The Original of the Universe,
and the Originalities of Gould

In our last chapter, there was opportunity to cite some of the views of Harvard Professor, Stephen Jay Gould, whom for brevity, and to avoid a sense of repetition,  we shall simply refer to as 'Gould' in this chapter. It seems both apt and just to look more closely at some of his proposals, lest it be felt that his undoubted difficulties when facing the outcome of his statements, and his efforts to mitigate some of the apprehensions from them, are simply omitted. In fact, nothing removes the facts, and it is these, together with the often apt and just responses Gould has made, in detail in Wonderful Life, which are our focus. Moreover, something of his diverse movements have been noted previously, either observed in detail or exposed in substance (e.g.  Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 68; 81, p. 178,   End-note 2 throughout;  Scoop of the Universe 51, pp. 247-248; A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.1 ;  That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7, pp. 176I-K).
 
 

FACING PREDICAMENTS

However in this chapter we shall look at the predicament he faces, the systematic position philosophically in which he has planted his feet, his religious orientation so clearly revealed to the point in view, and give an overview of the seeds of his scenario. He is facing what he calls a 'juicier problem', which is of course the comparative of a 'juicy problem', and hence one well-advanced in the realm of juice, relative to problems! He is right in this.

However in his efforts to solve it, he has worked into the other realm, of what is suppositional, and sought with references to what is not happening, and shows no tendency to happen, and no ground for happening, to find an answer to the first question: why it should happen at all! In this way, by singling out single trees in the forest, he is seeking to give grounds for the forest. However, the single trees themselves need grounds, his problem of origins is not to be removed by mental gymnastics with the concept of trees.

For these, you need ground and seed, and the question is still the same as before Gould spoke on this issue: where did either of them come from, and on what rational and causative grounds is their construction to be based, scientifically, logically and with something more than the mere articulation of hope, in the framework of imagination. As we shall show, Gould does not pass this stage, and his preference for particularity leads him to avoid the questions of rationality altogether. It is fascinating that he does not appear to have noticed this, to judge from what he says and omits. To this we must now attend.
 
 

FACING MISAPPREHENSIONS

 

First, however, as Gould himself has noted, of others, this is no reflection whatever on either his honesty of purpose or his skills and capacities of mentality. In his case, he sought to conceive of culture conditioning as what had prevented bright, honest and able persons from seeing what he conceived as obvious (and not without reason where the concept of necessary progress ex-ground, was in view). It is not their fault, just their calamity, was his virtual message; it is an affliction to which long habituation is open. Science is often caught in its own turmoils of tradition (thus see pp. 276-277, 260). However, it is not to others only that these pitfalls open, and Gould so aware of the genre, falls into it by the same criteria as he felt others had done. In this case, however, there are two special features to note.

Cultural conditioning is a disease of the mind, and it is, like the common cold, readily accessible. It is not necessary if you know the Creator, whose direct and personal, spiritual power is able to deliver you from anti-Biblical, undisciplined arrogations of power and pollutions of thought, which being illogical in essence, can be removed in principle at the outset. As with a wind when one is driving, one can steer in such a way as to avoid the impact on direction, without pretending the force is not there, indeed by acknowledging it, seeing its directional evil, and compensating for this.

When in addition, man is directed by the truth of God, he is in a position as shown in SMR, to follow its superb logic and rational maturity so that advents and interferences from culture are like the squalling of naughty or sick children, and not likely to be confused with beautiful symphonies. They do not work, are noisy and spiritually illiterate. This is the position with all who lack Christ in Biblical terms as Paul makes so manifest in Ephesians (Chs.2 and 8) and I Corinthians 2:14. To the natural man, spiritual things are foolishness; for him, that is natural, for that is his nature. It is divorced from the God who has the advantage of being there, so that it is allied to some alternative, which though irrational, is actual, so affecting sight and vision.

This is a RACIAL and not an INDIVIDUAL matter, an aspect of the current generic character of man without God, so that people in its hold are not being specially selected, but merely having their works specifically inspected. When there is considerable knowledge of God, which in the US is common and far from uncommon elsewhere, there can be a more acute version of the situation, which without changing its general characteristics, can add to them, as when one has pneumonia, and not simply a cold. That is the one of which Jesus spoke, and which we shall shortly speak.
 
 

A LITTLE OVERVIEW

Gould's suggestions to resolve the 'problem' he rather valiantly proposed, in that it was more related to facts than is often the case in this area, are of the order of Nilsson's: tinged with desperation, and void of scientific stature in a) being untestable, b) being contrary to what tests reveal c) being irrational in overview and d) being without either physical, biological or specifiable interface for the proposed activities to be infused into the system which does not evidence this type of power; and even if it did, without even an assignable matrix for its expression in reality, as distinct from mind.

These failures, allied with similar, and similarly ill-conceived 'solutions' from several other brilliant men, who have contributed very valuable practical materials indeed, are not really baffling at all.

It is not just that they provide us with some comedy, which can be uplifting. It is far more serious an affair than that. Their difficulties are just those of a student who WILL not accept 2+2=4, and yet tries to act rationally in the long-developed world of mathematics. The more brilliant the student, the more outlandish is his 'solution' to be expected to be, the more outrageous his intellectual buffoonery, for with his mind engaged, and his CREED in place, there is as a matter of fact NO WAY FOR HIM TO GO. The more he tries, therefore, the more ridiculous will be the result. It is like asking a gifted athlete to climb a million foot high greased pole without special equipment. The more his will is engaged, the less will his mind be satisfied.

The overdetermined (to use Gould's suggested phrase, as one much used in such situations) man will give results which do not coincide with success in the problem at hand; and they will have certain characteristics of OVER-DETERMINATION. One of the chief is collision with reality, or ignoring it, depending perhaps on penchant. At times, each is used, alternately, perhaps without realisation. Achieving the impossible is like that, it tends to produce or induce to the overdetermined, a variety of response, sometimes not outstanding for rationality or result.

It is true that with God all things are possible, for who will stop Him obtaining what He wants! With man, however, the impossible is another matter. If God does it for him, well; if not, it is not done.

Gould is comparatively spectacular in this group in this, that in his book, WONDERFUL LIFE, he makes so many ironic, dyspeptic, alien or alienated references to the Almighty or to believing in Him, like some psychiatrist on a trip in some reductionist glamour chariot, that it is apparent he is both considerably exposed to and exceedingly negative towards the Biblical and actual God of creation (cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch.1).

His name is bandied about with an ease and assurance, as if that of a septic scepticism, where the wry look, the angry tone and the aroused psyche come to be anticipated.

In this, the case, in the spiritual sense, may well relate to the words of Jesus, who covered this field with such precision and penetration that none has ever been able to show any fault in His words, as in His deeds, be they alienated or not:

• Hearing you will hear

and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see
and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn
So that I should heal them (Matthew 13:14-15).

Confusing basic issues, he sallies in philosophy with the panache of an emperor, into religion with the disdain of a mocker, long habituated and utterly detesting all the sound of it, and with the efficiency in this domain, of a sophomore of particular self-assurance. The result is certainly comic; but it has pathos as well, and much of this.

Pivotal to his position is his creed, as clear as that of a church, but not soundly related to logic or empirical grounds, as properly is that of a Church; and likewise his philosophy, of which little may be said in way of congratulation.

Let us consider the case, since Gould undoubtedly is rich in providing data, as well as fearless in pronunciamentos, thus exposing some of the nerves of evolution; while as reluctant as most, in following things to their formally required logical conclusion. To prevent any misunderstanding, it seems necessary therefore to add a note on this development, in a slightly broader perspective.
 
 

THE CREDO

which appears in Gould's Wonderful Life

A.

The CONTRA-INDICATIONS. Some of these "difficulties" he notes, some vividly! These lead on to the pronunciamento phase to follow.

These appear in *2, Ch. 5, above, but to these we may add.

1. There was in the Burgess shale a phenomenon low down in Cambrian, which was so vast in scope and variety that:

there are found remains of 15-20 organisms so different from ONE ANOTHER and from anything now known to to be living, that "EACH OUGHT TO RANK AS A SEPARATE PHYLUM" (op. cit. p.99).

2. This tallies with his statement that "INSTEAD OF A NARROW BEGINNING AND A CONSTANTLY EXPANDING UPWARD RANGE, MULTICELLULAR LIFE REACHES ITS MAXIMAL SCOPE AT THE START, WHILE LATER DECIMATION LEAVES ONLY A FEW SURVIVING DESIGNS" - op.cit. p. 233.

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

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

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

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

3. He rightly sees that survival does not presuppose by any means, superiority of design (p. 238).

"But we have no evidence that the winners enjoyed adaptive superiority, or that contemporary handicapper could have designated the survivors. All that we have learned from the finest and most detailed anatomical monographs in twentieth-century paleontology portrays the Burgess losers as adequately specialized and eminently capable" - p. 239. "But if we examine the Burgess fauna honestly we have no evidence - not a shred - that the losers in the great decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those that survived." Anyone, he cries, can invent a plausible story after the fact.

This adds to the consideration that terminating the life on this earth of this or that creation is not going to create, and is merely a maintenance phenomenon.

Easy outs at this level at last are being forsaken with some appearance of rationality, most rare in the company of those normally alight with the magical fervour which is organic evolutionism.

4. Indeed, p.260 brings us this impactive announcement, of the gradualistic, progressive, ' lottery' approach: "The modern themes of maximal disparity and decimation by lottery are more than just unacceptable under such a view of life; they are literally incomprehensible. They could never even arise for consideration."
 

B.

THE PHILOSOPHY PROPER (actually improper, but that is another usage)

TENACITY in the face of such intellectual carnage as is just revealed (above), is alas now apparent. Let us see important elements of the tenets, credo to the point, offered by Gould.
 
 

COMPONENTS OF THE CREDO

ITEM NO. of 7:

• 1. "WE   KNOW that evolution must underlie the order of life because no other explanation can coordinate the disparate data of embryology, biogeography, the fossil record, vestigial organs, taxonomic relationships, and so on,"  op.cit., p. 282.

This is presented without even a vestigial appearance of reason, or any embryonic form of justification, and its taxonomy puts it in the irrational.

In fact it is not even relevant. It is the grand existential moment, it seems.

Its assumptions are spectacular in dogmatism.

Let us take TWO which appear, if there is any coherence of thought at all, to underlie this manifesto of Gould.

v           God apparently CANNOT have imagination, even though we can. Not for Him the rollicking wonders that His word proclaims and His world exhibits. The Maker of our originality must not show this quality. But is that some kind of secular super-Puritanism ? Why not ? So far from such a thing being even improbable, it would be quite stunning if He were NOT highly original, since so many of our race are just that, though of course vastly less than His, in their exhibition of power in the process!

v           God CANNOT have deliberative design (SMR pp. 252Lff.): things similar must be throw-offs. The engineering resources of using similar things for various purposes (and in fact, sometimes in quite different situations, through acute intelligence), are to be excluded. Why ? It is PRECISELY in this that creationism is emphatic. It is not relevant as a criticism.

Further, the vestigial question, often misconceived for such assumptions, has been dealt with in some detail, with nothing of difficulty in it, (nothing, that is, except for naturalism, in its evolutionary retreat note in this field, another anti-verification, by courtesy of 'nature' ( as cited in SMR p. 198). Even that assumption, however, apart from normal deteriorative mutations,  is less conspicuous now, and understandably so when we realise the retreat mentioned (from 186 'vestiges' cited, moving downwards to near zero), as knowledge has increased and ignorance has retreated.

However, one thing about the Gould approach here, is that he does not try to minimise the startling originality of design and suddenness of its deposition in this work, the marvel of it. That the lack of transitional cases REMAIN between basic designs, is his own insistence, as with Denton (perhaps even more stringently: EVOLUTION: A THEORY IN CRISIS pp. 157ff.): they concur that it is  a fact. Denton stresses with G.G. Simpson the sufficiency of testing and checking.  They are not there. Links abound as absentees, and do so systematically (as noted by G.G. Simpson, SMR p. 106).

Thus the Cambrian case is a stirring and stimulus to leaving the failing Darwinian boat, leaking with every paddle.

Indeed, Gould draws attention to Darwin's belief that you cannot logically expect PROGRESS from the changes in view by any inherent propulsion, citing a letter  to Apheus Hyatt, Dec. 4, 1872: "After long reflection, I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists." That of course led to Schützenburger's impasse (SMR pp. 128 ff., 157ff.). We shall soon see in the CREDO of Gould, more saltations of thought, as in Nilsson and Davies.

As for taxonomy, Denton (op.cit. Ch.6) deals with this in grand manner, with considerable depth of analysis, noting : "It is only over the past two decades, with the adoption of new methodologies which have subsequently revitalized and popularized the science of classification, that the conflict between hierarchy and evolution has re-emerged and come to the attention of significant numbers of biologists. The reemergence of the conflict is evidenced today not only in the increasing scepticism being expressed by some of the more radical cladists over many aspects of evolution theory, but also in the increasing resemblance that is developing between the modern cladistic framework and the non-evolutionary perception of pre-Darwinian biology."

In creation: Plans, patterns and patents abound. SO does originality. As with our own minds, but in vast extension, there is the system, hierarchy, the individualisation, the creative thrust of pure imagination. It is highly organised, structured, not diffuse but profuse.

In fact, this organic evolutionary dogma of Gould, cited in the very pangs of evidential rebellion, nature's stark refual to produce or conform to the dead dogmas of obsessive theories, present or past: it is pure tumultuous, philosophy.  Devoid of even so much as relevance to creationism, which is ignored or distorted: it simply fails. Gould bugles its departure. Battles, however,  are not really won in that way; and all this serves to do is to emphasise the EXTRAORDINARY and extraordinarily constant manner in which creationism not merely meets the case, but superabundantly flows INTO it, like a stream.

We are however here prepared for this sort of philosophically based alienation, if not otherwise: for Gould speaking of another scientist has this to say: "The greatest impediment to scientific innovation is usually a conceptual lock, not a factual lack."  He speaks "of the subtle and inevitable hold that theory exerts upon data and observation." If this is his conviction, then he appears assuredly in this to fulfil it; but this does not help science as we see, in the light of the  dogmatics that counter reason, as if he were trying to fulfil his own prophecy. Thus, although he rightly abandons what he calls theories that "could never even arise for consideration", such as Darwin's in the light of factual data such as he has researched and extended, he adheres to evolution with mystic force, and a sort of Communist Manifesto self-assurance, founded like that one, on nothing (cf. SMR Index).

The precision with which, in this way, he acts as he asserts the scientific peril in which gradualistic evolution is placed, is noteworthy. It is, however,  a case of doctor, diagnose your difficulty, rather than doctor, heal your complaint! He was quite fair in the work of the former; absent from work, in the latter!

But we have not finished in this area. He has more to impart.

Thus we come to his second credo item, dogmatic assertion  -

2. "EVOLUTION IS A DIALECTIC OF INSIDE AND OUTSIDE...".

There is the concept of developmental thrust, such as Marx loved. This tends this way, and that responds, and the whole dialectic caravansary somehow manages in its rumbling ruminations, to advance, to go forward, wherever that may be. (It depends on what you are advancing TOWARDS!)

Now that neglects the trifling consideration of WHAT ways and WHY and HOW it should CREATIVELY lead to IMPROVEMENT, and this the more so when Darwin has just admitted the lack of progress inherent in things, even if his ludicrous theory simply begged the whole question by having design increments happen. Does the same in one's bank balance, house, national politics, vegetable garden ? This idea simply pigeon-holes the issue in hand: getting these sophisticated marvels. It removes some of the losses, does nothing to produce the gains.

Talking, as Gould does,  then,  of inside and outside, environment and genetic structure is merely a sort of rocking movement, a mobility of words which neglects the genius of genesis, the works to be wrought. Motion is not notion; system does not arise and return to its father's house, where there is none. The logical validity of this notion is just this: it has no interface of the propulsive need and the propelled result. It is not scientific. Laws, system, conveyances, codes, designs, unitary purposeful beings, all 'arise'. NO theory is produced, just words occur; and that without any even vestigial indication either of testability or operability.

'DIALECTIC' sounds politically modish; but it is productively meaningless in this setting, since no way of having the fact that things happen outside and genes move by channeled routines, interact, is known. Surely Schützenburger was right.

There is in these invasive evasions, a sort of fabrication by words; and it is here that, in spiritual and Biblical terms from the  mouth of the Lord, one sees anew the force of the term "that they should believe the lie" - as in II Thessalonians 2. It is a fabrication, an invention without and contrary to fact, a building of what is there by what is not, in the mind, a gossamer edition of creation, salvation, the things of the Lord in the relevant field of divine power and glory, by an imagination which has everything except demonstrable truth, available evidence and necessary law - oh! and power to perform. THIS is the ultimate fabrication by phrases; but houses built that way, you cannot live in them. They would never solve any problem of poverty; indeed the only poverty which matters here is poverty of spirit, to come to reality and repent.
 

Now we come to his third dogma, or credo item.

3. There are ecologically excited conditions which somehow, being there, do things like create life and all that it is. SOMEHOW is the operative term. It has nothing whatever to do with science, just as it violates fundamental law, and bids adieu to logic, as often shown. It is merely in this case, that phrasings appear, as if they were work wrought. This it is, but only in one sense: it is wrought in making the phrases; but they, they  do not make the world.

This gem of understanding occurs on p. 230, where we find there is the phenomenon of an 'empty ecological barrel'. This in some way INDUCES what is to be PRODUCED: the way an appetite induces steak, perhaps (provided you already have it, a stove and a cook, these being the little items apparently omitted in this slithering scenario).  An "ecological release" we learn, is a consideration too sensible to reject. The "homology of a genetic system" in the midst of an "empty ecological barrel" is somehow to induce the system in the first place, and the diversification in the other, so that the myriads of systems and sub-systems 'arise', being blown with the wind of the barrel being emptied (we do not know by whom in this scenario, and the wind would not create in any case, being mere motion), into existence. How straightforward is this matter: MANY systems ARISE because they are so similar: Impalas and Statesmen automobiles arise because somehow the engineers are not needed.

This is another world, as we have discussed in detail - for example in Chs.4,5 above, in News 74, 81, 82, in SMR pp. 226ff., 422Eff, Ch.3, The Biblical Workman Chs. 1, 7 and in Stepping out for Christ Chs. 2, 3, 8, 9. It is not this one.

In fact, there is merely a variant with a technical sounding vocabulary, of the old foozle, that principles=God concept, where the principles are not visible and the results of creation are. (See: Scoop of the Universe 57, 59, That Magnificent Rock Chs.  1,8, SMR Ch.3, and pp. 159, 315B-316A, 137, 1-50, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, End-note 2; Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming ... Chs.  2,  4, 5.)

As  such it is not helpful. Do principles think, construe problems, provide answers, develop materials from nothing, invent thought, create spirit: what PRINCIPLES are these ? That is merely a name to mask the actual efficiencies and effectualities concerned. A statement of procedure is not the power to proceed. You do not get without power, relevant power, adequate power, power with adequate basis to produce what IS produced. This brings us to the Gould credo item 4.

 

4. Darwin, we read (op.cit.282)

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

Gould appears to go even further, it would seem,  from his magic moments with the pen; for these do not qualify to produce, or to evoke what could produce  - in the material moments of the universe, in logic, in empirical reality, OR in THE fulfilment of any assignable and testable interface - what the universe is. It does not lay the foundations of it; it does not build its vital components; it does not do it with aid; it the more assuredly does not do it on its own. It seems cause does not even need to be PRESENT at all.

Causeless contrivances 'arise' in various biological places, since it is fitting so to do, though fitting what is not specified. The biological machinery produces new machineries in prodigious confusion, super-mechanical brilliance in code, elaborate sophistication, for no particular reason. Actually the reason is clear: they are programmed to do it; but alas, these programs to invent programs of radical design, they are never found, only the ones to COMMAND and to EXECUTE commands, within kinds! And as to the machinery before it 'arose' to be a starting point for the 'developments' which 'arose' - where was it ? Of course: like all vagabonds, it was ... of unknown address. Nowhere, really.  Which reminds us that you see the cause of where as well as what and when.

Cause ? it seems almost a dirty word, when imagination can create, as in children's book, where the big, brave, grown up world cannot come near. It is however impossible logically to exclude it, involving antilogy in any effort (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Predestination and Freewill, Section 4, Causes).
 

Causing Causeless Contrivances:
        Using what is not there

 

                          "Without a cause, events do flow,
                         without conception they will know,
                         plans unplanned arise and fashion,
                             each has its specific ration,
                       coded, imploded, integrated, perpetrated
                                   and in much,
                             perpetuated while they last,
                        framed and founded, not confounded:
                            consciousness itself arises...
                            Life is full of such surprises,
                          minds are made within the matrix,
                           a sort of adventitious perspex,
                               'respectable and valid' -
                               an invisible mouthing,
                                of codeless nothing?

except that it has taken the road,
irrespective, regardless,
of being written in a code.

                                Altogether very neat,
                             full of meaning and of meat;
           for what can come without due cause, might as well to all applause,
                           think and find and know and be,
                           everything that God could be...''

But yes, of course, it does have a name. It is normal to call it God; present without cause, an eternal Being whose powers are adequate for the assumptions of Gould, unlike nature, which alas is not.

But this generation with its New Age would often prefer to render Him anonymous, and try at least from time to time, to remove address and power as well as name; but use it all, just the sam. (Cf. SMR pp. 422Eff.). They also love to give reason for the defiance of reason. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 264-315A, That Magnificent Rock, Ch.5, Validity.)

God then is lost in phrases, while His functions are retained ? This is the logical status of the situation, but we must adjust the attributions somewhat. It is assuredly a profound loss though all (tainted and twisted) knowledge be obtained, and the Lord be lost simply through blindness or distortion. Yet it  is not HE who is lost, however He be caricatured and 'nature' be filled with imagination, as if smashing and deterioration ever created the stupendous! It is not He who is lost.

Ø   Lost ? Rather it is the heart and mind, the spirit and the future of the
bemused, befuddled idolaters of
imaginary gods,  gods
which  cannot even attest themselves in word or deed;
or idolaters of things,
those who would have

Ø   material things create their creativity,

Ø   encompass what they lack any evidence at all of power to do,

Ø   so becoming  recipients of a smuggled God ...

Ø   for the sake of the arrogance and folly of those who merely intellectually herniate in fruitless toil
that brings in no result but the testimony of fraud, duly passed on,
as if from mothers with AIDS bearing children with the infection, to the next generation.

But leaving the generic and Biblical diagnosis for the moment (Romans 1:17ff., John 16:8-19), let us return to the particular with Gould, and his concepts of causes, when his ways and words are considered.
 

Gould then ? In this regard,  he appears to follow the naive and over-utilised concept of Darwin, that a productive cause does not need productive power, that a scientific theory does not need scientific evidence, that a non-testable theory is sound wisdom, even when, by Darwin's OWN ADMISSION, the paleological evidence missing was so vast relative to the past, that he could see the legitimacy of rejecting his postulations on that very ground. Indeed, while one reads all the scholarly suggestions in trying to do the impossible, to gain consequence without sufficient cause, it is like reading a book of the Arabian Nights.

These stories, these affronts to reason, they are popular; but as in the Arabian Nights scenario, they go, but the climax, the end, is never in sight. It is prolonged. It is left to the imagination.

The end cannot arrive, because the beginning is never presented as it must be, for such an end. Hence they all differ, diverge and protest; but do not produce or agree. How could they ? Imaginary stories are not things you would agree about; you just listen and smile; no one would ever think of relating them to the world of fact, where things need power and propulsion, worlds of input for worlds of output. As Gould so rightly says of some of them: they are just-so stories. The genre, however, is broader than he thinks...
 
 

Let us then summarise a little.

Ø         What does NOT happen in the present, even with intelligent help (life);

Ø         or without it (creation of matter);

Ø         what contradicts basic laws of physics as been shown in the preceding chapters (and see Index, Thermodynamics), both as to creation and upward movement in the creation;

Ø         what is contradicted by all evidence in the past, which decisively lacks links so vastly that Gould professes himself unable even to imagine what might have been the way of these marvellous mirages of mighty transitions, if they HAD happened;

Ø         what lacks the evidences of the thousands of steps of transitions by gradual and illogical processes,

Ø         what, though harassed and prodded REFUSES point blank (as when the fruit-fly Drosophila was X-ray assailed for 50 or so years with the nil read-out noted - That Magnificent Rock, Ch.1, pp. 32-33) TO PRODUCE at the level relevant to our discussion, even with much ENERGY and INTELLIGENCE applied by man;

Ø         what insists, as Gould himself shows, on a diversity and depth, a creativity of prodigious proportions and a design manoeuvrability of intense practicality, in vast, ungradual, enormous thrusts into action to the point Gould wisely despairs of dice box engineering, and looks for something more to the point:

  
  THIS

is not going to be created, in terms of anything with any even distant relationship to science, by 'ecological vacuums' - like the poor crying for food - or barrels that brim over: metaphors are but poor engineers. Even the UN needs money, to supply the food.

Opportunity to a dunce to pass his exam may be repeated times without number, under the most air-conditioned or even non-competitive circumstances, provided only he PERFORM at the RELEVANT LEVEL, and it is not a case of induction. Vacuums do not CREATE what they suck in: this, it  has to be there. Opportunity does not make what must take advantage of it. It is all that same (IMPLICIT) deification of 'nature' which is to enable it, now to perform mighty prodigies of creation, in short order, in amazing diversity, in profound depth, in staggering abundance, in a profuseness belittling the normal powers of very imagination.

Ø        How does it do it ?

Ø        WHERE is the evidence of such capacities ?

Ø        in negatives? in failures ? in anti-verifications, any one of which is enough to invalidate the theory which is affronted by Burgess ?

 

QUALITY IN, QUALITY OUT; LOGIC IN, LOGIC OUT: sufficiency in, efficiency out. Nothing in; nothing out. Inadequacy proportionate to the performance, then non-performance. Why the magic word 'nature' is to violate all known law, the necessities of logic and the realities seen daily in all spheres and dimensions, is not revealed. It is one more case of smuggling God in, this time amid a host of anti-God mockery and contempt, using His name with a frequency bordering on intoxication of spirit, and then using His power, via anonymous phrases, to insert all that is required without the One to whom the name belongs. This puts Gould in a long line of evolutionary desperadoes (in the intellectual sense), so frustrated or confronted or affronted by the unspeakable facts, that they invent ANYTHING, even anti-science with anti-logic, and anti-empirical ideas to contradict scientific laws, and by sheer effrontery proceed to ... verbally create a universe that is unimpressed. It takes more than words, unless you be God, whose words mirror the capacities sufficient.

What then here is the credal item: That not only invisible causes, but undefined ones, with no assignable interface with practical reality, non-existent causes conjured up by imagination MUST be operative because GOD MUST NOT BE.

It is true that this is virtually going back to point 1; but it is now more specifically dealing with causes as such. Dispense with these causal things, because ... THAT, Ah! that, it is a simple contradiction in terms.

 

5. Gould's hideous caricature of productive necessities  is one which ends, as if it were a just-so story, of precisely the sort he has been justly lampooning, in the inventory of the Darwinians: his story deals with something with the designation of the biological human saviour (retrospectively).

It is the pikaia, a worm-like creature  with backbone ... or more precisely, notochord, stiffening rod which although not a vertebrate feature, is a chordate one. It has the format if not the feature of a vertebrate chord, something which, given an engineer of life, could be used, like a piece of steel to be fashioned into a car body, so here as a base as one created a vertebral column. It would be an aweful amount of work, in the supremely and superbly contrived order of life,  to fashion it so with millions of code features and orders, commands and executive workers, first making the pattern, plan and procedure, then encoding and programming it all for automation on a self-defining basis, in chemically conveyed symbolism; but one could do it IF ONE HAD THE POWER AND THE INTELLIGENCE AND THE PATIENCE. Life is like other constructions, but because of its vast ingenuities for production and reproduction over time, far more demanding.

But here, it is the simple notochord, the rod (like the piece of steel). It is a chordate that is here in view. It is in a whole class of creation. It (like the rest) has its own features. It is found in the Middle Cambrian, says Gould.

This variant (and there are endless variants which use this and that form of engineering, as noted under Deliberative Design - above, SMR 252Lff.) has for the thought world of Gould,  made all the difference. The sheer prodigality of creation notwithstanding, as also the diverse and attested multiple use of elements in different creatures, like the case of an engineer deploying practical strategies with intelligence, in different houses or factories: nevertheless, the fact that some creature is deemed a worm and has a backbone is crucial. So we are informed.

It is not at all clear why this should be so. It needed design no less than the ones without, just as the octopus needed design for its amazingly developed eyes, and we did, though we too have eyes of remarkable capacity. We do not owe them to the octopus. There is no bridge. Bridges in the imagination are difficult enough for 10 miles; but when they are to be made to bring traffic across the ocean, it is a little difficult. Prince Edward Island managed an epochal bridge over 9 miles or so of ocean, but that is within the territorial waters.

The simple requisite of multiplied, ingenious beings in-between is lacking^*1C. The concept of NOTHING in-between merely makes magic objective, without recourse to inference being necessary. Give a worm-like creation a (literal) back-bone or stiffener, and behold, creation is understood. Perhaps too, if we find a mammal fish, like a whale, all is explained.

The fact, however is this: the use of multiple measures in varied creatures is precisely the work of intelligence; and the failure actually to produce bridges is precisely the work of barren empirical evidence; while the use of imagination, because some creatures have varied features, in some cases more like man's, as in the case of  octopus eyes, is hardly the same as working out the principles which lead to creation.

The FACT of vast variety of structure, and its startlingly quick release, with various combinations of entire novelty and interest, with parts way up or down the scale in different combinations, does not show ANYTHING about WHY or HOW they came. It merely shows how great was the EFFICIENT and SUFFICIENT CAUSE for them all in their ingenious combinations, assortments, combinations redolent with higher mathematics.

If you want to talk of continuity, so that all the parts part company while magically becoming other parts, being transformed meticulously the while, then you need evidence in observable areas of one kind or another, and certainly not dire contradiction in ALL observable areas; and you need principles formulable, and you need indications, direct or indirect, of HOW they work and WHY they work, and on what grounds you are making this assumption about the WAY they came to be, in addition to the simple and obvious necessity that it must have come from a source able to handle all these ingredients, their codes, contrivances  and their synthesis - or else abandon logic, and hence argument.

Since none of these conditions is met, one cannot rationally talk of continuity: as Denton indicates, in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis:

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

This then is found only in man's mind, never in the testimony of nature as its modus.

If I find the work of an architect in many homes and many machines, and many locations, and in varied conditions, adroitly and astutely meeting varying needs with a grasp of principle and a power so great that he even deploys similar means in quite different fields for his purposes, I do not have any ground for assuming he made the various houses turn into each other at various times. THAT, it is , quite apart from needing a BETTER and MORE powerful architect to do so, to cover the requirements for its hideous complexities and perplexities, mere imagination.

To believe such a thing, one would expect from science, such tests of powers, of conditions, of capacities, of elements, of principles as would make the proposition not merely verifiable, but verified with so much force that the apparently ludicrous concept would be founded on things better than ignorance, and the quite extraordinary powers implied would be verified in places other than in the just-so category. Magic, by its nature, does not need to work, when it is in story form. The translation into science is based on adequate power, adequate principles, adequate thought, adequate conditions, and adequate direction. These of course are the things we find instituted in what works; and in DNA in particular.

Scientifically the case before us is NIL; and it is CONTRARY to what is found; and it is gratuitous; and it presumes way beyond the evidence. THAT, it is of variety and dispositions of things with exquisite acuity; but the concept of continuity is without perceptible difference in its attestation, from nothing at all. THIS is the force of its evidence; while the laws of logic and of the universe simply say - to the omission of the architect altogether: NO! (SMR Chs. 1,3). However, what we DO FIND, in transmission by KIND,  is on the other hand, what one should reasonably expect. What WISDOM would find HARDER to do, is not done; and what is convenient because, in generic terms, of lucid intelligence, fabricative facility and acute savoir faire, IS done. That as always is the verification that obtrudes, the veracity that speaks volumes, short volumes, condensed volumes, because of the necessary intellectual vigour and utter mastery of the subject in hand, like an architect to end all architecture: fashioning in life!

So there are two errors here:

·       the use of phrases for powers that need more than words; and

·       the invention of an additional hypothesis, even if the phrases were those of someone who had the productive facility re the invention of the law-conforming matter and the law-functioning physiologies and DNA's , namely that of continuity.

This mental as distinct from physical construction, then, is merely contrary to science, an otiose imagination. It lacks any evidence.

The evidence is wholly contrary; SO contrary that, in the case of Gould,  an hypothesis is put forward that must stand unique in KIND, with those of similarly placed frustrated specialists in this field, who refusing to give up organic evolution, will abandon science in the name of science, to make suggestions which, in any other field, would at once be regarded as scarcely worthy of primary school, or to use Gould's own phrase: 'literally incomprehensible', words without relevance, concepts without precision, suggestions without means. Or again, to use another of his expostulations against Darwinist type concepts, on p. 260: "They could never arise for consideration."

Now he makes it even worse. It is like a commercial company with a shocking record: "The bottom has fallen out of the market for it," they say as they watch its shares drop like martyrs before Communist rifles. But this! it makes it, if it were possible, even worse. You even have a chordate lurking in the Middle Cambrian reaches. Even more of the forbidden is found in the early reaches of (theoretical and alleged) time. A perfectly distinct type is to be seen amongst other perfectly distinct types, some no longer present; a further particle of the myriad design deliverance is visible. Disaster has become chaos; failure has become a fixation; dysfunction has become the mode of action. Evolution is not merely mocked. It is in stocks, the butt of every mirth and the fool of every passer-by. It is pantomine, a caricature, the song of drunkards, the mirth of comedians, the dirt of the earth. It WON'T GO!

It is a donkey, an ass that brays in the very face of its master, as it stubbornly refuses to budge. Now it kicks its heels WHILE it refuses! In terms of non-verification, gradualism in particular, and organic evolution in its devastated generality of irrationality, it  has the world record. As the non-scientific, it is in a class of its own.

It is like a delirium: through lack of water. In such cases, as a class, as we have seen many times, the sheer irrationality and divorce from scientific method in these concepts is a spiritual condition (Ephesians 4:17ff., II Thess.2) which with minds brilliant or otherwise quite indifferently, blinds the eyes and constrains the mind. This explanation is not difficult to comprehend. We all know the difficulties of human relations which can arise, and how simple matters can lead to seemingly endless complications between divorcees and so forth.

Where God, as Gould makes clear for his part, is in this area AUTOMATICALLY RULED OUT, by dogma (point 1 does this to the Biblical God of creation), and reference to Him is so disposed emotionally as Gould evinces, His name used so often without any appearance of reverence or - for that matter in the contexts - need! then we have that sort of situation; and it has this sort of result, habitually, in inter-personal relationships. Where God Himself is involved, of necessity a prescribed RESULT would have to be an extreme block, or knot, since His influence is pervasive. It is also a Biblically stated result.

Thus difficulties of understanding in the sphere of immense, intensive, sudden variation of design in such a case would be expected to occur, in a stark refusal to conceive the degree of power involved. That in turn is one of the predicted features of the end of the Age (II Timothy 3), as a prominent part of the system at that time (II Peter 3), the cultural condition of man. Thus we can have high priests of naturalism making the decrees nisi on God; they will not have Him 'butting in' or they would dismiss Him or both, because this pleases them. Let us consider this feature in naturalistic antipathy that is so common a combination of impiety and imprecision.

What! a creator of creation, an architect of architecture, a mathematician of mathematics, a sponsor of spontaneity, a crafter of inventions, an originator of originality, a reasoner for thought, an orderer of law, how terrible! Obviously thought came from its absence, invention from a dulness so great that it lacked mind at all, brilliance is clearly the to-be-expected consequence of the demented ? no the non-mental! Because of such cunning logic, such irrational reasoning, such use of the mind in its denial, such proliferation of absurdity, such invocation of contraries to account for their opposite, such drawing on non-accounts for payments, non-causes for consequences, such denial implicitly of the whole causal structure in a pretence at thought which DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON PRECISELY THE FORCE OF CAUSATION, with its categories and consequences, the ONLY ANSWER is forbidden (cf. SMR Ch.3). It is decreed. Woe to him/her who refuses!

Biotic oddments of this type and that, and there are teeming thousands, are merely illustrating the zestful variety, with the varied use of components, in different systems with different DNA and different channels for different things, a sort of exuberance of plan. It is like finding air-conditioning in a caravan. Perhaps then caravans preceded houses, and car-transported dwellings came before settled ones; and indeed the sides of the one transmuted to miraculously acquire  the appropriate specifications of house walls. After all, they ARE related, so continuity ...

That really is not the way to explain either houses or caravans, because they have this facility in common. It merely shows that the creative power necessary for each is vested in a mind or mind-group able to adapt the affair to various premisses, thereby showing the depth of their intelligence, but in no way is this the MAKING of  either caravans or houses, both with air-conditioning. That is something that springs up because, is it then so ? because people need to live in houses, and when there is a lot of raw material for houses around, then, don't you see, a sort of ecological opening, avenue, vacuum has 'arisen', and there JUST HAS to be a development in 'nature' to take advantage of this.

So up they come like mushrooms, the one - perhaps like a toadstool of transport, becoming quite naturally a thistle. After all, both have seeds so that when ... and so the just so story, ex-ground, rationality and means commences in the uninhibited imagination of the story teller.

This is so ? Things so transpire ? Why ? Because, evidently, nature has longings for exploitation, development; and opportunity = power, power = intelligence, and time is of no consequence. Let it come quickly, waiter, even though you are not there!

Time, in this it never was of consequence. It is not so constructive that it alters the nature of a system so that it produces what it is not good at. Now, in Gould's device of imagination, time is a comedy, so that in quick time, devices pour out in a plastic sort of protoplasm, a remarkable re-codifying special, which is so intelligent that no existing genius could begin to do what is done, even with the matters before it. It must re-plan, re-schedule, change and adjust, add and subtract, and as we all know, do all these other things which mark out the master programmer from the merely brilliant.

Such is the naturalism of Gould. Like the other cases, it has no logic, only phrases; and in a sort of dazed condition, he admits all the ludicrous evidential failures of the doctrine of natural continuity, only to offer this 'answer' - "it just happened", because of nature. Because of what in nature ? Some phrase which he has pinned to it ? but to which it does not, because it cannot respond. It is what it is, and words of man do not alter it.

What it is, is what it can do; and what it lacks, it does not do.

In another world, Mr Gould, your nature might be programmed as you suggest, though it would be an enormously inefficient way of doing things. Indeed, in another world with inbuilt provisions for miracles by constant decree, your little worm might be the flagship possessing the imagination of its beholder, seen in your volume, as the crucial flag carrier which brings in a flush of impotence, the results of limitless power. Wriggle by wriggle he makes genius look like a dim-witted, backward Primary kid, by comparison. Entombed in his being, is the lustre of the limitless, equipped beyond all measure with a mind for kind, power to perform, capacity to encode, chance a casualty, principle a prefect. A network of enablement switches with direct access to the Almighty might be presented, with a genie to use them adroitly. We might find these, and watch the genie at work.

In another world, it might be so.

In this one, it is not so. Nature has a nature; it does not invent itself, because it lacks the means. What has the means is therefore not nature. It is not matter, since this requires the specification and law builder. It is called Spirit, and it donates our own spirits, which are so free from the laws of reality, that they can create with phrases, even the people who use them: in imagination.

Divorced from laboratory testing, divorced from historical evidence, contrary to all evidence, without legal structure to illustrate, let alone demonstrate, this magical 'nature' has all the wisdom and knowledge and thought and law-making capacity which WE merely see it as having absorbed as an object of wise action, and it NEVER uses it when it is watched; but for Mr Gould's nature, it is by itself able to do it all. It must make itself from nothing, make order, make form, make laws, make machinery of code, develop it, change while still working, like running while having a heart transplant, then make minds, make spirits, leave no trace of having done so, show no capacity to do so either in action or in analysis of its powers, and DO IT QUICKLY.

Causes for this, must not only be invisible, but non-existent. Their existence and their evidence match to perfection, over all known time, not only in all known circumstances, in all known tests, but in experiments both noetic and empirical in the laboratory (cf. Repent or Perish 7, Excursion 2 cf. 1). Their powers as as absent in principle as in practice within the entire realm of nature. Just as the Bible has stated, the creation is finished. It does not go on. And so is this empirically testable statement verified, validated. What you logically need we have demonstrated; that it is not nature likewise. THIS, it merely verifies it.

Thus we are, to the point, endowed with non-existent causes; but non-existent causes do not cause, do not have relevant consequences to assignable needs. Without that, we are not made. Without that, we do not talk. Without that ... but then it is in this duet, only the present writer who does not deny adequate causality in its objective activities. To him therefore, this impasse does not apply. Christianity indeed is free of it. Therefore in rational discussion, this is the result. Coherence is achieved by one only; the other denies the very conditions of his own discourse, substituting words for reason, phrases for functions, and attributing properties where they are not found to lie, capacities which are never found to work, on a basis which makes insufficiency adequate, and something out of nothing, so invalidating logic, and disabling argument for his own part.

Nor is it a mere dis-enablement. Rather it is a multiply disabled multiplied activity which is called for on the organic evolutionary basis. It is a process needing almost endless repetition. In the first place, to get something; then to get law, mind, spirit, creativity, the conditions of conformity, the provisions for spiritual non-conformity. From nothing at all, to nothing adequate, the base must forever have sucked into it from nowhere, the needs and seeds for its success; and then, as opportunity arrives, it must use these non-existent means sucked in from nowhere, so that the dialectic of internal-external, that things have natures and the environment has impact, this deliciously intelligent thing, is to work to make everything.

Just think: you only have to have interior and exterior, and all creation can stretch before you. THIS, it is not reductionism, it is not simplistic substitutes of phrase for functions merely; it is irrationality itself. Reason neither supplies nor defines, neither observes nor finds laws to cover the case; but it is invoked in argument, even while it is being sacrificed on the funeral pyre of forgotten fields.

Gould has accounted for nothing; and with nothing, there is nothing he can account for; so that his case is as empty of substance, as his phrases of illustration, of principle, of conformity to law, to logic; and only to magic can they relate, hidden in matter; but more properly to the God at whom he delivers so many sallies, with heart stoic or sad (or some variant - p. 44)^*1B.

But let us see it in its setting with Darwin and others, using an excerpt from A Spiritual Potpourri.
 
 

MAGIC MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY
OF THOUGHT: around 1850-2000

What a to-do is this! For some 136 years there has been the inanity,
the spiritual insanity of Darwinism.

 
As if the beautiful designs in flowers and on the earth were for philosopher insects,
or ...

the amazing instincts and navigational gear in birds were for the benefit of those who did not have them, when they should have them, and arose through mistake;

as if the whole diverse coded marvel of particular triumphs of wisdom and creativity happened on the scene!

As if intelligence decided it would be advantageous to exist, and so set about it!

As if symbolic logic one day took a holiday from the routine activities of matter, or nothing, and decided to invent itself, complete with orders and connotations, assembled and remembered nowhere, since there was nowhere to put it, and no one to do the putting, for that matter.

Has the whole world gone insane! Not at all: Romans 1 in its declining verses spells it out. BECAUSE man did not see fit to acknowledge and worship God as he should, GOD GAVE HIM UP to foolish delusions. "Professing to be wise, they became fools." That is the way of it (Romans 1:21). This design called man has this surpassing wonder: he can make himself foolish to the point it is an exact parallel to his realisable brilliance. It is like any complex equipment: the worse you handle it and the better it is, the worse is the penalty for abuse of it! An atomic bomb might not appreciate one who would mess with it (cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chs. 1, 10).

Morals too decided to invent themselves. One fine day, some bright spark had the idea of social intimidation, social indoctrination, social hypnosis, and began to act as if what he wanted was more than that: it had a divine beauty, a holy wonder, an obligation beyond mere use of power. People felt this was quite a thing and although men can resist the worst terrors of Russian communistic torture cells, these people were like putty, and began to believe this thing - this product of statecraft. It became GOOD, and not merely REQUIRED.

How anyone can thrust this category of incredible stupidity onto earlier members of our race without the sort of arrogance which evolutionism breeds, is inconceivable! But then we do have evolutionism, so that we do have this sort of contra-evidential, illogical idea. (Cf. Romans 1:25: "Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, blessed for ever"; and Hebrews 11:1-4. Yet Jesus Christ, the expression of God, became man that He should lead us to the invisible God whose new creation is based in pardon through His blood: John 1-5.)

Something too invented itself. Nothing one day thought it would be good to forget its inhibitions about nothing being around, and resolved without delay to invent potential, and to make itself. Although it was nothing, not being there, it was the recipient of this great idea: although indeed, there was nothing to think it with...Scenario upon scenario is merely mirthful, rollicking fun.

Or this: one day matter, which happened by chance to be run by strict laws, decided to invent a few more and gradually, like some poor scholar, improved itself to the point it began to create other sorts of things for which it had neither capacity nor code! Wonderful. And this is science ? (Cf. Rest in Reality and in Redemption, in Biblical Blessings.)

How then is it that IN EVERY CASE a SUFFICIENT CAUSE for the postulated innovations is LACKING. Do we say: Because there is no such thing as magnetism, that is how we have a magnetic field. In other areas, do we ADMIT that we do NOT FIND what it takes to produce whatever it is we are trying to explain in our observations of natural things, and then happily, merrily go ahead and say:

"Well now, since there is absolutely nothing sufficient to do all this, my hypothesis, my own theory for my Ph.D. is this: BECAUSE we have nothing to account for it, THAT must be the reason!"

"But," says the supervisor, "my dear young student, you must be precisely out of your mind! YOU HAVE TO FIND what it takes, then suggest HOW it works to produce what is to come, and then TEST what you propose, and so VERIFY it. This business you have is the exact opposite of scientific method, and of common sense; as of all logic." To which you reply:

"Yes, but that is what they all do! and THEY ALSO EXPLAIN WHAT IS NOT HAPPENING WITH WHAT IS NOT THERE!"

"Not at all," says the scientific method oriented supervisor, "hundreds of Ph.D.s do NOT so act, and many denounce this fairy-tale-itis which makes a sort of intellectual romance. Leave romance till later when you marry; as for now, let's stick to the fact. Science is not a game but a discipline.

1) Where is the process observable which you wish to explain. When you find it, let me know.

2) Secondly, where is the procedure you wish to exemplify, exhibit, manifest by experiment to explain the thing you have not yet found happening.

3) Thirdly, where is the laboratory exhibition of this procedure which you use in
explanation ?

" When you find the first, that will be a fine time to consider the second; after that, the third will be relevant. In the meantime, let's do some science. If you are getting Austudy, that is what you are paid for! If this were English literature or especially work for children, it could pass for fantasy; and perhaps your real talents lie there. If the case is otherwise, please show from your work, your scientific capabilities, so that I can assess them."

Small wonder Professors Goldschmidt, Løvtrup, Agassiz, Cuvier, Nilsson, Director W.R. Thompson and many more are appalled at the pure folly of the theory of gradualistic evolution, while others like Stephen Jay Gould invent new theories of sudden surges, the better to account for the facts; and Professor Hoyle of Cambridge calls gradualistic theory "evidently nonsense of a high order" mathematically, while he talks of "The Intelligent Universe".

Little marvel there is such a stew, a befuddled series of controversies and changes, a billowing of clouds of uncertainties and confrontations - as from Michael Denton who acknowledges Darwinism an incredible intrusion of unreality, evolutionism to be a theory in crisis. In fact, the whole area of theoretical biology in its interface with irrational forms of philosophy is becoming a mere heap, factless, fictionful - like the religions of illusion : of which it really a member.

The requirements of reason for each element in the tower of life is that the bricks required the builder in order to order them, and in the first place to make them, and then to assign them, like that great brickwork just made in England with simple bricks, a steam engine - from millions of most brilliantly placed bricks, though perhaps to become an English parallel to Great Pyramids! Each level of understanding, architectural, mathematical (and the designer had every brick placed in his theories to be assignable for the labourers, of whom one expressed himself thrilled by the privilege of participating in such an advent of skill and thought) is in need of an origin, a sufficient cause, and an interface by which the cause produces its consequences. (Cf. Jeremiah 2:27.*)

If you look at pp. 329ff. in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, to which reference was made earlier, you will see a list, drawn up like a building, of some of the more obvious features built into man, such as creativity and formal logic, power to will and to err... and all that is required is to notice that NEVER is such made now; and that ONCE it was all made by sufficient cause. Normal name: GOD! Genesis has it.
 
 

END OF EXCERPT

 

But we have extended ourselves in this field. It is time to look at the next item of the CREDO of Gould, in this field.

 

6. 'God', says Gould, in one of his many transformations of speech, 'dwells in the details'.

Not really; rather He accounts for them. What Mr Gould seems to be seeking for here is legitimate in one sense: an intense mental articulation between the factual details and their logical requisites, which remember, are not removed because life, with its extra demands on logical ground, is in view. It is this articulation which is so entirely lacking, that one can only wonder why any effort in this area was made at all. Brilliantly he exposes the problems of his trade, ex-God. With incredible naïveté, he fails to provide any solution for them whatever; but he takes a position. We can all do that, but it does not create. Until we come to the power to create, we shall never account for creation - including our own creativity.

Let us refer to That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7E, and use part of the second end-note, to amplify these things here, and show a non-poetic, logical use of details, such as the way this universe and the laws of logic mutually and severally attest themselves.
 
 

EXCERPT

Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard explodes against the gradualistic hypothesis in terms of its being 'literally incomprehensible', however reluctant that admission may have come to be later: this was the impactive result of reviewing the multiplicity, facility and complexity  of completed things in the  era!

But it is not really the  result of reluctance. The Bible presents another ground (Romans 1:18ff.) for the rejection of the Creator, so that Biblical creationism not only accounts for the creation in the only way which is logically defensible, as shown from the above references, but with this added touch of mastery, that it accounts also for the widespread distaste for the concept of creation as well! and for that matter, predicts that this will become a phenomenon of note in our own season of history, as of course it is. (Cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, pp. 103ff.).

Surely here is a majesty which analyses the resistance, accounts for it and presents what stands over thousands of years, with all the apparent ease of a tennis champion rolling off one more overpowering drive. In this case, this too is what one would expect from such infinite superiority to man, and that in turn thus constitutes another internal verification to add to the innumerable external ones.
 

·  The universe we have requires a beginning, a cause sufficient and all attempts to make it manufacture itself without capacity are merely confirmed mathematically (cf. SMR pp. 15ff., 252E-L, 226ff.). All efforts to make it SHOW this capacity are merely shunned by the facts. Its dying character is everywhere to be seen. The thought of it, nature,  as a mother is contrary to all evidence; but most of all to the precise requirements of logic, which merely has its confirmation in the empirical world of actual structures, times and events. In surveying all the evidence, we see that the misdirection of a religious yen, enquiry, desire, which is inherent in man not least because of the rational capacities with which he has been dowered, and their outcome. It is because he also bears opportunity by his nature of direct relationship of his spirit to his Creator, however distorted this may become in transfer to objects and their processes, that his revolts appear like an epidemic in the history of our race (cf. Romans 1).

The ludicrous irrationalities, being misdirected like a stream that must have some outlet,  have been seen from early Greek thinkers, wanting everything to come from water, fire, change (Heracleitus), non-change (Parmenides), as also in the worshipping of heavenly bodies, or the universe, or in you will, the smuggled insertion into it of the super-human and indeed divine characteristics to create it (cf. Joyful Jottings 3, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3,  SMR p. 422E-L). This they do (cf. Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 80, pp. 160ff.),  in ways as varied as humorous - their grave consequences apart - as if thinking would invent them, whereas we ourselves in our material instruments, our bodies, are  the codified productions of thought (cf. Repent or Perish Ch.7, Scoop of the Universe 57, SMR Ch.3) , means underlying our spirits and their quests. Thus Zephaniah has call to declare:

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

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

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

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

Now the idolatrous fabrication is with mental idols, preachers of this unrighteousness now to be seen as physicists, biologists, sociologists, psychologists, with the hidden their forte, the unevidenced their thrill, the vanishing their focus; though their physical counterparts are as clear as ever, and as devoid of those divine powers with which man in his fancies would invest them. In this, those beguiled in this manner, and many are more than willing, seem rather like a young lady adoring her heroic swain, in whom alas the qualities of heroism are more apparent to her eyes than to the curriculum vitae, or to the eyes of others.

To so imagine is alas to worship, not a mere hero, but the divine where it is not. Penalties are not puny for such misappropriation of deity's name, even if sobriquets and phrasings disguise the attribution. One of the chief is the fruit of the very delusion itself, divorcing life from its source with all attendant consequences.

End of Excerpt

7. Finally, we note his view that "most myths and early scientific explanations of Western culture pay homage to this 'heart's desire' ".

It assuredly seems true in this case, since the heart's desire is that evolution MUST be there, though all evidence subverts it. Hence the myth of unreason called punctuated equilibrium, though equilibrium is a result of actions, not the engenderer: the creator of what reaches equilibrium, has arisen. "Or we," he declares, "may continue to seek cosmic comfort in nature by reading life's history in a distorted light" - p.44.

That point, though not his use of it, is entirely true. Man may indeed continue to seek cosmic comfort by misreading the creation, and irrationally discarding the Creator from thought. Instead, Gould may wish to seek the meaning of morality, in the annals of discipline and curse, from 'nature' as if it were God; to find the meaning of life, ignoring the purposes of its necessary and comfortably forgotten, yet entirely entailed Creator. Instead of direct comfort, Gould proposes the possible need of stoic endurance and fortitude, in words distinctly reminiscent of Milton's Satan - "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven", or of the pseudo-heroic defiance he emits, while seeking morality in other realms than in the word of His Maker.

That there are such realms is indubitable; but they are not those of the creation called nature. As to that, it  is morally inert, its programs beyond its own power. Man has reached accountability, and in seeking morals outside the Creator whom logic, scientific method and all verification in every field requires as has been shown in SMR and in other works on this site, he is seeking what is obtainable, like plastic gloves instead of hands. You CAN get these things; but the reason why they are called 'morals' is that in rebellion man proposes ANY source, ANYTHING, even irrational objects as with Gould, inexplicable, inadequate things to endue with such divine powers, intellectual objects of effective vacuity, with no more power than the phrases on which they stand, so that the offspring of words, may be brought in.

You can worship the curse (cf. Biblical Blessings Ch.7); you can worship program; you can worship fortitude, you can bow down before stoicism, or being stirred, do one more act, and actively assault the Almighty with flippancy; but it will be more than that in the end, when the forces are directly gathered against the Lord as predicted in Revelation 19:19. After all, to be objective, as noted in SMR ppl 252H-I (cf. 315A-316A), myth is defined to be "the imagination of results without adequate cause, for the satisfaction of desire", and of course this is normally in a widely held format, as is the case with organic evolution, now growing up in the hostile environment of actual knowledge, and finding its eclectic spiritual sources a nightmare for the other myth, that it is, despite its nakedness before reason, and emptiness before science, somehow knowledgeable (ofall things!).

It is this, precisely and accurately, clinically and sadly, which is what the doctrine of non-creation from a non-creator constitutes. Put differently  (316A as above), it is "myth entails precisely the undisciplined attribution of what is inadequate, to the consequences that are present." Speaking of the desperate movement of such as those of Davies and Gould in the field of creation, it continues: "The myth base has here simply moved from nineteenth century meander to twentieth century miasma, from something to anything: and neither has commerce with reason."

Moving from myth, however, one needs to face reality of the extant world with real causes really operative at a real level from which the productive consequences can really have come. One says 'has come', because, to the almost apopleptic embarrassment of evolutionism, they do not come at all any more. Creation now appears cardinally in the mind of man, that mini- and surrogate creator, that masterpiece of creation, who is turned himself into a pro-creator, not only physically, but mentally; and in this field, the abortions are all precisely the result of rebellion. Logic unflinchingly lifts its chin, even if pundits seem at times almost to make a profession of hitting it. It is not so easily bruised. It is necessary even to speech.

Let us however proceed with the seeking of this or that or morals, as Gould seems disposed to do (op.cit. p.44).

As Gould notes, causes do not have to be visible (op.cit. p. 282); but they DO have to exist - replete with adequacy and designated with accuracy!

Morals, then,  to be sought  from a product! Is this the excursion he has in mind ? This is assuredly the place of his foot. What could be said for such morals as these ?

THESE morals are founded on the preference of the heart, very much as Gould has written of scientific theories of desire, which seem now to abound in proportion as God is involved, and the most incredibly inept and ill-adapted substitutes are proposed with an increasing temper of frustration and irrationality, almost as if serious discussion being long past, mere phantoms were evoked, to pass the time. Indeed, Hoyle explicitly spoke of one beckoning the universe forward, in ghostly mode; for Gould, it is one, like some genie in 'nature' , capable of prodigies, exempt from evidence, contrary to evidence, disregarding the necessities of logic, and evidently bowing the beckoning, in his own terms, of impersonal, indeed depersonalised desire. It is certainly, at all events, not those of logic.

This final point of the credo appears then, as simply the attribution to nature of tutelary powers on morals, an impersonal base for a personal understanding; an impersonal base, based on nothing, which apparently, as with its own magical creation, is to amount to something. So do men contrive their own sufficiency, while ignoring that of the Creator who formed, formulated, expressed in code, enabled with mind and endued with spirit, the very rebellion that attests it. For in what would one who is NOT free from constraints, find absolute truth ? from being relative ? or if it were not there, how would he know it ?

But ONLY if the logical necessities be followed TO the actual BEING, the Creator, who is there, and KNOWING HIM,  CAN be met the double necessity for knowing what is the truth, on the part of man; and without this, ALL his talk CANNOT be true. If it is not there, there is no possibility.

If it is there and not known, there is no possibility.

Man is not absolute, and cannot evacuate his condition to be where the truth is. Thus the final blessedness of following the Lord appears: NOT ONLY is it logically necessary that He should be there; not only does He attest it with empirical, logical and verificatory evidence on all sides; but if you reject Him, then believing He is there or not, it is indifferent in this, you CANNOT know the truth (John 5:39-40 reflects this). Your stoicism would be towards ANYTHING, and your meaning would be necessarily UNDEFINED and UNDEFINABLE.

To such open possibilities, such theorists consign themselves. It is to be hoped that better times will arrive, and that these chartless domains will be left for the truth,
 

consistent, persistent, never falsified, of the Bible, of the Lord, of His salvation,

of our own inadequacy,

of His willingness not only in enormous creativity to endue us with the same, but to enable salvation by His creative consignment of His Son, God in human form,

to die for the sins of rebellion of all kinds, failure of every dimension.

This He has done with one Gospel in one book, moving from prefiguring to perfection (cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17, That Magnificent Rock Ch.3). Just as there is one language as in the DNA, so in the moral realm, one God, one hope, one Gospel: free grace given pardon based on God's initiative in the Cross of Christ, in His bodily resurrect ion, enabled in His entry into nature in the form of a man, in order to deliver man from it, since nature,  like himself, is defiled. When a new heaven and a new earth appears, in which righteousness dwells, then morals will not be snatched from nowhere, meaning nothing, but found in the love of righteousness, divinely defined, and in the name and beauty of the holiness of God. Nor are they now; and something better than stoicism is available, and only if recklessly refused, is a ruin which surpasses stoicism as oceans bath-water also available. It is indeed something earned, that! It is something that follows, eating the fruit of one's own ways.

Misappropriation of the creator's power in the interests of another part of it is the source of the muddle without meaning, and of much more. It ramifies and defiles, befouls and belittles, benumbs and distorts.
 
 

THE REAL OMISSION

This brings us to the real omission of Gould, other of course, than God.

It is SIN. This is an endemic mortal reality.

He, preparing for stoicism or even worse, stirring up the inner man to meet the onslaughts of outrageous fortune, prepared for the most dismal of concepts to be found (pp. 44ff.), to be brought out, examined under the microscope and digested, is precluded from his pursuits apart from their breach of scientific method in the ways already shown at length; he is unable to do this. Description can never achieve prescription, and ought is not the child of is. Only myths can arrive from reading into the creation itself, what one ought to do. It cannot speak, and as he says - facts do NOT speak for themselves. They DO indicate where one must look, and when one finds what is there, then one knows. Meanwhile, morals without mind are myths; and myths without truth are mindless.

Moreover, to the point, as  noted above, for absolute truth to be found, it must first exist and then be known by the one concerned. On his basis there cannot be any, for there is no knower to whom it relates, he himself being careful to talk of cultural occlusions, inescapable prejudices and the like, though not talking of what is even more valid for those who do not know God (it is rather like being without a cheque book in a foreign land, except that it is not purchasing power but DOING power which is in view, the dealings of life itself, fresh from the Creator on application).

What then is this even more valid thing ? It is LIMITATION. Shall a cog know the plan of the architect, being unacquainted with the same! Will it find it by examining steel ? Will the construction of the stage reveal the nature of the tragedy - and there is tragedy enough; or the manner of escape from it ? Here is the fundamental failure again. If you, as a man or woman, are that whimsically odd deal-out of what does not deal, then you do not and cannot know truth; you do not have capacity to comprehend what is your matrix maker; you are inner-outer dialecticised into some sort of stuff or other, and your illusions of grandeur will not put you into the driver's seat.

As to where he is going, you need to ask. It is not even determined by where he has gone; and this is worse, when like Gould, the eyes are causally shut to the necessities of that case.

But it is worse yet. SIN is that series of preferences, desires, constitutional embarkations of thought and action, stirrings of capacity and desire of mind, spirit, body or any combination, without restraint or limitation, which brings pressure for fulfilment of this or that (such as self, society, nation, race, tribe, prestige, psychic aggrandisement, dissolution of the universe, denial of God), without respect to and conformity to the handbook of the Maker and His will.

It is rather like a conscious car which specifically declines to bother with the service station, handbook and the like, working out from what others do or what feels nice or the like, what is to be. Captain of its soul, it is captive of its fate.

If SOW THE WIND AND REAP THE WHIRLWIND is a great message of the prophet Hosea, in spritual arenas and moral ones, purposive planning and social interchange, in personal seekings and cultural modes, and above all, towards God Himself in liberties, libertine or otherwise: then how much worse is this: "THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH" (Romans 6:23).

Sin ? Unredeemed, it definitely deletes the knowledge, understanding and illumination of reality to which we are apt (Ephesians 2:1ff., 4:17ff.) , but from which man declines in his battered condition, without the realised remedy^*1D of the Creator. It is by no means stoicism, or worse which is required; for this is merely bearing the toothache, past what psychic anodynes can do. It is repentance and faith in the logically necessary Creator, according to His rationally ineluctable revelation in Jesus Christ which is necessary, for as Peter declaims, "There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" - (Acts 4:12).

It is that or nonsense, non-knowledge of the truth which, in that case, is not known, and is as useless to you as non-existence, with which, in high dudgeon and voluntary deprivation, like someone refusing to go to the opera, it may be charged. But then if you do not know it, it is impossible to judge it, or life, or to declare what either of these things are. And if, again, you do not know what you are, then - and this is the condition of the activated but not consummated Gould or any other declared seeker - you are in no plausible position to tell us what it ALL is, or from whence, or why. That in turn, is just one of the reasons why this is never done.

That being said, let us hasten to add this: logically there is no escape. It is psychologically, and ultimately spiritually that the condition exists. Obfuscatory substitutes for common logic are merely a symptom.

THE CALL

Now it is time to notice something exquisitely important. We have examined something of Gould's approach to the 'juicier question' , and observed why it is inadequate, leaving him lost in details, empty of logic.

But LØvtrup invokes some portion of the biological specialisation for the productive resources, also: though he appears more specific, without being more rationally accountable, or grounded for actual action, in this present world. Nilsson would have a material something, and it is this  which which must nut it all out. They are ALL THREE excellent in revealing the painful inadequacies of current scientific theories in this field. They are ALL THREE painfully inadequate, like an examinee caught without having studied his question, in an important exam, in turning from their exposed vapidities of thought, to what IS required.

Negatively they surge; positively they seem scarcely to play. Vague systematically inadequate ideas form, and are tossed out, with a lack of acumen, detail and grounds which is in such marked contrast to the acuity of the criticism of Darwinism in each case, of gradualism of Darwinian proportions, that it is a startling attestation and indeed verification of the Biblical analysis of lost man, that it is even possible for such variation of quality in the two fields!

In each case, in theory, nature is arrested, commandeered, its goods sequestrated, and pressed into action in ways so far beyond the poor thing, that it is a marvel it is not prevented by the RSPCA or something similar. It cannot bear this weight, wear this tunic, present this face, hold this burden of creativity and invention. It does not do it; it does not show it; it does not know it; and knowledge is coin of trade, whether in code or the consciousness of man.

WHY then is this so ? It is because of the sin-obstruction which automatically rules out the logically necessity, one as simple as a picture, as likewise  resolving of ALL questions as a high resolution telescope on a near object (cf. SMR Chs. 4-5). God is out (rule one). Nature is in (rule two).
It MUST have happened ... somehow, nature care of, and sponsored by, brought to existence by ... nature. They ALL appear agreed, in ultimate princple at least, on that. It is a psychological necessity, the reckless inadequacy of which is comic; but to the propounders of these theories, if indeed they can be called that, rather than stories, it  would to appear so, for to such,  the action HAS to be found and MUST NOT be found where it is.

That double condition, it is enough to sink any ship; and it does.

THIS is the prophesied condition, position, situation for that SYNDROME of PATTERNED EVENTS which has never been found until the present (SMR Chs. 8-9,  cf. Ch. 1 of this volume, and may be pursued in PROPHECY in SMR Index). It is found in II Timothy 3, Daniel 12, II Peter 3.
 
 

THE TARTAN OF TRUTH
FOR THE GARMENTS OF THE END OF THIS AGE

First, MEN WILL BE "EVER LEARNING, NEVER COMING TO A KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH." It will be always just around the corner; there will always be experiments, voyages into distant space, or to Mars, or psychic research, ENDLESS LOOKING, SEEKING, just the sort of thing Gould mentions in his credo item on pp. 44,51. Flinging thought into areas unable to supply the answer, always about to announce a new evolutionary support which never comes, always sensationalising some pikaia or ape or fossil, despite the manifest folly of such merely casual imaginations and their failure EVER to show stages of development, or logical grounds, either, for professions made concerning them.

They wobble, like this handwriting, though the message was clear from the start.

That text is found in II Tim.3:7.

Then there are other elements. KNOWLEDGE WILL INCREASE (Daniel 12:4), and travel, international communication will expand. This will so notable that a terse reference to this LAST DAYS of this present age, has noted it in this singular prophet, who also accurately predicted the death date of Jesus the Christ (SMR pp. 886ff.).

It is not merely an increase in knowledge, but one allied with FORMAL religion without the reality, which is specified in II Timothy 3 for these days, which alone fulfil the conditions as shown in SMR 8-9. .

Thus Gould here is explicitly seeking from a plethora of facts, the meaning of origins, when the facts really provide the specifications of the ability needed to produce them. Immersed, like a mermaid in the waters of detail, there is no room for him to even so much as see the sky, and when he tries to sketch it, there is no lift whatever. He is enmeshed in process, simply and utterly failing to give grounds why it should be there at all, far less giving all the grounds for the guided and commanded processes in fact found, with the indicia of intelligence in the most supreme degree, dwarfing that of man in what is required to be requisitioned to produce the works of that order.

Pounding out exquisite machinery before our eyes, thousands of years after first being formed, by self-maintained machinery, one of the reasons we all delight to see the smiles of the new-born, in the presence of the machine maker, or better, code of life and contrivance pattern creator

It is not however machinists who are in question in the production of machines; they merely use them. Fundamental points of logic being shelved, truth is omitted. THIS is the nature of the predicted case. It is quite common, sometimes more dramatic, diagnosed thousands of years before, to be implemented when the time came, which the nexus of events, episodes and unique historical actions involved, attest.

Not only so but as already indicated in detail in News 74, Endnote 1, this set of symptoms making up the End of Age syndrome has also other features. There was to be - and there currently is in epidemic level as shown especially in exposures and presentations of these things in That Magnificent Rock, Ch.8 - a denial of the universal flood. This is sufficiently notable after the profound work of Cuvier and Agassiz and many others, and in the face of the enormous research evidenced by creationists today, and constantly paraded in such places as the CEN Technical Journal, and numerous books such as those by Dave Austin on Mt St Helens, and Velikovsky, Nilsson et al., where data has already been noted.

It is, this rejection,  moreover to be one that is a mocking, scoffing denial. The case noted in The Other News 1 abundantly illustrates that. This scoffing is to extend not only to the flood, but to the concept of creation, and as indicated in News 74, the very term was to be emasculated of meaning. That, as there shown (and in News 57), is precisely what has happened, is happening and continues to abound. This misuse of language so that it is harder to say what you mean in a given sphere, is certainly a useful communication device if your wish is to confuse or distance the issue. Ethically, it is another matter...

These things were to be so, as predicted for this syndrome situation in history, at the end of the Age. Paramountly now, they are, and they are so in association in a 'patient', this present world and its culture and ways, which is like a fever in intensity, blatancy, TV preaching being almost constant, while school indoctrination is continually removing from the young of our race, the status of humans with rationally expressed religious liberty, in the interests of State proselytisation.

Evil is to increase; wars, droughts, famines, horrid sights and immeasurable evil morals (Luke 21:11, cf. Matthew 24) are to become more the norm. Distress of nations is to be the way of it. The mushroom cloud is precisely the order of things predicted in both Joel 2 and noted by Peter in Acts 2. These things we have startlingly seen.

Here we apply them to the point.

We are NOT in the midst of interesting academic pursuits. We are dealing with life and death; and the morbid desire for death when life is at hand, is something to watch like the sleepiness, the sheer drowsiness which comes with carbon monoxide poisoning, while you sit, heated in your car, in the snow, while the exhaust pipe is closed by that snow, that cultural snow, perhaps tinged with acidity preparing for acid rain. It is snowing hard. Sleep is profound, plentiful, and the spiritual side of murder happens so freely when morals sleep, and spirits slumber; and this too, it  abounds as it had too, as we saw in the most dire terms in the light of the prophecy of Revelation in News 84.

The NECESSITY OF GOD, as the CREATOR, of His word being true, of Christ being authentic, all this has been dealt with at almost any assignable level, of formal demonstration, verification and overview, whilst any alternative approach has been invalidated. This is NOT however a MERE reason for the faith. It is an appeal to GET the faith by COMING to the one who is COMING to you whether you like it or not; for God is neither mocked nor impotent; nor slack (II Peter 3:9); nor should His patience and longsuffering be misconstrued as moral indeterminacy. He is determined that the world thoroughly hear the gospel, then, He says, shall the end come (Matthew 24:14).It must, the GOSPEL, MUST, Christ says, be preached in all the world. That is a spiritual necessity, a moral intensity. It is hurrying to the task.

WAKE UP WORLD! YOUR CREATOR IS COMING... and He is immensely personal, as was Christ. What you are, really, is accountable. It is not what you have DONE which is crucial; for you may be a murderer who may be forgiven for Christ's sake, since He bore the guilt of repented sin on the part of those who accept Him vicariously as Saviour (II Cor. 5:17ff.).. It is rather what you ARE, but even that is never good enough,  for heaven COULD not be heaven with even imperfect beings in it (Hebrews 12:23-29, with 9:12-14, 10:10,14).

It is WHOSE you are and on WHAT GROUNDS you are so persuaded (Ephesians 1): whether by faith or presumption (Ephesians 2), by your virtues or the pardon of your vices (Romans 3:23-28), by your adoption according to promise to the family of God (Ephesians 1:5), or your insurgence - taking the Kingdom of Heaven by force, as Christ scathingly called it, referring to the murder of John the Baptist.

That kingdom, it will not be taken by force of strident personality, or charm of manipulative personality; by mighty works, for Christ foretold just how He personally would judge hypocrites, many who would make such claims (Matthew 7:21ff.): not by these either. It is like the way you come to marriage. You receive what is offered, and what is offered is available. Christ is available... now. Philosophic seats to the Arctic may be more appealing; but the truth is not found in heat or cold, pleasure or prestige. It is in God, without whom it is not possible for it to exist; and it is in Christ, without whom it is not possible to be adopted into it; and it is in His cross, without which it is not possible to be forgiven; and in His resurrection^*1, without which it is not possible that He, predicted to rise, would be the Son of God at all.

It is in God all-sufficient and all-proficient, Creator, Saviour and ... please note, shortly to return^*2.
 
 

NOTES
 

1A
 

EXCURSION ON KINDS AND CATEGORIES
 
 

WHAT IS AND WHAT IS NOT

·       While Gould's theories wallow in uncontrived dogmatism, stultified by the use of phraseology to substitute for scientific interface, for directed dynamic, and causal bases for explosions of grandeur of design, teeming into life; and

·       while, secondly, the use of appropriate power, contrivance-creation and DNA origination is what is called for, not literary expressions of frustration:  so that after all, being scientific does not require one to be irrational on the ludicrous hypothesis, like a papal decree, that this world MUST account for this world, as if its manifest transcendence AS A PRODUCT BEYOND ANY ACTUAL or even SIMILAR power WITHIN ITSELF, to that required for its institution, could be discerned, descried, even as at a distance, in what it CAN DO: and

·       while, in other words, creationism is verified just as clearly as it is required for any sound scientific method, and indeed as shown in SMR, by stringent and formal logical requirement,

there are some further features of relevance apt for review.

Before we do however, let us relish the entire literary diversion created by "punctuated equilibrium",  Gould's well-known code word which disguises entire and unrelieved ignorance, based on naturalistic fallacy, and not occasioned simply by lack of capacity.

 

THE LUDICROUS PHRASE

The stress here, in this phrase, that is indeed the only indication of ACTION, is PUNCTUATION. There is 'equilibrium', the non-creative resultant; there is punctuation, which assigns to 'equilibrium' is bounds. Then, there is this quiddity, this something, this WHAT IT TAKES which in moments of NON-equilibrium, when the punctuation is no longer to any avail,  GETS UP AND DOES IT.

The cast of this ludicrous phrase is so set, that not ONLY does it not substitute as a literary excursion, for an engineering one demonstrably required on the part of the Creator; it EVEN in addition uses terms which DISGUISE the very thought of what has to happen, by talking about the cessation of non-creation, not its onset. Now its onset was the WHOLE POINT. Like that other verbal irrelevance, survival of the fittest, it ignores the arrival of the fit. That is like setting places for guests at dinner, with all protocol observed, and omitting the purchase of food, its cooking and indeed, transport to the table, in bite sized or related condition.

 

THE WELCOME FIELD OF FACT

It is good however that Gould, speaks at times with far more candour than many of his contemporaries, intellectually strangled in this naturalisitic and unscientific myth, which elsewhere we have exposed in terms of  the "cult of the forbidden" ( cf. SMR pp. 150ff.). Gould  does note and admit that the concept of survival of the fittest is by no means relevant to the creation of the more sophisticated or impressive (cf. Wake up World! Your Creator is Coming...Ch.5, pp. 84ff. and Ch.6 for the relevant background he provides). That was always a priori apparent, just as it becomes empirically so to him on investigation of the Cambrian proliferations and excisions over time! Creativity is not caused by a desire for design on the part of some Olympic Committee preparing for the most spectacular games. Nature ... does not have one.

What IS, is there; what is not there, this  is not invented by the spot which may appear. Rolls Royces
and bicycles are an uneven group; the persistence of either in a desert however is not so obvious. The car may lack petrol, the bicycle a persistent bicyclist. Even if however the former prevails (and spare parts are always are a problem), then there is still the little question, which in effect Professor Schützenberger of Paris was so concerned about, and not without reason: BUT WHERE did the Rolls Royce COME from ? and WHY did it arrive !

It is good to see, as ALWAYS, the empirical mirror the logical, in this way, and this has in fact been a most impressive and consistent resultant as we have moved from the rational necessities to the empirical illustrations, throughout. This is simply one more exhibition of nature and logic in glorious collusion; which of course becomes inglorious confusion when either is tampered with, as is customary.

The inhibitions of rationality and the exhibitions of observable reality in fact have been more than parallel; they have been as bosom companions throughout.

As to some of the former considerations, and some of their counterparts, apart from the most elementary necessities (as in SMR Ch.1,3,10), one could refer the reader to such aspects as appear in the following:

SMR pp. 252A-C, 252H, 214ff., Ch. 2 at the outset, and pp. 119ff., That Magnificent Rock Ch.1, pp. 13-14, 38ff., end-note 2 on p. 32, Ch. 8, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming... Ch. 4, Ch. 5, p. 84, Ch.  6, Stepping out for Christ Ch.9.

What is never found is a new design, a genuine novelty, a new architectural facility. That is why Goldschmidt remonstrates: "The facts of great general importance are these: - When a new phylum, class or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive... diversification so that practically all orders of families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions" - as cited in That Magnificent Rock on p. 38.

Gould is scarcely less literate on the topic of fact in this regard: "How could such a view of life as a single progressive chain, based on replacement by conquest and extending smoothly from the succession of organic designs through the sequence of human technologies, possibly accommodate  anything like our modern interpretations of the Burgess fauna ? ... The modern themes of maximal disparity and decimation by lottery are more than just unacceptable under such a view of life: they are literally incomprehensible. They could never even arise for consideration..." (Wonderful Life, p. 260).

This is literally true. It could not arise for consideration, except for a pseudo-papal decree, or decretal, or pronunciamento, this time  from biological 'believers' that so it MUST BE.

Arise for consideration! It is even enforced with withering rigour by the anti-cognoscenti, whose predicted belief in a lie (II Thess. 2:10-11, II Peter 3) is equal to the defrauding of scientific method occasioned in their arrant dogmatism. It is precisely like the papacy of old  telling Galileo that the earth does not rotate around the sun: for SO it MUST be, says their heretical authority. And yet it does, muses Galileo! because of the fact, not mangled by false churches (SMR pp. 1042ff.).  So here: "the life does NOT come by the superabundant power of creative enactment without evidence of 'trying'. Life MOVES." This is what the 'church' of Philosophical Biology decrees. You MUST affirm that it does not.

Yes, it does not come that way, say many Galileos of this century, in feigned acquiescence in the face of  money and power and prestige, ranting at them; and then mumble under their breaths, following their evidences of arrivals: and yet it does. It is required to disbelieve it in circumstances all but innumerable as often documented in this site, or else to act as if one did. Gould as we see above, despite being better in acknowledging facts than many, does just the same. His credo leaps from the mind, but finds no place in the book of life, for reference. It is just a dichotomy, with emphasis on the "die", as far as correct procedure in thought is concerned.

Again, we read from him in his candour, "Instead of a narrow beginning and a constantly expanding upward range, multi-cellular life reaches its maximal scope at the start, while later decimation leaves only a few surviving designs" - p. 233 op.cit... "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediate stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution" - cf. SMR p. 217. Required then is NOT MERELY to recognise the total disparity of theory and fact, but to change the accounts that do not bend, but far more properly and productively, actually interpret what is found. This has been done in detail, progressively, and with the detailed results,  in That Magnificent Rock Ch.1.

 

PHILOSOPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIA IN NATURALISM

So the ludicrous virtual philosophic schizophrenia proceeds:

v           the ONLY explanation DISALLOWED is the one which fully fits the facts.

This has NOTHING to do with science. It is an offence against it, an outrage. The empirical is literally man-handled. When it is interpreted, it is in one cluster with the rational and the Biblical, a trilogy of inestimable beauty, and unequalable force.

Over and over again, exponents admit this and that, and then imagine inscrutable scenarios, built on inadequacy, supported by phrases, internal to matrices which lack what it takes, and so the absurd parade of voluntary, sophisticated ignorance proceeds.

It is like someone denying to his wife, or to a court, that he is having an adulterous affair; and keeping up a babble of odd verbiage, when all the time, there is evident such a disparity with the evidence that the thing has long been, as in the Clinton case, such that the acknowledgment of the intention to deceive is the only thing lacking. (This was eventually forthcoming, it appears.)  It is rather more complex in this case; because, since God is, the desire not to meet with Him or acknowledge Him, if at all possible, can lead to a delusion which the Lord Himself visits as a penalty for long obstruction, almost like a stress cancer, so that many, caught in this spiritual pathology, Biblically defined,  merely thunder out words in their philosophic utterance, thought long having become irrelevant in the point at issue.

 

TWO THINGS THAT ARE

This short review is not to re-tread ground often viewed before. It is as a preliminary, on this occasion, to seeing that

·       JUST AS there is ZERO evidence in empirical fact, and as often shown, rational basis, relevant scientific principles, and only contradiction in all known scientific law, and total embargo by coherent logic in the matter of  the organic evolutionary hypothesis; and

·       just as only God could have done it; and

·       just as the only God who is, is the God of the Bible; and

·       just as He states how He did it in carefully conserved KINDS, which then proceeded, by direct fiat creation (as in SMR pp. 179ff., 560ff., The Biblical Workman Ch.7, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 9, 1-3):

SO there is MUCH evidence of two other things.

What are these ?

1) WITHIN A KIND, without breach of its specific character, there is indeed room for variation. It is quite visible and not at all odd.

Within a given design, such as that of mankind, there is planned scope for variability of individuality, such as allowing large heads and small ones, delicate feet and gross ones, huge fingers, flat and stubby, and little ones, delicate and delightful, not always in proportion to other features, but very specialised.

There are flat noses, and even almost flattened ones, upturned ones, well-graced Roman ones;
there are huge thews that seem naturally to adorn the bones, and there are massive bone structures, while on the other hand,  wiriness that does not lack strength may readily be found.

Likewise, there are diseases like acromegaly which give more, and in this case, pathological variation, as also applies with rickets. Thus there can be odd seeming  increases in  bone size or thickness,  or stooping which can come for example with arthritis. With this, there is intellectual variation not only in gross amount, but in specialised capacity, which is SIMPLY ENORMOUS, so that some have power to remember 10,000 or so figures, others to penetrate scientific mysteries, other facility with words that is positively Dickensian; and in other abilities the disparity is no less. Indeed, when you compare the UTMOST ANY HUMAN EVER has achieved in any given field, with the powers of even mediocrity, then the range is vast indeed.

For all that, it is human: there are emotions, there is spirit and sometimes also spiritedness! there is understanding, not necessarily low because certain academic pursuits were not followed. Indeed as Gould states too well for his own situation, the clawing restraints of cultural pre-conceptions are a major danger to science, which is invaded by philosophy at least as often as many another field. In fact, where arrogance, even professional arrogance does accompany a scientist, the vulnerability to that spiritual disease is greater and for that reason! The intensive irony comes when, it is because of scientific method that the arrogance comes, and its display is found in flouting it! Often high posts go to great conformists who in turn act as philosophical censors for perhaps more gifted contemporaries. W.R. Thompson reported this oppressive exclusiveness, and LØvtrup has reflected in the field of oppression in the fields of research, on it as shown earlier and noted before.

There is the KIND which is called human, and literature exhibits its intense commonality, just as likewise its diversity which does not breach it, but rather expresses it, and even adorns it, showing  of what it is capable. So a great oak may arise and grow and increase in beauty, because of conditions, and of genetic structure and the presence of some conducive stimuli, the absence or slightness of some which would be adverse.

2) There are many WAYS in which such variation WITHIN A KIND can be transmitted; of course as research proceeds, they mount, but in the same FIELD. Here is no blank. Here are means. Here is no failure of evidence. Here is evidence of what DOES occur (and it is not evolution, since no information increase is found, designs do not amplify their sophistication); and what is it ?

It is IN-KIND DIVERSIFICATION. It is exposure of the full complement, in time, of what the system included in the start. That is the nature of system. Given time, it shows what it IS, as Blum, reported by Professor A.E. Wilder Smith in his Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, noted. It does not show what it is not. It does show what it is. Time, in this, is its agent.

It is then, DIVERSIFICATION and NOT TRANSMUTATION which IS found; and there are means for showing its ways, just as surely as transmutation is NOT found and there are NO ways for showing what is NEVER SEEN would happen if it did.

 

SCIENCE AND FALLACIOUS PHILOSOPHY

THIS then is science; the other is fallacious philosophy, no more worthy of thought (even of 'consideration', to reflect Gould's phrase) than fairy tales. Indeed, in the case of fairies, ludicrous as this appears, there is at last a formulated entity; the only problem being there is no evidence of that entity. Fairies are precisely like evolution; but better placed in not being also CONTRA-INDICATED. They are, for that reason, a better hypothesis, though a lazy one. They do not evidence themselves.

In evolution, as the Wistar Conference so well showed, and there is no advance sustained  - there is not even a way of putting how it WOULD happen. It is not seen. It cannot then be described. It is not attested; it is not reasoned to; and it cannot be formulated. Construable imagination is not forthcoming. It is blank. The other, exhibition of the full status of a KIND, by its internal variations, this  is not only discernible (by whatever means, it is discerned), but explicable.

The Mendel chromosome discovery was of vast importance, opening the way to see : hidden genes, hidden characteristics, transmission nevertheless of availability to later generations; recessive and dominant genes appear and given new depths and dimensions; mutation of genes providing oddities (no more, cf. That Magnificent Rock, Ch.1, pp. 25ff.). Moreover there have been refinements in methods of information transfer allowing still more variation. The case of colour variation in human races has been pursued at length (cf. Answers Book, , and is in its technical recesses, able to show how one simple variable, melanin, in its intensity or diffusion, and mode of distribution, can account for all race colours (cf. The Answers Book, Dr Carl Wieland et al., from Answers in Genesis).  Disease can cause further change, some being diseases of genes and being transmissible. Cosmic ray damage adds to the list.

Then there is the POOL, the reservoir of information. Professor Maciej Giertych, the head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences makes an interesting statement in this regard: in the field of molecular genetics, the molecular study of genetic mechanisms.

·       "Many hoped that molecular genetics would confirm evolution. It did not. It confirms taxonomic distances between organisms, but not the postulated phylogenetic sequences. It confirmed, Linnaeus, not Darwin."

 

Denton has much to say in similar connections, and in a direction similarly contrary to assumptions of un-direction. As to this quotation, it is supplied with interpretation. Thus the taxonomic distances are those relating to sorting categories. Kind is indicated. Phylogenetic sequences relate to the theory of derivation, the imaginary tree of derivation. Linnaeus had the branding of authority, the classification by order and division by hierarchy. Things had logical relationship. There was in this, as Webster points out, no question of their derivation or inter-relation. The object was quick recognition; the means, orderly arrangement.

More generally of typology, Denton says this (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 99): "Typology acknowledged the existence of biological variation but denied that it could even be radical or directional. It was fundamental to typology that variation was always conservative and limited, always intratype, and never inter-type as is required by evolution." He then notes Linnaeus, Cuivier, Agassiz and Richard Owen, "probably the leading nineteenth-century British anatomist, who produced a classification system for fossil reptiles and originated the term dinosaur."

This then is the background of the word noted, from Giertych, above. THIS MOLECULAR DISTINCTIVENESS is mirrored in another related area. Blood serum precipitation results for various creatures. Some of the amusing difficulties included such ENGINEER-FREE but developmentally horrifying data as this: in terms of blood precipitation TESTS, planned to seek out possible evolutionary relationships, it was found that some human beings experimented on were less closely related than the anthropoid apes, to their fellowmen. Some men were as nearly 'related' to rodents as to their own kind (Dr Evan Shute, Flaws in the Theory of Evolution, pp. 78-79).. That was simply ONE MORE sought after verification, which instead of being positive, was ludicrous.

Thus order is extensive and intensive; but order based on assumptions of transmutation, organic evolution, is as diffident in distinguishing test, as in exposing itself EVER to sight. The order found in practice is in alliance with immense inventiveness, ingenious contrivance and unitary conceptions with functional outcomes of holistic proportions. This is what is found. Its nature reflects the minimal creativity, superintendence and capacity of its conception. (Cf. Scoop of the Universe 57, 59, That Magnificent Rock  1,8, SMR Ch.3, and pp. 159, 315B-316A, 137, 1-50, Repent or Perish 7, End-note 2; and supra, chapters  2,  4,  5.)

 
 

It is now time to revert from the environment of thought and terms, to our specific interest in the gene.

The initial GENE POOL, here seen in some of its elements,  is that from which the chromosomal variety of the present comes to exist. It is naturally another variable; and a fundamental one. What was it like in the original situation, before our current downward trend asserted itself so strongly, that never is any case of contrary, that is upward information action, to be found. How were the genetic collations, the chromosomal collections, integrated and made functional, fashioned at the first ? Since so much can divide and specialise, dropping out in various locations and situations, some of the diversity of the kind, presumably there was much greater richness in the original kind pools.

The nature of gene behaviour is a fascinating datum. Dr Eric Norman (Creation, June -August 1995) gave some practical indications from his own intensive research of the enormous stringency of the chemical and physical conditions required for DNA strings, even few - say, as in his case, 3 'letters': for example, momentary exposure to water  would be lethal. Then he proceeded to note that DNA in a 'simple' bacterium "carries so many 'letters' in sequence that, if you type it out, it would fill about 2,000 ordinary pages. One human cell would take about a million pages."

This pool of information, this encasement in a protective cover, of code, this archetypal architecture, this summary of purpose, this energy initiator, for purposes in hand conveyed by command, to be executed by arrangement, this format conserver, this cosmos constructor, the cell with its DNA, or better, the DNA in the cell - itself in turn emplaced in the cell, and that in its own other hierarchical biotic environments, up and up vertically in integral unity of action, until the species in question is seen operating: its many worlds are like the starry heavens. Wheels within wheels, organic sub-wholes within greater ones, all synchronised in fabrication, operation, functionality, all with 'eyes' as Ezekiel set in figure, all intellectually impressed, they turn. Wheel do not make wheels; they turn.

Thus is the DNA engineering: itself first, its products second.

They are one; they interact; their construction defies imagination. That is always and naturally the case with creation. When a genius produces, you marvel: HOW could he/she have done it! You realise of course, if you have any skill at all in the field, SOMETHING of the SORT of thing which may have stirred; but the actual powers are not yours. In this case, it is the capability of the Creator who, being demonstrably as we have shown, yours, is equally necessarily quite TRANSCENDENT over your own powers.

Yet for all that, being a creative creature of the Creator, you CAN sense the SORT of thing, even though you entirely lack the power to imitate it in this. That is how it is meant to be. You see, are inspired and follow, in YOUR OWN DOMAIN. It is intellectually and purposively comprehensible (to echo in the positive, Gould's term); and indeed entirely so. It is the QUALITY of it which soars as do the heavens, and the power of it. We for our part, again, have worlds within worlds, at the spiritual level, in the realm of the understanding and the will (cf. Repent or Perish 7, Excursions 1,2). This in turn leads to needful constructive thought and responsibility (loc.cit. Excursion 3).

Since then we are an exhibit of that sublimity of order and soaring creativity, in various heights and operations, we have abundant testimony of its sufficiency! Thus, here as always, the empirical VERIFIES what REASON has already demonstrated; and the more intimately you pursue it, the more ingeniously it confirms it.
 
 

DIVING INTO THE POOL

The GENE POOL, then, has its initial richness. What then ?

Different types can split off in specialised environments, such as polar bears, obviously safer when white in the Arctic, and in those, certain variables are lost, more or less systematically excluded. Breeding can have a similar effect; though as Creation Magazine points out (June -August 1995, p. 8) breeders have never made a dog into a non-dog, though mutational difficulties or oddities can be exaggerated by selection. Inherited copying errors can be 'matched up', they point out, so that instead of these mistakes being 'hidden' as now, they are exposed more readily to view. (See SMR pp. 252C, 201-202, 214-221, 221ff.).

Genes may in cases be turned off or on (SMR loc.cit.), and so various possibilities are environmentally related. Nutriment can affect growth rates as well as development,  and chemical input can activate, enhance or allow. Stimuli can activate certain responses, as when fire brings out the trunk shoots, later on gum trees.

They may evidently be transmitted in some cases, in the off or on position.

The point is that here there is a base, there is equipment and resource, there is stimulus and response, there is an ordered phenomenon with provisions of the most delicate, astute and ... limited kind.

We can amplify this.

In Creation ex nihilo, Vol. 22, No 1, Dec. 1999- Jan. 2000, on pp. 36ff, there is report of an interview with the distinguished and much credentialed Professor Walter Veith. On this topic of intra-systematic variation, diversity within kind, he refers to the case of "naked mole rats", observing that "if the ecological circumstances  get tough," these creatures can "respond with whole host of drastic rearrangements of their genetic material, so-called ‘jumping genes’ doing their thing…" This, he indicates, "creates a far greater diversity in their offspring."

Referring to the ‘latent DNA’ area, he notes that this is becoming better recognised as to its peculiar role. There is much to learn about the diversification and operation of this magnificent, enormously complex code-executive compilation that appears in biological life. Its operation is visibly, constantly, and with precision on the Biblical model: stern stringency about kind, ample variety within it.

This too is just the theoretical provision of the code: provision for many contingencies as in our own engineering creations very often; but no means provision for factories on the spot turning one crafted object into another. It is not seen. Its provisions are not found. It exemplars do not promote themselves from history; and logic denies them a self-sufficiency of this kind, proceeding from its absence, in a realm alien to it.

To revert, however, to Professor Veith: such gene rearrangement does not represent new information, he observed, but the change of order - like different tunes ON THE SAME PIANO. This allows marked change within kind. It is of the type that could allow ‘dog kind’ to present coyote, wolf and dingo.

On p. 56 of the same edition of this magazine, Dr Carl Wieland shows that in the case of wild radishes, some resistances can be passed on to the next generation - such as might render the plant less edible through toxins unpleasant to the appetite. Aroused in one generation from the equipment provided, it can be switched on, it appears, in the next initially.

Similarly, fleas can develop protective structure, ‘helmets’, when predator chemicals are released near them, and offspring can come with these ‘helmets’ from the outset.

Thus these built-in mechanisms, like air conditioning in a motor car, can apparently be switched ON, and may arrive in offspring STILL ON. ‘A pre-programmed response induced by’ environmental change, we read, is what is found.

In fact, it represents a wonderful dual feature: it can help the creature concerned (like chains, used in icy conditions to aid snow-tyres, and kept BEFOREHAND in the boot); and it can diversity the type within its kind, allowing the fluidity of adaptation which coheres with the rigidity of what it is that adapts. How much better than machinery is this precise adjustment facility. It has just that litheness of disposition which reminds of the athlete, who, also, does not cease to be a man because he becomes well-muscled, exercising all his resources  with something resemblind a ‘well-bred’ result.
In comparison with engineering, however, it is just what we do, but better done! It is exquisitely intelligent, just as the DNA provisions are intensively miniaturised, far beyond our capacities: such work beckons us, but it also  dwarfs us.

The field is utterly fascinating, a swathe of pure ingenuity in the domain of  creation, precisely in accord BOTH with the relatively large EXAMPLES of KIND as given in Genesis 1, on the one hand, and with the highly intricate, and procedurally precise code complexities in the cell, the blueprint, on the other.

It constantly shows how diversity can enter, with all the variables WITHIN KIND operative, and so the prodigy called creation continues, fixed and variable within fixtures, like a house with limited but real scope for alteration, by devices, but of the same fundamental, original architecture.
The bank does not run, in this case, to rebuilding; only to renovation or developments on the original. The building has facilities for response; but it does not create itself.

These are the facts as observable; and some of the features enabling them.

As to organic evolution: there is nothing to explain. You explain what you find. This is what is not found. It is not only gradualism, which Gould rightly lampoons; or survival of the fittest as the source of design, which again he rightly scorns; but it is ANY attribution to a nature - which is, and has no directly or indirectly discernible power whatsoever to make itself - of that power which is in the end, a scientifically childish substitute for relevant thought. This applies to a nature, to nature, to any nature.

Why childish ? It is because a child could do this; but a watchful adult never, without the scourge of philosophy driving, propelling or impelling him. A prodigy of designs with an audacity of profusion is what is found; and this is not the work which relates to the mindless; but to the creative. A servile matter is not the source of this; for it is designed to go on being matter. Its reception of legal specifications, like those given to a servant to take to the lawyer, is not the same as the power to formulate them.

Messengers are not professors. THAT is why it is a childish mistake; and this is NO reflection on the brilliance of those who make it. It is just that the cleverer the mind, the more astutely absurd will be the endeavours to conform to a philosophy which at the outset is a contradiction in terms.

What have we in this astonishingly absurd scenario! What does NOT appear, is by means which CANNOT be found, to happen in ways which are NOT evidenced, so that laws which are IMPRINTED are to be the source of laws which are to be FORMULATED. A book is to write itself, a student is to write the book he reads. (That is easier than this, however!) Happening is to order. Deposition is to think. Existence is to be its own sponsor.

·       In the end, nothing is really something;

·       and so for every world of order, it 'arises' or comes from what is

·       neither itself,

·       nor there already (in which latter case, for naturalism you have it by magic anyway),

·       nor sufficient to produce it,

·       being without the relevant world of equipment, the machine tools,

·       the originative capacity to invent it.

• Give me a pantomime; it is far more rational.

But let us return to evidence, science and reason. (Cf. SMR pp. 149-151, 934ff..)

Empirical science holds hands with Biblical truth. There is KIND with internal variability in the limits of the same, or non-developmental damage, in terms of information;  and that is it. As to KIND, it is not tiny in its formulation, the Biblical examples of kind being rather large in their dimension. AS kinds, they are not transmutative in operation, the KINDS being CONSERVED. As the Bible indicates, this is a fact by divine decree. The decree is noted; and it is seen in evidential operation. That is all.
 
 
 

*1B

EXCURSION OF AND ON YOUTH

In the Advertiser, November 22 November 1999, there is an account of the increasingly formalised annual student, post-exam spree at the nearby coastal resort of Victor Harbour.

A pastor of the now compromised Lutheran denomination (see Stepping Out for Christ, Ch.1), apparently proposed that the surging spring of the annual spree be given recognition with formal events. Shopkeepers were not displeased. Many more may now go with results the imagination may in view of past exploits, prefer not to contemplate.

The interesting thing to our present point is this: ONE of the students on being asked on his interest in going replied that it was an escape, that in this way, he could stop thinking about the REALITIES of life, what it was really about, and get on with other things.
 

·       Cynicism, secularism, the whole realm of dyspeptic eclecticism,

·       the knowledgeable ignorances of the indoctrinating pedants,

·       the sophisticated instructions of the lost, the militant materialism lost in its mirages, dependent on mind for their integrity, and losing it for that reason,

·       the religious relativisms, absolutely asserting their dismal substitutes for truth with flat self-contradiction,

·       these and the biological transfusionists, who worship nature and find the curse, and follow it like a litany:

·       all these and many more afflict the mind of youth.

THIS, they say like unordained preachers of another gospel to another world, happening by chance into this one, and not noticing the difference: ‘THIS IS THE WAY. There isn’t one. Be sour, be secular, be stoical, be eruptive, be anything: we only know that there is nothing to know, and of that we are utterly sure; but if we ever find anything, it will be self-centred, for we as god declare all things, though as relativists we CAN KNOW NOTHING.’

The last part of the declaration, unfortunately, is often not heard; and often not stated. It is the only good part. Since they can know nothing, they have no message, but seemingly self-forgetful, they give one anyway.

South Australia, with its painfully pathetic statements with absolute assurance on the topic of religion, having first carefully denied the ground of any assurance, is a world leader in confused pedanticism afflicting the minds of the young (That Magnificent Rock Ch.8). Many others have less blatant modes.

Cynicism and scepticism (for the astringent folly of which see SMR Ch.3) march hand in hand, while Gould’s aspiring hope of finding some meaning in what is initially stripped of it in the cosmos of corruption, gives them something to waste their time on, looking where nothing may be found, for the descriptive is never the prescriptive, and what happens is not what ought to be, nor can it even provide any reason why  there ought to be an ought; while naturalism in itself precludes the possibility, just as it is itself precluded by reality, being divorced from reason at the first and from empirical reality at the last as shown.

It is enough that youth be lost. It is enough that like deliquescent crystals, they grow moist with the impudent and irrational follies of this world, and run away. When crystals so dissolve and run, they are in danger of becoming, very fast, mere dirt.

Again, it is like dogs outside a barbed wire fence, that excludes.

Many point to the fence, and it is indeed there: barbed with sin, and strengthened with authority. The beautiful thing, the lost thing, the missed thing, the necessary item is simply this: it IS indeed impossible to breach the fence and find the world of love and kindness, meaning and rationality, wisdom and truth by breaching the fence. Truth is not for sale. It cannot be purchased. But there is a gate. The Lord, the Creator has provided it.

It is called the Lord Jesus Christ. It runs and turns on salvation (John 10:9,27-28). Its cost was the life of Christ on earth, busy redeeming (Galatians 3:10-13), not being lost. He came for the lost. That was the cost. It is paid. It does not need to be paid again. Payment is never effective till attributed, and this requires acceptance. Redemption cannot occur without transfer. Trying to pay excludes by definition. You cannot become the gate. You must enter it.

In not entering it, is all the sorrow of the world; for though the world in its sin is a testing place for ALL, it is a sad place where the reality needs escape, only for some.

Where truth is found, the life is to be RUN to, not ESCAPED from (Isaiah 53:1-6)! Taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8).This is the need of youth. Christ is not found by turning the back. The rich young ruler came running to Christ. He left mourning. It was not that there was no gate; it was rather that he preferred his natural state.

1C

In accord with this, it is of interest, now in 2004, April, that the Creation Technical Journal - 18(1) - on pp. 10-11, refers to a far more direct collection of some 500 fish in China from the EARLY Cambrian (sic semper tyrannis! in philosophy as in history...). As possessing not only notochord as fish, as chordates, but possessed eyes and it is considered, probably nasal sacs, these numerous items evidence once more the early diversification, the brilliance of creativity, putting chordate properties with eyes long before Pikaia, into the vast record both of soft-bodied and hard skeletal remains, which the world provides.

Thus an EARLY Cambrian fish with some index of craniation for the eyes, is obviously in one of the more advanced categories of kind, and antedating the Pikaia, leaves it no father! As Gish (Evolution: the fossils STILL say NO! pp. 74-75) points out, chordates are still here today, and in all the billions upon billions of soft-bodied and other fish to be found, many in the Canadian Burgess shale, we see no transitional series, but as today, limited variety on various thematic constructions.

We find what we have today in type, chordates, even in the early Cambrian, craniation, eyes, this last feature as indeed in the splendidly apparent trilobites, some of them with most complex eyes as Parker points out in his Creation - The Facts of Life p. 92; and it is not a little odd to try to suppress the reality of the fossil record by appeal to billions of obliterations with no residues in soft-bodied creatures when multitudes lie around, often as Gish points out in an amazing state of preservation (op. cit.  p.  63),  to declare the findings multiply void. Steps there are not in kind.

Even bacteria are found preserved quite merrily, with jelly-fish, worms, single-celled creatures, but no evidence of the suppressed billions of alleged transitions from soft to hard-bodied creatures, is to be found, so that it is small wonder that evolutionist Romer declares of the amazing NON-GENERIC sort of fish that appear early, that so far from constituting a nice basis for fish variation, there is a startling array of innovation, novelty, design, all at once. With notable frankness, he admits the very centre of the problem for all organic evolutionists: "it would have simplified the situation if they had never existed" (Gish, op.cit. p. 77). It would have simplified it too if the transitions had existed, if they had come in sequence, if there were systematic findings available, to show what they desire to see. But the void is more eloquent than this, and non-existence of the data is the only escape. With it, science goes, sultry and neglected, as attendant to such fantasies, amongst the worst of human dreamings and deceivings of all time!

What kind of a theory about kinds is so unkind to the record that it must invent what the latter does not provide, and continually 'adjust' and 'adapt' (the really large change in the mind of man!), to what denies it life. Death being not so very adaptable, the theory goes on, dead on arrival, without survival, a maelstrom of testimony to the anti-factual bias of man when his interests are involved, and his heart has no rock on which to rest. Many unthinkingly follow the sound of something hollow: a cultural phenomenon of the utmost importance.

Now there is this warrior from China, happily chordate, ocular, diversified and early Cambrian. The Creator life did what He did in startling singularity of power, innovation of kind and with all the expected evidences of what we humans ourselves, though merely derivative and limited, yet find for ourselves. In music, literature, startlingly sudden, wholly diverse, completely non-sequential things can burst like lightning into the scene, not building up from bits, but coming whole from the mint of mind.

Every endeavour to pretend or prevaricate always fails. Facts are quite obtuse when it comes to generic evolution, and simply refuse to co-operate, being bound by the creative word of God ... as are the kinds. Creation is attested and nothing else. Economy sometimes occurs as in deliberative design; but innovation is the order of the day, an appurtenance of creative power, and not of that blind child, without genes or genesis, chance, which merely follows the system invented, which not having mind, does not show its appurtenances or ways. Creation and creator are always infinitely distinct, their ways self-attesting.

1D

See Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6   -7, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, SMR pp. 47ff., Ch. 2 above, et al.
for the necessity of this remedy; also Index.  Index has a large array of hyperlinks, and may take a few seconds to appear, but not much longer than going to your shelves to reach for a book a little way off.

*1
Barbs, Arrows and Balms Appendix 3,
Biblical Blessings  Ch. 15, Extended Endnote 2,
The Magnificence of the Messiah, Endnote 1, SMR Ch. 6 and  Index, The Kingdom of Heaven... Ch. 9, Section 14,  JJ 25, Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 85.

 

*2 

See Chapter 7 below for the concept of consummation versus decimation in this arena of COMING, RETURNING and COMPLETION of the creation. Like the event itself, it is likely to be short.