W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc

W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New

Chapter 29

RATIONALITY AND HUMANITY DIE,

WITHOUT DESIGN

from Ch. 1 from DOWNFALL FROM DEFAMATION

DEGRADATION

FOR THE HUMAN RACE
through the VICE of DEFAMATION of DEITY, and

THE GODLY GRANT OF GLORY
IN THE GOSPEL

CULTURAL DELINQUENCIES

Delinquency is not limited to adolescents. Adults can be quite good at it.

Nor is it limited to misuse of one's own life, or that of one's fellows. It can stretch to malignity against God.

Delinquency against the divine is becoming an art form, a propaganda thrust and an educational tool.

It is leading, slowly, quietly, but with more drama as the thing progresses, to the systematic downfall of the human race. This is not a lurking, surreptitious thing, but precisely as in the Bible, an open, a gay, a swaggering, a swashbuckling antic, with its own devious ways; and that there are outbreaks of inflammation and high temperatures, both literal and metaphorical, among mankind, this is merely a routine expression of the advancing nature of the disease.

It is to be expected, like boils in a system adapted to them at a given time; where they come may be surprising, but that they come is not. It is the same with a body infested with cancer: it may come in surprising places when it colonises, as it were, enjoying metastasis. If however the first line of abuse, as for example in excessive and careless sun-baking with a fair skin, is wrought, then the result may be taught. It has ways of its own ? yes, but not without ground.

When you misuse the fundamentals of life, it may bite back; it may in the manner of life, writhe and contort, like a carved up embryo, as may occur in that modern way of life which is abortion for convenience (it may sometimes actually be required for health reasons, or in rape and so on). The life being aborted is like the life being abused in one's own case: it may writhe and its various, magnificent controls being abused, like a steering wheel of a car caught in a rut, may themselves contribute to downfall. When you are not killing an embryo but your own life, slowly, there may be resemblances of note between the two phenomena of degradation!

The defamation of deity which is one of these abuses not merely severs man from his source, but twists the truth, on which man's very existence as a spiritual and rational being depends, so that man is like a contorted embryo in these circumstances, wondering where next to wince (cf. *3A).

In the face of such grandiose plans of wretched wrecking procedures, levelled ultimately against God but often deploying man's own equipment with a combination of vanity in the sense of empty folly, and that of proud self-reliance: for this object, man, neither free to determine birth nor death (except the latter in that way-out called suicide, the resignation of life, not its surmounting or joy), there is a case developing.

Its face is contorted. It runs amok, like the ways of Saddam Hussein in his torture camps, where allegedly people new to upper echelons might be brought in order to be taught immunity both to compassion and to revulsion. But revulsion to what ? why, presumably to the things done to the torture victims, as well as to the quantity of death ensuing. There are other torturous evils.

This procedure now being aggrandised and developed for man ? It is this.

It is defamation of deity. It is being amplified to the young, in State Schools and many independent ones, happy to tempt the young with such febrile fabrications, undivine degradations and arrogant assumptions, leaving any god willing to co-operate scarcely distinguishable from devil, wrought with a gratuitous defacement, grievous to God, deadly to man (as shown in SMR pp. 186-187, Holiness, History, Review and Overview Ch. 5, TMR Ch. 1, Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3,
Dig Deeper ... Chs. 1-2, Calibrating Myths... Ch. 1).

The first of these references, dealing with the implications, is noted below.

Would the confused proponent of such theistic evolutionary views have God a hypocrite! The Bible notes that the righteous man is kind to his beast. Cruelty and kindness are indeed relevant to life forms well below man.

Will God be less so, be less merciful than He exhorts man to be, man made in His image- to the beasts ? will He, whose word constitutes truth, who cannot lie (Titus 1:2) mouth morals relative to animals for us which He, who became man and made him in His image, did not keep in the... little matter of the creation! Here is explicit teaching on God's perspective on the applicability of mercy to beasts.
Is God indeed to create by what He Himself condemns! Such a thought involves the sort of contradiction already laid to rest concerning deity; transgresses several impossibilities; achieves blasphemy, reconstructs God; attributes to Him the devices of the devil. It would be the mildest of comments, therefore, to observe that in theistic evolution we are moving into a new area, a new 'god'. Like those coming up newly, mentioned with such exquisite but poignant irony by Moses in Deuteronomy 32:17, new boy gods, such creations of the mind of man are not only irrelevant to the God of the Bible, but verbal assault on Him, when mentioned in His presence. What then are they when confused with Him?

Such a concept is by implication, one of the total condemnation of God. Since God then is allegedly involved, we have need to consider which god: it is one who involves the condemnation of the God of the Bible, and this is the point that we make. It is in fact normal, certainly scriptural, to refer to this particular 'god' as the devil.
In scriptural terms, what confuses God with the devil is somewhat beyond an error; it is a verbal catastrophe. It is more than travesty; it reduces talk at best to childish gabble, and at worst to an especially acute form of blasphemy... if indeed this is not an understatement.
vi) But someone might ask: how is it then that now these merciless, cruel and arrogant elements, these strong-crushing-the-weak situations, components, activities are to be seen ? Has God forgotten to be gracious?
They are, let us notice at once, present for a reason similar to that for which they are found among many of the human race: a combination of sin and judgment. It is no argument concerning the nature of God to note that men who have a few powers in the area of self-determination, often use them amiss. It is not always so: sometimes the sight is spiritual and excellent; at other times, we see vice. We see sacrifice and squalor; nobility and horror; quiet continuance of good in some and awe-inspiring agonies of evil in others. Man is not programmed; his passions are not required; but his responsibility is provided for, and he uses it!
But let us answer more precisely. This scriptural answer in its exact form is so categorical, as simply and powerfully to confirm what has been said.
That answer, since we are consulting the Bible relative to theistic evolution, is this. The Bible states that the creation labours and travails at the present time (Romans 8:18-22, an area of scripture which we have recently consulted). It also declares that the reason is creation's subjection to vanity, to worthless things. It is, we learn from Paul, to be "delivered" from this "bondage of corruption" (Romans 8:18-22). When was this 'subjection'? Genesis designates the curse on the earth in the arena of man's sin (Genesis 3:17-18); and it is here shown as broad as the whole of creation resident upon earth.
Now that it was at one time subjected to corruption (Romans 8:20 for the creation 'was subjected' to corruption) implies that prior to such subjection, it was not so treated. That it is to be 'delivered', indicates a vain, an abnormal, a currently harassed condition.
Further, the subjection not only occurred relative to a previously non-subjected creation: it concerned also one that was not 'willing' (8:20) so to be subjected. It was, then, not only a present creation, that which had already been created; it was also one quite lacking in desire for this change.
Man's madness is then mirrored in some of the lower creation; man's sin is given environmental reflection; his curse is provided with a scene of repugnance (one like himself in so many elements), in some respects a prison, a place of deprivation to aid reflection, as may occur when we incarcerate criminals. The world is by no means wholly lacking in beauty, utility, facility or even charm; but there is a reminder nonetheless.

The defamation of God which is now systematically inculcated into the young through many a government set against the word of the God of the Bible, as man is against man, has many phases, and in many ways resembles some protracted divorce proceedings, in which the verbiage is both spurious, furious and undistinguished!

VOLUNTARY DEFICIENCIES

One of the phases in which man manifests this is in the fatuous obscurantism of the current lines of debate on DESIGN! On this, the reader may desire to read first the two chapters on the topic in some detail, to be found in the last volume.

In this present chapter, the stress is more on the application of the matter! See for the former coverage, Dig Deeper, Higher Soar, Divine Glory Delights the More Chs. 1 and 2.

Consult with this, Calibrating Myths ... Ch. 1 and Wake Up World! Chs. 4-6.

There you will see, inter alia, Stephen Jay Gould breaching the normal, mystical ambit of Darwin – also in his own confused time, illogically wanting something for nothing unless it should be Lamarck, which was no better; yet there Gould us seen, reeling in thought at the egregious enterprise which astounded his empirical New World soul, the very modes of escape from design being left without loop-hole. The absurd idea of Darwin that death is the creator, in effect making novelty by exits, grinding its soulless way up, a matter so well exposed by Schützenberger of Parisian mathematics fame (cf. SMR pp. 128ff.), is not well replaced by another logical nonenity.

As seen in his Wonderful Life, this is the scenario which Gould could not face, but logically invoked: some innately operative creative force without a note of its presence to be found, moving upward, ever upward for unknown reasons, on unobservable basis and without a witness to be found of its presence! It splashes here, it splashes there, like intelligent waves, like a wise ocean, a brilliant sky, suddenly transformed into wisdom and thought, machination and imagination. Never such a fairy story as this, invention without inventor, and absent the dynamic that does.

Bergson more directly looked for this, but Lamarck with his use-inheritance or inheritance of acquired characteristics, had in effect a similar point. USE (which deploys what is there already) is to make a template for the advances in strength by use, to enable it to be passed on; but more, much more than this: it must program the same into the DNA if it is to have any relevant effect in the myth of organic evolution, conceptualise into formula, format and form a new design to enable change upward in the very nature of the equipment to be utilised. Use of a hammer makes a bob-cat, use of a tyre makes a a wheel, of a wheel, a chassis ?

What is this ? It is dream fulfilment by omission of means, with little midget masterpieces of intelligence running about, unsighted, or their equivalent: the normal equipment of myth.

Myth ? the unfolding, in romantic or unrealistic form, of desire for results, without bothering with the encumbrances of reason for cause. Here has myth its masterpiece; and yet it is sitting like sodden clothes on the easy chair of academia, as if unnoticed, as it rests its case on sodden cloth.

From SMR pp. 225, the point was made earlier, and is helpful here (the topic starts at SMR
p. 219, and the text of SMR is here amplified for our present purpose):

Fantasising about what is not seen to happen, on a magical basis of inadequate cause for progressing from nothing... is not science; and having a system which has what it takes in the beginning is merely begging the question - the only point being the particular way in which it is begged. Mathematics is no readier to such a project than logic or observation, law, means or principle.
Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of spiritual pathology, it is of much interest to see that just as Henri Bergson sensed and indeed saw that there must be some dynamic co-ordinating and creating power, and tried to have an inbuilt 'god' with that lack of success which failed experiments must demonstrate (God does not lurk: He made the materials- analogically, just as I make a poem - by creative power, not by tearing off parts of Himself, if indeed a Spirit had material parts): so Lamarck felt the need.
Each, unbelieving and unseeing, turned to some mechanism or developmental presence, and looked in vain within the realm of Nature. Nature has a nature; it does not include in this, the power to make itself, to enact its existence without being there.
Thus Lamarck was looking for some stimulus, rightly and deftly attuned to the materials in view. It was at least far more sensible than that Darwin who admitted the preposterous character of the interlocking marvels needed for the 'creation' of the eye.
And yet, for all its greater realism, the theory of Lamarck is merely one step back towards the Creator, on the part of one who was not aware of all the intricacies which present to us the possibilities we have, the microbiological gateways to life.
It is in all our ways the case, that more than wishing is needed to have results, and what we generate with our spirits is not available for mere wish-fulfilment in succeeding generations. Wishes never in and by themselves, in all law, logic and observation, create what they wish for. They do not do it directly, nor implicitly, nor logically, nor inferentially: only mythically.
Power and position and knowledge is needed, in measure as the creation involves such matters in its realm of implicit intelligence. The fastidious work of financial affairs requires an educated banking mind; how much more the various and diverse realms of knowledge, seen in our bodies, need a mind fit and apt and capable in all of these, and in their synthesising.
Thus Lamarck and Darwin are cases of that wish-fulfilment dreaming of which Freud speaks (though one could never^*1 endorse any of his own dreaming so aptly criticised, to the point, by Carl Jung). The difference of course is this: they do it when awake, and many read these day dreams with all the critical acumen of the sleeping, or indeed, the dead.
Bergson, then, raised the common sense quotient somewhat, seeking for that emerging 1ife force, something far beyond the dead dizziness of Darwin's derelict hypothesis, which simply is without merit in its special method re creation (though meeting one point, re maintenance, it touches a wholly different field).
Henri Bergson however, even he, whilst avoiding purely evanescent dreams, fell into the view so aptly criticised by C.S. Lewis. For, in the field of practical action, a force is that which moves matter, imparting an acceleration; and you must do far more than prod to gain these results! A life force is still something with life (its origin succinctly bypassed in this point) which imparts acceleration. Do that with building materials, and see how well you build! Sometimes one wonders whether just a tiny scrap of common sense might one day enter the minds of the wilfully deluded.
But Bergson at least was beginning to see the need of a creating and developing and guiding and girding and holding... what ? Naturally, what does all that has to be ontologically capable of it, has to have what it takes to do what it does, in other words.
That merely leads us back to God. There has to be one which is there, in order to contribute what Bergson feels so rightly is needed. Never without this, then, one goes to an eternal functionary; and the functions include the power to inculcate, originate, co-ordinate and so on. It is merely a verbal substitute ignoring the implicits, for God.
Again, we must realise that Bergson was as far beyond Lamarck as Lamarck was beyond poor Darwin, whom so many others seem to have taken far more seriously than he took his jaded and frustrated self. The Bible is far further beyond Bergson than he beyond either or both; for in it, you see the composed and unitary expressions of this Being, expressed with the evidential display in covering history with understanding, future history with precision, and focussing on the Lord Jesus Christ.
It did this showing Him as One to come with awe-inspiring readiness to impart, characterise and specify the things which had to be, when God showed not a creative force but His saving plan, via that Person with whom He created the worlds in the first place.
God has spoken into more than cells; but modern man is practically practised, not merely in deafness but also in blindness; though the results of his blindness, he can hear...

He can hear them. Can he however bear them ? The world contorts while modern man cavorts, unkind to conscience, commandment, design, his destiny, to justice, righteousness and realism alike, hiding from God like a latter day Adam, using more sophisticated means, but with results showing no advance. Where folly smirks, judgment lurks. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; it is more important also.

SEEKING TO HEAVEN FOR WHAT DOES NOT HAPPEN ON EARTH

We return to the edifying discomfiture of Gould, and his disarmed declaration as attested in Wonderful Life, for example .

For the time, facts of Burgess shale's simply overwhelming deviation from the simple magical and miasmic conception of design by inadvertence, left Gould making many fascinating observations which, though not seldom called for, were as far from conventional magic in the organic evolutionary myth, as could be. This is given attestation in the Dig Deeper Chs. 1-2, references. We might add further here.

Thus Gould excoriates the Darwinian myth, as we read on p. 234 of Wonderful Life, ironically congratulating it on its irrelevance.

"The traditional interpretation is tightly linked with the conventional view
of the origin of Burgess disparity as a filling of the empty ecological barrel.
An empty barrel is a forgiving place. It contains so much space
that even a clap-trap disaster of anatomical design can hunker down in a cranny
and hang on without facing competition from the big boys of superior anatomy.
But the party is soon over. The barrel fills, and everyone is thrown
into the maelstrom of Darwinian competition. In this "war of all against all,"
the inefficient survivors from gentler times soon make their permanent exit.
Only the powerful gladiators win. Thumbs up for good anatomy."

"You will read this interpretation in textbooks...," he notes scathingly of this imagined scenario, as he adds to his rambunctious, preceding satire.

He resumes to the precise point on p. 236.

"But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit that
we have no evidence whatsoever not a shred-
that the losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design
to those that survived. Anyone can invent a plausible story after the fact ..."

He sums up on p. 239:

"We do not know for sure that the Burgess decimation was a lottery.
But we have no evidence that the winners enjoyed adaptive superiority,
or that a contemporary handicapper could have designated the survivors.
All that we have learned form the finest and most detailed anatomical monographs
in twentieth-century paleontology portrays the Burgess losers
as adequately specialized and eminently capable." (cf. *3A below).

Thus, on the usual 20th century geological iconography, relative to the Cambrian: the FACT of plentiful design in abundance of sub-varieties coming evidentially in a cluster, and that of decimation of the design totals over time, of brilliance and extraordinarily fascinating contrivances and constructions of vast scope and variety are heaped up to attest an outthrust of creative attestation; and any thought of there coming in labouring ranks of sweaty tears to find existence is nauseatingly erroneous.

"How," Gould, warming to his task, rightly asks,

"in heaven's name," he rather exposingly proceeds,

"could such disparity have arisen in the first place." (p. 227).

In fact, if to any extent rock strata, so ludicrously interrupted by 'paraconformities' so often, with so many so often missing and such ludicrous misplacements of imagined series where stress evidence for movement is absent, indeed with these 'ages' of deposition so comically interspersed with polystrate single objects - like a tree or two - covering 'millions of years' of imaginary time, simply jutting through the lot: are to speak, then their message is uproarious in the face of gradualism. In this, Gould was right in his expostulation! At this, the anguished laughter of Gould is rightly directed.

On the other hand, there is superabundant testimony of something else.

There is the intensive evidence of vast flood exhibits in consistent testimony over vast areas, such as Dr Gary Parker attests, like Dr John Morris in his work on The Genesis Flood, "Creation, The Facts of Life" pp. 122-133 (cf. News 1 in this site). The literal force of the evidence in vast all but hemispherical translocation of fossils, disseminations such as Nilsson emphasised (cf. SMR pp. 108ff.), devastations and excavations (cf. Dr Steven Austin's Grand Canyon), just that form of mixing, just those grounds for missing 'millions of years' in rock strata refusing to be intimidated by theory, following the forces of nature, not of imagination.

This is a vast testimony; and throughout all is the fact that there was once a massively greater pool of design (cf. Dig Deeper ... Chs. 1 - 2) type than now exists. Gould is almost hypnotised by this erratic slap at Darwin, this creative masterpiece, this exuberant dynamic, this generous panache for imaginative toil.

We have diversification in detail; it has dynamic in kind.

Either way, there is nothing but obliteration of evidence by the theory of organic evolution, and Gould in this is perfectly correct:

“Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history.” (An Early Start, Natural History 87, February 1978).

He has more to say to the point.

"How," he asks with his more than justified expostulatory exasperation, "could such a view of life as a single progressive chain, based on replacement by conquest and extending smoothly from the succession of organic designs through the sequence of human technologies possibly accommodate anything like our modern interpretation of the Burgess fauna" (Wonderful Life, p. 260).

Gould (op. cit. p.257) points out that Darwin wrote to Alpheus Hyatt, Dec. 4, 1872, thus:

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

Paleontology, Darwin had admitted, was a major confrontation for him! (The Origin of Species, Dent, 1971, Ch. X, pp. 292-293)^*2A, just as Gould refers to the state of the transitional art, its negative condition, its vast absenteeism in terms of evidence, as one of the trade secrets of paleontology (Evolution’s erratic pace,-Natural History, vol. LXXXVI (5), May, 1977, p.14).

Indeed, Gould makes this comment on Darwin's condition ... position (op.cit. 258):

"The logic of theory pulled in one direction, social preconceptions in the other. Darwin felt allegiance to both, and never resolved this dilemma into personal consistency."

Of course, it could not be done. Error has no solution; the only remedy being return to the facts.

The evidence is not of the gradual, but the superabundance of types of design in the past which the present knows nothing of: the opposite of the legitimate expectation of the illegitimate concepts of Darwin. Indeed, it is more amusing to find that in Gould the idea of a lottery is even invoked at times, a far cry from the idea that death was only being creative in moving out with what failed, so that what was better could miraculously invent itself as a means of origination, to fill the gap. It could even look forward to finding intellectually what the gap was, in order to fill it, in order that what failed and was on its way out, would with exuberant vitality find its replacement arrive en scéne.

Thus what would not, because it could not fail could have as a resource NO power of conception or imagination or logic, in making itself, but work it would. It MUST do so, because otherwise nothing would work; and the theory WANTS it to work, so work it must, though it has no mind for it, or ability whatever.

If Gould is not over-sold on the lottery concept^*2, preferring some nameless something which because of sheer numbers will 'think' of something, yet his end is no better. In fact "luck', as the advancing agent, is as nubilously ruinous to thought as Darwin's non-existent 'mechanism' for origination. It simply means that ostentatious pretence, contrary to the record and to reason, being abandoned in its survival-becoming-creative-of-what-survives concept, then in a fury of frustration, moves back to its empty base.

Now it is a new case, that Gould seeks; but it is one with the same ground: nothing^*3A. The stuff required is not ground out from nowhere relevant, rational or realistic; it simply bounds out. No more are simple death and time the basis for the imaginative cascade of utter brilliance in design; now it is a mass display, arrested by punctuation every time we look at it, but dynamic for all that, for the same reason: that is, NONE. Further, it has to rush out its rationalities, from unreason, and career quickly with its superb prodigies of contrivance, lacking all means. This, it is science ? To ask is to answer. It is naturalistic hypnotism, it is absurdity in white coat, dream awaking at the desk, without noticing that it is day once more. It is precisely myth, magical machination without citable rationale, but worse, it is unreason give AS a reason.

It is as magical as the peace which follows its preconceptions in the world of international politics, of power-broking among nations, with lurking mistrust, and devious mentalities, seeking to outwit, and to survive, with scant thought for what survival, what life is either for, or how it came about. It is assumed. Therefore it is done. Magic speaks, and it was done. Alas, this does not happen; and it is for this reason that it is NEVER seen!

What then do we have here ?

Now rather than have exit (of what fails) the GROUND for entry (of what succeeds), as if departure of an aeroplane were adequate ground for the landing of the next, we have suddenness its own ground, requiring all things to nurture, fabricate, conceptualise and so program, to land on the empty deck; but they do not really, only in thought. Thus the thinker of the theory exports his own thoughts to the vacant 'origination' field, and they work for it, though absent in fact at the time. It is a sort of export of the creative imagination of the contemporary thinker to the barren heath of their model of the void past, in order to do in thought and vague phrasing, what cannot be done without adequate equipment on site at the time.

The equipment required of course as in all conceptualisation and programming, is AT LEAST the equivalent of mind (our minds are not up to it, even with the example, though they keep trying), and its products are beyond our own. If it is mindless, how much more mankind; but man, he is far from mindless, even so exuberant in mind that he does not mind his own business, rather seeking to invade the profundities of God with his tiny, inadequate, inarticulate, phrase-mongering magics and myths, seeking to find results without articulable causes, so that there is nothing to investigate, since nothing is in mind! All that is seen, is not there; it is seen in the imagination which denying imagination, yet lives by it. It is all a matter of nothing, nothing relevant, nothing rational, nothing visible, nothing observable, nothing attestable, nothing as base in the first place, whether in all or in part; and as for anything else, it is simply assumed.

Science by suggestion becomes scientistic folly by the films of the mind, screened on a background that is not there, so made a mere matter of evanescent talk. Nothing however does not really do much, let alone create the universe, whether you specify it or merely imply it, whether in part or in whole.

Now non-system, non-knowledge, non-grounds, these become the relics left, the fossils of the ideological fight, to produce the most sophisticated design ever seen on this earth, the most elaborate combination of logical methods and processes ever seen in a material design, the most intensively expansive series of concatenated orders ever issued and discerned in what is largely automated, even to reproduce itself and its parts in large measure, normally at the minute level, often at larger congregations in aspects of organs, or in some animals, organs themselves.

This is the biological equivalent to the delectably ridiculous physics concept that was once becoming popular: the answer is - nothing did it, it came from nothing, thus admitting the self-contradiction with the starkness of an adulterer caught in the very act.

It has the proportions of satirical comics. This is as unscientific as it is possible to be, as irrational, abstrusely and obtrusively seizing on the most distant and slipshod 'reason' in the darkness of irrelevance, while ignoring the obvious, shown every day in our own lives, itself exhibiting the species of dynamic required even as we think, in the thinking process. It is mute, it cannot speak, for it lacks something to say, merely gasping out virtual irrational gibberish, instead of grounds, as specious ground on ground is removed by evidence, to the long enduring chuckles of reason.

Some might gasp, The reason is luck. Luck brought in and on, the best! so they clamour, like roistering roosters, asserting themselves for lack of anything better to do.

Luck as creator ? It has to do rather more than select; it has first to invent. The amount of systematic devising and schematic construction, laborious articulations of reason and program, form and integration to result from the lack of means is as great as usual: when you are not conceiving a universe where the very thing to be made is hanging about somewhere, somehow, already, ready to do its forlornly little stuff, when the TOPIC is where it comes from ALTOGETHER. Assuming the stuff does not create it. Making it do in mind what it does not show prowess or fixture, procedure or function to perform, is a work of black magic, horrific metaphysics, as if the thinker became suddenly the Creator, and what occurred in his mind, then had to happen! In fact, it is not so with man!

Luck ? It means that there were to be found all NECESSARY elements for the construction and type of construction and mode of construction in what is a system which contained NONE of the them. The system itself also arrives unsolicited, and systematises itself, having first systematised its underlying means of atom or electron and logic and correlation, unaided from nowhere, and all of this before it was even there.

In this hideously nervous, stressed and sweating generation^*3, we like then to see it all done by no one and to arrive by no reason ? A rest then to the imagination ? Perhaps, it may seem so, but it is in fact over-heated, like an engine without water. It is nothing to do with either science or creation, and ignores all that is known both of the phenomenon of creation and nothing, alike. We are all well acquainted with the prowess of nothing; and of creation, all in these matters being creative constantly in their own imaginations, though not WITH them! It spins like a fly-wheel without an engine, thumping uselessly onward.

This is the nadir of necessity, the insistence on devoiding God of His power, and avoiding responsibility, which nonetheless is to be accounted of, in its hour. It does all that nothing can do: nothing. The facts remain, never varying, always demanding what has been said from the first, and in the Bible in particular. ONE creator did ONE job in making what is, and the variations do not amount to creation, but differentiation on a model basis.

That is what is continually attested (cf. SMR pp. 106, 236), Professor Simpson of Harvard having depicted it well:

"Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are
systematic and almost always large."

That is the norm in creation. You make this and that, the merging from one to another being a challenging task, and the more so, the greater is the object of your creation. The IDEAS however are common in part, originality not disdaining its earlier actions; but the creation is distinct. You may vary an idea in its presentation; but its nature is the same. New ideas have new forms. They all relate by logic and conception to the thinker and his modes and means of thought. There is no self-made transition in conceptualisation and its products: there is active thought which using what it will, past, present or new, makes variety in its own manner, with similarity the testimony of its creative unity.

That is what it is; and that is what is always found. Verification is not nominal but phenomenal, and underlying Gould's healthy exasperation (comparatively healthy!) is this inordinate creation testimony. He gasps to heaven because on earth he has excluded it. In his furious horror, he cries that there may be found in one small quarry in British Columbia, "the remains of some fifteen to twenty organisms so different one from the other, and so unlike anything now living, that each ought to rank as a separate phylum" (op. cit. p. 99).

ALL current phyla, he notes, tend to be assessed as between 20 and 30, and this ? it is all that ... remains. So he speaks. Indeed, in the Cambrian, he asserts, there is "the maximum in organic disparity." The maximum starts the gradual process in fine style, as if the ludicrous were the congratulatory word for the 'established' theory of organic evolution (op. cit. p. 227). How original must the non-original be when its originalities are maximal in the era of beginnings, and attenuate as they go! How long does anti-verification not only happen, not only occur monstrously, but in such dimensions as become comic in conception, as if someone were managing a publicly popular show, satirical in kind. It is not only excluded, what has for so long been urged: it is lampooned by the testimony of evidence, on the basis of thought used.

What then ? Starkly missing the means, the aspects for such concentrations of order, logic and command: these the products of what was not there, simply arrived, because there was no ground for it. Surely we have reached the end of the line, rather like the case in some Pentecostal 'churches', where having violated the biblical constrictions on the use of 'tongues' (as in I Corinthians 12, 14), they descend to barking like dogs! The end of a matter often exposes the fallacies of its beginning, a sort of reductio ad absurdum in life itself, rather than merely in writing!

LOOKING TO LOGIC FOR WHAT NATURE IS THE RELEVANT ONE,
AND WHOSE IS ADEQUATE

As to Darwin's approach, then, better at criticism than construction, Gould correctly notes (p. 272), this point, relative to the evidence:

"Darwin, making his characteristic (and invalid) conflation
of leisurely, gradual evolution
and change by natural selection,
rejected the fast transition theory out of hand."

Also revealing as to the insights of Gould, when evidence suddenly impacted as he researched the Burgess shale, is this (op. cit. p. 282):

"Darwin explicitly rejected the naive but widely held notion
that a cause must be seen directly in order to qualify for a scientific explanation."

This point of course means, if taken without prejudicial constraints of mere cultural clutter, that WHATEVER explains consistently and adequately, without evidential or logical rebuttal, what is in view, beyond all competition, is not to be rejected. This means that scientifically, we do NOT decide in advance on what is relevant power-source, design-basis and basis of non-nothing, with all the eternity thus demanded, and all the collateral evidence then to be sought. We look for it, WHEREVER it is to be found and meets the case of what is before us (cf. SMR pp. 140-150). .

Darwin looked, but did not find; and now what is found derides his obscurantist irrationality.

We must look where attestation is found; this is the work of man if he is not to be confounded in what he propounds, impounded by what he pounds, confronted by what, by Him whom he affronts.

As shown in SMR, it is precisely this which alone either in verification or in logic meets the case, the realm in this case, for the visible, not of the visible self-production, in part or in whole, but of the action of what has the power and attests it roundly and comprehensively on all sides. That is the summit of science, and its pit is the prejudice which denies evidence its place, and asserts itself in the face of it.

The the war of Gould on the establishment of his day, like that of Goldschmidt and his, and Løvtrup and Nilsson with theirs (cf. SMR Ch. 2), form different angles to be sure; but they are all with one basis: the ludicrous irrationality of the theories presented by Darwin. Whether by inadequate collusion or continual confusion, which is in each area the case, these things in their varied and various different directions, merely attest by their dust, the irrelevance of all such magical, mythical and eruditely irrelevant theorems. They are disenchanted with each other, with Darwin and with failure. They thunder, and they crash; but there is only spray. None of them rationally has anything to offer; merely phrases arise like spume.

In that void arena, nothing wins. It does, however, not win by irrationally becoming the self-contradictory source of anything; the point rather is this, that there IS no winner when 'nature' is stroked, and by a rather odd metonymy, is made to become what any particular visible nature is not in the visible universe: namely, gifted with power and precision, wisdom and way to construct man, matter and spirit in man. In that project, there is in this barren field, simply no winner. Nothing active on this earth, or visibly available for its material structure, fits on that basis. You need to go beyond as in anything exhibiting the force of creative activity in its interstices, but not itself evincing the power to make itself, let alone before it is there to do so: and in doing so, you must drop the spurious cult of the forbidden, and go where the evidence leads and logic demands.

We must avoid "the widely held notion" that what ? "that a cause must be seen directly to qualify ..." Yes, Mr Gould, we must indeed do so, and go as far from the material under our noses as necessary, even if in in the end, it costs a bit!

Travel often does.

In so doing, of course, we shall have to use the invisibilities of conceptualisation and imagination, and the spiritual properties of understanding (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9).

On this point we must, unless bound by irrational prejudice, be thoroughgoing!

This has been dealt with in detail in Highway of Holiness... Ch. 5.

It is indeed the capacity of reason to identify revelation, and of revelation to identify God, and of God to identify His word, which reason also insists upon, which gives to mankind when uninhibited by fears and foibles, when scientific in disposition and discipline, the answers to all of inhibitions, antilogies and anomalies. Cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5, 10, TMR Ch. 1, 6, 7.

When will dictates to science, it is no longer science, but will o’ the wisp.

CULTURAL PROHIBITION ON LOOKING WHERE IT IS TO BE FOUND

See in particular, in SMR, the Cult of the Forbidden, pp. 85, 150, 330-331, and with this on poetry instead of principle and power, see SMR pp. 211-214.

The point here is this: that what is a mere inclination for various specious or insidious, erratic or uncontrolled reasons in the field of religion and the ultimate, is frequently designated a 'cult', a following in which desire is lord and truth is subordinate. When this is applied to the realm of science, where it relates to the ultimate, it is still just as applicable. When some people, trained in science, so depart from scientific method as to desire to limit their hypotheses to preferred philosophical postulates, it is apparent that this not only aborts science, which is supposedly not interested in the mere investment with divine or pseudo-divine or at any rate exalted clothes, what it wants, but in finding what is there, what meets the case.

Such a cult is so fashionable that sometimes its priests even articulate their passion directly, telling us where and where not, they will go, presumably in the interests of desire, for it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth. In fact, we must go both very near for an example on a derivative scale, and rather further in understanding, for the original of our origination capacities themselves.

On this point, we find in Sparkling Life ... Ch. 6, this exposure:

Thus, you find in your own efforts, and those of your fellows over centuries, the evidence of basic ingredients of creation. You see the intense parallel in method, in integration of concept, in relationship of code and control, program and end purpose, imagination and execution, means and ends, and then IGNORE all this as if the mere fact that the parallel is complete, except for our obvious limits, as of a child before his father, were a denial of it! Next you act as if THIS demonstration in the universe in creation (in ourselves as sub-creators) has no bearing on our own creation, or as if the world which so closely resembles in its modes of working, the very created territories we ourselves try to make, were a disreputable model, as if the evidence were deceased, diseased, untouchable, subject to intellectual apartheid, a part of the cult of the forbidden, a taboo.

What then, facts being then in confrontation with theory, as observable, principles likewise deleted from it, the world must mysteriously be thought to bring itself here from nothing, while we who are in it, find that this is precisely what produces nothing.

Yet we are not nothing; and are produced. This is not merely a negation of scientific method; it is a REPLACEMENT of it by will, so that the verifications, the more they mount, the less are they received; the principles, the more irreparable the damage they inflict on vagrant theory, the more certainly must it be received, and they removed; the logic, the more certain, the more must irrationality be invoked, though this automatically removes at that same instant, all power to reason.

This then is the way, the manner of insistence on irrelevance, here lies the arbitrary antinomy, the irrevocable antilogy, the crass incoherence that makes of modern man a prey to folly, and a butt for discipline.

If Mr Gould detests Darwin's leisurely irrelevance, he yet seeks constantly, despite his reference to heaven, for something to do more than congratulate him on his 'punctuation' in his 'equilibrium', and provide the 'go' for glory! This he does not find, since by internal decree he has removed that field from his view, like a child telling his mother, I don't see anything! while looking everywhere except at his unmade bed!

If it is amusing, it is also illuminating to see such a scientist appeal to 'heaven's name' as he rushes headlong to the world of facts, and suffers what might almost be called a temporary cultural insanity, abandoning without possessing any actual ground for any substitute, the Darwinian contra-factual nonsenses, 'explaining' as they do, the opposite of the case.

Indeed, the whole whirled world of war on design in life, is of this type, although usually excess verbiage clouds the practical facts. Neither however (Dig Deeper ... op.cit.) does the definition of design, nor do the absent modes for its accomplishment in terms of what is on usual theoretical grounds taken to be the evidence, nor does what actually is the duly sorted evidence, allow for its omission. Man is design; and designated design at that; moreover, the designation is a publicly declared one, and as to that, it is a verified and not a virtual one merely, in the word of the Creator (cf. SMR Chs. 1 -2, The gods of naturalism have no go!).

THE DEATH OF LOGIC AND OF MAN

Furthermore, the removal of this reality of scientific method (cf. Scientific Method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation) leads to predictable logical abysses, such as the meaninglessness of this design-built integrality of thought, mind, spirit, organic integrity and purposive creation - man, so misconstrued: so that on this model, he lacks meaning though compounded with means for purpose, and exhibits design while surrounded with ignorance of purpose! (cf. SMR Ch. 3).

Thus the divorce from reason, the pseudo-scientific exclusion of all except material means for the creation of material things, by a wild frenzy of incoherent thought (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), becomes a mother for a frenzy of purposeless purpose, who yet expects to define his purpose, a meaning-meter who adjudges all meaning, yet lacks meaning. In these contradictions, does the model of unscientific prejudice leave man, the meaningless child of a 'nature' he can yet assess, and to which attribute what it has of meaning, and even tell us why. In such insatiable absurdities, he is left, a devotee of self-destruction.

Let us pursue this last antilogy. It makes of man a meaningless discerner of meaning, which is of course a self-contradiction, since at once to KNOW he is meaningless, he has to have the access to ultimate reality by which ALONE he COULD know this to be true; but if he had such access he COULD not be meaningless, have the meaning of being a reality checker. Moreover, on the same illusory model, he would not be able to KNOW it to be true that there was no truth (in a relative world), since for that to be knowable, it would have both to exist and to be accessible; so that he is involved in further self-contradiction, as well as being the most design-worthy object ever seen with visible eyes on this earth, while not a design. Self-contradiction becomes the lot of those who contradict the truth and hallow unreason. What else would one, in any case, expect!

Bring in the prejudicial cause of confusion, and you will have it. Abuse reason and you become unreasonable. Become unreasonable, and you can have gratuitous antinomies for breakfast, antilogies for dinner, and infelicitous phrases, the substitute for thought, to burp with.

All of this is but a natural outcome of survival as the means of creation (as if survival of the best copies of an idiot were to create Shakespeare's works, duly bound in leather), madness about means with a natural outcome in insanity for many, something psychiatrists increasingly treat with pills to interfere with the agility of the equipment, which is dangerous to those now deluded. To be sure, there are other grounds of insanity; but such grasping guilt as in Lady Macbeth's case, is one of them. Now it is not only against a king, but THE King; or to defame His name; or both.

With her, it was the secession of meaning and the accession of guilt in the deployment of irrational ambition in the flesh for political gain; but with mankind in general, as propaganda begins to outdo even Goebbels contribution in World War I, in our contemporary culture, the same sort of result is accruing with racial ambition the thrust - that of the human race. We are to become a master race, not as Aryans this time, but as humans. Humanism is raising its giddy head to do an international Stalin plus Hitler plus Mao spectacular; and it is as well-based in fact as was Lady Macbeth. Like her, it may enjoy the act; but the next Act is harrowing. "She has seen what she ought not to have seen!" seems an apt comment.

Such a model, embraced by reason's dissidents, reality's rebels and God's truants, moves man in his dizzy silliness of miscreant thought and racially adolescent escapades, into war, kingdom against kingdom and country against country, as Christ put His forecast in Matthew 24, till the earth should become tilted to the point of unlivability (Matthew 24:22). Realised or not, this is its lèse-majesté, its irrationality and its presumption. Here lies the defamation of God, spawning its results.

This is but one part: in addition, false prophets like Darwin and organic evolutionists are also to be in vogue, as they undoubtedly are (Matthew 24:24), just as they long had been (Jeremiah 2:25-28).

It is now, as it was then, and man has been more than slow to learn his lesson on naturalistic vacuity. As Jeremiah put it:

"... Saying to a tree, You are my father; and to a stone, You have brought me forth: for they have turned their back to Me, and not their face, but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us.

"But where are the god that you have made ?
Let them arise, if they can save you in the time of your trouble..."

Again, to them there as to mankind now, the prophet calls (Jeremiah 10:12).

Jeremiah is instructed by the Lord to declare this:

"The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth,
even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.
He has made the earth by His power; He has established the world by His wisdom,
and has stretched out the heavens by His understanding."

Insisting on the products of what you deny, ignore, exclude or distort, while of permanent necessity being one of these, of necessity must spawn spiritual sleaze, mental disease, rampaging youth without basis, incited increasingly by the absence of even traditional relics of true religion. It must lead to international thrust, and making 'nature' the producer of itself and yourself, so that as you put your trust in its thrust, this becomes the source of false gods, scientistic or other, which then compete in their inglorious gallantries, as in the Islamic militancy, the Communistic insurgency^*4A, the sexual depravities and the confused social antics which destroy the agents of stability and the exemplars of truth.

The world in its former relative stability is dissolving into a ruin as featureless as the brilliant fool of matter, which is made a grandmother to man, or the gaping abyss of nothing (lacking of course the sides, which are something), which leads to anything but nothing, when it is inserted where God belongs.

What, oh what would you expect! It is this: what you find. Verification ought not to smirk; but its smile is much more definitive than that of Mona Lisa. It has much more to show, to the captured 'science' which ignores it. Moreover in this case, the biblical MODEL predicted the nature of the result of the non-verification of the naturalistic idolatry, that with its confreres, and likewise provided in advance, the grounds for its own verification, a truly noble and unique performance.

Indeed, it not merely MEETS every requirement when tested in available areas of verification, but designates areas for test, in ways which ONLY the supernatural God COULD, and then meets these also. In this respect, it is not only verified, as nothing else is in this field (as in others), but it rules. It has a supply of modes, means and levels which merely natural fields do not because they cannot supply. In ruling in this arena, it laughs (cf. Psalm 2) to scorn what does not, because it cannot even meet the simplest and most obvious of tests (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1).

In the end, truth is unmanipulable (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5).

These themes are pursued in the next Chapter, including Mother Nature, the God of Creation, and the gods of Defamation.

Chapter 2 proceeds directly from this, to complete the presentation at this phase.

NOTES

*1 See on these topics, Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 9, * 1 and *2.

*2A

Two further citations on this point are merely a pair amongst a small army, that stands by, largely ignored by the forces of prejudicial preconception and perennial propaganda.

The original thinker and former Cambridge Professor Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, in Our Place in the Cosmos: The unfinished revolution, London: J.M. Dent, 1993, p. 135, have this to declare: it is that the

"small divergences are there, the big are absent. We do not see part-bear, part-horse. Even within a single order, families remain stubbornly distinct from one another. For instance, the order Carnivora includes cats and dogs, and it is obvious that we see no evidence whatsoever of part-cat, part-dog.^"

Hoyle's The Intelligent Universe, 1983, is a larger account of such things. On Hoyle, see SMR pp., 224-227, 422L.

As Jeffrey Schwartz says:

" ...the truth of the matter is that we are still in the dark about the origin of most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus – full-blown and raring to go ...^"

(Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 3).

The light is not far to find.

	The concept that unintelligence created intelligence, non-form created form, not dynamic created dynamic, non-existence created existence is merely one sad, endlessly romantic ruin of irrationality. Any part of the program is as sadly inadequate as any other; and together they create an insidious urbanity that replaces thought, both in the presentation and in the conception itself.
	It is when you proceed to rectify the multiple myths involved, starting as logically necessary with something not nothing, which thus must be eternal, since otherwise nothing would recur, and be insuperable, as always; and then proceed to what is needed: to create intelligence with its criteria, conditions, constraints and abilities and to fashion this into existence by having so vast an intelligence (at least) that the parameters and provisions of intelligence can be conceived for creative export; and then proceed to have the legislative capacity installed, or rather recognised, which can ordain laws (for they do not arise from nothing, but from something adequate, or causality and logic alike must be abandoned, and hence part in any further discussion or presentation because of self-contradiction cf. TMR Ch. 5, Barbs ... 6 -7, Causes), and so move on as in SMR to the requirements of reason for what is actually here, rather than symbolising thought by its absence, and requiring everything that lacks what is to be, and all its specialties, to function so that it is to be there: it is only then that reason returns.
	It is then that folly is ready to depart. It is then that all things cohere rationally, in revelation, in practice and verify themselves on all sides with that beautiful clarity and superabundance which is one of the never failing victories of absolute truth! (cf. Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host ). For this world, however, it appears that it needs more desolations to confirm it that it is vagrant and reckless with God, as so often admitted in much, but more rarely regarded in remedy; and the process is lethal. Nor is this forsaken parade merely pathetic, for it is dynamised by its own basis, and supported by its own thrust of aroused negations (cf. The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 8). What is needed is outlined in SMR pp. 582ff.. What is in the interim to come, where such need is neglected, is shown in Biblical Blessings Ch. 2. In short, if you keep scratching a sore, you may find an ulcer, and this ? it is a spiritual one. Healing is far better than such aggravation.

*2 He is not over-sold, op. cit., p. 239, but in his explosive frustration and appalled amazement, he does not exclude it.

*3A

Gould in his "Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness," Natural History, 1988, p. 14, has this to say:

"This extraordinary abundance of some fossils
illustrates something important about the history of life.
Evolution is a theory about change through time --
"descent with modification," in Darwin's words.
Yet when fossils are most abundant during substantial stretches of time,
well-represented species are usually stable throughout their temporal range
or alter so little and in such superficial ways (usually in size alone)
that an extrapolation of observed change into longer periods of geological time
could not possibly yield the extensive modifications
that mark general pathways of evolution in larger groups.
Most of the time, when the evidence is best, nothing much happens to most species."

In other words, gradual evolution, such as that Darwin imagined, is dismissed by Gould as a contra-evidential extrapolation; evolution is assumed as an invisible action; the dynamic and the drive with the creative power is likewise assumed by Gould, as it was by Darwin, who for his part was making slow movement a way of importing skilled movement; and when the assumptions are done, nothing of science is to be seen in such ramblings, any more than of the fossil change envisaged in any observable reality relating to either vacuous model.

You see no series of carefully continuous movements for any transmutation, all so small, so varied, so variable in progress, so deft to the end, so multitudinous in erratic ends and byways as well; they do not come to the light, hidden in darkness, obscure in the imagination of man. Nor for Gould do you see any vast mistakes, hideous happenstances of inglorious folly, named in the fossils, naked misnomers, sudden and spectacular in folly, as the non-existent power in his model makes the prodigies of abandon, as well as the prodigious steps at which it is so ostensibly gifted, although on his presentation, it is not there.

Verification vomits; method faints; only myth remains. This is the way of death, with the scientistic, the fantastic and the fantasising in one inglorious realm where the real gradations are from arbitrary antinomy, through ascending antilogy to alogistic vacuity.

It is all 'in the mind', never in the facts. What Gould said, precisely of Darwin, must be said of Gouldism (why not ? you have Darwinism ? and he is much nearer to the facts than was Darwin)!

Gould's 'punctuated equilibrium' that emperor's new clothes phrasing into the phasing of existence, is so pathetic that it seems better in such a case not to mention it!

Gould's superiority lay in better regard for facts, however, not in superior theory; for all such theorists have a vacancy notice when it comes to the real work. This ? It is that of constructing delimited material things, setting their bounds, making myriads of inferior systems, subordinating them one to the other (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), integrating their coding for language with the laws for what they must command, correlating command with automation, by programmatic devices, and importing rationality as a conscious facility for man, so that he might conceive the work, be instructed and worship the God of creation, and investigate with delight the depths of His constructions, creations and devisings.

Thus man also had to be so made as to become a fitting co-worker with the rationality of the system, so that he in turn was equipped with the linguistic and logical ability to find out the language of life in DNA, and to see the hand of God in command, which like other specialised works of precision, requires precision to make it, imagination to blend it with its various components systematically, cohesively and with an integrality which in the end, with the spirit added, becomes that one thing, a person, who is MAN, who thinks, who ponders.

Thus with the language for life,

and that of man and the provisions for thought for man,

together with the laws of matter,

the forms of the inanimate and the animated,

the forces to run what is according to the laws made operative, and with

the provision

for maintenance as in living things, reproduction where applicable,
and later than that, at the fall of man,

for the nature and scope of the curse which reminds man of his fallen state
and so blessedly helps him awaken from his dogmatic stupour of unbelief
in the One who has made him (cf. Beyond the Curse):

it is all done.

The constructive creation is so forged that it all WORKS, in integrality, according to design as is always the case with such conceptual, commanding, programmatic, synthetically forged, cohesively combined works.

God, all-knowing, and wishing to give comfort and consolation, knowledge and wisdom to His creation, man, has embraced the future with finesse, in this respect as in other crucial ones (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9, The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet .... Ch. 4).

In the midst of the predicted perils for this end part of our present Age (as shown prophetically in Answers to Questions Ch. 5, in terms of the verified, unambiguous evidence), man has the psychological additive of stress, with the spiritual crippling of what refuses to use the spiritual wings supplied, so that they become arthritic.

Luke 21:25-36 has this, giving not only the diagnosis at some distance - two millenia - in time, but the course to follow.

"And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near."

^"Then He spoke to them a parable:

'Look at the fig tree, and all the trees. When they are already budding, you see and know for yourselves that summer is now near. So you also, when you see these things happening, know that the kingdom of God is near. Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.'

"But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly. For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man."

The Greek term used here, rendered 'generation' can mean, breed, contemporary people, or, as we find from Thayer's Greek dictionary, those of a given race, sometimes 'perverse race'. The flavour in context is decidedly negative! Whatever, however, was to happen to Israel (and much that was sad and tragic had been in view from Matthew 23:37ff., 24:1ff.), it would remain until the VERY END! Christ Himself would come, when the time was ready (Matthew 24:23ff., Acts 3:19ff., 1:7ff.); but for all their vicissitudes, they would be THERE, at that time.

Thus here the term, genea, is used in the last-noted sense, above. As Christ indicated in Matthew 24, there was a whole breed of nations and kingdoms which had to arise and set about their comings and goings, before HE would return! Israel, IT would be there, it also.

In fact, the Jews, generation of Abraham, were indeed OFTEN in danger of destruction, at the hand of Rome, Romanism, Communism, Nazism, anti-Semitism more generally; and it is one of the marvels of life that they have not been quite extinguished: such is the odium in which many successive empires and regimes have held them, such has been the extortion practised by whole nations, like France under Louis XIV, upon them.

They not only remain (and in this context, a thousand years, since Peter, in terms of the return of Christ, are but as a day in the sight of the Lord, II Peter 3:9 - this is now two 'days' of that kind, since the Lord was on earth); they have even come back to be a nation, their nation.

This too was predicted by Christ Himself, and many prophets (cf. Dig Deeper ... Ch. 5, SMR Chs. 8 - 9). in Luke we see it in 21:24, where Jerusalem is the alarm clock. When it is no longer under Gentile control, Christ declared, then the Age of the Gentiles is passing away, or if you like, the fulness or completion of the Gentile period is over. That is of course now, since 1967 indeed; and the world is preparing for its last rites before the return of the Lord, the exposure of the antichrist and the demonstration of the beauty of holiness (Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Isaiah 59, Revelation 20), so that the earth shall indeed be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14, Isaiah 11).

*4A

See Youth 3,

The Desire of the Nations and the Crystalline Fire of the Faith Ch. 3,

Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3.

See also more generally, History, Review and Overview Chs. 4 and 5,

Aviary of Idolatry,

Nothing Doing from Nothing,

Highway to Hell,

A and F Schools.

	and that of man and the provisions for thought for man,
	together with the laws of matter,
	the forms of the inanimate and the animated,
	the forces to run what is according to the laws made operative, and with
	the provision

	for maintenance as in living things, reproduction where applicable, and later than that, at the fall of man,
	for the nature and scope of the curse which reminds man of his fallen state and so blessedly helps him awaken from his dogmatic stupour of unbelief in the One who has made him (cf. Beyond the Curse):