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.
 

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