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


Chapter 31

 

 

The Era of Delusion

Dreams defile, truth awakes, and imagination may be used to distil thought from confusion.

 

from History, Review, Overview, Helps, Hindrances and Holiness Ch. 5,

 

 

FASTIDIOUS FLUMMERIES OF THINGS
SUMMERY BUT UNSUBSTANTIAL:

and TRUTH

Fidgetting instead of Exercising Faith

Man Manipulates only his own Self,

The Facts Remaining Inviolate:

But the Penalty is Pride of Race, the Human Race, and Ultimate Disgrace

 

News 343 The Australian, and The Advertiser, March 12, 2005\

 

SHRIEKING INSTEAD OF SEEKING

 

In the last Chapter, we were moving into that hindrance to holiness, the secular myth, which is observable in the domain of naturalism. Now we examine it a little more, not because we have not considered it earlier, for indeed a volume Secular Myth or Sacred Truth has been written on it; but because it is part of our current theme, Hindrances and Helps.

We had reached the conclusion of *1 in Chapter 4.

 

                    Because its glory has departed from it."

Before we proceed with the second part of this citation, let us consider the meaning of this one.

The 'calf' was a symbol of one of the naturalistic gods of Egypt (cf. Exodus 32:1-4, The Grating Grandeur ... Ch. 3, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 15).

Note the hysterical desire for nature worship - they 'shriek' for it. The contemporary parallel may seem to some less intense, but such data as revealed in TMR Ch. 8 and Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3, multiple sackings or threats in academic circles, and intimidation at many levels by the ruling cultural junta, show far otherwise. Our 'modern' malady is just as intense, and no less vacuous.

Tastes change, but the impact and outreach, the movement to nature worship via whatever symbols of thought or form, this remains the same. Modern man has his own formats for naturalism, the gods of forces, the delusive dynamics of desire, the ostracism of God and the alternative immersion of the divine in the creation itself, as if to deform the author into the book, or upgrade space and matter into the realms of thought and understanding. The logically illicit becomes the scene of spiritual corruption and complicity. The hideous 'shriek' for this delusion, the avoidance of divine authority, the elevation of man to his own mastery, the making of this little unit of birth and unseasonable death a parody and comedy of self-affirming importance: this combines now with the shriek of the dying, the carnage of aggrandising wars and militant madness, as the delusions of the flesh make the exit of millions, without the fear of God, or His love.

Much later in that Chapter 3, from which the above scripture is cited, the topic resumes... However, there has been substantial addition and change in the composition of the new draft below, better to meet our present purpose.

 

In News 100, we  look at many things including the religious variant of this myth, and to this we shortly turn.

Meanwhile ... Myth ?*2 you ask. Certainly myth: you are trying to get without nameable or adequate causal input, a consequence, hoping by mystery to allay the inadequacy. That is a myth; and the bits that are supposed to do it are fairies or monsters, or aliens or wizards or something ... awfully strange! That is how it is. Books write themselves, DNA codes make themselves, even though life shows no trend to new information; yet they do it, in some mysterious ... eerie way. Evidence is irrelevant, like Jews to the Nazis. It must GO to the gas-chambers. Scientific laws are of no account; desire is all.

Now all this might as an exercise in gruesome imagination be very well if it is some children's fantasy, if less blasphemous, and holding some information in its very own self; but it is not even that. It is myth or Master, pastiche of the meaningless or the salubrity of Scientific Method, dream or data, desire or observation,  submission to law or man as lord. It is explosion that creates instead of destroying in a fit of fantasy, thrusting from the meaningless to create the magnificent, or creation that provides a unity which is FROM ITSELF, just as one's books proceed through oneself, and have that sort of unity.

Is book 74 REALLY the same as book 23 ? Not really. But surely, one says, surely and certainly it is IN A WAY, the same ? It uses words, its style is not very dissimilar, its passions and so on, these have enormous characterisability, almost. They must be one.

Really ? Let us then examine each word, break it up into its letters, and then look  at the punctuation marks, with Gould, and surely somewhere, somehow, there must be the ultimate particle, be it letter, or part of letter like a quark, or full stop. In this imagination, such things MUST be, though they scurry from observation and hurry away like shadows as one passes over the ground in an aeroplane. They are to be found, but are not found; they are the invisible constituents of delusion.

Away from this shrieking naturalism, let us consider. It is often cited that the DNA alone has something like the equivalent of 1000 volumes of an encyclopedia, such as Britannica, in its commands and concourse of directions and provisions. In this it is like a book. It has contents, it has cross- references multiplied, it has unity of meaning, capacity for implementation, access to resources for the purpose, symbolic logic and substantial results. It is far more than a book, but not less.

Let us suppose that the book could reply to interrogation from naturalism, such dumping of their dignity and imaginations concerning their source.

 

IF BOOKS COULD SAY A FEW THINGS

Why, the books might reply to such scarification (being perhaps a little more articulate than matter, but still only in imagination, like all these naturalistic theories themselves which are thus parodied in such replies),

why do you not see that what BINDS us so that we ARE WHAT WE ARE is not ourselves, and what is similar, is not the PRESENCE of words, but of what they portend, and that these symbols are productions of one which gives their actual usage in our cases just that SENSE of unity which you seek, but will never find, and that for two major reasons. First, our being chosen to be, this is the result of thought, and that is necessary since ours are the elements of understanding, producing results in symbolic and hence meaningful ways; for if we were not comprehensible relative to relevant action, we would not be of interest; but we interest you because we ARE and act, agents in continuity of our author whose knowledge, control and consecutive constructions attest the acme of intelligence and the height of understanding!

WE WERE WRITTEN.

 

Oh no, says the naturalistic purist, in reply, present and meaningful we are, though there be no meaning in anything (admittedly an antilogism, but then we argue with reason in order to remove it, because we have learned to SHRIEK for our calves, our naturalistic idols, and when passion rules, no self-contradiction matters), present I say and meaningful. In fact,

(given to oratory this naturalism),

we admit you books to be, but written ? That is heresy. It cannot happen.

Why, bother the book! It is unscientific to have intelligence DO anything.

Why ?  asks the book.

Because matter is all there is, says the investigator in his perfectly unprejudiced state of captivity, speaking his passion, witless of its irony.

Then what are YOU using ? asks the book, deciding to throw the book at it, in a comprehensive sort of way. Intelligence ? Not much of it that I can see! it says, but in principle, yes. SO you do not believe that you either do or COULD exist ? is that it. To be or not to be has the thumbs down, and you choose not to be: but then, in that case hadn't you better actually DO it, and commit suicide. It is no good not believing you COULD exist if you go on working you know. Contradiction in terms. If you use intelligence to THINK what could and could not be, it is useless to exclude it from your universe in which you humans exist.

Even if you all succeeded ultimately in killing everything with intelligence, such as you and dogs and so forth, then there still would indisputably have been the TIME WHEN such things were, when they had existed. Intelligence is as much a part of the universe as matter's product phase; and spirit as much more, with its will able to be rational or rebellious, captious or capable in the provided powers and formats. You can, as you know, reason or reject reason at will.

There is NOTHING in any of the residues, if you killed intelligence,  to create them, as you find by inspection. As things now are, they are what they are, function for what they are worth, produce in terms provided and often these are nowhere near understood, though their depths continually are the more clearly seen as in any work of magnificent brilliance.

Their forms and organisations are replete with all the qualities of one intelligence, making, machinating, contriving, and doing so no more. YOUR intelligence works because its creator works; and trying to ignore the mode of your institution and to make it some kind of a mode of simply operating on a prepared base in an island of function, is not implicit propriety, but explicit exclusion.

Unless invisible reason has integrity, neither does any argument of yours, nor does any construction have its milieu for thought.

Back of the diversity is institution of the same: without it,  there is no interface; there is no structure differentiation unit for mind, matter and spirit; nor is there any shrouded machinery for the integration of the operation of these three. Before the institution there is, therefore, the execution of a command that anything might be, and being, be of a type that is uniform for manipulation by command, in just one language, ordered to the uttermost and delicately dirigible with the intimacy necessary for such a trilogy of triumph.

When it is done, then all foreign and alien misshaping of the matrix removed by intelligence, foresight, insight and due control, the creation arises as normal, and acts as directed, except when, able to de-recognise its Creator as part of its liberty, they may so act. Some parts, in the human field, do just that, being enabled by the height of their construction to have spiritual power to survey and will, with hatred or hauteur, ambition or deliberate pulling down for satisfaction, of the blinds of delusion.

Short of will however, in the anterior domains, the things so instituted, having what they are given,  do it, being made that way. Inherent is the command to BE, to act in a GIVEN way, to act in ANOTHER given way, and to integrate the diversifications in terms of DESIGN: there is nothing reducible to anything else of the big three, mind, matter and spirit, but each having impact, the one on the other, each is enabling the other to perform its task in the total structure. Then as normal for man in particular, the thing being achieved, the will moves on the surface of the construction, surveying in mind, conveying in thought, purveying in overview, selecting with imagination; and it makes itself felt, for good or for evil. If for evil, then the cost is horrendous, since this is to make war on God.

What practical illustration may one find ? the book proceeded to query. It is like a car, which is not a wonder because of its form, for a wheel or pieces of metal are nothing much by comparison.

Yet because of its purpose and its streamlining of components and plan, process and its provision of control options for the operator, the person provided with such an array of power and individually honed equipment; because indeed of its enormous susceptibility to the user's direction, its mobility AT WILL and BY WILL, and its coherent relationship with the road in particular and space more generally, and its convenience for vision during motion, and revision of motion at will also: we have no provision for doubt or delusion.

Not at all! The vehicle is remarkable. It excludes alternative notation, to that of creation for unitary action and MEANING. If a machined thimble is not susceptible to ambiguity as to its origin, how much less such a vehicle as this automobile. It can act meaningfully because meaning meant it. Meaning requires thought, understanding and purpose capacity. In particular, in general, it is so, for you do not get out what you do not put it, except by magic, a thing which while diverting to the young is irrelevant to thought about actual operation.

Indeed,  just as the computer has control over multiply aligned process, with driver's seat and controls for the driver of the computer and so on, so is man enabled to ACT to institute on the basis of a double derivative (creation of a creation), he being a creature acting on the computer, his creature: except that he may be termed an operator, or less favourable names, depending on his choice of conduct as the driver!
From the first nut, bolt, camber, contour, silicon chip, program, combustion injection contrivance, to the last polish, it is one and designate for action as such: unitary in construction methodology, conception and purpose. The driver is the object of the creation. 

Call him what you will, he operates on the operation complete. This is his equipment alive, and with the will donated so that he may direct himself and his controllable equipment to its meaning as meant, or to its doom as the spent sedition of purpose, abusing its excellent feature for its own destruction. This is the height man never reaches in his own productions, since it involves the creation of spirit, which man uses, but as a self given, cannot make. It is one which is given to him. He can ruminate, investigate, contaminate, but he cannot create spirit such as he habitually uses, any more than a babe can create its own mother. This simply verifies that he is in the image of the Creator, but a created derivative, able to perform stunning exploits, unable to make himself. He is something given.

For man, when he is bent on deleting the very mode and model of his action in the imagination, and of his institution as a creation, this  is irrepressible ruin to logic. It is no accident that irrationality has become popular; for reason rejects myth such as naturalism. It is however no escape, for reason defrauded becomes reason disabled, so that such proponents of irrationalism are without help, suicidal in debate.

Shriek for intelligence but matter will not provide; shriek for analysis, but matter will not think for you. YOU have to use such things. YOU are part of the whole. YOUR will is part. YOUR trilogy, mind, matter and spirit,  is part. Its synthesis is part. YOUR operational ability to see the reason in and the organisation that binds, more and more, and the fact that reason when subordinate to biblical revelation is never stumped, but finds light, these things show not creation at work, but creation worked. (Cf. SMR Ch. 6, TMR Chs. 1, 5, 6, 7, Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will... Ch. 3).

In what way is it worked ? It is seen in the correlation of your capacities, their co-ordination with the facilities of the rest of the creation and the strategic symbolisms, garbed in one linguistic medium, commanded into being by the coherent necessities of thought, its domain, while in turn commanding being for each new generation.

Indeed, reason relishes this biblical revelation, since here likes the key to every mystery of thought, dilemma of philosophy and error of conduct. If you want law without conception, command without comprehension, ingenuity without capacity, magnificence without basis, a myriad of units and sub-units collated in cohesion, manifest in diversities enormous, operability in totality, in the midst of decline in design, erosion of vital displays, then of course you may opt for the antilogies of unreason.

Reason has no such option, needs none, and is satisfied only with a ground adequate, and as in SMR Ch.1, this is found only in one illimitable Creator whose word was indeed active in the creation, as Genesis 1 declares. In this sense, DNA is a contemporary index to the folly of trying to make text mean what it does not say, and to turn the dimensions of history into the plaything of poetry. (Cf. TMR Appendix 1, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9).

What then do we find ? It is this. Operation is never the same as creation. A car, a house, a universe, a law made is not the same as the power to make it deployed in the act of making it. We operate; but operation is a whole casual level below creation of the parts, their mutuality and the integrality of the whole. What is required is what has what it takes. Mere confusion is not an option.

The empirical then ? Just find me a book that no one wrote, directly or indirectly, that none caused to be written! Just find me a result that relinquishes a reason for it, or show me a coded language arriving untaught, unintelligently produced, with neither the person who thinks nor the results of preliminary action from such a source! Why all this talk ? Do it. Are you not to explain what is, rather than your dreams, or is scientific method your sworn enemy!

Books, then, this we are, but first we were written, and both the means of writing and the means for its record were simultaneously required for the operation with the creation of the operability of a code, its relevance to construction and its implementation, reticulation into contrived components conquerable by its orders,  with provision of its matériel,  but parts of the entire program in its necessity.

Creation is like that, immune to dismissal by pugnacious products: logic demands it, reason requisitions it, and dreams deny it. It is for dreaming when you should have your mind on things, that you can be booked for parking illicitly, parking your magic car in a non-magical environment of truth!

So spoke the book.

MAN HAS MIS-SAID NOT A FEW THINGS

So from the early Greeks till now, the desire, the lust, the shrieking for something which will construct itself, as man from fire or water, or a suit from cloth, as cloth from wool, as wool from sheep, as sheep from thin air ... it is desired. Neither 'Nature', that mythical personalisation, nor dream does this however. Such a thought is anti-empirical, exhibiting antilogy as a plague, like marijuana in the mind.

To call into being, institute, cover the case, to create: You simply need to have what it takes, and not to be taken with your fancies.

The folly of it all is seen in this, that Nilsson is aghast, as is Hoyle and Løvtrup, for the motor of Darwinism does not work, and Darwin is dead (cf. Overflight ... Ch. 7, Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 4), its motor always logically ludicrous (cf. SMR pp. 157ff.), with the decisive mockery of empirical fact, exposed as the logical barbarity it always was.

The motor does not work, for it was always as real as those museum monuments to deception which combine bits of things, and make a pretentious and deceitful mock-up for public display (cf. Creation June-August, p. 47, 2001) . You DO NOT in empirical practice or logical thought, in scientific verification or harmony with scientific law either engender new designs, or find them engendered, but merely reach thresholds (cf. Science magazine article May 2001, cited in Creation  Dec. 2001-Feb. 2002, p. 7, referring to obstructive barriers and limits over time, in paleontology), find barriers, both paleontologically and in breeding. Thus KIND is as kind to the truth as these foolish theories are to fantasy.

Death does not create; removal does not initiate; weeding the garden does not make roses; creation is not a derivative of good rubbish collection; survival is not creation, and fancy is not that prodigious power and aptitude which makes unitary language, unitary construction, unitary dirigibility and intricate composure. 'Chance' equals system without purposive intervention; what is needed is the plethora of systems, laws and products, together with their universe in all its profusion of complementarities. We do not need redundancy. We have it, and it is. We need causation for propagation, delimitation, legislation and ... decline. We require therefore creation, not the mere procedures of having been created.

You need not to worry the car, the product, but find the sufficient cause for its creation. Entropy is not kind to creative imagination which does not work for its supper but dreams it up; and so instead, shirking the work, imagines the product.

Hence there are the complete rejections of imagination of this kind. Fact stamps its foot and refuses it, and this is so, whether in the ever increasing revelation of intimate procedures within life, magnificent protein folding or other components, external diversities of kind, irreducible to transition whether in paleontology or type, collisions with scientific laws, whether the 'big three' or that of information decrement, profusions of design types from earlier times now decreasing, not increasing, absenteeism from observability as of means to produce these dreams of naturalism. In short, this same rejection from the domain of data, is drastic, uniform and multipartite. This variety of something from nothing has all the hallmarks of intellectual rapacity, which dies on the sword of logic.

Thus the naturalistic short-circuit has all the obliterative attestation which results,  laid out as one looks, would demand of their causes, with sheer obstinacy to conform to the easy way of dreaming.

How comely it has been,  that Gould has ridiculed the Darwinian motor, since its 'products' are diversified in the utmost profusion at given and almost comprehensive levels at the early phase of the Cambrian in an explosion, on the current read-out of such theories. This spectacular dismissal of Darwin by something beyond his normal non-verification, as in paleontology, noted by Professor W.R. Thompson, and now by antithetical mockery in the Cambrian, was not lost on Gould, even if his own constructions were no better. If the motor is rubbish, irrational contrivance contrary to reason and reality, then what of the absence of motor ?

Gould is left without motor or method, in the midst of nothing as the arbiter and drive, a nonentity which is not really very successful (cf. Wake Up World! Your Creator is coming Ch. 6)! and he seems to be making a great deal out of ... nothing, an earlier attribute of Paul Davies' thought (cf. TMR Ch. 7).

So some are aghast at the end of the Era of Delusion (in THIS regard only), though many still motor on in their childish non-motors, a tribute to human imagination if to nothing else. This era, our own, has followed the Age of (so-called) Enlightenment, of Modernism, Post-Modernism, and it has penetrated like rays of darkness beyond itself.

Others, less aghast but bewildered,  are going half-mast at the funeral of the Darwinian myth, a multiple interment, for with it go the engineers of magic, who devise in the guise of phrases, the functions of creation but find them not at all.

Gould (Wake loc.cit)  is a-blast, but has no fuel, or for that matter, motor. Invisible things proliferate, so long as they are not God, and their current inactivity in creative phases is impactive, though at that, people often want them to be acting anyway, even if there are no visible results. Such is 'science' ? Of course not, for science properly so-called is called to explain what IS, in order to account for it and build a web of understanding which tested, verified, is useful for development. Its part is not that of the irrational or the absurd, as if to pluck from the skies the most skilless antinomies of thought and denial of the observable conceivable!

Shriek for it, then, 21st. century, for you are lost, and cannot find your way. 'Nature' is obstructive to your purpose, as an idol. It makes demands, but it cannot satisfy. Like some fallen woman, maintained in a flat for her adulterous sustainer, it takes, but it does not give.

Shriek for it, like the Israelities of old, determined to find a substitute for the warranted, evidential, verified and only valid realities (cf. TMR Ch. 5, Barbs 6   -7, SMR Chs. 1,3, 10, It Bubbles ...Ch. 9 and see Index).

What is the use of determination to 'get somewhere', when principles being used are imaginary, illicit and wrong (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go! Ch. 23). What is the use of constructing pseudo-gods, ex-evidence, who waft things into place, contrary to verifiable fact , who move in this way though they are not there, or if there, are marvels of understanding and wonders of intelligence, not limited to matter's mindless chores, but capable of addressing it with sophisticated brilliance, though it is never seen! If this is not magic, then what is ?

Man is not made by metaphors or the words of man, but by those of the Being adequate for the purpose of creating liberty and life, thought and spirit, will and want, wisdom and capacity for the erratic, the erotic, or even the despotic, if the defiled spirit of fallen man so desires; and no less,  of presenting the remedy, in prospect, in action, in retrospect, in person. It is only when this is faced, that the face of man finds meaning, the logic of man finds validity and the verification for man finds feet. Nothing else works.

Especially is this so of the endeavours to make by phrases, what requires effort, whether those phrases be 'survival of the fittest', which is as if to say that the genius of the artist comes by his throwing away all the bad ones, or upward mobility, or any other contra-factual imagination. The book is GIVEN, and any upgrading if there were to be any new edition, would require vast understanding and enormous effort, so that if you had the wisdom in the first, far better to make it at the beginning, right.

Such is the testimony of reason and the empirical alike, for design types depart, do not accrue! The world is worried because it cannot make its wilful witlessness work. Well it might be, for the cause of consciousness and the constructor of spirit has given with unrestrained freedom, having no need, being constrained by no system; and the lying vanities of the idols of man, these divorce from source, and create havoc. It is in this sense, that man might claim to be a creator!

 

What is it but creation when a Being of functionalities so construed from the works, and so defined by the necessities of valid thought, other than 'nature' operates to make it ? As we see continually further as we proceed, ALL that creation is, is exhibited; NOTHING that non-creation provides is verified; and so, as is usual in definition, having the characteristics which require the one, and lacking those which permit the other, the terminology is determined. Creation is quite simply the case. Words do not have to be divorced of meaning in order that someone not liking God can have the grumps. As to that, it is precisely the biblical message on the point.

God, as Ecclesiastes 7:29 declares, made man upright, but he has formed many devices! Yes, his life is alienated from God (Ephesians 4:17-19), even to the point of making imaginary ones, so indulging the desire to worship, a natural grant of our condition, in a perverse alternative (Deuteronomy 32:15ff., Romans 1, Acts1:22ff., Revelation 9).

We have considered PROGRESS, that magical push which people try so often to invent in the ways of life, rather than to observe in the progressive deposition at the outset, current finding merely no funding for the continuing progress, but rather regress. Now let us consider the other side, the initial invention of life.

Here the same negativity is in place. You might as well make ingenious suggestions about how you learned to read without a brain, or to think without a mind or to plan without a will. Let us however see how parallel is the dysfunction of the irrelevant, passionately presented, as if an oaf should seek the hand of a Princess, in the area of life at the start.

What then do we find ? It is this. Man cannot so contrive 'nature' that it becomes the equivalent of a personally equipped being, disposing constructions, investing creations, exposing brilliances innumerable, offering integralities, so that myriads of components are fashioned to perform as one being, and the like. He can find no WAY that this would happen, duplicate no MEANS for this to happen, find no EQUIPMENT in nature which verifiably makes it happen, work out no scenario for its occurrence. 'Nature' remains as oafish for any such purpose, as a cylinder head for creation of tyres. It is a silly question to ask, and the answer is as lordly in disdain as the enquiry immune to logical and empirical reality.

Every effort to invent oddities, such as those of Darwin, where NOT having propulsion is the imagined means for getting it, or dying out is the method of creation, simply fails as logically could be seen before hundreds of years of 'research' showed it to be so; and Gould after a long line of theoretical arsonists, simply explodes the myth with éclat. Left bereft, and not without apparent relief, however, his own means of production are zero, his punctuation being fine, but lacking means for the sentences in-between.

 

EXCURSION on the MILL that Gave No Bread

Life is not neo-matter nor is micro-biology uningenious

Just as every avenue is closed, and that emphatically, as endeavour is made to force matter to declare its mentality and its ingenuity in origination, and just as logic denies success to what lacks the means, or access to myth or magic as the ground; and just as in the functionality, the equipment and the record, in terms of the grosser kind, a pall of smoke attests the devastation of mere imagining, that lazy option, so in microbiology it is no different.

As Denton remarked (see Ch. 4 above):

"molecules, like fossils have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology.”

Moreover of the molecular level, one recalls, he declared this,  

"their arrangements and character show mathematical precision, definitive design unlike gradational concepts".

Would you expect a Swiss watch to be an affair of plasticity ? It is child's play compared with this. Plasticity is not in the stars, but in the framework invented and deposited, each area and avenue, each arena indeed exposing what is its own intrinsic capability, as when many modifications of ride and tempo can be achieved in a car, but not the exposition of the vehicle into verse.

There are things rational, and things irrational. The diversification procedures are many, varied, and continually being better realised; but they are just that, not creation! That requires the understanding and the facility of symbolic, sustained, preserved, coherent, practical, energised executive and coded constructions beyond the best human minds.

The barriers are immense, intense, in complexity and in structure; and they count as we have seen, not only in the vast concourse of top biological pronouncement about the empirical lack of any evidence at the grosser level of advance, not merely in the information theory denial of the very concept, not alone in the logical exclusion of effects dwarfing the causes categorically, not singly in the molecular divisions in their acuteness and non-alignment with gradational theory, not just in the exquisite and all but unending mathematical, structural, ingenious and compressed data storage, application and movement through stored command to new equipment of the kind preceding.

No, they count also in this, that the very endeavour to make life, not merely pair its finger nails, or move about its organs, inserting genes or removing, with intelligence of a rarefied kind, with persistence that spans the scores of years, with desire that naturalism naturally inculcates into the hearts of its devotees: this is an utter failure.

In this regard, Dr Jerry Bergman, one of the most degree adorned of academics, in the Technical Journal, Volume 18(2), 2004 reviews three things in connection with this non-connection, this endeavour to falsify the law of biogenesis, which declares that life comes from life.

The first is this: that all efforts have failed, and that the Miller-Urey experiment, when analysed, sketches out the profundity and grounds of failure in a monumental way.

Secondly, there is growing despondency, at least at the practical level, where efforts in this field are becoming increasingly disregarded and de-glamorised.

Thirdly, in effect, the point is made that slight as was the Miller experiments' attainment for anything to be called life, this being merely a marginal contribution  at a component level whereas the crux is far higher: yet even this minimal modicum has been made by intervention and control, purification and removal of byproduct, assumption and exclusion, so that it might appear a testimony to desire more than to performance. 

For these things, he supplies abundantly detailed attestation. On p. 31, he summarises:  that Miller produced and used pure compounds that are not normally found in life. Otherwise, his apparatus would have produced many destructive cross-reactions.


"Therefore, Miller had to remove many contaminants and impurities to obtain pure compounds." After all, if you mix petrol vapour and air, and do not bother to produce the right container, you get explosive destruction, not propulsion. Everything in its designate place is the procedure of intelligence, the essence of design and the outflow of vision. This is the name of what has this result, the criterion of what exhibits such integrality of feature and the requisite for what moves in this order of correlative consensus in the way of disposability as one unit.

Bio-chemistry, he points out, at this level has sensitive reactivities which are not charmed into existence by indifference. Again, "Miller stopped his experiment after just a few days, but if it had been allowed to go on, would the compounds he produced be destroyed or would they produce more complex amino acids ? Research on Murchison meteorites found that natural conditions produce compounds much like Miller's, and the result is stable."

This, he indicates, shows that further time would not produce any new products. Further, these experiments produced many products aside from amino acids, resulting "in a sticky mass that was actually further from the building blocks of life than were the postulated original precursor chemicals. "

After all, omit the traps and the exclusions, include what is not artificially given chemical purity, and you get the products that come from a system without intervention, interference, direction or control. You get the reverse chemical reactions, the destructive environment, the contaminating tars and the drive of entropy. Further you have to restrict combining opportunities, since the desired result is otherwise apt to be derailed, combinations being made freely in more than the desired direction. In short, purity, direction, collection, removal, oxygen-free environment, all this is needed, and even then you get a TOTAL failure for life's left-handed variety of orientation (cf. SMR p. 214).

The oxygen itself, however, is as Bergman points out, increasingly attested in early environments through the presence of oxidised materials in the pre-Cambrian geological strata; and volcanic emissions suggest carbon dioxide, monoxide environment in great abundance, whereas Miller's imagined gases, methane, hydrogen and ammonia are losing ground as abundant constituents of that atmosphere. Given, however, the intelligent intrusion and the abstraction of thought, rather than the control of actualities, Miller of course did not even begin to produce life, merely biochemically making a simple constituent, one without direction, collation, programming information, DNA, RNA, or any of the ingredients of cell life.

Let us reconsider further,  this return to childhood, when this crucial and typical feature of singularity and selection in actual life, is ignored, from Dayspring.

CHILDHOOD IS LOVELY, BUT DREAMS ARE NOT THE STUFF OF SCIENCE:
AS FOR REALISM, IT RELATES TO REALITY

Simply as an illustration of this principle of discontinuity so stressed by Dr Michael Denton as the empirical fact for life, let us consider the famous Miller experiment concerning its production. The work of Stanley Miller is given very due attention by John Mackay*1A, international lecturer with Creation Research, Queensland. In his fascinating video series, much used in schools in American schools, and filmed in a Canadian High School, he shows the relevant matters with an excellent questing method. One of his points of course is that there is a left-handed orientation (L-H), spatially, of living molecules of protein, whereas those not associated with life tend to be statistically neutral, L-H, and R-H, and to move to that condition, when the tissues concerned have died.  Such is the almost universal nature of protein. Accordingly, almost all enzymes are geared to such a situation. Leave an unguided production schedule, and you get half of the right, half of the left.

The Miller experiment is of interest as an analogy to life, by contrast, and thus a useful teaching device for highlighting some of its features. Thus Miller sought by using electric discharges, and various inorganic chemicals with methane ("marsh gas"), to form "life", in order to show, presumably, that it is a NATURAL derivative from NATURAL products which lack life.

As with Pasteur's work when it was thought germs would arise as NATURAL products of NATURAL forces, given rain and air and the like, however, this was not scientific. Only life producers life, and Pasteur dealt a death-blow to the fly-by-night excursions in imagination by showing this to be what was happening in the case in point. Spontaneous generation of life is not the observable case, any more than the theoretical, verified case in experimental situations; for things do not work that way, and you do not reap what you have not sown.

All chemicals have natural propensities to do this and that under various conditions, in various combinations, because they have laws and characteristics such that given A, in condition B, you get C. Cause and effect work with simple ease, although the equations can be exceedingly complex. Give some electric discharge in a suitable mixture, hence adding energy in a forceful mode, remove certain chemicals which result  (see SMR 41, 120ff., 129ff., 171, 209ff.,222, 251-252A, 252Kff., 326-327, 422Eff., and That Magnificent Rock, pp. 227-230, 256-257), in a chemical ‘trap’, and you can forward the movement of certain reactions, no longer ‘damped’, retarded, inhibited by reverse action which tends to destroy the product.

That means this: that given intelligence, its application, certain chemicals and energy, with a special abstractive feature, a trap, you can produce new chemicals. There is nothing entirely amazing about that; it is routine. The chemicals formed in this manner, in this case were amino-acids, which are used in the replicative, organised and sequential series of actions governed by DNA in the case of life. It is like saying, Plastic is like skin, skin is associated with life, and we can make plastic; so life is really accounted for in this way.

It is not so much that it is illogical; it is irrational. Plastic is not skin; it is not living; it does not replicate itself when damaged; it is not a part of a totality with programs attached. As a case of reductionism it would serve admirably for a lecturer in the black arts of false logic, and is commended for this purpose, and for this alone!

EVEN IF plastic could successfully masquerade as skin, it is not in our illustration, formed by chance; EVEN IF it could be suggested that certain products might assemble by chance, to revert to our Miller case, the scientific abstraction of products to enable the continuation of the forward production of the amino-acid is not chance, but intelligence.

Even if this were disregarded, the amino-acid does not ‘live’. It does not have ONLY left-handed, spatial orientation in its amino-acids as is the case with life. As Mackay points out, the 50% averaging of the right and left-handed varieties of amino acids is characteristic of death. Time does not alter it. It merely constrains it. It is something towards which  dead tissue moves; and it is that which plain non-living, non-residual material exhibits.

This universal criterion of life is thus absent in the Miller product. His is a different product; it is formed by intelligence, it lacks programming, it does not replicate, it is not integrated in a organised matrix which supplies its own energy, form, cell-casement for survival, and replicative means or directive DNA. In every one of these respects, it is non-life, characterised by non-life. It is dead: not a very vital contribution to life.

That apart, it is not EVEN shown that what is NOT LIFE by MULTIPLIED and ALL essential criteria, forms when left without the artful intervention in the productive process by the organic chemist, who however dull, is scarcely to be compared with the unformulated processes of chemical nature! If to form a hammer is to make a computer, well; but it is not even the hammer, the tool which is here shown formed, but merely the metal, as it were, on which intelligence could work. If it did, then a tool is made by intelligence. The experiment shows that if it does, and often enough, and with enough understanding, then … you still do not get life. Surely unsensational…
 

The dreams of man. They are so varied and so interesting; and as Jung empirically showed, they often indicate the desire for a 'lift' into some form of resolution, and here they do just that. Without God, they want His products, do not get them in space, or in the laboratory, or in theory or in practice. But they still dream, and sometimes do it in space probes to Mars, in life probes in laboratories, seeking for seeds without seeds, life without directions, assemblages without assembler, vitality without foundation, as though imagination were back to child-hood stages.

In this sense, it is as if ONE form of evolution really did occur, backwards, the reversion to childhood; but since even that is part of a formed, organised whole, even this is not in the field at all, even in reverse! What we have here is simple regression along the line of life, in undisciplined imagination of children, grafted onto the learning of man, to misuse the former and to debase the latter.

 

Experiments must be such, not surreptitious works of unnatural chemistry, fitted out by crusading bio-chemists. Consider in review.

You set up not what you think will work; but what has this to do with what has no aid whatsoever from the end of the experiment, imported into the beginning by intelligent, purposive thrust, not from the nature of things, but of man! He was not around, on the scenario in view; in the current one, he is very much there.

Again, Miller had a chemical trap to remove unwanted ingredients, since the chemistry is such that the disintegration of the desired acids becomes faster than the formation, so that even if there were any formed, it would be evacuated with more speed yet. It is like having bigger bills continually than profits, and trying to find how you can upgrade. It is futile.

Thus, reverting directly to the contribution of Dr Bergman, in the Technical Journal, p. 31, we find "The Miller-Urey experiment also had strategically designed traps to remove the products from the radiation before they could be destroyed. On a primitive earth, any amino acids formed in the atmosphere would be destroyed long before they could be removed." UV light in particular, he points out, has a destructive index four to five times higher than constructive for amino acids! Heat also is destructive in this case, and when high degrees of heat are is hypothesised, he points out, for the formation of proteins, this is also to invoke the means of destruction means, in the naked unprotected case in view. Water ?

Even this, in vaporous form, a frequent additive from volcanic action,  is not conducive to the formation of inter-amino acid bonds, called peptides. Bergman indicates "the strong thermodynamic tendency is for the peptide bonds to break down in water, not to form." Enzymes are needed: the average protein, meanwhile ? It is composed of some 400 amino acids.

System, as always, is needed, constructive means for construction. You do not make orchids in a blast furnace, or delicate originals in vulnerable emplacements. The conceptions that have come are an eloquent testimony to the assiduity of the drive, the passion towards the avoidance of the realities: which like most passions, tends to occlude the obvious. Depth is no help, in water; nor is concentration available in the deep. Ponds are available to the light, depth to the water; and the reaction equilibrium points in such upward movement, face the left-leaning dissociative movement, contrary to formation, far more to successive, delicate, complex integration. Dilution, pollution, energy, heat, radiation, oxygen to build amino acids in which it inheres, oxygen to destroy them - for such an environment would be "devastating for Miller-type proposals."

What is it like ? It resembles a proposal to build hygienic nappies in an industrial smog.

All forms of energy can disrupt protein, Bergman points out, including those postulated to be important in the myth of abiogenesis, such as UV and lightning.  Miller, he indicates, screened out wave-lengths which would have been destructive. This ? it is intelligence or nature! He ADDS pure ingredients, he SUBTRACTS dangerous ones, he ASSUMES no oxygen, which now is strongly indicated form primitive compound analysis, and he PRODUCES something NOWHERE near to life.

As an expensive way of showing what a biochemist can manage, it is both unspectacular and unenlightening.

Energy does not create life any more than an electrical connection creates cars, once it is linked to a factory. Causally, you need all the contrivances and the gifts of understanding for manipulation of symbols; you need correlation of symbol of execution, for to speak is wonderful, but not so much so if nobody can listen and you need capacity for making such contrivances meaningful to each other, capable of continuity over millenia within bounds, and of landing into their own midst, the materials for operation; for it is no use making cars if steel of the right kind is not presented at the right interface at the right time with the right skills to do the right things to make it right to specification.

Just as the construction is contra-indicated in ludicrously inadequate imagined initial material, so the destruction in what Dr. A.E. Wilder Smith refers to as the left-tending equations, those more dissociative than associative in equilibrium, is deadly no less (cf. SMR p. 171 together with glossary reference). Things do not so associate in this ascending vertical manner.

You must ACT to make material progress, and even then, when you take what is THERE, just as in genetics and breeding, there are LIMITS to what can be achieved even in the realm of variety. Imagination is not an adequate correspondent in such things; you need the empirically actual! It does not arrive any more than a sandal arrives on a beach, by natural processes. The co-ordinative is incomparable with the dissociative, which envelops.

Bergman cites the famed Karl Popper, of London University, in his dictum that the problem is crucially this, that the genetic code is without any function without translation, to the actual procedures indicated in the code, being done. The means of 'translation', execution, are made by the code; and hence you not only have the 'riddle' that, in any progressive conception of the construction of the cell, a major component has to be present as a result, before the beginning is operable, but that both have to be there before anything can happen. Further, the result is what makes it - so important in construction - HAPPEN!

When you asked how a genius comes to be, and were to find that you need one to make one, you would be wholly irrelevant in any concept of what has produced genius! You posit it to 'create' it, in one more myth of the mind that represses the creation of the systematic in which all the components are operative mutually, since that is what creation does, and non-creation does not.

To each product, there is a plasticity and a reactivity, within its milieu; and beyond this comes the line of demarcation which arises from the simple fact that a product is not intelligence, when it is mere chemical, and it is not imaginative. It simply works within the parameters and provisions given to it, and exists by being what it is: matter. It is not the stolidity of the inanimate that is needed, but the functionality of mind.

Experimental science CAN only say Amen, and does so, except when the 'science' part is removed; for this, it is incontestable empirical fact. Things do not invent, but exhibit, and what they exhibit is what they are rendered capable of doing, each according to kind.

Energy does not advance, but occasions means; explosion does not advance, but occasions injury; what is not in a system does not advance, since it is not there to do it. What is in a system does what it is capacitated to do, and not something of the nature of designatory excursion, symbolic logic invention or imaginative discursion.

That is the fact, in causative considerations, paleontological observations, allegedly ancient deposits abounding design types, and sub-types contemporaneously as Gould observes in his Cambrian expeditions, as also in the case of information science: all in one. Neither building to plan, nor Information accretion HAPPENS. Information deteriorates, as Professor Gitt's challenge makes so public. Non-intelligence does not create it, any more than any other structurally vertical marvel.

Otherwise it is created by intelligence. Its parameters are set; its requirements are clear; its testimony is undiversified. Materials are just that; not minds.

Nothing moves, except to diversify about a kind. That is what was said in the beginning and is found at the end. The word of God in the Bible*3, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth is attested in two ways: the removal of each endeavour to obviate it, and the exposure of each field as a witness.

You need it all: protein protection, cell cover, prepared ingredients, enzymes, exclusion of some byproducts, of many common ingredients, direction of co-ordinations, and no one has even begun to create life DESPITE elaborate provisions to restrict as far a possible all the devastating conditions and enable as far as possible, all the adequate provisions.

The Miller experiment involves some of the simple sub-units, amino acids, like bricks, before the question of design and kind, placement and function, integration with many other features and making of the major wings and steel emplacements so much as commences. It precedes all plan and the point of plan, and the nature of the house. It succeeds much planning and intelligent intrusion, and in no way imitates 'nature'.

If someone decided that the ability to make bricks of some kind or other, make him a great architect, this would resemble the concept that the Miller experiment related to life 'arising'. A fortiori, and in fact, it did not even make bricks on the natural basis in view, but most unnaturally invaded the situation with many provisions for purity and removal, which makes it a mere intelligence experiment, and one not so liberally endowed with that. This is one of the many testimonies to the obscuration of desire, and the danger of passion; and this is the more so, when God is to be excluded, while other things are to be included, both by prior mandate.

Small wonder Bergman in the article in view,  indicates that Miller 50 years on acknowledged he was no nearer his goal than before.

It is rather like trying to build a shopping centre on a salary of $100 per week, and capital of $1000, when the initial costs turn the capital to vast debts, and the ongoing costs turn the salary into comedy. It cannot be done like that. You need what it takes. You need at the least, a creative genius, in the case of life, far beyond the power of man, who can merely copy; for here, there is origination resulting in man and his ways, a sheer magnificence in creating creativity itself in man, the sheer wonder in creating will (cf. Predestination and Freewill).

Even at the simple material level, you need a chemical protectorate or protection agency, a disposition in dynamic contemporaneity in the normal creative way, so that the various provisions and procedures and protections and inputs and outputs and machineries for each of these things, are all in order and functioning together. At the actual level, in the naturalistic myth, you need in the main, what is absent in entirety (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5, SMR pp. 348ff.).

Ponder a moment the ways of living material. Let us abstract and simplify in order to regard elemental matters, so often lost in the fog of the brilliance of the techniques used in life.

The reason the cell has its own energy section for making this commodity is that it needs it, for its action to proceed, for life and for reproduction. As in a factory, you are creating and moulding, merging and uniting in highly specific ways which do not happen on their own - that is why you built it. Otherwise, entropy acts. You counter it.

Again, the reason why the cell has DNA is that it needs it to continue life, since cells are not eternal by nature. The reason for its having enzymes is that it needs them to secure this performance of intricate tasks as commanded and in dynamic equivalence with other actions, to match and merge. Remove the products of life, involved in these gifts to the system of the cell, remove the proteins, gift of life, and you remove the means of life: it cannot go on. As it is presented: without life's products you cannot have life. Life must be borne into life's products to be living. Results of life are needed for the production of life. This is extensively discussed in the work of the noted biochemist, Dr A.E. Wilder Smith in his Man's Origin, Man's Destiny.

Let us be simply empirical. What ONLY life produces is needed for life to exist. Its equipment requires what its equipment solitarily produces. Thus both are needed or none are obtained. In vain does one consider various imaginary 'stages' in the production of the cell: NONE is evidenced. As Denton points out, there IS NO simple cell, but the most lowly is a veritable treasure of magnificence of intricacy and complexity. What is needed for life, is provided by life, and by nothing else visible at all.

Thus there are no stages. If there were, show them! If you can have it without following the only paradigm, show it. If you can have controls without DNA and its associated elements in the cell, DO IT. If you can have the blueprint without the messenger and action elements, such as RNA, perform it. Do it better. Why all this talk ? Science is to explain what HAPPENS, not to talk endlessly of what does not.

Let us however revert to Dr Bergman's outstanding article.

Miller's experiment, he concludes after a review including the points so stressed by John Mackay earlier re the chemical trap and what is termed the homochirality of life (the Left-handed specialisation in protein orientation), and some elements such as Dr A.E. Wilder Smith noted  in his Man's Origin, Man's Destiny,  and extending the coverage with fascinating depth with more ingredients of technical nature, DOES have a contribution. Its multiple defects and ultimate failure, since it produced nothing in the least like life, is this, that it helps people "better to understand why life could not have emerged naturally."

It is like an array of why a factory with electricity and no workman, and no book, and no specifications, does not produce cars. You can leave it as long as you like, but what is needed to overcome entropy is knowledge, intelligence, selection programs, rejection provisions, quality control, purity of ingredients, the right environment and the concatenation of qualities by astute manipulation until you get something so projected, so ordered and so protected that it will get you places until it rusts out.

 

THE UNHOLY GRAIL

It is a task indeed to find what is not there. The god of forces doesn't go for you need far more. People seek, but do not find; speak, but do not verify; talk, but do not walk; imagine but do not confirm; imagine everything but produce nothing, in this realm of the creation. It is a habit so bad that it is becoming part of the funeral weeds for the interment of the race. It is well that the Creator has made arrangements that whosoever will may come, and provided the inlet for the output of the saints, the Redeemer (cf. SMR Ch. 1). Thus, though the topic may appear desolatory, a sort of Hiroshima of the waywardness of man, the truth is delightful, for this is mere pathology; health is available.

Let us consider, now,  where we have reached and ponder its significance.

It is a tremendous testimony to the precise accuracy of Paul's declaration in the Lord's name in Romans 1:17ff., about man holding down the truth like a wrestler, being alienated from God, and turning from creator to creature in a foolishness that is epochal and inheriting divine wrath. CONTINUALLY the human race does JUST the sort of thing required to invent magnificences of creation; and our own construction by which we work, it is vastly beyond all of this, but our powers are adequate to allow us to see the kind of work required, and our capacities are adequate to let us realise the kind of input necessary.

Yet instead of worshiping the vastly superior and unlimited being on which it all depends, the exquisite brilliance of the format of material atoms and compounds included, bricks which themselves are marvels of composition, involving vast depths of understanding which even now man merely limps after in his efforts to comprehend: instead of this, man in millions upon millions worships himself, matter or ANYTHING that is not God.

In this way, the Gentiles nations show themselves truly worthy successors of the follies of ancient Israel in doing precisely this, saying to a Stone, You are my Father (Jeremiah 2:23), or seeking to worship ‘new gods, newly come up’ (Deuteronomy 32:17); and thus the Gentile Age is getting its come-uppance as did in history of that marvel in history, the Jewish people whose existence and vicissitudes are better than any sermon from science. As to that history, it is intimate, personal, propositional performance in exact conformity to what God told them at the first, to the last, and the scope is several millenia.

If then Israel has been dispersed, there is nowhere left to BE dispersed for the Gentiles, now that their time has come, and their world is ready for rebuke at this same categorical level, because of inveterate folly, graceless rebellion and inane self-vaunting, first of this race or that, and now of the human race, than which little could be more ludicrous.

GIFTS ? yes. We did not compile them. They do not empirically or logically or in terms of the major scientific laws, make themselves. The opposite occurs, and has occurred in the realm of biota in particular, as Gould shows, to a vast degree. Imagination, on this earth it is the only precursor of life, and that, it is to be found in the mind of man, who does not make it!

We as a race have misused the gifts we possess to the point that the word atrocity scarcely is enough, and Belsen is not needed, the case is on all sides; and where it is not murder and maiming, it is maiming of the minds, as found in the naturalistic tyrannies in schools and colleges, which leave intelligent life close to desolate; and there it is not that of minds, it is that of spirits, as in so many so-called churches which use the Bible for credentials, and then attack it for kicks, or people or whatever else may be the always non-rational ground for such contradictory conduct.

Gifts ? yes we are clever, to a point, when foolishness does not devastate as the last century has shown, that we  produce confusion and atrocity, folly and vanity, pride and strutting, threat and counter-threat, misunderstanding both intentional and unintentional, and calumniate the race by a contempt for life. This we produce in our own contribution as a race, to spiritual entropy; but this, it is able to receive dynamism from devilry, far beyond the bestial, and so it goes to its appointed place.

Men are with increasing predictability, reacting  against that learning which truth, declaring it true that there is no truth; while the means of manipulation in chemistry and psychology, are traced as if this were the most important thing in the world. The price of integrity, sold, is meaninglessness in the heart and judgment due and with marked escalation, becoming visible in this world, the former as an inward penalty, the latter as the ultimate destiny. Moreover, the escalation of manipulation as a philosophy, and the rejection of truth as a criterion, means that power is threatening the globe as never before.

So does 'Nature', that personification in idolatry, become a shroud for vanity, and naturalism, the singly most appalling misuse of scientific method, one hopes at least, even conceivable, one of its pall-bearers.

How vain are man's increasingly shrieked for idols! What NEVER works in ANY adventure, at WHATEVER cost, and what defies all reason and defaces all logic, what is contrary to all verification and any validity, is insisted upon, till even some of its devotees mock others, or challenge them now at this point, now at that, like Løvtrup and Nilsson, Gould and Goldsmith, Hoyle, and Denton who with these, solemnise the death of Darwinism, while others expose it from outside, with acumen and reality: like Professor W.R. Thompson, and Gould, like Gish, Gitt and Sarfati, and some of the most academically adorned of mortals, like Bergman and Wilder Smith, E.H. Andrews, each contributing an aspect of refutation, protesting and exhibiting the follies at the technical level.

But man in his masses does not listen, for he prefers what C.S. Lewis calls the Great Myth, the inveterate movement  of progress, forgetful of the myth's conclusion in disaster. His title for the thought: The Funeral of a Great Myth*1. This lifeless lift, this rolling progress, this articulation from the inarticulate, wit h all its pretended goodness, as means of devastation multiply to allow survival for the cause. It is nonsense. It is inapplicable. There are costs for delusion, and inane projections of culture. As to this myth, in its simplistic furore, it does not happen. It is simply ... dead. Millions have died in its jaws.

 Nil desperandum, they cry, as they throw another irrelevant die, and the flower of a generation dies with the dice. Let us however return to our soup course.

Bergman, Gish and Mackay all stress the artifices of artificiality, intelligence not 'nature' in the little biochemical contribution of Miller. What is implicit in even the most marginal and all but irrelevant degree of approach made in the Miller experiments, is just that application of intelligence, interference and design and purpose manipulation which is in accord with the Law of Biogenesis. Here was life, in this case, human life,  trying to make life; but it was done not on an accurate or actual analogy of 'nature', but in terms of life's knowledge and its application; and it was a failure the totality of which is now more apparent as the extent of the omissions comes to read more like an encyclopedia.

For such zeal, misplaced and almost compulsive, he supplies attestation in this famed experiment, and he notes that in the end, the tarry residue is further from life than the original chemicals employed. Intelligence has not managed to create life, but if it did, it is apparent that the degree of control would be prodigious and sensitive, the intervention would be systematic and intelligent, the codes would be ingenious and beyond man's knowledge in their various prodigies of astuteness, for man is even now only beginning to unravel some of the non-DNA directions and their varied and deft interventions, provisions and intrusion.

It may be convenient to some readers here to parallel this with earlier statements from Dr Duana Gish, seen in SMR pp. 129-130.  The material is somewhat extended in this adaptation for our purpose.

Wilder Smith covers the case by pointing out that it is not merely a matter of having the collocation of various thousands of specialised molecules. These materials are matters repeatedly of equilibrium products, involved in reversible chemical reactions. They do not stay happily stable and in place. Indeed, 'the longer the molecules are exposed to random forces, the wider will become their random distribution...' he says, p. 67 of Man's Origin, Man's Destiny. Time merely allows the interstices of a system opportunity to show themselves, and its character to manifest itself: it does not in itself alter them. Entropy not invention is the nature of the case, and systems are similarly subject to loss of information, as Gitt whose field this is, has so strikingly insisted.

They do not invent information. In vain do we look for such inventiveness in the inanimate; such accretions in biota design. Decrement is the decisive factor. (Cf. SMR p. 252H).

What does NOT continue in declining kind, since the foundation of the world, is man's sin; for although it has been of one kind since the start, the kind that fitted the specific designed capacity for abuse of the system given to man at the first, yet it has developed with all the specious insidiousness that intelligence, the gift to man along with potential for the exercise of spirituality and morality, together with abstraction, could produce. As to life however, in its material provisions, it does not advance, and its decline is less remarkable, though certainly massive, as Gould insists.

 In this field, we may see also p. 325 infra and Gish in his Speculations and Experiments Related to Theories on the Origin of Life.  On pp. 12 ff. of this work, Dr. Gish indicates earlier problems and impasses in contemplation of life processes: there is no organic chemist in the postulated primeval period to remove the other byproducts of imagined processes, to trap the desired substances or deter the destructive dynamic of the 'undesired' forces:

The tendency of organic chemists to remove the products of their reactions from energy sources used for their synthesis before significant destruction of these products can take place is understandable. There would have been no organic chemists present, however, on the primitive earth to accomplish this and products once formed would have been subjected to the destructive forces of electric discharges, heat, or ultraviolet light responsible for their synthesis.
 

Progressive equilibria in possible organic chemical reactions being far to the left or dissociative side, Smith points out, the overall trend is to destruction, not construction, more entropy, not less. We are going uphill without a motor, when the natural direction is down.

Successive enzymes are needed to achieve any degree of concentration, and a 'motor' to provide the energy of construction: and yet , while the cell provides this, 'a protein metabolic motor', it is needed before the cell comes, in any naturalistic suggestion, since without it, life is neither maintained in energy (being rather continually in need), nor extracted in directional thrust. It would depart before arrival, or cease even if it could arrive; indeed, it requires enzymes for any significant association at all, much more for complexities bordering on reality, and much more for their coded commands, and much more for their executive direction in practical reality, and much more for the energy plant in the cell, to provide the thrust, and even more to cover the whole with a protective device, such as a cell wall, to enable its coherence, cohesion and non-disintegration.

In other words, in the natural system, essential substances for life are made only by life, and if any commencement were to come, these would be needed to enable it to ... live. Are the byproducts of life to become its wet-nurse, when in life, only life produces them ? If the son to become the father ? the daughter the mother ? What new kind of genesis and generics is in
view ? As so often noted, it is magic, where things are ... different from the case in the real world.

That is the empirical testimony, and none other exists.

Gish further cites Hull who 'considers not only the rate of formation of organic compounds but also the rate of decomposition, pointing out that energy sources invoked for their synthesis are much more effective in decomposing them' (op.cit., p. 12).

Even oxygen would be summarily fatal, as would U.V. light without cover ... progressively so, first in the atmosphere, and then in the water, itself an agency of destruction for unprotected poly-peptide links. The case becomes even more extreme, when more delicate and complex molecules are in view. Dispersion then merely dismisses the cast, while dissociation removes its platform. The double-edged sword of undirected forces cuts, so to speak, heads as well as hair.

First, then, our concern is with the situation where cells exist, complete with protective cell coating and coherent quantities of complexly ordered and organised factory systems of enzymes to execute and stimulate, and DNA to direct and contain plans and programs, mutually adjusted. Materials must be directed on the 'assembly line' to the waiting arms of enzymatic workers, under the direction of DNA management and any other.

It is all or nothing. It is not only

 irreducible complexity, but

indivisible integrity,

indissoluble co-operation,

inter-and intra-systematic proliferation,

coherence of logic and symbolic notation with
executive receptors, skilled to catch meaning and execute orders, 

continuity of sequence from

connotation, to denotation, to implementation,

in a series of systematics incomprehensible except in totality

(indeed see SMR pp. 332Gff., Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, in End-notes,    and   for further considerations!).

The path of true reductionism, false to science, of course, is always to ignore what you have got, and to explain what is not there. It is however the essence of the challenge to meet the case as it is, in all of its sequential, symbolic, integral and mutually intimate and pervasively singular procedures, whether in code type, implementation, co-ordination or exuberance of methodology; and to do so in a world which likes energy for construction and time for destruction. The other point about the construction ? it is direction. The third ? something to do as directed. In this world, and by any form of valid logic, the specifications of life parallel the requisites of intelligence with available power.

The result, life, it matches nothing but mind, requires nothing less than something as far beyond mere genius as the heavens above the earth, requisitions an artist, artificer and maker down to the last electron and the least of the biota. Paintings do not paint themselves, Raphaels do not come by omission of the artist, and life is as far beyond these things in what it demands, as a genius beyond a talented toddler.

The perspectives and nuances of art, its undertones and its overtones, its sentiments and its modes of communications to receptors called human beings, who may decide to pretend not to like it as a competitive device, such is their programmatic liberty of will in certain arenas: these do not arise from what does not cognise them; but only in what goes far further than that. It must with enterprise not only appreciate but perform, and not only perform, but meaningfully perform, and activate the executive elements of the body of the artist to ensure that the result actually appears; and that the way in which it does so can be 'read'. Art is merely one facet of life. ALL functions must be accounted for in any reputable endeavour to present its basis.

As soon as one discovers one phase, feature or facet of human life in particular, there are realities within, meanings beyond, there is all the grooming of a thorough-bred horse, all the intestinal reality of a cathedral, the coherence of a great speech, the intricacy of superb mathematics, the intimacies as of love, such is the subtlety and the inter-dimensional as well as intra-dimensional sophistication, as if intelligence were easy, and brilliance a manner of life.

As if ? THIS is the testimony. If someone places a new Boeing 747 on your drive-way, it is not as if it had been built! It is not the nature of life, or logic, to give output without input; and what we see now as the centuries progress, is no more input, but the same residual decrement. In design terms, there is to be found, as Gould emphasises, DECREASING residue. The progress of centuries in this system is the regress of design types. What is needed is simply NOT NATURE. It needs its author.

There is vast loss of the remains of output, one not now to be found, as is natural in creations, which tend to dissipate. As with creation in this world generally, on the part of human participants, this decrease follows the vast effort of bringing things to be; and as that is distanced,  forces work to the detriment of what one has made. All this is precisely as the Bible depicts (Isaiah 51:6 for example), and it is simply anti-scientific to dismiss the enduringly correct, and uniquely present solution, while appealing to the calamitously non-verified imaginations of the heart, which dismiss the eyes and dispense with their testimony.

That is quite literally anti-science, what is biblically called knowledge falsely so-called, one of the chief dimensions of that falsetto spuriousness, which infects much of modern 'science' to its profound detriment and everlasting shame. Do not misunderstand, science has not done this, for on its method as shown in SMR pp. 149ff. and TMR Ch. 1, this is the result: creation is indicated irrevocably by all the criteria of scientific method. It is the work of some who name 'science' as their trade or profession.

Scientific method is clear, and delightfully sure in its results in creation; but since science lives in culture, a pathological culture can even constrain it till the point comes that argument is substituted for admission, non-reality is explained by reductionism and pathetic propositions are constantly presented, which neither logic nor observation ever sanctioned.

In the intimacies of ever-more unravelled marvels in life's visible provisions, we find increasingly that everything provides for something else, and the more we dispense with ignorance, the more simplistic substitutes for empirical observation surge into the farcical.

For centuries now, man in his growing secularistic conceit, sham imaginations and shameful self-fulfilments, mere ferments of disorderly imagination, has tended to under-estimate all of creation, except himself.

What we are facing then, is not only all the above. It is also directional dynamic with integral meaning, once exceedingly fast-moving, now long arrested. As well have spare tyres and spanners and gear levers in incomprehensible confusion lying about, as think of this or that chemical as if this were at all to the point. The electrons have their partitions and procedures; the atoms likewise; as do the molecules; the compounds are characterisable; the genes have their task and the DNA its blueprint. Each is a construction. Each has required the art of the artifice and the power for the presentation. ALL require a totality of systematisation to render coherent their interaction, univocal their meaning and practical their interaction.

Moreover, chemicals, as Wilder Smith points out, operate in their conventional and coherent norms; they do not perform alien tasks. New information input can be invented and disposed with the appropriate sophistication and power: this is not seen now, but it is seen in the nature of the creation. This is how it works.

Indeed, in the actual design situation (cf. SMR pp. 86ff.), that author shows that 

bullet "it is no mere matter of order, even of the spatially variable order.
You can put atoms in a given arrangement, but there are still variations
in their spatial relationship, three-dimensionally, which can have significance.
Beyond that dimension, there is a fourth - the super-imposition of code specificity.
There is, he notes a code-conveying specificity superimposed on the 'macro-molecular stereospecificity'."

The chemistry is not only variable in the spatial configurations, but on top of that, there is code significance, another dimension of meaning exhibited by the formations provided. There is economy in that there is multi-purpose function; there is compression. We also seek our own form of compression, for example, in the field of computing, in modems, where by using symbols in more than one way, we impose additional significance on the situation, and achieve faster results by preparing more intellectual forethought about our symbols.

Proceeding then, from the unreal world of magic and non-method, to that of effort and labour, construction by logical devices with ground-work for the task, through which are created by intelligence what could not arrive by itself, things being limited, each,  to and by what it is, we find life has its lessons. These appear not only morally, ethically, aesthetically and civically, but in procedure. Input and output, removal and inspection, with operations of intricate character are required.

'A factory that has no source of raw materials, or which has no market for its product must shut down in a short time. Living systems are extremely complex, having hundreds of series of metabolic pathways perfectly co-ordinated and controlled... Each chemical task performed is useful and purposeful because it is coordinated in a marvellous way with all the other activities of the cell.' Dr Gish (op. cit. p. 28) proceeds: 'Without this coordination, enzyme activity would not only be useless, it would be destructive.'

For instance, if there is an enzyme capable of catalysing the formation of chemical bonds between amino acids to form proteins this same enzyme would catalyse their breakdown to amino acids. Gish points out that the input of raw materials, use of same, output of end products - including 'waste products' is so coordinated and controlled 'that the amount of intermediate products and the structure of the cell, itself, remain at a steady state...' (p. 29).

With the cell in its systematised, linguistic, mathematical expression of plan, program and procedure, instituted despite the fact that 'the longer the molecules are exposed to random forces, the wider will become their random distribution', let us reflect on what the case is.

This situation is merely a technical way, or format, or illustration of the fact that non-intelligence does not, in time or without time, produce the specialised constructions for which intelligence is required. This is not to beg the question; on the contrary it is, at last, to face it!

 

THE TRUE DIRECTION OF MAN IS GOD

Man is inadequate even with intelligence, for such prodigies as creation declares. Even if he were to succeed, it is no more comparable with the magic of naturalistic invention of life, than would be some stolid motor-apprentice who, after years of study and experience, at last managed to make a car on the basis of what he had been able to investigate for so long, created by another, his boss. That, it would not be an invention at all, but merely show the power of being a FOLLOWER.

Man, however, in the case of life, is NOT EVEN THAT. His efforts have failed, whether simplistic, reductionist, self-vaunting or guileful. The effort failed, despite the admitted fact that man at his most intelligent, and in teams, can produce prodigious artifice and understand vast schedules with diligent application. What is here, it is far beyond all that.

Yet man tries to presume, instead of understanding, following the designs to their necessary minimal source and, seeing his Maker's work, seeking His acquaintance.

To do this, the same kind of care should be shown, as the ways feasible are checked out, as in SMR Ch. 1, which demonstrates the Bible as His word; and the same assurance should exist, as properly forces one to believe in Him; but it is more than understanding alone that is needed. Logic as shown there, leaves no loop-hole; but one must proceed to find Him where and how He may be found, and that, for its part,  is no mere action of venturing mind.

If finding various organic compounds is a matter of high sophistication, even at relatively ordinary levels, how much more is the finding of their Maker! Yet such is His grace, that He is to be found, where He declares, and that, it is in Christ, God manifest for the purpose of BEING FOUND, and in particular, as crucified, as the means of ENABLING the finding, for rebels and authority do not mix; but where pardon is provided by payment of the cost of rebellion, then with grace let it be received. That is the biblical offer, and it impossible to extract it from God as if by insight, for God is infinitely beyond the sub-systematics and derivative creators called man.

ONLY by His speech, COULD we know; but by His speech we know. At that, it is but a beginning, though a blessed one. The heart has to be ready to receive His word, way, will and covenant. While only God can move the heart (John 1:12-14), God has known all hearts before He invented the universe (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:28ff.), not being susceptible to instruction from His exhaustively derivative creation; and offering freely to all, He receives His own. He WOULD LIKE all of His human creations (Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33:11), but will not force them, and so invites them; but it is He who has foreknown who are His, and these He liberates by a power beyond all human levels.

The beauty of it all, it is always this: IF you want Him, thank God and proceed. It is not possible to desire Him with all the heart, and be told you cannot be received, though you receive Him; for as many as received Him, to them He gave the authority to become the children of God (John 1:12-14).

Let us, however, revert to man's endeavours to make life for himself, using simple ingredients.

His work in this matter therefore has never succeeded, for it is mere misuse of logic and deformation of the empirical, and an alogistic excursion like jumping from an aeroplane, without parachute, on the basis that there must be a way to do it, somehow and one might as well try that!

Of course it failed, as well as all that, and that most miserably. With every assistance of prompting and providing, intervention and evacuation, all that came was minus DNA, minus, protein-folding (the intense marvel of which not only dwarfs human efforts as seen in the last chapter, but makes them seem quaintly childish by comparison), minus RNA, minus the necessary enzymes. Moreover, the case of life requires the missing DNA to make the enzymes which allow the thing to work in the first and primary place, and to proceed, even if it were present; so that it is not a self-derivative system, even if were to be constructed, but needs, as in creation in general, a number of facets and features simultaneously constructed with mutual intimacy of thought and relationship, making them relevant.

bullet

It needs stunningly brilliant devices to be
correlative, co-operative, co-spatial, uni-linguistic in code to the uttermost degree,
with power to copy the director, provide for his directions and
enable this provision to be implemented all synthetically interwoven
in a miniaturisation making man look
like someone not only ham-handed by comparison,
but scarcely out of infancy class.

What then of the colleagues for co-operation in that aspect which is material sub-structure of life ? Not merely is it a matter of making them so that they are simultaneously and intimately relevant, nor even making them so that when one stage is freely formed, which is contrary to observation, the other stage is ready for use with it, and likewise sundry other phases of enormous correlative function and complexity, each in order of time and of space, co-ordinated in conspectus. They have specifically to incorporate the phenomenon of coded command linked to 'understanding' executive equipment able to read the directions, and simultaneously in the system, IMPLEMENT them.

This in series, in system and in sequence, in space-time additive and removal van, in construction in due time of components for each time, this with its blueprint of orders and its executive of fealty: this is the intelligence part, beyond the characteristics of the materials which have their own beaten paths of combination and kind; it is beyond encoding, beyond architecture in chemistry for the encoding and for the application and for the performance involved. It does not evidence the current operation of intelligence, since it is in principle fixed; but it does evidence the exercise of it, at its own time, to institute what displays it, albeit automated, integrated, correlated, coded, constructed, instructed and deployed in advance. Naturally, this was never seen by man, since it is he who is one of the products of the operation now in stasis, as with an author who writes for the time, no more novels. Trying to make them write themselves because you want more, or to show he did not write them, is a tiresome adventure in irrationality, rebuked continuously, attempted gratuitously, with results deadly because of pure wilfulness and intellectual abandon.

 When you need eyes to see, it is obvious that you will not see the creation of eyes.

Here, moreover, is the area of co-ajutment of the criteria, the mutual abutment and coverage for the entire operation, just as a car, beyond the marvel of tyres, computers and sensors, must yet have steering and engine and gears, and beyond this, equipment for the driver by which he may relate to the thing, and beyond all that must have the unitary conspectus in some kind, that it may be dealt with direct, or encoded and automated.

In this case, ourselves, the 'driver' has to be able to relate to the whole semi-automated construction in terms of which way to point it, to appreciate it, to evaluate it and deploy it, with what relationship to the Maker and to the value of the cargo contrived, created and provided.

Steel does not create this, though it may be an ingredient. Rods and gear do not create it, though they are a form for interaction of parts. Parts do not create it, for they perform their appointed roles without knowledge, The entire design does not do it, for it is but that, and requires implementation that it may become an actuality which works, not a thought which is encrypted. It is a construction so vastly beyond the most sophisticated car that we have, that one cell has been likened (by Denton) to New York city. It is still in need of utilisation; and some drivers ruin the equipment, whether on the road, or in the house of protoplasm!

It is wisdom that creates it, neither evident in 'natural' products without intelligence, nor a part of them, and so beyond their domain, as an author a book, an engineer a building, a poet a poem or a babe, its mother. There is a precedent proficiency which is exercised to provide a causal consequence which nothing can make to operate, and while bits of the engines of cars can be interchanged, or beaten in heat, this is not really the creation of cars, but that of wreckers, trying to be constructed with second hand parts. Indeed, they may help remove a dint here or there; but as to creation, it is sui generis, and requires what is not here presently in action, or contained in what is.

The endeavour to thrash the personification called 'Nature' into having the results before the eyes,
which it merely incorporates, it is rather like seeking to make the automobile, with various faddish and Mad Hatter-ish options proposed.

Why not ...

bullet

a) make another (difficult... with the universe).
 
bullet

b) make wisdom appear from steel and oil, plastic and gasoline (undiscerning).
 
bullet

c) create integrable entities meaningless apart (rather planles