Education on the Rampage 2

II. IGNORED PRESENTATIONS

Concern re: The infamous - Circular to Principals,
South Australian Ed. Dept. Jan. 5, 1988, cf. pp. 188-242 supra.

This mischaracterises religion as well as creation, and sanctions monopolistic powers preventing free, rational discussion in science or elsewhere
in the government school system, even model presentation and scientific objectivity
in dealing with organic evolution, which sits enthroned by the will of Caesar.
Slight revision or addition may be made relative to the originals. No reasoned ground for rejection has been given, merely appeal to authority - in the end, their own.

It should be emphasised that never has any rational ground for this ignoring of challenge to the unfair and irrational government sanctioned practice been given, over ten years, merely the desire and reference to what this or that body thinks in RESULT: NEVER the thought itself.

It continues to have its schools pour out propaganda, DESPITE the necessary ground for preferring creation in science to organic evolution; it continues to prevent rational discussion of the issue in science. Liberty is replaced with pabulum, pre-chewed to the specifications of the stomach of the Party.

This is doubtless a result of at last two causes: there IS no rational answer as shown repeatedly in this site; and secondly, there is no excuse.

Meanwhile, the government school scene is in this, a disaster area, appearing rather like the country area in S.A. where in 1999 there has been the location of a factory, pouring out fumes around 300 m. from a SCHOOL.

Result claimed: windows of nearby houses shut, children with constricted throats, reduced freedom to breathe, large absentee rate from sickness. THAT is merely from a polluting source 300 m. away.

BUT THIS, it is from a pollutant source WITHIN THE ACTUAL SCHOOL, per courtesy of this politically accepted folly that uses authority instead of reason, even in science. If it were otherwise, one would have been glad to have debate accepted, discussion extended. Alas, the only answer to reason so far, in a decade, has been this: I cannot reason with you. The ground given for this statement from one who became Minister of Education ? : He lacked enough knowledge!

So it goes, and so the children go. THIS is oppression and sadness, seizing up thought for cultural convention. Moreover, what other State has the gall, effrontery and folly to define religion in order to define creation out of the school scene, with a definition gratuitous, gullible, academically not covering all cases, unsustained and unsustainable, bursting into philosophy like a novice, declaring for this also, the sovereign will of this extraordinary government.

THIS is invasion of the State's human resources.

When one reads from Psalm 144:11-15 of the blessedness of the godly nation - on the daughters grace on the sons straight growth in godliness, on the people the grace of the Lord, one realises the more sharply how great the grief, the sabotage when even FREEDOM is imperilled, liberty is lassoed, corralled, sequestrated by the State. Although the establishment theories of organic evolution so sedulously and seditiously taught in their monopolistic grandeur, are myths, alas, their results are no myth... in the hearts of the young, built by God and bruised by man.

Now let us ponder the first presentation selected, from those given to Government in this State, as a ground for change of the academic duress to academic liberty.

1. THE CULTURAL DOMINION OF THE STATE
. .

A REPORT ON THE PROGRESS AND CONCERNS OF A PETITION FROM HUNDREDS OF PROTESTANTS: The Ministers or Pastors of various churches have participated. Two Premiers have been challenged, the current one by several Church leaders, including the aboriginal President of an Australia-wide denomination. Like the writer, that Pastor had no desire for Western dream-time injections into young aboriginal people, in the form of the metaphysical abstraction of organic evolution.

Interestingly, he provided a fascinating document from the history of New South Wales, in which appeared a published account of extensive observations on the beliefs of aborigines at that time (last century) as recorded by eyewitnesses. Much of it involved a clear belief in creation in the rather early days ^*1of N.S.W. settlement.

Alas, the State's intrusive crusade for its preferred philosophy, and indeed, in no small measure as we have shown, its own metaphysics of religion, despite its numerous antinomies in logic, and rebuffs in observation, shows little restraint. The State bull crashes where it will, and shows here little regard for niceties, but especially that pleasantness known as freedom.

In an article in The Advertiser, which came when the Government was being actively confronted on this area, Simon Davies questioned whether Australia might not be in the very vanguard of the world in one respect: a certain desolation of privacy, the limitation of freedom relative to State control. Here it is not guns, not tanks, but information and surveillance that concerns him.

There are other Caesars who specialise in that.

There is however one area that he did not mention: that of religion. Recently, hundreds of people, some of them Ministers, presented their protest to the Premier concerning the notorious Circular to Principals of the Education Department, run out in 1988. They protested the misuse of the powers of education, administered by this State, to forward unscientific and religiously intrusive doctrine in Schools, even to the point of formal counsel to Principals, coming from 'higher authority'.

This protest is that this 'Circular to Principals' prevents due answer in schools to certain propaganda presented to children in Science Classes, and excludes free, rational debate in other Classes.

The field is the evidence of creation, versus the 'faith' (as eminent Professor Karl Popper quite evidently regarded it) of the laws of evolution. The fact is that the exclusion of proper, logical debate and fairminded evidential review in the face of the considerable variety of approaches represents an assault on democracy, on the free rein for ideas and the facility for what stands logically, to do this openly.

It has something of the assault impact formerly associated with Russian indoctrination; and as we will see later, the activities of a distinguished Russian scientist, earlier enabled to visit Adelaide, led to a startling reflection in this area.

The Petitioners have this to say:

WE REQUEST THAT THE CIRCULAR BE WITHDRAWN. IT IS AN OFFENCE TO OUR RELIGION, TO THE USE OF REASON AND TO OUR LIBERTY, AS WELL AS A MISUSE OF AUTHORITY. IT MISCHARACTERISES BOTH THE BIBLE AND THE STATUS OF THE VARIED EVOLUTIONARY THEORIES. BY THIS MEANS, IT TAKES SIDES IN AN AREA OF FREQUENT INTERNATIONAL DEBATE AT TERTIARY LEVEL, AND TENDS TO SLANT STUDENT MINDS PRIOR TO THAT TIME. IT DOES NOT RENDER REASON, WHICH IS ONE THING: IT MERELY 'TAKES A POSITION' AND ISSUES A DEMAND.

THIS IS INTOLERABLE IN OUR SOCIETY, A MISUSE OF TAX MONEY AND OF THE LIBERTY OF TEACHERS, INCLUDING PRINCIPALS: A SUPPRESSION OF THAT OF STUDENTS.

NO ADDITIONS WILL REMOVE THE STATEMENTS MADE WHICH, WE BELIEVE, MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO STAND. WE WISH THE REMOVAL OF THIS CIRCULAR ALSO, LEST ITS AUTHORITARIAN INTRUSION BECOME AN EXAMPLE OF THINGS TO COME...

Merely one of many elements of the presumption in this doctrinaire Circular comes by comparing its tone with that of the famous Symposium of the Wistar Institute, relating to mathematical and biological sciences. At this meeting, outstanding world scientists, evolutionists, acknowledged that the theories of evolution they considered simply did not have a working means of formulation, a way to be put which would bridge the gap between rational thought and theory entertained ^*2. Honesty constrained them to admit this. An account of the debate is to be found in the Adelaide University Library. (See Moorhead and Kaplan, in Bibliography, SMR.)

We do not object to a proper review of the evolution of evolutionary theory at a suitable level in schools: it would be refreshing and an eyeopener to the history of desperation in thought and it has very humorous aspects like that of Professor Nilsson in his vast tome of thousands of pages on evolution.

After a lifetime at it, heartily sick of trying to pretend that what was taught was what the evidence provided, he ended with the view that orchids arrived... all at once. It is marvellous how like creationists the more realistic evolutionists can sound, when desperate Evidence confronts them. The deficiencies were excellently reviewed by the learned Professor Thompson in his introduction to the Everyman's edition of ORIGIN OF SPECIES, at its centenary. If he was ruthless with Darwin's brainstorm, at least he was factual and realistic. It lay, as increasingly it is seen to do when factually and conceptually regarded, at the hand of scholar after scholar, in abysmal ruins.

No, the fact is that informed historical review of the writhings and twistings of this unhappy theory would be in order, if the matter is to be treated in government schools at all. It is not to this we would object ; but to what appears the dictatorial intrusion into rational debate, prejudging by a mere wave of the educational hand: it is this which is our concern. No nation is wise that lets culture rule, no democracy which lets its name become a shroud, while a corpse lies within. Error must be exposed, the better to fall; and truth has no fear from freedom.

By this method of the Circular, education is cheapened, appearing very hard to distinguish from oily propaganda; and those of us who have lived long enough to retain memories of the reek of dictatorship which was so evident in Germany in World War II, do not savour this.

This challenge to the government's abuse of power, in so controlling this area, is multi-denominational; nor is it limited to the Petitioners. Certainly we conceive the Bible, being truth, has no trouble standing by its claim that all things in their 'kinds' were created. It is indeed frequently stated: for example in Colossians 1, in Ephesians 3:10, throughout Isaiah, in Revelation 4:11, while Matthew 19 finds Christ applying Moses' teaching here to a topic in view.

Accordingly we note with no surprise the evidential fact that there appears a SUDDEN AND MASSIVE advent of many kinds of varied life, swarming and highly differentiated and developed, in the socalled CAMBRIAN AGE. This however is the very one supposed, as a representative layer, to be near... to the beginning...

Famed scientist, Stephen Jay Gould has quite recently published a book, WONDERFUL LIFE: THE BURGESS SHALE, in which he stands in awe at the very prodigy of life found in this supposed first, or near to first step in earthly life; indeed, he alleges that though it is well known, the earlier examination of these deposits (the ones he investigates personally are in Canada) has involved an element of slanting, doing less than justice to the sheer wonder of what he finds the evidence on the field to be.

(For further on this, see Ch.1 above, Lectures on Creation, Section 2, The Crux of Things:
Point 7.)

This is scarcely verification of the GRADUALISTIC ideas; and with the famed Professor Hoyle of Cambridge vehemently criticising the mathematics of gradual evolution, one is scarcely impressed with what amounts to 'creation on the spot' evolutionists still without God !

People like Agassiz, Cuvier, Nilsson, Goldschmidt, with Drs Morris and Gish and Professors Slusher and Wilder Smith, have in effect long provided a witness or a warning, as have - dealing this way or that - Professors Eden (cf.SMR pp.136ff., 156ff., dealing with elemental, ineluctable, factual realities in language), Weisskopf and Schützenberger. It is one that conflicts with the inflated claims of covert religionists who intrude their philosophies, their views with an arbitrary authority that is void, into the field of science. This might not be quite so terrible if only they noted, or were at least aware of the switch to a spurious 'religious' button, a sort of existential leap without logic. This is as nonscientific as it is nonscriptural.

Unfortunately, in the Circular here, the authority which seems to push Principals towards this style of thing constitutes, if analysed, a sort of partial religious establishment. It would be quite easy to distil out of the Circular a series of assumptions, and to make a CREED of it and this, in a 'free' country! No, this establishment of thought needs very quickly to be removed.

That such religious bents should be so indulged with such educational adventurism, as the Circular appears to provide, and be so propagandised with such monopoly on teachers, is objectively reminiscent of Hitler youth days, and reminds one of Mao. In Germany, equally disastrous theories
were put forward (the studies in eugenics, how to make the best, mot 'evolved' race, on behalf of the 'superior' race, were no mere chatter), as has also been the case in Russia. Darwinian intoxication, harmful to the brain, is not limited to theoreticians; nor are theoreticians limited to harmless ones, in terms of physical action.

Now however, to an amazing extent, the Bible is received back with no little acclaim in Russia. While the Chief Executive has shown a face far from Communism in the matter of his own religious beliefs, the phenomenon of a Russian parliament of deputies stopping proceedings in order to claim Bibles in the foyer is remarkable reading.

A noted Russian scientist, Dr Dmitri Kouznetsov visited Australia in 1991 and on September 6 addressed a meeting at Adelaide University. His cry was for freedom, openness in education, not indoctrination in the proclivities of a State or other philosophy. Science should have the dignity of freedom, not the drabness of direction. After all, one might add, this gives undue and perilous scope for politicians, many of whom blatantly and patently, but some covertly, tend towards absolutism, paternal or tyrannical. They may thus program things for their pet philosophies, philosophers - as Lysenko illustrates with Stalin; and throw weight behind the views of cliques or coteries, political, scientific or manipulative.

In all this, freedom has great possibilities for therapeutic merit.

Dr Koutnetsov himself had been converted to creationism by the evidence before becoming a Christian. As winner of the prestigious Lenin Science Award, and holder while in his thirties, of 3 earned bio-science doctorates, he symbolised what he declared. And that, to our point? It was not only the conviction that the Creation Model far better fitted the facts, without twisting, torture or torment, but that there was more freedom with the scientific treatment of the concept of creation in Russia than is the case in the U.S..

That freedom of ideas should take plant again in Russia better than in our vaunted soil - and not unsoundly at that, for in two world wars much blood has been shed for it - is an expression of the notorious decline in our land, in so much like the U.S.. It is to he hoped that the Australian trend towards independence will not so readily be thwarted as in our present CULTURAL DOMINION OF THE STATE, biting at the heels of the people of this land, like a dog with rabies.

It is to be noted that our State, S.A., has not only put a half-nelson on the children with its distasteful and arrogant force rather than education in this matter, it has also mischaracterised the Bible in its crass generalisations on the topic of religion. It is one thing to defend a thesis on a field; it is quite another to act as if a pseudo-divine wisdom required neither research nor justification. THAT is where vilification begins, and freedom ends. Is this fever to infect this people? Epidemics can have ravaging consequences, and often, to prevent them, what is needed first is cleanliness, not the pollutions of intemperate thought.

This however is not all. It is not merely an unscholarly assault on religion via rash generalisation, it is an attack on academic traditions of great value, a usurpation of the freedom of debate in the field of PROVOKED controversy, to aggravate it: it is also discriminatory and a gratuitous attack on the Biblical basis, which many keep on the wholly defensible grounds not only of faith, but of reason, uniquely indicating it. Such things need freedom of access, not petty dictation by what is woefully taken to be: THE CULTURAL DOMINION OF THE STATE. In fact, it is not human culture which is the topic, but what underlies man. Those who, being informed and able, so suffer the State to arrogate such dominion, may well deserve such domination.

It is far better that these things be taken freely; conviction may be aided by liberty, and those who love scientific method may well prefer the liberty to check these things out for themselves, as Dr Kouznetsov wisely urged, without discrimination or merely authoritarian direction as to results... Perhaps when one has suffered, as millions have done for so long in Russia, from the pigheaded princelings who dominated in such power and often in such luxury for so long, one begins the better to appreciate the purpose and calling of liberty.

It is not the holding of views, but THIS METHOD of implementing them, to which we object.

In sum, then, we request the removal of this invidious DECS document, the opening of free debate (if the area is to continue at all, at this school level), and the use of appropriate terms in teaching regarding scientific method and the theoretical standing of this theory.

We seek a position where students may freely reason and debate rationally, maintain positions, if they so desire, and this not without reasonable encouragement, and be free amongst well supplied evidence of all types: being unrewarded for mere conformity, and not presented with examinations based in their very structure, on mere presupposition. This we conceive to be or readily to become... demeaning, devitalising and immoral.

We seek the end of this undiscriminating discrimination, and of the State's vile intrusion into an area in which it appears as both barren and arrogant, as if being elected conferred on its rulers, untempered wisdom, serene knowledge and the end of human affairs in law, rule and dogma. Does it not even occur to such rulers that it is for them to open doors to rational endeavour, rather than announce what lies behind them; and provided presentation be not personally vicious, directed to the hurt of people as its aim, but intended well and defended ably, there is no room for State deification, apotheosis, blending with the mind of the Almighty per se, whether in adjudicating for Him, or assaulting Him or putting Him, as done in the Circular, very definitely if bucolically, "in place".

As for the Circular, never let it be said that protest after protest has not been made, on radio, in the press, in the Education Department, now DECS, to the Opposition but more particularly to the government in power. We are not here reviewing the government's intentions: but its performance, whatever the intention. Better results than these are urgently needed.

Unless these things be soon changed, this government may soon - while claiming concern about discrimination - with full knowledge, become the greatest perpetrator of discrimination in the State.

It is hard to believe that in one High School in this State, there was felt - very possibly because of the Circular - to be no freedom for a Christian group (often attended by a sympathetic Deputy Principal) to have at LUNCH- TIME, a film on Creation... After one has read the Circular, however, the effort required is significantly reduced.

Before presenting the SUMMARY OF ISSUES, we shall consider a comparison, in this field, with the once much-vaunted French MAGINOT LINE, directed against German invasion, with the utmost confidence; one which, being so long well-received by the French, was cavalierly treated by the Germans, who ... put it to the test.

Endnotes

The article is reproduced from The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, November 4, 1882. It reported on the monthly meeting of the Royal Society of New South Wales. A paper was read entitled, "NOTES ON THE ABORIGINES OF NEW HOLLAND". It dealt with the period from 1844 of which the speaker reported this: "I had the privilege of taking some interesting notes from the blacks of this colony on the subject of their religious belief. These notes were necessarily and mainly taken from the most intelligent of those natives... No missionaries ever come to the southern district at any time, and it was not until many years later that the missionaries landed in Sydney on their way to Moreton Bay..."

He proceeds: "the notes which I took later on upon the religious belief of the whole of the aborigines of this continent are perfectly true and consistent with their own traditions." He notes that he has met with fresh confirmations in general belief in a Supreme Being in all parts of New South Wales.

Later in his paper, Mr Manning, the speaker, refers to a note in an aboriginal grammar, sent back to England by Archdeacon Gunther. It recorded the missionary's certainty that the aborigines could not have derived the beliefs he noted during his work, from white men, as they had had no communication with them. The beliefs in question included the concept of creation in that they referred to a Being who "made all things", in whom was the outcome of life. He made at the first and would judge at the last.

The point for us is simply this: that this very early report merely confirms other testimony printed more recently to the same effect. There has repeatedly been attested at least a notable belief among many aborigines, in the Creator.

It is therefore not without reason that distaste at the racial or cultural level may enter into the minds of some aborigines, when they are abused with the Circular's prejudices, imposed so cavalierly, a Western dream-time. (See Index, SMR.)

This contemporary secular missionary effort is not at all voluntary in this: that the alternative in education is far from readily obtained. It costs to diverge from the State philosophy; and doubtless it is worth it. Nevertheless, being the victim of others' dreams can be more of an imposition than imposing. It can strike differentially.

Involved are the nature of what observably happens, something to be recorded in the books of the naturalistic; and on the other hand, the nature of what for 'Nature' is claimed. These parallel lines do not meet.

Believers in creation of course on the other hand attest that it has finished happening, the act of institution of the designs in their intensity and complexity - creation. Confirmation comes in a predicted inability to find it happening, now. This is a fair, normal and rigorous test.

This is in fact what does happen: that is, such creation does not happen. Respectively, this involves anti-verification of naturalistic evolution and verification of creation. The facts unlike some of the theories, are perfectly free to do what they will. They do.

It is for this very reason that one of my children, some years ago, at that time even in a State High School was NOT taught the theory of evolution, it being a degraded and non-scientific theory. Part of the reason was this: events illustrative of it, signifying it, DO NOT HAPPEN. Since the School at that time had an enormous and interesting stress on the EMPIRICAL, showing the students WHAT HAPPENS and letting them see FOR THEMSELVES, as basic and essential to science: therefore the simple fact that as far as evolution is concerned in the laboratory, it very transparently does not happen, there was nothing to be said. In Mars, outer space, fossil series, demonstrable method, tests, power, verification: the same! They do not EVEN make life WITH intelligence and power!

It is this, in context of the NON-FREEDOM to debate the issue LOGICALLY in science (or freely anywhere without exclusivistic presuppositions in Government school time), that is doubly unbecoming for what is NEVER shown to happen. It makes the sort of discussion permitted rather like a debate in which one party has a microphone, while the other is shut in an outside toilet block. Free? Yes, within decreed confines that exclude rational interchange and mock equality as well as science

2. THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT'S MAGINOT LINE: OR
DECS AND THE CIRCULAR MESS

The French, as we now see, trusted foolishly in their massive Maginot Line, designed to keep out the Germans at the frontier. Germany simply invaded behind it and took it. The South Australian Government in its noted Circular, this abusive, intrusive Education Document, trusts foolishly in a doctrine on the one hand, concerning religion, and on the other, concerning creationevolution. No FREE AND LOGICALLY DEBATED CONTRARY THOUGHT is permissible. No intelligent interchange occurs. They KNOW. Clichés masquerade as thought. Protest and criticism alike are vainly disregarded. Education is nullified in these crucial dimensions, and the Department of Misinformation acts in peace as if at war.

However, it is not good enough to misdefine religion in general, or to mischaracterise Christianity in particular, through erratic and undisciplined generalisation, through the direction of a Government Department. We did not elect a pope, a dictator or a guide to souls. We would also prefer education which has more regard for the normal canons of logic, and provides a better force of example, both with reason in general and with scientific method in particular... and this not in name, but in demonstrable, attestable fact. It is not platitudes which we need; but practice.

It is not good enough to idealise the competing and often catastrophically contradictory current theories of evolution, to misapply scientific method, to misuse reason by defining in advance what students must believe and teachers receive or accept as parameters^*1, before they speak; or to patronise the people of God by the mere scratch of a pen or sound of a key, astir within the Education Purlieus of this State.

Quite the contrary! Facts must be presented, the realities of contrary evolutionary theories must be made apparent, their mutual criticism, the one of the other; as also where some of these theories now accept creationist premises long held. Reasons must be presented likewise, reasoned student responses should be encouraged, if we are to have education rather than a lurid mix of discrimination and indoctrination . And this ? it is by some fearful, lurid, bureaucratic mistake, masquerading as secular education. Conceivably, the whole area could be omitted; but if it is included, it must be treated openly, rationally and adequately. It should be regarded as a matter of education, befitting a Minister for Education, whatever his department should now be called. It is no service to youth to replace their minds with the preferences of his culture, subculture or person.

Examinations, including those of year 12, should not be discriminatory in their presuppositions, thus giving an unfair advantage to those who share the cultural canons adopted; a command educational establishment should be abolished. In short, liberty should continue to bat. It is far safer than being pseudoomniscient.

Children should be taught, encouraged to think, and in particular, made aware of the demanding requirements of scientific method. This area should serve as an example, not a repudiation of it!

As Dean Brown has stated, we have raised several important principles. This was his pre-election view, expressed in writing. Their importance, there stated, however has not been sufficient to induce him to receive even for a few minutes, the representatives, four of them Christian Ministers, of the hundreds who have petitioned his Government for review. Review? It was not timely, he said before embarking on over 1000 days of inaction.

Freedom is not the least of them. There have been those who, in two World Wars, thought liberty of the body worth protecting; and there are those who now consider liberty of the mind should not be prostituted for simplicity or sold for convenience.

There are even those who consider gratuitous insult ought not to be offered to the children who, with or without their parents, hold otherwise. Ostensibly at least, the United Nations in its Convention on Child Rights, to which this country has for some years been a party whatever the faults of that statement might be among them.

The acts prejudicial to information, to participation and to free and equal education, involved in this dogmatic direction to Staff and students, are notorious: and in particular, Convention Articles Numbers 12, 13, 17 and 19 appear violated.

Far more importantly to us and to those who hold with us, this shameful indoctrination not only flaps the wings of political potency against various major Church Confessions, but this prejudice given such astounding licence in the field of State education, is against the clear teachings of the Bible.

People do not HAVE to believe the Bible; but when they

assault its premises, one would at least hope that

something of at least spurious reason

would be offered to help dignify

the occasion

and the oppression which is coming into vogue,

just as it now has long been put into practice:

whatever the intention.

When however the presentation by

AUTHORITY is or purports to be a

GENERALISATION on the

VERY NATURE OF RELIGION^*2-

and this is manifestly nothing other than contrary dogma, without justification:

then this is, if anything could ever be, vilification.

Is then the Government of this State acting in some sense criminally ? Such a question is for lawyers. It is acting unprofessionally in its ostensible description of, but actual indictment of religion in general.

That such religious bents should be so indulged with such educational adventurism, and so propagandised with monopolistic exclusiveness is objectively reminiscent of the Hitler youth days, in which similar, and of course equally disastrous, views were put forward, as has also been the case in Russia. The common content of evolutionary mythology that is of a theory constructed without exacting regard to actual evidence, or discipline by it, or in disregard of it, to satisfy a yearning or desire in these cases is not accidentally related to human conduct.

That is one more reason for protest, in view of the corruptive force on morals which this unscientific mythology involves. As to the views on the Bible expressed in the Circular, a rather drab and antiquated form of theological radicalism, a relativism, as if those who teach that all is relative, somehow had access to absolute truth in order to so declare it: this is not merely illogical, but presumptuous. As a base for the behaviour of Principals and teachers, it is laughable.

It is not mirth, however, whatever its elements, which is our main concern. The misuse of authority often has a mirthful side; but equally, the results can be murky, as Macbeth found in Shakespeare's so just expression of the moral issue of overweening dictatorship. The extent and intent of it are separate questions.

The presumption of the State in characterising the Bible as is done in the Circular, and in speaking there in terms of one vein of former theological fervour, of 'meaning stories' and the rest, is in total opposition to the Biblical claims of absolute, factual truth as to what it declares to be such. As to the Bible, it denounces those who reject God's absolute verifiable, continual, unique prophetic coverage of fact (Isaiah 41,43,48 for example) and mocks the opposition for its clamorous, emptily self-confident projections.

That is fine for God to do; the Maker can contend with the miscreant creature. We merely note that this current assault on Biblical Christianity is unwarranted, unevidential, unconformed to scientific method, a breach of liberty in this State, an attack on our academic traditions, a usurpation of the freedom of debate in the field of provoked controversy, and a discriminatory and direct attack on the Biblical basis which many keep, often on stated and wholly defensible grounds not only of faith, but of reason indeed, of reason as supporting nothing else.

While such a position can be presented, published and defended (see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock*3 for example), it is not our present desire to do to the government what it is illicitly doing to the children. It is indeed to be hoped that at least some of the government is unaware of the ludicrous contradiction involved in officially ...

TALKING against discrimination -

while being perhaps this State's most gross, and certainly its most extensive violator of the same. The position is not improved by the tender age of those so treated.

We request therefore the removal of this infamous Circular by the S.A. Education Ministry, the opening of free debate (if the area is to continue for study at all), the use of appropriate terms in teaching, regarding the scientific and theoretical standing of the theory being indoctrinated so shamelessly, and this in its major and conflicting varieties; as of creation within the same stringencies of method. We seek the due teaching of scientific method along with this subject, should any of it continue, so that students may decide for themselves, without fear or favour, the current state of their thinking or beliefs, and act freely.

Maginot lines have a place for hype, hypothesis and possibly hubris; but it is better to get back to education in this case.

The opposite is here the case, while in terms of the rigours of the method, evolutionism is at an impasse so great as justly to call forth from prominent noncreationist scientists, titles such as Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, and Evolution: a Theory in Crisis; and comments such as:

"The deficiencies are real. They will never be filled... The idea of evolution rests on pure belief." (SMR citation, p.109, emphasis added, from a Scandinavian academic, author of a vast biological treatise in this area.)

"We believe that there is a considerable gap in the NeoDarwinian theory of evolution... of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology" (SMR p.129). This contribution came from a Professor Mathematics at the University of Paris at an international symposium.

Further (SMR p.309), an academic leader in this field states this: "The Darwinian myth" is deemed "the greatest deceit in the history of science", defying both "Nature" and "experimental conditions" in their provisions.

"Why", he asks of the Darwinian theory, "has it not been abandoned ?
Noting Darwin, he states "they follow Darwin's example they refuse to accept falsifying evidence." (SMR p. 252C.)

A Cambridge professor of physics attacks in depth those theories which do not reckon with the inability of "natural process" to "generate" the vast "information content of even the simplest living system". (SMR p.252A.)

Of gradualism here, a Harvard professor in life science declares, after investigations of RAW MATERIALS, that it is "literally incomprehensible" (SMR p.234). Indeed, he is as one subjected to outraged affront by such a thought. Listen to his expostulation on p. 260, Wonderful Life.
- "How could such a view of life as a single progressive chain,
  based on replacement by conquest and extending smoothly
  from the succession of organic designs through the sequence of human technologies,
  possibly accommodate anything like our modern interpretation of the Burgess fauna ?"
  
  he asseverates by his rhetorical question!

Of the same area, the noted Cambridge professor declares, "evidently nonsense of a high order". "The fossil record stubbornly fails to deliver one single bit of evidence in support of ...'phyletic gradualism' which is supposed to be a prediction of the micromutation theory" (SMR p.203).

A leader in research, FRS, showered with scientific honour, in this field, observes of this hypothesis, astonishingly bereft as it is of confirmation, validation and any normal support from the proven methods, that is here, scientific method:

"To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion" (SMR p.200).

From a Berkeley academic in biological science comes this protest

on the glib and glossy substitute of imagination for relevant evidence,

in the gradualistic organic evolutionary gyrations:

"Incessant repetition of this unproved claim, glossing lightly over the difficulties, and the assumption of an arrogant attitude towards those who are not so easily swayed by fashions in science, are considered to afford scientific proof of the doctrine" on gradualism and organic evolution. (Cf. SMR p. 252B.)

But let us revert to a very distinguished New Zealand biological academic and writer in this field:

Again we find the refrain of fact versus myth -

· "If the evolutionists were 'looking down the right road',
it was certainly not a road derived directly from the facts of nature", and

· "Can we accuse antievolutionists like Agassiz of 'looking down the wrong road' ... ?" ;

or,

· "It was again the same basic contradiction between observation which spoke for discontinuity and the idea of evolution by natural selection which demanded continuity of nature that lay at the heart of Darwin's angst in the Origin.... How could it be otherwise when they admitted as did Darwin himself that the crucial evidence in the form of connecting links was emphatically absent ?" Denton, op.cit., pp. 3545.

Indeed (op.cit. pp. 353-4):

"The concept of the continuity of nature has existed in the mind of man, never in the facts of nature. In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity has always necessitated a retreat from pure empiricism, and ... it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts..." (Italics added.)

· Further, to revert to the former Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control at Ottawa:

"Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce palaeontological evidence sufficient to prove his views but... the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different today" (SMR p.200).

Moreover, "the inference to design is purely... a posterior... based on a ruthlessly consistent application of the logic" (Denton, SMR p.116).

As to this theory providing everincreasing evidence for itself,
"nothing could be further from the truth" (Denton, op.cit. p.77),
despite "the overriding supremacy of the myth".

For theoreticians who specialise in the extrinsic visible field, it is an excessively failed case to have nothing visible to show:
this is a specialty shop without goods.
(For details of those cited see SMR at pages noted.)

"Myth", "greatest deceit", refusal to "accept falsifying evidence" -
it sounds uncommonly like a Biblical denunciation of follies such as 'Nature' worship. Those who so decry are amongst the leading scientists in their fields. If you want negatives on this concept, it is like a mass of them inside your camera, unfortunately often ... lost when protagonists of evolutionary myth, roughly open the back of the camera, so that they are not published where they ought to be.

Such is the case, however, when one simply exposes these their statements made of the situation, WHEN FACTS are in view! Myth, the fanciful attribution of powers where they do not belong, is in cold, realistic fact what is the nature of such ultra-scientific theories that fit facts the way Cinderella's sisters' feet fitted the neat last required. The very effort is grotesque.

On the other hand: the assertion that the visible is not equipped to be,
or active as author of itself,
is not merely logically, experimentally and rationally fulfilled before our eyes constantly,
as well as unrestingly attested by rational and confirmatory results in all directions.

It is quite simply what the Bible in fact asserts (Hebrews 11), as to the arrival of the created universe. It came from what had what it took; which the visible logically and observationally lacks. As to the visible universe, what it is good at, is being what it is; what it finds withheld from it, is the power to make itself into what it would be^*4 .

What observationally is found is that the visible sphere lacks the powers to do this very thing, which it does not do. No coherent exposé of such an act or any observation of it has ever occurred.

Verification is perfected for creation just as perfectly as evolution is anti-verified.

Small wonder there is such patent audacity, pertinacity and tenacity on the part of those who want to 'educate' the young into such fields without opposition, with monolithic powers of legislation replacing both thought and transparency!

It is worth emphasising that all quotations above are from biologists of advanced or eminent standing. With the exception of Dr Thompson, none is known as a creationist; and the latter was of great scientific eminence.

The demonstration that, on the other hand, creation fits scientific method uniquely is presented in detail in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, esp. Chs. 12, with a useful summary on pp. 145ff., and a relevant Extension at the end of Ch.2, in the Supplement S1-S34, in pp. 421ff., and 251ff.. The logical requirements that this doctrine of creation in turn is part of what is necessarily the communication of God Almighty, in the Bible, is also first presented in the same publication. This, it stands in the starkest contrariety as to FACTS and their scientifically correct interpretation, as a basis for thought. It is not only confirmed, verified, it stands with just that bleak indifference to illogical constructions and patently unempirical pretence, not to say pretension, which has marked the magic of meanings without mastery from the first.

Such matters merely increase what is a major contention here presented. And this? It is that in this educational field, people should be free to think, that youth should be neither oppressed nor disenfranchised; and that the government has neither authority nor ethical propriety in substituting preferred philosophy masquerading as science, any more than it has logical propriety in avoiding logical grounds in favour of clichés, as though the latter did service for thought. People must be given opportunity to test, to learn, to select, from a just curriculum in Government Schools. If this people permits the present position to continue: in a democracy, it will deserve with increasing gravity, what it gets. Indeed, it is beginning to get it already.

ENDNOTES

*1 It may be added that this cultural selfindulgence by the government of the day is not merely gratuitous, with nothing that could feasibly even pose as rationally stated grounds, mere begging of the question being deployed, chosen 'definitions' determining the issue. It is also a mockery aggravated by a failure to distinguish between vast and relevant diversities in religions, which indirectly leads to a caricature of what the Bible states concerning the actions and intentions of God. For this erratic definitionalism, there is neither excuse nor extenuation: it is unscholarly.

*2 As the abovementioned publication shows clearly; the concept that scientific method and the Bible are at some kind of variance is both prejudice and presumption.

*3 As to the relevant teaching of the Bible see The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, pp. 482498, 177199; or in this file, infra at pp. 293-338; and as to Scientific Method and its impasse with this Government's approach, see the same work, pp. 145153, 931ff., and Index. It is here relevant to note the SMR was first published in 1992, reaching the Government soon afterwards; and that the 2nd Edition, together with That Magnificent Rock were both placed on the Web, November 1996. (Update note: The Kingdom of Heaven - see Ch.1 et al. - followed in July 1997.)

*4 This is no unusual situation; it confronts us too, all the time; although we, being more creative, can affect some works within the models provided, and with the imagination, itself a work provided at another level; as is the power to defile or deface the evidence and reject its portent, at another level again. There are worlds within worlds, scenes and scenarios; there is mind, matter and spirit. Reductionism is an alternative mind style to realism.

3. THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL PAPACY

WHEN a State elects, or is visited with a government which claims absolute authority in religious matters, there is always a problem. It is one which could justly be termed that of 'political papacy". NOT religious in their essence, such a government nevertheless may aspire to direct the thought, or the understanding of people in religious spy This it may do either absolutely or in significant part. It is not a question of keeping people from murdering one another, or mugging as an objective: the State now moves on to keeping the thoughts of the people, in named situations such as education, where the Government thinks it best they should be.

WHO however gave the government the right to do this ? Force sometimes helps, but then might is not right. Propaganda may for a time subdue people: but subduing is most unlikely to be total. Many will normally protest or present a determined opposition. In our democracy, the government has acted in this way of dictatorial tyranny: but few there are who protest. It is true that hundreds of people have done so, some Ministers including the President of a denomination but percentagewise, there are few.

For a State, the condition which tends to follow is one of voluntary servitude, one step nearer to political papacy! HAVE the government by mighty works, by the presentation of religious laws which they can show they know and which operate, have they EARNED the right to do this? ASSUREDLY not! Was it granted to them? Scarcely: the issue did not even arise in the election!

Is it then a cultural norm in this country for such political domination in the field of religion? On the contrary, it is a gross departure from the Australian insistence, vigorous insistence, for which it is famed, on freedom and independence. To view religion as meaning stories, myths, legends, subsisting in a realm... other than fact, may seem a worthy thought for a government, should it wish itself to play God. Yet to issue a Circular to Principals to constrain their conduct, on such grounds, seems the work of comic impudence in some Gilbert and Sullivan opera: fiasco not service. To do so without warrant, gratuitously is, in a word, political papacy.

If then the religious ways which are forced upon the State education process IMPACT NEGATIVELY with or even contradict the religion with which the country was, if any, founded; and if they do so in crass, gross and wholly unsubstantiated ways; and IF the government will not even allow dialogue on the matters, or arrange interview, or provide closely reasoned grounds: what then! Yet if it instead aborts approach, ignores hundreds of petitioners and pursues its ways saying IT IS NOT TIMELY OR SEASONAL TO CONCERN OURSELVES WITH YOUR MATTER (in essence what has over improvident years been the case in S.A.): then politics is becoming imperious indeed. It is time for freedom-loving people to call such a Government to account. THAT time is now.

RELIGION BY POLITICAL DECLARATION THE POLITICAL BULL IN THE CHINA SHOP

To take a case, the Christian religion, in the Bible which throughout the history of the church has continued as its supreme written source book, more, its doctrinal base and security, contains references to things that have been SEEN and HEARD. These are numerous, solemn and substantial. You find this for example in John 3:11 and in Acts 4:20.

Thus both Christ directly and Peter and John state that they speak what they have seen and heard. In the latter case, this follows the account of a miraculous raising of one lame from birth, occupied in begging alms, but categorically cured, with the sermon which followed and a priestly arrest of the apostles. We speak what we have SEEN and HEARD, they say indeed, they go further. WE CANNOT BUT SPEAK THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE SEEN AND HEARD.

Here is a religion, as the very title of that book, The Acts of the Apostles indicates, dealing with FACTS, EVENTS and OPERATIONS VISIBLE AND AUDIBLE, PHYSICAL AND PRACTICAL, as well as with their SOURCE and His teaching. Nor is this all. In the case of the CENTRAL FIGURE of this religion, He is proclaimed on a CENTRAL OCCASION (Pentecost) to have been UNABLE TO BE DETAINED BY DEATH, so that His flesh did NOT ROT (Acts 2:30333).

THIS Christ, did NOT have His flesh rot (cf. Luke 24:39 "Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see Me to have").
Paul in I Corinthians 15 pronounces that a failure to receive (15:13) that what it was that was buried, was raised from the grave, is a failure to
receive Christianity at all, and constitutes an ENTIRE REJECTION of it ( I Corinthians 15:1315).

The fact that this CENTRAL FIGURE, the Lord Jesus Christ is also attested as the Son of God who was PRIOR to incarnation, in the very FORM of God, thinking it nothing to snatch, to be equal with God (cf. John 10:30, 5:1923), makes the case more than central. It is basic, inalienable, definitive. To act against this with the assault of mere political authority is to act to the uttermost against Jesus Christ (cf. Mark 8:3132, Luke 24:3740, John 20:2529). Political assassins (or wouldbe assassins) of Christianity should at least seek mandate, or cease.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE ?

In sum: The present State Government has acted against this whole area in a general way, through unscholarly, undefended and indefensible words, pushing a preferred if weird philosophic base, in the Circular to Principals, first sent out in January 5, 1988, but remorselessly continued by the present incumbents. This has divorced religion from the realm of fact as such, in statements as crass as careless. This is attested liberally in - "The Situation" pp. 193ff., above, which reviews the Circular in considerable detail.

THAT serves as excuse, in turn, for refusing to have creation dealt with at all in Science; or in FREE debate, elsewhere in Government Schools (free debate does not set up discriminatory conditions at the outset!). It directs by arbitrary definition.

As we have seen, THAT means that the Christian religion of the Bible is a priori rejected at the heart of it, and this without evidence, without argumentation to the point, and without even a willingness on the part of Government to meet with the Petitioners or even representatives of them: or to review the vilification with which they are now long involved. Even GOD is willing to "reason together" (Isaiah 1:18, I Peter 3:15) but in this, not this Government. They do not find it TIMELY, over the passing years, to do so.

For any form of ethics or responsibility, it is necessary for this Government to arise to meet this situation. It is of course necessary, should it persist in this discriminatory prejudice and coup, that it formulate the matter for its next election, so that the people may at least CHOOSE whether they want this sort of dictation rather than free learning; and that it formulate the matter for its next election season, while apologising for its presumption in so directing a section of the Australian people now.

It is necessary that this vilification and confrontation be backed by overwhelming argument, or removed; and since no argument of any such kind can be found, that the Circular be removed.
As noted, the work, THE SHADOW OF A MIGHTY ROCK has been put in the hands of those who rule, showing BY REASON the inescapable grounds for the Christian faith, a reality which no tyrant can overthrow or with reason has ever overthrown.

Of course, FORCE has often been used (never appropriate here), but has never in the end prevailed. The FORCE of this Government lies in this: using its circular Circular, to guide and counsel the Principals of Schools along the lines noted, and shown in detail in the preceding critique of the Circular. Thus children, for example, of Christian parents, and even Christian children, are remorselessly, with no small amount of the taxes of Christian parents, miseducated, with no logical warrant mistaught, subjected to disinformation, ruthlessly, imperiously, insistently. Neither is there sustained ground in the Circular nor is there liberty for students freely to confront the invasion.

That this MISDEFINITION of religion, on which the Circular is largely based, is UNSCHOLARLY, ACADEMICALLY INDEFENSIBLE and unwarranted, merely adds to the folly of this damaging action. Similarly, and further, the area of creation is likewise imperiously judged: making directive education implacable, and misleading education uneducative. It is therefore time to consider the greater selfcontrol and finesse of the Queensland Government, which required sane and realistic treatment of all the issues, not secular dogmatism (far less uninformed secular dogmatism).

Should this people want the government of the State to toy with religion, to tinker with its UNSCHOLARLY and misdefining ideas, to engage in SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION by mere decree or fiat, to pursue a socially conditioning concept of what makes the people 'one', in some delusive sense, or with a culturally conditioning concept of what satisfies a ruling clique: that much at least would be clear. But the mandate for such deeds is lacking.

Hitler was inadequately opposed: and it is not necessary to be an INDIVIDUAL to gain odious authority where it does not belong, or to act as if to play God with God, by telling Him where He belongs (somewhere in this case, without intelligible factual speech to the human race after all, Christianity is a RELIGION and the Government has ... shared with us, its concept of religion). Indeed, a GOVERNMENT as a whole can be directive in this way, quite well.

THIS Government must now withdraw from these areas of occupied territory, realise into what it has drifted (actually it kept in place, over all protest, what the preceding Government had created viz. the Circular in question), and, having apologised, preferably as a warning to others, it should revert in its Education Ministry to a more consistent use of reason and caution: indeed to education. Academic topics are not the proper domain of political direction.

It is well to use reason. Actually, that is one of the things the trilogy given to the Government (The Shadow of a Mighty Rock) shows: scientific method favours creation, and has no commendation for organic evolution. The details need not be repeated here.

WHAT WE NOW SEEK

THAT is not to say that for one moment we are seeking to ESTABLISH CHRISTIANITY as a State religion; or to have it RULE people's thoughts by political enterprise, as the Government in its Schools is now tending to do in terms of its own theological preference: one there geared to what in the field of religion, is categorically anti-Biblical.
We seek education in freedom, debate without blinders, that what is able to stand be permitted to do so, on its own merits; and that students be able to make up their minds on the basis of reality , of facts presented without prejudice: not harassed by subjective preconditions.

As you would see if you read the paper: The Education Department's Maginot Line, (as it was in 1988) or DECS Circular Mess: failure to review ALL the evidence can be fatal to many. Peremptory obstinacy, in the place of earnest enquiry with freedom, can justly terminate a nation.

But what if the children could not have a simple review of these things? (though we are assured that they could, if obscurantism were replaced by simple factuality as many of the most noted scientists are now stressing in this field; and clear instruction were given in scientific method) ... What if it be plaintively urged that young people of 16 or 17 are TOO YOUNG to look rationally at such things (a marvellous proposition!)

Why then how much more so is this the case in their younger years, with propagandising in texts well attested in this very area propagandising in texts ?

How much less should they then be indoctrinated with monopolistic fervour by secular missionaries! Yet this for many years has been the occurrence for many. Here is one of the most hateful monopolies of power and privilege ever witnessed in this nation.

If justice means nothing, perhaps pity might find a place for the oppressed young. Indeed, if the material is REALLY too hard (as the Circular would seem to propose), why then it should be omitted altogether. You cannot have it both ways. We do not need imperial political dictation. In the field of education, we prefer education rather than erratic dogmatics.

III. SUMMARY TIME RELATIVE TO
AWARENESS AND ACTION

We live, but the source of our lives is not educatively to be subject to the didactic coups of bureaucrats. Life is filled with marvels and with wonder: even at the crass biological level, we have intriguing cells of an all but ultimate expertise, running with a technical facility engineers might envy.

They resemble our most sophisticated efforts with computers and assembly lines at the microbiological level, and there we find analogy. . . except that those in the cells far surpass the endeavours of man's utmost genius.

The miniaturisation advantage over our nonliving correlative efforts, the advantage of the biological over our own technology in this aspect is, Denton observes, of the order of 100,000,000 times. For the 'problem of information storage' he notes, a "chemical solution... has, of course, been solved in living things... It is a superbly economical solution... it is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram," and indeed, "the information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet...approximately one thousand million, could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room left for all the information in every book ever written" -op.cit. p. 334.

Given unlimited time, even my book would never be imagined to have arrived from a non-code making source. Not even a fountain pen. And what shall we say even of a book?

We are too well aware of the realms of reality and the sufficiency of causation to have systematic codes equipped with comprehensible overview, enactive emissaries, copying sites, brilliant integration of numerous wholly diverse principles, supplemented, yes equipped beyond the visible interface, with originating capacities wrought within the person, apt for imaginative scopes in realms yet undreamed of, worlds within and worlds beyond worlds, and wonder if perhaps what lacks these produced them, and what is without the wherewithal to formulate them, formulated them, then executed them in a fit of absent-minded unrealism.(Cf. SMR pp.21-26, 251-252N, 315A-316G, 283-314, 348-351). This is for one book, yes and one author. The dimensions of the mind are apparent, and its non-derivability of its individuality, even with and through applied human intelligence, is a rebuff to any arrogance which some might project into science (just as others at times project it into war or into politics).

These things we see. These things we observe. The activity of life we watch.

The self-verifying crowd of the actualities of life are constantly exposed to the view. There is something however which we do not see. It is evidence to the eye, to the data-collecting hand, which in time, or without it, in principle or in process, in logic or in law, displays the inherent capacities in something some people like to call "nature", but which is really what is around us... of these things, then, to rise. To rise? Yes above what they are, to create it.

These things also we savour.

Of the verificatory situation for Darwinism, however, Denton declares: "The overriding supremacy of the myth has created a widespread illusion" - but as to the idea that "in the newer branches of genetics and molecular biology" there has come an "ever-increasing evidence for Darwinian ideas" ?

This: "Nothing could be further from the truth."

The observational base, the theoretical exposure of verificatory areas, the practical and confirmatory tests to verify, the appropriate principles, the absence of contrary principles. . . and the calm quiet assemblage of constantly confirmatory parallel facts. . . this we do not see for the fallen theory. All fails.

As Malcolm Muggeridge says, it will be regarded as the joke of the twentieth century, this obsessive devotion to evolutionary theory. A sad joke: a sad thing to see. And what Darwin was manful enough to seek to signify by a method, however inane and inoperative, now we have people trying to provide with a substitute: and it ranges from nothing to clandestine principles never discernible except in the able intellect of man, given new speed by the instant generation, principles instantly able to produce... nothing.

It is indeed as Job said, "Whose spirit came from you?" (26:4). No doubt, he cried to the seemingly all-knowing, those with words but no deeds to the point, "Wisdom will die with you." It was, and is to this day with such, less clear that it lives with them. Sheering off the young with reckless enthusiasm, they implant in them the irresistibly irrational so that another generation may be enticed into what is not there, does not go morally, spiritually, or materially; lest they should observe with their eyes, and discern with their minds and return to the Lord, and believe in their Origin and follow Him. Like lemmings, the sea is their absurd destination, in this case, the sea of writhing striving, that never ceases and never achieves; for what it gains in knowledge, it loses in philosophic tantrums, and destroys with the fantasies of pure anti-data, unreasoned waywardness. (Cf. SMR pp.422E-W; and That Magnificent Rock, Chapter 7, Section A, Mental Chiropractic, above.)

The cost in personal and social consequences, as this antiChristian survival ethic is personally or socially applied by mistaught youngsters is scarcely able to be computed. Plague may break out indeed is breaking out as many of its selfcontained little biological prisms, men, increasingly become immoral prisons. There assumptions are pouring in, and presumptions are pouring out through teaching propaganda and suppression, aggravating the already great human trend to folly. Now folly is taught, selectively! unscientifically! with the effrontery even to mention science in its company. The label should read: 'Science falsely socalled'. . .

IN SUM ...
1. The Propaganda Portrait

The problems then with this dreadful directive in SA are these.

It is defamatory of presumptuous religion, the Bible in particular: and it is so in an unscholarly and fashion.

It is suppressive of free speech: in particular, of free, rational debate where the theory is taught, as it often is from my own experience in this State, in schools in science.
It is distorting to argument, preceding its permission for talk in humanities on this point with assumptions of 'meaning statements' as distinct from rational challenge, from the Bible. Preempting the floor, it tells us the presuppositions to be in view.
It is propagandist, using repetition and repression to assist an untenable theory which would require no defence from such means, if facts spoke for it in the realm of austere and accredited scientific method, in such a way as to make it regular and creditable: they do not. The whole realm of the visible is as silent on design advance by nature, as a closed book, which as has been shown, it veritably and verifiably is.

What is observed and in rationality confirms what is written in the Bible, in point of fact, a total estrangement of this current universe from any proclivity to self-create from what it is: this we have on the one hand. Logic as shown in SMR, observation and coalescence with other laws is the harmonious spread here before us.

What is not observed, never has been observed by mankind in any recorded form, it is this: sure increase of design complexity without intelligence at work and applied to the point. This is what is in fact in conformity with organic evolution - intrinsic integral development by transmutation of what is here, over the spectrum of natural things. The laws to compose it, the observations to exhibit it, the cohesion with thought used in the process, to validate it and the avoidance of self-contradictory antinomies to render it rational: this is what it needs scientifically. This is what it lacks in each dimension.

Which theory then is chosen?

The theory chosen is the latter, presumably, one might imagine, because it is entirely contrary to demonstrable fact. It is spree day when, as it were, the bankers throw their money bags about the Bank. What is not chosen in the Circular is the long-standing creation statement which is in accord with fact.

Here then is a marvellous thing, concerning creation (more precisely biblical creation) and evolution respectively:

that what, in its model, predicts the absence of what is not in fact observable
(contemporary design advance - CDA), being verified,
is rejected in its summary as to the participation of natural things;

and that what, in its model, makes natural the presence of what is not observable,
CDA, being unverified, is accepted.

Small wonder heady clashes in evolutionism are now conspicuous (see above re Denton, Kouznetsov, Stephen Jay Gould and a collection of clangour). Failure can readily be divisive. Result: Verification void is preferred above verification accord. Loser takes all... THAT! It is science. And this, it is but one of the areas of failure in this model noted in this Chapter.

Science ? No, it is procedurally derelict, evidentially immune, non-science and astounding prejudice: rashly conceived, believed and then foisted into the realm of science in the most contradictory possible way, relative to scientific method.

It is dangerous: diverting free and rational enquiry by mere effrontery, without the semblance of rationally sufficient grounds, so that error in science may be prolonged.

It is authoritarian, determining, by a few lines, matters that scholars toil over.

It replaces science with statistics, consulting what are in fact, personal preferences of scientists in a quite standard appeal to authority, and use of the ad hominem error of logic.

It is pernicious: setting up an example of dictation from bureaucracy in place of determination by logic and scientific enquiry: it is thus unsystematic.

It is clandestine: authoritarian pronouncements are made as if assured, to the total ruin of fair play, and then the Department declined to so much as send its text book writers or teachers to confront Dr Gish ^*1when he came.If it is true, why not show it? Since it is preferred in this propagandist style, why not defend it? The Department has 'not' taken sides? Not? well, if Hitler did not take sides against the Jews, well then. . . perhaps *¹.

It is outrageous towards children, oppressed like the victims of industrial mines at tender ages in the Industrial Revolution. These children are brainwashed so nicely, so pleasantly by their dear educational community, which appears to have its its gods before it, these wet with the blood of those who too well follow their ludicrous lore: for that is as near to law as the theory goes.

S.A. is polluted heavily by this tragicomic intrusion of the State into the field of religion, dogmatically creating a creed (it is easy to propound one from the Education Department document), without logic or clear ground: a monument to intrusive religious prejudice as also to unscientific methodology - erected by the broken wall that once stood for freedom!

*1

Granted that Dr Gish is an eminently successful debater for creation on university campuses throughout the world, being granted indeed one hour television coverage in debate in the entire USSR television network when in that area. This however scarcely excuses the Education Department in South Australia for avoiding the debate, when alien material, instead of science, is forced on trussed up children, not allowed, that is to deaf with the material rationally in science.

2. The Issues ...
- 1. The fiat action of creation relative to the misuse of scientific method in this philosophic, naturalistic evolutionism - is this to be considered on merits, or peremptorily pulped, then hidden, then buried with radioactive waste? Is this to be a society of fear or of assessment and competition?
- 2. The misnaming of evolutionism as science in the educational setting not merely begs the question but disregards scientific method, which favours performance not philosophy.
- 3. The assault on the historic doctrine of creation with appeal to authority is pseudo-obsessive, safeguarded, kept in private from exposure to speakers of contrary view, indeed from free and open debate... in what are supposedly places of education.
- 4. The assault on religion in general is not diminished by caricature of some of major examples of it, worldwide, in terms both undefended and vilificatory; nor does 'good intention' equate with scholarly accuracy.
- 5. The mischaracterisation of what 'religion' is about in general terms, does not cover important cases: for at least one of these, this cardinally falsifies, without stated ground, the declarations of its scripture concerning what it is about and its relationship to reason.
- 6. Reciprocally, there is a misrepresentation of evolutionism exclusivistically as science, when it does not in fact meet scientific method, rigorously applied, at all.
- 7. Naturalistic evolutionism is a contra-observational hypothesis long seeking ground for its ideas. As such, it is cardinally misrepresented in the Circular.
- 8. The assault on freedom of speech, of thought, ideas, on the commerce of ideas is linked to subjection of ideas both in science and out of it, to 'critique' by mere authoritarian intrusion.
9. The assault on the children through this misuse of their freedom, and the adding of prima facie intellectual bullying to the other degrading evils of the presentation, remains a critical issue.
- 10. The exaction of this religious philosophy imported into science, as a cost of studying science is oppressive.
- 11. The bureaucratic abuse:
is a nearly fatal prescription in terms of the history of nations and of science.
- 12. The institution of what is in numbers of points a religion, indeed an assessment bureau for religion, without even telling the electorate, is dishonourable, quite apart from the question of the political authority with which to perform such a task.
13. The conflict remains between this authoritarian substitute for freedom, made worse by propagandising its advent as science, in terms of jarring discord with:
- a) the federal provisions of the Australian Constitution^*1, below which this vastly falls for those in this State, and
      b) the tenor of spirit in the rejected Referendum several years ago, in which Government
      power increments were searchingly rejected (i.e. before the publication date of this
      volume), in which Government power increments were searchingly rejected. .
- 14. The patronising abuse of God's name as a possible additive to the evolutionary teaching concocted, involves the moral attributes of any such god of convenience: murder, mayhem, self-interest, scheming, subtlety, guile, deception, lying and so on, as chosen media of creation.
- 15. This simply means that the god in question Biblically corresponds with the devil, with his profound passion for arrival and survival, parasitically preying on the creation (cf. SMR pp. 179ff.).
- 16. Students are thoughtfully permitted (Circular p.2, end of Section C) to conceive of a matching 'god' for this arrogantly asserted evolutionary mythical process - an imaginary 'cause' which does not articulate with the consequences in any interface, scientifically.
- 17. The double-action invented process and imagined harmonisable 'god' permitted or prescribed has also this result. It erodes freedom both for teachers and for students.
- 18. For some, moreover it means that in all conscience, in the name of freedom and truth, teaching is now morally impossible in State-governed secondary schools.
- 19. Such a result involves, categorically, an affliction of minorities and that not only through its propagandising mode and matter, but through its exclusion of people who value truth in the tongue and freedom in the power to express it, more than any approbation or commercial comfort.
- 20. Some may not realise this, but these are in fact critical issues.
  Racism is not only biological but spiritual in such a case.
·       What then do we want? For what do we ask?

It is this: the removal of this offensive, minority-afflicting, authoritarian and unscholarly document which not merely afflicts children, but assaults religion with an easy indifference of tone, while failing to provide evidence logically or even scientifically sufficient for its view, even in germ. This it does while gratuitously, mischievously, aggressively, unpeaceably and without any appearance of inhibition, in content assailing the Biblical Christian faith at the same time.

·       If this be not vilification, then that activity cannot exist. Reasoned argument is a part of the price of liberty: irrational fiats, irresponsible force, in human politics, are symptoms of tyranny.

·       We however have not elected tyrants, quasi-popes, religious directors, but people whose policies are to be honestly made clear before they are, after election, set like a boon or, on the other hand, a scalpel in the midst of the heart of the people. That a former government stated this pestiferous substitute for education, tyrannically suppressing, not expressing due and free argumentation in State Schools - and that without cogent argument at the outset: THIS does not improve things. In fact, it merely adds for this present government, the woe of unoriginality of oppression to its irksome performance of the evil. Should it retain it, then The Circular is not even its invention, only its retention.

·       Several Christian Ministers have challenged both Governments on this issue, in the hope that the second elected body would be spared repetition of the errors of the preceding Government, or at least limited in its entanglement. The major difference is that leading and relevant officials in the present government, before their election however, showed some of important issues being raised: but there was provided in neither case, any rational defence of the Circular whatsoever.

·       Subsequent to election, this Government has indulged the same irresponsive inaction as was in this matter, found in the former one. If that is an advantage, be it so. It is not one to be coveted. Meanwhile, their inherited Circular, monumentally replete, somewhat appropriately, with circular argument as shown, remains enduringly barren of rational defence.

·       (The relevance for the last two points is as in 13 b) above, for the time of publication of this volume.)

3. The Categories

1. CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

One of the major issues involves the freeing of children from the bondage, the quasi-Industrial Revolution oppression, with mental confinement in the Schools, rather than a physical one in the mines of industry. Mental? It is moral and spiritual as well. Deliverance of these youngsters from this shocking, hacking hocking of their liberty is one of the crucial issues. They must be free to learn, not from political despots, but from information made available without prejudice as (in one point at any rate) the Child Rights program would have - one to which this country is committed.

2. PROJECT FOR PARENTS

In addition, there is the deepest concern for parents. Not only are the pockets of some almost piratically attacked by the provision from the common governmental fund, of tainted education, filled with a bitter milk and a polluted pre-packaged offensive meat, made up slackly with great danger of infection: so that many must take their children to the heavy charge of private schools.
This is not by any means all. The children who are NOT so taken, may well fester in this immoral environment (see issues above), this intrusively and arbitrarily directive fraud, to the detriment of their whole lives. If children ELECT in a government school, to believe this or that, with fair presentation of what is, so be it. That is their affair; but that the government should elect ahead of them, and for them, and then intrude into the schools themselves with a vexatious, unprofessional and embracive call to arms: this is nothing to do with either democracy or with education.
To refer to it as illiberal education would be flattery. Let what can stand, stand. Let what is fallen, stay where it belongs. Let children survey the scene in government schools, without this advent of unacknowledged religion.

3. NEED FOR THE NATION*

It is undoubtedly true that righteousness exalts a nation. The greater sense of justice, the greater order, the greater and more delicate concern, the awareness of others and of their predicaments, the pursuit of workable morals from the indicated source, of spiritual vitality where it may indeed be found, indeed of God Almighty in His wonder and in His provision for the people of this world, where He is near: such things raise up a people, and have done so in several outstanding cases over history, to stupendous degrees. That none has nearly matched these standards does not alter the fact that some have come far closer, and have reaped the benefits.
This nation is, as in this current case, in catastrophic drift. It is as if all the lessons of history were irrelevant, and some educated, evolutionised, mesmerised body of people through a combination of pre-set blindness and self-approbation in the absence of their Maker and His decrees, could suddenly outwit the future, falsify the past, and live. This is where naturalism rises to the inane heights of the unnatural.
The remedy of this current affair in South Australia however should be one step in the direction which needs to become something like a role model for more. It is not enough to deliver this nation - only Jesus Christ can do that as has been shown in depth and in detail: but it would immeasurably strengthen it.

4. GLORY TO GOD

When God is given the glory due to Him, then the wonder of His presence is more accessible, the greatness of His ways is better appreciated and the beginning of what this race was made for, can be discerned. When God is given glory, it is where it belongs. When He is not, it is put where it is often so ridiculous as to become a derisive comment on the incapacity of the race to deny its birth and continue in life.

Epilogue

We now consider in somewhat more depth, some of the concepts noted in Section 1, Endnote 2 above - that is, forThe Cultural Dominion of the State.( For a broader treatment of these, see Models and Marvels, Ch.7 in That Magnificent Rock; and in SMR, Ch.2 Supplement pp.S1-S34, and pp.315A-316G, 329-332H, 348-349E and 421-422W.)

We were there pondering the concept of the Contemporary Secular Missionary Effort, and that really brings up the whole area of the Naturalistic Hypothesis, or what might here be called Philosophy Farmland.

What then is this training ground? It may be conceived of as not merely local, State-wide, which it undoubtedly is, but world-wide and in time, century wide. It has its heavily and discriminatingly endowed research facilities too.

There is however a problem with - shall we say - the orchestration of these activities. The research branch has failed in every endeavour. From 'Nature', whatever that may be, they draw, but like a dry cow, it will not give.

The real struggle for survival, literally true in this case, is survival of the fittest as a mode of creation. This has lost credit and is bankrupt in terms of intellectual discipline and scientific method. It is clung to, like a girl whose boyfriend stays infatuated with immature eyes, when she has grown up. She has no eyes for him now. It lives in a fantasy of romance, not in the life of maturity.

Alas the Nature cow has no milk. Its Martian moon that looks down on it has nothing upon it to show. Its radiation laboratories are living on an ancient scholarship grant. "Nature" is stubborn: it will not yield. "Love my Maker," it says, "or you are living in a vacuum. It is HE who has said, and I am part of what He said. You cannot make me say it. "

NEVER!

Never! Say the secular arm of the Materialist Missionary Headquarters!
We would rather die than admit it!

That, Nature echoes, is what you will surely do,
when you worship the production and ignore its Producer.

But no! The Unhallowed Headquarters send out expeditions, experts in discovery. Yet their Captain Cooks of astral and nuclear affairs, of cells and secularism seem more cooks than explorers. Nothing they find! 'Nothing!' they report. "Oh!!" says the Philosophy Farmland, we shall see about that. "Nothing' now," it says, " that is a very pregnant answer, filled with meaning!" They try; but their case is provocative of mirth. God is not mocked.

HE can laugh too!

"Let us break their bands in pieces," echo the ancient words of Psalm 2 as the nations sought to be loosed from the Lord and His anointed. Actually, it says they plot, take counsel "against the Lord and against His Messiah" (emphasis added). Peter cited that at Pentecost, relative to the murder (civil, judicial, injudicious) of Jesus Christ. The murder goes on in effigy in many, many nations.

Yet they look. They seek for the natural way to make 'Nature'! They grind. They scour - even the depths.

Snorkelling -

Seeking in the Wrong Place

Snorkelling in the depths they look for it, diving, striving, manoeuvring, twisting, writhing, conniving, aspiring, squeezing, cavorting, contorting, they declare scenarios of magic, sing operas of the imagination, coax particles, fling flares in the night. They stare, snoop, salute the hidden powers of 'Nature'.

Meanwhile she - or he - better it, remains unmoved. It yields no creation, has contributed no floor show. It remains for ever what it was before: blind, obedient, contrived, controlled, an assemblage that spends itself.

To all this massed and writhing effort, it makes no effort, for it has none to give; no satisfaction will it provide.

In the simplest terms, it does with icy stare what it was made to do, and no more responds to this ardent entreaty of naturalistic philosophers who happen to be scientists, than does a rock to a love song. It has no heart for it; for it is not - emphatically, decisively and if need be, derisively not - the creator. It is a book written, a car framed: of the making of cars, it has no knowledge. Of the writing of books it has no knowledge. None of them do.

That is the nature of creation. Outstanding it may be, and indeed is, but it does not change its response and ways any more than do the laws of logic, however much the learned may invade logic, making themselves irrational in the process. And the result of this as always - 'Nothing' which has no now been given a knighthood. (See Models and Marvels, Ch.7 in That Magnificent Rock; and in SMR, Ch.2 Supplement pp.S1-S34, and pp.315A-316G, 329-332H, 348-349E and 421-422W; and Nothing, Irrationalism and Nescient Man, in the SMR Index.)

We should proceed a little further in our Psalm - 2.

"He who sits in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall hold them in derision. Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, and distress them in His deep displeasure: Yet have I set My King on My holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the Lord has said to Me, 'You are my Son, Today I have begotten you. Ask of Me, and I will give You the nations for Your inheritance.' " (Emphasis added.)

Distress? Why yes, it is distressful when you have a (spiritual) cancer and decline the free operation offered by the Lord, to remove it. As Jesus put it, amid predictions of His coming murder and resurrection: "For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive", and "there will be... on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity" (Matthew 24:24, Luke 21:25), "... men's hearts failing them for fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth" (21:26).

But the Lord says this of this murder so re-wrought in the Blight Lights of the Gentile Spiritual Follies Show - "He who sits in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall hold them in derision."

You see the humour ? Naturally it is grim humour, when murder is involved. God's patience is the real miracle, that He holds out the Olive Branch, just as He said He would to all who will come (John 10:9). If you have not come, come! (Matthew 11:28-30). It is high time!

But as to the vain search in 'Nature' for a hand to make it, without the Head... ?

Nothing is the sonar echo. Not here! It cries.

Indeed, this eloquent silence where God is not to be found reminds one of a former epoch in history. It held a singular episode.

Elijah (I Kings 18) having upset the King of Israel considerably by his "no rain" forecast in the Lord's name, indeed given in terms of God's answer to entrenched national sin in this case, at last appears. In man's eyes perhaps the lack of rain had been as painful as the lack of man's righteousness had been in the eyes of the Lord. More, it was covenant breaking sin, for the people had freely declared whom they would serve with both Moses and Joshua, then seeking to mix God with nature in various ways, according to the symbols of the time.

It was quite like the present, which repeats without apparent blushing. The Gentiles are like the Jews in this, repeating these items of national history at the international level. Surely no flesh will glory in the presence of the Lord. Those who think the opposite should have learned this by now. Neither would Hitler win by racial superiority nor will the Jews today, and in this one must take some issue with Ben Gurion in terms of what is often elsewhere rather a magnificent book (ISRAEL, p. 846).

It is easy to see how a trend to such a view can arise in the midst of incredible seeming adverse numbers in the Middle East conflict; but the very Jewish prophets themselves are full of admonition on this point. It makes little SPIRITUAL difference in this regard whether the trend is to HARM others or to HELP oneself. The spirit of man is of crucial importance to the God of the Bible. Thus we find:

"Woe to those who trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen
because they are very strong, but who do not look to the Holy One of Israel,
nor seek the Lord!

Yet He also is wise and will bring disaster,
and will not call back His words,
but will arise against the house of evildoers,
and against the help of those who work iniquity.

Now the Egyptians are men, and not God;
and their horses are flesh, and not spirit.

When the Lord stretches out His hand,
both he who helps will fall, and he who is helped will fall down;
they all will perish together."

Whatever one's theology may be, if one is trusting in any kind of superiority (as distinct from crafting one's best not as any ground of victory but as a case of simple duty), it is not compatible with trusting in the saving power of God. Indeed, the very magnificence of the Jewish victories, as has been shown in great detail in Ch.9 of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock is just as much a matter of prior divine prophecy as is the necessity stated in the same place, for the Jewish people at the end of this Age, to recognise their Messiah: as indeed it is predicted, amidst repentance for the piercing, they will do. Compared with much of what is coming into the Gentile world by the same prophecy (Ch. 8 SMR), this is not altogether an unhealthy situation!

But we must revert to Elijah and the Israel of that ancient time, and complete the picture.

The King of Israel meets with Elijah, giving him the view that it is the prophet who is the enemy of Israel. Not so, says Elijah, it is you who, with your fathers, have sinned yourself into this situation with your nature worship. What then was to come! Sent of God, Elijah was happy to prepare a test which could impact on the eyes of the king who would not apparently listen otherwise, despite the wonders earlier wrought in Israel. We are all aware of the cyclotronic effect of passion, whether of this or that kind, when misdirected.

Let there then be a test, making the thing if you will, scientific in a laboratory sense (as negatively, we have been finding also in our century, for ever-heady but never-ready naturalism). Try it out! See what responds. This was the historic call which Elijah fearlessly made: a test on the top of Mt Carmel. To that high arena, then, went the nature prophets and the people, with Elijah and the King.

The report of the action is well known. The Israelites had imported the pagan "god" Baal - as the Freemasons did much later, into one of their secret names. This Nature "divinity" was worshipped amidst lust and depravity in those times: was it not ... 'natural' to forget your Maker, misuse the equipment He had made and to do it your own way?

This they did, religiously. It as very like the present, with irreligious religion.

The priests of Baal, like our high-placed evolutionists, in the pay of the State then as now, sought to attract the attention of the Nature - "god". They leapt, called, cried, entreated, cut themselves, the Bible records, much as, in theoretical parallel, they do to this day with State funds to these unavailing ends. ( Løvtrup you may recall, levels just such a charge against the continuity of selective academic support for adequately discountenanced Darwinian style research). Indeed, "they called on the name of Baal from morning even till noon, saying, 'O Baal, hear us!'"

"But," we find, "there was no voice, no one answered."

Elijah taunted them: "Cry with a loud voice, for he is a god; either he is meditating, or he is busy, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping and must be awakened!"

So they cried louder, extorting contortions from their bodies, but no answer from 'Nature' or its secret gods, goddishness or other elements, could be heard. Denton with others appears mystified following his lucid survey of the scene, as well he might be; for there is no answer from that ground, nor has there been, nor can there be. Løvtrup for his part continues his protest at wasted funds to validate Darwinism, as we saw, holding that research could better use the funds where philosophy is no longer domineering science.

Silence was the only answer of which that Baal was capable. Then as now, the world was a production. It is vain to seek to be coquettish, to fascinate or entreat it, to extort from it with contortions physical or metaphysical, what is beyond it. The made is not the maker. It is only the Producer who can speak, and to man's mind He has spoken in recorded words. Other words are desired; but they do not speak, neither may they be found, nor their trace, their laws, principles or parallels. Logic declines now as then to pack up and depart for the sake of those who, at their pleasure, still wish to use it (cf. Chs.1,3 SMR).

Now we do not need a fire from heaven: we have already had Christ from God, the Word which the Father speaks, put into flesh, according to the stated program and with the stated identikits, which we have found in Chs.8-9 of SMR, continue to this day, throbbing with vitality, in the arms of history.

Then as now, they look for help from Nature, but there is none. They merely molest it and, with all their excited childishness, in the embrace of simple philosophy, many imagine that by examining the particles of ink with which, as it were, Nature was written, they will divine the mind of what is in fact, the Creator.

He has already however used words. The particles of the ink reveal nothing but particles of ink - or sub-atomic particles, or wave-particles, or particulate waves, or equations within equations, and fragments within fractions. It goes on. There is here a branch of physics which when not mystically misemployed has its place. The atomic bomb at least keeps them in touch with the concept of beginnings and ends - though more particularly the end. There is one: it will surely come, just as man did, and he will endure for a season, according to plan.

Similarly in language: the letters of speech contain much interest - but they are only symbols. It is what they signify that matters. It is not to magnify the letters but to see the purpose they serve, that matters essentially; and this matters altogether. There is no matter in matter that matters as much as this matter.

But let us now return to the Psalm 2. We were looking at the peoples esteeming God not to be allowed, seeking to banish His ways as if they were bonds: as indeed restraints of construction often do seem when the construction is being employed for a purpose contrary to design. That is the nature of the case, but to be fair, it is not really the case with nature, for this is a contrary to nature intrusion into nature by what has been given a nature which can molest even nature itself ... though within limits, which in this century have been tested rather severely. As with children, again, the testing impacts negatively on their own bodies, their own lives , their own prospects.

The "bonds" of God ? As men scoured the depths in search of the meaning of, means for, origin of Nature in Nature, like a Ph.D. student examining ink instead of the meaning of the words before him - they met merely nothing, Nothing (if you prefer, and it seems that some do ...), not anything. It is then time to return to the writer of the scenario for the spirit and mind and body of mankind; to the Author of the book, who has already shared the scenario, and with punctilious care, never broken, has constantly performed it (as Joel notes in 2:11 - Strong is He who executes His word).

How aptly Paul undercuts all this writhing and barren effort to find in Nature what made it:

"The righteousness of faith speaks in this way, 'Do not say in your heart, Who will ascend into heaven? - that is, to bring Christ down from above) or, Who will descend into the abyss (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).' But what does it say? The word is near to you, even in your mouth and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach) that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in hour heart that God has raised Him from the dead you will be saved." (Romans 10:9, Deuteronomy 30:12-14.)

Indeed, Elijah's bringing down of fire in terms of repentance towards the true God and the acceptable sacrifice symbolically displayed by him, is like the Son of God whom they buried, yet whose resurrection they could not still. This with what follows resembles also the world's demise, set not for a race but for all disobedient peoples when time delays no longer. The Lord has given us much time; but that time is not for ever.

Then as now, rejecting the Designer, they have designs on the design, which is man. They lust to reconstitute him his kind, more agreeably to their wishes.

Yet this Design will not connive with them, no, not though 400 priests of Baal cry louder, as in the case of Elijah, not though 1000 reductionist Hitlers and his co-partners in social metamorphosis who continue in various camps to this day, right or left, should stomp on its flesh, pollute its mind or aspire to dominate its spirit; not though a million Maos compose their simplistic, reductionist manuscripts for the blind. Never has the world been more incompetently confident, more asininely inventive.

But what is the word of the Lord Himself, the Maker who calls ? It is this word of God only, which stands and endures for ever, and with a just authority, demands attention, action and acceptance.

Quiet like evening gloaming, beautiful like the golden gloaming which quietens while one listens to its deftly penetrating voice, the word of God says this:

"Seek the Lord, while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon."

And then? If even reason points to the word of God, and to the Lord whose it is, with undying zeal, constant and consistent validity, and this uniquely, how much more does the Lord point to the hearts of mankind, yes men, women, boy and girl, youth alike, saying: Return to me and I shall return to you, and -Bring with you words saying, Take away all iniquity, receive us graciously... while pointing to this door open to faith, to the stone which the Builders rejected, this Christ and Him crucified, who said:

"I am the door. He who enters by me shall be saved."

It is not words about words, but life and health and peace, whose object is God, who made mankind subjects who could think, and asks them to examine their thoughts, as He will examine their ways. The beginning is God, who is also the end of it: therefore repent and seek Him while there is time, and our current time has the nod, till it is wound up, like a fishing line, and this world is taken away.

The Three Frogs

The Book of Revelation also gives indices for the ungodly myths of our day. Thus we find in Revelation 16:13, three highly mobile and doubtless, as is normal in such cases, voluminously communicative FROGS which come out of the mouth of the 'dragon', a symbol for Satan in his worldly vestments. They are 'unclean spirits' which seem to have such flexibility of passage that they come not only from the mouth of the dragon, but from that of the beast of political pomp and pretension that seeks the worship of man, and from the false prophet, whose austere duty would appear to be to 'interpret' the unclean. We have much of this, and doubtless it will soon have its own archbishop.

It is quite possible this refers to our three hopping heroes of the last hundred years, the liberators of thought from God by the unclean irrationalities which appeal to those who desire to be bound by them: namely, the outpourings of Marx, Darwin and Freud. This is quite a table of naturalism, in fact. Marx sought to gain genesis and meaning from the structure of things: but their structure did not create them, and this applies equally to his mental militia which studies, almost as if with Buddha, the navel of matter to see if its head can be found there, and meaning assigned to it. This has a certain fraternity.

Darwin tried to gain vital genesis and meaning from the flow of things, and projecting unconfirmed extensions: but their inter-relation did not create them.

Freud, a little more forward, sought to gain glints of human genesis or meaning, from the drive (and shuffle of things in the reedy reaches of psycho-somatic broad waters): but the drive did not create them.

Indeed, Jung combined drive and flow in his own way, reaching again from 'Nature', as he sought in 'Nature', the nullity for source which it possesses. He probed more factually then Freud into ... the screws and pulses of the thing, for the meaning/direction of the engine. But the pulses did not create the thing that pulses.

(See for all these things in more detail, SMR, Chs.2,3,4,10, esp.303ff., 750Bff.; and Index on the 3 names in view.)

Alas, in the syndrome so constant and consistent, the frantic engineer forgot the factory, the diagnostician of motor troubles forgot the plans, the sketches of machines in his sales talk, confusing drawings with construction, just as the accident analyst ignored the creation of what had the accident. The accident in the end is neither the design, the creation nor the law of life. It is rather the breach of it!

So do the frogs of Revelation leap, so well symbolised these or their like, hopping into the (mental) houses of men with their raucous and atrociously unintelligent croaking, as if to laugh at the pretensions of houses built in swamps.

The Free Fogs

Whether, then, in

1) biology,
2) psychology,
3) sociology,
4) politics or
5) physics,

one and the same result obtains as man peers into the 'profundities'.

There is nothing of genesis there. As to the ceaseless callow substitutes, each one doesn't work; it can't even be made to work. (Cf. SMR Chs.4, Sections 1-3, with Ch.7, pp. 611-631A and Ch. 5.)

On the other hand, in each of these categories there is an overwhelming attestation that verifies the Biblical statements, as has been exhibited in SMR continually and in considerable detail, and amplified in some respects in the present work.

Indeed, the categorical testimony of Genesis, competitively, is overpoweringly irrefutable, significantly testable, verifiable, applicable. That is, the acuity and accuracy of all verifiable components leaves organic evolutionism with no place as a serious contender, competitor, in terms of scientific method, or logic more generally. How much then depends on the 'g', whether it be as in Genesis, or merely genesis! - on the source, the substance of the power, the sufficient cause.

There is a way for each of these five fields in this area, that is right; none of them is self-creating or liable in itself for this result. Rules and principles, laws, personal, moral, political, sociological, physical apply. They must be kept in mind, in heart or in use, not applied artlessly or heartlessly: or else the thing doesn't work. Indeed, what they portend must be met; and at that meeting, what He wills must be found, and HE must be found. Otherwise it is rather like silly children, spoilt in many cases, playing without wisdom, with the father's equipment.

There is a way in the ultimates for each of these five fields that is explicatory, and without antinomy: and indeed, just as none of them is self-creating or available in itself for this result from itself and its world, so none is available for autonomous manipulating. Yet it is tried!

Autonomy?

It is like a baby in a womb, wanting for the sake of self-expression (or self-respect?) to smash out of it... Created by God in His image, we have as a race a natural desire for finding out and exercising. Yet as to proceeding to forget ourselves as if we were non-derivative, it is quite as foolish as is the custom of making ourselves central, and wondering what on earth (or beyond it, for that matter) possesses things, that they DO NOT WORK OUT!

If however they WERE to begin to work out in this more ultimate sense, that is the case when indeed it would be true: the womb is the tomb. Men should subtly be gulled, deceived; but this excuse we do not have. Each field fails to find its ultimate rationale within itself or its world. Nevertheless, with neither excuse nor extenuation, the race as a whole is tumbling that way now in this century, ever faster. Yet this speed is not progress; soon there will be no speedway on which to ... travel.

Furious, frantic or even frenetic efforts are being made. Firstly, this is to circumvent those laws and secondly, to re-create them either directly or by inventing subtle scenarios for quasi-geneses of man's invention. Yet these lie like so many Junkers bombers in the Battle of Britain, trailing clouds of vainglory, on the beaches, or on the high seas of philosophy, futility or poignant regret.

We are made, all of it and all of us, by direct fiat of the Almighty whose grandeur tolerates significant variability within kinds, physical, social, psychological and biological (just as is the case with differences between faces); but no pretence of creation is or has proved to be defensible, outside the Creator. (Cf. SMR Chs.1,3,10). The fact that this is not the name normally given to it does not alter the fact that substantively, this is what is being pursued, wholly in vain.

It is time to repent. As Ezekiel put it to his own people in the name of the Lord to the people of his own day: Thus says the Lord God: "Woe to the foolish prophets, who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing! O Israel, your prophets are like foxes in the deserts" (Ezekiel 13:1-2). Confusion and delusion mislead many; but as with motor accidents alas, the result does not differ in blood...

God brings the people to the end of imaginings and twistings. He announces (Ezekiel 12:22ff.):

"Son of man, what is this proverb that you people have about the land of Israel, which says,

'The days are prolonged, and every vision fails' ?

Tell them therefore, 'Thus says the Lord God:

I will lay this proverb to rest, and they shall no more use it...
For no more shall there be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel.

For I am the Lord. I speak, and the word which I speak will come to pass: it will no more be postponed, for in your days, O rebellious house, I will say the word and perform it, says the Lord.' "

The Lord proceeds: "None of my words will be postponed any more, but the word which I speak will be done, says the Lord God." (Ezekiel 12:28). Jesus likewise attested that every jot and tittle of the law and the prophets would be fulfilled (Matthew 5:17). In objective fact, that is the unexceptionable way of it. That is the way it goes with the word of God, always has been. There is reason for it; but there is also continual expression of it. Both apply.

Now finally, as then for the first 'innings', that of the Jews, there is a diminishing residual time allocated to folly, false prophets and to a people, now a whole world indeed of all races, conniving with such persons, replete with their fashionable irrational nostrums.

The word of the Lord will be done, the time is increasingly ripe by every facet and phase of Biblical authority, even to the pinpoint of the doomed and arbitrary denial of the last judgment, the one which preceded, that of the flood.

The word of the Lord will be done in termination as in creation. Things have gone on, long, the circuits of ideas in all 5 dimensions have been covered more than once; with magnificent foolish thrusts and querulous galaxies of thought. Opportunities have been multiplied, delusions have been spawned, barren marvels have led in all but endless seeming circles and circuits of fantasy and murder: increasingly by the million in the latter, as corpses, and in the former, as books.

But no! says the earth!
Not at any event! says the world.
Jehovah of the Jews become Jesus of the Christian, and all His Bible can go to the devil, says the world.
We will not have this man to rule over us, it rowdily intones.
As a plaything for philosophy, as a possibility for religions, it can be tolerated of course ...

the world concedes;

but as Truth, no! - again no! likewise never.

"He has 'gone on a long journey!'"

declaims the wit and wisdom of the world.

"Let Him! We will NOT be ruled."

It is then time to repent for the world now, as it was for the Jewish people in the days of Jeremiah. But if not, then as now, there is scope for those who do.

Return to the Lord, and He will turn to you: for the hand that created the universe in macrocosm, is ready to create a new flood, that of the outpouring of His Spirit (Isaiah 32:17) on each who receives His gift of repentance, His gift of the forgiveness of sins, of the Saviour whose vicarious sacrifice secures for all who come, an atonement, a peace, a reconciliation.

As Paul puts it: "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us... that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith" - Galatians 3:13-14 has this for the flock to whom it was written, for the Christians who have appropriated these things by faith.

For them, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new... He made Him who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him," Paul continues in instruction to the Christians. This way is open.

Time however has its limits.

Thus as Peter reminds us,

"The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (II Peter 3:9) - and of course, eventually as Isaiah 51 reveals this essential point, so Peter states it, "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, the elements will melt with fervent heat, but the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up."

The end is as prescribed as any prognosis, is being fulfilled with almost slavish seeming servitude to the prescription given thousands of years ago. At times, it has almost an added tragedy, because the "patient" seems all but proud of his condition, parroting the lines of text to say, as if they were a discovery. Thus in the approach of the final movement of judgment, there is precisely the predicted arrogant disdain which dismisses the catastrophic declensions of the flood, which evidentially exercise themselves endlessly in the surface of the earth. Never! They say. It simply did not happen.

"Where!" they contemptuously declaim, "is the promise of His coming!" This they do while the whirlwind of the contemporary express train passes station after prophesied station in fascinating but awe-ful precision (see Chs. 8 - 9 SMR). These words they utter without seeing the irony of it: THIS is the spiritual situation predicted and these are the words predicted for it; yet they speak them like someone with delirium tremens.

He does it because he can no other. There is no pleasure in such a fate; but those who pursue it, will find it can run faster than man. Their moves are foretold in kind.

It began; it will end; it will be assessed. This is the final assessment: the world has been warned and faces extinction: those who come to the remedy, the Redeemer are responding to a better Ark, one of eternal strength, prepared before it all began (Ephesians 1:4-5, I Peter 1:2, Revelation 13:8). These are washed with something better than water (I Peter 1:19, 3:21); for all the waters in the world would never wash away what dirties them.

The pollution of our oceans is symbolical as well as substantive. The depths of humanity are suffering a profound, forceful and indeed forcible pollution, secondary to what preceded it.

The consequences are out of man's depth: it is time to turn to the Lord in repentance and to seek righteousness according to His word, and salvation according to His diagnosis and prescription. There is no other: nor is there any other name given to men, under heaven, by which they must be saved (Acts 4:11-12).

A first step is this: to restore freedom and to employ scientific method; a second - cease playing god to other humans; a third, buy the truth and do not sell it. The fourth: settle the sediment of sin and cast this burden on the Lord, who came to take it, leaving no excuse.

Endnote

Concerning the Australian Constitution of 1901, see News 10 and News 18. Excerpts are provided here for convenience.

1. From News 10, in The Other News:-

A trend is being considering in which the people are

moving from the Bible and resting less in what God requires than in what the people seem to want, and their own preferred concepts to require. (A Question of Gifts, pp.47ff.)

Certainly, the form of sound words was far nearer in Australia than might otherwise have been the case; and its majestic realities wrought much in the ways of the nation, legally, morally and culturally, despite the rampant paganism which sought, like a cornered fox, to run in among the chickens with murderous intent.

In fact, Australia had its reference in its Constitution to "Almighty God", in the first paragraph, "humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God" - but does it so rely ? and did not Victoria in the 1851 Constitution, for example, make Christianity the "preferred religion"!

Sundays were days, to a significant civic extent, of rest. Various moral adventures, or more precisely immoral ones, were less than mainstream; and what is sometimes referred to as hypocrisy, could better and more objectively be styled an expected standard of morals, and a British background in spiritual emphasis which, however much it may have been - and was - flouted, was nevertheless an unavoidable presence, and often an unspoken bar for thought and conscience. In the days of Menzies as Prime Minister, such emphasis was considerable, for example. Though form alone is no adequate norm, the form of sound words serves at least as reminder, not least of the meaning of freedom and the power of truth; and when they are the word of God, their power is intrinsic and searching.

A land of restraint, without dictators, with some rein on banana republicanism, freelance history re-writers, government by wildness in the wilderness, with an intense love of freedom: it had much in the way of blessing. It is not only the skies and the shores in which we might look for beauty; and cancers can be worse than physical. Not that it was by any means a Christian country; but it had a substantial relish of it.

It is now time to add to this excerpt: This is not a fancy for nostalgia but a recognition of the immense distance covered in this land, as it has developed in pride and carelessness, fearing more and more skin cancer and adolescent violence than Almighty God, who has the answer for both.

2. From News 18, the next excerpt is taken, dealing with the divorce from the spiritual, increasingly evident in the nation. It is not a new idea. Its old results litter the earth.

Dealing with the pomp and circumstance given to the "law" of survival, of spiritual selfishness, of irrational weediness which reaches for a meaningless life which merely continues without regard to quality, to God, and is hence mere vitalised rubbish, we proceed:-

SPIRITUAL LIFE: AN EXCURSION INTO REALITY

Ø It [the concept of survival as basic, a belief] is based on that unchaste and illusory dream of the absence of God, and is accompanied by the absence of blessing.

Wars erupt as independence, self-fulfilment, national, regional or sub-regional are passionately sought, in whole strata of society, becoming the be-all and end-all. Indeed, such pompous and unlovely follies show significant power to end much in this sin-afflicted globe, as in the lives of millions already slaughtered, amid such visionless glorification of the ways of death, such acrid substitutes for spiritual life.

Life depends on its source and origin; and so long as the mythical attribution of life to what is non-life, of design to no designer, of law to chance, of spirit to matter, of mind to magic continues, and God Almighty, mentioned in the constitutions of both the U.S. and Australia, is actively mocked in the drugged philosophies of morbidity, of power-play, casuistry, evolutionism and death, so long is society not healthy.

Says the Lord in Proverbs 8, speaking of His wisdom: "ALL WHO HATE ME LOVE DEATH." Man is engaging in vast numbers, then, in a funereal courtship with death, as if the verification of the word of God in this case became an all-consuming passion. All-consuming ? is arithmetic to interpret the term!

The separation of church and State is not the separation of God and State, at least in terms of the Constitution of this Commonwealth of Australia. The assumption that God is to be excluded when His blessing is formally and officially sought in the Constitution is bizarre; and we return necessarily to the simple fact that scientifically there is need for objectivity, not secular prejudice. [Let us now add to this excerpt, as below.]

It would seem that in the blinded eyes and bound hearts of many, "without established religion" (cf. p. 198, *1 supra) in the State, means: in express de-recognition of God Almighty. (Indeed, it can become excuse for the confused or even surreptitious advent of an irrational creed masquerading as devoid of religion, while living on its vitals, and creating its own.)

Hence what we have called the "cult of the forbidden" (cf. p. 238-9, *7 supra) is the more exposed as merely a rugged invasion by innovative irrationalists; and the necessities of scientific method must cease to be derailed by blatant prejudice, while the heart of logic is stopped by this humanist sniffing, making all things relative, but never to God; making man the measure of all things but himself unmeasured; knowing no basis, but instituting a cryptic religion which makes man a prodigy of pettiness, the basis of a truth which neither, in that case, exists nor could be found. For all that, we are told what it would be if it could be with nauseating repetition and acrid irrationality, like breathing in and breathing out. It is time to awake to the facts.

	that what, in its model, predicts the absence of what is not in fact observable (contemporary design advance - CDA), being verified, is rejected in its summary as to the participation of natural things;
	and that what, in its model, makes natural the presence of what is not observable, CDA, being unverified, is accepted.