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CHAPTER SEVEN

MODELS AND MARVELS

How to put it in Perspective
An Introduction to, or
Elaboration of
the Excursions of Edition 2,
The Shadow of a Mighty Rock,

and comprising

A. Mental Chiropractic, with
B. Davies' Dilemma and
C. Nothing and Davies, together with

D. Predestination, Power and Performance in the God of Creation,

E. Antics of Dating and

F. A Space for Space and Time for Time.
   

A. Mental Chiropractic

It all really started long ago. It seems to satisfy a longing in those who really feel that life should be left at it is, for what it is worth, in their own hands, for one thing. Left, that is, until it departs perhaps peremptorily, and perhaps not at all quietly.

There are the two approaches to this aspect of the affairs of life:

1) since it is so readily jeopardised, SEIZE it now, and model it in mind and will as you can: serve it right; or,

2) since it is so amazing, find its creator and examine the specifications for this walking laboratory, this mental marvel, this volitional prodigy.

If you don't like the latter, then exploitation may seem the best way; and if this does not necessarily exhibit itself in inter-personal spills, then at the least - make the most of it mentally, put life in place and sadly consider its gradual departure. That at least seems to cover much of the case, at that dispositional level, though the models can vary for individual specifications.

Manipulation can be physical, as done by chiropractors, or mental. Then in the mental variety, it can be self-manipulation, in which the inward desire is satisfied by some theorem or sum or computation or analysis, which would seem superficially to satisfy what the individual is really after. However it may be social, in which case the one misleads perhaps, the many. Manipulation is frequently desired by those who have dislocations, and such can be irritable because of undue vulnerability, or desperate for much the same reason. Some seem to prefer it, though the question always is - Does it solve or complicate the problem? Mentally however the desire can be based in pathology. The result can be an advance of that condition - or rather, in it!

Naturally we are coming to our topic: that the mind is to accept that IT, all things that be, and all that is, is all REALLY ONE thing. The worlds of obedient matter, error-prone mind and spiritual purpose are to be shuffled into a homogeneously unitary sort of ball. The ancient Greeks from Anaximander and Anaximenes to Democritus, and the moderns from Hawking to Davies seem to have much the same in mind. It is rather like a library, where the desire is to have it all, actually, in just one book: the ONE BOOK LIBRARY, Conceptual Place, Avenue of Imagination.

Of course there would be a certain vacuity in it, since the space given in it to any one of the differing volumes could be contested as disadvantaging to its rivals and to its reality, therefore. Still, the desire is there, it MUST be ONE book, for that is simple, significant, streamlined, subject to ... easier control.

The analogy is not undue; for the worlds of command and purpose, of moral impetus and vision, obedience and law, intelligence and intelligibility, error and conformity are all to be reduced in the very paragon of reductionism, in unscientific desire, to satisfy a model of the manipulative mind. The concept of homogeneity is not an experimental index, but a philosophic panacea.

Hiding from the Creator makes this ONE of the main possible lairs. After all, if everything, despite its irreconcilable non-homogeneities and underivable differentiae, were all there was, a person could be so vacuously masterful. All that loot out there and no one to answer to: the stuff happily making itself and organising its inter-relationships and arranging for its becoming before it was there, and of course after it, and for the coming of reason for no particular reason, and of choice for no special purpose, and of purpose from no actual ground: to so me, it can seem quite a plan.

To be sure, if reason must first go, that might seem a small price for getting control without responsibility; and as to morals, if they similarly arose without interface, inventive base or substantial cause (and such is the idea that people merely dupe themselves in morals, actually moronically meaning just that someone wants something, and it is nice to imagine it is good too) - then that makes it easier still!

If they and all the realities therefore are dismissed, then there it is. Palaces beyond measure, riches beyond dreams. They don't belong to anybody: they just happened to be there. The Jaguar in the driveway doubtless came into being because time was bored with just doing its thing, and wanted to develop engineering magnificence: and so it did. Brilliant!

The irresolvable realities of differentiation however are simply set forth in Chapter 1 of Edition 1 (and 2) of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock (SMR), in more systematic detail in Chapter 3; within one of the Sections in Chapter 2; while in Chapter 10, there is the religious approach to consider. The ideas that various beings, created from the mind and spirited excursions of man, did this or that: these become a world of their own. (See in particular, pp. 249-252N, and 329-332H; and Reductionism in Index, SMR.)

This merely stresses the imaginative and specialised character categorically, of man the creator of worlds that are, and yet are not: that HE has (in mind), but which do not of themselves come to be; worlds which at times both cannot and will not do so.

Beyond that, we there look at the attested reality of what we could call metareligion - the doings, speakings and dealings of God Himself with this race, and with its environment and with its history: His declarations and deeds. (Contrast this with man's inventions concerning religion, we might for definitional clarity, call simply 'religion' - cf. SMR 422Qff., 374-386.) The contrasting attestations of reason are considered there, and the unique result is a verification of the position concerning the highly and definitively expressive God of creation, demonstrated earlier. In short, this is the verification in the field of applied religions.

But what is this monistic manipulation, and where does it dwell?

 

The categorical clash

between meaningless action and purposeful action,

developing error as an answer to intention in the case of being thwarted;

between performance on program and making programs including bad ones,

between assessing action and performing it merely, between imagining contrary to creation and creation contrary to imagination,

between personality and impersonality,

between love and mindlessness -

and really, between something and nothing, and

between diverse somethings within their own worlds, and simple somethings within their own,

between the craggy magnificence of a whole order which is neither mandatory at the personal level nor by man dismissible at its own, neither answerable to man nor compulsive to his thoughts, as indeed in this very instance:

these things need not be considered. Such is the view. After all, one can, to be monistic, just be irrational. Just deny reason...

Yes. But then two points:

1) you cannot use it if you deny it. Then you must cease all argumentation. Grounds are then irrelevant. You are simply displaying verbally the situation where you lost the business of giving grounds and accounting for things, and prefer to abide unmolested in the solitary confinement of undisciplined imagination. One can, for a while, to a point; but the world stays on, and reason continues, and its demands are the same.

2) Not only however can you not then use it without self-contradiction: if you do, your own word has determined it invalid in advance. No one else therefore need do so.
In fact, the forsaking of reason neither dismisses it, nor the matters with which it has to do, nor the results it requires. It merely dismisses the speaker from participation with any logical validity, in any discourse on the topic. Reason invalid makes its use ... an error.

Where data and reason are to be applicable however, rather than constituting by their absence an antinomy at the outset, leaving the speaker in irresolvable contradictions (see Ch.3 for more detail), the worlds of reality are of great interest and of wonderful implication.

These realities are considered more closely yet in Edition 2 of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock and the following may be noted as largely additions in that Edition.

1. pp. 251-252N (taken with 208-210, 1031C, and #4 infra).
 

2. Cosmologies and Constancies, pp. S1-S34, at the end of Chapter 2.

3. pp. 315A-316G, 305ff., 284ff. with emphasis on mind, matter and creation, and the categorisation of worlds of realities.

4. pp. 329-332H,including on pp. 332G-H, A  Pattern for Man - The Elsewhere Earned Edifice).

5. pp. 348-349D, where the spirit of man is pondered in its properties.

6. pp. 418-422W, dealing with such things as Great Burials over history, famous ones (metaphysical, spiritual), with Davies' creative but reductionist concepts on creation, and their classification at this level, irrationalism in physics more broadly; and with cultural innovation replacing thought.

See also What is Life For?, which appeared above as Chapter 6 of this present work, That Magnificent Rock.

The wings of thought can loft into the magnificence of confirmed, consistent and verified reality, or collapse into the dreams of the deep: it is when they deny their own validity that the deep becomes an abyss, reached from wing collapse. We are so voluntary that we may elect to go that way; matter, on the other hand, is so constrained that it is sure to hurt.

One should mind however the matter of mindlessness: it does not alter the terrain but rather, surrenders one's distinctive place in it, one's opportunities: and capitulates to captivity. Over (the concepts of) matter one must be mindful of the place of mind, and over error the place of will, and over vision the place of creation, and over it all the place of what is sufficient for it.

There alone in the knowledge of the self-revealing God, with His self-verifying Word, the Bible, with its all-fulfilling Jesus Christ, is there the known base of absolute truth, from which the power to present truth is exclusively derivable. To this we shall return, in Item F a little later - A Space for Space and Time for Time. (See also The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 1-70, 101,315A-H, esp. 316C, and Index, under Remedy; and also Public Divine Communication. Useful here in addition, is Ch.5 C, above: The Classic Analogy.)

Man is not sufficient for himself: it is time to stop grieving and inventing inconsistent paradigms in infantile but intellectual regression, adolescent but intemperate thrust, or plaintive if passionate angst, and to face the reality that is. Reason has no other answer; and this one has no failures.
 
 

B. Davies' Dilemma - Much Ado about Nothing

The remarkable production, 24 Hours, some time ago, in fact August 1992, ran a story on Paul Davies' ideas. It invited comment, but used astonishing editorial indiscretion in manipulating (womanipulating ? it is immaterial) one of the requested responses, with or without cognition, almost beyond recognition. The magazine made a shameless shambles of the distorted letter. It is indeed notable what a few omissions may do, especially when they comprise most of the writing. Perhaps then a little may be considered here.

Paul Davies has some arresting howlers in this article attributed to his pen (or keyboard). Thus:


"If a way can be found to permit the Universe to come into existence from nothing as the result of a quantum fluctuation...', and

These pearls need just a little look. We must realise that it does not matter how brilliant you may be, or even in your own intentions sincere, the Bible mirrors history in its clear statement that when it comes to God, the failure to accept His prescriptions about coming to Him and knowing Him will lead to the magnification of error to degrees spectacular WHERE HE IS CONCERNED... AND He IS CONCERNED A GREAT DEAL! Here however it is explicit. Statements like those of Ephesians 4:18, 2:1,12, Romans 1:18-20, I Corinthians 1:20-21, and in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:22-23, are to the point here. 

 

 

1. Suppose we were to take seriously for one moment the concept of something from nothing: it violates the definition of the term. Nothing has no future, past or present, no potential, demarcation or criteria, no characteristics. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 332Fff., and its Index on Nothing.)



2. If the physical correlative of 'quantum cosmology' were to be in existence, nothing would not. This then becomes either a verbal ploy or a definitional error. If a verbal ploy, we return with the finding: it was not meant. There WAS something. If a definitional error, we return with the finding: use language which signifies what you mean, and so avoid errors which may be 'priceless' for fun, or exquisite for child talk on magicians, but are not so for mature usefulness. For what the 'something was', see Chapter 1, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock.


3. A 'quantum fluctuation' is still a quantum at work, with a fluctuation in process. The terms have meaning, the events relate to objects characterisable, so that we are assigning grounds for what is in view, only exceedingly vague language is being used. We return: use exact language lest you confuse yourself with inchoate concepts mixed with precise processes, and so lose yourself in the mixed milieu. If a fluctuation of an object had no cause, the object would to that extent be uncharacterisable; so that to term it a 'quantum' would be terminological abuse.


All characterisable things interact according to the character in view; where it lacks, there is nothing. The interaction may be purposive, as with humans, or not; it is still interaction according to characterisable features. It may be free from deterministic direction: it is still the act of what is designable in kind - for man, a design which, within the power of provisions of its Maker has access to creative thought and personal will. (See esp. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 258-284-309, esp. 258-265, 284-288 and 299ff.. See also Barbs, Arrows and Balms 29).



  4. In practice, the 'quantum fluctuations' have designable effects when the scale of operations is sufficient to allow wave specifications, so that the inability to inspect the procedures resulting in these patterns is an ignorance which cannot claim ground for dismantling the causal system. Ignorance may be bliss at times; but it is no substitute for knowledge.



  5. On the view of Dr David Bohm, the ignorance is one of mere measurement limits, so that normally conceived rationality is at work. (See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 421-422A). The case, then, is not even one of intellectual tardiness where, as usual in science, it takes time before the 'intellectual object' that works has been adequately grasped. In the interim, in that case, meagre understanding limits levels of precision. Rather it is, on Bohm's approach, more fundamental: inadequacy of the tools of measurement. His concepts are given a vigorous exposition in Scientific American, May 1994.


6. The argument that something or somebody must have set the universe going initially is not even touched by all this.



First, however, Davies seems rather Aristotle-bound here. The 'prime mover' concept to that effect is not Christian as such. The Bible teaches that God INITIATED THE MATERIAL as well as the movement, creating time, space and man to relate to them: just as we initiate a poem in one medium, which was created in thought first. (See Romans 8:38-39, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 11:1-4, Isaiah 45:18-25, 41;43:13, 44:6-8,26, 46:10, 48:13, 51:4-6.)

(See Romans 8:38-39, Colossians 1:16-17, Hebrews 11:1-4, Isaiah 45:18-25, 41;43:13, 44:6-8,26, 46:10, 48:13, 51:4-6.)

The initiation of serial time in our sense is ascribed to God, whose time is such that He is the first and the last, the beginning and the need for all creation. That is the Biblical model.

The scenario we look at in physics is simply the serial model, as in a novel. It is the way the thing proceeds, being there. The time frame is specialised by the mind of the writer, but it is NEVER to be confused with his own personal parameters! HE made the novel with its time. There is a certain consistency in its time-line; but it is not to be confused with the way the maker of such time lives for His own part. Even with the finite novelist the distinction is real; here it is dominant. 


7. Davies seems superabundantly confused on these points, one reason why it is never wise for specialists in technical fields too freely to involve themselves in theology: especially if they are personally unversed in the things to which they refer. See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock pp. 31-35, 882-884, 316D-G, 329-332H. At least sufficient needs to be known to travel in the scope of the situation to which address is made, rather than in a cartoon of it.



8. Even St Augustine, who lived quite some time ago on this earth, nearly 16 centuries ago, in fact - dealt with this point. The creation was not so much instituted IN time, as WITH time. Certainly the Bible, as above noted, teaches that time is in our world, a created thing. It came into existence because the Author desired it to do so.


This Augustine, since he is referred to, we may note makes perfectly clear. Indeed, how strange if the little characters tried to tell the Author how to set about his business, or the parameters of his existence, in terms assuming he was bound to his novel. So it goes...


But concerning Augustine, he though mentioned by Davies in already noted article in 24 Hours, certainly did not teach that it is meaningless to ask what happened before time, in the sense that nothing was active and existent. Rather he taught that time was correlative with creatures, so that it is a case of: No creature then NO time.

GOD however, Augustine was quick to declare, existed in a way not subject to the sort of change we know and have, with its limitations and periodicity. (See The City of God, by Augustine, Book XI, sections 5-6.) To bring Augustine in, as Davies did, at this point, is merely misleading. The ancient did not teach anything assimilable to Davies', view; but held an entirely other perspective that by no means defied rationality.


9.  Actually, Augustine could have rather more aptly said this: That time in OUR sense did not exist without the correlative creation of the rest of the universe, for which it was the apt and chosen instrument for its procedure and processes. In what OTHER sense it existed in a different format is a wholly different question. Despite Davies, it is not answered simply by negating TIME as such, outside creation, because it is not a serial thing, where one awaits developments. (Cf. The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Ch.2 Supplement, pp. 31ff..)



10. Indeed, Augustine, far distant though he was in time, said this: "Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." He who created in this simultaneity for the species of creation, both substance and time AS WE KNOW IT, yes and space, and the conceptual correlations that were appropriate for the apparatus in waiting, and soon to come: He was in His own ontological mode, as chosen by Him, without our time because it was part of creation. 'God', as Augustine said, 'in whose eternity is no change at all, is the Creator and ordainer of time.' Let us go beyond those conceptions however and say this.

Yet BECAUSE God was in His own operations and then pursued them in the presence, but - as we constantly point out - not under the conditions of our time, which is His creation not His confinement: it is certainly meaningful to speak of pre-temporal time, or pre-creation time. Thus, although all things were then known to God before any of them came to pass (see Ch.1, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock), so is this the case also now.

The invention of serial time is not the invention of categorisability or displayable time, inspectable time, viewable time before the mind of God. It is simply a delimited and serial mode of time which is instituted, being created modally in the interstices of the universe. Thus, to be aware of the Biblical model rather than to use its presence as if it were absent, and to invent something else to which to relate in its name, let us be clear. Model distortion is not a scientific procedure. In Ephesians 1:4, we are told this: "According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world".

Hence the Biblical picture is not one of writhing antithesis and antinomy, but clarity. BEFORE God created the universe of which Romans 8:37-39 makes it clear, serial time such as we have did not exist in physical fact: THEN God knew who were His own.

Hence we speak not only with logical consistency in speaking of the concept 'BEFORE God created the world', but with Biblical precedent. THAT is the picture the Bible presents.

It is just that OUR type of time did not then exist. What did exist is not there stated: but God did, with His roving ability without creation to know all that it would portend, and to see the end as at the beginning (as He states, Isaiah 46:10, John 8:58, Acts 15:18, Ephesians 1:4, 3:9, I Peter 1:20, II Timothy 1:9; and cf. SMR pp. 30ff., 882-884). THAT is not our time; but its results could be intruded into it, if God so chose, on behalf of the mind of man, on an individual basis.

Prophecy of course often did just that (for experimental verification of Biblical prophecy, see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chapters 8 and 9, as well as in Ch.1). But it is time for us to revert to Davies' 'nothing' and to give space to this super-attenuated basis of his.

We are left with the stripped down nullity that is, to be precise, infinitely divergent from logic, from Augustine, from causative adequacy as from scientific validation, verification, method and any form of reason. Once again, we move from literary history on the one hand, and logical pre-requisites, to the marvellous irony which Paul Davies unwittingly provides on the antics of evolution for two generations.


11. Just as we cannot THINK in non-characterisable terms, or ACCOUNT without using causality, so any endeavour, as here, to wed irrationality and reason is doomed. It violates the ground rules it uses, breaks the universe of its own discourse, and gives causal grounds causally natural, conceived for non-causality. Actually, it is not even possible to THINK of a non-causal area, for this would demand the disappearance of rational characterisability, hence of specifiability, hence either of expression, designation or description. (See references to The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, under A 2 above.

12. Nor is it possible to account for causality per se (i.e. in and of itself, apart from its expression in the form it has in this world). It is not, because the very effort is an exercise IN causality, and endeavour to get beyond it, assumes its operation wherever it goes. goes. (Cf. SMR Ch.5, pp. 424-431, and Predestination and Freewill, Appendix on Kant.)


Christianity very simply indicates the God created OUR type of causal nexus through an ETERNAL operative, creative power, not serially limited, but quite able to create the serial kind if desired. We must not mix the metaphor of authors 'putting themselves into their work', as if this were literal. They merely give something of what they have, to that form. THEY themselves remain as they were, in form and essence. That is the invariably observable nature of creative power in its conceptual directions. It is so here.


13.  It is quite a nice dilemma which Professor Davies has carved for himself in his excursion into theology. Dismiss in terms of a cosmology the very idea of cosmology (self-contradiction, plus the logical fallacy of special pleading), use the form of a term ('nothing'), while changing its connotation (logical slide), and access reason in order to dismiss it by reason (self-invalidation), whether this be intentional or not being not relevant; or else...return with reason to reason, and be absent from nullity.


The beautiful part is this: to the 'insider', the mesmerism of the fiasco of biological evolutionism may make this step to the fantasies or irrationalism, philosophy-of-physics style, seem a small thing. From the first, however, it has in principle been as gross and outrageous an abuse of logic and sufficient causation, as Davies' new-look dedication to nullity as his base, is in practice.


After all, 'nothing' has been a very good description of the evolutionist's powers and findings at the positive level of what it 'theoretically' takes, for extant things in the world of nature, to make what is there. There is nothing to show. Nothing is precisely what has been found for this job. In science, however, nothing to the point is not normally made the ground of a theory, but of its departure.

To actually come out into the open, and to SAY it: NOTHING was its basis, this is, shall we say, merely a verbalising of the actualities of evolutionism for decades. It is the sort of thing a court jester would say in a Shakespearian comedy. It is altogether too correct, and hence holds a poignant comedy.

If then, increasingly and embarrassingly, volumes are written about these facts, is it any wonder that the 'next step' or even 'the final solution' is taken. Extermination of reason, for grounds with irrepressible magnificence of folly, stated - this is just what the empty irrationalities of evolutionism needed to complete its picture - a snapshot in the dark.

The facts in question are such as these:

a) Micromutations do not exhibit macro-invention but abide within the constraints of their own parameters.

(For all these things see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Ch.2, , in this Library, and Lectures on Creation, 1996, which is Ch.1 in the present work.)

b) Logical machinery to secure something (advanced conceptual engineering criteria) from nothing (in the sense of their absence) is not visible.

c) Observation-based laws are fundamental to science and contradict this spree of creation by daydream, in preference to creation by one sufficient for it, hence called the Creator. (Try winning a way by this method of assuming in its testable absence what you need for the result.)

The orders, code-driven commands within the cells that set about construction, do not invent their symbolic logic expressed in their vast and complex language, whether slowly or quickly. Orders do not happen - they arrive from what is, in the end, conceptually competent to produce them.

Current nature therefore in effect has nothing to contribute. In law, in logic, in experiment, in experience, its relevant prowess is nullity. Its fundamental powers of creation of its own being are what they appear: nothing. Creation has been outsourced to produce what lacks its powers. God wrote His own book. We are not entirely ignorant of authorship, being gifted with subsidiary creative powers and prowess ourselves.

d) Cells, like languages, do not have their primitive exemplars. Language, whether encrypted in living cells, or crafted by men with their internal language creating programming facilities, show only specialised and advanced, no sequential development as noted (see reference in a) above.) Not improperly, these things are called gifts.

Yet... from these 'nothings' of natural contribution,
all arises... This however is not even faith: it is
conceptual antinomy at war with facts. It does not vault above them: it puts them into Auschwitz, while miseducating the minds of the young with this torturous substitute for science and knowledge.

(See the Brown-Bannon in this Library. It is not the intention which is in view, but the result quite simply; and equally simply, it will not do.)

It is, so to speak, in the language of fairy tales, The Emperor's New Clothes all over again. They are not merely see-through, but not there - and the royal purse pays the tailor for this masterpiece of the sartorial art: one that none dare acknowledge, though it is not there, lest the vanity of majesty prove dangerous. In drug terms: if that which has happened for so long is like marijuana, then this is heroin. There is a natural if devastating progression; but it is not progress.

Professor Davies' view on this topic, here, is merely the end of the line, the reductio ad absurdum, the result which shows the enormity of the proposed method, by its end appearing in folly. It is used extensively in geometry; but now in physics, which after all is allied: however its result is not here being followed!

If, then, all those things have for generations been taught as if science, and are becoming the subject of increasing rejection by specialists of this and that kind, as shown in our Lectures on Creation 1996 (Ch.1 above) and elsewhere; and if these are NOT being rejected (to the outrage in some deep sense of many scientists, one declaring Darwinism the greatest scientific deceit of all time): then what is the step next in line ?

EITHER these pretentious daydreams are now rejected, each in its line and for the reasons which evidence and logic provide, in terms of duly applicable scientific method: or the habit of lifetimes in this area of pretence becomes a veritable Vanity Fair of triviality, and the last step is taken. The car has failed all tests on the ground so we send it over a cliff with hope that it may fly.

It is not rational; but it is in one sense at any rate, progressive... If 'nothing' has been the power and the testimony on which this myth of evolutionism has been based for over a century, why not go the whole way and make nothing come onto stage, beaming on the cheeks which are not there, acknowledging the plaudits with the hands it does not have, and take the bow! I alone did it, says nothing; but to those who still think about it, it amounts to nothing.

In an examination paper, the score would be similar to the concept.

(Note: Some of the above material for this Section appeared in the 2nd Edition of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, but it is included and expanded here for convenience of reference.)
 

 

C. NOTHING AND DAVIES

We have referred to Davies' refusal to have the universe come from something or somebody and in particular, sufficient for its production. However, if he has dismissed the cosmological argument in favour of just nothing, then he himself invokes it.

After all, if the universe comes into existence as a result of a quantum fluctuation of nothing, absurd and self-contradictory as we have shown such a concept to be, THAT is nonetheless something, whatever elaborate contraption of contradictory words you may use to describe it. It is therefore time to reflect further on these things.

1. Davies has dismissed the cosmological argument, but here invokes it. The only difference is that he has rejected a causally sufficient ground in favour of a causally insufficient one, indeed one chosen by definition to be insufficient.

There is then a causal ground for the universe coming into being after all! This vacillation, fluctuation is wholly typical of God-smugglers who invent systems of thought after first disavowing what they then use; they disavow to rid themselves, it seems, of the competition. Then, without competition, use this to 'establish' what appeals, even when they themselves define it into absurdity. Freud does it with the MIND subject to subterranean invasion (but of course not his own mind) . Marx does it with a SYSTEM from which 'all things flow', likewise using a mind controlled by it, yet quite safe from it in 'telling us it like it is'. Darwin, no less does it with a system where truth is never a criterion nor a possibility; and now Davies in his causeless paradise uses causality to get it, the thing, there! It is truly marvellous how simple are the logical errors pandemic to the conceptual paraphernalias of the would-be God escapees (that is, the God-the-Creator departure corps).

2. Cosmological causality is past, we learn: but OF COURSE, not this one. (For references see Section A, and Section B, points 1-10 above, with Causes.) Famous! At this rate, the infectious intellectual disease department will be flat-out; the conceptual conquest of truth will be in full tow - as it was in the crucifixion of the One who called Himself the Truth. There OTHER burial means were used, as are common in Communist countries, and increasingly in this one.

3. NOTHING is not actually something with a quantum in order to fluctuate, in that a quantum is after all, something.

4. A FLUCTUATION is actually something which varies in certain ways, and must be there in order to vary... to do it.

5. Hence a quantum fluctuation CANNOT be of nothing: that is a simple contradiction in terms, not permissible, for a physicist or, for that matter, anyone else interested in establishing anything.. It is useless to try to 're-define' nothing (as in the case of those who fail, trying to succeed by 're-defining success'). Such is mere semantics, verbal manipulation, use of terms in a confused or propaganda way, self-contradiction leaving no one in any need of further contradiction: if one contradicts oneself, enough! Self-contradiction will never create the universe.

6. Davies' concept that the 'supernatural' CANNOT invent a system with a time element, component, aspect of its matrix - define it how you will, it is a part of the whole: this is merely a re-defining of his irrational assumption that the God who created our kind of time - serial time in material aspects, though the mind can surpass it in some ways - is not there.

Read: BECAUSE God is not there, THEREFORE God is not there. If you grant the first point, you come to the second; but both are reliant on NOTHING. I t is a simple identity proposition, without the saving grace of having any identity other than... nothing for its assertion. Now nothing, it is not sufficient ground for asserting anything.

7. THAT, it is a REAL nothing! There is no ground for this self-contradictory approach to God. The underlying, gratuitous and anti-model assumption (i.e. one which mauls what it is rejecting, before doing so, twisting it into something else - the old straw-man approach) is this: that God would HAVE to have the SAME sort of time or system as we do. But that is PRECISELY IMPOSSIBLE, if one is dealing with the Creator.

An author is NOT incorporated into his novel's time-schedule; indeed, IF he were, he COULD not be the author, for he would be limited BY and TO what is after all, merely his creation, adding with whatever else he deems it fitting to create: as distinct from his own person or being.

8. What Davies here is doing is declaring that if God does not exist, then He cannot as God do what only God can do; and since He does not exist, then He cannot do it. The logical input is zero, a restatement of an irrational belief system that itself precludes truth; and the psychological input is this: God must be excluded. But what has psychological appetite to do with science. More than enough, as noted in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock on more than one occasion from the mouth of notable scientists!

9. It is truly amusing, quite edifying and most impressive, this thing: that here is a theory which would have the wit to find that the universe was not always there, while yet it employs the incredible self-contradiction to be seeking GROUNDS, CAUSES for its non-causal arrival! But this is not all...

Then it would INSIST (without of course quite saying so, or giving anything to the point as GROUNDS for this), that any CREATOR of the system must nevertheless be IN it, OF it and PART of it, while acting! The reality is staring one in the face: it is not NOTHING but SOMETHING (that is NECESSARY even in Davies' own language, as shown) which brought he universe into being; and WHAT it was is WHATEVER is sufficient for this exploit.

As we have shown, when you REASON this out, unaffectedly USING the causation Davies is so slow to acknowledge, but AT TIMES so fast to use: it means one thing. The Creator. Wonder, Oh wonder! It was not nothing that did it; rather, what it took that was equipped for the task, or a sufficient for the result.

10. Even Science after all is not immune to sufficient causation. Indeed it uses it all the time. God the CREATOR is the answer which satisfies scientific method; but surely, it does not satisfy all scientists, or all lawyers, or all bankers or butchers. Faith is a gracious gift of God; though reason rigorously requires what it teaches: God, the infinite and eternal, the Creator is. To what it teaches however, sin blinds. From what has no validity, Christ saves; and He saves from a great deal more than invalidity.

This brings us into another realm touched on by Paul Davies. To this, we now attend.
 

D. Predestination, Power and Performance
in the God of Creation

 

Predestination will show the power, capacities and the control of the Being who executes it. Someone indistinguishable from nothing will have nothing much to do in this line, as in any other. The name will be an intrusion from theology into a physical or other reductionist island for specialists who wish to make a universe without the rest of what is. In the Bible however, predestination has an enormous function, unique with the power and will of God.

1.The Idolatry of the Visible

Part of the idolatry of the visible - a sort of extension-at-large of special idolatry addressed to particular objects - is that it is a sad parody of the real problem. Dealing with the nothing or the inadequacy which is an intellectual object to replace what is there, you address the wrong issues and resolve non-existent problems, or describe them.

This matter worthy of being addressed is NOT: How can an illusory, secreted parody of the Creator predestinate, when the thing rolls in its own fancied way, with all the idiosyncrasies of idiocies of arbitrary and irrational philosophy rammed down 'his' illusory throat? That could be an interesting consistency exercise, but does not deal with the results of valid and sustainable reason.

Further, that would kill any patient. Besides, God is not a patient but the Producer of those who through their misadventures of mind and spirit, not to say body, become the patients called man.

It, the question, is rather this: How can the Creator of infinite resource who has tossed off the universe as men toss off a poem, but with infinitely more understanding: How then can this all-powerful and all-wise Creator know what will be, when man has a measure of ... liberty ! (These things were treated systematically in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock - 'SMR'- esp. Chs. 1, 3, 5, 8, 10.)

This question has also been dealt with and the logical perfection of the Biblical answer at great length in Predestination and Freewill (1964, with a 1997 Introduction, now available at this Web site q.v.).
 
 

2. The Simplicity of Foreknowledge.

Here we shall merely reply to the point. God knows utterly the thoughts of man, from beginning to the end, and from the end to the beginning, through their seething, believing, belittling, parodying nebulosities, wilful caprices, quaint idiocies - both academic and unacademic, learning being no guarantor of wisdom or understanding.

Man's measure of liberty is not, by definition for a creature, autonomy. At that, what he has is the production of his spirit, mind, facilities in the arena of the situation God created, both in splendour and in judgment on sin: and God knows all these an as author knows a book. He knows them much more, for He created the raw material for the book, as well as the account of its characters, and indeed, is characterisability.

Foreknowledge is, so to speak, child's play for the exhaustive Creator and Designer of the roving spirit, the enquiring mind and the derivative will of man. The real point is the predestination (Ephesians 1:11, Romans 8:29-30, Isaiah 43,48). This is where the physicist's idolatry, so often found and so seldom recognised, becomes a thing of pathos: for it corrupts vision into a sort of fogged-glasses substitute in dimness.

What IS spread out, not as a continuum, but as a varied and multiform reality of which space and time are mere coastal outlines - is the multiplicity of all things, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, moral and immoral, spiritual, unspiritual and non-spiritual, created or desecrated, judged and unjudged, to-be and not-to-be, potential and actual; for God is of infinite understanding. By understanding He has created all things; He is there at the first and with the last, knows the end from the beginning.

This is that God of which the Bible speaks, and these are those things which appertain to His power, conform to His Being and are consistent with His declarations, none of which chides reason in its place, and all of which inform it.

It is this God, and not one of His poems called space-time (which is rather one verse of that particular poem), continuum or discontinuum, who is to be worshipped. It is also He who is at work when we consider according as we are able or enabled, the issue.

Backwards and forwards can this God, our Creator and the Creator of all things, indeed move like light, surveying but not rupturing. Not His is the absurd problem of moving 'backwards in time', as if it affected time, so that slain roosters' heads have to be with some awkwardness... re-attached.

Rather He perceives as the brilliant architect, the contingences and their issues. This putative universe, with all the spirit of men in it, is like a fabric of proto-history.

Although it is an analytical act - not constrained to time as may be some terrestrial author, but related to it as a chosen span FOR His own authorship: God can adjust what He surveys in the model that is a backdrop to history. Whatever the mode, however, this is the magnitude and the scope of the power.

God can move from the beginning or from any point or point subsequent, with multiplying ramifications, insertions, directions, to adjust the lectures, lessons, licences, augmentations, diminutions, collaborations or concatenations of events that He desires. This He can do, IF HE WILL, before any history peeps or chirrups. Nor is He limited to what we have for illustration spread forth, simply to express the potency and potential involvements.
 

3. The Unenviable Path of Evidential Oblivion

Evidentially, as ontologically, God is not at all limited to a universe with a sort of open-minded pathway, hewn from nowhere and for no reason, towards some species of absent-minded creativeness in the overall direction of more complexity. Davies in his 24 Hours article, speaks in an analogy to which we refer in SMR p. 421ff., of development in the universe being such that: "The rules encourage certain outcomes, but do not compel them." Again, "The rules have the effect of constraining the play by channelling it along certain pathways of change that lead to interesting complexity, but they do not serve to fix the fine details".

The significance of these ultra-observational, data-empty philosophic philanderings, for our present purpose, is this: predestination is out. Knowledge of our great excursions and attainments in advance is excluded. The power of God as displayed so readily (in creation and declaration - see SMR, esp. Chs.1,3,10, with verifications in 2,5,6,8,9) is removed by the stroke of a pen. It will however take rather more than that, if our statements are to depend on logical method, or even on the causative methodology of science by which it lives, and moves and has its being, makes its projections and verifies itself.

Actually, predestination is in. Not only is such knowledge, as shown in the above cited work, a NECESSARY power of the Creator whom no reason can ever, did ever - and let us project - will ever remove, and we believe in and practice contest at this point: it is also a VERIFIED one, as shown in the Chapters noted in the preceding paragraph.

It is ridiculously and delightfully humorous to see scientists deny verifiable data on the basis of contra-causal philosophy, prescribing the while, the removal of rationality by means of rational discussion. WE ARE IT, is the implicit premise: so it does not seem our generation can have much in the way of development! For confrontation with reality, we are a gem for any collection. That science should be constrained to such a task as this, is perhaps the height of it!
 

4. The Free (*1) Predestination of Personality

But let us return to our consideration of the powers of God, in a very minimal sense it is true, but at that level, in terms of what was shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, but here applied to our present purpose.

God can then select initial aspects, compose, invent realms for interaction, or for direct responsiveness to Himself at will; he can intrude systematically or personally in terms of the spirit of the enterprise as He defines it, to ensure its end, its middle as also its beginnings, retrospectively , prospectively, synthetically or as He may elect. Limited by nothing, He has no limits.

By the nature of what He has created, God can move the spirit of man in particular, forge and foster the results, inter-relate and integrate, synthesise or pare what He will: HE is not bound to the vaunting philosophy of man where nothing is its basis, and nothing is its very understandable result; only philosophers may so debase themselves. This they may do, whether their trade be that of biologist, physicist or other.

HIS however is the amplitude without access to which (on His terms of course), man is left more like a leaf, than a being of understanding. Yet has He left sufficient to make the avoidance of Himself (see esp. SMR, Ch.3), an exercise not merely in futility, but in irrationality; so that there is no excuse: they are "without excuse". That, incidentally, is the phrase used by God in His revelation at Romans 1:18-20: the precise term.

Currently, the Creator has some 5 billion influenceable persons in the human race - far better than computers are they; but with componential similarities in some ways, to them. This race and its members, these are one target for review and oversight - the combinations resulting are all but infinite in all the interactions, mutual responsivenesses and inventions. History is in His hand. Such matters, again, are child's play to the One who made the mind that made the computers that render the merely processive so (relatively) simple. The understanding is beyond them, and its consequences are (to a degree) put into them.

Though it is not His pleasure to have made man servile, like a machine, yet it is His prerogative - with grace, irony, sardonism or delight, with reproof, rebuke or searching exposition, or even quiet and still exposure (as in a snapshot): to act on, through and with man.

It is a (relatively) simple task to ensure that the action SERVES the spiritual liberty given man; and does not distort it. Even a human author of characters in a novel can understand something of that. At the same time, vast projects can be co-ordinated and integrated, like the history of the Jews - or even the moral and teaching path, say , from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima.. and Nagasaki.

As to that - to put it in Biblical terms :
Sow the wind, and reap... the whirlwind.
 

5. The Freedom of the Predestinator Himself

Paul Davies shows the tenor of his own theories in this sphere, to be analogical to the creation, not to the Creator: and their tenure is hence as dismissible as any other misconstruction at this infinite level. Something blinks (except that it has no eyes) and the universe is there - a case of much ado about nothing!

Then the 'something' (that really did make quite a blink, and really was 'quite something'), is to be fixed, indeed incorporated in, with and by its universe. "If," he asks, "God is really a necessary and immutable being, how can he have free choice?" (p.40, in Paul Davies' The Mind of God).

This query illustrates a systematic confusion of the highest order. The necessity for a Being of minimal powers is, as shown in Ch. 1 of SMR, complete. That the logical necessity that this Operator-Creator should exist, be forced to coalesce with the concept that His powers of choice are in turn subject to something else, not Himself, has already been examined (cf. esp. pp. 23-36, 88-100 op.cit - see also SMR Index, on Freedom). Were this so, as we have shown, this 'god' would be a mere component of a total derivable from the actual Creator-Operator who is not a monistic movement, but necessarily the unconstrained and self-existent Author, authority, contriver.

If He WERE contrived, this god, constrained, then He would merely figure as one more item which requires a cause, so that we proceed by necessity then to its Creator, as with everything else. When a necessity is shown that such an entity should be, there is no point in making the simple confusion of imagining that what leaves no doubt of its existence must be without freedom. That is a howler amongst howlers. Indeed often it is freedom which itself leaves no doubt of the existence of the agent! In fact, in accord with this, in the work noted (loc. cit. et al), it is shown that FREEDOM is precisely what is necessarily present!
 

6. The Predestinator is necessarily free.

If this Being is not contrived, by nature of the case as reasoned, then BY necessity, logically inevitable, He is free. That, now, it is about as far from being subject TO necessity, as is the deducible wealth of some billionaire (shown necessarily to be such) subject for that reason to some necessary uses, let alone those of the journalist who 'discovered' them.

What then are the systematic options to posit here ?

If contrived, not He; if He, then limitlessly and abundantly free to be whatever He is, at the option of none, at the constraint of none, and at the requirement of no component, system or systematiser. Eternal existence has no logical problems, and is shown to be necessary; it is developing all these wonderful things from nothing that has the problems arise! ... It is not an entirely uncommon feature of the human mind so to despise, to devise impossibilities and to ponder appreciatively the results; and even in some spats, it might appear that the thing, the furore has come from nothing likewise: but the fact is not so! It has requirements of its own.

In short:

Necessity for something or someone, and necessity of or in that being, these are two totally different things, a form of confusion of the most elemental kind.

Demonstrability of power, functional minima and logically coherent underivability, which relate to the Supreme Being, so far from precluding freedom, in fact demand it. What nothing constrains, is constrained by nothing.

That is the REAL 'nothing', that unfortunately Davies appears to confuse with the Creator - a mistake of some magnitude, and more profound than Einstein's famous error (SMR, pp.39, 422D - noted by Robert Jastrow of NASA), when he divided by nothing, an unwitting excursion in meaninglessness. Davies, however, would multiply by nothing, achieve multiplication by its means, with yet nothing to multiply, and so create a universe.

Many - but by no means all - of the physicists, in their unconscious idolatry, their truncation of actuality to a field of specialised attention, of limited capacity and interfaces with the psychic and personal realities, in their (ideational) burial of God in His creation (cf. SMR pp. 421-422F), resemble something in literature. It is like a literary critic prone to insist that Robert Browning the man, is PART of some particular poem, failing to see at all that he was its creator.

In a way similar to this, they invent a debased 'god' who isn't there. Then loudly do some of them complain about the monstrous problem confronting god in predestination, or indeed, in anything. What is not there has indeed a large problem in doing anything at all; but then that is Davies own personal problem created by virtue of his own thought.

It should of course be noted that leavens such as these, while common and contagious to a point, are by no means universal, even in the seductive-seeming mini-culture developed 'in the trade'. Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Kepler, Whiston, Herschel, Dalton, Joule, Dana, Gosse, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, Fleming, Von Braun are examples combining the uttermost distinction with godly testimony in this field.

It would indeed, to revert to our point, have been difficult for poet Robert Browning to have created another poem, if he had been dismembered and degraded to the status of a part of one of his creatively conceived pieces of verbal magnificence. Indeed, in THAT case, he could not even have created THAT poem! We should have had to have done without the creation altogether.

A poet in a poem, constrained, controlled or contained within it, suffers a certain indisposition not conducive to further such creativity. Mercifully, this is not the way of things. Creativity is not really like this; it is not a monistic methodology at which we there look.
 

7. The Strident Cacophony and the Bow of the Musician

Inter-face-free reductionism, reductionism without rationality, is never a hallowed proceeding, any more than it is a logical possibility. We must return to reality with a bounce, better than trying to exhort from our 'progressive' universe the tortured confession that its substance, laws, progressiveness and powers have no creator but rather happened to stumble in no time, from no place, and for no reason. 'NOTHING' LACKS SUCH POWERS TO TORTURE.

But this concentration on one phase, what is it like ? It is like a lover who has imagined that the skin-continuum of the girl he loves is her personality: he can then never 'see' how she can do what she does, or be what her words suggest. (In fact, blindness to the realities of personality can account for wrecked marriages with much facility.)

This part of the problem, in short, is this: When a particular tradesman puts his/her CHOSEN phase of creation, that in which he loves himself to roam, in the place of the rest of creation, yes, indeed, into the place of the Creator of the entirety: then he can account for nothing. Endless ramifying theories are directed at a maze of the misunderstood, in constant disrepair; and at times, as is paralleled in manic-depression, there are moments of 'glorying', while it is merely at nothing or at some reflection in an abyss; or of abnegation.

'Unyielding despair' as with Bertrand Russell, or a quixotic self-contradiction, a pregnant nullity, as with Paul Davies, may be the philosophic fruits of this miasmic voyaging: in fact, they are the testimony of the simplistic-reductionism that parodies the truth. Just as in geometry, impossible options may be pursued amongst others, just to prove them so, leaving thereby the true answer as that one alone, which is left (technically called reductio ad absurdum - reduction to absurdity): so in this case. However here the absurdity is prized!

Biblically this is accounted for (Ephesians 4:18-19) NOT in any fault in talent. Nor need there be conscious vagrancy: it is a quality of life shared by all who look where God is not, lost to what is systematic and sure, disoriented and dispossessed.

This disorientation and dysfunction surfaces in the environs of life, wherever this comes to be, in the ways which appeal with elaborate inadequacy, as if it were an apt medium to relate to that setting. There is in all this, an overall genus likeness in the thing, wherever it surfaces. Philosophy is full of it, and its export trade is currently strong in physics, as also of course, in biology.

In fact, however, it is not only that the canvas is far greater than the cut-down versions which endlessly brutalise the realities of creation in the interests of homogeneity passions which find no ally in actuality. Beyond all that, the point is that the painter is not part of it at all. He can indeed perform a self-portrait in oils (as when Christ came and displayed the Father in His own person in the flesh), without oils being apart of His actual form and being. It is Himself who chooses an apt medium: and HE who is in fidelity presented.

There are many 'continua', and One who has power to make as many more. Pierced and penetrated by His mind, the discontinua with the continua have an awning beyond themselves. First, there is the spirit given to man, that surveys by licence and with created powers, by virtue of which he (sanely, because it is there) esteems the truth; then there is the Creator of those created powers who knows them, as indeed He knows the rest of His many created milieus, with direct spiritual insight of which our artists' visions are merely a limited and earthy parallel. Sublime as may be their inventions, sublimity itself has made their powers both so to act and to envisage.

The 'painter', in this depiction, predestines and interprets, and knows it all at any and every level, being bound by none, and limited by nothing. Predestination is merely a function of His greatness, a deployment of His presence, which those who deny it will never, in their current format, understand. As in any discipline, their inability-parody merely exposes their ignorance of that with which they deal. As to God, He is not far from any one of us, but man can distance himself greatly. God however is not ignorant of them... nor will He be (Acts 17:22-31).

In this magnificence of power, wisdom, understanding and judgment: God has acted, knowing and foreknowing. The curse on earth that followed sin as a sound boom follows the supersonic speed made by an aircraft ... what is this ? It is a glance of the divine eyes, the swift and deft darkening of the picture before the painter's hands, addressed in change of mode, on his easel.

It is rather like a strident cacophony flowing from the brow of a musician who, moments before, had poured out the sweet tones of innocent purity. When the musician makes his sweet music, to the uninitiated in the marvel of creation AND of music - the thought that so different a composition could come from the one composer, might have seemed outrageous. Impossible! the ignorant might have said.

However, it is the very power of the musician who can make the sweet music, by which, lashed into controlled passion, he can equally well produce a sudden change. The scope of the first may signify the transformation of the second.

The curse changed the scenario, the scene, whilst preserving the unity of the overall composition.

Equally as revelation exhibits (SMR Chs. 1, 7), the heart of the Creator is love. Neither sin nor death is passed by as if inconsequential; but through both, an anthem of disciplined expression comes to man. For this, His special creation, God made demanding provision of Himself; and this, THROUGH the very turmoil of these evils, which misused liberty before the God of justice, has God produced.

The symphony of history has this as a repeated theme, a rondo, with no variation of essential content in this, but almost endless variation of presentation. The chosen aptitude of intervention for His purposes, moves lightly and aptly with His intention to that end, and is announced over thousands of years in many preliminaries in word and deed (SMR Chs. 8- 9, cf. Barbs, Arrows and Balms Ch. 17, and News 87).

Having made man to be capable of fellowship with Himself, God even created a way to express His very self as one of them. Free of sin, but capable vicariously of bearing the curse which justice required, this man is Jesus Christ.

I say 'is', since as has been shown in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, the resurrection of the body so provided, that of Jesus Christ, is the rationally unanswerable reality. (See Index 'resurrection'.) As to this, the performance was very costly for the Creator: He delights in His word, His living and eternal Word, who became flesh.

That delight is an index to the love with which He was sent. Equally, the love of Him who was sent saying, He who has seen Me has seen the Father (John 14:9), is a definitive expression of the love with which God composed predestination. (See The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Appendix B.)

The love is ample *2, impervious to imposition, without regard to cost, chaste, but also efficacious. That power and wonder is the expression of what keeps the Christian till the symphony is past, and the musician confers direct with His friends.

Not only indeed is God who loves, free, but He knows how to confer freedom on men, even when pathological torment atrophies its use, and to predestinate with total security the course of His freedom in accord with it (I John 4:4-10).

Overcome by nothing and securing the simple grandeur and the grand simplicity He desires, though many provisions, historical, material, moral, ethical, personal (Proverbs 8:22-31 in its vast context, like Romans 12:34-36, expresses it sublimely): He 'works all things after the counsel of His own will' (as Ephesians 1:11 indeed attests).

WHAT that which He desires is revealed to be is yet more wonderful - John 3:16, Romans 5:1-11, I John 1,3 expressing
that depth with a simplicity becoming to its profundity. Christ has quintessentialised in His own Person the mind of God, having expressed it in word, deed and with power. The protoplasmic format prepared from the first for man, served in the end for his redemption through the living and eternal word of God sent on His fearful, wonderful and age-encompassing mission to mankind.
 
 

END-NOTES *1, *2

*1-*2 ... Of predestination as the work of the Almighty, this must be said.

Quite simply, necessity bound by God is not necessity bound on God. He establishes what He will, just as He is what He will be and in His Being is always the same. (Cf. SMR pp.30-35, and A Question of Gifts, Section VII, on the All-Sufficiency of God; also 'Aseity', in Index, SMR. Both are available in print, and both on the Web at the address noted above.)

What He seeks with His own restraint, He gains - and since He seeks the lost, He knows who are His, the prayers, hopes, indeed what He would engender and how, in the circumspection of His love. (Cf. Colossians 1:19-23, II Corinthians 5:14-21.)

What He resolves is deep, very deep, it omits nothing. His understanding is indeed infinite. (Cf. Psalm 145:3.)

Predestination ensures the result, and as a means of the One who came to seek and to save that which was lost, not that the world might be condemned in this mission of mercy, but that it might be saved: it is the friend, this predestination, the friend of man, the gain of the human race, the wonder of the wisdom of God.

If in the hardness of unrepentant heart, most turn from Him ... even from Him who, in love unspeakable, made of Himself a sacrifice for salvation open to all (I John 2:1-3), but equally covering just and justly His own (Romans 8:32, I John 1:17) -... so be it.

This does nothing to alter the saving grace before the face of the Almighty, whose heart is attested by His action. As to His mind, look around you. If YOU created that, one might say, it would attest yours! Teachers, if your student did that, there see the consummate and appallingly magnificent ability at the least! To create indeed the creative power of a prodigy, what infinitude is available in the Creator of all !

As Job put it to his critical friends: 'Whose spirit came from you!' (26:4). The creation of spirit is a prodigious enterprise, of the most fascinating, the most intriguing, the most spectacular, intimate and yet brilliant, a wonder for ever.

Nor, while we look at this point, should judgment be confused with creation. The sin on this earth is appalling, truly appalling. That the earth stands at all, is fair in its beauty still, at all, is astounding. That its spiritual cyclotron continues to spit out particles of pollutants from activated personalities, and yet the love, the grace of God in the resurrected and soon attested to return face of Jesus Christ, continues with the offer of and in the Gospel: this is what... ?

It is part of the magnificence of that Rock, the Lord Jesus Christ, of the glory of God, who truly IS glorious. It attests the supremacy of His power and of His patience.


 

E. THE ANTICS OF DATING

(Updated, September 1999, August 2000.

Updated in Divine Agenda Ch. 1, and Ch. 7

Updated further in *4 below, August 2001,

and slightly in September 2002, August 2003 and September 2007; again in February 2008.)

 

See also

Answers to Questions 5: pp. 112ff., 116ff., and for further material, with

Calibrating Myths, Machining Minds and Keeping Faith Ch. 1,  and

His Time is Near Ch. 9, incl. *1  (2003) and
Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 9 (2004)

The Defining Drama Ch. 3 with

Dayspring

 

See SMR pp. 234-251
 

See further in Answers to Questions,  Appendix, in some detail.

 

 

When did it start? How long ago? When did WHAT start? The world? Its Maker? Matter? Form for energy? Energy for form? It appears a little unusual to be clear on such questions, prejudice being often preferred. However to ask such vague questions is no way to get precise answers.

If FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE, and indeed, as shown in Vol.1 of the Shadow of a Mighty Rock, from a rational perspective, we ask: WHEN DID GOD BEGIN? The answer is: He did not do so. If we ask, How and why did matter begin? The answer is: He made it in a chosen creation in accord with His power and chosen design criteria. If the question be, WHEN did he make it? Then at least we know our parameters.

This preliminary may seem irrelevant to the question, When did IT begin? But it is far from it.

IF you assume uniformitarian ways of going from nothing (also irrational ways, for to go from ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is simply a contradiction in terms), then clearly it will be a different sort of thing from the case of starting (rationally) from something ADEQUATE to produce what you have in mind, to that thing, here matter. Start with nothing, and, if you will forgive the humour, it will take rather a long time. Start with ALMIGHTY GOD and the situation is potentially the EXACT reverse.

Instead (by definition ) of having NO power, you have ALL power. The difference between hand-digging and a steam-shovel is nothing compared with that! And even THAT makes a difference. Ask any manual labourer, and you will find even that difference is profound. It DOES affect quite startlingly the time to elapse for the completion of digging whether you use your hands or a steam-shovel. If you want to make a hole, an atomic bomb is even faster. If God acts, there is no limit.

However maybe the question is not going to be one that involves a self-contradiction at once. Perhaps the question is, How long ago did whatever came before matter act so that matter arose? THAT is a nice question: Could we then clarify? WHAT came before matter, to which you so numerically wish one to refer?

Let us then deal with what we know and acknowledge frankly that depending on the power, intelligence and will that preceded the universe's institution, so are the time parameters for that institution. It is quite useless to say, SINCE you are wrong, how long did it take to found the universe on OUR terms? That would be like asking a Puritan how long it would before he got AIDS from proscribed sexual activity, only much worse. IF, in short, you assume a gradualistic, uniformitarian action on whatever-it-was to make whatever-came next, then you could deal with the entities you imagine and work it all out on the basis of all your varied assumptions. It would be no more or less useful than any other novel.

To be scientific however is quite a another matter. It is not that we despise art forms, it is just that we need to know what genre we have in mind.
 

ASSUMING WHAT YOU HAVE TO PROVE MAKES IT EASY

Scientifically, a number of questions relate. Answer them all and you could better answer the first one. COSMOLOGICALLY (*1) the views are diverse, the assumptions monumental and certainties dissipate like morning mist. MODELS can be made with various presuppositions, but these are as sure as the assumptions.
Science by assumption does not prove anything.

Let us merely illustrate. Suppose a series of steps were to occur which would slowly allow some system which had all it took to develop ( that is, aptly and adequately fitted with all the programming etc. required) into something more sophisticated: why then, apart from the oddity of the assumption which is founded on exactly nothing in the way of evidence, it would take just as long as your imaginary parameters for the proto-system which you imagine would require. Another novel.

IF, to take another case, GOD created (as we assert is logically certain), then the time taken, and the methods employed would clearly be ABLE to differ monumentally, infinitely, from the gradualistic, processive, uniformitarian. Thus, to take a minute but parallel case, if I create a story, the TIME depends, not on the rate at which the paper on which it is written deteriorates OR ANY SUCH THING, but on my power and means, and their relationship.

Take light for example: if GOD were creating the universe, then the very concept that the speed of light in its initial and developmental phases (if any) would have to obey what was at length instituted for it, would be simply to ignore the nature of creation, and to ASSUME (wholly illogically and implausibly) that INSTITUTION of light, and events correlative, is IDENTICAL to MAINTENANCE or PROCESSION in light, AFTER it is created. The STORY I write comes in ways of its own: they are not nothing. It is not that they lack form and reality; it is just that the very nature of creation is a different form and application of energy and intelligence, from the maintenance of what one creates.

It is of course true that Dr. Russell Humphreys has written some most interesting material, applying the GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY to the sphere of APPARENT time now, relative to creation. He is a mathematician and a research physicist of long standing, and this is rather intriguing. On the assumptions he makes, and the application of the noted theory of Einstein, he comes up with a date for the earth in the area of thousands of years, and the physically discernible possibility of a speed for light vastly in excess of the current rate: because of the MODE of creation which he has in mind. Past all that, however, there is the question of creation as such, getting way past the quite different question of what means like those we see, MIGHT have been employed.

Enough! The cosmological assumptions are all-important in seeking the time answer, for the institution of the universe. Without these, we know NOTHING. That is my own opinion of the date of the institution of