Chapter
5,
THE
PINE LOGGING EXCURSION
Sequel
to Ch.4 - on one aspect
SOMETIMES A LITTLE COMMON-SENSE
ALLIED WITH WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT HAPPENS, CAN HELP ONE TO DEAL WITH
WHAT IS, RATHER THAN WHAT IS NOT.
THIS IS ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTALS
OF SCIENCE, AS IS THE TESTING OF WHAT IS DEEMED TO BE, BY CHECKING THAT WHAT
IS ASCRIBED TO IT IN THEORY, HAPPENS IN VERIFYING PRACTICE.
In these regards of course, evolution is NEVER validated in principle and law, NEVER exhibited at the progressive and hence only relevant level, to questions of origins, and never induced by intelligence, though if it were, that would merely confirm the point. This too however is lacking in the world of current observation, with only one exception: divine miracles of healing. That figures.
Secondly, with organic evolution, the testing of the hypothesis to check that what it prescribes is what transpires, is NEVER verified.
By contrast, the Biblical creationism which STATES that creation is finished (in terms of the constituent members of the universe, down to kinds) IS ALWAYS VERIFIED. This is simply the obverse of the total scientific failure of evolutionism; but the Bible COULD have said this or that: WHAT it HAS said is what is in fact continually verified.
Its PRINCIPLES are constantly validated, and as shown in references above, are mirrored in the three chief laws of basic physics.
BOTH phases are validated
scientifically, for Biblical creationism, principle and practice. BOTH are
NEGATED for evolutionism. There is no contest. The Biblical statement is
not to be rejected because some people do not like God or the Bible: the
SOLE question scientifically is what is fulfilled in practice and correlates
in principle with other laws, knowledge and verified theories.
The longer science
continues its course the MORE such integrations occur, and the FURTHER the
confirmation and triumph continue.
This is an alternative approach to that of pure logic, such as has been taken; but it is also a complementary one. Like the two jaws of a nut-cracker, they move on the nut of the universe and as they are followed to their demonstrated logical conclusion (SMR), they reveal the word of the Creator of these things, LIKEWISE validated in logic and verified in practice, in ALL points, and that in a situation where there is once AGAIN, NO COMPETITION, for science CRITICISES itself in a few decades; but the Bible is not liable to demonstrable correction these three millenia.
But
it is time to make a little trip into the country. We will look at things
from yet one more perspective, which will merely, but with much interest,
confirm all the others.
WE SET
OUT ON OUR EXCURSION
IN THE
PINE WOODS
It is not the
usage even of current well-constructed, settled and developed natures - amongst
that assemblage of natures called by some 'Nature', for certain obvious features
or characteristics to "arise".
Probabilities cease even to be relevant on an atom by atom basis, or on some yet further fragmented counter condition, even though their mathematical testimony of a self-made 'Nature' is an indictment on its own (cf. Hoyle SMR pp. 226ff., 15ff.), of the very concept (if this were necessary, since on logical grounds it is already shown excluded - SMR 1,3, That Magnificent Rock 1, 7, 8, A Spiritual Potpourri 1-9). .
This ARISING syndrome, the use of words in place or works, hope instead of experiment, dream in place of principle, is as fallacious in mind as its reverse is true at the simplest of levels. Things do not just arise. THAT was one of the pet insistences of our chemistry teacher, who insisted that we speak scientifically and instead of waving a verbal wand, exhibit well-based testimony from the integral conclusions and practical paradigms of science.
Let us stroll into the country: we see a pile of pine logs, neat, attractive, beautiful in aroma, crisp in newness. Here is the fresh (and hence undulled) surface of pine wood, with the smell and savour of pine, the slightly roughened edges, the exact uniformity of piling, the bark texture with just that lack of sag, and the small pieces at the edges of the bark, with just that degree of serration, particularly precise since the sawing is recent; here is the bark wood interface, the tree's grandeur subdued but the result still brittle and sharp in edge, with the occasional oddment of sawdust clinging to the rough cut edges at the end. This does not happen by chance. Seeing this, we do not wonder how it could have happened; and the more exact our knowledge of wood and process, experience of results and understanding of principles of materials, the more secure is our conclusion.
To assume this by chance
would be a mathematical calamity, but far more importantly, it is a contradiction
of USAGE.
COLLATION OF CHARACTERISTICS
It is not only that the collation of characteristics which we merely commenced to list, and list in such a way that the integrity of the whole was featured, those diagnostic of recent sawing and piling and pine-tree origin, of intelligent intervention in 'nature' by the special, intelligent, purposively directed will of such as or greater than man, does not happen in 'nature' on its own. It is a non-occurrence. It is just that there is no room for imagination. Now there are reasons for this; and experience is only one of them, as we have indicated above; but it is an important member, and its depths move into many related fields as knowledge is assimilated, constructed in understanding, and then applied. Science merely refines the process; its office is not to move from all this as if refinement were contradiction.
Fairies, giants, lunatics, hoax perpetrators ? all have a certain degree of will and intelligence however, with the capacity to exercise them in unison with some measure of patience. NO other possibility, man or greater in relevant power, would rationally in practice be maintained.
If you like imagery: the co-ordinates of this work location are not duplicable by what cannot comprehend co-ordinates. This 'sum' is not available to the mindless, the purposively inert, that which is free of intelligence.
In principle, therefore, there are reasons for this: usage has its own basis.
The deterioration alteration, the dis-assemblage of ALL these diagnostic characteristics, of the fresh-cut wood pile, the aromatic-edge-quality, the crispness of bark, colour of bark, relative uniformity of bark freshness etc. - is predictable.
There is evaporation, time for its occurrence, rate of same, indentation on bark, style of edge of indentation, blowing of natural deterioration agents like wind or sand, shine of warmth - a multitude of, let's face it, natural processes that forbid exception. Natural processes do their stuff. The results are their for a reason.
That is the way it
is, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is quite clear. Although the pile
is in a forest and this is in a region, which is in the world, and fixed
stars glow away, none of these things has an interface within the bounds
of its nature, which relates to the precise, intelligent counter-measures
which would preserve our wood-pile with what we have called its diagnostic
qualities. Vague arisings, in the arising syndrome, are not acceptable because
a wand of irrelevant words is used to indicate a realm of irrelevant
non-interface IN THE STYLE REQUIRED.
THE SUPER-PROGRAMMATIC UNIVERSE OF IMAGINATION MUST COME DOWN TO EARTH!
That is where we are.
IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE, programmatic, purpose-built devices might indeed conceivably so control weather, and compensate by subtle chemistries, built into molecules (as subtle information is built on chemical bases in DNA) and formed code in botanical DNA, that they would alter and counteract, compensate for all these intricate developments of rotting, to a 't': in time, order and sequential correlation, so that each stage would in exact synchronisation of command and sequence, schematic point of application and overall coherence of plan, be kept precisely in its relationship to the other.
That is not impossible. Severely controlled deterioration agents, to allow some hope of counteraction of the entirely predictable, might in such a universe achieve such a result, provided the control, programs and intelligence were sufficient; and provided also that these provisions did not contradict other features of the alternative universe which might be desired, such as a certain measure of natural freedom allowing developments of sunsets in an artistic liberty that resulted from the free movement of NON purposively directed elements, merely executing their own lower level track performance.
In such a universe, product of intense thought and imagination, with such intelligence, such programming, the creator of it with such foresight and insight and aptitude, could conceivably prevent the decay on the wood pile, and its way-stations, by such counter-measures... There, in THAT universe, such wood piles, for THAT reason, might indeed stay to meet the fresh-cut qualities for years, or even centuries, though exposed freely to the elements, or whatever in that universe you might wish to call what was left of them.
The control of the chemistry and whole environment., however, at whatever cost, together with the superabundant programmatic inserts, and their bug-free correlation with existing programs actually IN DNA, might compensate for each rot, downward movement. This would put into this corner of 'nature' or more broadly into more of it, as the case might require, much data, and in fact constitute it in relatively much or little, one large anti-rot system - for NOTHING for this result, that has any relationship at the appropriate level, is allowed to vary from the astutely configured anti-rot specifications. That is imagination and it would require a prodigious creative performance.
In OUR universe, DNA has specific editorial features to diminish copying errors when new cells are formulated and formed; but in THAT universe, a NEW NORM of STABILITY would be needed in a very different 'nature', so constructed that nothing was ALIEN TO IT!
That then is the imaginary universe.
We however are not living in that particular one.
Science is looking or should be looking at the evidence of what happens in our own.
It is important in finding out its features and characteristics, to find for what it is apt, and what not, and why, or why not. It is really a serious business, and not a matter for dreams; imagination is highly relevant, but in terms of actuality, facts and fashions, not in terms of dispensing with these things. It is a matter of seeking theoretically to dispense ascertain data, and construct theories FOR reality, not to dispense WITH reality.
Children's stories are a different universe, of thought and imagination specifically freed, liberated from bothersome things like factual reality; and this is itself a realm of creation such as man constantly sees in his own midst, which precedes the creative productions known as children's stories. All these things have an adequate cause, each in its own world, each in worlds integrated synthetically, each requiring IN that creative action, that forge of thought, that construction of spirit, what is necessary for action in the realm it puts OUT.
Have we lived in this world so long and do not realise these things. The Second Law of Thermo-dynamics merely formulates one facet of the reality. Programs and automated systems within a realm of construction, purpose-driven designs, in fact get what they can to work, if they've astute enough formulators (to protect, restore, renew) to make things work in that sphere; but even these programs of conservation themselves, they have no adequate in-built natural protection. Protective programs themselves are subject to deterioration.
The case here is OPPOSITE to THAT imaginary universe; its ways are not APPOSITE for our universe, which requires protection of constructions, or decay; and has decay of the protections.
It is not only a breach of this basic scientific law which is made in some simple a thought as a pile of fresh-cut logs, if you seek to imagine a contrary case: it is a different universe, where a huge insertion of governing intelligence changes its verbiage, nature, disposition, to a sort of programmatic police-state.
In this, "Nature" would be
dead, its very vitalities surrounded and encased in unnatural specifications.
No such are these, our natures, or if you prefer "Nature"! This world is not such a place.
With exquisitely sure grounds, it deteriorates, the grounds themselves for such action interlocking tested laws in the intellectual objects according to which the results duly accrue (when the former are accurate) in the practical realm. Thus the thought world that RELATES to practical realities, and the latter itself are interlocked as in a beautiful marriage, where disharmony is in only one direction, and is to be removed at once, by adjusting or removing negatively verified hypotheses.
Reason and reality
cohere; like brother and sister. We see THAT it happens, work out why, in
thousands of multiplied phases and facets, with multiple expressions of the
whole substance, structure form and nature of the matters in hand.
Now if a fresh-cut pile of pine logs, a system so simple as to be entirely ludicrous
in comparison with one cell of living tissue,a system ex-will, ex-life, ex-thought in process, and of limited - indeed,
vitally defunct results, ready to accrue -
one severed from its relatively simple vital botanical source (i.e. its trees were cut) :if this clashes entirely with expectations, contrary to reality,
and would require suspension of law, laws, customs, usage, cosmos construction,
to "ARISE" on its own, so that it was stable as such:- then how entirely lordly is the lore
that has life thus "arise"! deploying forces in the imagination,
not available in the world that stands.
All its specialties
need simultaneous protection (the cell membrane to protect its instability
being one) from contrary processes, and every part in the evidential cell
that is always high grade in design, showing NO development in ANY series
at ANY time in ANY creature, wherever found, must be right. As Stephen Jay
Gould put it*1, in one of his admissive
moments, adding to
"Instead of a narrow beginning and a constantly expanding upward range, multicellular life reaches it maximal scope at the start, while later decimation leaves only a few surviving designs" - Wonderful Life, p. 233 (cf. 212).
This of course relates to his personal findings in the Burgess shale. "The main burst" [of vital activity] occurred well done in the Lower Cambrian" - p. 227. He puts it again, "the Burgess maximum in organic disparity" . Again, he says, p. 277, "I just can't accept that if organisms always have the potential for diversification of this kind - while only the odd ecology of the Lower Cambrian ever permitted its realization - never, not even once, has a new phylum arisen since Burgess items." This ? It is said of "the Cambrian explosion" which was "too big, too different, and too exclusive." It relates to the SCALE of the occurrence in which so vast a proportion of all life is suddenly deposited with such enormous variation of structural design, suffusion of varieties, architectural assemblages and the like.
SINCE the rock strata repeatedly give contrary results to fact (like trees standing more or less upright, in multiplied strata, through them, though it is supposed to take millions of years for them to be deposited - something for some other world, perhaps, not this one); contrary dates by different methods; and since the construction of the COLUMN is in vast proportion, in the mind, not with the eye, but rather TRENDS to columnar results are found without explanation for differences, and huge translocations appear, which show no signs of overlay, and the like, and this in vast areas of the earth's surface; and since dating methods give vast differences from assumed rate predictions as shown in SMR (Index Dating), and in That Magnificent Rock, Ch.7; and since there is so much inexplicable material on the huge degree of sedimentary rock throughout the earth, and the mass graves of fossils such as biologist Nilsson documented with such appalled horror, abandoning Darwinianism on the spot, and all gradualism: it is not surprising if SOME materials are hinted at now, in the pre-Cambrian.
After all, it is ONLY on the gradualistic approach that the column appears to be a dating procedure. In fact, the geological hydraulics would be expected to have a massive TREND in deposition, but one with significant VARIATION for local reasons from place to place, and it is THIS which is found; so much so that it is indicated that in only a small fraction of cases on the earth's surface can the full "column" found (CEN Technical Journal - Vol. 13, No.2, 1999). Missing is normative; overlay is vast; a trend is all that can be found, with edges often found not easy to relate to gradualism.
One would therefore EXPECT that there might well be exceptions, though perhaps not numerous, where multicellular creations could be found 'low' or simply deeper than the pre-Cambrian norm. The norm however is as spectacular no doubt, as the observer Gould maintains, and it is this point, in the arena of the evolutionary mode of dealing with findings, which has to be accounted for. Gradualism does not do so*1A; it is aborted on the spot by these findings. They are a MOCKERY of it; it is a child in a school where SILENCE has just been commanded, who instead of complying, has succeeded in bringing out his rock-n'-roll band complete with trumpets, drummers and percussion, and equipped with high-sound broadcasting, while placing the speaker within one inch of the teacher's ear. It is not mere disobedience; it is comedy.
In our own terms, in the case before us, it is the most monstrous exposure, that is not merely an anti-verification: it is a flood! The constructions on earth laugh uproariously at the fallacious constructions in mind, in the little, quaint oddity of organic evolution.
Again from Gould
(op.cit. 236-237) "But
the mere pattern of life and death offers no evidence that survivors directly
vanquished the losers. The sources of victory are as varied and mysterious
as the four phenomena proclaimed so wonderful that we know them not (Proverbs
30:19) ... But if we face the Burgess fauna honestly, we must admit
that we have no evidence whatsoever - not a shred - that losers in the great
decimation were systematically inferior in adaptive design to those that survived." Indeed, p. 273, he explodes:
"
THAT, of course,
on
Gould indicates this
point on p. 271: "
- This new concept of evolution is based on the fossils we don't find and on genetic mechanisms that have never been observed. The case for creation is based on thousands of tons of fossils that we have found and on genetic mechanisms (variation within kind) that we do observe and put into practice every day.
- He adds, as a scientist:
- "I'm inclined to prefer a
mode that's based on what we do see and can explain (creation),
rather than one that's based on what we don't see and cannot explain
(evolution)."
Later and rather aptly, Gould notes what is the real problem, in its practical and psychological manifestation: "... the most important message taught by the history of science: the subtle and inevitable hold that theory exerts upon data and observation." The word "inevitable" is too strong: it is sometimes normative, but at times there is that keen edge of untainted desire which is not anti-God, disposed to resist what is, and which hence faces facts with willing glee. It is nevertheless true that the danger is real and to be resisted; and is exhibited nowhere more than in this ludicrously HOLD which gradualism has had on the philosophy of science, leading experts to speak of one another, in their various distresses, with a disparagement or amazement, as if they were school children. Such is the message: INSIST on the irrational and your bedfellows may well include fleas. They bite.
Incidentally, Gould
- p. 226 - speaks of a Chinese parallel to the extreme case of the Burgess
shale, and declares: "The
Chinese fauna is half a world away from
Let us then reflect
on these things.
THE WORLD'S
GREATEST NON-CONTEST -
for THE
BOOK OF RECORDS ?
Thus NOT ONLY, in FACT, is the record of INSTANT cells of sophistication impact, but SUDDEN VARIETY in multicellular records, with a DECREASING information resultant, and a DECREASING variety effect over time; while there is a massive total contribution of types and stages in an assemblage as if the Headmaster was calling the roll. This is not mere negation: it is mockery.
Clearly we are in
the presence of something other than students coming by chance! Let us further
review the imagination of transition for major groups:
- Even if, however, such structural
magnitudes and vast varieties of design were to be imagined,
- coming in the unattested
ways, to enable uplift in steps;
- and even though they baffle
imagination of such a distinguished researcher as Gould,
as to WHAT in the world they COULD have been (Stepping out for Christ ... Ch. 10),
just as it WELL might, if you were considering the development steps
between the - ASSUMED - bicycle beginning PHASE of a space station,
and pondered the NATURAL and DEFENSIBLE ways in which the design
would be triumphant all the way up, while developing,
- IF they were to be imagined,
- perhaps stored in some sort
of museum ?
- where there could lie in
wait, all the parts to be required at the end,
for otherwise, all specifications being precise, it would be a virtual creation
at the last basic stage, in any case -
-
yet there is worse to follow!
There is still the little point should the imagination work feverishly for hours and invent mythical marvels of design manipulation (which call for greater than ever specifications to enable this highly complex and exceptionally demanding work), and then find a museum for parts storage, you also have to HAVE those parts. Imagination baulks; storage facilities are not found, nor yet caretakers for them; parts lack.
Then again, as to all the "experiments" (to use Gould's term) which would have been made, on the organic evolutionary hypothesis, made of course without an experimenter, but that is the way with magic, the happenings in code and integral brilliance of ingenuity: these failures lack. They should sprinkle the surface of the earth, like the beginnings of a snow-storm. They should be present in prodigious numbers, like the work of a Latin student in a stiff exam, when he had neglected his work, only far, far worse. He has SOME intelligence! They lack. For that student whose work so manifested itself, one would rather think SCHOLAR, than DUNCE, let alone, inert!
And the myriads of progressive, made in America, biological success stories ? They should vastly adorn the ancient landscapes. What should ? Things which despite fundamental faults and incredible clumsiness, and being produced without ANY imagination, SOMEHOW or other, chiefly other, managed so much as to exist in the most bizarre and unimaginable sequential modes - not a triumphant posture for SUCCESS in acrid competition!
As to these, TO SUCCEED, NEVERTHELESS, IN BEING FOR LONG ENOUGH FOR THE NEXT STAGE, they would HAVE to live for LONG TIMES, and hence have highly stable and visible modes of living. The FACT that these transitions of KIND are NEVER found is merely the requirement of logic, as always, duly found or certainly not contradicted, in the honest laboratory of time. Gould engages in choice language on the lack.
On any level as on all levels, the CAUSE is not present in nature, for it is manifested operationally, neither empirically nor validly at all in logic, at this level (SMR Ch.1,3). The cause ? It is not exhibited in time; it is Biblically stated to be beyond time, and to inject into time, as we onto paper when we write. That is the claim. Paper does not make words, not being equipped for that; it is a receptor. So are we, as may be seen by an examination of our products and powers. We live, we die, we age, our cells have it made, and unmake when their time comes. We are recipients. Matter is so at a much lower level. We have spirit; it doesn't. If it resented something, it couldn't express its displeasure; provoke it and it proceeds as to constructed facilities. The cognition for resentment is not present! It is all here, matter, mind and spirit, in its various natures.
That specific Biblical depiction
is what is in PRECISE conformity with the facts, in every respect.
It is verified. Gradualistic
evolution is not. Let us not merely talk of creationism, since
a) the word is being
currently increasingly prostituted into ambiguity, and
b) the real issue is
the real source, who as such, is not without power.
Let us speak of Biblical Creationism, for that is where ALL the answers ENTIRELY meet ALL the facts, and hence is the preferred procedure, MERELY from a scientific method point of view, just as it is required in the further domains of logic as noted above.
The situation is delightfully
simple. The theory of evolutionary naturalism is not relevant to science.
Transitions of BASIC TYPE lack. Experiments of ANY kind lack. Logic forbids.
Now scientific method precludes, and this multiply: as has been shown. Chaos
frowns; logic laughs.
SPECIAL EFFECTS DIVISION
Very well: special effects are NOT evidenced as BEING manufactured, or as EVER having been manufactured BY nature and within nature. Imaginative needs for a play, however long you wait, and clear your patient throat, will not arise by waiting.
The system is not built that way. You need imagination for imaginative things. That is the quality which is back of it. Even a slight deficiency in this quality, in a child, is noted sometimes with appalled expectations of dismal fruits. Its entire absence is another thing, especially as the basis for the MOST imaginative engineering constructions ever seen, in the MOST apt and intelligent combinations and presentations ever known; especially when linked with a personal analysis instrument for self-inspection and repair, and many other imaginative purposes, called mind; especially when linked to the capacity to breach mind and body, with an even more liberated instrument called spirit (or any other name you want to give to the functions so often noted in this site).
Let us dwell on the now clear absentee from the play, this special effects division. Yet we have its results.
What is the source
of the special effects division, then, with its specialist provisions in
such milli-second beauty of motion, all in order, sequence, setting and coded
? It is no junk yard.
The highly specialised parts are not suitable for on-the-spot engineering refashioning to the specifications desired, to match other specialised parts. A junk yard has only so much value. You need an engineering intelligence to get anyway in this field. It is not Nature, which is endued with the museums of diligence to store the work for which it has no power of thought, strategy or scenario writing. It is written. It is not a writer. That is ALL the facts show.
For intensive, multiplied, synthetic schema, with extensive precise manufactured parts, together of course with the machine tools to make more machine tools when these ones wear out, and the programs to tell them how to do it anyway: the whole world systems of logic, thought and practical agencies, are needed, in concert and speaking the same language.
The preliminaries for any one "stage" on the way to any creature, do not CREATE the structural schema for the next thought-world production, when the wrappings are removed. On the other hand, the final practical world production does not GET the design tools for its needs from the last one, the new design construction from some earlier one; but rather it must have extensive re-design at each operative level. This is so in little things, in much; but when there is a total construction alteration in principle or purpose, then of course the case is of prodigious proportions. Novelty of design means in large measure, novelty of specification, and hence of construction methods for what is to meet these. The world does not go crazy because life is there. Life is there because the reason back of it was adequate, the facilities of thought sufficient, the will apt and appropriate.
In fact all this special effects division is not found, nor any of it; and in theory, it is far more difficult to invent systems to suppress the deteriorative forces while you keep in hand the special things you need when the system is at length constructed, so that it can use the things which you kept awaiting the moment when you could put it all together. This implies, as noted, a STOP ROT program as well as an IMAGINATION IN PUT program. It is more complex than the needs and evidence of creation exhibit. Awaiting the moment ? If you could wait; and that would be difficult, because of course, you would not be there, in the naturalistic reductionist prison system, in order to get knowledgeably to work on what is then to hand.
As to that: There would undoubtedly be LESS intervention in MAKING IT ALL AT ONCE. That of course is what the biological trend is, but the only program left, is HOW DOES IT DO THIS ?
The answer, "it arises", as the reader will by now know, if not before, is not relevant.
That is the unscientific one. HOW and BY WHAT MEANS and in WHAT INTER-CONNECTED TISSUE of law verified and seen to be operative do you account for this ? Those are apt for science.
The SPECIAL EFFECTS division is interested in this once it looks for the right, and rightly programmed players.
Before that, there
is the far more basic question, by what logic is anything; and is its legal
structure formed, its mind and matter, its spirit and their interconnection
? Laws galore and integrated structures of living thought, where is their
source ? Imaginative constructions, what is their propulsion ? certainly
not needs that would be there if the imagination arose to match them.
As to these exhibits, at times of almost frolicsome imagination, THEY are objectively evidenced; for the work seen is precisely that of such a world of originative function and capacity.
The opposite, naturalistic reductionism, has not constructed a ramp. There is no way to go up. Nature is not equipped to make itself. Its abilities are non-progressive: just watch it act, and investigate it properties and powers.
It has not acted EVER in ANY time place, visible or implied by collateral evidence; and as Gould says, there has even been a reduction in the variety available, as we proceed in time. That too is what in general was the point made by Polish geneticist, Giertych (SMR p. 252H). Gould has merely intensified the point by the garlanded drama of the DEGREE of the disparity. VAST stores of sudden information; large losses since.
We have not
to ponder reduction for creation, since it is opposite. This is not an interesting
procedure to achieve this aim. It happens to be the exact opposite. It would
not commend itself to relevance. We do need to ponder production for
creation, and hence what has productive powers, as equipment.
THE SOURCE
OF PLAY AND STAGE,
WORDS
AND ... ALL BUT SIN
(cf.
last section, below)
As this necessity leads to the adequate source, God Almighty, so naturalism leads to the inadequate postulations.
By WHATEVER MEANS and in WHATEVER TIME, what lacks has to produce what it does not have. That is the essence of organic evolutionism (and it is high time this word was used in parallel with creationism, and the more so since the latter only meets the test of scientific method; for my part, and for this reason not least, I prefer creation and evolutionism).
It has to invent systems of law, by chance, and use non-existent chance to invent systems in the first place, so that there could be any chance. From nowhere (since nothing does not have any 'where'), it makes what is; what is, being simple and limited in power; from this by any method, it arises with all that it lacked, making partial prodigies with what it does not have. This ? Is it because we USE some simple things like matter (relatively speaking) that people crassly tend to imagine that it is not persons but the properties, invisible to all investigation, those of matter which are REALLY making the things ? Does matter purpose things ? Does it try ? Does it think ? Does it make laws ? Does it have equipment to command and symbolise commands to order itself to be what it is not ?
No. Naturalism of any variety and Biblical creationism are two presentations that have nothing in common: one has all the answers to every point in the whole gamut of logic, evidential reality, scientific method, prediction, both natural and historical. The other collides, collapsing on EVERY POINT. In this excursion our chief concern has been empirical, since the logical has been so fully treated earlier. But that, it is the way the matter stands.
It is not merely that organic evolutionism fails; and creationism succeeds. Nor simply that the one fails on all fronts, and the other succeeds on all, where either is testable.
In fact, the one
positively entails; the other negatively fails, so that there is complete
harmony everywhere, except in the minds of the professional unbeliever. Now
THIS question is merely one well down the line! There is not only LAW, there
are thousands of these things, laws galore of this and that kind in a tartan
of grand design, integrated and executed in one systematic whole, subject
to causal enquiry, rational investigation and repaying the same.
TAKING STEPS
IT WOULD HOWEVER PERHAPS DISAPPOINT OUR READERS IF WE DID NOT LOOK MORE INTIMATELY AT TAKING STEPS, AS A PRINCIPAL MIGHT SAY TO A STUDENT, IN OUR WAY TO THE DESIRED RESULTS: "I shall have to take steps..."
Steps however are irrelevant in our own case, as they are absent from view, and nature lacks what it takes, in any naturalistic theory, in the time when these things were done, to do it. WE humans, for example were not there (and precious long it would take us to do anything anyway, for we lack the power to make spirits, and cannot EVEN NOW make life).
The total programmatic direction, with its library bulk miniaturised - the one we have - and the relevant multi-formatted resources , must BE in place for the cell to "arise" in the way it is seen, open to investigation from any corner of the globe (no, this does not mean one believes in a flat earth: it is a simple metaphor!).
Now we do not need to consider how the most devastated cripple climbs Mount Everest. It does not happen. The capacity lacks. If we FOUND one do so, we would realise we had been ignorant of the nature of mountains, or cripples or both. THAT however is not the problem. We do NOT find the 'cripple' of chance mimicking the rollickings of imagination, the productive dimensions of intelligence. It does not happen. Deficiency is no substitute for efficiency. Effectiveness is not found in the inoperative.
 |
Chance is merely a pass word
for all that is NOT in the system, and as such, is merely a futility
in advance. Information being injected is merely ONE of the elements
which naturally and mathematically go contrary to the need. Imagination
is another, to fabricate in that realm, with the characteristic criteria
of wedding or melding intellectual and spatial, governances and graces together in one, with a view to integrated action or exhibition in an appropriate environment. |
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God has produced both, being alone sufficient. His invisibility is merely a necessity, since matter, being visible, lacks power to make what it is, so that its maker must NOT be material; and is in fact self-named, a SPIRIT. As noted, this is nothing new, since functionally we ourselves are equipped with one, in entire contradistinction from matter, and use it in all such discussion as this. |
But let us proceed with our detail.
Mini-programs - even to GO to a step, without legs - these do not create multi-programs. That is simply not the way they work. In fact, they tend to break down and create enormous problems, the more so the more complex and multi-phased and ambitious they are, for resolution as they face this and that situation, and are overcome by power-spikes or misadventures of this type or that, through intrusion or otherwise.
To ALTER a Volkswagen to a Boeing 707 being far harder than to make either, merely accentuates the problem of intelligent products from utter dumb resources. Steps make the thing worse, and have a far greater call on the resources which, in naturalism, are not there.
It is not a very intelligent idea, therefore, propounded in opposition to the facts; and it gets what it deserves in "successful" creation, which does not show any such thing, but rather the precise opposite:
The idea of making each car
in a different factory, or not one from the other, is merely an example
of intelligence; from such transmutative procedures what can we
expect, but that they would merely arrest sanity, complicate performance,
stultify action. Action however, on a wholly different observable model,
is what abounds. Its methods and results must relate. Stupidity profound
is not the way to intellectual property (in your cells) of the highest
coded character on earth. We must be realistic. NON-existence is not
the way to existence at ANY level.
For all such steps, you lack the mainspring. They are rather steppes, vast
and dry, cold and waste, than steps.
The rational faculties needed are those of mind. The design features those of purpose! They have their sources and characterisable resources, no less than the fresh-cut pine log situation, which we considered in Chapter 4. Whatever vast and overpowering superiority to need is in the Creator, reason indicates, there can be nothing less than these minimal necessities, and as He says, His divine nature and eternal godhead are obvious (Romans 1:17ff.). It is as we have shown in Ch.1. of SMR, and touched in this volume, also NECESSARY that He should be always there, always the same, yet wholly sufficient to deal at the personal level. C.S. Lewis was perfectly right in stressing the idea of MINIMAL NECESSITY. The results demand it. THAT OF COURSE has nothing in the world (or out of it) to do with compulsion acting ON the Creator; quite the contrary. It is logical COMPULSION acting to exhibit basic features attested irreducibly.
What is absent, does not act.
This fallacy then of organic evolution is simply one more example of reductionistic error. Because implements can be relatively simple, like electrons, though even these have their marvels - in the "hands" of those who like man, inhabit other 'worlds' - those of logical initiative, symbolic discernment, imaginative envisagement: it appears to be imagined that as if fascinated and agog, 'Nature' somehow does it. No, personification does not create proficiency.
The imagery helps, some think. Such theories of 'Nature', however, the goddess lose their bearings when 'she' is dismembered into total inertia in the mental realm, far beyond mere stupidity. What is not there, does not act.
Because each electron in each atom, in each molecule (those structures, laws, formats) is in fact moved or deployed differently when purpose and intelligence operate, becoming a tool of the productive agency: therefore, the nature of the merely material operation per se is annulled, and the displacements and disposition of particles are excluded as natural, when the evidences and testimony of such interference are not merely existent, but pervasive. If now a Downes' syndrome child, limited by affliction, is asked to write a Shakespearean play, with no mentally active helper, or purpose driven keeper, the answer is soon found: THE CHILD CAN NOT DO THIS THING.
Why ? He/she lacks the capacity. What capacity ? that which includes knowledge, understanding of high level experience and refined analysis, planning capacity, dramatic understanding and a sense of its application for discerning minds, and so on, almost ad infinitum. Pages could be written in a preliminary survey of what would be needed.
Above all, a different PERSON would be REQUIRED. The child's NATURE would be wholly irrelevant to such a production. Playwrighting at that level does not exist as a possibility in this case, short of divine intervention: since the array of letters, strokes of pen are merely ONE MINOR feature, or result of the understanding, perceptions and thoughts. THEY deploy them to convey these things. They are merely a MEANS. What they MEAN is entirely another thing, in domain and requirement.
Their governance
for such a result is entirely at the disposition of a mind of the right proportions,
experience, intelligence, imagination, dramatic feeling. The system of the
Downes' syndrome child's mind is not equipped with features wholly necessary
for the result. Probability is wholly irrelevant, for the arrangement of letters
which is the same as a play of Shakespeare (a swamp mathematically - SMR
p. 15) is the least of the need.
The play is equipped with MEANING, as its chief characteristic. The assemblage
of letters would fail to impart this. They must be SO arranged in SUCH a situation
that their CHIEF purpose, exhibited by their MAIN result, is CONVEYED. They
transmit. Only receptors at the correlative level can receive. Arrangement
is merely a medium. Symbolic signification is the purpose, the product in
its integral and effective form.
THE MEANING STEP
What is meaning ? It is the conveyance of person-to-person information, at the personal level, actual or implied. It has range of purpose, emotion, thought, spirit and imagination. The play is chiefly in this field. Its excellence is the HUGE extent to which it KEEPS things at that level, integrated, developmental, coherent, reaching the message, the moral, the thrust, the perspective, touching it here and there, with irony adorning it, with wit sharpening it, with depth of feeling illustrating it.
It is true that this is mere analogy. However it brings out the point that we are instruments, ourselves, of meaning. We are continually conveying it, desiring it, exchanging it - and it is a main feature of our living. What is not there, does not create. What is created requires what is adequate. We constantly reach the same result in looking at things minute, as in looking in the vaster realms of necessities.
What cannot be done is SO because it lacks the ingredients of the production of such things. Matter per se has no meaning. It does not use it. It expresses it without participation. We can read it. It cannot.
All these things CANNOT be done without a base adequate. Matter is a comparatively trivial, no-purpose entity, internally, and hence it is a no-error object. You cannot be wrong when there is only law to follow, without option (SMR Ch. 4, pp. 429ff.). Matter's arrangements are the work of children's parties by comparison with the injection of meaning, of plan, of expertise, of imagination, such as is seen in life in profusion, not confusion. It is formed in the execution of DNA command via symbolism in chemical message servants. It is seen in our own discussions of that very thing. It is present in automation; it is even more obviously present in cogitation. The fact seems to be, as one delves into these byways, that the aghast human is so sure that GOD is not loving, that he/she will NOT believe (one of the most famous biologists SAID this) what is taught in Sunday School! NOT THAT! OH NO! A mother in law would be an angel compared with that, to invoke the popular mythology on mothers in law!
HOW, they say, can any one be REALLY loving and intelligent, whatever his technical expertise who has invented a 'nature' which bashes itself so!
That is an absurd question if made without introduction. It obviously presumes greatly. HOW could anyone kill a man! It is atrocity! and so on: one may say. But when the general discussion is over, the answer may on occasion be simple: He threatened my life, and I defended myself, and in the struggle he died. THAT is how. It is not so atrocious. Generalising here is mere illusion.
MAN has sinned. NATURE
is his domain. GOD has brought it into more harmony with his sin.
It reflects man's own
vanity in its own (cf. Beyond
the Curse,
Biblical Blessings Ch.7,
News 74). Evolution is merely a way to try to make
it look as if these divine disciplines were misdirected, and we are responsible
for NOTHING, but rather, if anything (ask Hitler concerning his OWN race
if you could!), to be congratulated on our own UNDOUBTED success in still
being alive! It is very susceptible to pride of race, of individual,
of nation. The pride routinely falls, if not in one way, then in another.
GOD, says Paul in Romans 8, has SUBJECTED NATURE TO VANITY, to modes inclusive of FUTILITY, because of the sin which man exploited. Man is awry; so then is nature. Man is aggressive, insulting, and abuses; so then does nature. Man creates; nature does not. There comes the beginning of the end. Man's creativity which goes to the point of making new worlds and new gods that are not (at least in imagination), new men, and so forth, is marvellous in innovation; but it is equally a failure in all attempts to dispense with the intelligence, wisdom, imagination and power of God. Man ? he is like a deaf-mute next to Shakespeare by comparison. Yet there is some resemblance, in this, that with proper methods, communication with God is indeed possible.
GOD HAS SAID. It is written in our cells, in the book of life, the Bible, in the utility which DOES NOT ever SHOW improvement in design, in 'nature', but only diversification and deterioration. His CONSTRUCTIONS HAVE UTILITY: HIS JUDGMENTS CAN STRIKE WITH FUTILITY. You shall be filled with the fruit of your own ways, is one of the most extraordinarily simple and yet crushing forms of divine rebuke (Isaiah 3:10, Jeremiah 6:19, Proverbs 1:31 cf. Romans 8:19-22). The Proverbs passage reads:
- Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
- And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
That is the way of it. This is a pilgrimage and our end is co-ordinate with
our beginning. Offering insult to the intelligence of God is only one way
of showing the aptitude of the frustration visited on our environment, Nature,
for our cause. We are left, in this respect, to stew in our own juice. And
that juice is leaking now, across the world, as the return of Christ draws
near. War, terrorism, mass weapons of destruction in small cases to enable
vast evils which contaminate the world and make life a miracle if it so much
as survives.
God is not impressed with prevarication. If you want proof, we have given it many times on this page, and none has so much as touched its validity. Truth is easier to defend than fiction, and all the evidence is on its side, just as reason wrestles with error.
The word of God states that the requirements for the Creator's return are indeed near. It itemises the requirements, and little remains; the whole thrust is present, as for some rare disease where 100 qualities attest its presence (cf. SMR 8-9). There are not only items; there is the patient's overall condition, and this too is prophetically attested in multiple dimensions, as has been shown.
Even pine-logs, noted in Chapter 4, of which this is the sequel, even these positively require DIMENSIONS of activity to preserve them as they were seen to be. There is simply no alternative. THIS system so works.
Let us return to
our playwrighting. This, at the level of Shakespeare, simply does not exist
as a possibility since the array of letters, open strokes is merely ONE SMALL
result of understanding and thought. Reproduce these and still you have done
almost nothing. They must, to be what they are, be SUSCEPTIBLE to understanding
BY a suitable receptor, and OPERATE at that level.
The arrangement is
trivial; the communication is realms ahead of it. The letters, indeed, have
significance of brilliance ONLY because of what they convey. In an extreme,
and perhaps alerting illustration, one might say they are slaves carrying
the communication of their master to someone.
The slaves convey, and without this, this means would not work at all; to that extent they are important in the process; but WHAT they convey is not at all their domain. They are simply instrumental for something wholly beyond them, clever enough to use them to transmit the realities of that domain, to one able either 1) to understand them or 2) being a thing, able to execute them so that the thing planned and planted, actually occurs. The latter is the hard case when symbols go beyond expression and have to incorporate AS WELL the means for construction and reproduction on site, of the imagination involved.
Each word has its own rules, laws, required facilities and functional co-operation reservoir in OUR play, our own construction that we walk about with, and may not dispense with, except at departure from this earth; and its genetic stabiliser-implementer provisions. It is all so integrated that all possibilities have to be in view so that the whole works in a coherent, brilliant system, effectively. If it is subjected to vanity, to corruption, to decay, to tribulation in some cases, it yet has extraordinary resilience.
THAT is why it works.
Deprive it, and it does not work; let it deteriorate and it works less. Try
to start even with it assumed, but without the coherence scenario provision,
and it does not work.
It does not work because
it lacks what it needs. It can be IMAGINED easily, provided it is intelligent
imagination. But then, imagination is not the issue, in MAKING the thing.
It is a necessary cause in the ONE WHO MAKES IT, but of itself it is entirely
inadequate. You need power, relevant power, and contrivance. In us, at this
point of discussion, imagination is merely a substitute for the necessary
action which accordingly, we do not DO. We are not the creator. Nor were
we there to do it.
It, imagination, however,
is here. It is indeed ONE of our OWN features. The meaning is conveyed in
even much of our equipment with which birth endowed us, and as it is implemented
past symbols into actuality, we gain means of expressing ...meaning ourselves.
ROSES AND STAR-THISTLES
Roses do not grow on star-thistles, no, and nor do figs, as Christ said. It is for a very good reason. They have as ONE of their facets, a programmatic nexus ot vast ramifications and unitary character. You could still have roses if the programmer used the power directly and made them without the multiple generation provision our roses in fact possess. But this programming, it requires a MORE complex working of intelligence. It attests yet more than seeing it suddenly happen in front of you.
Work
? for it
to work at the level of thought, it must be invested with it. As to work,
it can, in certain circumstances, transcend the materials it uses, because
they are like logo-building blocks (which in that case are not even alive!),
able to be transformed beyond their inherent conformity, by imagination's
realm. Work can use symbols, logic, data, knowledge, understanding,
imagination of what does not as yet exist in the unpurposeful material realm,
and systematically deploy, dictate to, direct the system it creates, so that
the wisdom of the maker and his/her power may be seen.
It functions because
it is there.
System however is merely the integral assemblage whose powers and levels are as instituted by the systematiser. Time enables it to display what that system is; its levels of facility because of this, are to be discerned. It is not something else which it displays; for it is not something else which deploys. What it has, it shows; and the longer you give it, the more assuredly it shows just that. If it were not so, that would not be the nature of the system. Matter does its bit; mind; spirit. None substitutes. All vary. Each has its indications. None can act for the other.
Cadillacs do not soar into clouds; for that is not the nature of their systems. Aged university professors, verging on antiquity, do not print at record levels, their fingers racing over the keys. Their systems, however complex, lack this feature, and hence they do not possess this facility.
Even freshly cut piles of pine logs teach us these things. Reluctant nature deification merely smuggles into one system, the exalted ingredients of another; and ultimately of the systematiser, whose understanding made each and every system, the strategy and concept of systems, in their supervision, their natures, limits and laws, in which as subordinated systems, they obediently abide. That is why it is idolatry, so much warned against in Old Testament times, in New Testament times, and in epidemic proportions in our own. We noted more than once the prediction of the situation in detail in II Peter 3, and considered this in detail.
Man ? he is different in one thing. For in him, system has its overseer who can dispose thought to assault structure of mind, spirit or body, and of God if such were reachable, so that the character of excellence is marred. Man has gone astray. His freedom is open to abuse, and he has abused it. He is an ACTIVE systematiser, inside a systematic series of procedures, invented for his beck and call: or perhaps to be used for the purpose of his rebuke and reproof, as he finds in some of his saner, or humbler moments, when he is not dully murdering by the million, starving children by countless thousands, dismembering youth, blasting bodies with land mines, or spreading radioactivity, and living by it, in so small an earth as this one, so vulnerable.
But then, we merely pass beyond (but not without) system, to an illustration of the NATURE of an ACTIVE sub-systematiser, such as man. That is a very profound creation, and creature; but it too has its laws, facilities, qualities, calibre and results as it uses the sub-systems at its finger tips (in some cases literally). Often it does this with sublime foolishness and arrogance, like an adolescent wrecking his dad's car. It is theft. It is unauthorised. It is dangerous. It will have results.
God made man and man made sin. It is amazing enduement that enables it; it is his folly that does it (cf. Romans 5)..
Matter, mind, spirit, and sub-sections, each shows what it is, by what it does. Imagining systems to be other than their structure displays is mere confusion. It alters nothing but the rationality of the thinker who thinks in this manner, and in the end, denies reason itself, making nothing the mother of something (or else magic, which is much the same) and system the offspring of disorder.
The minimal cause for what we have, a self-existent, eternal, intelligent Being of understanding which has no directive implant, this remains. His qualities include entire sufficiency for the products of His activity, from the first. If HE 'improved', then as a system-component in which this was achieved, he would be a product, in turn. This would change the mode, merely calling for the creator of this proposed intermediary agent, for HIS creator; but it would not affect the logical need, necessity. Whatever subordinate angels there are, these are not the series, system, total environment and occupancy figure, the creator.
More or less is wholly
irrelevant to the logical requirement. In the end, there is One without beginning,
who was also adequate for what He did. That is basic to its happening. We
are expressive of it. HOW He did it is His affair; that He needed what it
takes, is our affair; and that the evidence indicates His method to be one
of total creation of types, as His word, the Bible, indicates, is also
our affair, since this too is the evidence of the world that it gives to us.
They match, these things. It is also our affair to notice that. In the case
of the Bible, such matching is the name of the game: which game ? That of
God's explicit challenge (Isaiah 48). When an enemy aircraft is about to
shoot you down, it is time to less to your Squadron Leader, watching above.
It is time to heed reality. Disease and death are merely two of the elements
of this subjection
to vanity,
of which the Bible speaks. DELIVERANCE from vanity is the other side (II
Corinthians
Overall, then, God is always the same, not progressing as a sub-unit, always adequate, just as the propounders of unreason are not: but are without Him, disastrously embraced in system: like a child with her hand caught in a car door, they are dragged along. At times, they stand in old-fashioned cars, on the running board, but that is their position. It is not at all admirable. With that, they should not ... proceed.
It is as if she were screaming,
our figurative child, uttering irrational gibberish. She must be still
long enough to hear what is to be done. It is always a miracle when she stops
and listens. Sometimes she pretends she is not hurting but this does not
alter her position. She needs to be still and know that the Lord is God.
He has been at great pains to let her know...
End-
Notes
and
Excursions
*1
Answers to Questions Ch. 5, Appendix.
Parallel in kind, and in the same vein, is this complementary admission from Gould:
"The absence of fossil
evidence for intermediate stages between major transitions in organic design,
indeed our inability, even in imagination, to construct functional intermediates
in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic
accounts of evolution" - 'Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?',
from Paleobiology, vol. 6(1), January 1980, p. 127.
A
MATTER OF METHOD
in
CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
1
a) A
CAMBRIAN CONCEPT
The Cambrian
The Bang
The Demonstration
cf. That Magnificent Rock Ch. 7, Section E
It is not to be desired, that the righteous should bow before the wicked, says the Proverb. Nor is it, when as ambassador for truth, he/she is on commission.
Thus the FACT of the Cambrian "Age" (admittedly a philosophical construct, but then, we are showing on THEIR territory, their prodigious failure, no righteous holds barred) is evidencing an explosion so vast that Gould wallows in it, glories in it, expostulates in it, admonishes concerning it, uses public address systems to embrace the ear concerning it, details it, lists it, loves it: this has to be faced level-headedly.
It is everything that Gould says, and more, in the dimension of novelty, innovation, prodigious spread of engineering design impact, streams of PHYLA not now around, EARLY rock profusion leaving current biotic levels LESS! How can one say this ? Simply because the innovations back of the innovations, those of constructive thought and executive means require MORE than what appears. This is merely the aircraft, as it were, in motion, watched by the buyers. BEFORE THAT, the thing has to be ENVISAGED, and put together in mind, in thought, in the domains which, like it or not, are the necessary field of activities which are their specialty.
Hence the suggestion one has recently read, that the astute Christian Apologist no more really STRESSES the Cambrian situation is not to the point. This is to yield to propaganda, to go with the flow of frothy philosophy. Gould's endeavour to philosophise with irrational modes, on the basis of his actual scientific observations have no more validity than the expositions in this volume attest. It is what he has SEEN that is important. His exuberance in attestation of the facts is delightful.
That is not to be countermanded by philosophy, far less acceptable philosophy.
On the basic premiss that the rock record and its piles, strata, modes and manners, IS a RECORD in a TIME dimension BASICALLY and one with supreme importance in DATING, which has NOT AT ALL ceased to play this pirate's role, then the RESULTS of the CAMBRIAN explosion, which on Gould's attestation is in effect in the atomic dimension, after using merely conventional explosives, MUST be stressed ALL THE MORE, by those for whom evidence is critical, vital, crucial, and not merely a prelude to tiresome philosophy.
IF the rock strata are to be abandoned in the above role; well. Let us hear it. If not, very well, let us draw conclusions in terms of the philosophical parameters imposed by the organic evolutionists.
On those bases, it is all that has been said. It is outrageous, as incredible as to Nilsson, were the flood evidences (see SMR Index Nilsson), or the mutational NON-PROGRESS to LØvtrup; and indeed with these senses of profound outrage, that of the paleontological, the fossil gaping and unredeemed gaps to Director W.R. Thompson (Index, Thompson) . These with Gould are protesting in a furore of disgust, a clamour of incredulity at the REALLY VAST GAP, the one between two precipices, those of theory and evidence. What they do is one thing; that they have been outraged is another. Folly is at the helm in these philosophic substitutes for theories relating to data, for the most simple reason that they not merely lack finesse in adroitly handling the data for an explanation, they would NEVER BE THOUGHT OF, to use Gould's masterpiece of phrasing. Further one should indeed go: they are the OPPOSITE of apt theories for the evidence. They are philosophically propelled like warships against the tide of evidence. There mission is not scientific AT ALL!
Hence all these outrages are justified. They ALL hit gradualism. Various as are the suggestions for 'resolution' in reform and change of theory, NONE has been acceptable to all, for the very good reason that NONE is really based on fact and indications and known laws or logic any more than the original! With ONE exception: that of W.R. Thompson, who justly and clearly adduces the fields of evidence and those them all utterly devastated by the alien theory superimposed on them, whereas one, which is neither new nor at all difficult, creationism merely IS VERIFIED; and in THIS, it is WHOLLY UNIQUE.
By no means, therefore,
let us supinely , or indeed in any other way, accept the concept that the
Cambrian excursion is no longer on the tourist guide list for travellers
to these realms, in Christian Apologetics. It is as devastating as ever;
and Gould's desire to distance himself from its clear cut impact, with an
immersion in detail is just what he said it was at the outset in WONDERFUL
LIFE, an alternative to addressing the real issue of HOW did it happen.
In the end he seems to return rather shame-facedly, or at least almost surreptitiously,
with some reference to some particular corpus of characteristics found, like
so very many others, in an interesting combination of the same. Novelty is
almost the name of the game. Its sheer profusion SCIENTIFICALLY ADDRESSED
in terms of known phenomena, known laws and causal stringency REQUIRES innovative
capacity correlative, and that is FAR more, and not at all less, than that
of any man, or indeed, than that of the ENTIRE human race for SEVERAL generations,
working in the growing tip of its super-abundant research!
b) The
CONFORMITY CONCEPT
The Grotesqueries of Unreason,
and
Drying out from
the Drugs Drunk
at that
Blind DATE,
from the Cup of Continuity...
or
CONQUERING THE EARTH WITHOUT GUNS - IN ORDER
TO LOSE IT
OVERVIEW concerning TIME, RATES, SPATES, DATES
and the APPROPRIATE CHRISTIAN