is this: that God would HAVE to have the SAME sort of time or system as we do. But that is PRECISELY IMPOSSIBLE, if one is dealing with the Creator.

An author is NOT incorporated into his novel's time-schedule; indeed, IF he were, he COULD not be the author, for he would be limited BY and TO what is after all, merely his creation, adding with whatever else he deems it fitting to create: as distinct from his own person or being.

8. What Davies here is doing is declaring that if God does not exist, then He cannot as God do what only God can do; and since He does not exist, then He cannot do it. The logical input is zero, a restatement of an irrational belief system that itself precludes truth; and the psychological input is this: God must be excluded. But what has psychological appetite to do with science. More than enough, as noted in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock on more than one occasion from the mouth of notable scientists!

9. It is truly amusing, quite edifying and most impressive, this thing: that here is a theory which would have the wit to find that the universe was not always there, while yet it employs the incredible self-contradiction to be seeking GROUNDS, CAUSES for its non-causal arrival! But this is not all...

Then it would INSIST (without of course quite saying so, or giving anything to the point as GROUNDS for this), that any CREATOR of the system must nevertheless be IN it, OF it and PART of it, while acting! The reality is staring one in the face: it is not NOTHING but SOMETHING (that is NECESSARY even in Davies' own language, as shown) which brought he universe into being; and WHAT it was is WHATEVER is sufficient for this exploit.

As we have shown, when you REASON this out, unaffectedly USING the causation Davies is so slow to acknowledge, but AT TIMES so fast to use: it means one thing. The Creator. Wonder, Oh wonder! It was not nothing that did it; rather, what it took that was equipped for the task, or a sufficient for the result.

10. Even Science after all is not immune to sufficient causation. Indeed it uses it all the time. God the CREATOR is the answer which satisfies scientific method; but surely, it does not satisfy all scientists, or all lawyers, or all bankers or butchers. Faith is a gracious gift of God; though reason rigorously requires what it teaches: God, the infinite and eternal, the Creator is. To what it teaches however, sin blinds. From what has no validity, Christ saves; and He saves from a great deal more than invalidity.

This brings us into another realm touched on by Paul Davies. To this, we now attend.
 

D. Predestination, Power and Performance
in the God of Creation

Predestination will show the power, capacities and the control of the Being who executes it. Someone indistinguishable from nothing will have nothing much to do in this line, as in any other. The name will be an intrusion from theology into a physical or other reductionist island for specialists who wish to make a universe without the rest of what is. In the Bible however, predestination has an enormous function, unique with the power and will of God.

1.The Idolatry of the Visible

Part of the idolatry of the visible - a sort of extension-at-large of special idolatry addressed to particular objects - is that it is a sad parody of the real problem. Dealing with the nothing or the inadequacy which is an intellectual object to replace what is there, you address the wrong issues and resolve non-existent problems, or describe them.

This matter worthy of being addressed is NOT: How can an illusory, secreted parody of the Creator predestinate, when the thing rolls in its own fancied way, with all the idiosyncrasies of idiocies of arbitrary and irrational philosophy rammed down 'his' illusory throat? That could be an interesting consistency exercise, but does not deal with the results of valid and sustainable reason.

Further, that would kill any patient. Besides, God is not a patient but the Producer of those who through their misadventures of mind and spirit, not to say body, become the patients called man.

It, the question, is rather this: How can the Creator of infinite resource who has tossed off the universe as men toss off a poem, but with infinitely more understanding: How then can this all-powerful and all-wise Creator know what will be, when man has a measure of ... liberty ! (These things were treated systematically in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock - 'SMR'- esp. Chs. 1, 3, 5, 8, 10.)

This question has also been dealt with and the logical perfection of the Biblical answer at great length in Predestination and Freewill (1964, with a 1997 Introduction, now available at this Web site q.v.).
 
 

2. The Simplicity of Foreknowledge.

Here we shall merely reply to the point. God knows utterly the thoughts of man, from beginning to the end, and from the end to the beginning, through their seething, believing, belittling, parodying nebulosities, wilful caprices, quaint idiocies - both academic and unacademic, learning being no guarantor of wisdom or understanding.

Man's measure of liberty is not, by definition for a creature, autonomy. At that, what he has is the production of his spirit, mind, facilities in the arena of the situation God created, both in splendour and in judgment on sin: and God knows all these an as author knows a book. He knows them much more, for He created the raw material for the book, as well as the account of its characters, and indeed, is characterisability.

Foreknowledge is, so to speak, child's play for the exhaustive Creator and Designer of the roving spirit, the enquiring mind and the derivative will of man. The real point is the predestination (Ephesians 1:11, Romans 8:29-30, Isaiah 43,48). This is where the physicist's idolatry, so often found and so seldom recognised, becomes a thing of pathos: for it corrupts vision into a sort of fogged-glasses substitute in dimness.

What IS spread out, not as a continuum, but as a varied and multiform reality of which space and time are mere coastal outlines - is the multiplicity of all things, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, moral and immoral, spiritual, unspiritual and non-spiritual, created or desecrated, judged and unjudged, to-be and not-to-be, potential and actual; for God is of infinite understanding. By understanding He has created all things; He is there at the first and with the last, knows the end from the beginning.

This is that God of which the Bible speaks, and these are those things which appertain to His power, conform to His Being and are consistent with His declarations, none of which chides reason in its place, and all of which inform it.

It is this God, and not one of His poems called space-time (which is rather one verse of that particular poem), continuum or discontinuum, who is to be worshipped. It is also He who is at work when we consider according as we are able or enabled, the issue.

Backwards and forwards can this God, our Creator and the Creator of all things, indeed move like light, surveying but not rupturing. Not His is the absurd problem of moving 'backwards in time', as if it affected time, so that slain roosters' heads have to be with some awkwardness... re-attached.

Rather He perceives as the brilliant architect, the contingences and their issues. This putative universe, with all the spirit of men in it, is like a fabric of proto-history.

Although it is an analytical act - not constrained to time as may be some terrestrial author, but related to it as a chosen span FOR His own authorship: God can adjust what He surveys in the model that is a backdrop to history. Whatever the mode, however, this is the magnitude and the scope of the power.

God can move from the beginning or from any point or point subsequent, with multiplying ramifications, insertions, directions, to adjust the lectures, lessons, licences, augmentations, diminutions, collaborations or concatenations of events that He desires. This He can do, IF HE WILL, before any history peeps or chirrups. Nor is He limited to what we have for illustration spread forth, simply to express the potency and potential involvements.
 

3. The Unenviable Path of Evidential Oblivion

Evidentially, as ontologically, God is not at all limited to a universe with a sort of open-minded pathway, hewn from nowhere and for no reason, towards some species of absent-minded creativeness in the overall direction of more complexity. Davies in his 24 Hours article, speaks in an analogy to which we refer in SMR p. 421ff., of development in the universe being such that: "The rules encourage certain outcomes, but do not compel them." Again, "The rules have the effect of constraining the play by channelling it along certain pathways of change that lead to interesting complexity, but they do not serve to fix the fine details".

The significance of these ultra-observational, data-empty philosophic philanderings, for our present purpose, is this: predestination is out. Knowledge of our great excursions and attainments in advance is excluded. The power of God as displayed so readily (in creation and declaration - see SMR, esp. Chs.1,3,10, with verifications in 2,5,6,8,9) is removed by the stroke of a pen. It will however take rather more than that, if our statements are to depend on logical method, or even on the causative methodology of science by which it lives, and moves and has its being, makes its projections and verifies itself.

Actually, predestination is in. Not only is such knowledge, as shown in the above cited work, a NECESSARY power of the Creator whom no reason can ever, did ever - and let us project - will ever remove, and we believe in and practice contest at this point: it is also a VERIFIED one, as shown in the Chapters noted in the preceding paragraph.

It is ridiculously and delightfully humorous to see scientists deny verifiable data on the basis of contra-causal philosophy, prescribing the while, the removal of rationality by means of rational discussion. WE ARE IT, is the implicit premise: so it does not seem our generation can have much in the way of development! For confrontation with reality, we are a gem for any collection. That science should be constrained to such a task as this, is perhaps the height of it!
 

4. The Free (*1) Predestination of Personality

But let us return to our consideration of the powers of God, in a very minimal sense it is true, but at that level, in terms of what was shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, but here applied to our present purpose.

God can then select initial aspects, compose, invent realms for interaction, or for direct responsiveness to Himself at will; he can intrude systematically or personally in terms of the spirit of the enterprise as He defines it, to ensure its end, its middle as also its beginnings, retrospectively , prospectively, synthetically or as He may elect. Limited by nothing, He has no limits.

By the nature of what He has created, God can move the spirit of man in particular, forge and foster the results, inter-relate and integrate, synthesise or pare what He will: HE is not bound to the vaunting philosophy of man where nothing is its basis, and nothing is its very understandable result; only philosophers may so debase themselves. This they may do, whether their trade be that of biologist, physicist or other.

HIS however is the amplitude without access to which (on His terms of course), man is left more like a leaf, than a being of understanding. Yet has He left sufficient to make the avoidance of Himself (see esp. SMR, Ch.3), an exercise not merely in futility, but in irrationality; so that there is no excuse: they are "without excuse". That, incidentally, is the phrase used by God in His revelation at Romans 1:18-20: the precise term.

Currently, the Creator has some 5 billion influenceable persons in the human race - far better than computers are they; but with componential similarities in some ways, to them. This race and its members, these are one target for review and oversight - the combinations resulting are all but infinite in all the interactions, mutual responsivenesses and inventions. History is in His hand. Such matters, again, are child's play to the One who made the mind that made the computers that render the merely processive so (relatively) simple. The understanding is beyond them, and its consequences are (to a degree) put into them.

Though it is not His pleasure to have made man servile, like a machine, yet it is His prerogative - with grace, irony, sardonism or delight, with reproof, rebuke or searching exposition, or even quiet and still exposure (as in a snapshot): to act on, through and with man.

It is a (relatively) simple task to ensure that the action SERVES the spiritual liberty given man; and does not distort it. Even a human author of characters in a novel can understand something of that. At the same time, vast projects can be co-ordinated and integrated, like the history of the Jews - or even the moral and teaching path, say , from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima.. and Nagasaki.

As to that - to put it in Biblical terms :
Sow the wind, and reap... the whirlwind.
 

5. The Freedom of the Predestinator Himself

Paul Davies shows the tenor of his own theories in this sphere, to be analogical to the creation, not to the Creator: and their tenure is hence as dismissible as any other misconstruction at this infinite level. Something blinks (except that it has no eyes) and the universe is there - a case of much ado about nothing!

Then the 'something' (that really did make quite a blink, and really was 'quite something'), is to be fixed, indeed incorporated in, with and by its universe. "If," he asks, "God is really a necessary and immutable being, how can he have free choice?" (p.40, in Paul Davies' The Mind of God).

This query illustrates a systematic confusion of the highest order. The necessity for a Being of minimal powers is, as shown in Ch. 1 of SMR, complete. That the logical necessity that this Operator-Creator should exist, be forced to coalesce with the concept that His powers of choice are in turn subject to something else, not Himself, has already been examined (cf. esp. pp. 23-36, 88-100 op.cit - see also SMR Index, on Freedom). Were this so, as we have shown, this 'god' would be a mere component of a total derivable from the actual Creator-Operator who is not a monistic movement, but necessarily the unconstrained and self-existent Author, authority, contriver.

If He WERE contrived, this god, constrained, then He would merely figure as one more item which requires a cause, so that we proceed by necessity then to its Creator, as with everything else. When a necessity is shown that such an entity should be, there is no point in making the simple confusion of imagining that what leaves no doubt of its existence must be without freedom. That is a howler amongst howlers. Indeed often it is freedom which itself leaves no doubt of the existence of the agent! In fact, in accord with this, in the work noted (loc. cit. et al), it is shown that FREEDOM is precisely what is necessarily present!
 

6. The Predestinator is necessarily free.

If this Being is not contrived, by nature of the case as reasoned, then BY necessity, logically inevitable, He is free. That, now, it is about as far from being subject TO necessity, as is the deducible wealth of some billionaire (shown necessarily to be such) subject for that reason to some necessary uses, let alone those of the journalist who 'discovered' them.

What then are the systematic options to posit here ?

If contrived, not He; if He, then limitlessly and abundantly free to be whatever He is, at the option of none, at the constraint of none, and at the requirement of no component, system or systematiser. Eternal existence has no logical problems, and is shown to be necessary; it is developing all these wonderful things from nothing that has the problems arise! ... It is not an entirely uncommon feature of the human mind so to despise, to devise impossibilities and to ponder appreciatively the results; and even in some spats, it might appear that the thing, the furore has come from nothing likewise: but the fact is not so! It has requirements of its own.

In short:

Necessity for something or someone, and necessity of or in that being, these are two totally different things, a form of confusion of the most elemental kind.

Demonstrability of power, functional minima and logically coherent underivability, which relate to the Supreme Being, so far from precluding freedom, in fact demand it. What nothing constrains, is constrained by nothing.

That is the REAL 'nothing', that unfortunately Davies appears to confuse with the Creator - a mistake of some magnitude, and more profound than Einstein's famous error (SMR, pp.39, 422D - noted by Robert Jastrow of NASA), when he divided by nothing, an unwitting excursion in meaninglessness. Davies, however, would multiply by nothing, achieve multiplication by its means, with yet nothing to multiply, and so create a universe.

Many - but by no means all - of the physicists, in their unconscious idolatry, their truncation of actuality to a field of specialised attention, of limited capacity and interfaces with the psychic and personal realities, in their (ideational) burial of God in His creation (cf. SMR pp. 421-422F), resemble something in literature. It is like a literary critic prone to insist that Robert Browning the man, is PART of some particular poem, failing to see at all that he was its creator.

In a way similar to this, they invent a debased 'god' who isn't there. Then loudly do some of them complain about the monstrous problem confronting god in predestination, or indeed, in anything. What is not there has indeed a large problem in doing anything at all; but then that is Davies own personal problem created by virtue of his own thought.

It should of course be noted that leavens such as these, while common and contagious to a point, are by no means universal, even in the seductive-seeming mini-culture developed 'in the trade'. Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Kepler, Whiston, Herschel, Dalton, Joule, Dana, Gosse, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, Fleming, Von Braun are examples combining the uttermost distinction with godly testimony in this field.

It would indeed, to revert to our point, have been difficult for poet Robert Browning to have created another poem, if he had been dismembered and degraded to the status of a part of one of his creatively conceived pieces of verbal magnificence. Indeed, in THAT case, he could not even have created THAT poem! We should have had to have done without the creation altogether.

A poet in a poem, constrained, controlled or contained within it, suffers a certain indisposition not conducive to further such creativity. Mercifully, this is not the way of things. Creativity is not really like this; it is not a monistic methodology at which we there look.
 

7. The Strident Cacophony and the Bow of the Musician

Inter-face-free reductionism, reductionism without rationality, is never a hallowed proceeding, any more than it is a logical possibility. We must return to reality with a bounce, better than trying to exhort from our 'progressive' universe the tortured confession that its substance, laws, progressiveness and powers have no creator but rather happened to stumble in no time, from no place, and for no reason. 'NOTHING' LACKS SUCH POWERS TO TORTURE.

But this concentration on one phase, what is it like ? It is like a lover who has imagined that the skin-continuum of the girl he loves is her personality: he can then never 'see' how she can do what she does, or be what her words suggest. (In fact, blindness to the realities of personality can account for wrecked marriages with much facility.)

This part of the problem, in short, is this: When a particular tradesman puts his/her CHOSEN phase of creation, that in which he loves himself to roam, in the place of the rest of creation, yes, indeed, into the place of the Creator of the entirety: then he can account for nothing. Endless ramifying theories are directed at a maze of the misunderstood, in constant disrepair; and at times, as is paralleled in manic-depression, there are moments of 'glorying', while it is merely at nothing or at some reflection in an abyss; or of abnegation.

'Unyielding despair' as with Bertrand Russell, or a quixotic self-contradiction, a pregnant nullity, as with Paul Davies, may be the philosophic fruits of this miasmic voyaging: in fact, they are the testimony of the simplistic-reductionism that parodies the truth. Just as in geometry, impossible options may be pursued amongst others, just to prove them so, leaving thereby the true answer as that one alone, which is left (technically called reductio ad absurdum - reduction to absurdity): so in this case. However here the absurdity is prized!

Biblically this is accounted for (Ephesians 4:18-19) NOT in any fault in talent. Nor need there be conscious vagrancy: it is a quality of life shared by all who look where God is not, lost to what is systematic and sure, disoriented and dispossessed.

This disorientation and dysfunction surfaces in the environs of life, wherever this comes to be, in the ways which appeal with elaborate inadequacy, as if it were an apt medium to relate to that setting. There is in all this, an overall genus likeness in the thing, wherever it surfaces. Philosophy is full of it, and its export trade is currently strong in physics, as also of course, in biology.

In fact, however, it is not only that the canvas is far greater than the cut-down versions which endlessly brutalise the realities of creation in the interests of homogeneity passions which find no ally in actuality. Beyond all that, the point is that the painter is not part of it at all. He can indeed perform a self-portrait in oils (as when Christ came and displayed the Father in His own person in the flesh), without oils being apart of His actual form and being. It is Himself who chooses an apt medium: and HE who is in fidelity presented.

There are many 'continua', and One who has power to make as many more. Pierced and penetrated by His mind, the discontinua with the continua have an awning beyond themselves. First, there is the spirit given to man, that surveys by licence and with created powers, by virtue of which he (sanely, because it is there) esteems the truth; then there is the Creator of those created powers who knows them, as indeed He knows the rest of His many created milieus, with direct spiritual insight of which our artists' visions are merely a limited and earthy parallel. Sublime as may be their inventions, sublimity itself has made their powers both so to act and to envisage.

The 'painter', in this depiction, predestines and interprets, and knows it all at any and every level, being bound by none, and limited by nothing. Predestination is merely a function of His greatness, a deployment of His presence, which those who deny it will never, in their current format, understand. As in any discipline, their inability-parody merely exposes their ignorance of that with which they deal. As to God, He is not far from any one of us, but man can distance himself greatly. God however is not ignorant of them... nor will He be (Acts 17:22-31).

In this magnificence of power, wisdom, understanding and judgment: God has acted, knowing and foreknowing. The curse on earth that followed sin as a sound boom follows the supersonic speed made by an aircraft ... what is this ? It is a glance of the divine eyes, the swift and deft darkening of the picture before the painter's hands, addressed in change of mode, on his easel.

It is rather like a strident cacophony flowing from the brow of a musician who, moments before, had poured out the sweet tones of innocent purity. When the musician makes his sweet music, to the uninitiated in the marvel of creation AND of music - the thought that so different a composition could come from the one composer, might have seemed outrageous. Impossible! the ignorant might have said.

However, it is the very power of the musician who can make the sweet music, by which, lashed into controlled passion, he can equally well produce a sudden change. The scope of the first may signify the transformation of the second.

The curse changed the scenario, the scene, whilst preserving the unity of the overall composition.

Equally as revelation exhibits (SMR Chs. 1, 7), the heart of the Creator is love. Neither sin nor death is passed by as if inconsequential; but through both, an anthem of disciplined expression comes to man. For this, His special creation, God made demanding provision of Himself; and this, THROUGH the very turmoil of these evils, which misused liberty before the God of justice, has God produced.

The symphony of history has this as a repeated theme, a rondo, with no variation of essential content in this, but almost endless variation of presentation. The chosen aptitude of intervention for His purposes, moves lightly and aptly with His intention to that end, and is announced over thousands of years in many preliminaries in word and deed (SMR Chs. 8- 9, cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Ch. 17, and News 87).

Having made man to be capable of fellowship with Himself, God even created a way to express His very self as one of them. Free of sin, but capable vicariously of bearing the curse which justice required, this man is Jesus Christ.

I say 'is', since as has been shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, the resurrection of the body so provided, that of Jesus Christ, is the rationally unanswerable reality. (See Index 'resurrection'.) As to this, the performance was very costly for the Creator: He delights in His word, His living and eternal Word, who became flesh.

That delight is an index to the love with which He was sent. Equally, the love of Him who was sent saying, He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9), is a definitive expression of the love with which God composed predestination. (See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Appendix B.)

The love is ample *2, impervious to imposition, without regard to cost, chaste, but also efficacious. That power and wonder is the expression of what keeps the Christian till the symphony is past, and the musician confers direct with His friends.

Not only indeed is God who loves, free, but He knows how to confer freedom on men, even when pathological torment atrophies its use, and to predestinate with total security the course of His freedom in accord with it (I John 4:4-10).

Overcome by nothing and securing the simple grandeur and the grand simplicity He desires, though many provisions, historical, material, moral, ethical, personal (Proverbs 8:22-31 in its vast context, like Romans 12:34-36, expresses it sublimely): He 'works all things after the counsel of His own will' (as Ephesians 1:11 indeed attests).

WHAT that which He desires is revealed to be is yet more wonderful - John 3:16, Romans 5:1-11, I John 1,3 expressing
that depth with a simplicity becoming to its profundity. Christ has quintessentialised in His own Person the mind of God, having expressed it in word, deed and with power. The protoplasmic format prepared from the first for man, served in the end for his redemption through the living and eternal word of God sent on His fearful, wonderful and age-encompassing mission to mankind.
 
 

END-NOTES *1, *2

*1-*2 ... Of predestination as the work of the Almighty, this must be said.

Quite simply, necessity bound by God is not necessity bound on God. He establishes what He will, just as He is what He will be and in His Being is always the same. (Cf. SMR pp.30-35, and A Question of Gifts, Section VII, on the All-Sufficiency of God; also 'Aseity', in Index, SMR. Both are available in print, and both on the Web at the address noted above.)

What He seeks with His own restraint, He gains - and since He seeks the lost, He knows who are His, the prayers, hopes, indeed what He would engender and how, in the circumspection of His love. (Cf. Colossians 1:19-23, II Corinthians 5:14-21.)

What He resolves is deep, very deep, it omits nothing. His understanding is indeed infinite. (Cf. Psalm 145:3.)

Predestination ensures the result, and as a means of the One who came to seek and to save that which was lost, not that the world might be condemned in this mission of mercy, but that it might be saved: it is the friend, this predestination, the friend of man, the gain of the human race, the wonder of the wisdom of God.

If in the hardness of unrepentant heart, most turn from Him ... even from Him who, in love unspeakable, made of Himself a sacrifice for salvation open to all (I John 2:1-3), but equally covering just and justly His own (Romans 8:32, I John 1:17) -... so be it.

This does nothing to alter the saving grace before the face of the Almighty, whose heart is attested by His action. As to His mind, look around you. If YOU created that, one might say, it would attest yours! Teachers, if your student did that, there see the consummate and appallingly magnificent ability at the least! To create indeed the creative power of a prodigy, what infinitude is available in the Creator of all !

As Job put it to his critical friends: 'Whose spirit came from you!' (26:4). The creation of spirit is a prodigious enterprise, of the most fascinating, the most intriguing, the most spectacular, intimate and yet brilliant, a wonder for ever.

Nor, while we look at this point, should judgment be confused with creation. The sin on this earth is appalling, truly appalling. That the earth stands at all, is fair in its beauty still, at all, is astounding. That its spiritual cyclotron continues to spit out particles of pollutants from activated personalities, and yet the love, the grace of God in the resurrected and soon attested to return face of Jesus Christ, continues with the offer of and in the Gospel: this is what... ?

It is part of the magnificence of that Rock, the Lord Jesus Christ, of the glory of God, who truly IS glorious. It attests the supremacy of His power and of His patience.

 

E. THE ANTICS OF DATING

(Updated, September 1999, August 2000.

Updated in Divine Agenda Ch. 1, and Ch. 7

Updated further in *4 below, August 2001,

and slightly in September 2002, and August 2003.)

 

See also

Answers to Questions 5: pp. 112ff., 116ff., and for further material, with

Calibrating Myths, Machining Minds and Keeping Faith Ch. 1,  and

His Time is Near Ch. 9, incl. *1  (2003) and
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9 (2004)

The Defining Drama Ch. 3 with

Dayspring

See SMR pp. 234-251
 

See Appendix, in some detail.

 

 

When did it start? How long ago? When did WHAT start? The world? Its Maker? Matter? Form for energy? Energy for form? It appears a little unusual to be clear on such questions, prejudice being often preferred. However to ask such vague questions is no way to get precise answers.

If FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE, and indeed, as shown in Vol.1 of the Shadow of a Mighty Rock, from a rational perspective, we ask: WHEN DID GOD BEGIN? The answer is: He did not do so. If we ask, How and why did matter begin? The answer is: He made it in a chosen creation in accord with His power and chosen design criteria. If the question be, WHEN did he make it? Then at least we know our parameters.

This preliminary may seem irrelevant to the question, When did IT begin? But it is far from it.

IF you assume uniformitarian ways of going from nothing (also irrational ways, for to go from ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is simply a contradiction in terms), then clearly it will be a different sort of thing from the case of starting (rationally) from something ADEQUATE to produce what you have in mind, to that thing, here matter.

Start with nothing, and, if you will forgive the humour,
it will take rather a long time.

Start with ALMIGHTY GOD and the situation is potentially the EXACT reverse.

Instead (by definition ) of having NO power, you have ALL power. The difference between hand-digging and a steam-shovel is nothing compared with that! And even THAT makes a difference. Ask any manual labourer, and you will find even that difference is profound. It DOES affect quite startlingly the time to elapse for the completion of digging whether you use your hands or a steam-shovel. If you want to make a hole, an atomic bomb is even faster. If God acts, there is no limit.

However maybe the question is not going to be one that involves a self-contradiction at once. Perhaps the question is, How long ago did whatever came before matter act so that matter arose? THAT is a nice question: Could we then clarify? WHAT came before matter, to which you so numerically wish one to refer?

Let us then deal with what we know and acknowledge frankly that depending on the power, intelligence and will that preceded the universe's institution, so are the time parameters for that institution. It is quite useless to say, SINCE you are wrong, how long did it take to found the universe on OUR terms? That would be like asking a Puritan how long it would before he got AIDS from proscribed sexual activity, only much worse. IF, in short, you assume a gradualistic, uniformitarian action on whatever-it-was to make whatever-came next, then you could deal with the entities you imagine and work it all out on the basis of all your varied assumptions. It would be no more or less useful than any other novel.

To be scientific however is quite a another matter. It is not that we despise art forms, it is just that we need to know what genre we have in mind.
 

ASSUMING WHAT YOU HAVE TO PROVE MAKES IT EASY

Scientifically, a number of questions relate. Answer them all and you could better answer the first one. COSMOLOGICALLY (*1) the views are diverse, the assumptions monumental and certainties dissipate like morning mist. MODELS can be made with various presuppositions, but these are as sure as the assumptions.
Science by assumption does not prove anything.

Let us merely illustrate. Suppose a series of steps were to occur which would slowly allow some system which had all it took to develop ( that is, aptly and adequately fitted with all the programming etc. required) into something more sophisticated: why then, apart from the oddity of the assumption which is founded on exactly nothing in the way of evidence, it would take just as long as your imaginary parameters for the proto-system which you imagine would require. Another novel.

IF, to take another case, GOD created (as we assert is logically certain), then the time taken, and the methods employed would clearly be ABLE to differ monumentally, infinitely, from the gradualistic, processive, uniformitarian. Thus, to take a minute but parallel case, if I create a story, the TIME depends, not on the rate at which the paper on which it is written deteriorates OR ANY SUCH THING, but on my power and means, and their relationship.

Take light for example: if GOD were creating the universe, then the very concept that the speed of light in its initial and developmental phases (if any) would have to obey what was at length instituted for it, would be simply to ignore the nature of creation, and to ASSUME (wholly illogically and implausibly) that INSTITUTION of light, and events correlative, is IDENTICAL to MAINTENANCE or PROCESSION in light, AFTER it is created. The STORY I write comes in ways of its own: they are not nothing. It is not that they lack form and reality; it is just that the very nature of creation is a different form and application of energy and intelligence, from the maintenance of what one creates.

It is of course true that Dr. Russell Humphreys has written some most interesting material, applying the GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY to the sphere of APPARENT time now, relative to creation. He is a mathematician and a research physicist of long standing, and this is rather intriguing. On the assumptions he makes, and the application of the noted theory of Einstein, he comes up with a date for the earth in the area of thousands of years, and the physically discernible possibility of a speed for light vastly in excess of the current rate: because of the MODE of creation which he has in mind. Past all that, however, there is the question of creation as such, getting way past the quite different question of what means like those we see, MIGHT have been employed.

Enough! The cosmological assumptions are all-important in seeking the time answer, for the institution of the universe. Without these, we know NOTHING. That is my own opinion of the date of the institution of the universe FROM THE SCIENTIFIC VIEWPOINT: It is ENTIRELY unknown. We talk of straining at gnats and swallowing camels: if there was ever such a case, this is it. The PRELIMINARY questions determine the whole thing.

But let us proceed to other aspects.

TAKING A PEEK AT... (of all things in this area) FACTS

We have considered:

1) The COSMOLOGICAL.

Now we note:

2) The INITIAL.

Whatever the cosmological view chosen, there will be a time by which the thing is in action - the universe. WHAT however was the concentration of this and that radioactive material (if any), and what the extent to which all processes are set at zero, or all combinations of producer and product are of one (assumed) type? When I create, I may use ANYTHING, something already showing some process, or brand new, in any combination.

When you cease to blind your imagination by thinking poor old 'god' is not very clever, you realise that just as WE can use what we will (to a point) so HE can do so, only incalculably more. The term 'incalculably' is used here advisedly.

You simply, indeed, have no idea of what products are placed at the outset in this or that state, or in what ratios any particular combinations occur, or indeed whether some elements were at given situation or not, or in what amount. You DO NOT KNOW. That is the only cosmologically, rationally honest answer. There is SO MUCH that depends on assumptions, that by this time, to make even more is an exercise in imagination. The cardinal reality is that:

Process does not direct creation: it interprets it.

However, DEPENDING on the initial conditions, ratios, amounts, and so on, is the WHOLE question: HOW LONG did it take to go from that to this, which we now see? If I start my golf drive half-way up the fairway, it will surely make a difference in this question: HOW LONG it will take my ball to land(?) on the green... Initial point, rate and final point are inter-related questions. We do not know the first. Nor do we know the mode of arrival, or the conditions by which it arrived.

This however is not all that is involved in our first little question.

There is also :

3) the RATE

at which the change from the ASSUMED first state in the IMAGINED (or believed) scenario, to the current one has come. This is quite determinative - or one of the determinants. However we do not KNOW

a) what the rate has been, only what is or was a short time ago;

b) what variations there have been, and although there is evidence as Dr. Slusher has shown, of variation under certain conditions (and the conditions WE are considering for this question are obviously as extreme as one could wish, or may be), the extent is not sure, any more than the initial material is sure, or the way it got here. (That is, from a simply scientific point of view).

We also do not KNOW:

4) THE PRECISE FORCES

to which these processes have been subjected, although the work of Professor Tom Barnes (*2) of El Paso University in Texas is a monumental thrust to exhibit very large magnetic forces were at play on our earth, in the early stages. These things are such extremes as to leave questions of rate, along with the evidences of effects from changing conditions on them, UNKNOWN. We may GUESS, on our preferred cosmological view, and assume further that it WORKED ITSELF OUT in this way and not in that: but we do not know. The more we know about what we did not know forty years ago, the more scientifically ridiculous it is to pose as knowledgeable on all such questions even in terms of precise issues; but when these pose cosmological presuppositions, the effort is of small impact.

Nor do we know:

5) HOW MUCH OF THE SUBSTANCE

we use for checking dates has been leached, lost, dissolved, disturbed, polluted and so forth; so that the ELEMENTS of our equations are ALSO in doubt.

It is therefore small wonder that we do not KNOW:

6) why there is such ENORMOUS variation

between different RADIO-dating methods, when they are applied to the same substance, so OFTEN, and why these results - as in the Hawaii   case (SMR p. 241) - can be ludicrous, making millions of years date for something happening hundreds of years go.

An amusing case is given in CREATION magazine, Dec. 1999, Feb. 2000 on pp. 19-21. In this instance, the variation between dating methods is KNOWLEDGE as to when rock was formed, and DATING TECHNIQUE (with potassium argon) as to when it SHOULD have occurred!

Gifted and original geologist, Dr Andrew Snelling, refers to Mt Ngauruhoe as New Zealand's newest volcano - and one of the most active. Rising to some 7500 feet, it erupted in 1948, with a lava flow proceeding thereafter down the north-western slopes, in 1949. About 20 million cubic feet was the estimated volume of lava. In 1954 an eruption hurling blocks with ash, occurred with some 8 million cubic metres of lava. Further activity occurred in 1974, with an ash column soaring into the atmosphere. Blocks of some 1000 tons were hurled hundreds of metres. Then in 1975, a huge violence occurred, with blocks up to 100 ft across catapulted almost 2 miles.

Snelling then notes the conditions of dating, via assumptions: 1) no daughter radiogenic atoms in the extrusion; 2) rock must be a closed system after hardening; 3) radioactive decay rate must be constant. "If," he indicates, "any of these assumptions are violated, then the technique fails and any 'dates' are false."

11 samples were collected from the five recent and conspicuous lava flows during field work in 1996 - from the flows of 1954, 1975 and 1954. All with maps were clearly identified. Various carefully checked samples were sent to an eminent laboratory for dating. The dates for the age of the ROCKS were of the order of millions of years. The laboratory manager re-checked his equipment and tested again.  The results were similar.

Since the rocks are KNOWN to be of the order of 50 years old, the apparent 'age' is assumed to have come from 'excess' argon, radiogenic inclusion, in the lava, before the rocks formed. This sort of failure is "also known to occur in many other rocks, including both recent volcanics and ancient crustal rocks," Snelling adds, giving references.

Here the INITIAL SITUATION assumptions are wrong, but confidently made (cf. SMR pp. 240), just as the VARIABLE RATE can be merely a theory based on philosophical preference, abstracting from the ages to the present, or to the ages from concepts of choice. As noted, Professor Keith Wanser indicated (CREATION, Sept.-Nov. 1999, p. 40) that - "It's not really widely known that standard quantum electrodynamics predicts that the speed of light (c) is a function of the field strength, thus changeable in principle ... some are starting to accept that c may not be some eternally immutable thing." IF THIS is NOW known, what else ?

Playing with these fundamentals, in the midst of unexperienced catastrophes and unobserved onsets, and extrapolated to creation itself, when by its very nature (and even Davies accepts it began) its institution is no mirror copy of its subsequent maintenance, it is almost like philosophy itself: a work for bright young minds, not overburdened with factuality. Speaking of that, we recall the work of Dr Russell Humphreys, who has shown a DIFFERENT aspect of the matter, in terms of General Relativity theory, so that estimates of age can ON THOSE TERMS be hugely astray, based on false hypotheses.

It is not that this or that point is stressed particularly: just that the whole scope and array of the unknowns, the problematics, in principle, allied to the whole scope of time and catastrophe on the one hand, and to the assumptions about the first state from which dates are to be assessed, is so huge a quiddity as to make the field in the older times in particular, more like a jumble sale of uncertain origins and assumptions. When creation itself, the beginnings of this universe, are considered as well, the entirety is rather a field for the horse-play of mere assumption, than a field for science. If and If and ASSUMING this and that, and provided the other ... and then philosophy calls its siren talk, and the STATEMENTS are made with all the authority of mystic trances.

When it comes therefore to facts, let us be consistent, not intruding the playthings of ideas into such mundane questions as dates. IF far more were known, then we could be much more sure of getting much more consistent dates, and far fewer gross anomalies. However, it is not, and we do, and the reasons themselves for all this, begin to appear.

In this case in New Zealand, we could CHECK UP^*5; and hence we can know THAT the technique is wrong, and consider the presumed error basis. In other cases, there is simply the DIFFERENCE between different dating techniques, which having their own assumptions, run their own perils, and their NON-AGREEMENT is rather like that of two poor students in a class, who do not have the same answer to a mathematics problem. The reason, in general, is often simple: BOTH ARE WRONG. Neither have what it takes at that point.

We do not in general and surely KNOW why there is such enormous variation between dating results. It ... all depends.

Nor do we KNOW:

7) why parts of the SAME rock can give amazingly different answers for age,

though we may GUESS, or ASSUME our way to some sort of 'knowledge'. This however is not sufficient to prevent such measuring troubles. We DO KNOW that these enormous variations, variabilities and uncertainties are in full accord with the fact that often 'RIDICULOUS' dates are discarded in an endeavour to make the ones accepted 'fit', in a way statistical methods support. The THEORY dictates the terms of the selection in such cases, instead of the data being given unslanted scrutiny. Such is not science but philosophy, in a measuring suit. (The distinguished scientists, Professor E.H. Andrews gives meticulous data on this question in his work, God Science and Evolution, pp. 109-127, cf. SMR pp. 237,241,246-248.)

Talking of what we DO (*3) know, for a pleasant change, we do also know that very MANY rates of a simpler and readier character for measurement DO show an age for the earth in the area of thousands of years; and indeed Dr. Russell Humphreys who is writing on such topics, has noted that in his view there are about 90% of all relevant measuring methods that DO give a date for the earth's age in terms of thousands of years. These would include those mentioned in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, such as the rate of disturbed lunar rock shape-recovery, the rate of cooling of the earth, the rate of change of its magnetic field and the nature of that field, salt concentration in the ocean, the helium concentration in the atmosphere, and the fact that carbon dioxide measurements of the ordinary and radioactive isotope components, imply a world of merely thousands of years: since the ratios are not stabilised. (See Index, Dating, SMR.)

From a strictly scientific point of view, the writer would have to say:

1. The date is not at all known.

2. The preponderance of evidence favours a young earth.

3. The difficulties of dealing with the divergence on dates, among evidences, are not great for a young earth, but seem insurmountable for an older one.

4. Much more would need to be known before any idea could be given.

From a Biblical viewpoint, the read-out might be this:

5. The Biblical date for life is certainly in thousands of years only.

6. The absolute initiation date is unsure, but almost certainly the same.

7. The huge agreement of the great mass of evidence with these propositions is what is to be expected; and the lack of concurrence on all sides is equally what is to be expected when knowledge is making such sciences outdated in a few years.

However:

There is no systematic problem whatever on a Biblical perspective, whereas the other option has insuperable difficulties at the outset with its cosmology leaving total ignorance in many spheres. Failure to recognise this, and nothing else, is making the scientific problem. No problem in this field exists for the Bible believer. Where science keeps within its competence, its accord with the Bible is notable. As shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, 3 MAJOR PHYSICAL LAWS are IMPLIED! (pp.330ff. in that work).

As to the First, The Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, Scriptures fundamental to this include: Isaiah 45:12, 48:12-13, Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 1:3, 11:3.As to the Second, The Second Law of Thermodynamics (see the above cited work, pp. 330ff., and Index), Scriptures to the point include: Isaiah 51:6, Psalm 102:25-27, Hebrews12:25-27 with II Peter 3:10. As to the Third, the Law of Biogenesis, consult Genesis 1:11,21,25,28. Also relevant here are Matthew 24:35, 19:4ff., Colossians 3:10, Ephesians 4:24.

For a production dating back well over three millenia, its irrefutable statements to this effect show prodigious performance characteristics, not merely unparalleled, in their total prophetic setting, but in sharp contrast to any production of any science. Contemporary Science, in comparison with this BASIC LAW SIGNIFYING BIBLE, is an infant in arms as to constancy and consistency.

The Bible does not change, goes deep, and stays there. It gave knowledge from thousands of years ago, duly confirming this in the New Testament: knowledge of what ? Of the basic character of the 3 crucial laws of physical science taught to it through the scientific methodology: information, observation, data based laws.

The Bible spoke, science echoes. Science is after all the ordered thought of man in such areas; and where it keeps to its mandate of method, such agreement is not surprising.

It is of course fascinating as a commentary on recent generations of philosophically gyrating thought (contemporary models in vogue), that evolutionism, organic naturalism is neither confirmed by categorical evidence, sustained by correlative laws, implemented to the eyes of observation nor available for test, as it cringes in the twilights of time, wanting, always wanting something to redeem it from its lost estate. What has not got it, will not produce it! ... is far to simple! The Bible however does not however alter. There is never a reason why it should.

It may be noticed that one used the term 'Science'. The actual science, however, not as a philosophic substitute for thought, but as a disciplined procedure in observation, inference, creation of hypotheses, verification, refinement, validation and rejection or confirmation: this continues (*4)  as it has for so long, quite a useful pursuit. It has the wit not to play God, or to tell Him it doesn't want to play with Him any more, because of aspirations of its own. That is for the quasi-respectable pseudo-'Science'.

As to that, and consequences of not taking God to heart: notice that the Bible declares that man as he is, is blighted both by sin and the curse on the earth, and needs redemption. Re-creation (not mere recreation) is declared as a fundamental necessity for the inhabitants of the earth to so much as continue in their order and their function here. Further, it is stated that this fact is to appear with increasing obviousness over time... our time! The creation and what was done in this sphere subsequently in the curse (SMR Ch.2, S1-S33, pp. 179-190, 472-498), require a further act of creation for which the parameters are clear, were long stated, and without which the climax will duly arrive (like a medical prognosis, but this one is certain). Then, said Christ: "Except those days were shortened, there should no flesh be saved" - Matthew 24:22.

These laws of denying the dominion of Jesus Christ and their results ("the law of sin and death" - Romans 8:1), they with the others, they progress and continue as stated... in the Bible. The mouth of Jesus Christ is the mouth of a truth which is invariably verified under due test.

After all, as the Bible clearly states (and cf. Ch. 6 of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock), without that living word of God who was incarnated as Jesus Christ, THERE WAS NOTHING MADE THAT WAS MADE (John 1:3).

The Creator has His own prescriptions, both internal and external, for man, and it is in Himself that it is fulfilled and must be met (Matthew 20:28, II Corinthians 5:18-21; II Peter 3:11-18). It is then that "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus", as Paul says (Romans 8:2), makes one free. Mercifully the way is both near and clear to the reception of His redemption (Galatians 3:10-13, 5:1-25, John 10:9,27-28, 4:14, Romans 10:9).
 
 

Endnotes

*1. See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, 1995 SUPPLEMENT on Cosmology, pp. S1-S34, following Ch.2. On dates see SMR pp. 208-252B also.
 
 

*2. (Updated, September 1999, August 2000; see also  Answers to Questions 5: pp. 112ff., 116ff., and for further material, Appendix, in some detail.)
 
 

AN EXCURSION OF INTEREST -
To BEGIN OR NOT TO BEGIN,
and having begun, HOW TO PROCEED.

The first was never our business, but its results are;
and the second is our observation.

Barnes in his "Origin and Destiny of the Earth's Magnetic Field" stresses grounds for the non-generation of magnetic fields in this setting - i.e. for magnetic fields NOT being produced from our terrestrial situation, by the earth - from the structure of the earth; just as he provided reason for the necessity of a declining field for the earth over time. This decline has in fact has been measured, and is in accord with his prediction, based on creationist premises. THIS is one of the things which is crucial about scientific method: ANY view, hypothesis, presentation must be able to verify itself, and the more it does so, in the more fields, with the greater improbability of such results in a given case, the more impressive this is; and the more it ties in with diverse fields, the more commanding such a fact becomes.

Following the presentation of Barnes in this field: What is left is a picture of initial invention of magnetism (which would be part of the ab initio, from the first structure deposited in creation) and decline, as in other creation on this earth. This case of magnetism simply has successful prediction added, as a special feature, based on that background; it is a useful plus. It is, in this, similar to the feat of Russell Humphreys who, on creationist, non-gradualist principles, predicted other results which have come to pass, as we shall see later. As Physicist, Keith Wanser (professor Physics, California State University, Fullerton) points out, of the latter, 'There's no evolutionary model that has come anywhere close in that department' - in competition with this sort of precision and prediction (Creation-Ex Nihilo, Sept.-Nov. 1999, p. 40).

Because of the logical requirements, you would expect this sort of superiority, and you find it. That is simply more verification. As is the nature of truth, when you are right, and especially right in perspective, the free flow of confirmation can be all but overwhelming.

Barnes for his part,  also used the scientific past and referred, along with his own investigations, to the view of Sir Horace Lamb, who earlier had presented the concept of freely decaying currents in the earth, with an associated freely decaying magnetic field for the earth. That is, we are here not conceiving of their GENERATION, but that they are THERE and this being so, in the status quo, they are to be expected to decline, in precisely the way, in this particular setting, that they do.

Thus Barnes notes that measurements of the earth's field have been made for (what is now) about one and one half centuries, and that the data allow the expectation of using the field, which is changing in understood mathematical terms for decay, as a CLOCK! If other clocks were lost. Lamb's predictions stood the test of time! Over time, this aspect of time (as a part of creation)  is confirmed by time.

This situation required for its actual operation, a conductivity better than that of the earth's surface; and this of course is provided by earth's core of some metallic kind or ingredient, for which there are important data in the earth, as with the 3 magnetically significant moons of Jupiter.

It may be useful here to revert to Barnes, in terms of the consequences of this approach.

The actual data for earth indicate a process of decay of the magnetic field which, as he showed (op.cit. pp. 23-24), has large implications for the repulsive power of earth towards cosmic rays. The scenario: These rays are impinging on the earth's atmosphere, so producing neutrons which in turn transmute nitrogen to carbon 14 (C¹⁴ - the radioactive variety).  Since carbon dating is dependent on the assumption that the C¹⁴ production rate in the past is similar to that of the present, the carbon dates so obtained are simplistic. They are indicated by this consideration, to be too high. Indeed, the further back in history one goes, the bigger the error, states Barnes, since the relevant mathematical curve over time is an exponential one! The far greater past magnetic field for the earth decreases C¹⁴ production for that time, so making uniformitarian assumptions to the contrary the basis of exaggeration of age, a result wrought the more dramatically, the further back in time one goes.

In view of Melvin Cook's point that a non-equilibrium condition now exists between C¹² and C¹⁴ in the earth's atmosphere, and the effect this has in reducing estimated dates by changing the mathematical assumptions, Barnes' point re magnetic field data is reinforced in a double-action date-reduction, as he observes (Barnes op.cit. p.40, cf. SMR pp. 237-238, 247). Thirdly, the relevant C¹⁴/C¹² ratio would also be affected if there were in ancient times a greater natural carbon, C¹² source background (coal deposits suggest this), so lowering the ratio and, just as in the case of the higher magnetic protection than postulated, also requiring a downward dating adjustment (Morris, op.cit. p.163).

The non-equilibrium fact itself further suggests a short age for the earth's atmosphere (Morris, Scientific Creationism, pp. 164ff), and a comparison of  C¹⁴ formation and decay rates provides an avenue for estimate of the age of the earth's atmosphere, in fact in terms of thousands of years. This in turn is in full accord with the purely magnetic inferences to which Barnes refers. So it ties together.

Indeed, these data give ample thrust to the conception of an earth young enough to allow for FOSSIL DNA (Creation, March-May, 1993, p. 9). There cited in New Scientist, Oct. 17, 1992, is a Nature article's reference to DNA magnolia tree fragments, "allegedly some 18 million years old", in the context of Nature's article to the effect that "the rate at which DNA breaks down spontaneously means that after 10,000 years there should ben none left."  Even excluding moisture and bacteria, says New Scientist, this means that "total breakdown should occur by 10,000 years at most."

Amber is a good keeper for this, and New Scientist reports that two separate teams of US researchers have "extracted DNA sequences from a termite and a stingless bee, both in ... amber, of evolutionary age 30 million years." Similarly, New Scientist reports that dinosaur bones of e.a. 75 million years, have "yielded the protein osteocalcin". As proteins have long chains which naturally disjoin, this discovery confirms the others just noted. Such things as these are no longer in defiance of bio-chemistry, when the evidence is all taken as it requires, in terms of laws and logic, to its conclusion. A young earth is the empirical indication, and satisfies what nothing else does in many dimensions.

Again in Dec.- Feb. 1996 (p.9) , Creation magazine again quotes from New Scientist (May 27, 1995) re "many recent claims  of extracting DNA - tiny, unbroken strands of complex molecule that carries the various instructions for living things - from amber insects." This is an exciting new discovery, it notes, for creationists. It  adds that "evidence that DNA should not be there after only 10,000 years is " so persuasive" that some try to discount the evidence itself. Now, it relates,
"the chairman of the microbiology department at California Polytechnic State University, and an assistant, have claimed in Science magazine they have cultured live bacteria from the gut of a bee in Dominican amber. According to evolutionary assumptions, the fossil is 25-40 million years old." General agreement, despite wonderment and concern, is that the claim is 'most compelling'. The researchers also claim that have revived 1500 different types of ancient micro-organism.

Yet such matters do not stop: for how could you hold back a dam by a theory ? Thus in a 2000-2001 report, there is claim to have isolated and revived salt-resistant bacteria from a salt intrusion dated 250 million years old appeared (reported in Nature 407:897-900, 2000). Great pains, it is indicated, were taken to prevent contamination.

The report of Micahel J. Oard, Dec. 26, 2001, notes this: “The researchers admit that they do not know how the bacteria could survive 250 million years … It truly is astonishing that bacteria, DNA, red blood cells, bone proteins, etc. could really survive the vicissitudes of tectonics, heating events, water seeping through the rocks, and other geological processes for millions of years and remain ‘alive.’ Before this barrage of discoveries, scientists considered that such survival was impossible past several thousands or tens of thousands of years.” So does the fairy wand of will wave over the land of make-believe, the unwarranted assured, the negated affirmed, as in the vastly endowed Cambrian fields explored, verifications denied (cf. Earth Spasm, Conscience Chasm … Chs.   1 and   7, SMR pp. 140ff., Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13, at “Conspectus”), laws broken (TMR Ch. 1), and the dam of fact bursts continually over the sorry scene. But let us revert to this particular bacteria case.

This also explains how 'small pieces of coalified bark' could be detached from a coal seam component (Creation, Sept-Nov.1998), assigned an age of 250 million years, and then given a laboratory age of about 34000 years. As Dr Snelling points out, if the wood were really 250 million years old, there would not even be expected the C¹⁴ or radioactive carbon, on which to make the assessment! So do the very stones cry out, the very seams and their very contents, as well as the dates! All radio-carbon, he notes,  should have decayed "in a fraction of that alleged time."
Dr Robert Gentry work on coal (Creation's Tiny Mystery, pp. 54ff.) similarly shows carefully reasoned grounds for the supposition that the Colorado Plateau coal seams were in fact formed in a small number of years. His double halo empirical work is outstanding, and the implications considered with care, leading to this result.

The principles and the practice in this area all point to a young earth age, in concert. This explains the evidence; the option of scientific guesswork, assuming determinable rates of radioactive decay despite the ignorance, and the variability as noted above,  and assuming original situations from which decay is to occur, was never valid and does not cover the empirical case. This is again true of the helium situation for earth.

Thus Creation (June-August 1998,  p. 19) covers the point. The rate of production and dispersion can be worked out, together with the escape rate from the atmosphere, into space. When all the aspects are covered, and even on the assumption NO helium was the initial contribution (an extravagant guess, again), current rates suggest a MAXIMUM age of 2 million years. If there were more at first, this maximum would be lessened, and it would be lessened in terms of the bulk reduction, in view of the initial amount.  No known escape mechanisms to remove this challenge are empirically found. The Creation article also cites Dr Robert Gentry's work in seeking safe storage for radioactive material. He found zircons, mineral crystals containing helium, which had far too much helium residue for an age in millions of years; but the findings did not collide with an age of thousands of years for the pre-Cambrian rocks concerned (cf. Robert  Gentry, Creation's Tiny Mystery, pp. 179-180).

Gentry devotes some space to the point, from pp. 163 onward, and indicates what a precise test was provided by the core drilling at depth. Where the heat would be considerable, at lower levels, the normal room temperature diffusion of helium would be accelerated. How would any be left after the billions of years to which the idea of a self-creating nature commits itself!

It should be enough to dismiss the concept by the irrational character of having things create themselves from nothing, or for that matter, anything lacking the requisite causal capacity, in any case.

Thus dating merely confirms causal reality, on which science is built. What could not happen, does not confirm itself. Indeed, what would you expect! one expects what one gets. The whole thing is deliciously rational. It is not at odds with reason; only with rebellion.

What then was the result in this experimental probe (as it became, although there was other purpose in this governmental work) ? If the period since deposition of the rocks were great, then helium would be an almost ridiculous thing to expect as a residue, and radiogenic lead in the granitic zircons would be expected to depart in substantial measure, especially with great heat. In practice, as a 15000 foot hole in granite formation in New Mexico was explored, it was found that there was both substantial helium and radiogenic lead; moreover, there was no great gradient from the surface to depth. Excessive time at great depth did not do what would be expected to the gas and the reactions. One reason would be that it was not there.

All these things were eloquent testimonies to far less age for the rocks, and indirectly, to earlier rates of decay of far greater dimension than that current, in order to produce such young ages for these rocks. Dr Cook's work on accelerated decay, considered in SMR pp. 237ff.,  therefore inheres beautifully with scientific secondment, into this situation, as with the lack of equilibrium of carbon 12 and 14 to which he also alludes, with due implications to the same effect. Dr Cook's concordance (of dating indices) model is amplified by Gentry's findings. (For the indications of something close to  instantaneous creation from Gentry's special pleochroic halo field in radioactive physics, see SMR pp. 250ff., S 23ff..)

So the evidence is not available to relieve the distress of the vexed and vexatious dating assumptions, guesswork and dogmatism. Empirically, the situation is just what it is in principle, when known laws of science operate. After this brief excursion, we ponder again the magnetic field situation, for the earth.

Now let us turn to events nearer to the arrival of our earth.
 

• Is there any theory presenting also some idea of what may have been related to the procedure of the Almighty in creating the earth's magnetic field ? Is there further attestation of a detailed character available, to serve as a yet further plus to the generic realities which we have discussed, previously (SMR Chs.1-3, with Ch.1 above), in this case ? Let us see.

Notable, and once again in terms of prediction in the same field of magnetism, is the work of Dr. Russell Humphreys, who
 

• has worked out an hypothesis which may indicate something of the method the Almighty used in the original production of magnetic field.
  |
• has, as with the work of Barnes, the inestimable advantage of making predictions which are verified. On the basis of his creationist, young-earth approach, Humphreys predicted the magnetic fields for Uranus and Neptune.

 

Published beforehand, his projected figures were some 100,000 times larger than those based on evolutionary theory (Creation-Ex Nihilo, June -August 1993, p.20). The test therefore seemed an exceedingly clear one for distinction between the competitive capacities of the two approaches to account for the evidence. If X in this gets 100% and Y gets 1%, the disparity is great. Here however the results are not merely 100 times better, but 100,000 times so. Where preliminary assumptions or configurations of thought are in view, and this disparity occurs between the capacity of each, there is an immediate ousting of one competitor, assuming the data are correct, and the prediction made was correctly worked out, while at this point, the other has marked superiority. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE in scientific method, to cling conscientiously to a theory which is anti-verified in ANYTHING, once the facts of the application are assured.

If it is wrong, it is not right. It is changed or killed. Nor is this one feature; it is repeated ad nauseam in this arena of the evolutionary hypothesis and creation. But let us return to the particular magnetic case.

• The divergence was intense and immense; and Humphreys' figures were verified in no uncertain manner when the measured and practical figures becoming available, the two approaches could be compared. 100,000 times superior, and twice verified in a major happening is no mean feat. Other correlatives of his hypothesis in terms of universe age and the transmission of light are noted earlier in this Section. 

In the September-November, 1997 edition of Creation Ex-Nihilo, p. 8, there is further verification for Humphreys in terms of the four largest moons of the planet Jupiter: Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto. The first three have cores and are equipped with magnetic fields; while Callisto has neither core nor field. Since Europa's magnetic dipole has an 80^o tilt away from the spin axis, even evolutionary-disposed theorists issued a report in Science, May 23, 1997, p. 1239, acknowledging that for such a scenario it is unlikely the field has been generated by a core dynamo. Barnes of course showed earlier there was no way for such a generation in the first place, from the earth per se, while predicting the field decrease in the case of earth, effectively on the creation basis adopted.
 

• The new information merely confirms in this extended way, a field with new exotica against any such imaginary generation. The phenomenon is not going away, and the current magnetic field production theories are not accounting for them. What does account for them is what is being confirmed both by measurement and increased scope of investigation. Initial fields decaying at the measured rates in question require a very young earth indeed, as Barnes showed. Humphreys' theory has a very young earth scenario resulting from the concepts involved, which include some work from the General Relativity theory of Einstein; and his predictions have been astronomically startling in their accuracy.

 

Finally, it is interesting in our principial coverage of time, and merely reinforces the obvious fact stated in this article,  that the assumption that what is NOW the case in physical law for an EXISTING universe is by no means to be assumed to be the case for one in the process of formation. It is not logically plausible to say: IF THAT had happened then, at institution of the system, then what happens now, that the system is up and running is a sure index of what would be the case then.

In fact, maintenance phenomena in any field, cannot be assumed identical with creation phenomena. Thus, in the former case, the forces and qualitatively institutive activities are by nature those which RESULT in what became the universe, or any given phase of it; whereas the forces and qualitative activities of the present do NOT result in universe. They result in its mere continuance (not that this is a small thing, but it is a very DIFFERENT one!). The glibness of assumptions that the one acts as the other, that the developed situation acts in the parameters of the starting one, are mere imagination dressed as science. When matter's own formation is in view, the assumptions of uniformity become ludicrous.

On this basis, we have pointed out that the velocity of light may not with aplomb, like the insistences of some traditionalist in religion, be assumed comparable with that which related to its formation.

It is in this connection that the words of Professor Wanser bring back a little more rationality to the physical bombast which so often is touted as if by a football match crowd, showing only too clearly how perceptive was Lord Zuckerman when he noted that when the core of their beliefs was shown wrong, scientists could be just as perverse, obstinate or insensitive as any one else (see SMR p. 205). It is the method not the man which is to the point.

Wanser pointed out in an interview reported above, this:

• "It is not really widely known that standard quantum electrodynamics predicts that the speed of light (c) is a function of the field strength, thus changeable in principle. I've been playing around with this for years, and while it's still heretical, some are starting to accept that c may not be some eternally immutable thing."

 

He is further quoted as making this statement:  "In fact, there are good reasons to believe that c might be drastically altered in the near vicinity of an electron; recognition of this might help to develop a viable theory for this particle" - (pp.40-41, op.cit., emphasis added).

It is of course precisely during the invention or ordination of any new phase of things that the changes which induce these results that come to be our system, would be required to be remarkably different from the situation which does NOT produce our system. It is thus intrinsically not merely ludicrous, but misleading in the extreme ever to use data which relate to a total picture, its commencement exercises and its maintenance phase, as if they could be assumed the result merely of the present, or read back from the present to the past. It is rather like assuming that the rate of change of a musical score during its production is similar to that shown in its yellowing age in some university or museum. In fact, some musicians create fast, some  more slowly, some with many revisions (like Bach), some with express speed, perhaps like Handel at times. The object brought into existence has a very different set of parameters from the one being formed!

It is in this situation, this complex case with which we are faced, that it becomes far more understandable that the various radiometric approaches to dating, with their various assumptions (cf. SMR Ch.2) produce such discordant results that many geologists want the fossil 'confirmation' before being too sure what the right date might be, selected in some cases from exceedingly divergent possibilities in the measuring process, as shown (loc.cit.).  In fact, Professor Wanser (loc.cit.) adds  from the area of his professional expertise, that "when you get the nucleus 'excited', decay is going to be much quicker, making things look vastly 'older'. People have been talking recently about magnetic stars giving off big bursts of gamma rays; there are all sorts of ways that radiometric 'clocks' could have been reset catastrophically, during the Flood for example.' " (Cf. SMR pp. 237ff., and the work of Physics Professor Harold Slusher, SMR pp. 77ff., in *13, pp. 76ff..)

Barnes' reference to the highly diverse results in the production of C¹⁴ atoms, in the presence of an exponentially greater magnetic field, which is not merely assumed but indicated by the data long recorded: these are merely one particular example of this generic fact. The PARTICULAR effect of the higher magnetic field, in times past, is the reduction by calculation of the age involved. This has the same effect in this regard, as that of a slower light speed, and accords with the other dating data noted (loc.cit.), indicative of a younger earth. (See also *3 infra.)

Wanser also points out the current impasse in the 'big bang' theory, which while it stresses beginnings, which are to be assumed in any case from the various processes which are not for ever in their degrading, is filled with the folly of Descartes in loose imaginings without the discipline of all the evidence, as seen elsewhere in this article. The point he makes here is this: If one were to imagine matter being made out of energy, as in this theory in some current vogue, then it requires one to "end up with equal amounts of matter and antimatter." This is widely divergent from the facts that are found in the universe. So this 'scientific law' (re antimatter) is 'violated' in the interests of the theory ('big bang') - exactly as in the case of the Darwinian hypothesis, as repeatedly shown (cf. SMR pp. 140ff.).

If this law is violated, he continued, then "this would make protons unstable, so for years they've been looking in vain for even one proton to decay.

"They haven't found it, and all indications are that the proton must be stable for a period of time much larger than previously thought possible, more than 1,000 billion billion times the assumed evolutionary age of the universe. This makes it completely impossible for the 'big bang' to work" - op.cit. pp. 40-41.

Quite apart from the logic of the situation as presented in SMR Chs.1-3, these mathematical expressions of disdain for the suggested secular hypotheses are like those manufactured (even when there is more to come as we show in SMR pp. 226ff., cf. 234-236, 252Eff.) for other aspects of the naturalist fiasco, which is really the desire or hope for what does not show capacity, to somehow have it any way! (cf. Joyful Jottings  3, 2,). Time does not increase the scope of an inadequate system, but as Dr A.E. Wilder Smith shows, merely ensures that the system's ingredients, its intrinsic content, expresses itself with more accuracy (cf. Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, pp. 55ff., cf. 88ff.). What is in fact required is treated in some detail in Repent or Perish Ch.7, pp. 141ff., with implications and comparisons, assessments and applications to the point at issue. This continues to the end of the chapter, at p. 179, and is correlative to parallel phenomena cited in SMR pp. 251-S34. (On the topic of man, in this connection, see Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 81, with 82 and SMR pp. 204ff., with indexes for SMR and the Rest.)

Indeed, Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge fame regards these hopes as "evidently nonsense of a high order", and of course duly proceeded to write about 'The Intelligent Universe', correctly construing that intelligence as a quality has results of a comparable, characterisable quality. In a purely empirical way,  Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard explodes against the gradualistic hypothesis in terms of its being 'literally incomprehensible', however reluctant that admission may have come to be later: this was the impactive result of reviewing the multiplicity, facility and complexity  of completed things in the Cambrian era!

But it is not really the  result of reluctance. The Bible presents another ground (Romans 1:18ff.) for the rejection of the Creator, so that Biblical creationism not only accounts for the creation in the only way which is logically defensible, as shown from the above references, but with this added touch of mastery, that it accounts also for the widespread distaste for the concept of creation as well! and for that matter, predicts that this will become a phenomenon of note in our own season of history, as of course it is. (Cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, pp. 103ff.). Surely here is a majesty which analyses the resistance, accounts for it and presents what stands over thousands of years, with all the apparent ease of a tennis champion rolling off one more overpowering drive. In this case, this too is what one would expect from such infinite superiority to man, and that in turn thus constitutes another internal verification to add to the innumerable external ones.

• The universe we have requires a beginning, a cause sufficient and all attempts to make it manufacture itself without capacity are merely confirmed mathematically. All efforts to make it SHOW this capacity are merely shunned by the facts. Its dying character is everywhere to be seen. The thought of it as a mother is contrary to all evidence; but most of all to the precise requirements of logic, which merely has its confirmation in the empirical world of actual structures, times and events. In surveying all the evidence, we see that the misdirection of a religious yen, enquiry, desire, which is inherent in man not least because of the rational capacities with which he has been endowered, and their outcome. It is because he also bears opportunity by his nature of direct relationship of his spirit to his Creator, however distorted this may become in transfer to objects and their processes, that his revolts appear like an epidemic in the history of our race (cf. Romans 1).

 

The ludicrous irrationalities, being misdirected like a stream that must have some outlet,  have been seen from early Greek thinkers, wanting everything to come from water, fire, change, non-change, as also in the worshipping of heavenly bodies, or the universe, or in you will, the smuggled insertion into it of the super-human and indeed divine characteristics to create it (cf. Joyful Jottings 3, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3, SMR p. 422E-L). This they do (cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 80),  in ways as varied as humorous - their grave consequences apart - as if thinking would invent them, whereas we ourselves in our material instruments, our bodies, are  the codified productions of thought (cf. Repent or Perish Ch.7, Scoop of the Universe 57, SMR Ch.3) , underlying our spirits and their quests. Thus Zephaniah has call to declare:

"I will cut off ... those who worship the host of heaven on their housetops" (1:5) and again in 2:11:

"For the Lord will be awesome to them,
For He will reduce to nothing all the gods of the earth,"

just as in Jeremiah we find this (10:11):

"Thus you shall say to them: 'The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.' "

Now the idolatrous fabrication is with mental idols, preachers of this unrighteousness now to be seen as physicists, biologists, sociologists, psychologists, with the hidden their forte, the unevidenced their thrill, the vanishing their focus; though their physical counterparts are as clear as ever, and as devoid of those divine powers with which man in his fancies would invest them. In this, those beguiled in this manner, and many are more than willing, seem rather like a young lady adoring her heroic swain, in whom alas the qualities of heroism are more apparent to her eyes than to the curriculum vitae, or to the eyes of others. To so imagine is alas to worship, not a mere hero, but the divine where it is not. Penalties are not puny for such misappropriation of deity's name, even if sobriquets and phrasings disguise the attribution. One of the chief is the fruit of the very delusion itself, divorcing life from its source with all attendant consequences.
 

But let us return from this visit to the religious aberrations to which the flesh is heir, through the rife hyperactivities of imagination and the failure to reckon with the realities of reason and evidence. The underlying cause of any eccentricity of thought, it is always sound to be able to consider in any survey, and these are multiply attested; but it is for now rather to the overlying facts of the data that we refer.

These are the bones of the matter, as we find with consistency and continuity in the various fields considered. That these varied negative results in principle are themselves predictable is the simple result of breaching the logical principles from the outset, as shown in SMR Chs.1-3. That the efforts to find what is not there, merely reveal the nature of what is required, step by step, as the absences mount to reveal a configuration of what should be present (see Ch.1 above).
 

• THIS then is where science is useful in this area of apologetics - the facts constantly refuse to be browbeaten into what would invalidate the logic which from the first has required the Creator and His work, in order for the universe to so much as exist, or our own thoughts to have any validity. On the contrary, in serene seeming indifference to all this naturalism, the universe facts and intrinsic procedures are what they are, and do not bend to the role of being their own creator.

As to what is  required in terms of logic: The validity resulting from this absolute truth, the Creator,  being known, then ties in with the use of the reason which points out that He is there and knowable; so that what is required by logic is what is confirmed by what it finds, the word of God.  This same validity then results in the constant and consistent confirmation of His presence and ways which is above exemplified. Coherence, consistency and insistence are the unique and privileged requirement of the truth, and they reside in one place only. It has many rooms, as well as a street address.
 

*3.
 

See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, page 241.

Also of interest, in the way of update (1997), the constant combinations of FORM in the universe, of SPECIALISED and SPECIFIC character is not at all limited to the staggering linguistic codes and commands in the DNA. In CREATION Ex-Nihilo (June-August 1997), there is an extension of the oft-noted fact of a vast wall of galactic structure 'early' in the universe's hypothesised times, contrary to all randomness and expectation. THAT expectation of the Unexpected, IS expected in ALL fields, because of

i) the frequently rehearsed requirements of logic for the Creator, as shown for example in That Magnificent Rock, Ch.1, and SMR Chs.1-3,10, and

ii) the continual and continuous exhibition of JUST SUCH SPECIFICITY as accompanies creation and does NOT appear as the norm in uncontrolled, uncommanded exhibitions of the chaotic.

The interesting features, which fit into the data like leaves cut to size in a book, are these.

A. Creation magazine, Sept.-Nov. 1996, pp. 26ff. notes that in addition to the discovery of the Great Wall of massive galactic formations, in areas which astronomers theoretically consider likely to be near the beginning of our universe's formation, and contrary to the Big Bang distribution scenario, there is now aggravation in the form of more of the same. More powerful telescopic work has enabled preliminary analysis to suggest many "structures the size and shape of the Great Wall, but dozens of times farther away" (Science, Vol. 272, June 14, 1996, p. 1590).

Indeed, Arizona University astronomer, William Tifft, having long claimed that "red shifts" , normally supposed to measure the distance of galaxies, fall into distinct packets or quanta. Creation notes that Oxford's Bill Napier and Bruce Guthrie (Edinburgh), after studying 200 galaxies, claim Tifft's basic thrust is right. "Explosions" with measured steps for particles (here galaxies) are too rich even for cow's milk. Order is inextricable! Actually, the Big Bang follies were part of the delusive apparatus of the thought of Descartes, though he had a more orthodox base for the bang.

Such things are always peripheral to the realities, mere paint over the wood-work, which fails to realise that the wood came from trees. Differently expressed, random expulsive forces are merely useful in populating universes, not creating them; for dispersing realities, not making them; and whatever "forces" create acceleration, need transcendent order to create the laws and structure of what, being originated, is accelerated. The concept borders on the childish, being a simplistic piece of reductionism that has not even a generic genesis, but as it were, a moving van for furniture which it does not bother to have crafted.

By way of update, we might add here from a finding exhibited in Creation Vol. 22, No 1, Dec. 1999- Feb. 2000, p. 8. Also here placed is further data on neutrinos from Technical Journal, Creation, Vol. 17 (1), 2003, on neutrinos and the Faint Sun Paradox in terms of this finding.

Noting the Cosmological Principle, that used in the 'Big Bang' scenario for the universe's deposition, the article observes that the Hubble Space Telescope has now seen far more of the universe than in Einstein's day (when the above principle was assumed). Things universe-wise appear "anything but uniform", we find, with the flattest of contradictions making this assumption seem rather like the flat earth concept that some indulged in.

"Galaxies are gathered together in great chains and walls which curl around vast regions of empty space known as 'voids'."

Nottingham University's professor of astrophysics acknowledges that the universe is not uniform, and is cited as follows:

"We're lost… The foundations of the big bang models would crumble away. We'd be left with no explanation for the big bang, or galaxy formation or the distribution of galaxies in the universe. "New Scientist, August 21, 1999 (pp. 23-26), and Science, April 16, 1999, pp. 445-446 are cited.

This of course is merely further confirmation of the phenomenal vast walls of galactic materials, already noted, and ranged in their concentrations, in acutely inappropriate places for the thoughts of this kind.

Another way of saying this ? the evidence is reluctant to meet theoretical notations of uniformitarianism. Indeed, it cannot be induced to do so and is always a 'problem child'. That this relates to science is of course the rag doll of philosophy of the 20-21st centuries!

What would you expect ? That uniformity make specificity! That nothing makes things uniform, and then improves on that feat of irrationality, by making them specialised ? Or that activity is creativity, even if it arose from nothing, by some lapse of logic so vast that ever afterwards it has been at pains, if not in penance, to make amends ? Or that cause is a vain concept, and the reason or cause for that thought is … something which assumes the validity of causality ? Such are the uniformly ludicrous types of assumption, or self-contradiction indeed,  which many have, underlying these substitutes for thought. Such febrilities act as if the power in the present order of things is self-accounting, like the poor, looking into the Gates of Buckingham Palace, and assuming that it all came from some alley by a strange form of osmosis, or a surge of something or other which did not have what it takes to build.

So are hopes of rebellion built on an abstraction from what is there, a removal from what is found and what is causally needed, in the interests of the nugatory formulations of admitted incoherence. You can fabricate in thought; but when it comes to fact, you need power and concept, creativity and a well-managed interface both for your symbols of operation, words or thoughts or whatever, and your agencies of implementation. Nothing is even worse than something inadequate, when it comes to creation. When it is all both contrary to empirical reality and logical necessity, we are dealing with romance; and it is simply a fact that some of the great romantic novels of our time are written by one group of scientists, and oddly, compounded with their serious work.

Meanwhile, in Creation Technical Journal Volume 13, No 1, 1999, we find that Professor's Slusher's reference to the missing mass needed to keep adequate grounds for the continuation of the spirals in galaxies at such an age as is often postulated, is validated. Empirically, their continued structural form is adverse to the concept of great age.  Why have they not drifted apart, like the Little Girls in Blue, in the old song! What hindered them in this uniformitarian grave-yard of the imagination of man nature-worshippers and naïve dreamers ? Thus, new research does not find the 'dark matter' which, it was assumed, would appear in vast quantities within the enormous stellar congregations, sufficient to account for these - to some - incredibly youthful seeming galaxies, as a cohesive force.

Like the missing link, what is missing is the crucial verification of thought. Things fail to move astronomically or biologically as man would like to move them. After all, man did not make them move; and what did, it is best to relate to what is found and what is adequate ground, rather than what is merely imagined, with evidence at rest or on vacation, like Baal in Elijah's day. That too was a nature-worshipping religion. You might as well pay in for the week, with an imagined cheque from an imagined week of toil. You could write it out; it is just that the value would not be there.

Noted also in this issue, is a report in Astronomy and Astrophysics (Crézé, M., Chereul, E., Bienaymé, O.  and Pichon,  C., 1998, in 329.920-936 of that magazine). Making a motion of an aggregate of stars, they were able to "analyse the gravitational pull dragging them back towards the galactic disk."  The "local dynamical density was much less than former calculations had suggested, and was contrary to any concept of 'disk shaped component of dark matter' ". Further research by Honc-Anh Pham of the Paris Observatory (Ph.D. thesis)  analysed the motion of 10,000 stars in the Milky Way disk, reaching a result concordant with the above.

"These studies," she declared, "confirm that the dark matter {presumed to be } associated with the galactic disc in fact doesn't exist." ( The reference: Hellemans, A., 1997, Galactic Disc contains no dark matter, Science 278:1230.)

To revert to the Astronomy and Astrophysics article noted above, it is fascinating and instructive to note that the team, after "analysing the distribution of motion for 100 stars" were able to proceed to "analyze the gravitational pull dragging them back towards the galactic disk."

"In this way," says the report from Oard and Sarfati, the researchers could "deduce the gravitational mass that is

• 'practically hypothesis-free and model-free' "

(this last phrase being cited from the researchers themselves).

It is this phenomenon which is arresting. All throughout these assiduous efforts of many to replace observational fact with hypothetical figments, routinely dismissed in due course, like some great delay of execution by any legal means available, there is the same result. The pleas of irrationalism, ignoring the stentorian voice of logical necessity from the first (SMR Chs. 1-3, 10), as scientific method in much at the last (in uniformitarianism assumptions -cf. That Magnificent Rock. Chs. 1,  8), find only fall and gravel rash, not floating experiences in the spatial and spacious roamings of the mind.

When, however, we look in verification of logical necessity, what is continually found! Here the FACT and the OBVIOUS indicate NO NEED for the assumptions of uniformitarianism, which NEEDS some dark matter, or some black holes to help the universe to outface its multi-faceted and continually attested (relative) youth. These things are not proposed since they are contrary to specification, just as they continually become contrary to observation. Nothing has to fail, for it being unneeded, has no place for being presented, that it might fall. It is desperation which invents the imaginary, only to be defeated in its own provocation. Imagination, it is good, in a good cause; but not in prevarication or procrastination from the joint testimony of reason and the revelation of truth.

Identified as the word of God, the Bible indicates relative youth in the universe, to which all things point, from which nothing consistent and rational in its coherence, in any thing stands. Hypothesis on hypothesis, as Dr Thompson so well pointed out in his own field, versus the biological uniformitarianism, are in fragile, unstable and ineffectual layers. They do not stand. This is because they CANNOT  stand, for reason rejects their bases, and observation rejects their implications. They are forever surreptitiously supposing order and structure and causality and at the same time, dismissing them in form of expression, in a very boxing match of reeling self-contradiction. It is a merry-go-round of great sadness, deluding many; who, however, in much, ignoring the necessities, ask for it.

Thus as Slusher points out in Age of the Cosmos p. 13, 'black holes' have been calculated to be needed, if they are to aid the non-disorder of galaxies, and their persistent continuance, in a special way. This gravitational  model is not a free one. They would need to be "distributed as a common constituent of inter-galactic space". In the hundreds of thousands such holes would be needed. Further, as Paul Ackerman relays in his It's a Young World After All, p. 69-70, their net effect in such multitude is to be dispersive, to 'eat up' galactic material, not to enhance order and uniformity. In reality, this would merely be ONE MORE of the dispersive, disruptive forces at work on the comparative uniformity and indeed beauty, of galaxies (Slusher op. cit. p. 16).  But it is not these things only, for a black hole MODEL to account for coherence and beauty of form in a chaos of theory, which is in view as the problem. There is more to face for any such model, looking for a black hole structure in its orderly if imaginary existence as a 'glue', albeit in order, a rampantly dispersive one! There is another and fateful difficulty, one which Dr Slusher does not omit in dealing with this needed dispersed arsenal of 'black holes. It is simply this: "There is no evidence for that."

Doubtless this is one of the reasons why the hope in dark matter has been thrust for so long, as the glue; and why the reaction of negativity or disillusion appears, as cited in the article of Oard and Safari, on finding it non-available in our Milky  Way, on the basis of careful analysis. (They cite from Science, 281:332-333...  'bad news for astronomers who thought they finally had an answer to the puzzle of what could be holding galaxies together' .)

What! yet ONE MORE hope dashed! Et tu, dark matter! if one may adapt from Caesar's fateful remark to the assassin's hand of Brutus, his 'friend', in Shakespeare's rendition. In fact, this quoted negative reaction of frustration is exceedingly similar to that noted above, re the structure of galactic matter, from Nottingham University. That occasion, one recalls, was from revelation of observation from the Hubble Telescope. There is little more upsetting to obstinate theories than unco-operative facts.

It is the same with short term comets. Slusher discusses with a beautiful and concise precision, the possibilities surveyed for their ... origin, a model hypothesis, here, there, and finds no rest for thought. Nothing meets the considerations of the current geometry in comets, from such bases (op. cit. pp. 43ff.). Ah but the very idea of a young universe with its young fragments, processes and results, this is intolerable! so go the mental engineers in their tirades. Hence insoluble 'problems'. What is indicated MUST not be; why it implies CAN not be. Some problem!

Indeed the necessary beginning; the necessary order - it has to be there, in order to be dispersible; the necessary spirals still quite lacy; the actual order imposed beyond all expectation in cosmic walls near 'the beginning' where of course they are especially theoretically unwelcome;  wrong, ludicrous or conflicting relative ages and 'miracles' of preserved antiquity (cf. SMR p. 77, 241, Creation Technical Journal Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 3ff., and above), on the one hand,  and the second law of thermodynamics on the  other:  these things are as alike as two peas - one of granite, the size of a mountain, and the other of vegetable origin, and rotten. (Cf. Wake Up World, Your Creator is Coming… Chs. 4,  5,  6, Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 2 and Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium Ch. 13.)

 

• The jagged, waggling absurdities,
• like an exposé of confused folly,
• in which not merely such things stampede en scène,
• but ages of parts of the universe may readily be theoretically calculated to be older,
• perhaps by a factor of 50% -
• than that whole of which they are part
• may add the nostalgia of child-hood, but subtract the needs of the task. (Cf. Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, Ch. 6, p. 128.)

 

So do theories futilely wave their unsustainable magic wands of desire, in the midst of a universe alien and indeed intractable to their thought. It conforms rather, precisely to the thought of God as accurately, sublimely expressed in the Bible. For this, evidence needs no broken theoretical crutches. It shouts and triumphs. The 3 major laws of physics resound as if given from its word, their cue! (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, pp, 8, and ff.,  and Ch. 8, on various pages ). Neither order nor indeed its causes arise from the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2), too well founded not only in observation (NEVER known to contravene or contradict it), but in logic itself. Moreover, nothing arises from nothing (1), for the good reason that there is nothing there as an even verbal source for the operation. Life comes where it is placed (3) by the intelligent creator of its confines, its domain and its dynamic. So it goes. What is FOUND is merely what is the mode of being LOST. It is not a particularly good scenario for its arrival. Arrivals require action of what is appropriate.

With a certain relish of grim humour, sometimes therapeutic, this is precisely what is found not only materially, but spiritually. It is found that man is lost. What HE needs is to be found. As with other things, it is found where the evidence attests, logic constrains; and for man this is a matter of mercy, the name of which is sublime, the source of which the Personal Sovereign Sublimity of God, the way of which the pathway of peace in Christ whose name did not blush in the obscure realms of the unknown, but has been published for millenia, without logical or evidential competition, in the presence of countervailing power for every need.

Man's life spiritually also needs to be placed by the One sufficient. In his case, the residue of life needs to be redeemed (John 1:12-14, Galatians 3:1-13), and for some 3500 years the song of Job to this effect has been upon the earth (Job 19:23-27), and as if for emphasis the Messiah of Handel recounts it with poignancy, power and pathos in a multitude of centres every Christmas; while for 2 millenia the Redeemer's work has sounded like a symphony upon the restless globe, its predictions from the first, and precise detail from 3 millenia. (Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17.)
 
 

B. Let us now return to Creation magazine, June August 1997, as quoted in A above.
 

On pp. 8-9 (op.cit.): NATURE journal, January 9, 1997, publishes the results of research by an astronomical team led by an Estonian academic: Their conclusion concerning galaxy structures -
 

• "The large-scale structure of the cosmos is an orderly rectangular, three-dimensional latticework of clusters and voids." It is found, by report, that 'the lines of concentrated matter appear to be spaced at fairly regular 91 million-light-year intervals'.
   

Creation notes also that an Internet posting quotes the New York Times (undated) as saying that this finding resembles a massive 3-D chessboard.

How COULD it possibly be surprising that the magnificent SPACE of grandeur should not be without the intriguing breath of order, seen in MINIATURISATION of the microscopic in cells: that order in mathematical applications to great areas should appear in its own way, paralleling that in minute ones! If ANY phase of the universe were really random, both we and it would assuredly be incapable of form, order or understanding (cf. SMR pp. S26-S34 and 263-287).

Granted the implicative aspects of all such work, yet the trend is equally clear.

C.

On pp. 46ff. of the same issue of Creation, we find that exploding stars producing supernovas are covered in a mathematical discipline which expects a certain number of them to be formed, and visible in our universe, in certain times: that is, there is a projected RATE for supernovas to form. Categorising the 3 stages whereby exploding stars form supernovas, the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd, in vast expansions, there is a NUMBER for each PHASE or stage, to be expected.

For the big bang type of cosmogony, the number expected visible at the 3^rd stage is 5000, the number visible is zero. For the thousands-of-years old creation, the number expected is zero, and the number found is zero, one more scientific verification of what on other grounds is often dramatically attested. For the 2^nd stage, the projected number is 2260 for big bang type time, and 125 for the short age creation, set here at 7000 years. The actual number found: 200. The customary Biblical verification occurs, in terms of this observational criterion.

TIME is certainly on the side of the angels; and it is of interest, further, as shown elsewhere, that Biblical genealogies often focus merely major parties. Comparisons of genealogies in the Bible, presented for different specific purposes, show that 'son of' can cover several generations, signifying often simply a descendant worthy of note in the degree of detail accorded to the genealogy in question. Biblical dates for biological life on earth fit perfectly with a date range from 7000 to 12000, or of a similar order, without the slightest question in terms of the actual data... If the earth is older, no evidence in the Bible declares this. (Cf. SMR pp. 169-179, S1-S34, 422E ff..)

The singular, sovereign, staccato dispersal of power, in creation matching the overpowering wonder of the Creator, is what is recorded, and as shown in these passages and similar ones, "DAY" does not mean DAZE, but is repetitively specified after light comes, evening and morning, with a literal force verging on the science note book kind of fact-event notation; "KIND" is the eventive outcome to continue, and historic reality is the scene to which this scenario imposingly comes.

A measure of poetry, it may indeed contain; but poetry designed, as in great music, to hallow the event; nor is it poetical in any pre-emptive sense, it being rather the magnitude of the events, in parallel with the simplicity of the style, which evokes a sense of the poetic. In fact, the language has a certain precision and economy of style, like that of a King to his commanders.

That these are the"generations" of heaven and earth, the originative activities, the accounts, records and reports of the way from who was and what was, to what is, is made even clearer by the DECLARATION in Genesis 2:1-4 to that EXACT effect. "Thus" it was done, thus "finished", "all the host of them", "in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." "Generations" is likewise the term which continues to be used, of other historically specific events, such as descendants from parents. As in Luke 3, the genealogical accounts proceed from the historic to the historic, and in Luke's case, from Adam to Jesus Christ. What the Bible means is not in the least doubt; and the reader is referred to the SMR pages noted above, for more detail.

As in the Bible, so in other earthly history, relatively short time is repeatedly indicated by specialties remaining and rates relating to observation: rather than on the basis of presuppositions, themselves based on the very assumptions which stand in need of support, as shown in the text of this Section.

The whole point of specificity, as shown in the galaxies (see Slusher and others in this context, and related criteria, SMR pp. 76-79, 235-260, esp. 233-234, 239-240) is constantly one of massive originals with degenerative descents over time, inordinate inputs of information with significant losses over time. All this is even equipped with a law to declare it (2^nd Law of Thermodynamics), which is everywhere to be seen, as with extraordinary correlations, computations, constructions, architectures, mathematics, in a system on the slow and sometimes faster decline, like ageing furniture or cars - or books.

This one, this creation, has an amazing facility as far as we are concerned, with massive provision for editing and checking our cell-duplication, the copyings which allow life to continue since it is not being formed on earth by ANY observation except FROM life; nor is the way known, any more than is the way Shakespeare, in particular, cast his plays: creation is like that. (Cf. The Kingdom of Heaven, Ch.10, esp. pp.  205ff., 201ff., 191ff., A Spiritual Potpourri, Ch.9, esp. pp. 145ff., esp. 147-148 at the end of Section 3.)
 

It is HIGHLY individual, and copy-cats even among men have their trials. When it comes to genius, the case is immensely more forbidding; when it comes to the author and original for this universe, it is ludicrous to pretend. He has done it, and copying verges on delusion, except at that lower but still highly fascinating level of using our gifts AT THEIR OWN LEVEL, FOR what they are assembled to perform.

Children are often wanting to become instant adults, and man is often at the foul business of wanting to be instant God; whereas in fact, his whole structure is TELLINGLY growing old, both for the individual and for the race, a reminder of mortality, and of the only source of immortality (Titus 2:13-14, 3:4-7, II Timothy 1:10), which He has brought to light, as He brought physical light to light also, and all the rest of the creation of which we are an amazing image-bearing set, relative to the Creator.

The Christian may care to reflect, as the non-Christian wisely might ponder this reference to the power and time of God, from II Timothy 1:9-10:

... The power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling , not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began, but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
 

*4

Recent findings such as those noted in references cited below, merely confirm the points, made in principle earlier in *2 above. There it was indicated:

It is of course precisely during the invention or ordination of any new phase of things that the changes which induce these results that come to be our system, would be required to be remarkably different from the situation which does NOT produce our system. It is thus intrinsically not merely ludicrous, but misleading in the extreme ever to use data which relate to a total picture, its commencement exercises and its maintenance phase, as if they could be assumed the result merely of the present, or read back from the present to the past. It is rather like assuming that the rate of change of a musical score during its production is similar to that shown in its yellowing age in some university or museum. In fact, some musicians create fast, some  more slowly, some with many revisions (like Bach), some with express speed, perhaps like Handel at times. The object brought into existence has a very different set of parameters from the one being formed!

 

Now we find in particular attestations even more than those already cited above in this section,  as from Slusher and Wanser, and in the update noted immediately below this end note. In the CREATION Technical Journal 15 (2) for 2001, we find in an article from John Woodmorappe, pp. 4-6, that it is only since the 1990's, experimentally attested, that bound-state b-decay provides the decay rate change that is so vast as to be ... to this author, wholly of a kind expected!

Why ? It is because this is the sort of thing that follows from the nature of the case. There is a phase of creation, where the constitutive things are being put in place, free while form is provided and delimitations are installed; so that to the eventual product set in the performance phases for the purposes intended,  there are correlative phases of institution, and non-limitation, relatively or substantially. These creative features of  institution are to be expected as in all things of this order, to contrast with the modes of mere continuance, where the conditions and coherences fit for the purpose, are walls and ways that work in the ways provided.

Such a scene and scenario has been emphasised on this site in this section and elsewhere for years, and such is verified in kind the finding in this relatively limited example of an extreme case. From freedom to form and function, from understanding to delineation and definition, such is wisdom (as seen and made manifest for example in Proverbs 8 (q.v.), and found for man in his own works, though these by the nature of one who is himself a product, though one endowed with thought as a product, these are by nature far less in scope than for the Creator Himself, the source and Spirit behind all creativity).

Let us however return to the detail of this change in decay rate, as experimentally now attested in b-decay.

This is found in the cases as specified in the report, to represent a radioactive decay-rate acceleration "by an astonishing nine orders of magnitude" - a billion-fold. Imagine our local Holden suddenly accelerating its product presentation from say 200 kph, to 200,000,000,000 kph. It would indicate that our concepts of this sort of thing had been rather seriously limited! Our conclusions about cars and their ways, their proclivities, possibilities in certain circumstances to be sure, would be in need of some humbling revisions!

This nine order of magnitude increase in radioactive decay, then, evidently occurs when a neutron changing into a proton, has eventual products including an expelled derivative electron, exiting as a negative beta particle,  b. The process, difficult to stage as an escape in normal circumstances, appears greatly assisted if the nucleus first loses surrounding electrons, these  vacating or not locating in their orbits, this situation facilitating exit for particles to be expelled with nucleus change.

The latter  may occur in the plasma state, which is thought to be that such as abides in the sun, at extremely high temperature. In that matter-dispersive state, in which normal coherence is changed, electrons and atomic nuclei are deemed to exist, with a measure of dismantling from the norm.

This type of accelerated b emission scenario has been found, the report indicates, in the rhenium-osmium system, with the billion-fold acceleration  of decay rate, thus reducing an anticipated 42 billions of years to some 33 years, in terms of half-life. This type of accelerated response has also been found in other (cited) cases.

This is a true-to-type exemplification of merely the sort of thing expected in

	a) the creation process itself, when parts may have been co-ordinated from unco-ordinated bases.
	b) the day when initiating processes themselves may have been forged which, in the incremental moulding and forming processes of creation, were far removed from the mature and relatively dignified events of the completed forms, delimited to their desires parameters akin to the purpose, information being fed from formulation.
	c) the mini-processes which may have been contributory to maxi-ones, such as, purely as admonition, in the opposite direction,  fragmentation particles, of small time endurance, indicate in the break-down scale. This is illuminating in that the make-up moments are an ample repository for what is diverse and even divergent by NATURE, just as, to take a gross example, molten metal has very different characteristics in terms of accomplishing change of form, from those of  solid metal in which the product may be housed, and far more generally, any unintegrated part of a system is at that primary stage, not regulated by the mechanisms, restraints, constraints and paradigms of the design, which limit, direct and by formulation, as in the DNA for man, exclude and include for what is the limit desired.

 

It is sheer negligence to disregard what we know of creation in the amazing record of many writers and scientists, in the various forms of its appearance in the mind, spirit and hand of man, in considering the creation of our universe.

There is NO NEED for it to have followed our admittedly very limited, though staggeringly delightful, facilities for creation.

(There is however need for the sceptic's failure to make any unity of all things on some programmatic or profane basis, mind, matter and spirit being so diverse in mode, divergent in content, and correlative only in the facets of their creation from one source, all other and very diverse efforts to unify matter, mind, man, or meaning, or all of them, being predictably dismal failures - cf. Spiritual Refreshings for the Digitial Millenium 13,  3, The Frantic Millenium and the Peace of Truth Ch. 2, Ancient Words : Modern Needs, Ch. 9, TMR above, Repent or Perish Ch. 5, With Heart and Soul, Mind and Strength Ch. 11, News, Facts and Forecasts Chs. 8 , and 14, SMR Ch. 3, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 19, Appendix 1, Divine Agenda  1, 4 .)

 

This is true, but it is so BECAUSE these are free to  have been surpassed infinitely!

However as to observable creation from creativity, and associated phenomena: their direction in kind is filled with admonitions against the simplistic, the irrelevant and the disjoined. To make creation a part of maintenance, or institution a part of constitution, as though the one is the brother of the other, is as blind as to make a fortune in its bank repose, comparable with the way it was won. There may be more or less similarities; but in thought, the genesis is likely to be wholly of its own nature, matured into parallel format of mere continuance, only to the extent it is the same mind which performs both works, the creation and the maintenance of the thought, the understanding, the idea, the fortune or the contrivance.

Thought, speech and action, where there is power apt and adequate, are depicted so decisively in Genesis, where God spoke and it was done. Within vast limits, but with staggering liberties in the grace of God, we little products that we are, shrouded in the marvels of personality and equipped with the liberties of spirit within our domain, elevated inspiringly by the presence of God not as mere producer, but as ground of thought, source of spirit and designer of mentality, see this in our room of operation on this earth. It is a privilege but to witness our working, the gracious provision of the Father of spirits.

It is the same with mechanical equipment, story writing, and to some extent at least, the envisaging of acting, its moeurs or mores, its manners, its atmosphere, its point, its purpose, and then in its time, the means of performing in exhibition of the same.

In general, institution and constitution are sufficiently variable, so that any effort to found the NATURE of the one, and its WAYS on the other, is like comparing the creation of a child in the womb, as to process and procedure, with the performance of an athlete at maturity. It is not so much naive so to do, as irrelevant. As to there being some relationship, certainly: there is some relationship between the mind of a deprived moron and that of an idea facilitated Einstein. These however, though diverse, are on the plateau of the operation of the extant. There is, in such a case, not the important difference between formation and function, so that here we are left with a situation which tends to make a measure of relationship merely a formal matter.

With creation this is not so. Here the degree of the divergence, in thought itself and its instituting speed, in mode and in ontology, for the creation of either of these people noted above, as compared with their functioning after their creation, leaves any merely comparative measurement of two people, a far lesser thing.

They differ in degree: this differs in kind. Not only so: they differ amongst a species, in part through disarray of programmatic devices after much time in a world that has been cursed. These, however, the creation and the operation, differ beyond any species, in a species of diversity so profound, that no performance of a created thing is comparable at all. Here is a measure in various scales too prodigious to be quantitatively estimable;  the difference in MODE of occurrence is almost without limit.

There are, then, numerous orders of divergence between creation and institution, and constitution and operation. Some have been listed above. Any one of them could be operative within the formed or forming things becoming extant by creation.

In the b-decay case in hand, in a relatively small but certainly highly significant stress situation, one of plasma and its energies, with changing occupation of electron orbits, stripped nuclei, where a neutron itself is in change, other known particles proceeding in its place, it is thus highly of the order of expectation that there could be diversity of SPEED in operation so great that a case of one billionfold is far from surprising.

It is precisely this sort of thing which has been in mind, beyond all the date determination failures to cover the case in so many and such detailed ways, destructive at once of the long age theory, as reviewed above, which has rendered this multi-assumption tradition so unwise as to resemble the  study of the process of page-ageing in a book, when seeking to understand the rate of page creation by an author; and to assume these to be parallels,  in terms of comparative change! The items, processes, procedures are disparate, and where at all comparable, the relationship involved is FIRST OF ALL in need of understanding as to TYPE!

Further, the assumptions made in much radio-dating are not only unwarranted, being mere guesses based on other assumptions based on thoughts and cosmological preferences, but vapid and jejune, required by nothing, assured by nothing, and as if this were not sufficient to give the game away, they tend to assume as a basis in the febrile stack of cards of assumptions, not only the sort of process now visible, ex-catastrophe and ex-diversity, but ex-creation, so that its exclusion becomes the hypothesis on which the dating excursion is based, while the results of such an exclusion, are  then applied, mirabile dictu, to exclude it.

That is the underlying fact. Surely, then,  this becomes an exercise in question begging, dressed in dogma, equipped with systematically stultified imagination, demonstrating to a significant extent, that if you assume what you want to verify, it may  be possible if you are very careful, then to verify it! To complete the comedy, surely worthy of Molière, they then fail even to do that: in clashes with concurrent phenomena, relationship to geological events and even mutual support by their diverse methods.

To say that it is an exercise in contradiction is not too much:

• for the pursuit of theory as a result of observation is abandoned (1),
• the alliance with concurrent phenomena is significantly disregarded (2),
• the engendering of an overall view able to account for all the data is discounted (3),
• the plethora of discarded data mounts (4),
• multiplied and diversified excursions into results that are chaotically contrary to recent events, or required ones, are the punch lines of contrariness - as for (4) cf. The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, et al.  below (5),

  while the clash of different streams of data (6)

 

are all contradictory either of scientific principle, in data result or for theoretical cohesion.

• As if all this were not enough, it is then somehow wafted out, or even declared, that this deplorable result in misplaced theoretical steadfastness is in some way relevant to the creation of the universe, the exclusion of which in the formulation of assumptions, was primary!
   
• Despite these endeavours, often no doubt made in that obfuscation which theoretical desire promotes dark in the recesses of the misguided mind, or tradition binds in the unwary, the construction falls upon the two-edged sword of delinquent data, unintimidated by this reverse order program of assumption to begin, rather than to interpret, and perverse schema naturally active in the creation, yielding not at all to such comedy. Like Balaam's ass, however, their 'perversity' is merely their inability to co-operate with error. Life is a serious matter; and while comedy has its place, as a source of scientific dating, it is very limited!
   

But let us return from the dating fables to reality.

This nine orders of magnitude phenomenon for the rate of decay, relative to just the sort of extreme conditions which are integral to creation, in the very field where such rates are used as a measure of time, is a good illustration. Limited as it is, it yet makes the endeavours to tie institution characteristics to constitution criteria such an exercise in vanity, that it fully explains the enormously discordant results obtainable by different dating methods, the falsification of so many assumptions, and the erosion of plausibility for others, the ludicrous phenomena of having rocks dated beyond the imaginative dates for the whole universe, of having them in the younger formations (by normal geological reasoning, as in parts of the Grand Canyon), 'measured' by radioactive methods, to be far older than the 'parent' rocks, of having different results for the same rock by various methods, of having rocks millions of years old which were formed some scores of years ago, as in the case of Hawaii mentioned in SMR, and in the case of Steve Austin's recent rocks being 'given' an age of millions of years, for the Mount St Helen's phenomenon of late in the last century ... and so on, and on.

Whatever other errors occur in this finesse work of trying to read the past from the phenomena of the present (cf. SMR pp. 76ff.) , this alone is SUFFICIENT for all the enormities which mount like an eagle, tired of this earth, to heaven!

Other 'order of magnitude' alterations, recently found include those mentioned by Woodmorappe, relative to granitic cooling times being far less than imagined necessary, as in the Technical Journal 15(2), pp. 122ff. (TJ), together with significant summaries, such as those on TJ 14(1), p. 19ff., TJ 15(2), pp. 31ff.. These remind one of Dr Slusher's instructive work on rates of cooling for the earth,  when subjected to careful mathematical analysis, and the normal corrective in the normal direction which this provided (SMR p. 170, and correlate That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, pp.  8 -13, Spiritual Refreshings for the Digital Millenium 13).

That ?  back to correlation with the numerous and exceedingly diverse other rate indications for an earth so 'young' that the discordant, and internally discordant counter-claims of in the realm of the radioactive, with the  massive and demonstrable, common and dangerous errors thus derived, the re-assessments and the selection from the data, of acceptable data and hence dates, these things fall into disrepair as models, like an ancient car, incapable of being 'lovingly restored', and frankly the better for that!

Much in the same grandeur of divergence, is to be found in the radio-halo phenomenon, in the way Dr. John Baumgardner points out on pp. 88ff. of the recent publication, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RAE). Those radiohalos cited by him are reported as embryonic in their development, and some of these, despite the large absolute amounts of the chemicals concerned, show little nuclear decay since they were formed, even when tested with most sensitive equipment. "Since," he states, "radiohalos provide a tangible, visible, physical record of nuclear decay", he is persuaded that here prominently, is to be found something better than a matrix of varied assumptions. Included in what is deemed an early geological "age", these samples as found in such sites as the Colorado Plateau and Chattanooga Tennessee, provided for the material concerned,  age results of merely some thousands of years.

Even that depended on the assumption of a constant decay rate, something intrinsically improbable, as noted above!  (See on this phenomenon: SMR pp. 164-165.)

Again, in Creation Magazine, Sept.-Dec. 2001, is found correlative verification relative to radiohalos, in the article by Drs. Steve Taylor, Andy McIntosh and Tas Walker. They presented to the reader a complex radiohalo phenomenon found in coalified wood from uranium mines on the Colorado Plateau of Western USA. Three different geological formations were considered, and samples taken from each. On the unvalidated assumption-model, frequently perilously invoked, these were separated in time by millions of years. What however were the evidential realities ?

The elements were as follows.

When certain scientists brought these to the attention of Dr Robert Gentry, specialist in this area, he revisited the matter, and  published his results in Science and in Creation's Tiny Mystery.  As radiohalos, formed from uranium decay, have a possible multiple number of rings, where the particles reach on exit into the substance from the radioactive material, and these in Colorado had but one ring, this indicated that the last radioactive isotope in uranium-238 decay, polonium-210 had been present.

If then the wood had been saturated with a uranium-rich solution, and the polonium atoms took residence in certain sites within it, allowing small cores of this polonium to form, then the halos would result from the particle emission. Since the half-life of polonium-210 is 138 days on present accounts, it follows that the impregnating solutions must have reached this stage quickly, since in as little as one year, 2 or 3 half-lives would expire, leaving but little material for emission. After 4 years, say about 10 half-lives, there would be virtually none left.

Since this only of the 3 radioactive isotopes of polonium acted, that is the last in the decay series, as attested by only one ring or halo, the other two leaving no sign, not surprisingly since they decay with extraordinary rapidity: this implies a rapid penetration of the wood by the mineral solution. SInce these rings are mainly elliptical, this also has implication. It is that there was large compression, to distort the body of the wood, and so the rings, following their formation.

Some circular rings remain, next to elliptical ones, this is indicative of the radio-decay occurred after the compression, the substance still emitting at that time. Hence within four years there is indicated a compression of the even earlier impregnated wood.

This scenario is complex, and the halos of such wood were found in THREE different geological formations which, on the fallacious reckoning in mode with many, were dated in different eras ranging from a distant 35 to a more distant 245 million years.

At once the point is clear. The impregnation was not a long process; the decay was a matter of a very small number of years and the situation, being duplicated in what were alleged to be far separated times, required the same scenario repetitively, one both speedy and unusual complexity. The compressions would require vast forces, and speed. Again, this calls not for speculation based on theory, but theory based on evidence. The evidence is for the same phenomenon in all three areas, and the smart jump action not occurring at huge time gaps, but in one time. Further, in Creation Magazine, op. cit. pp. 32-33, it is found that tiny uranium cores found in the same wood samples, show large amounts of uranium-238 but little of end-product, lead-206. Millions of years should vastly increase the lead product proportion, but the ratio suggested thousands, not millions of years. This follows from the ratio of uranium to lead in these cases, up to 64,000. Further, lead would be far more difficult to leach out in such a situation, than uranium. This then is the evidential position.

Not only was this so, but similar results were obtained from all three geological formations, allegedly separated by millions of years in age, on the febrile assumptions basis often used instead of observational analysis.

Thus the millions of years, as so often, evaporate into fossil-bound theories, confined to evolutionary magic, and run into what is becoming a virtually normal clash between assumptions and geological formations. (See also Answers to Questions Ch. 5 , End-note 2B.)

In particular, an array of evidentially attested methods of falsification of the assumptions underlying isochron dating methods is found in sites such as Dr. Steve Austin's Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5,   Appendix), and the heavily documented work, RAE, noted above. These cohere well with the exceedingly numerous and varied cases cited by Woodmorappe (see below), where discordances of various kinds in radiometric dating exhibit or indicate the vulnerability and unreliability of this method, especially that of isochrons. The latter was indeed earlier documented by the distinguished British scientist, Professor E.H. Andrews, in his work, "God, Science & Evolution," a refreshing combination of simple logic, vast experience and detailed exposure of inadequacies of simplistic rate-date determinations, and their incredibly defective generic assumptions (cf. pp. 107ff.), not least both in terms of theory and practice, in the field of isochron dating in particular.

Thus after considering grossly defective dates, carefully collected over time, and relating thereby to the concepts of obtaining clashing or meaningless dates (allied ones contrary to one another, or dates indicative of what other evidence dismisses), he declares (p. 122) :

• "It appears¹² that isochrons are just as likely to give geologically meaningless ages as are straigthforward calculations .. the assumption that Sr⁸⁷/Sr⁸⁶ ratios are identical at zero age for all closely associated minerals lies at the heart of the method and is quesitonable both theoretically (because of thedifferential mobility of the two isotopes) and experimentally (because the isotopic ratio varies widely in nature)."

 

Another pair of assumptions of course is that the rate of decay is known and constant. In view of the evidence noted in this chapter, that is an alarmingly unastute conclusion! The dates are bound to differ when it is a science of multiple guesswork. As verification, they not only do so, but Andrews and Woodmorappe are able to cite evidence of a considerable disinclination to believe the radioactive dates on the part of field workers, so that it appears part of their practical culture, and the desire for stratigraphic 'confirmation' makes almost a mockery of the thing, if the contradictions involved did not do so.

Materials in great detail on these matters are to be found in recent works or foci such as:

• Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, 2000, a compendium from Ph.D. scientists, from the Institute for Creation Research, including a bevy of specifications from rate phenomena in their exceedingly complex and diverse, sensitive and mutually interactive scope, leading to linear graph results for various radionuclides, thought to be not indicative of radiometric decay in areas where this may be assumed to be the cause (e.g. p. 10). However, when such assumption were made, "discordant 'ages' resulted, even for mineral concentrates from the same rock." Grounds of confusion are many, not only in mere assumptions about initial conditions, which are simply more specialised than in non-isochron approaches generally, but in end readings (cf. p. 184, in differential dispersion of end-products of neighbouring materials), as are its manifest results in multiple systematic discords! It is time theory caught up with practice, to explain its rising tide of failures, and therefore excellent to see these developments.
   
• The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, John Woodmorappe, 1999 from the same Publisher, Institute for Creation Research, with most detailed, highly varied and carefully considered evidences of false assumptions, disavowals and failures in fields so diverse as to constitute a practical indictment in the isochron method. Of course, outside it, the multiplicity of mere assumptions, sometimes ludicrous in the extreme, and virtual paradigms of question begging, are already proverbial for the simpler rate cases, where guesswork in the worst possible taste, in the systematically crucial and intrinsically unknown, precedes its application, with the expected turmoil of diverse and inconsistent results ...

More is seen in:

• Creation Technical Journal Volume 15 (2), 2001, pp. 4ff., from the same author; and
   
• that from Dr Tas Walker (Creation Magazine, March-May 2001, pp. 22ff.), demythologising coal formation - just as, in parallel, it has been formed in short times in laboratory conditions;
   
• the contribution of Dr Keith Swenson, Creation Magazine, June -August 2001, e.g. pp. 23ff., exposing total enormities of readily verified, not to say dramatic and instructive dating errors, on the grand scale; as in
   
• the design background area.
  
  Here mathematical adjuncts to the demonstrated fact of creation as set out in SMR, are found in consideration of the total constraints essential for developing systematic forms, replete with unitary methodology of function such as DNA and its correlatives, enormous variety of its expression and vast complexity of highly specialised interaction. Consideration of these or such elements, is found in such presentations as those of Dr Dembski in his work, The Design Inference and Professor Bebe in his Irreducible Complexity - TJ 14(1), reminding the secularist that the data and the concepts must mix harmoniously, and not by disjunction. In some ways, the noted Professor Fred Hoyle of Cambridge, in his iconoclastic side, performed a parallel task (cf. SMR pp. 224ff., 252Aff., 422H,  L). Intelligence can effect, and does, what the directionless cannot specify, having neither voice nor thought.
   

What does not work, needs but one exclusion, when its object is to cover the case. Such is normal scientific method. Here the failures are endemic, epidemic, pandemic. This is the normal situation when you proceed with great energy and many means, but without understanding, whether in war, or in peace, in weather prediction or in industry.

The denial of design, impossible logically as shown in SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, for this universe, is accordingly being continually exposed in its essential vacuity,  by more and more research on the positive side, while attested by an ever-growing array of scientific data on the negative side, phenomena which refuse to conform to such expectation, decline to verify assumptions, while they fail  even to provide for plausible schemas on their own terms: those hopefully engineered being filled with purpose-built assumptions on the one hand, discordant results on the other, or both.

This theoretical discord is attested in the above places and elsewhere, not only with the expectations, as where they conflict with geological features in their inherent character, but with the results gained now from one, now from another, now in this realm now in that, yes even in this part of a rock, and in that, till the farce too long held in the face of the more natural and better understood order of dating data, becomes a side-splitting example of the death of a theory. Bedside manner has continued long past decease, even to the coffin. It is, as such, long since, a waste of time.

Of interest further, as science begins to catch up with the realities and necessities which a too casual shrug to the underlying necessities has occasioned in many (but by no means in all), is the fact that the Oort Comet Cloud (always a postulation of theory and the needs of intemperate contrivances of the mind, never at all related to observation) is mathematically contra-indicated in its  'necessary' profusion by the collision concept (TJ 15(2), 2001, pp. 11), relative to its genesis, and thus this non-science is the more indicative of nonsense. It is always difficult, even in a tantrum against truth, to insist in the material realm, on what does not have the decency in terms of its own propositional putation, to show in any way imaginable or detectable, its divergence from total nullity. It is rather like a protested fortune which, when the 'owner' is in dire straits and surrounded by debt collection agencies, cannot be found anywhere, and lurks in the unseen with the distant smile of sardonic absence. If what is absent could not smile, yet its postulation can do so!

Observation could never find it, this nugatory Cloud; now theory is unhappy with its ... arising. Meanwhile, the unsourced short term comets come, and their appearance is merely one of the constant and continual rain of the data of design, the results of its relatively recent occurrence in the field, as with the supernova situation noted earlier in this Section, the spiral galaxies, the helium signature, the bunched and ordered aggregates in space, for a universe of magnificent contrivance, showing its age in decline, but at the same time  its youth in creation. (See also SMR p. 170.)

Order is not the child of chance (cf. Ancient Deeds, Modern Deeds Ch.13, It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls ... Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 3)  and chance is itself a consideration, if meaningful at all, contingent on order for its operation, and purpose for its very pronouncement. It is not creative but expository. What there is to expound, however, is the created vehicle, just as thought is its rational correlative, and spirit is its creative genesis. Something from nothing, whether conceived (as in the earlier parts of TMR Ch. 7's critique, cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29) in toto, or in steps, is merely a form of logical cheating, whether by a massive raid, or a series of robberies.
 

*5
A similar cross-play of dating 'methods' occurred at Snelling's hands, relative to deposits on the Dorset coastal area of Southern England, as recorded in Creation, March-May 2000.

In a frequently quarried area, fossil dated strata allegedly provided an age of about 189 millions years.

Dr Snelling took embedded wood, still 'woody' in the sense of allowing some snapping, that was found to be occurring alongside index fossils, in the 'Hornton Stone' 'the oxidized silty top of the Marlstone Rock Bed.' Indeed, 'fossil wood was actually found sitting on top of a fossilised belemnite (Figure 5), probably belonging to the genus Acrocoelites, a Toarcian State index fossil in north-west Europe.' Many such exhibits had been found during quarrying.

Three samples of fossil wood taken, were sent to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Boston, USA, while for checking purposes, some of the first was also sent to another Laboratory, in Australia. Staff were not told the source.

Using sensitive accelerator mass spectrometry technique for radiocarbon analyses, this method is said to be recognised for even minute amounts of material . The results aged the material at under 25,000 years. This is approximately 750 times younger. If you were to estimate the height of a mountain range at 30,000 feet, and then found the actual height to be 40 feet, you might wonder concerning your methodology. (A similar enormity concerning erosion is found in the same issue, at the hands of Dr Tas Walker, pp. 18ff., and another concerning population growth under assessable situations - from Dr Don Batten, June -August 2001, pp. 52ff.. )

Snelling emphasises that many would not even try to find the wood carbon as a method, in such a case as this Dorset one, since they would assume at the presumed age of the fossil-index age for the rock, that there would be none! Thus there is a double collision of fact and theory.

This is part of the procedure: guess on the basis of assumptions and fossils, what the age is; then do not measure what is obvious, or if you do, discard the measurements that do not fit, or if you cannot, try to find some 'explanation', or if you cannot do so, cast doubt on what you would normally accept, or try to find some combination of events that could conceivably cover it, or if you cannot even do this, then make a swelling sort of reference to the reliability of the methods; but if you cannot manage that, then you have to consider science.

Science, properly so-called,  goes from fact to theory, not vice versa. It is far better so. In this case, likewise, it leaves you without data in contradiction with your theory, something that should have ended your theory, by scientific method, long ago. Since cases of various contradictions are multiplied, the delay is multiplied. This is the normal scenario for confusion, illusion and complexity. It works that way quite well. The alternative allows consistency, coherence of varied results and removes the figment of the imagination. Imagination is fine, but it needs discipline.
 
 
 

Note

For further updates and presentation on this and related themes,

see 

His Time is Near   Ch. 9,

Barbs, Arrows and Balms 15,

Divine Agenda Ch. 1,

Calibrating Myths Ch. 1,   

and The Defining Drama Ch. 3. 

See also Dayspring, Ch. 9 in A Spiritual Potpourri,  

Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13,   6, 16

Divine Agenda Ch. 7, at   *8  

and

Technical Journal, Vol. 17(1), 2003, where the 'faint sun paradox', as it is called, is examined in terms of the new appearance that once seemingly absent neutrinos, relative to a sun powered by nuclear fusion, now are being discovered. We now turn to this last reference.

Robert Newton, whose paper on this topic is in discussion here, notes that the possibility that is now more indicated than previously, that the sun's power is procedurally derived from nuclear fusion, in view of the recent neutrino findings, does nothing to remove the 'paradox'. A sun so powered would need, he points out, to be much fainter in the past, in terms of such an assumption of powering, and this would as before, require so much less warmth in earliest times, that the indications that do not support such a thing, remain an index to a young earth. The 'paradox' is only for gradualism, which is perfectly normal on all sides.

Newton points out that there is little temperature change on a 6000 year time scale, on such a basis,  whereas "the composition changes drastically on a billions-of-years time scale". A 25% (estimated) weaker sun in such billions of years term (3.8 is in view here) is far from according with the independent indications of the heat state of the earth far earlier in its history.

This 'paradox':

like the haemoglobin preservation reportedly found in dinosaur relics, and other ancient finds,
contrary to informed estimates on its stability over time, 

the helium non-aggregation, and lack of indication of means of escape from the earth,

the Gentry halos,

the sea input of minerals in terms of time for the concentration being in many cases far too small for what is found, except for a young earth,

the cooling phenomenon of the earth, pursued with young earth result since Kelvin,

the impressive and conspicuous magnetic verifications of Humphrey for a earth thousands only, of years old, 

the erosive powers on the mountains over large times,

the Slusher exhibition concerning moon rock deformation,

the considerations of the moon's rate of removal from the earth and possible age in such terms,

the supernova arithmetic in conformity to young earth and grossly in conflict with imagined ages,

the failure of the 'cosmological' principle as more data is unearthed,

      the velocity of light findings
      together with the routine mix-ups on dating methods, when they differ,
      and contradiction of obvious and demonstrable events by large measures, while indicating
      things not allied to known natural events:


it is just one more feature showing that where man seeks to be the equal of God, he fails.

When he considers what he knows, he does better. What is within the bounds of something approaching knowledge, has only one outlet! It is a 'young' earth.

What is beyond these bounds, in terms of constantly changing theories, in terms of cosmological constructions, is so often mutually self-contradictory, at variance with other findings, unstable in formulation, but for all that, never producing anything like a confirmation of this vast age so much desired by those who ignore the lack of transitional testimony to fit the model, in life, that the purely illusory character of the stubborness to keep to the philosophy, becomes anti-scientific.

Indeed, as noted in this volume, it is so far at variance with scientific method in terms of life, that its falsification in terms of time, is only to be expected. More, it becomes an independent verification. The Bible ? Nothing changes here; the wisdom of the flesh ? It changes like the wind, but is less refreshing. What is unstable is like that. Truth does not move because of what it is.

 

F. A SPACE FOR SPACE, AND TIME FOR TIME:
KING, COSMOS, CHRISTIAN AND CREATION
 

1  CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS

The cosmos, having been created, man at its visible peak, reproducing according to kind, beasts and plants likewise, differing forms of life being set within their typical confines: there is a remarkable display in this being, man. Of what? Of spirit, of purpose and program, of freedom and fashioning, of which sin is the extra feature man has developed - analytically parallel to rust, yet capable of vast aggravation by will.

The scene set for this scenario is a cosmos in ascending magnitudes - comets, asteroids, stars, galaxies, nebulae - system, like life, though the scene itself be not living … a system with its own structure. Down on earth, that place where God sited life: like Shakespeare's England his blessed isle of that time - here is an array of rivers mountains, islands, which within the settled structure of the ordered planet, may in turn alter course, form, sink or rise, with no great astonishment; yet with a sense of awed contemplation, before the eyes of man.

Back aloft: within a context of myriads of stars, in a system instituted, constituted and contained by the same spiritual power that made life (SMR Chs. 1-2 -*1), there are items and elements of motion, created forces from created aggregates, curbing or displaying the grandeur of power in the formation, deformation, concentration or dissipation of galactic 'isles', 'rivers', of forces in their courses - to speak analogically.

Aloft in the admirably vast scene of space, there is an awning stretched over the myriad marvels of programming conspicuous microscopically for a man; a grandeur for the spirit to behold. The dimension of the work exhibited there is different; but the display is grand.

Nevertheless the arms of immensity should not cloud our own vision. The sheep station is vast; its reaches impressive; its formations in select areas may astonish: but it has no comparison with man, small as his dwelling may be. The earth is the homestead: the stars are like flocks that man surveys.

Whichever our segment of interest, however, as we have shown (SMR Ch.1 loc. cit.) the entities of matter and life are made; with their respective resources of law and constraint, program and containment. For man, those basics are acutely capped by consciousness, multiplied by mind, dazzling with analysis and sublimely submitted by spirit: all with their respective resources.

Indeed, for that creation known as mankind, there is an element which thoroughly explains (though it does not at all excuse) the frequent reluctance to acknowledge ANY limit: and this? It is the fact that his mind and spirit are made able to commune with the Creator. Such heights dwarf space, a creation itself; but misuse of this privilege may also compress and contort access to reality, like a spiritual black hole, with no light. A humble but hallowing holiness is as unpopular as it iscrucial and essential.

As to the material aspect of creation, its cascades of force and form, within the structure which put it at birth into place, from the realm of divine thought at the creation (like a book now written and no more to be harboured simply in the mind of the author): these are delightful exhibits, analogous to the islands which form as volcanoes of massive force erupt.

Indeed the structure and system which provides the facility for form amid the concentrates of astral entities, made as creation irrupted from the mind and by the power of God: these operate with lavish displays amongst its permissible procedures and created potentials. The Hubble telescope (Time Magazine, Nov. 20, 1995) has shown material in this dimension, to which interpreters will flock with mental parameters and perceptions of their own, at the prospect of proto-stars inhibited from birth, extant stars better exposed or a few stellar replacements.

When we come to the magnificent displays within creation, we see them microscopically, macroscopically, topically in heavens, earth, the directed cell. The difference here, within the material and visible level, it is one of magnitude as we study in times unknown (the theories cavort), the extraordinary marvels with which the created system is endowed, its components endued: now eroding, now erupting, always using the energies, and concentrates with which it was gifted at its birth. It ages, though within the forms and features cascaded upon it at its institution.

Heaven and earth, cell and structure, but more, there is the mind and spirit of man. That far more powerful telescope, though one subject to violent disorder, the reflective mind of man also ages, though its force remains alive in the midst of sin, ready both to procure and to consider what its judgment shall be, when divinely dispensed. To this we shall presently return. Meanwhile, what of the physical universe ?

Like a child, though far less marvellous, according to its form, force and prepared potentials, it grows within the assigned parameters, and it likewise, ages, while preserving the identity of its created nature. Its assignments tend to run their course, though accompanied with majesty. As it was born, there was a sublimity, a wonder of irruption, of production; as it is now there is a maintained marvel, a wonder of a different kind. Birth has ways of its own.

Magnificent then as was its irruption into birth, nevertheless, it ages, within the confines of its creation's ordained procedures, till its time comes (II Peter 3): just as man's folly ages in quite another way, so that the whole may be concluded, together with the procured results newly commenced within the heart and mind of divinity: in heaven or in discard.

The wonder here is that man's eminence in creation allows his participation in this discard (John 3:15-19). Even vileness is not violated; even sin is not supreme. God is sovereign and His own children He finds, knows and redeems (John 13:1, Titus 2:11-13, 3:4-5, Romans 8:28-39) with predestinative certainty (cf. Section D to its end). There is none lost through lack in the love, power or wisdom of the Almighty.

In essence, to be lost before such love (I John 4:4, Colossians 1:19-23) is to be obstructively set against the light of the Lord who came, calls and declares both the call to salvation and the criterion of condemnation (John 3, esp. v.19, 12:46-50, 9:39, cf. Psalm 89:14, and refer Appendix B, SMR, pp. 1121-1123,1130-1135, Predestination and Freewill, pp. 120, 129-132, 155 ff., 166ff.) at the face of His advent into the world.

So great is the love, power, wisdom and mercy of God who publishes peace even to those who are afar off, that none is 'inadvertently' allowed to escape the 'net' of the kingdom of heaven (Colossians 1:19-23, Matthew 13:47-52, II Timothy 1:9-10, John 3:17-19, Ezekiel 33:11, Micah 7:18-19). Indeed the real 'escape' is INTO the kingdom of heaven (cf. Hebrews 2:1-9, John 10:26, Isaiah 66:18-19, John 8:42); but those turning from the way, go.

What fury does hell contain more than this: that it has been procured, and then, procured again. It represents a payment, a liability beyond power to cover by any sinner, yet one in dogged determination faced by him without relenting: and this, in the face of the loving and free mercy made available in a display of the grandeur of the generosity of God Himself. As to that, it was offered in a form able to suffer unspeakable anguish in providing that satisfaction of justice which covers the redeemed sinner, in the Christ of eternal glory, and Him crucified, yes rather risen: through whom the Christian receives pure pardon (Romans 5:12-21, John 8:58, 17:1-3).
 
 

2. CITIZENS OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

This, then, we must speedily emphasise: as to the physical universe in its spatial grandeur, it has no will.

Man is other in this, that constructed in God's image, he may travel far beyond the limiting spatial horizons, as may a child at the sea's verge, travel into channels unknown - though his father may know them. The spirit of man, in the image of God, has depths and dimensions of its own, surpassing the material but able to operate within it. Formed in matter, granted the analytical gift of mind, sourced in spirit, man is and always has been a prodigy, and to this are matched prodigious gifts that are not by any means forced upon him.

God who made both the spatial splendour and the spiritual resources by which man may look, and in which he may move, Himself has will. This He exercises, He who made the most intense visible design, where vast spatial marvels are merely a contrast in the opposite end, to the miniaturised magnificence basic to man's operation in this field.

This spiritual facility of the Eternal Spirit, the omniscient Creator, is displayed with a grandeur which space cannot emulate, more directly in and for the composite life of man, who may look to Him, resource incomparable, recourse all-sufficient: as also in the composure of a work of unmatched majesty, in a commanding, appealing and infallible communication long shown to the world - the Bible. This is seen not least in the prophetic coverage in advance of the character of history (Isaiah Chs. 41, 43, 48; Ephesians 1:11, Amos 3:7, Luke 21:28,31). This divine word remains itself unmoved, as the life of man, the way of the world and the course of history move to their appointed end (Isaiah 51:6).

A 'new creation' - the Christian whose Lord is God and whose salvation is found in the Cross of Christ, yes indeed and in His resurrection (Romans 3:23-25, 4:25, 1:4, 8:32-33): this wonder has already passed the confines of the first creation; for here is found the race of the redeemed children of the Creator of all this magnificence. Thus while this universe, given its store of energy will assuredly be deleted (Matthew 24:35), like an old car rubbished: those reborn in spirit as children of God through Christ - these individuals, they will not pass away (John 10:27-28, Philippians 3:20-21, Galatians 6:14, Isaiah 51:16). These are fixed results from a 'stage' or plateau of impermanent process!

A new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness has its grand display manifested, this will transfigure this cosmos, yes and surpass it: that benign eternity of the celestial commonwealth, one past all pilgrimage (Colossians 3:1-3, Philippians 3:20-21). And that? It is the place of each of those who have received the Lord of glory by faith; for this is the inheritance of all God's children redeemed in Christ (II Corinthians 4:15-5: 19-21; Revelation 22:11, 17, John 6:37-57). These are they who, by divine appointment - as have been all the other marvels provided, but so often desecrated by many - will continue in forms of wonder in a fellowship where God is seen "face to face" - I Corinthians 13.

Now as to redemption (Matthew 20:28): the magnificence of the incarnation of the eternal word of God, God's only begotten Son, Jesus Christ is a star to incandesce beyond all physical stars: it is this which leaves the cosmic grandeurs in poverty by comparison. As Paul puts it (I Timothy 3:16):

AND WITHOUT CONTROVERSY: GREAT IS THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS: GOD WAS MANIFEST IN THE FLESH, JUSTIFIED IN THE SPIRIT, SEEN BY ANGELS, PREACHED TO THE NATIONS, BELIEVED ON IN THE WORLD, RECEIVED UP INTO GLORY.

 

3. CITIZENS OF DOOM

Not in time as we know it, but WITH time as a constituent, God created the universe. It was He who took such time as ours in hand and made it perform as planned. The Almighty who knows the end from the beginning and for and in whom no serial or sequential time such as we have, has constraint, and who may operate freely in any time, invented the world and man, whose times are indeed constrained.

THESE do not flow forward and backward - try unkilling a rooster with backward flowing time! TIME for us, caused by the God who made space and matter with it, flows on like a raft on a river sustained by God, to the falls of His judgment. "Time shall be no longer," declares John in Revelation, as the time draws near when there shall be no more time to avoid in timely fashion the assessment of the players on the stage of life which God at first constructed. As this approaches, we read: "He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him berighteous still; he who is holy, let him be holy still" ( Rev. 22:11). It is like the children's ball game: "Stand!" goes the cry.

Then comes the day when many indeed wish they could turn back time, or re-invent the universe for God (Matthew 25:31-46, 7:22, John 3:19,36) - but in vain*2, their paths having been chosen. Yet still the cry goes out to the end: "And the Spirit and the bride say, "Come!" … And let him who thirsts come. And whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely" (Rev. 22:17).

For the time comes when "The earth will grow old like a garment, and those who dwell in it will diein like manner; but my salvation will be forever, and My righteousness will not be abolished" (Isaiah 51:6). Then those who are His, they will 'know as they are known' (cf. I Corinthians 13:12).

One is to come (Daniel 7:25) who without God "shall attempt to change times and law"², afflicting the people of God. However, "the court shall be seated, and they shall take always his dominion...Then the kingdom and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to ...the saints of the Most High. His Kingdom is an everlasting kingdom" (Daniel 7:27); and everlasting are those who have entered the door of the Redeemer (John 10:9, 27-28).
 
 

Things Everlasting

Poignant indeed, but without excuse in the light of God's munificence and willingness is the end of those who would not begin in the Lord (from Daniel
12:1-2):

" ... there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time your people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.

"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And those who are wise, shall shine as the brightness of the firmament..."

Such grace and glory is in the Lord: let us therefore take space and time for the author of both before neither is of any avail.

Endnotes

1. The acronym SMR refers to The Shadow of a Mighty Rock.

2. It might soon be timely, in view of the times and the forecast, for some to spend time with time and attempt to change its function or mode in some way (cf. Daniel 7:25). It will be of interest to study the theoretical and practical steps to be taken, and to ponder their preliminaries, as judgment on the one hand nears, and desperation on the other, grows. God is not mocked, though the liberty to engage in mockery derives from Him; the abuse however is personal to the misuser of His graces.