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Of course, you may say, If it was late last year, it is out of date.

Not so. Contrary to the popular cultural fashion, it is date itself which will before too long be out of date. The world is in its last throes, and it is time to compose thought, and look in perspective at many things. Actually, cloning is just beginning, and this is the topic.

The article in the above noted journal by Dr Jonathan Sarfati (p. 19ff.), is undoubtedly good. It deals with questions of stem-cells, their use, their nature, their origin. He emphasises that documented specialised work on stem cells NOT from embryos, but instead from locations  'hidden in the nooks and crannies of our brains' (itself a quotation), in  umbilical cord areas, bone marrow, hair follicle areas, about the pancreas - while research develops the list grows - have remarkably efficient usage for the purpose in hand. Thus, they may prove most beneficial for the growth of organs to help the sick, or for use as self-specialising cells, which can start repairing tissue in the areas into which they may be placed.

Likewise, he emphasises the extreme danger of being too ignorant while trying to clone, pointing out the importance, for example, of epigenetic direction units. These are supplemental to the DNA, not in the nucleus, and are thought to help in the sequencing of actions which, being far more complex than our most complicated assembly line techniques, do not go well, with fouling up of the follow on. Controls outside the genes can have input to determine the switching on and off of differentiation for example, so that specialisation proceeds, and skin can go ahead in its genre, or other specialised cells in theirs - or not. Thus an addition of methyl groups to the "chemical letters of DNA which code for instructions that need to be 'turned off' ", methylation, can turn off the instructions for specialisation.

The obvious ethical implications, that it is bad enough to start exploiting someone else's life for your own organs, but worse still, when fast growing evidence of OTHER resources for the stem cells are at hand, are followed with some care.

Our present task is not to rehearse these matters, into which we have looked previously
( News 153,  166),  but to ponder the aspect of whole bruit of cloning in the precipitate lust of DOING when, in fact, epigenetic questions may turn out to be a source of trouble to the hasty proceedings.

THIS is the genre: assumptions of simplicity, when the fact is astounding complexity; assumptions of unintelligence^*1, as Hoyle so wisely castigated in his now just past days of exposure of establishment unwisdom (q.v. Hoyle, who however had a way to go), in his Intelligent Universe stress; assumptions of meaninglessness, except what WE mean now for OUR purposes at once, without logical basis or even possible validity (cf. SMR Ch. 3, Repent or Perish Ch. 7^*2).

When however we turn from this profusion of simplistic substitutes for thought, which are equally carnal equations with irrationality, to what do we then come ?

We find the continual attestation of coherent conceptualisation, integral function from myriad outposts and processes, cunning contrivance, brilliant methodology, symbolic accounting, overviewing operations and the like, refined, miniaturised and effective, self-supporting to an all but incredible extent, so that the assemblage with its code, conquest of means for end purposes, copying and execution, continues without need for new deposition of structure (these structures have indeed the power to make new ones, which is unlike man's ways, except where of course the structure has this purpose, being a factory), since they are both to a substantial extent self-renewing, self-corrective and self-overseeing, and to a vast extent, self-duplicating, yet with fascinating diversity about the original plan. Nothing man makes has this  power to be self-duplicating for millenia; and nothing man makes has this power to live, to think as distinct from carry out the wearisome directives of masters who conceive the parameters, propositions and parentheses.

Nothing man makes has this power. Man is a spiritual being (cf. SMR pp. 348ff., 25ff., It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls ... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7), and one of his spiritual powers is NOT to create spiritual beings on his OWN plan. He normally does not even understand his own spiritual nature, to the point that he may USE it to DENY it, being capable of systematic obstruction of the obvious, using the obvious. Who else on this earth invents wilful and often witless substitutes for thought, clings to them for centuries before being forced out of them, uses social power and cultural means to secure their arid and vapid continuance, and does so by an irrationality which he tries to defend with reason, even denying reason by reason, in order to establish results with reason ... who else is so brilliantly free, freely brilliant, and yet in such bonds of servitude to the freakish fantasies of his own will.

Sometimes he is brought out of it, and realises the evil - it is known as conversion. He finds the root cause (cf. Causes), and comes to the revelation He has made of man, so that man, being made, can understand how not to court that eternal unmaking, so fitting for one of his significance, but rather to come to the Maker for regeneration, so that the clowning of centuries may become the crowning of Christ.

Sometimes he is not. Man may then vary between vanities of this and that kind (cf. Lord of Life
Ch. 8, Red Alert ... Ch. 17), philosophies of confusion, each disestablishing the other, while using that power to deny his own Maker, a capability which is such an unduplicated masterpiece inherent in his very being. WE cannot create beings like that, that talk back, and aching with self-importance, seek to secure their own immortality with clones, or philosophical clowning acts, with drugs or physiological hopes, as premature and immature as the Second Law of Thermodynamics is inveterate, and unsmiling.
 
 

To the current topic, cloning: man imagines he can do this and that with the invisible hinterland which makes man what he is, and differentiates him both from matter and from animal, that rational capacity, that moral proclivity, that spiritual creativity, that assessment rationality, that power to overview and construe, verify and predict, alter and align with symbolic means directing towards understanding and unification of understanding.

Yes, he will make clones. How simply brilliant! Without even understanding the purpose of man, his nature or his resources, he will duplicate the power of the creator who gave to him the often automated and sometimes partially automated equipment which is his as instrument for his desired agencies and will.

Man will make man: or more precisely, he is coming to his apogee, the WILL to make man. The vanity is almost past comprehension in its arrogance and impotence; but it is not so. All he will really do is make an alteration of some kind in the design methods, which as with other such immature aspirations, often detected by grown man in youth in its yearnings, will tend to abort what he has, in the end;  and fail to consider that, in an arena where he is himself a product (cf. SMR pp. 211 and see *1 below), his originality is no wisely exercised without reference to his own Producer!

Ignorant and excessive, he has toiled with faint glimmers of philosophy, each disestablished in its pagan premises by various succeeding generations, with political panaceas, psychological nostrums (changing like the seasons^*3 , social enormities (cf. SMR Ch. 4), until one would have hoped that perhaps some slight measure of humility and realism combined, might have sent him scuttling to the Lord, or even bowing in acknowledgment of the Maker of himself, should repentance have aided him open his eyes on the true majesty and delight of the Creator who as Redeemer, is superb beyond all possible comparison. Instead, man who is so limited in what he makes, increasingly is being carried away by a little power, to imagine, vaulting in pride, no limits tolerated to his invasion of all things, seeking investment with his own little misunderstood image, of the universe, at large, bowing at his feet.

It does not however so bow; for it is not due to man for it so to do.

Alas for man! He is reaping what he has long sown, and the more his pride diverts him from the manifest deity (SMR), which he himself, prodigiously beyond his own powers in his construction, manifestly is not, the more his increasing knowledge makes him seem not merely immature but virtually infantile! It is rather like a toddler masquerading before mum, as dad! being about one year old!

It is a marvel, and one can love children indeed. However when they become big-headed and begin to imagine what is not true, of their little selves, the beauty becomes bestial, and the loveliness derelict. So does the bloom become ash, and much current psychology is still investing in the best ash. For one's own part, blooms are preferred, and these occur when the Gardener and His prescriptions are involved, rather than in the hideous amateurism of professional disregard of the Founder and Professor behind the Universe, the Creator who has given us mental, moral and rational life, spiritual zest and quest and indeed, the written answers, set forth ONLY in His book. Not left to the imagination of man, nor to his own surmisings, this is what it takes to live: know God and find His way, and then having found, walk with Him as Father, Saviour and Redeemer. Not merely is this Bible, demonstrable as the sole authorised word of God to mankind, but it is irresistibly verified in incalculably vast ways, on every side imaginable. This we have often seen (cf. SMR, TMR, Repent or Perish, Spiritual Refreshings ...), but now merely notice in looking at aspects of the cloning crowing.

Thus instead of noticing that MAN HIMSELF is a prime and most readily observable creature, who in his inventions will often make a proto-type, a model, a generic, and then make various new things, as in car manufacture, and then seeking intelligently more information on the propulsions and propagator of his world: man in his social masses tends to be found dreaming, wafting. Listless in luxury of imagination, he ignores the needs, follows them for his own part, and fashions his own images, without ground, need or consistency. Man fashions today his vanities as in the days of Jeremiah:

"O LORD, my strength and my fortress,
My refuge in the day of affliction,
The Gentiles shall come to You
From the ends of the earth and say,

'Surely our fathers have inherited lies,
Worthlessness and unprofitable things.'

Man himself may make a good factory, capable of limited adaptation; and then when turning from car to aeroplane, make a new sort of factory with various limited powers of adaptation; and then make a new one entirely, for his Concorde, or whatever is sufficiently novel in concept to require it and so on.

Never once would we consider the use of a Volks factory, for Boeings; but we MIGHT consider the use of the same technology in mathematics, assembly line technique, professional inter-relations of workers, codes and symbolic meaning and so on. Just so does DNA always employ the same code; have diverse kinds, and within a kind, diverse and limited powers of adaptation of the most fascinating, but controlled kinds. As in factories, things may go wrong, and there are limited powers of rectification.

Thus there is the CONCEPT of creation, of creativity, of symbolic governance, of operating by program, of personal intervention at certain levels, and there are the MEANS for its implementation. Then there comes the COMMON CODE or basic education when the Maker is not in need of ANY education (man is in such need, God is not, and so the DNA continues, man's programs and very basic methods by contrast being susceptible over time to very considerable change as knowledge and understanding both of mathematics and empirically based knowledge grows). By contrast, there are phases in which these things tend to be relatively stable, when it is merely a creature, like man who is involved, who does and must grow in knowledge (as Daniel predicted would be the case as history moved towards its cascade into judgment - Daniel 12:1ff.).

With either: Things may be terminated with the executive axe; or continued. Man creates NOT by everlastingly making old factories from the 16th century become new ones in the 21st. He simply makes new factories. He is not in a haze of continuities between factories; but uses them in horizontal and vertical integration, and then changes from time to time the infrastructure, both to some extent, intellectually and culturally, mechanically and mathematically, and makes new ones.

It is all so easy: it is seen in operation constantly. It is simply that ours is a creature's creation, and we are the Creator's creation. We operate with equipment not fully understood; God however operates without given equipment provided at all. There is none to provide; and He is Himself. He is what He would be, and becomes nothing new, since all things are from before time, before Him, and are as He would have them, potential and potentiation being His prerogative, and not at all  His condition. As for the Lord, He lacks all condition since none is there and nothing is therefore able to to provide itself as a waiting phenomenon and restriction. it is this which applies to creation as a book's pages to characters for an author, one obviously not himself so limited RELATIVE to the book.

Naturally, except in the pit of the inadequate, you do not see half-made cars, design becoming another; though with the imperfections of man, you might find some unsuccessful prototypes. On the whole, however, his designs must work, and they do or do not; and if they do, they are not merging from the past. They are new creations. The past may stimulate; in general it does not dictate! It is past. The inventor is not. He invents. Factories arise on facts, and material designs on understanding. So it goes.

God is already there. His procedures do not change; His DNA, formed by His own configuring construction and designing brilliance, is but one created kind. There are no examples of merging designs, new information in DNA 'arising' from nowhere in particular, or from the preceding generation. Examples are unknown (cf. SMR pp. 252Eff., Technical Journal, Creation (15(3), p. 92, 2001). What would you expect, or as the French so beautifully put it, Que voulez-vous ? Books show no facility to write themselves, since they are products of symbols, not their producers.

Yet this pseudo-science, ignoring our own obvious input as creative operators, our motif as manufacturers, with vast knowledge of procedures, difficulties, methods of overcoming them accrued to the race over time, intimate knowledge, psychological, moral, spiritual and personal, of what it takes, what foils it, spoils it, continues as if wholly dead to the region of comparable production, albeit much less. Our own specialised knowledge of the very inward processes of creation, their relationship with design, determination, decision, understanding and symbolic powers in our mathematical and logical enterprises ON GIVEN POWERS which we do not AT ALL invent: they would by pass all this.

A news headline style SPLASH of vast exhibitive style, of the very PRODUCT in type, and process in style, this time within a creation, is bypassed. You SEE it happen; but you ignore it. As to the imaginary inventory of what is never found, accountable or producible: you do NOT see it happen, of course. It is however to this that you look. Is it blindness ? insanity ? speciousness of the contrived player, deep in his inward designs and divorced from fact as he lives out his paranoia ? Whatever it is, it is certainly not in any way in the least related to science.  This is the first line of negation of scientific method, of lording it with the illicit.
 

Further, there are to be found no examples of things half-way made ? of designs in transition ? Of the billions of unfortunate non-achievers amongt the spawn of what in principle and practice cannot and does not spawn ? yet scientific method wants evidence ? This is the second line of negation; yet it still affirms. It is not interested in seeing the evidence; it invents it, ignores what is there, and makes vanity its virtue.
 

This total NIL of reason and evidence is not in existence ? Truth is to be permanently divorced ? So what is to be done by the wilful violator of scientific method, or the drugged or deluded ? What is his procedure in speaking about this abyss of omission, and this profusion of irrelevance in his inventory of fact ?

The procedure ? It is this: You SAY, this is science, but what you DO is the opposite. You assume that what is NOT found is the way it came. Your NEGATIVE findings are the testimony of the positive. It is not related to science AT ALL. It is a fairy tale, worse than myth, an escape from reason, a violation of rationality, a perversity of pronouncement.

Is it because, as with Hitler, it is affirmed so constantly that it is the correct thing, that people

• come to believe this nullity as if it were evidence,
• ignore the profundity of multiplied evidences, all in one accord, that the creation is done as we have ourselves seen, creatively in spirit and mind, matter being conformed to plan, pattern and procedure,
• and then, in an ecstasy of intoxication,
• shout Heil Evolution!
• as if organic pretensions, as ludicrous as were Hitler's world dominion ones, and their bases, could counterfeit themselves into acceptance.

Thus, you find in your own efforts, and those of your fellows over centuries, the evidence of basic ingredients of creation. You see the intense parallel in method, in integration of concept, in relationship of code and control, program and end purpose, imagination and execution, means and ends, and then IGNORE all this as if the mere fact that the parallel is complete, except for our obvious limits, as of a child before his father, were a denial of it! Next you act as if THIS demonstration in the universe in creation (in ourselves as sub-creators) has no bearing on our own creation, or as if  the world which so closely resembles in its modes of working, the very created territories we ourselves  try to make, were a disreputable model, as if the evidence were deceased, diseased, untouchable, subject to intellectual apartheid, a part of the cult of the forbidden, a taboo.

What then, facts being then in confrontation with theory, as observable, principles likewise deleted from it, the world must mysteriously be thought  to bring itself here from nothing, while we who are in it, find that this is precisely what produces nothing.

Yet we are not nothing; and are produced. This is not merely a negation of scientific method; it is a REPLACEMENT of it by will, so that the verifications, the more they mount, the less are they received; the principles, the more irreparable the damage they inflict on vagrant theory, the more certainly must it be received, and they removed; the logic, the more certain, the more must irrationality be invoked, though this automatically removes at that same instant, all power to reason.

This then is the way, the manner of insistence on irrelevance, of what, in a cognate variable, our own acts of creation in terms of kinds of results, shows the arrival of JUST such things as we constitute, though at a vastly lower order; their relationship to method and function: and it here becomes a second negation of primary evidence. The areas ? getting things like this to do unitarily construable tasks, using many parts to one result. The one ? our doing so. The other ? our being so, and the world about us. The insistence ? That they CANNOT be related. The reason ? Non-existent.
 

The third negation ? It is this: whereas we often fail in a more or less intelligent way to secure our so carefully thought out results, yet they are not mere stupidity. They show method, form and effort, yet the world of creations beyond us, and about us, does NOT EVEN show this much. It has only complete and completely organised cells of magnificent sophistication, designs of stunning brilliance; and while some do not like their purpose, neither does a school-boy like discipline.
 

This so far from removing the headmaster, brings him but nearer; for if there is one thing likely to produce trouble, it is the desire to ignore that you are its source, or a significant part of it. Dreaming does not make for happiness ... when the dream is over, and the work, the realism is spent for frittering. The universe is provocative to drifting, evocative of response; and profaning it with profoundly ignorant 'conclusions' which exist ONLY where evidence is ignored is the FOURTH line of rejection, or negation of evidence.

In this case, the operations of the operator himself, herself, constitute the data, the multiplicity of the evidence on the one hand, in kind and quantity, and the tenacity of the organic evolutionary theorists, the sheer profundity of irrelevance to the evidential facts, this itself is the attestation concerning our growing  irresponsibility as a race. It has existed before; now it is virtually mandatory, calamitous in proportions, intrinsically incoherent in idolatrous acclaim.

Meanwhile, the race does  EVEN tend to study itself, in factuality, as far as cultural mandates of man are going. WHY is there this sublimely ridiculous bias ? this indigestion as a mode of
digestion ? Like the rest, it is accountable in terms of ignoring the powers and nature of the Creator, requiring His omission despite all, and at any cost; or if allowing 'existence', making it irrelevant where its power is required most stringently and utterly. The result is utterly the same. The latter case is merely a diplomatic accord.

SINCE God the Creator is ignored in this mandatory, establishment mode of cultural negation of God, THEREFORE you would expect man to seek to distance himself from all that reminds him of what he scurries to avoid. This is what he does; and explains with simplicity the vast gulf between the innate brilliance to be found in the race, and the extraordinary and pathological failure to USE even a small part of it, evidentially and logically, in this area. Man tragically ignores himself, in this equation, and does not see the verification of his own pathology, a thing so profound and multiple in this area, as to REQUIRE a reason. Here it is found. That is the fourth rejection. Man does not want this, his own attestation in the field of operator!

The breach of scientific method ? It is manifold and successive. It involves the rejection arbitrarily, of the enormous input in the creation field, the arrival of such things and objects, performers and prodigies being our own methodology in our own mini-creations of thought and form, machinery and systematics, while favouring the wholly other coming into existence of those things, ourselves included, which we do not because we cannot institute. Man wisely establishes the method, scientific method using the method itself as he does so; but then, gripped by this vagrancy of thought, despises what he has established; indeed, effectually ignores it; assumes an opposite thing, and then preaches it, teaches it, as if it were in any way related to anything other than will, will-o'-the-wisp though its foundations in fact are shown to be just.

However, when you return to the practicalities and principles for action: Such things in logic and life do not have the grace to display themselves. How could they ? It would be an irrational universe if they did.
 

Moreover, the universe and all in it is most totally comprehensible in principle, since the Bible has unleashed, than constructive more than atomic power, the nature of the case, into which
everything fits, and into which alone, like a giant portmanteau specially prepared for you, while your things are strewn in disorder on the windy pavement! There is nothing else like this.  That of course is the fifth rejection, since this is virtually ignored, though it does just what the method requires, shows the entire empathy, sympathy and intimacy of involvement of all things on all sides in just this light!
 

The sixth arbitrary rejection of relevance, of course is simply this, that inherent in our own, there is the concept of limit to variability, and the obvious need to make NEW things, not endless sub-variants of old ones, as if a scooter factory MUST be adapted by many stages to a computer one. The thought is absurd. Actually, it is the understanding which continues. It is not some hazily deficient, defective, self-reformatory blob, spewing out information as if it had never heard of the principles of information technology, of logic, of reason or the need to have what it takes before doing it. The 'need' for jets does not create their factories.

This mirage, or anything that could turn it to reality,  is no more evident internally in powers to produce such prodigies as are required, than externally in attestation of way-stations on the path.

Mirages are very interesting, but they are not water. When they evaporate without water before your eyes, you begin to realise that this is merely playing with light; not making moisture.

In our own case, the knowledge is demonstrably increasing^*4, though not in kind, merely in extent, our secular philosophies not ceasing to fail. However, in the creation field of which we are part, where is to be found attestation of the arrival at the scene, on the field of such things as these, and much more advanced, there is the UNIFORM technology at ALL times, the simplest cell, as Denton points out, being most advanced. Again, the concept of early simplicities is utterly contradicted as Stephen Jay Gould (q.v. in evolution) has shown by the Cambrian material.
 

There is moreover that vast overkill of deletion of the evolutionary gradualism concept, by the sudden arrival of MUCH more design diversity  than what is left, according to this Harvard biologist: when ? Nearer to the beginning, on the secular geological concept (cf. That Magnificent RockChs. 1, 7, 8, which also serve as a good introduction to this chapter).

That then becomes the sixth breach of scientific method. That, it is just one of the careers of collision in this field which delights in many cultural cliques, to bring it the awful three, what is not, cannot be, and never has shown itself to be! Talk of the vanities of the Gentiles, they are here in soccer style crowd, hostile as the stand falls, not for them, but on them, and with them.

SO Darwin is gone (cf. A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, TMR Chs.  1,   8, Wake Up World! Your Creator is Coming… Chs. 4-6, Stepping Out for Christ Chs. 2, 7-10); and the rest is merely seeking for perpetual miracles, in continuity, with no failures, while deleting God to provide them, seeking from non-code source, code, from no understanding, the attestation and means of the same. Nothing in complete harmony with this massive mental malaise has even seriously been proposed as the source, though its definition precludes all things, and hence potential, potentiation, future and the like (cf. TMR Ch. 7, Barbs, Arrows and Balms Ch. 29).

The flaws are like the floor and basis in this exotic testimony of anti-creationism - at heart and in essence, anti-Creator - to the downfall, not this time of the Roman Empire, but of the race in its very substantial testimony and mode, mood and malaise. Remove from your way, the unconditionable Creator and you remove not He, but yourself from the relish of reality, the basis of morality and the evidential torrents which know no subsiding. Science CANNOT so do, in terms of its scientific method; anyone however may ignore this, reason and reality alike. There is a charge. It is a heavy one. What, however, would you expect!
 
 

Cloning then ? It is merely one more illustration. The divine impetus in man, when turned upon himself (and in II Thess. 2 we see its uttermost absurdity, a mere man in power SHOWING HIMSELF that he is God), becomes merely a macabre substitute for outward death, within. When he wants LIFE, instead of getting it from God, or following His divine directions, secular man wants more and more to control all things, not satisfied with his endlessly immature efforts to get any satisfaction that is enduring, logically coherent and meaningful from his psychology, sociology, philosophy or even economics (since sin is hostile to any system, however good), not content with the prodigious perversion of scientific method in biology.

What then ? GIVE ME LIFE! he declares. It virtually has to come to that. There is to be NO LIMIT, to the God divorcees; and since there IS limit, in our very manifest construction, there can only be disaster. Cloning from embryos is merely one of the excesses of ignorance, playing with what is not even understood. it is like blind men trying to build the most intricate electronic equipment, while systematically ignoring the facts of sight. It is worse: it is a case of denying sight, while seeking to construct what cannot even be seen, let alone understood, without it.

With physiological life, there are other means of sensory perception which may at least help atone for the absence of sight. When however the topic is creation, the denial is absolute. When this is made, it is like a man without sensory perception at all, willing to become master of sensory matters. Here it is the spiritual which is callowly with calloused hands despised. It does not conveniently depart. It is part of the equipment used with which to DENY IT.

It is not for nothing that self-contradiction is the very essence of modern philosophy. Its only secular hope is to deny its basis in reason; and that none, it cannot ever argue validly. Since it continues anyway, it is rather like a runaway car. It is just a question of how near is the cliff.
 

There is however a boat to take you over; a ramp to the ocean and there is a Guide. Rampaging around cliff-tops is not the way of reason, revelation, actuality or spirituality. The waters are so beautiful, when you are close to them, not airily ignoring them from ‘above’, lofted in eyries of distance and dimness. They even sparkle, they team with light, when He who is the Author, takes His characters on their way (Psalm 36:9 - " in Your light we shall see light." ).

*1
See on intelligence, SMR 117, 120-121, 130-131, 141, 209-210, 211, 224, 135, 252E-G, 113-116, 141, 252F-G.

*2 See also on meaning: Barbs, Arrows and Balms  1, 3, 7, 14, 18, 19, 26, 28, 29, 30, Little Things Ch.   5, News 110, Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane  87, News, Facts and Forecasts 14 (News 122), A Spiritual Potpourri Ch.   9, The Biblical Workman Ch.   7.

*3
 Cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5, 10, and see Dr Spock's volte-face, that pseudo-farce in terms of the by-products, and philosophy- medical in index.

*4 Dr Peter Gurney, a distinguished eye specialist in London, in an article on pp. 92-99 of the Technical Journal of Creation (15(3), late 2001, exposes with faithful and minute specifications, such a detail on the microscopic intricacies, operational mutual dependencies, sub-organic correlations, chemical specifications required even for tears, double usage as in the cornea, with some lens power, cell arrangements for physical results, antibodies, chemical composites to combat infection, brilliant conception and astounding capacities, each point in place and each place with a point, for the human eye that it is all but overwhelming.

The concept of some ill-design, specifically exposed in a recent and notable CD-ROM significantly featuring Dr John Sarfati, is seen this time with overview of actual function, as a testimony to twisting. Here, in "Creation ... a shattering critique of PBS-NOVA 'Evolution' series", the Answers in Genesis Ministries exhibit with no small aplomb, the seemingly sightless sentence passed by critiques of that most astute organ, the human eye. As the fallacious suppositions are exposed and the facts of design necessities considered for maximal functionality and complex series of adaptabilities; and as the alleged alternative option are dismissed as dysfunctional fantasy, on the one hand, and  Dr Gurney's diagrammatic expositions of the eye's structure and function are pondered  on the other; and then the two phases of the matter are seen together, it is most apparent that our definition of design in SMR  is here most abundantly met.

What is true of the body in general is sensationally true of the eye!

That definition ? "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." There is more to be seen, but not less on pp. 113-116, the above on p. 115. (See also A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 6.)

On the eye, see also the last cited work, Ch. 7.

Meanwhile man lumbers ploddingly to try to begin to unravel some of the least components of life, the genome which lies as in much, as one of the physical directors of such operations (cf. News 45, Lord of Life ... Ch.   5, News  166,  News  153, Licence for Liberty Chs.   6,  8, Beauty of Holiness Chs. 7 ,  8,  Spiritual Refreshings ... Ch. 13, Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch.  10, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch.   9 ) - ... But operations ? It is far more than a mere question of how it functions.

In fact, the typologically fixed RE-MAKING of such things, their architectural emplacement, their growth adaptation as various site construction works grow in size or even shape, after birth (and indeed before), the arrival of energy from the culinary factory areas of digestion, adapted to the various engines, cellular and organic, the provision of directional power via bone emplacements, themselves a world of combination, continuity and constant mutual geometric adjustment during growth over years, the copying of information (which does not create itself, since it is a reflection of what is, ordered and organised, and in this case also, a data bank suffused with integral correlation linguistic and directive, for minute and maximal, micro- and macro-function), the copying of director-roles, themselves, all this and far more is inherent in what then must simply function when it IS made.

Function ? But that too is staggeringly complex. The eye article (ocular dissertation, ophthalmological depiction) of Peter Gurney is an excellent illustration of what 'function' means, even in so short but so compressed an article. A world of maintenance and provisions for maintenance then unfolds likewise. One eye specialist once told the author that in his view, the human eye was not meant for much more than 70 years in its design, the term he used, since various things tend to become very vulnerable after that time. In the meantime, as in a highly sophisticated luxury automobile, staggeringly complex and delicately intimate proceedings and procedures team to make eye life pleasant, profoundly competent and what is often complacently received, marvellously stable. The provisions for arrival and dispersal of moisture, including tears, leaves one delighted to see that such psychological needs as crying, such grubby hands in the child's eyes as may arrive at such times, are all provided for with a sensitivity of chemical and architectural products which work in their designated ways, to a marvel.

How long and under what conditions does it go ? As with all design, there is always purpose. Some manufactured goods are MADE for a period, after which, if they continue (like the author's more than 30 year old car - still very comfortable), then it is a thing of some remark! Thus if one may be permitted one more personal eye reference, when one found an eye pressure about the lens nearly 3 times too much, SUDDENLY, some time after a car aerial penetrated the eye (not its matrix, but prodding vigorously into the space between the lid and the eye itself, thus of necessity impacting the eye ball ... like a fist in this case!), there was later some malfunction.

One could still see (a feat which seem to impress the specialist, in view of the huge pressure which built up), but there were oddities of focal length and specificities of changes observable in some circumstances. When laser was considered helpless, drugs were deemed inadequate, and the details of what to the author seemed a horrendously simplistic (but normal) operation to pierce the eyeball and keep it pierced despite all prospective healing efforts, described by the specialist as a generic but non-hi-tech operation: then the woe of the plight appeared. The prospect was dim.

It was, as the specialist conceded, on the basis of all expectation, a matter for piercing or miracle. However, with less than the drugs, put in for some hope, since one medicine was a rather disorienting seeming one, one found in 2 days that the pressure was normal. It stayed so, being checked months later, proceeding from 43 or some such figure in mm of mercury as to pressure, to 15, then the same for both eyes.

In the meantime, the author had communicated with the Creator in the name of Jesus Christ, the Lord. Pianists need hands, authors need eyes, especially on demanding computer situations, with the only office worker oneself! The pleadings with the Maker were answered with the staggeringly sudden and complete remedy of a condition which had been developing for weeks, and demanding action of the compromising character, vulnerable to repeated infection, as described. One doctor deemed it a miracle, the other a minor miracle.

However the author had been careful to establish with the specialist that the only plausible way, short of operation,  to get it better was a miracle. Thus when the restoration came on time, to obviate any operation or even any quandary about one (a failure to have remedy, under such pressure could have led in a comparatively short time to blindness, one was informed), it appeared as the exhibition of the power of the Maker. The living option had made the mechanical one unnecessary. For this, one can only praise the resource for all things at all times, the Redeemer, who never fails, and who, one must add, solves problems with a view to all the information and wisdom which is His; and this time, acted in this way.

It is not a part of this complex and amazing creation, the human eye, to provide in its programmatic base of conceived and coded information, for intrusion of radio antennae of automobiles! Thus the intelligence that made it, the personal and communicating God, acted direct: this is the testimony  on the basis of the evidence. It was even more apparent in the asking room, that preceded this gracious restoration, where one sought from the profound mercy of the Creator of man, this ocular need for the worker in the kingdom of heaven at this time.

More had yet to be written, and in mercy, He acted with grace.

Design, designers and their power and morals: these things are current topics with atomic and genome research moving with all self-assurance into what they are inadequate to control. It is only when the designer is known, that His work can be discerned. It is only when His work is discerned that it can properly be done. Not being on speaking terms with one's employer is most unwise; and with THIS employer, the Maker, in view of His total redemptive provisions for the spirit of man, yes and in the end, his resurrection, is a choice sort of folly. Where love is concerned, there is no other option. Where grace is sought, there is no other effectual source. Where life is in view, there is no other Designer... not one.