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INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER TWO

See especially Bulletins 39, 111 and 121 on the up-to-date, down-to-earth, intensively researched contributions  from Dr Nathaniel Jeanson with Ph.D. in the field from Harvard University (in his new work, Replacing Darwin), and Dr J.C. Sanford, Emeritus Professor from Cornell University (Genomic Entropy).

Recently published also is Dr Sanford's 2019 work, Bones in Contention, with Christopher Rupe, a brilliant, detailed, multi-partite and arresting interpretation.

By empirical and actively vital means, informed with recent research, these are among those showing what has been logically in essence apparent for long, though unheeded by many. See also News 57 on 'principles' and their working. 

The gods of naturalism have no go has been a convenient repository for multi-faceted work in the domain of creation, and brings us with many references to May 2017. As to naturalism in its various forms and guises, variations on an unoriginal theme, assigning time to what is

	question begging in the first place,
	self-contradictory in the second,
	definitionally confused in the third,
	empirically negatived in the fourth, and
	involved in vast variation in technical results in the fifth,

it becomes increasingly like an absurd dream. It is like asking Alice, in Alice in Wonderland, how much of the mushroom she should eat, in c.c., for a given result. On such points, see the exposition at Department of Bible and Spiritual Affairs, Volume 7, Chapter 10. Aspects of these matters are given multiple approaches, covering their deficiencies and derelictions.

 

The extended list below could prove helpful.

That Magnificent Rock Ch. 1, Ch. 7, esp. Ch. 7, Section E,
covers much in more recent scientific data and for detail in general,
these sections of Ch. 7:
1        2    and   3.
and for astronomy, this one in addition to the earlier presentations of Ch. 7,
and the later ones in 2016-2017, Bulletins,
numbers Thirty Six, Forty Five, FiftyThree, Fifty Seven, Fifty Nine,
all available through the above Bulletin link. 
For specialist interest, there is now a sub-set of 5 volumes,
The gods of naturalism have no go! into which relevant new material and chapters are put
from time to time, up to April 2017, the present at the time of writing.
Volume 5 will have the latest additions.

See also the various specialised sets in Search, which also provides coverage of much of the developments in presentation on other topics including predestination, currently in a sub-set of seven volumes, the Predestination Heptad. .

Allied is the large work,

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

and one even larger,

DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY

both with some millions of words in their construction.
No changes in approach have been made, but matters have been extended,
new data have been added and procedures have been amplified in
what is now a library 187 volumes.

One can only praise the Lord Jesus Christ and indeed the glorious Trinity who have provided for mankind such facilities, testimonies by the inspiration of the Bible, the aid to the hearts of His people and to the display of nature, that nothing lacks or boggles, but it is all clear in principle and basis, in coherence and explication. For those who sincerely want an answer, it is there.

While much is to be found, what is found is much more abundant than necessary for the purpose of the truth of the Lord and of His word, God being liberality itself to those who seek Him in faith, on the basis of His unattenuated, unchanged and immutable Gospel of grace.

Apologetic Method has been presented especially in What is the Chaff to the Wheat, Volumes 3 and 4, Possess Your Possessions Volume 9, Ch. 2, but also in more specialised containers.

Thus, these may occur in the space-time and related arenas, which have more attention in:

The Divine Agenda Ch.   1,
TMR  7, esp. Section F; The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.   1, ASP  3,
Red Alert Ch.  11, Repent or Perish Ch.   6,
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch.   6,  
News 80, Great Execrations, Greater Faith Ch.  6 (meta-space),
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.  4 ,  Mars esp. (face ...),
Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch.   1, 
Let's Be Reasonable, for God Is! Ch.  5
See also in Indexes, space, time, 'Big Bang'
and Bits and Pieces Metaphysics;

See further,  Unity ; The Divine Drama Ch.    3 (space-time continuity),  CCC   9.

On Genesis 1, see especially Dayspring,

Possess Your Possessions Vol. 8, Ch. 5, Ch. 9, Ch. 2,

The Biblical Workman Ch.  7  ,
Gracious Goodness Ch.   6;
Answers to Questions Ch.   8;
Bright Light ... Ch.   9

see Index: Beginnings

Again, in terms of the method in this presentation of Biblical Christian Apologetics, see validity in particular, but by no means exclusively, for example, in:

It Bubbles ... He Calls Ch.   9, esp. *1A,

TMR Chs. 5, 7 ; 

Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming... Ch.  5, End-Note 1A,

Repent or Perish Chs.   2 and  7, pp. 152ff.;

Serenity not Serendipity ... Ch.   6;

Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch.   6;

Barbs ... 29,  19; 

SMR   3, Ch. 1 pp. 50ff.,

Little Things Ch.  5,

TMR 9, Epilogue,

News 94; 

The  Defining Drama Ch.  4,

Grand Biblical Perspectives Ch.   7,

Let's Be Reasonable For God Is!  Ch.   2.

While attention is given to method, and there is structure in this, yet no one method is necessarily at all times exclusive in usage, different hand-maids being available, as when a dental nurse supplies this or that to the dentist.

 

We now resume our introduction to Ch. 2 of SMR.

Does a Scientifically Oriented Approach to Life,
one using Scientific Method, exhibit in its own way,
what has already been demonstrated by reason ?

 

Creation in life is like a brick wall into which the findings lead us with remorseless efficiency. We cannot bypass it or overcome it. In terms of scientific method, organic evolution violates the procedure over and over again, and is negatively indicated repeatedly. Creation on the other hand conflicts with this procedure at no point. Whilst neither creation nor evolution have been seen by any inhabitant of this world, yet each has aspects relevant to scientific method, and the readout is fully unambiguous when these are considered.

Only creation meets the case. To this result we come in summary form, on pp. 149-150 ff.; but in the meantime, let us launch into the resolutely enduring sea of certifying facts.

In particular, for Section 5, pp. 128-197, where specialised extensions are provided past the initial more general consideration, the teaching device and procedure for readers' convenience will be to give a degree of independence to some of the treatments. Thus at the expense of some repetition of data which apply equally for various considerations, and with some conformity to the special features of different special fields, there will be reminders of matters applicable to the particular speciality under consideration.

This should reduce the burden of cross-reference, while at the same time increasing familiarity with considerations all too seldom presented in many areas of thought. Over 100 pages of End-Notes and Supplement complete this Chapter, providing particular confirmation, application, verification or information in a fast-moving field.
 
 

In cells, he is superb in a construction near the ultimate in miniaturisation (*2); in imagination, he dims computers by comparison, themselves the product of high intelligence; in structure, he is compressed, composite and yet cohesive; in mind, he is deftly analytical in probing high orders of musical, mathematical and physical complexity; in spirit, he has strange finesse in word and art. Indeed it is part of the evidence of the grand design of man's being that he can with all this, yet err, meander from his true meaning by explicit will and, with rebellion even from visible reality, cease from his own good.

Programmed he demonstrably is, in part, in his DNA, that microscopic marvel (*3) of delicate chemical information code- yet programmed in spirit ? Not entirely. He can err because that created masterpiece, the non-programmed person has arrived. Man, that prodigy of creation, has in fact been on stage in this earth for some thousands of years, but his very body leaves our latest and highest technical advances almost as if they were the work of children, by comparison.

Humour and the human

He does this while holding his own thoughts of rebellion, against the clear evidence of higher than human genius in his construction, to be somehow meaningful, valid and marvellously able to summon sound perspective over and about the whole process; that they are true and right and to be relied upon.

If this is his humour, it is folly to humour him. Despising the God of absolute truth, the twentieth century worldling yet absolutely 'knows' and indeed does not hesitate to tell us, omitting only the source for the true perspective, already buried in the rubble of his dismantling. The dismal punchline occurs when he tells us it is absolutely true that nothing is absolutely true. Such is man in full flight from reality.

To revert to the High School situation, earlier noted: a little matter then of vestigial organs touted in a textbook, appeared as assumption. Their virtual demise (*4) was not received by all students without some seeming sourness. They did not all seem comfortable with the thought that all was not well with evolutionary theory.

However, to revert to the textbook case in particular - that of the vermiform appendix in man, the circumstance of a blood supply inconsistent with dysfunction (*4), recorded in technical literature some time ago, was brought to light orally. Indeed both from Oxford and John Hopkins Universities, we find categorical words on this matter (*4). We find further in Slusher and Moore's Biology: A Search For Order In Complexity,p. 425 (*5): "There is now evidence that man's appendix serves as an aid in the body's defence against disease."

This sort of discovery grows more and more routine in the systematic whole of multitudinous parts, parts by the billion in each individual human person's body. These are increasingly obviously connected and inter-related, indeed integrally operative in that vitalised engineering side of the construction of man. In the 'vestigial' appendix, then, one can see no vestige of truth. What one can hear however is the whole clamour for a biology which will seemingly happily unwrap laws from no cause, by the billion, and integrate them, codify them and copy them. This affair of solemn fantasy continues like a rush of lava. It is an eminently popular, though irrational passion.

Law does not cease to be law, nor logic to be logic because of vital processes (cf. *18, p. 81 supra). I notice that biologists do not laugh at logic whilst trying to use it. There is the same requirement for cause, and the same need to avoid magic. Vital processes require more (cf. p. 210 infra), and not less explanation in terms of a cause sufficient for their routine and programmed operation, for they incorporate more meaning than merely that of matter. Indeed, as has been pointed out, it is rather strange, even for man, to seek in chance for an explanation of the complex and ordered coding system inherent in the cells of his body... a very logical system.

After all, in information technology- an area noted in the School discussion, the fact is that chance tends to decrease information, not to increase it. Entropy, consigning things to failing specifics (p. 329 infra), applies even here; nor does one need to be a genius to perceive this in life, the extensive and natural tendency for loss of order and running down. Not for nothing does the scientific field speak of the law of entropy.

How then ascribe to chance the increase of what it decreases! It is as if spending were to be made the source of saving; eating of slimness and mindlessness of mind. Let us revert to the dilemma. If this is logic, then magic is science.

Discipline and "daydreaming"

With function now overwhelmingly seen in these erstwhile dysfunctional relics, and the presumption of ignorant folly exposed which derived this thought from a magical theory exposed: yet still two things continue. The theory is still widely assumed (if being transformed hectically this way and that), and the false assertions about vestiges continue as if a vast number of these were not exposed, as merely the work of ignorance on the basis of magic.

Here is a theory in wild confrontation with the evidence, being asserted as... a fact, or of a factual character. Truly man is a marvel of construction to be able, at the mere flick or flicker of will to say, with straight face, that that is science which is divorced from imposing areas of fact (when only one confrontation with evidence alien to the requirements of verification, calls for the knell of a scientific theory). Small wonder that now, new developmental theories of 'evolution'- whether 'quantum' or 'punctuated equilibria'- are calling for what, in effect, are acts of creation!

As Karl Popper (Professor at London University, of world fame in this area) declares it: the law (*6) of evolution is not science. "Can there be a law of evolution... I believe the answer to this question must be 'No'," says he.

And why not ? Such a law enables neither prediction nor verification - essential ingredients of scientific law (*7). As a universal law - it is lawless. The imagination of evolutionists holds a ready and steady stream of captious improvisations, which are not subject to the discipline of facts. This lawless philosophy masquerades as science, and great is the guilt of all those who so forward it to the minds of the young.

Different 'authorities' declaim that this (*8) is the way such and such a living creature, living organ 'evolved' from some other; whilst others with apparent seriousness tell us: No, it was not so; rather it happened in this wise...

Meanwhile, neither the display nor the mechanism for such vertical transformations in the scale of biological life is steadfastly to be seen. Thus Pierre-Paul Grassé, past-President of the French Academy of Sciences states of this matter of mutations as a means for advance: "THERE IS NO LAW AGAINST DAY DREAMING, BUT SCIENCE MUST NOT INDULGE IN IT..." (*9) - cf. p. 251-252N infra.

As we shall see, the eminent Dr Dmitri Kouznetsov, with triple bioscience doctorates from the Soviet Union, asserts precisely the same, concerning mutagenics: Design advance, as distinct from variation, genetically does not occur.

There is evidence of the power of organisms in varying degrees to adapt to certain requirements of life, just as our own designs, say of air-craft - comparatively simple- have contingency plans to allow for this or that emergency. To suppose (*10), however, that we have any evidence of power to become a different design, rather than existing as an adaptive structure incorporating a plan and facilities to respond, to buttress existing organisms against foreseen contingencies: this is indeed day-dreaming.

The genetic structure, already a marvel and a masterpiece of miniaturised engineering as a matter of fact, is yet not a miracle in motion. Miracles have their place; but it is not all over the place.

Miracles are things which should be noted, reported, recorded; but not simply assumed. Indeed, were such a miracle to occur within Nature, a redrafting of a livingdesign, it would merely the more manifestly show the hand of God; but what He does choose to do, can evidence itself in matter. It can present itself as evidence. It is that evidence which we discuss. The evidence for such a feat is lacking; not lacking however are theories about it: without an observational base, with no law to test and no parallel laws to suggest. Quite apart from not being Science; it is an imposture of the greatest possible kind.

Nor does this irrationalistic or gradualistic case fare better, as was shown at the School, if we turn to fossils. Professor George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard University has declared:

GAPS AMONG KNOWN ORDERS, CLASSES AND PHYLA ARE SYSTEMATIC AND ALMOST ALWAYS LARGE (*11).

The fact of systematic gaps in the record of past life, when arrayed in some sort of supposed order, is precisely what one would expect from a creationist basis. Verifying, as is the dust-layer on the moon by its startling thinness - it is just what the creationist might rather expect. Surprising to the infidel, it yet has the discipline of order to the mind of the believer.

Biologically, without assuming the extravaganza of something such as a crypto-magical movement from marvel to marvel of design... by some hidden, automated and stored programming (which some would seem more readily to imply (*12) than overtly to declare) - a rather than a cyclic program, alas without evidence (*9): what then ? How do the competitive explanations deal with the facts ?

This series of systematic gaps is then the prediction, specifically, of  fiat  creationism. That is, it is precisely what God's let it be done, creation clearly asserted, from the start. And where is that in terms of scientific theory ? It is simply that this is verified and the evolutionary dream of Darwin is not. That is the first lesson of the many, for the many compelled at last to surrender the poetical myth of gradualistic evolution.

In terms of logic and evidence in happy harmony, it is a unique verification. If there were no gradual change from species to species, order to order and so on: why then, there would be large gaps, certainly there would be systematic gaps. These are found: the creationist claim is verified thereby, in a precise, ordered and logical way, without ad hoc tempests or the ludicrous mental torture of diehards.

In the line of verification, then, that is the current end in terms of scientific method, of the theory of organic evolution, of gradualistic chance 'creation'. It has been a great waste of time, though not for the devil. Its verification both competitively with creation, and actually, is negative. Yet the theory wallows on, like an opium smoking teenager, indulged by doting parents. (Cf. pp. 251-252N infra.)

Shrines and scientific method

Actually, we noted that in scientific method (*13) there is properly a certain economy, a thrust, a short and decisive approach. If the verification from a hypothesis fails, so does the hypothesis. It is better so. It helps to preserve people from illusion and delusion. Oh we must be sure we are correct relative to our tests: but when this is done, the theory goes which fails to meet the test at any point. We do not need multiple chances. You pass or fail. We are dealing with truth.

ln the School, we compared for illustration this clustering (*14): that is, the grouping of biological exhibits about norms, on the one hand, with decisive and repetitive gaps on other, to an imaginary situation many years hence, in another field.

Let us trace such a situation. Multitudes of 20th. century cars might be unearthed from their automotive graveyards: there might be many clusters of types of cars which one could assemble, with variety about a norm: maybe groups of Volkswagon type machines, Daimler species, Rolls Royce models and so on. We would not, however, be able to find pivotal transitional car species; though there would be more resemblance between say, some sports cars, than between a sports and a saloon model. The reason for this phenomenon would be simple: they were not made by some enormously expensive, complex and wondrous transmutative device (crypto-programmed), one moving by agonising stages to something decidedly different, after its manufacture was completed, in the normal order of things; nor by chance!

They were simply not made that way - and small surprise at that! They were not programmed to turn from Volkswagon to Rolls by various little steps... Their similarities related to function and the minds, similar minds, that made them. Homogeneous if not identical intelligence made them. The same might apply to different models from the same designer. It is simply not practical to engage in huge reconstructions of designs of great complexity, normally being simpler to use base materials and intelligence, perhaps re-using certain processes. Not at all do the processes suggest improvements to themselves, either.

If, then, we found that sort of evidence, in our imaginary situation, and asked ourselves what could account for it, it would conform to the hypothesis of one mind, or similar minds making many cars with similarities for various purposes at convenient times, or chosen times. It would not conform to the hypothesis of car evolution. The logical point is illustrated then. The gaps, systematic and sustained, conform to creation... and not to evolution.

If it was obscured by magic, mist and pseudo-scientific traditions before, its obvious reality should now be clear to anyone who looks. The discipline of the evidence cannot into eternity be avoided. Not by the fairy wand of desire must these gaps then be wafted gently away; the trend to the magical in some biology must be avoided. Sobriety must return.

That casual evolutionism - antithetical to all causality - which would produce the highest degree of art and form (*3 infra) from nowhere in particular, is here walking on air without any systematic foundation. To teach this in any depth in philosophy and history might be questioned and refuted by many (cf. Ch. 3 infra); but to teach it as science is a profound testimony to the comedy so often latent in intellectual affairs.

Our illustration from the car-yards, moreover, has not created any new facts: none at all. The facts have created the just ground for our illustration. Indeed, gaps are challenging sorts of chaps, seen systematically, when it is precisely here the two approaches of organic evolution and fiat creation differ in their inferential requirements of the evidence! Not only are the gaps systematic and large indeed, but transmutative upgrading mechanisms for a species are neither practically visible nor licensed by known physical laws. To be seen are neither the means to effect categorical advance, nor the disposition of power by law to enable it. (A fortiori: such is even in fact contrary to the tenor of known laws - *10.)

Where but here would men so easily read the failure of evolution to provide the facts (and the success of creationism in predicting the findings in advance), and yet fail to note that verificatory requirements of scientific method are not met. Should the emotions demand an outlet, then mourning is in order, not worship, at evolution's shrine... as far as scientific method is concerned.

The theory, for its case, required multitudes of exhibits among the masses available, displaying determinate movements of transition vertically, in proper logical (*l4) construction. The logic however is in the cells and in the structures that operate before our eyes, especially with the aid of recent research in molecular biology (see Denton, op. cit. ch.'s 10-13); and at least in principle in the mind of man: but not in the theory.

Denton (op.cit., p. 194), noting the gaps that Gould calls the "trade secrets of palaeontology" states after careful review: "The gaps have not been explained away." Darwin's cited palaeontological admission, frankly facing the then current evidence, or lack of it, becomes damning in retrospect (cf. Denton, p. 188), both as to the systematic organ and species gaps. Validating verification has failed, despite dedicated, sustained, systematically substantial and prolonged research (Denton ch. 8).

Indeed, the defects, deficiencies and empty returns in the area of law (*15) evidence and logic, but especially in evidence appear to have driven Professor Heribert Nilsson (*16) in his massive work on the origination of species, to some very plain speech (that is, in his Synthetische Artbildung).

Decrying the frantic efforts to find such changes as the theory demanded, wearied with long almost delusive endeavours to cover for evidential misfirings, long continued in the face of negative results so continual as he found them to be, he apparently found it almost distracting to maintain the pretence of reason, of method, of verification. The theory was dead. "THE DEFICIENCIES ARE REAL," he summarised, "THEY WILL NEVER BE FILLED... THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION RESTS ON PURE BELIEF" - English Summary, op.cit., p. 1212. It reminds one of a Nazi at the grave of Hitler, after many years of devoted service, the observer of ruin.

Schools at the shrine

What was missing, Nilsson found selectively missing (*17): it constituted a wonderful collision with the expectations of the theory so long foisted with so much confidence on so many.

Ah science, where is thy shroud; evidence, where is thy tomb ? Rich in norms and clusters, the fossil record yet 'hid' the necessary serial evidence of manifest transmutation. It declined to show it. It would not bring it forth. Theory demanded it; practiced spurned the soliciting. This was nothing other than whole-hearted shame to the name of science.

Thus Nilsson (loc. cit.) has this to say:

A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs. Instead they consist in each period of well-distinguished groups of biota, suddenly appearing at a given time, always with a complete variability.

It would appear to one watching the situation, that the cries of crisis are more often heard than those of contrition. Our schools remain often so viciously indoctrinating with this absurd theory, that it is close to a closed ship for those requiring scientific method in this phase of their education... not to mention Bible believers, not desirous of putting their children through this sulphurous fire, dimly glowing, acridly smelling, a dump of philosophy in a wilderness of schools, colleges and even universities.

If this is a trend elsewhere, one yet learns with appalled horror for the treatment of truth and for the judgments on this State all too likely, that in N.S.W. - Law opposed the teaching of creation in schools before it did so in South Australia. Run? Run whither but towards ruin. Since then, in N.S.W. (the status quo in 1987) the government has changed and the laws have been reviewed; but in South Australia there has (1988) been sent forth a Circular to School Principals which not only hides in the cloak of 'science' (grossly miscalled) from the logical presentation of creation, but excludes the latter from science and from other subjects, except as predetermined non-factual material, requiring no rational response or decision.

Folly though this authoritarian intrusion is, worse is befallen the hapless State. The Bible is subjected, at the same time, and in the same Circular, to libellous claims of poetic non- relevance to rational factuality as well. The failure even to give plausible grounds for such an approach marks this as a religious establishment, surreptitiously wrought by the State, even if unconsciously occasioned.

We are a nation in convulsion; and the reader may determine how closely his or her own nation conforms to such a mould. How near is the antichrist in its final bloom, when scientific method is thus negatively met by the force of government regulation in school science classes... in hundreds of them, jelly moulded into hapless homogeneity.

In that God has long ago exposed this tragi-comedy in its essence, this is still further verification of the Bible's presentation of life, covering the case in excellent comprehensiveness, with all the effortless ease of truth. Thus He says in Romans 1:20-22: ''For since the Creation of the world, the invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were they thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image.''

The main difference is the form of the image, as ages pass. Peter in turn predicts an unwillingness to face the creation in general, and the flood in particular, as a phenomenon which would stamp the times near the end of our Age, when the return of Jesus Christ would come near (II Peter 3:3-5). The term chosen, "scoffers" seems a masterpiece of pathological precision in describing the syndrome that has plagued man in this area with particular force, for the last 140 or so years. Like a cancer, afflicting the minds and hearts of men, it will have its terminus.

Meanwhile, so great is the travesty that even a non- creationist like Nilsson declares war on evolutionary gradualism, through the force of its sheer unfactuality.

What then does Nilsson say, facing the scientific facts ? His terms are reminiscent (*18) of those used by Pierre-Paul Grassé, former President of the French Academy of Science on evolution by mutation, and of Malcolm Muggeridge's contribution. To the former, there was a question of nugatory 'day dreams'; to the latter, evolution provided what would be looked back on as a massive twentieth century joke. Nilsson for his part deemed the essential chapter of this bedevilled theory reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland (*19)!

In fact, he found the drab dereliction of disillusion no less, in the evidence! Over long years, he found the facts displayed a robust if not rambunctious seeming refusal to conform to the requirements of this imperious theory! Alas, wayward facts! For them, the theory had no place. Not spawned by facts, it was spurned by them, just as now it spurns them. So much for scientific method: a precious method, it is suborned by deceit, conquered by confusion, but above all, allowed to slide silently away. Now Alice in Wonderland is fun for children of course; but what could Nilsson do ? After all, as he said, it was precisely where the branches of change, the ramifications of 'developments' should appear in the record of life, that they were not to be found (op.cit., p. 1188). This was verification in reverse, justly deadly.

Hence OPERATION INSTANT ORCHID, Nilsson's expedient, was at least a bold if only verbal substitute for creation (op.cit., p. 1210):

Do you really mean to say that an orchid or an elephant should have been instantaneously created out of non- living material ? Yes I do.

The reality of what he proposed, at once apparent to logical enquiry as devastated by its use of chance to erect law, is now also revealed by empirical science in an embarrassing distress signal: DNA with its miniaturised marvel of code is merely physical science catching up to the equally real rigour of logic. Coaches and pumpkins are for Cinderella, instantaneous orchids perchance for Nilsson; but miracles are for God, and the mind of man has been created able to examine evidence. For Christian creationists, the evidence is a very pleasant thing (cf. Proverbs 3:17). The word of God declared the truth long ago. Here, revisionism is neither appropriate nor necessary (cf. Jeremiah 6:16, I Peter 1:25). It abides for ever - mutation of the word of God could only spoil it! It abides now, like the creation; but in its case, it is under no curse whatever!

Whilst some non-creationist scientists hold a vague pseudo-religious hope for what they would like... one day... to find: precise, Bible-defined religion has predicted a result of just such a character, empirically, as the one we have; just as it predicted the coming of Christ from the Godhead to become man, and predicts His return in judgment upon this creation. Creation is not being created; it is here already; the word of God is not being revised, it is right already (cf. 1 Peter 1:25, Jeremiah 23:28-29). As it claims, so is it evidenced.

It is time to face reality and cease from that which bears nothing but just reproach. Small wonder the world gave unjust reproach to Jesus the Christ, when it so reproaches the truth daily! Let us hear that inevitable, inerrant and unwavering testimony from the word of God, set to song, to remind ourselves of the cleavage between what is logically necessary and evidentially attested, and what is rationally insolvent, and evidentially fanciful to the point of oblivion. What chaff is this casuistry so common, and how long has it been exposed! (cf. Jeremiah 2:27-28, Deuteronomy 32:17.)    *This music only in CD version.

Something for nothing

Indeed, to look at the hypothesis of organic evolution narrowly: to act as if a system possessing a given level of intellectual base, coded contrivance, law - itself no friend of chance - at one level of ideational conspectus, should 'give rise' to another of a diverse, or divergent and more developed order: this is worthy of the djinn of modern magic. Such action makes of pseudo-science such as organic evolution, an amusing magician forsaking in this, the laboratory (where nothing to the point of organic evolution is EVER found) where he more properly would belong, for the vagrancies of undisciplined imagination. If thereby logic suffers, how much more the mind of man.

This brings us to our second consideration in the tortuous twistings against the evident reality of truth. It is this...

Designs upon design

These we find with their infinitesimal construction, codes and economy, including the microscopic fuel and energy production sites... in general, in species... provided with systems not only apt for inter-cytological programs and inter-organic correlation, but aiding the coherent expression of that dazzling trilogy: mind, matter and spirit, found in man.

To deny the use of the term 'design' to the fact of design, complex, coded and replicative; this is to illustrate rather well the sharp dichotomy between organic evolution and evidence. We must not mention design; we must not refer to it even when we find, and investigate in awesome detail, the self-duplicating machine tools relating to it: even indeed when its immensely integrated multiplicity of components, with sectional and overall control and expression features, is found to incorporate programs for the making of new mini-creator bodies... called babies.

No, it is as forbidden as might be the mentioning of the name of an architect who designed the house of a competitor!

To refer to the forms of another time, with another image: we, in our generation, have found not only the "watch on the beach", the find that betokens mind; but the machine tools and the factory assemblage plant and indeed the ordering system for factory erection, to produce more of them. All this, we have found; but still, this is not thought, not creation, not design! The brilliant academic buffoonery of our time has the smell of death, a disordered, mental miasma of Belsen about it.

Objectively, this has come to be a matter of balking at fact. There has indeed been a tendency for fashion to replace thought, it appears. Meanwhile the personification of Nature, as C.S. Lewis implies in his Mere Christianity, with sensitive sardonism (*20), is a wholly implausible ruse. Nor is it always man who is the source of such shameless 'creation' by the flick of a figure of speech: he is however the butt.

In various places, we may read that 'Nature' has 'striven' to do this or that; has foreseen this or that need; has provided against this or that contingency; has created this or that and in general is the most marvellous mind, brilliant fellow and greatest chap you could ever meet... except for the fact, you know, that it has no mind, is no person. For a figure of speech, however, it does them rather well at engineering... So cheap, these words, so very cheap. But how it serves the philosophers in constructing with idle words, what takes applied power. You would almost think that they were entertaining thoughts of being God, so freely do they create by their... words.

Man is indeed free to leave God out, whilst smuggling in His power through semantic deviations, self-deception or theoretical 'grave fairy tales for older children', such as evolution: where fantasy rules and neither logic nor observed data determine things. Man does however for ever seem to be worrying about the consequences of this selective mental oblivion.

Nor, when you come to think of it, is this surprising... Indeed, to revert to the language of scientific method, alas so displaced: this threatens to be a valedictory verification. The confusion and the abuse of truth is in line to set man morally, ethically, religiously and culturally - and his poor suffering, misled children after him, at high speed straight into the unyielding face of the rock of reality. It can shade, this rock; but when used as a collision point, it is awesome and exacting.

The call of magic, and of drastic designs upon design, these two topics concerning man's malady, being looked upon, we come to a third folly. This next relevant element of human logic-dodging is what we might call: casuistry with causality or removing the issue by sleight of thought.

The effort to get something from nothing is neither wise nor logical; nor evidentially supported. This consideration applies both absolutely and relatively in the area of structured thought and its correlate in system; as to its programmable expressions indeed. Origins require a theory which is logically coherent, and not a specious avoidance of the concept of causality. (Cf. pp. 158-159, 284 ff., 264 ff. infra.)

Indeed, notwithstanding the anti-causal cant of philosopher Kant (*21), no casuistry with causality can account for it in in absentia: you can't consistently say why it doesn't apply, is not valid, or attempt to explain it away, as if to get away from the operation of such a principle! The very concept of rendering causality defective, removing the objective validity of cause and effect, has a fatal flaw. In reasoning on these lines, you are pre-supposing what has to be proved. Why ? Because you account for its arrival on the scene; but to give this reason for it, you are using it. You use it to "derive" it, operate it in order to make it operational, use it as a midwife for its own birth. You have it, alive and well, waiting upon its own birth, whenever you try to account for it. It is not reason which can escape it (cf. Ch. 3 infra).

In terms of begging the question, that is a classic case. There is a basis for any non-self-accounting example of a causal system; it is caused by what is adequate to set it up in that format. Yet the moment you try to avoid the inter-action of that basis, as cause, and the system, as result, you have buried the very means of research, while using them. Contradicting yourself, making what you call invalid, the means of showing it, you need no further contradiction from anyone else.

Released from the torture chamber, we look again at the truth:

Something from Someone

By 'faith' you can believe anything; if by faith you mean determination. We are free to use it. By faith Biblically defined, however, you find the evidence harmonious, whether in the book of life or the book of nature, or indeed more directly in the Creator Himself. The author finds reason and religion of this kind a glorious logical composure; while illogical theories are utterly to be rejected. Of these, few better examples could be found in philosophy (where it belongs) than this organic evolution.

Whether it irrationally assigns a cause for causality, to 'derive' it, or denies to effects the presence of any adequate cause, it still fails to use reason, substituting desire.

Michael Denton in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, notes of the mass level involved (1985, p. 338): "It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10-16 grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man."

Modern molecular biology merely makes what was fundamentally necessary at first (cf. supra pp. 108 ff.), obvious at last, to many earlier duped by the meretricious mirages of philosophy. Never valid, they merely appealed or pandered to mesmerised intellectual vagrants, in danger of dying in sight of water while rushing to irrational ruin, in the flurries and furies of unquenched search.

Thus Denton excludes the relevance of Hume's criticism of Paley's argument to design. (For Hume - see pp. 257 ff., infra.) In fact, we have not merely sequences but molecular sentences; not merely happenings but reasons for them, not events alone, but here at the cellular and organic level, are the programmed engines for their accomplishment: intelligible, coded, requiting reason.

Let us pursue this point. Take man himself... the acme of design involving matter, on earth. Is what he is, to be excluded from design ? Yet what holds, as subject, the criteria of the distinctive definition of design, cannot be rationally excluded from it.

Far less so, in this sphere, can this be rationally done in the case of man-as-object (who in terms of materially visible form, is the strongest example of integrative, replicative, rational cohesion able to be found on earth): unless the thinker saying so... first excludes his own theory-making from the realm of design also. This would make it what it is not: a pointless product of his mind arriving in a debate that is neither objectively valid nor capable of it, a subjective surge in a sea of circumstances from which, for some illusory reason, he wishes to launch himself, onto a rock which is inadmissible where only sea is there.

Our moment of humorous indulgence is past. If design is invalid, so too is the one who says so; for without objective design, with mere lunges of subjectivity, he is self-consigned to immersion forever in the nature myth he has created. If systematically, you cannot reach reality, then your debating is derelict, your endeavours are futile, and your contribution is callow.

Furthermore, in making such a claim, you are speaking in the plane, or from the plateau or with the orientation of reality; for this is it, which you tell us; and you have achieved this break-through from what you have claimed is a constitutive limitation of man. From such a base, nothing may consistently be asserted concerning the actuality; if it is, the base is logically abandoned; and if it is not, then no argument exists. This is a no way for rationality; while irrationality has abandoned the quest, and can provide no reason for anything. As we see, moreover, in Chapter 1, Section 1, Part B (supra) and elsewhere, this arcane position excludes even language from use!

Further: not merely is language, which intimately rests with logic in its substructure of conveying thought and coherence with comprehension, excluded from the conveyor belt of reality in such a case; since thought too has logic in its interstices, cause and effect, sequence and correlation, in its criteria and their application, this too is to be abandoned relative to any aspiration for reality. Like a burp, otherwise, thought also would betray its discomfort, not convey advice of intellectual digestibility.

It is rather like flying an aeroplane, when all the gauges one by one, begin to cut out, signifying that you are not using the thing aright. You are, as part of mankind in such an instance, simply abandoning successively your stature and potential by theories that dismiss it. So be it, but this equally excludes you, as a sort of dead man by choice, though still ostensibly living, from any part in rational discussion, any possibility of relevance to debate about reality.

Indeed, objectivity requires objective grounds, and if they do not exist, all being reactors responding and not capable of breaching the barrier of confining involvement to reach the ground of the absolute reality, then exchanges are foredoomed to the same area of unreality. Such a captain, to change the image, has scuttled his navy before he sets sail; and hence can offer no resistance.

Avoiding such fantasies, we must ask: what has all the indicia of design ? To know it, we must examine what a design is, ask: What does it have ?

Multiplicity of parts, co-ordinated in simplicity of meaning; or layers of comprehensible integration of meaning and function, relative to a use; or the perspective of the whole: this together with mental acuity and intellectual discrimination, displayed in coherent, cumulative interaction with the product, its parts and its use... such things would be the territory of design. And what else ? Vertical integration of component processes and eventual resultant formation, with expressible criteria consistently applied, into forms fit for the operation of such things as high-level integrated mathematical and logical principles, derivable from the subdued but spirited display of non-amorphous materials... that would be near its acme! Whatever, then, possesses such things, this may indeed be evacuated from the realm of design... but only by changing its definition! Now that is a pointless exercise, perhaps useful for debased debaters in search of a 'slide', but logically null. If anything was ever designed, such as an argument against design: then man is design par excellence!

We commence this note with Denton's reference to the miniaturised marvel of almost massless and extreme intricacy found, in biological life, hidden in biological cells. This "protein synthetic apparatus", says Denton, also solves the problem of "constructing a universal automaton". It can replicate not only itself, but once programmed, can construct "any other biochemical machine". It can form materials by its presence as well as direct the formation of materials. It can be like a company director willing to serve as a brick (giving a more literal sense to - "Be a brick!"), as well as act as a servant, sitting at the engineer's table awaiting the most intricate instructions as foreman. Plasticity to a marvel, it is also a marvel of executive skill.

Moreover, says Denton: it is when a design "EXPLOITS WELL-UNDERSTOOD TECHNOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES", so that "ITS CREATION IS PRECISELY ENVISAGED", that it may be regarded "AS AN ARTEFACT..." That status, he indicates, is incontrovertibly the case in terms of new knowledge of the "molecular biological revolution" and its progress "in cybernetic and computer technology."

In life materials at this level, he notes: "In every direction the biochemist gazes, as he journeys through this weird molecular labyrinth, he sees devices and appliances reminiscent" of the latest twentieth century technology, and the level much surpasses it (p. 340). "We have seen a world as artificial as our own, and as familiar as if we held up a mirror" to modern technology. In "the atomic fabric of life we have found a reflection of our own technology." Indeed "the inference to design is purely... a posteriori... based on a ruthlessly consistent application of the logic" (p. 341). "It does not depend on religious presuppositions."

It may be useful now to point out that the philosophy of Hume, in particular, was in any case always invalid in his attack on our regulative concepts, like causality, which of course leads to designer for design, rather than designer disdain. It was far worse than mere misuse of definition and simplistic survey of ingredients of the data. His theory destroyed itself at the outset.

If as Hume asserted, events were mere sequences and the cohesion of the mind was mere assumption; if events were simply atoms of occurrence on the screen of visual circumstances; if there were no just substance to thought back of the observation of events, then the person who says so, as part of such a processive universe, cannot constitute a cognitive platform, a theoretical creator, a reasoner concerning reality. A sequence is not a thinker determining the character of sequences, not a creator, inspector or analyser. If it has no ideational and cognitive fabric, far less can it create one.

Hence the theory of Hume eliminates the validity of the theoriser and hence the entertainability, the claim to attention of the theory. He has to have a 'rational substance' to achieve the valid denial of one...

Destroying himself before all else, Hume leaves his metaphysical corpse as an obstruction to reaching his theory. Had he been a woman, we could have said this: that his corpse blocked us from the still-born (and twisted) form of his theoretical babe. How he despised our 'theories', while using such very concepts in creating his own; and how many try this, not least Marx and Freud. (See my Reason For Faith and Life From God, Th.D. thesis for detail, and also index of this current work.)

Hume's theory of nature aborted his criticism of the nature of theory; for the first as a special case must be viewed in the light of his general principle. The hand of the suicide can hold nothing. Kant's failure (see pp. 111 ff. supra, 424-427, cf. 284-289, 397 infra and the Appendix of my PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL) is rather similar, in that he seeks to give a cause for the principle of causation, which is a valid procedure only if this principle preceded its alleged origin! Design has always stared us in the face, but the frequent human blindness was one of shut eyes.

Further, in fact scientific theories are not at all mere sequences - rather, they interlock, interact and have a cohesive rationality (if refined!), that is an expression of integrative thought. Failure so to be able to correlate some new hypothesis with the structure of previously tested thought, this is one of the criteria for failure of a hypothesis, in practice - that it does not take account of the results of other related findings in a system which, after all, is interactive at the material level. If thought is divided from itself where matter is not, the thought may be interesting; but it does not cover the material data.

Whose integrative thought is in the materials of science; whose integrative thought is given derivative, investigative expression in the enquiring minds of scientists; whose fabricative thought is in the cells; whose mind preceded ours and made the single cell building blocks that are, as Denton notes, marvellously advanced beyond our greatest technology ?

Whose thought made intelligence, before we found in the later twentieth century the dizzying heights needed for even advanced artificial intelligence, men losing themselves in the very thought of concept- producing mini-creators who add personality to power to perception to cognition to dimensional inventiveness to creation beyond any imagined parameters, far past programmed limits... such powers, those of mankind, being far beyond any of our own imagined parameters, far past our programmed limits, or the limits of processive programs themselves ?

Who extended the creation to the possibility of a form of error, wilful or otherwise, a mode of liberty not dependent on systematic 'bugs' but capable by abuse, even of proud blindness or subjective conceit in the character it has; or of worship, also capable by abuse of  self-glorying delusion as is seen in the dying grasp on the mangled myth of evolution - itself only one such morbid example from the sometimes clammy history of science ?

Who disposed these powers, allowing such morbidity, or nobility, on the other hand?

Who, in short, may we ask in this generation beginning to appreciate some of the least things about man:
who made man ?
The name of God is not a recent discovery and we have had a Person, Jesus Christ, who on earth used and exhibited as man, the divine power, in 'presencing' that personality whose power it was.

The marvels of creation are as sublime in some ways as those of re-creation, and the power to do the first attests the expectation of being able to do the second. Even we can panel-beat our own cars, remould our own literary efforts, and imagine bountifully in the areas of our own creation. We should certainly expect plentiful evidence, when the Creator should visit the earth, of the class... class ? it is perforce unique - of the scope of the power shown in the Creation. It is in this connection that the record of scripture confirms as a verification in its sheer ebullience and scope, such an expectation, just as others subsequently have found such a power. This is the connective tissue of argument and outcome; and it is a least requirement of the truth.

Radical healing and raising of the dead are rational activities, when the mind that made the world attests itself in human form. They are most meaningful in meeting those of the lost who seek the truth, and who need the redemption that a personal death exhibits when followed by a personal resurrection - one acclaiming the credentials of Christ by simple factuality under the broad blue skies, that shroud the earth He visited.

Indeed, one of the most intriguing, not to say charming features of Jesus Christ's personal intervention is this: we are, He authorises, to be born again so that we become, as Paul has it,'new creations'. This fascinating phrase indicates a new work of creation on us - on our spirits. Like plastic surgery on the body, yet it is a reconstructive remedy at the deepest level, wrought on spirits that have erred.

How deep is that error: how massive is that reconstruction. Forgiveness clears the contused spiritual tissues; redemption cuts the diseased mass out; renewal infuses sound and healthy life, while regeneration attests the divine 'signature' of this radical surgery on His personal work of restoration, on each soul remade.

The costly recreative work of the Creator had to involve a personal element for persons, and this surgeon did not spare Himself in the reconstruction that relied first on His own crucifixion as ransom.

These elements are expressed far more fully in my Reason For Faith, in the relevant section on Jesus Christ, and will also appear later in this work, substantially in Ch. 7. For example, design verification - Section 11, pp. 620-623.

Christ's curing of mind, spirit and body alike is the testimony not of partial powers; it attests the total dimension of the Creator, who is conversant with all; for whom nothing is too difficult; and whose word creates as scripturally noted and subsequently seen (e.g. He Heals Today, Elsie Salmon) in cases where the sick party was not physically present. There can be even a novel part of a defective bodily member made, when it was absent; a healing made at a distance, in Christ's name, now as then. Such mercies are as much by divine discretion as is our own giving: by human discretion, not being a matter of levers and buttons.

Though physical healing is a discretionary, if sometimes radical event, and though not common enough to become a fad without the love of truth, yet it is well-enough known to evidence itself beyond the mere reach palliatives (Salmon's cures, for example undoubtedly specialising on the medically incurable, as also attested by lawyers and doctors, concerned with those whom she helped). It is not as simple to secure (for man), as is spiritual healing; the latter being far more necessary, and of universal application. Spiritual healing carries its own sincerity and reality; physical healing by divine means was always, in the Scripture, most carefully safeguarded against merely pragmatic, or manipulative misuse. It is a means of helping those whose 'sickness' is far deeper, towards the ultimate solution. (Cf. Matthew 8:4, 9:30, 12:15-16).

Again, just as precision is a criterion of physical healing, as we now know far more fully through molecular biology than we did, so purity is critical for the spirit of man: and it is the slightly healed, the drug-controlled relics of humanity, so often 'manufactured' by psychiatry, which alas move often through twilight zones of aching inadequacy, towards a grave whose final comment has no success.

With Christ, however, it is central to His work that pardon, purity and joy are aligned with peace, power and understanding, that the heart is undivided and the will restored to a meaningful relationship with the universe. Christianity is filled with those whose attestation is this: 'As this great Physician, Jesus Christ, has said, so He has done, and in Him, I have come to life before God.'

This is so because in such a case, the personality, the life is first restored to its Creator.

He knows what is good for it ...

when it does not pose as God, or pretend there is none;
when it ceases to foster the pretence
that matter marshalled its laws for no cause,
that mind made its analysis on no ground,
while will arose from the regularities of Nature:

when it no more says all this with the contradictory assumption
that an objective perspective is available for the subjective component,
from which to declare - "No God!", with witless voice.

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