Chapter 34
GENES
AND GENIUS, PARADIGMS,
PARAGENES AND PARAPEOPLE
This is a
chapter showing that you cannot escape from truth by twiddling the dials,
for the requirements are absolute, and the orchestra without conductor,
composer or manuscript plays havoc. The acme of system and the glory of
creativity when paradigms in language and marvels of innovation in its domain
of command combine, to create with elements differently deployable and
magnificently enjoyable, a poetry of penetration and a symphony of
understanding.
This is from Gratitude for His Glorious Grace, No. 4
PARA-GENES, PARA-PEOPLE
AND GRACIOUS CITIZENS OF THE PRINCE!
TIME TO LOOK AROUND IN THE WORKS OF GOD
Cf. Delusive Drift ...
Ch. 8, Repent or Perish Ch. 7,
Ineffable Peace... Ch. 5,
Pride of Life ... Ch. 5, esp. *6, SMR pp.
307ff.,
252 Eff.,,
211ff.,
135ff.
PARA-GENES
In "Creation" magazine, June-August 2006, in an article by Dr Jerry Bergman, one finds references to 'paralogous genes'. These are deemed to be mutations which cause the duplication of a gene that would allow one copy of the gene to mutate and evolve to perform a novel function, while allowing the other copy of the gene to continue in its past function. In that their role is to be outside the genome structure, but capable of insertion, they appear similar to paragenes (or plasmids). Having defined our meaning, we shall use this term.
It is interesting as seen from the Creation article, that exaptation, or the take-over of a function by something else, cannot cause the origin, since there would be nothing to take over. Take-overs, whether in commerce or biology, require something to be there, two entities, one to gain, one to contribute or be taken over. Transference in general does not account for origin, merely for variation of combination. Further, in the article it is pointed out that it is increasingly clear that the epigenetic control system, likened to the piano player using the notes, is crucial in the disposition of results through genes. Thus, it is here, rather than in the gene, that the major action is needed in any endeavour to show 'nature' making itself.
Again, it is clear that there is an inverse relationship between the quantity of DNA and the sort of change in view. The complexity tends to be a retardant to effective alteration. Amazingly the organisms with the most DNA is a bacterium, and again, not surprisingly, the lung fish has an enormous amount of DNA, and is demonstrably most stable over the ages.
The idea of FINDING a new function developing which was not inherent in the former data bank in the DNA, and that this is in any sense an upward movement in design, this does not seem any more palatable in the idea of progress upward by transfer laterally, than in any other phase of the aspirations of evolutionism, a barren plant, without fruit, verification or principial rational basis. Let us then, now regard the matter in that sense.
The paragene, the paralogous gene idea for advance then ?
As an evolutionary tack, this does not move upon the water. There is no wind.
1) No new information is the barrier at the outset as always. Mutation and new information are not the same. Variation and loss within limits, these are not information, but as near to it as are the wearings of pages of a book, wholly diverse in kind from having either the power, result or transmission procedures of what writes. Gitt's declaration remains as we remind ourselves below.
Dr Werner Gitt from Germany's Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Braunschweig, has made a flat statement which for years has gone unmoved. This fact was noted in Creation, Sept.-Nov. 2001. It was made in 1997, in his work, In the beginning was information. It is this:
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"There is
no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this." |
2) Thus methods by which new information might be made are as relevant as methods by which perpetual motion might be obtained. If you want to DO it, fine! That is always the point in getting something for nothing, or from a source not inherently capable by nature.
As always in evolution, natural law is ignored, actual events are bypassed, variation becomes transmutation, while degeneration or dissolution (as Gould so unhappily points out in his "what in heaven's name!" raging) is not construction (cf. Wake Up World!... Ch. 6). Intelligently selective computer programs notwithstanding, and indeed existing as mere examples of the need for intelligence in construction, set in a context of loss of such vast kinds as Gould attests in his sorrowing over design restriction over time, its sad loss since the Cambrian 'time', form a tableau in the setting of the unavailability of new productions in kind, for observation. The sad non-provision of the witness-facility of new genetic themes is as obvious now as when Professor Simpson of Harvard pointed it out (cf. SMR Ch. 2).
In short, frustration leading to intelligently constructed selective computer analogues for progress, design diminution in large scale loss since the earliest domains of 'geological time', and non-cooperative natural processes, too hidden to be seen, refusing to show the things happen which are in mind, together with the intensive desire for originality without causative origin, to reside in systems not designed for it: these things are a picture for children. That is, they are fit only for children at the logical level, worthy only of undeveloped mental activity; but they are certainly not fit to be TAUGHT to children, for that very reason!
This is not in the least to disparage the intellectual power of some of evolutionism's crusaders; rather it is to esteem it, for anyone even trying to make the logically impossible work, and managing to have much of the world believe in absence of any demonstration or verification of the point at issue, cannot lack talent. To be sure, there is a groundswell of desire to follow such teachings, since its anti-authority panache attracts many who, like wild horses, cannot stand the bridle, even of God, and many like Hitler and Stalin, whose philosophies of strife seem palatable to those who see fit to make of themselves, the heirs of the results they have sought by FORCE, to achieve. EVEN force, however, cannot do this. You need wisdom.
Let us however return to the dictum of Professor Simpson.
Professor George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard University has declared:
GAPS AMONG KNOWN ORDERS, CLASSES AND PHYLA ARE SYSTEMATIC AND ALMOST ALWAYS LARGE (*11).
It is like the gaps between Volkswagens and Cadillacs, Cadillacs and Boeing 737s, or old monitors in their bulk, and flat-screens, morons and geniuses: there ARE similarities, to be sure, but the main one is in the mind of the makers, whose logical thought and willingness to INSERT into natural products, each in its systematic environment, the thought and creative power needed to deploy things in sophisticated integrality shows itself. Similarly, in the case of many modern cars, an almost saddening loss of the flamboyant originality of former times is founded in the need to conserve gasoline, its price rising, and thus to achieve good aerodynamics.
While diversity of means is a sign of grandeur in intellect, there are many features so good that their adaptation to this and that form or formula is intelligent. So is it with cars. This by no means excises the possibility of the aeroplane, in time; but rather has a dampening effect on each type, for each must conform to what in comparison, we could call its genomic necessities. These of course have to be CREATED, and logic and the systems of the raw materials will even then show much similarity, since they are CONSTANT CONSTRAINTS for thought.
What then is better able to produce elevations of design structure in the architectural, mathematical, engineering field, it is not the product of bonded 'nature' but of intelligence.If the product be spoiled or soiled, so be it, you have variation, or if it be damaged, yes it may serve some specialised purpose in some limited confines; but it is not advance per design. Similarities are an attestation of mind; the grossly diverse and incontinently divergent is suggestive of non-system. That is to be carefully distinguished by remarkable brilliance in using the systems at hand in staggering ways, at the disposition of infinite wisdom. For this, in any chosen universe, from this comes the working through the deployed system within the parameters, and these within the overall containing schema.
The marks of similarity in logic and brilliance, together with leaps into various realms of thought expressed in action, called 'kinds', these jointly are the normative model for creation; just as they are the actual, empirical model for sight! It is only what may be justly termed anti-faith which neglects the consistent, invariable testimony of the grounds of ultimate variation ... not to mention creation.
3) It is, indeed, the origin of the systems, partial and overall, which is to the point. Fiddling and fiddle-faddling with words and ideas no more produces the evidential necessity of propulsive, upgrading power in the terminological equivalent of design, which is what is present, than does talk remove a burden from a man's back. You have to act, to gain the system or the systematic exhibition of intelligence, for it is not present in matter (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3, 10, p. 80). Empirically, this is the way it is; logically that is the way it is; jointly, these are the ways they have. Imagination is as useful as is flicking off cigarette ash for making cigarettes. It does not obtain relevance (cf. Causes, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth).
This is one or rather part of a batch of reasons why there is now so much emphasis on sudden creation, ex-cause. How ELSE COULD it come, when it must work coherently, systematically to a degree UNATTAINABLE even by the best genius of man, and must be wholly effective within such a glorious scope of complex inter-relationships, honed to the uttermost, skilful to the point of astonishment, miniaturised to the point of envy for the God-abusers! Moreover that is merely the beginning; it must also work effectively and at once, or GO! That is the tableau evoked.
Thus Gould's punctuated equilibrium sort of fascination merely avoids the point, though it does have an advance on the dead Darwinian concept of variation as the source of design, when there is none allowable at the commencement (see death of Darwin, in Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 4). The trouble for this fall-back of Gould's, however, is simply that the idea of brakes and quiescences is fine, so long as you do not mesmerise yourself into imagining that this explains dynamic and design. It merely makes the more ludicrous the concept of design without its causative sufficiency to back it, by hurrying the thing up in its production requirements (cf. SMR pp. 315Aff.).
4) Anti-progress and disadvantage-harness is the same barrier as usual in para-genes or any other substitute for genius, yes for the power of God which so surpasses that of man as to constitute man's power. In this action, He has displayed both to and in the mind of man, powers of far greater technical facility than man comes near to reaching, while inventing what man cannot even envisage in terms of creation, the specialist capacities which man possesses.
These most remarkable capacities, are they some outstanding intelligence ? Intelligence there is, but there is far more brilliant an achievement than the creation of this, in man, to be considered. it is the power to contradict by conceptual reasoning, abstractly stated, either because a thing is logically in error, or vagrantly, because of mere will, as in evolutionism, which sees not at all what is occurring.
This displays in man the facility to err, and to do so with a combination of abstract thought and closed eyes, as he concentrates on imagination. To be sure, this is wholly anti-scientific, a philosophic medium, thrust into genuine science, like a drug lord, into a cargo of tourists, on account of whose presence all are condemned. Nevertheless, the ABILITY to be wrong in this way is a marvellous achievement in its creation, since it is merely a misuse of power, the power of abstract thought, of logical arrangement (or derangement in assessable ways, as here), and involves the power to choose error, the power to will, the power to have a liberty, certainly within limits, but outside minor restrictions, in a way very ample in scope.
What then of these paragenes, as we are calling them ?
If the gene is NOT involved in the processes of life, then it is not EVEN mixed in culpability crisis, where failure excludes, failure deletes. It does not have the discipline of having to act. Not that this loss is relevant to the gain of what is needed in the first place, but that is the sermon of Darwin at its worst. Even this does not occur in such a case. If however the para-gene IS involved in the necessities of life, then it must work perfectly, as always, in the midst of almost inconceivable systematic complexities, and nothing can ever remove the leap to a wholly diverse system on the part of what simply is not working until it is, in the terms of the innovation conceived. Were it to be said that it was merely peripheral, of no real purpose at all, then it adds nothing to the point.
If it be said that it is slightly relevant to real purpose in living, merely marginally helping, then to be helpful at ALL, it must work perfectly for what it is, for an encumbrance merely makes life harder. Nothing really changes. In the end, the same leap is needed, just as at the beginning, the same felicity is required. Duplicates of typing or of type do not create design, but merely allow variation about a kind, which may or may not be tolerable to the message first imparted, in terms of which the letter - or the kind, works.
Typing may be mechanical, or biochemical, with code control or that of intelligence direct, and consequences may vary from the ludicrous to the tolerable. In life, if peripheral, it may enable variation without total default at once, and could become a means through error in one or more complexities, or recombinations of assembled procedural materials, of a range pf alterations which, if not too vital, conceivably might live.
Deleted or depleted information, distorted or recombined, the range in view, sets up not a new design, but merely a crippled or a lateral one, with probable defects in vitality, fertility or versatility, while demarcated as usual by the boundaries of systematic information, symbolically expressed, and integumentally integrated in the design as defined. It must also be integrable with the epigenetic code control, or overview. Both the means of checking the code transfers in life, in the coded editing controls of DNA and its associates, and the penalties for error, are considerable. As in any other profoundly brilliant and inordinately complex invention, errors are not all fatal, usually are, and can only enable oddments of variety, while bringing defect into the operational integrity of the whole. Invention is wholly other.
5) The definition dilemma remains.
If you define design (even pragmatically) in terms of
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an integrated
correlation of unitarily-coded or contrived fabrications, |
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with components in
ordered combination, |
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involving
multi-systematic concatenations of construction, |
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not merely
irreducible in complexity for function to their sub-areas, |
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but set as
contrivances of integrality for system: |
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then that is precisely what is found in life. |
Take a drawing. It involves a sub-system of paper (which needs a cause to be white and right for the fight of drawing), another of ink (which needs to be clear and not murky to distinguish things with finesse), a third of the objective, a fourth of the skill, a fifth of the will, a sixth of the available environment permissive of such activities, and all of these things, including the imagination and any preludes of imagery to be found, are to be co-ordinated, concatenated: that is the essence of design.
The alternatives for these things do not exist. Neither does imagination come floating on the clouds of chance, nor does purpose, for chance is mere performance of a system, without which nothing would even be definable or describable. The idea is that one system of such and such capabilities will do what another is needed to do, and that this happens if you wait. This is merely equivalent to anti-definitional nonsense.
It is like telling someone starving, or slowly dying of malnutrition, that it is just a matter of waiting. In one sense, this is almost true, for death is the result. It is necessary to find food if life is still in view.
It is necessary to find the sufficient causes of all the above ingredients to attain rationally the functionalities which they provide. Assuming it with some such name as 'chance' is merely using a word for the works. Many do this; but they do not prosper. It is necessary always to have what it takes and to use it; and if some series of systems or intelligences produces just what you want, this is entirely irrelevant to the point in view. THEY HAD TO DO IT. It was to be done, and they had the constructive capabilities inherent in them. If you find what they did, it was still done by sufficient causative agencies.
To whisk into being the results of the causative sufficiencies by appealing to a denuded system or series of systems (systematically concatenated in their turn, of course) of causative deficiencies is merely to use words to avoid facts. Time does not make systems, nor do systems of one kind hold the perquisites of what has the prerequisites for any given task. Logical force and imagination are needed for each system, for each parameter, for each combination of the resources of sub-sets of systems, and imagining pies from grass, by assuming an oven will turn up, and a cook, and pastry, and a processing system for grass to become pie-like as a content is really a children's story, funny precisely because it both cannot and does not happen.'
Of course if the cook and so forth do turn up, this is that fairy like feature: and in the end, the cook was always the point, not to mention the farmer and the products, and the means for all to work, each in his or its domain, and to co-operate. It is known as wisdom and power, intelligence and imagination and it has no substitute.
On this, see such chapters as The Pride of Life ... 5, Dancers, Prancers. Lancers and Answers 5, The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2 esp. *1.
Take the last for example, in this excerpt, revised slightly for our present purpose, which clarifies the point.
As in any design, and in accord with the definition of design*1, there was the initiation structure, to enable the design to become actual, there was for this the intellection aspect, to HAVE something to actualise, the purposive aspect, to have a reason and point for having something to enact, unified in finality as one; and there are all the means, to secure the procedures in progression and progressiveness, for the attainment of the result. With this, there is the point of the whole thing, the underlying drive for such a concatenation of imagination, intellection, execution and means, and the point of application for the resultant, WHY it is needed. All these things are part of design.
You do not ask for roses from cabbage leaves, but from an adequate stock, equipped with all the features, functions and genetic constructions that serve as template of order, and ground of production. The stock base itself, for each and every operative, for all created things that live, using its single and singularly brilliant DNA language, this too needs to be found from what has known qualities that correlate with such creation, capacities in kind kindred to the production of such results. Science normally and normatively seeks such correlations. The uniqueness of evolutionism in the field of science is that it seeks the exact opposite, and is not instantly failed, as if an umpire were temporarily in delirium, and the players decided to make a funny game of it, for kicks. Unique ? are there not other errors of like kind within the traditions of science ? of course, but they too are not science, having already moved with evolutionism from the scientific to the scientistic, exempt from verification, correlation with scientific law, from logic and from normal comparisons alike.
It is the fatuous fabrication of living things from the mind of man without the established means required, that makes one wonder why the Wright brothers did not simply wait, for the fabrication required, from so fertile an imaginary field as this 'Nature'. It is from this goddess in disguise, which in fact, pointedly, is merely an excuse for ignoring the point, that they look, ex-God for His attributes. In science, you look for what does the job, alone, in correlation, has the capacities, not for what does not! This liberty of man, this imagination component, this power to err which is correlative to the power to create with studied imagination, how well it is exemplified, and how well the very spirit of a man is shown in such distortions.
Here the dream world of pseudo-science, that branch of Paul's 'knowledge falsely so-called'*1, operates as if it were a type of LSD, producing illusions of grandeur where there is none, nor is any to be found, neither is it to be seen, for creation as the Bible has for millenia told us, is PAST. As stated, so it is found. But let us look further at it.
As to
these thing components of correlation,
these coded commands allied with coded provisions for the execution of the same,
and the placement of the results,
not omitting the allocation of raw material resources so that they are present as required,
these multi-systematic concatenations of construction, not merely irreducible in complexity for function, but contrivances of integrality for system, achieved through the symbols of the coded commands, finding operatives or executives moving into the substance of what is forced to operate: they are more abundant in the case of the human embryo, than in all designs on earth which man makes, and which are materially available for inspection.
They are thus, except perhaps in the case of the phenomenon of the mature man who comes at the epitome of the growth season, having moved first from the womb into the outward world and thereon having achieved an instant breathing categorical change, so that it is from air, not blood, that the oxygen is received. There, the program proceeds on till formed before our eyes, he is the counterpart of design, procreated with the same abundant power, as in his first creation, magnificently equipped with the template provided for procreation thereafter.
What is defined as design and met, must be acknowledged as such, when it constitutes in itself the most profound exemplar of the definition of design, involved material happenings, that is known. Otherwise the definition must be mutated, in order to allow confusion, so that it is used where it does not apply, or applies where it is not used. Terminological confusion, however, is a but a poor replica of science.
6) Duplication of informed genetic media cannot per se alter the equations of advance More scope cannot alter the principle of progress, any more than more morons alters their complete incompatibility with the production of a brilliant critique of Shakespearean style plays. They lack the relevant qualities, so no time will produce the spirit of the thing, the meaning of the thing, for it is not there. The performance is not, for them: they lack its information-productive basis. For them, one is infinity, many are the equivalent of one IN THIS AREA. It does not, because it cannot happen: it is antithetical by definition.
Chance empirically does not create new information, because it is only another name for the workings of a given system to which the investigated notion of 'arising' is systematically not given. It is all, in the end, about magic, the irrational arousal of the systematically excluded.
What is missing on such a model, it is the propulsive force for that creation of that information, the intellectual texture or the imaginative and extended boundaries of understanding which the words enshrine. The innovative power in the realm conceived is not present. The conceptions are not present. Tasking them with such a production would scientifically be absurd. You always look for what has the productive sufficiency, in seeking back from result to cause, and accordingly in scientific hypothesis, provide what shows that sufficiency, and then verifies it. In this case, what is less than moronic, a system without ANY of the relevant features (the price of such a proposed upward movement, in terms always of what it is to which one then proceeds, vertically), is merely more ludicrous. It is sub-moronic to the point at issue. That is its extant, exhibited and verified nature. It is never seen to do the desideratum of evolutionism because it cannot.
It is true that you can make money in the sense of criminally producing it; but this is not the same as having the purchasing power in the first place. It is merely an effete way of using resources amiss. It does not create them or the trust on the basis of which they are to be bought. It manipulates what IS sufficient and on critical examination, is found to work. It works only as a parasite in commerce, just as evolutionism is taught only as a parasite socially. It has no basis.
Worse is to follow.
The concept of vast transformations at once, which seems increasingly popular, merely extrapolates the degree of exclusion of the excluded; and as in all erratic thought, is merely the equivalent of a high-power microscopic enlargement of a pathological exhibit. All that is altered is the degree of obviousness of the original low-power picture. It is the system that counts: not how much you want to abort it, or sink into it, whether admittedly, or subversively, by smuggling in divine powers without acknowledgement of their operation.
Any attempt to have units of meaning derivable from units of symbols thrust here and there as if by an idiot (which is far worse than a moron, lacking all to the point of the sphere in view), and yet composing a play is far more ludicrous than considering the arithmetic folly of time and energy so to be imagined as squandered; for the functionality of the words is nothing without the reader, for whom alone it is effective. You cannot OPERATE in such realms with ANY results without the propulsive and recipient powers to make and to respond. You need, in material aspects of life, the orders, the field, the correlative media for executing, all together or not at all. You need code and capacity, program and field, correlation and concatenation, symbol and servant, system for all and provision for the outcomes to be fielded and processed anew into the ever moving dynamic of institution not only of the first (by observation exceedingly complex cell, as Denton notes), but of each other major innovation.
Nor is even this a matter of relevance to the need. You could have ALL of this, and yet have nothing to the point and to the purpose in hand, which is to avoid intelligence in design-matching features, in accord with the definition of design. Thus, ALL of these correlative combinations of order and sequence, system and contrivance, set and sub-set, setting and security merely commence the meeting of need; and nothing commences them, either logically from what lacks the ingredients of power, nor actually in what the eye can see or has seen.
Yet what is needed, beyond all this, is a logical system so that ANY of these systems, sub-systems, codes, symbols, commands, services to meet commands, helpers to facilitate productive steps, catalysts and enzymes, can work. If you ASSUME logic in order to EXPLAIN what you are trying to invent, then you assume what is a PERVASIVE and total system at the outset. It is functional, symbolic, assessable only by intelligence and acts precisely in the way that intelligence does, moving from system to system, to forge a new one, or to conceive and imagine another one.
To act IN logic but without it, is not to be gainfully employed. It is a null operation. You sacrifice the entire system before you begin, and it sits in lonely majesty, a scene without scenario, a buildable bustle without a form to inhabit it. The brilliant intimacies of contrivances, on the other hand, the unquestionable magnificence of the sheer and fantastic operational virtuosity, on the other, these and all bespeak with precision, the EXACT opposite to action within a system by a blundering bull, who understands neither china nor care. To posit for the exact opposite to what you have, the ground which exactly denies it, is sheer scientific method lunacy.
It is not an intellectual collapse however (Romans 1:17ff.), but an ideological Nazi- or Communist- style invasion. It is simply a take-over by force of what is not relevant to it. You need skill and will and understanding. The case is as in Hosea 9:7: it is at the SPIRITUAL level that the error occurs, in the field of the spirit of man vis-à-vis the Spirit of God! As Ephesians 4:17ff. exhibits, this 'darkness' is a product of inter-personal alienation, and the modern phenomenon of children 'divorcing' their parents adequately illustrates it.
You need in short, as a category, what man by design (as defined) in fact has. To gain that, moreover, you need what not only has this, but has the power to invent derivative means of operating with it: that is the human race. Not only is mind needed, but mind-creating mind.
You need liberty. You need the power to invest into a logical system, with the coded commands which by design make it an operative and meaningful totality, something which is ultra-systematic, but not ultra-logical. It has to be able to find and assess meaning, and apply it with felicity, and to follow the design (by definition) components of the creation (by the nature of the minimal powers for such design-integrality in the universe cf. SMR Ch. 1). You need understanding, a spiritual power to survey a scene, compare, contrast, intuit, test and compose in complexity, the symbolic outcomes that it possesses in symbol. You need, moreover, if you are even to be of mankind, the power to reverse the findings of the logical system's native land, by which it is able to operate at all, and to use will to spill these contents in absurd theories*2, like that of Communism, nihilism, evolutionism, while continuing to use the very logic which you disdain, in order to formulate and sustain them.
This is liberty (cf. Licence for Liberty, It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5, SMR pp. 348ff.), and it is not containable by program by its nature. Program can PROVIDE for will, but it cannot MAKE it will; for then it is not will, but a programmatic aberration miscalled. Wisdom can KNOW all about what wills will do, when it is exhaustively the Creator of the same; but it is merely a contradiction in terms to have will and liberty become program and necessity. It WILL happen thus and so, yes; but it is not MADE to do so, in oblivion to the quality itself, without failing to have it, without the loss of the thing under discussion, liberty of thought and imagination.
Thus, in that case, there would be no meaning to error, but those who believe in such arrant determinism continually USE such a concept when they argumentatively combat with believers in liberty, so becoming involved in patent denial of the grounds of their own discourse (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7).
In short, liberty and error and guilt are quintessential to man, and the effort to deny them by ignoring the preconditions of discourse is a good indication that this is so: man CANNOT give them up, and uses them even when denying them. Design is quintessential to what contains the elements of its definition, and definitional abuse is the only escape from the correlation of the term and the world as it is. Intelligence is the minimal requirement for the ingredients of design, in view of what they are, in the universe of logic in which they are found, and causation itself can no more be dismissed (airily or otherwise), than can the sun (cf. Causes, SMR Ch. 5, Ch. 3). It is necessary in order to DEFINE objects, for the terminology must characterise and character involves order and cause and effect, that what it is, it does, being apt to just that. Logic then would cease, and so argument.
Not only then does duplication of genes fail to provide for the definitional dilemma, the logical universe, or the liberty of man, but it has, as noted above, to conform to relevance criteria, and so function as integral to the systems at once, or become irrelevant to constraints. Function-creating is not a work in the abyss, but in an intelligible system, by intelligible means, with intelligible results, and intelligible systems, made with intelligible commands and intelligible insertions into intelligible sequences leading to unitary results. The episodes are not in the end, to the point (though now they are to be 'sudden'), but is it the system in which they are thought to occur.
Everything has to be coherent and ordered, composed and interpretable; and where mind is not the operational medium for such, it must then be in the field of the programmatic, which in turn logically requires the creative in origin to bind its will in what requires imagination to make, and logic as a system to be deployable at all. This is its turf. To ignore it is merely to avoid, once more, definition. WHAT the mind of God did is shown in the kinds of things He made, and the precise correlation between the verified retrospective and predictive statements of the only testable and wholly verifiable Bible*3; not least in the field of creation, which steadfastly refuses to be seduced or induced by means of non-creator!
PARA-PEOPLE
What of people as going concerns ?
More and more distortion from their designed image does nothing to improve their viability or reduce their prospect of ruin. They may imagine that they can become para-people, and move themselves into some irrelevancy which would give them the lordship of their lives; but life does not develop that way. Go to a Pacific Island and what about the tsunami, the kidnapping, the revolt, the theft ... go to Florida, and beware the tornado; to wealth, and behold, the treachery that impoverishes, the boredom that appals, the ruin that comes of misuse in indolence of the power to work. There are no free rides; freedom is not for luxurious licence, but for fashioning what is good, productive, sound, intelligent, imaginative, helpful according to design, and hence co-ordinate with the will of the designer.
Life itself is a gift, assuredly from its nature; and eternal life is not other. The prepared design is ready for the prepared consummation, also according to design. God thinks! He plans. He knows. Sin is foreknown, and its remedy is foreknown, and the design includes all the foreseen elements and events, eventualities and results, which are known as history (Romans 6:23, Isaiah 46, James 1). Yet WITHIN life and eternal life alike, there is a field, there is abundant provision for activity, and there are abundant criteria and limits, just as there are liberal liberties and magnificent opportunities. The limit is this, that you are not GOD, not a god, not autonomous; and the liberty is this, that being what you are (and not imagining yourself a goddy sort of thing, but knowing yourself a creation of God, for communication, communion and mutual knowledge), you are free to be it in the whole realm created for you.
The spring-board for ideation, comprehension, illumination, activation, innovation, invention is a thing of wonder; the use of it to try to reach the skies, however, is as futile, as vain, as commonplace in the idiom of our exultant times, a sort of bipolar elation mixed with fear, tension and dread. This is most natural for such an abuse of liberty, often allied in the unspeakable confusion of the Age, product of interminable sin, with denial of liberty altogether, is bound to produce results unspeakable, for which none is inclined to take the responsibility.
To wish a wild dream, and try to make it happen, it is perhaps thought a thoughtful preliminary to hold yourself in advance wholly unresponsible, as a safeguard against being held wholly irresponsible, with results of guilt and punishment unacceptable to the proud spirit, the haughty mind and the self-centred life alike. The motive for self-determination ex-design is vast; the capacity for it is zero.
You are not a lawn-mower which can be used as a beard-trimmer (ridiculous as that would be); you are in the very image of God, equipped with liberty, within limits, and subjective as subjugated to the blindness of sin, but still present in principle as a potential, and relevant to your Maker. What is it like ? It is like a stalled car is relevant to the driver, who devises means for making it functional and meaningful, according to design, but temporarily inactive in the medium in view: repair and normal function!
Hence otiose considerations, life without necessity, without bothering about who you are or simply trying to be what you are not, is shame, sham, folly and endless ruin, since it is fictitious in kind, fictional in a world of reality.
There is no new information for such cord-cutting, system-ignoring liberty, as supposedly possessed by those who are gods in their imaginations, for man. All that results from such divagations and extravaganzas, moral, physiological, psychological, logical, social, is the abuse of the voluntary part of his own design, leading to that of the involuntary part: disease of mind, body or soul. The super-abundant use of psychiatrists and executions, according to the national taste of the country concerned, merely the more shows the sickness of revolt, whether in the nation, the individual or both.
The voluntary part of of man, of his design, the information of what he is, stored in the mind of God, cannot be seduced into novelty. Variations within kind, by imaginative thought, such are a just domain for man. Once, however, he makes himself the target for innovation, in himself, as to what he is, he ever in the end, ruins his very survival - and that quite justly, and without divine mercy, interminably. It is merely the irrational extension of the effort to have himself made without effort!
It is then but an extension of the dizzy or even fizzy fey of the dreams of youth, where immaturity has its domain stretched to later years, and mankind grows delusive. The delusive then readily begets the conclusive elements of time, the occlusive regions of non-entry looking like barriers, in a prison. This in turn often excites passion and spurs what should be spurned, the construction of false gods to bring about what is needed. Genies however are not the requirement; and evil often enters in, that spoiling dynamic which is more than error! Indeed, devil worship as such, is merely the extreme case.
This is what you get when you abuse liberty - then appear bars of reality, the confines of your construction, seeming to be barriers to desire, even perhaps inciting frustration, or exasperation, consternation, indignation, or relentless but pointless rage. An 'angry young man' to this extent grows into a 'raging old race', which the devil lusts to the dishonour of God, to cart off to the garbage.
Garbage has its place; one is unwise to make it one's very own. There is an 'out', an outage from the electric-seeming dynamic of such anti-geysers, such abyss-seeking devastations, and depravities; for in the end, the essential depravity is willing sundering from the image of God. It is not a question of one's inner self, or ideal self; alas this concept is either too weak or too polluted to hold, and is only a step, when what is needed is a new floor. What is needed is the self-creator, God who has the facility, the agility and the resolve, the plan and the design for restoration to Himself. This, it is not required of Him; it is by His grace.
THE POWER OF LIFE IN THE LORD OF ITS CREATION
and the GRACE in His FACE for His Kingdom
Grace for garbage: it is a great transition, and those too good to be true, will find in the end, that their good is not true, but a lie, and so find judgment at the hand of the very mountain of mercy, Jesus Christ, for their deceit.
It is one thing to be a para-person in folly, or to take any other futile and irrational course, misusing your design; but it is quite another to outface mercy, and confront grace, making of yourself a heap of proud garbage, which might have been better than any dream, a restoration to the original design of creation, and a resurrection to glory in the presence of the Lord, of God Himself; for there is one God, God who loves and sends, God who comes and does it, and God the Holy Spirit who applies and blesses, in triune being. One in character, three in persons, HE has no designer, being eternal; but His designs are for good and glory.
It is better to have no designs on God, but to find in His design, not only that created, our current selves, but in all which He designs both in and for us, the depth of His mercy, because He has loved us. It is far better to find in this, the perfection of cleansing, pardon and correction, so that the friendship with God, like that of Abraham, becomes the consummation of creation, and the blessedness of life*4.
Titus 3:5-7 speaks on this:
"But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
that having been justified by His grace
we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life."
What gratitude is apt for such a transformation of destiny, such a restoration of reality, such a vitalisation of the lost, such an invigoration of the dispossessed, the elimination of guilt, the re-rooting of the déracinés, the bringing back to the Creator, the creation itself. This mercy which is eminently available in the Gospel Age which is ours, comes despite misused liberty, the coping stone in a design so prodigious in both the nature of man on the one hand, and in the scope of salvation on the other, as to make all magnificence bow in wonder, joy and thanksgiving.
NOTES
See
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch. 3, Deliverance from Disorientation Ch. 7, Secular Myth and Sacred Truth Ch. 7, Earth Spasm ... Ch. 1.
See:
Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 8; The Grating Grandeur ... Ch. 2;
SMR pp. 925ff.; Beauty for Ashes Ch. 6 , with News 98, News 37;
It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Barbs ... 29;
See
a) The Necessity of the Location of the Divine Remedy for Man.
b) the testimony of implacable reason (because it is a testimonial gift of God) to His own and unique, authorised written testimony to man:
The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy
REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER.
c) the survey of the confirmations, verifications and validations:
For some of the blessed interstices of the Kingdom of Heaven, which does not lust for the earth (Matthew 4:8ff., John 19:36), but will inherit a new heavens and a new earth (Revelation 21:1, Isaiah 65:17, II Peter 3:10-13); which does not seek to conscript, but have hearts freely yielding to His drawing, and which does not try to instal peace, but rules from within, there is need for reflection, based on what God says on the topic in His word. For this see The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 2.