W W W W  World Wide Web Witness Inc.  Home Page   Contents Page for Volume  What is New

The artifice of seeking to find in 'nothing' the nostrum for the universe is clinically delightful^*1.
What better exhibition could there possibly be of unscientific method, than attributing to what by definition has neither past nor present, nor potential - each of these being something other than nothing - the source of all things. It is in itself a comment on the aptitude of Romans 1:17ff..

However there is a new contribution, one from Paul Davies: it is an interesting exhibit, exposed by Alexander Williams in Creation Ex Nihilo, March-May 2000, pp. 42ff..

Some admissions here are of great interest, and most commendable. They are noted by the reviewer relative to Davies' The Fifth Miracle, Penguin 1998.
 

• 1. The known laws of physics, chemistry and biology do not explain the origin of life.

 
• 2. Ideas of chemical evolution, as in the Miller Urey experiment, are not relevant, since "Throwing energy at amino acids will not create delicate chain molecules, just as putting dynamite under a pile of bricks won't make a house."

 
• 3. There is no evidence for an inbuilt bias or even conspiracy to create life, in 'Nature'.

 
• 4. Chance is not favoured (after all chance is merely the name of structure or system in which one's purpose is not held in view cf. Ancient Words: Modern Deeds Ch. 13, Deliverance from Disorientation Chs.  1,  7).

Disposing of these common nonsenses of pseudo-science, in this case in principle correctly, Davies proceeds.

What then is considered for the basis of buildings using material 'bricks', buildings, for example, called man ? What source is summoned for mankind,  with his neatly constructed systematic interrogations which make not only a Boeing look like child's play, but the Empire State Building look like the work of a Primary School student, by comparison with the entire and staggering brilliance of the organic totalities integrated to generic and specialized purposes: plans for man, and through man, to a degree which nothing in man's own capacities can even begin to touch, since the making of a will like man's, does not commence on the horizon.
 
 

From the article mentioned, a useful introduction as a review of the book, we find it is 'some sort of principle'. We have, however,  already discerned how barren and futile principles are in this connection. Let us here cite one approach made in SMR pp. 157ff., emphasis added.

Thus creation alone stands before logical thought. Denton and Schützenberger and Eden are all looking for something quite different, some principle to make it all happen. Where ? But what becomes of our poor bewildered friends ? They look for a 'principle', something unknown. What is this thingummy, this quiddity, this strange... thing ? What then is its function, or what must it do ? That after all is the call here; they need something which somehow will do what is not being done, but must have been done.

This it must do. It must have power to institute law, to constitute concepts in material form, to constrain, contain and restrain, so that copies are made and errors are fought against in cells and organs and organisms; it must rise like a phoenix from the ashes, equipped with powers to conceptualise therefore, and to implement. But wait! what do we say about ashes! We are discussing institution not destitution. Our wars and judgments make ashes too near; but in the institution phase, what was not instituted has no ashes, or anything else destroyed, for destruction must first wait upon construction. So, not after all like a phoenix from the ashes arising, but rather arisen, without pile beneath, is what makes the piles, the foundations, instituting and constituting the world of change in order that it might change from beginnings to endings, from creation to desecration, judgment or performance as the case may be.

And it must provide mind for man and spirit for him, that he might conceptualise and implement in his own derivative and contained way. And for man, an 'image' is needed so that he may do business with God and have ground for truth, without which he is mere reactor and could not intelligently discuss what is and what is not; nor, therefore, this, to affirm or deny.

It is here alone that the irrepressible human desire for truth, to declare it or rebut what others think it to be, has its rational basis. (Indeed, the capacity to know God is the ground of the assurance, and even where this knowledge is lacking, of the assumption of availability normally implicit; while the frustration so common in this, is the result for the renegade from reality, for refusal of truth. The underlying reason for that is that God lives; and many do not want that life, whatever private gods they may create - cf. John 3:17-19.)

It is here Bible gives the evidence... shown in SMR Ch.1. We need not however recapitulate: it is the same. The movement from the conceptual calamities of the organic evolution hypothesis is the same thing as movement towards the God of the Bible. The circuit to avoid God is now in the re-entry phase. How shall it be formulated ? Where shall it be found ? Oh, just in the same place as always, in God, who from everlasting to everlasting is God. (See Psalm 90:2; cf. Isaiah 29:13- 20, esp. v. 16 - "Shall the thing framed say of Him who framed it, He has no understanding!")

What sort of a principle thinks and conceives and even constructs conceptual apparatus in man ? Oh well, not quite a principle. After all, a principle is a name for some thing which is caused to operate in some way. It is the cause which makes it do so which is needed. A principle is a description of an order and procedure; and because of this, it needs its base, the force and creative content which it describes so that it can be a principle. You need the worker to make it work, the creator to allow it to happen, the structure in which it is to work, the imagination to formulate it so that it might work, the thinker for whom it is a thought, the functionary for which this is a function. Something which is in order needs the orderer, if code then its commander; and what operates needs the gear in which to operate, the power by which to operate and the basis on which to act. (Cf. pp. 252B, 315B-316G, 348-353 infra.)

Very well, as always you need God: all we are seeing in modern evolutionary gasping and panting after immediate 'creation' is a denial of the cause and a clamour for the effect. It is always the same: God is smuggled in and His name is smuggled out.

(End of Excerpt.)
 

At the more minute level, in the interview noted, Dr Denton observed that there are many components of individual proteins, and they are very complex. Each one of the components is part of a whole, "and the whole has an end and a meaning and a purpose." He indeed notes, in trend rather like Sir Fred Hoyle of Cambridge fame in this, that "a biological end or purpose is written throughout all the laws of physics ... that in fact the entire cosmos bears evidence that biological phenomena is the end of nature". (Cf. SMR 422H,L, 226, 224, and esp. Repent or Perish, Ch.5, pp. 99ff.). The blatant and patent error in magical Darwinism, which impressed its author far less than its exponents, as has been shown before in this Site, leaves Dr Denton surmising that perhaps even a "silent majority" of biologists do not find the answer in any form of Darwinism. He notes further that a number of physicists are of the view that the laws of nature seem to be arranged for an end."
 
 

Looking at Fictions and Regarding Facts

It is here that the lapse in logic begins to appear, which formerly had looked more like a failure to apply it. Speaking of "creation", Dr Denton is looking for something other than the Creation of the Bible. Nevertheless, he considers it clear from the evidence that the "world is optimised for our existence". Overall, he appears to consider this: "I think there is a general teleology which is behind nature and which has generated it." He proceeds to what seems a caricature of Biblical truth: that Biblical creationists believe in a "myriad of interventions by God in the history of the Earth... they don't represent the theory of design really." He makes what is perhaps an even more obvious error in this assertion: that it is in the English-speaking world (actually the interchanges make this a rather imaginary conception), only in the last 100 years or so that the "strict Biblical creationism" has become prominent, and this, in his own opinion, as a reaction to the delusive errors of Darwinism.

First, we must notice that the Bible produces NOT LESS, but much MORE than a design theory, to use Dr Denton's phrase. It produces what is minimal for a design function: that is, a sufficient cause. Whether with or without mediation, this must at last incorporate the criteria required: brilliance of conception, execution and contrivance. Unconceived conceptions are not design at all, but contradictions in terms. Mental operations require a mental operator, a mind in which they may occur, a milieu for which they
are appropriate.

This may be far in excess of what we use; but it must at last incorporate the minimal conditions of roving function, envisagement and actualisation. Matter, as we have shown, has no such powers, does not make itself but makes its making apparent by what it does. Science does not account for what might have been, but for what is; and this is what is.

The whole bunch of exceedingly UN-NOVEL views about making a system do it all, a somehow interwoven, programmed, or meditatively musing interstices of "things" have all the thoughts: this fancy is as old as it is delusive. It is merely to seek the function without the functioner, the cause without its criteria, the operation without its means. The relationship between conception and creation, possibilities, the putative and the real is well-known to us. (Cf. News 52.)

It could happen differently, but it must happen, or the simple reality would be that we would be "explaining" the combination in observable reality, creativity and creation, without bothering to construct from observable reality what it is that happens in such cases. If we failed to be empirical in this way,  and it would not be science since the model, the paradigm is both multitudinous in nature - our own, for example - and intimately known as to its operation and mean: then of course even there, there would need to be a limit.

The imaginary, non-natural concept we would generate, about "what did it" would need to HAVE THE POWERS AND FUNCTIONS to act logically, create brilliantly, conceive efficiently, call into being in understanding what is to be instituted in practicality and so on. What does this is already labelled quite clearly: MIND. It need not be like ours in some ways; it could outdistance them infinitely, and in fact the Bible teaches clearly that it does! But ours are in some vital ways, of this, as modelled BY IT. THAT explains how we can see the affinities between what IN FACT is instituted in Nature, and what IN FACT, we do. The last is a point to which Denton in his book attaches much significance, and in this, rightly.

We can of course - and some do - talk airily about "principles" which will supposedly avoid having a mind, an analyst and a contriver and a creator and a surveyor and indeed, a person. We have already in various places noted the superficial oversight of minimal, causative realities which this constitutes. Thus on p. 159, SMR, we note this, reproduced below, adapted and extended.

Thus creation alone stands before logical thought. Denton and Schützenberger and Eden are all looking for something quite different, some principle to make it all happen. Where ? But what becomes of our poor bewildered friends ? They look for a `principle', something unknown. What is this thingummy, this quiddity, this strange... thing ? What then is its function, or what must it do ? That after all is the call here; they need something which somehow will do what is not being done, but must have been done: creation of the universe!

 

 

A PRINCIPLE! This however is merely a description of a happening, not a cause of the happening. If there is a principle, the causative sequence is to find its basis, what produced it. But what principle creates! The "principle of creation" - what is that except a tag (to use Denton's own term) which - again to use his language - is no explanation at all, but a description. An explanation of creative power is the combination of the capacities relevant, the actualising component, the conceiving component, the imagination, the thrust of will to put it into being and the antecedent oversight to control what one does.

The prodigious error attributed to Dr Denton about the teaching of creation in the church is corrected in some detail in News 57. It is scarcely credible that any such statement could be uttered. The facts are as far removed almost as the East from the West.

Our present interest however is rather in the evocative way in which each specialist, Dr Denton with his principle of design, that portmanteau term for the facilities of designer, and Dr Davies with his more physically construed principle, are each thinking in what does not show what it takes, and what has in any case FIRST to be constructed in any scientific ascription of cause (cf. cause, and SMR Chs. 1,    2,  5), in order that it might then be rendered in further conceptual input and intelligent direction to make direction for future generations, in its DNA and so forth.

From the review of his 1998 book, one finds that Dr Davies' 'horse' if you will, is a matter of 'discovering a very special type of molecular system from among a vast decision tree of possibilities. True to his specialty, he conceives of a quantum computer, one which can theoretically render all possible solutions simultaneously. In go the data (from some hand or other), and on goes the computer (from some hand or other), and out come the results (to some hand or other), which are then fashioned with many other sorts of results (for the system is merely one of the needs, this being a conveyor for particularities for which it is to be employed) ... by some hand or other. In a little, the whole logical bypass is obvious. Intelligence is EVERYWHERE, from the construction of the computer, to the utilisation of the resources for PURPOSES of imaginative character, which are not SOLUTIONS but investings with ingenious creative thought, far beyond system, though using it.

Indeed, what is required is not some imaginary construction which man with intelligence might make, but something which non-man without intelligence might ... lead to! If however the nature of intelligence (see Ch. 7 above), be considered, and its necessity, then of course we might as well give the 'principle' some of it, in fact far more than we possess. That done, we might as well acknowledge that constructive imagination is far removed from the 'solution' of a problem, since until your purpose is clear, there IS no problem. Available means become problems only when active purposes have to or choose to deal with them!

There is altogether far too much concealed anthropomorphism in all this, as if the presence of man or his superior, like some ghostly figure, is ALWAYS just there, to make proposals, imaginations, creations of thought and then utilise possible means by some brilliant other creation, this quantum computer or its ilk. When you conceive that the thrust towards bionics is largely driven by the fact that it leaves utterly for dead, this DNA means and its ancillaries, anything man has in mind, then the presumption of imagining the thing was somehow made by materials in matter wholly obscured, with powers wholly divorced from anything matter has even been seen to DO, or CONCEIVE, or CONSTRUCT, and which in some way had this spare quantum computer hanging about, shows the extremes to which people may be driven in their need to escape the simple equations.

In fact, however, man was not always there; and if he were, he would be even more prodigiously incapable and incompetent for the task than he now is. In the March-May 2000 issue of Creation, we find for example (p. 6), that IBM is planning to spend $US 100,000,000 to build a supercomputer "to simulate a basic biological process". It is to run 500 times faster than the world's fastest computer today'. How long however is it expected to take, if all goes as PLANNED, to 'run a computer simulation of the folding of a single protein' ? About a year. How long does it take in actual life ? Less than a second! You see that one is not exaggerating in some of the comparisons made! THIS! It is for the FUTURE, this pitiful beginning of ONE case at such a nearly paralysed snail pace. Noted in Creation is this comment from an IBM researcher:

• "It's absolutely amazing, the complexity of the problem and the simplicity with which the body does it every day."

In the same vein (loc.cit.), we find that "one gram of DNA can hold the information -equivalent of a trillion CDs".

No, it would not matter much if man had been there (another begging of the question) in order to do the things ASSUMED in all these engaging little plans to 'account' for life, all the time. He is incompetent to the last degree in these matters, to IMITATE them, let alone create them; to imitate them WHEN life is already here; to imitate them when it is NOT; to imitate them when matter itself still, demanding a cause and showing no self-sufficiency, merely power to continue (and that with limits, as with other creations), is absent, that is something else. Gradually, we come to the need for far more than man is, before anything was. It is so simple.

But let us return to our simple equations. What IS in fact needed ?

REQUIREMENT FOR SPECIFICATIONS of matter   =  all the conceptual, legal, uniformly drafted, structural, correlative series of aspects found in matter, and all the functional powers to institute these so that they have a causal basis adequate for their construction.

REQUIREMENT FOR SPECIFICATIONS  of mind   = and so on as in Ch. 1 of SMR.

REQUIREMENT FOR SPECIFICATIONS of will = and as above.

REQUIREMENT FOR SPECIFICATIONS of the construction of the coherent, composed totality in one unit, capable of formulating purpose, using imagination, and wilfully defiling purpose, of understanding and misunderstanding, and wilful misunderstanding, as well as of brilliant interpretative work, both relative to what is human and what is material, capable of pomposity and humility, self-effacement and wiliness, guile and goodness, enhancing and understanding progress, or defiling it with irrationalities so barbarous, as to yet retain in their enunciation, something of knowledge!

Then there is the total requirement for all, and the necessity that what made matter without EVIDENCED powers of thought, or imagination, or cogitation, or creativity, but powers of obeying the instructions already inherent in it, should not be matter. If it were, it would be asking that the necessary cause of matter, by which it comes to exist, should already exist. This is not only begging the question, but avoiding it. It is as useless to try to make stars by having them already, as their genesis, as to try to make matter by having it already.  When you come to mind and will, you enter new domains entirely.

The necessity is for the self-sufficient always, and the sufficient for all that is to be, before there can be anything else. If it is not there always, it has nowhere to come from. If it is there always, it must always be adequate. Potential is a created thing, to be outworked; it must first be inworked.

Principles however are just names. It is the goods that are needed, that total capacity, that all enshrining, mind, matter and spirit genesis facility, and the power, and engenderer active, towering over what it makes as a creator must, in the inherent abilities, since for the creature, it is a matter of operating with what you have; but with the creator, of MAKING what in its most derivative fashion, must so operate. YOU must be free to be able to insert into it, what you are not, but it must be. IT merely has to HAVE it inserted and then DO whatever it is for which the insertion makes provision.

Authors do not inhabit their books, and writers are not written with their works. There is a vast step up from being GIVEN what you need to do what you do, and MAKING what must do what you then cause it to do. A word does not engender a system, imagine its components, direct its purposes. It is something which is a SYMBOL. The WORK to be done may be done with words; but it has to use words to secure the result with POWER and intelligence, the ability to muse and to know, to adapt and deploy, and the PURPOSE to secure an integrated system of myriad facets, unerringly, so that it HAPPENS.

'Principles' here are merely verbal delusions. They describe activities; but the issue is not a description, as if mathematics MADE things, rather than provided a symbolic means of thought relative to the construction; nor is the issue a design principle, as if it is merely the  OPERATION of some principle, which then has to have the POWER and the TABLEAU in which to operate so that it might BE a principle, that is needed.

These are mere words.

It is what MAKES the things to be devisable mathematically, as to this facet, as likewise what is to be designable, so that both these things can operate. It is what puts them into being, so that they are. It is THIS that is needed. This Being may USE what He will, including words. You  NEED, in parallel, words or expressive means evocative of results, together with what GAINS those results from what is resource pre-existing and sufficient for these ends; these are a design ingredient. Power, intelligence, imagination, purpose, and will therefore, adapted means to purpose, all these things must precede.

The words do not MAKE anything unless FIRST there is a total system, or rather being, where communication is so devised or active that it works in a power and design totality, each aspect being prior to the operation of any, so that the whole can do anything at all. A system would not in itself do, since you would causally require the author of the composed entity which runs in a prescribed way. Prescriptions do not 'arise'. Orders and systems are to be causally constructed. You require a Being.

When that Being must be eternal, as noted above, then there is nothing of designing in view, but the operation of what is voluntarily in the mode desired. It must, as a minimum, be there. What is greater than the creation attests may of course be there; not what is less.
 
 

PHRASES, ILLUSTRATIONS AND CAUSATION

Before action, with created things, you need to THINK THEM OUT, devise the whole symbolic nexus for their operation, and then, if you want to make, find the interface between word which means, and word which ORDERS, and prevent confusion, keeping clarity and supplying POWER that is RELEVANT to the order, as well as orders apt for the power, and so on and on ... When the topic is what is back of creation, you need no less, though in the end, you find far more as we have demonstrated in SMR. 'You' ? There needs to exist a Being with these facilities. It is a matter of function requiring factuality before it happens. Nothing does not function, and inadequacy does not function enough. Adequate or sufficient function is the necessary requirement, and in terms of scientific method you have to look for it where evidence attests it.

Where on earth, or out of it, then do quantum computers fit in ?

Quantum computers are merely the objectivisation of ONE of the numerous features of creation. There is a virtually unlimited assemblage of further  needs (some of which are discussed in detail in their place in Repent or Perish Ch. 7). You need freedom fashioners, so that people can make mistakes or hate their creator and act against Him or for Him. You need mentality makers, so that minds can construe other creations, and fossick out their modes, and consider their necessary minimal causation; or else deny the principle of causality, and so opt out of discussion while still discussing, and other off-beat things... freedom for folly as well as for wisdom. All this has been discussed in its place, but currently it is necessary to show the futility relevant to the point at issue, of the mere objectivisation of SOME, a small number, of the things seen in creation, at the causal level.

To objectivise in human equipment, something that could help in creation, is nothing to do with the ascertainment of the presence of any such device in nature. It merely shows in an electronic form, the sort of power in one small phase, that would be required.

In doing so, it may be thought of as performing a useful, if misdirected purpose. It is not what WE can create that is the target. It is what CREATED us. It is not our capacity to solve complex mathematical problems, an attestation of the wonder of our own creation (since we cannot create ourselves), which is in view. It is this: in the absence of man, part of the creation, what was the minimal requirement to gain all that has come. Mechanical toys show in detail, SOME little part of the need. They do not of course imagine, nor do they have purposes, but their very logic chips are imposed. They are exceedingly cheap sub-creations of man - when the comparison is man himself as a creation!

Dr Davies appears therefore to have taken a retrograde step, backwards even further, in considering a mere toy, compared with the total requirement, an invention of derivative intelligence. There is NO evidence of nothing making it or anything inadequate, such as NON-intelligence, which is merely moving from the implausible to the comic - OMITTING what is needed for the theory about origin! Long applied intelligence has to make it, if you are interested in evidence, logical or empirical, that is the case.)

What has a toy to do with the GENESIS OF THE TOY. What has an exhibition of one phase of the need (at a subordinate level, since this one presupposes the system,
whereas the question is its GENESIS, not its operation when there), to do with the creation of the result ? is not the provision of ANY phase of the invention of man the assumption of man as maker himself! Without man, what did it ?

This, it is merely a contraption of our own exceedingly limited intelligence (when you compare what we are with what we make), being foisted or hoisted into original causation.

Even if it be claimed that this was merely an illustration, then one must ask: What then does it illustrate ? Does it not simply show that it is possible to grow nearer to the understanding of the divine mind (which thinks) and will (which makes what can opt for folly or seek wisdom), than hitherto, in terms of what we, already created in a way being considered,  can do!

Machines to get fast at answering pre-posed, carefully postulated, verbally engineered questions, given by some more miracles, semantic standing and question putting power to a question receiving instrument ... all this is merely to imagine some fast moving things to help in the construction of what needs not merely speed, but existence and more, beforehand. It needs also organisation, and not this alone, but intelligence; yet not only this, but a prior system of communication to make any equipment relevant, and not only that, but what thinks in order to invent any and all of these quantum computer ingredients, and then imagines in order to make relevant any of the questions anyway, and imagines and purposes.

There is no problem until you want something. You have to be there to want.

Does man's power, then, to find some of the plan^*2 , mean that the plan created itself ? Since when does power to understand something mean it made itself ! Even the understanding grows, and it is still infinitesimal concerning the spirit and mind of man, at the secular level, being the subject of endless controversy and confusion, at the most basic levels! Does this mean that it made itself by better and better methods ?

Does the power to construe on the part of man, mean the power to create itself on the part of what he construes, when even he cannot create it ? Has reason quite left its bearings and is direction a matter of chatter, then! Since when did construe mean construct ? At what point does construing by intelligence mean constructing without it ? What IS construed in the contemporary scene is program, and what IS known is how to make the same - by intelligence, though not nearly so well as the version implanted in nature. It is THAT which relates to man. He can twiddle the dials; but even he did not make them. He can think about the dials, but he did not make even his thought. He merely uses what is kindly provided...

Man was not around to create it, and if he were, he could not because he cannot, or even begin to do so; and what was around had to be able, not only to begin, but to complete the construction, installation and functional requirements. For this HE required functional facilities. All this is not so kindly ignored. Man can make something ? Great, so therefore we can now think in man's terms about just needing this and that; as if man were there, and more, and all that sort of thing, for no particular reason, except this, that he can now make some things which in an inferior way relate to some of the things which are in nature. The fact that nature has to BE there is ignored, and sort of something is to active, but it had better not be named, for some reason or other, or its minimal features considered.

As noted, this ghostly sort of anthropomorphism, this smuggled power and capacity, is just there via phrase or courtesy of language, and it straddles all such reductionism. All sorts of things are just there, as if man were there too, and it all just somehow ... well, does it.
It is easy: ignore the need, talk in terms of the creation as it now is, and imagine that somehow by phrasings and doings now, which do not create, you explain it. This is the anthropomorphic fallacy. Assume it done, and then fiddle the dials and say, Look! see this show you. Or twiddle the phrases and say, Look, a phrase created it. Nothing happens, nothing is seen, but the phrase is seen. Ecce! behold, the answer.

However logic does not work by omission of the question, assumption of the result or the provision of terms, meaningless to the point at issue,  referring to unobservable results.

The need for God is one of MINIMAL POWERS FOR OBSERVABLE RESULTS. He does not have to be thought of in imaginary ways, but initially  in mini-functional ways, as has been done on this site repeatedly. You do not just HAVE matter in order to have it do what it does not observably do, that is, function as it in principle NEVER exhibits capacity to do. It does not function in order to create this level or genre of being. It merely acts within it. Then you have to get matter too, that masterpiece of what is design (as defined on SMR p. 211 and elsewhere, if words are not to be redefined arbitrarily, the opposite of all science). It is the creation which is the point.

You need to get it, since it is manifestly in terms of ALL its powers and limitations, an exhibit of a creative action. It is NOT self-sufficient and yet it is, it exists, it is here. HOW did it get here ? By the provision, as in all else that is not SELF-sufficient (i.e. not requiring any basis or background, because its existence is unprogrammed, undowered, eternal, unlike matter which is programmed with exquisite finesse). What is THERE and NOT having requirement for its manner of existence, has to provide for what is NOT there, by creating it. Otherwise, it does not arrive; but it did. That is all.

The same is true of mind and spirit. Playing with phrases, and using 'principles' which describe what is, in order to GET IT, is really going over the moon. Actually going to the moon is realistic, since it is there and so are the means, intelligence and a stable structure of integrated thought  capacities, and synthesisable material capacities. Going over the moon, however, in the sense of IGNORING what is, forgetting reason and reality, in the interests in effect, of something wholly other than scientific method, this is a jaunt of enterprise, but not of science; and it ignores logic.

Scientific method, however much it may be INTENDED to use it, does not ignore all the ingredients in order to imagine what is not exhibited. It ponders each of them, and INSISTS on a minimal requirement, considering each possibility on the basis of evidence, logical cohesion and theoretical harmony. Self-contradiction does not help.  It merely renders the more remote the thought which is trying to interpret beyond itself.

What answers the case is needed; not some construction of the case, called man, made thereafter, not some phrase referring to what is unobservable, and contrary to all that is observed. That is anti-science, philosophy, in all fairness, at its dogmatic worst.

Back of mind, matter and spirit, and their logical integration in one unit, there is the need for what is sufficient for these things. Principles merely describe some operation of what is there, or caused to be there, so that it can show that it is there. What IS there is the point! It has to GET there to HAVE principles, even when they DO appear, which in this case, is not so. These ... 'principles' are conspicuous by their absence empirically, as by their misformulation, logically. It all coheres. It does not work that way.

It has already been exhibited in SMR, that as to the eternal being who has always to have been there, so that anything might ever be there,  His powers are describable functionally, as to minimal facility, and His being in essence discernible in terms of reason. What He is like after that, in person, is attested by what He says, not this time in DNA, filled with billions of characters, but in a book written direct for our comprehension. There is in empirical fact NO other book which is testable, verifiable, and this to a colossal extent, as a mere addition.

He is not dumb, who made us speak; nor stupid who gave us knowledge. The power to create us with the capacities for either, so far transcend our own as to make our mere USE of such things, without acknowledging Him, an exercise in will which just shows how marvellous a thing freedom really is, and how far removed from our uttermost capacities to create. The God who made things as they are, has not made them in order that they might war on Him; if HE had need, He would not be God, but a mere constituted thing requiring what his systems demanded. Nor did He make nature what it is that man might deny it, or lie about it. He has not removed the race, though He will naturally remove the earth when the tests are over; but He has ensured that ignorance is not an escape for the reckless, the irrational or the arbitrary. He has spoken, and the earth continues, thus confronted by reason and revelation in one clear cut package - revelation for what it is, reason to see that this is where it is - until its time is up.

What then for man ?

Whether it be mind, matter or spirit, we are derivative. We do not create the universe; we play in the one He made. Its features do not include auto-pilot, to create universes. This is nowhere to be found. They do however include capacities to shorten this one, something on which man is working with his customary liberty, however abused. He fouls it up to an extent that the blind would see, if they ventured to consider even the testimony of their ears!

In principle, no principle is the creator.  What has purposes and power, intelligence and thrust, what creates the SCENE for 'problems', is the one who 'solves them'. Does it not occur that we are not to start making God in the form of a man ? HE first INVENTS what He then uses. Not less intelligent than engineers, He has the facilities not to make mere factories or objective equipment, but in thought to make all things fit, what is made and what is wanted, not merely as instruments, but as creations, all from a non-material power, self-sufficient and not the recipient from anyone^*3. The ultimate is self-sufficient, all proficient (since nothing can limit Him) and has made time, that limit for matter which is one of its vulnerabilities and its glories, both.

 It is almost hilarious to imagine Him trying to forge something out of the matter which He first created, as if it were some sort of problem, such as man faces, with a universe here, already made. It is like a son imagining that daddy must go to school, when he is 60. With God, there is no school, there is no potential implanted (for the implanter would be God), there is no limit. Time is a mere trifle in a book called our universe. His knowledge is beyond any time and all.

But what is it like ? It is like a first year painting student, speaking of Raphael, and depicting the real basis of the paintings, in terms of imaginary technical means, when the artist himself wrought for his purposes, by his own imagination, things past even the preliminary understanding of the student, means meet for magnificent undertakings for which the student had not even the feel, the conceptual apparatus or the calibre of thought. Means with God, are ends of purposes; there are no such thing as means to which He must adapt. All is what He created, and the most gross and injurious misuse of His equipment, a thing occurring daily now, is only ABLE to be misused because HE CHOSE to make liberty. This is the OTHER SIDE of it. He has both sides covered, with remedy first, as now, and still yet, and with judgment, which comes. Truth indeed will out.

Creation is not a thing to cover with futile phraseology or inept comparisons; it is a thing invented, with all its capacities, before time, for time, to last to eternity. There is a time for time, and for the little artifices of matter, which are used in it.

But what is it like ? It is like a student suggesting to Einstein that he has a particularly good computer which would make the invention of new theories a breeze for his teacher. Einstein might not know whether to laugh or to cry. MEANS are not in the material but in the mental, the understanding,  in the overviews which creatively arise past all means, touching them as a seagull's wings might skim the surface of the ocean. Flying ? it is something different.

Put more formally: the cognitive, creative, self-sufficient and hence non-material, always present Maker, who must always be for anything ever to be, is no more replaced, in part or in whole,  by material devices that speed processes, than is thought replaced by addition, realisation by replication or purposive order by materials not yet deployed, because themselves uncreated. What serves purpose is first to be accounted for in material terms, in mental ones and spiritual ones. The purpose itself in this case has no accounting, being the creator of the means, and the proposer of the ends. As thought invests the means, so the ends. The means do not limit or define the ends, but are created to enable them. Limits are IMPOSED, not met; and solutions are prior to means, since means have meaning and existence only to meet them. Romans 11:33 expresses it admirably.

It is not really a matter of seeing how to paint what is there with what is there. Instead, you have a painter who invents the paint, the possibility of paint, the skies, the land and the ocean, all, and it is not a comparable situation to that of man, surrounded internally and externally, multitudinously and variably with what he did not purpose or propose, and seeking 'solutions' within this given personal and practical environment. To imagine it so, is merely to ignore the parameters. Bringing in principles and practicalities in order to 'explain' powers and performances, purposes and imaginations, designed masterpieces of equipment, in the definitional sense as shown (loc. cit.), is to be guilty of the logical fallacy of ignoring the question.
 

• The question is NOT what is comparable in some measure to some facet of creation, in terms of creation; but what is POTENT enough and COMPREHENSIVE enough to account for creation, so that it might appear in the first place. Illustrations, verbal or otherwise, of what might be, in a world fully created, are not DEMONSTRATIONS of what must be so that the world might be here at all, and everything in it, including the imagination with which to think of the illustrations, however inept or irrelevant. In fact, the power to make mistakes is one of the glories of man, since it shows him a purposive being, not merely programmed, mistakes having no meaning in what is merely 'there'.

 
• If it is all description merely, there can be no prescription; but when error results ONLY when something is prescribed, then the abyss between man and matter appears. Man proposes; matter merely acts in its own way. Man prescribes as he may; man continues AS prescribed. For matter, mistake is irrelevant; it merely shows that the investigator has not understood it. It is HE who mistakes! With man, mistake occurs just as soon as a purpose is met with the wrong means. Man is a proposing, purposing being, with many procedures annexed, and many allowed for his choice. But what of the procedure, here chosen by some, to invent the universe by phrases, without objective attachment, verifiable reality ? or by noting that man can do this and that with what is already created ?

 
• Such procedures are indeed doubly defective: imaginary aspects of what is never observed, in part or in principle, or what man may make out of what is already made, to show how to do things, with what IS already made, much faster, are neither scientifically germane, nor logically adequate. The latter assumes what is here already, when the question is its arrival; the former uses words, when the question is deeds.

 
• To smuggle in the Almighty under cover of a phrase, or in terms of a contraption of man's making, when the topic is the arrival of mind, matter and spirit, is not merely beside the point, a verbal or utility cover, but is wholly irrelevant. Usages to be made of verbal or engineering skills of what is made, certainly illustrate the power needed to make us; but they do not relate at all to the actual making. These are by-products. The question is the product. THAT is what is in view. To assume done what has to be demonstrated, is a normal description of the logical fallacy of begging the question, simple, straightforward and present in all its usual repugnance to reason. Not the action of the product, but its actualisation is in view. To ignore the issue, is called ignoratio elenchi, another fallacy. Both occur in the domain just rehearsed, from the reviews provided.

 
• What is here, the universe in general and man in particular,  is that which requires not phrases or feeble contraptions of man; but the power and the work, the knowledge and the wisdom to erect all the aspects of his structure, and each of the ingredients of the aspects, so accounting for them, and providing coherent causal grounds for their arrival... while accounting for man's bypassing of issues such as occurs in this way, likewise.

 
• THAT,  it IS imagination, for to make such an imagination as man's, alas so readily misdeployed not for lack of capacity, but often simply in the factories of desire, this is a work of soaring scope, leaving man's thoughts not only little by comparison, but duly placed in awe at the power of such a Worker as the Creator. No puppet, he wills; and willing, he may become wise in his own eyes. To make it even so that man may not so much as be aware, in the outworkings of what has already occurred, of what he is doing, captivated by his own thrust, until much later if at all, such is the power of his will and the penalty so apt.

 
• What is this and for what is it ? It is to invent a superlative instrument in kind, beyond all that might be compared in mere contrivance, infinitely past the best prowess of man the creator. Its penalty is just shame, where it belongs.


Moreover, this creation, the will of man, it is one which, on the other hand,  may be unmoved by mountains of will adverse to its actions, like giant waves on the rock, and steel itself to reality at all costs, seeing and fearing nothing, sure in the knowledge of the Creator. It is this which is made so conspicuously manifest in the sole valid presentation concerning origin and outcome in the annals of man, that of the Bible meeting all that reason requires, and in nothing failing, then surpassing it with materials so vast in scope, certain in verification, that mystical phrases look like the mere spume on a windy day, playing at being the ocean.

What sparkle is in the waves, when you look at them, and not the spume!
 
 

NOTES

*1  Cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, A Spiritual Potpourri 29.

*2

It took (p. 9, loc. cit.) geneticists 5 years to work out the sequence on one 545 gene chromosome, one of our smallest, leaving 22 more to go. There were still 3% unresolved in the one. Somehow it was thought that the fact that there is a governing instruction (things do not come into being by chance but by sufficient cause) means (taking the opposite error in an hilarious seeming manner) that there is no freedom left. ANYTHING happens is the first nonsensical proposition; and then NOTHING happens, merely, it is all controlled. It is like children who are never satisfied: parents are too wonderful, or too horrible. It is better to study the facts than become so emotionally unstable that ANYTHING is said!

In fact, as with a piano, there is a fascinatingly, intriguingly brilliant background to the order and organisation, the planning and the thought to enable liberty to play. In a Stradivarius it is the reason, in the violin field, for the possibility of paying some millions for just one of these old-fashioned violins (in the literal sense of fashioned)...

See SMR pp. 316Dff., 348ff., It Bubbles, It Howls, He Calls Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, where the issues are reviewed.
 

*3
Thus if He CHOOSES to make man in such a style that in man's spirit there is facility for communication with Himself, both ways, there is no impediment to that. If He later chooses to visit man in the form of a man, minus the sin, that is simply expressive of what He is like, so that His motives and means can if you will, conspire together to reach man and do for man whatever it takes. It will of course prove adequate, as there is no limit to Him, who from the beginning wrought the perspectives, platforms and potentials in man which He then decided to reach in this way, just as previously they were reached in the self-authenticating, scientifically self-verifying Bible. What He showed was a love that is not possessive, a ransom that is sufficient and a way of life which, in nonconformity, leaves man a maker of a trail of death on earth, with disorder, both ever more manifest.

It all verifies itself continually. That is the way things go, when you treat them with scientific method, and get it right in the first place. That is the way this goes, has gone and continues to go.