“Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” < Back Causality and 'The Bhagavad Gita' David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” In an earlier article Cause and Effect , we spelled out a ‘new’ theory of causality , based in part on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. According to this model, every ‘act’ ( aka Actual Entity) begins with the conversion of the disordered multiplicity that is Universe (“Universe is plural” – Buckminster Fuller) into a uniquely ordered nexus, an Actual World. Each Actual Entity (event) has its own Actual World: one world, one event; one event, one world! However, it is important to note at the outset that the Actual World does not in any way cause or determine its Actual Entity; rather every Actual Entity determines its own Actual World. The first stage in the concrescence of any Actual Entity is a single process with three aspects: (1) conversion of the Multiplicity (Universe) into a nexus (Actual World), (2) evaluation of that nexus in terms of objective eternal values, and (3) formation of intent (‘subjective aim’), not necessarily conscious, based on that evaluation. Expressed this way, these three ‘aspects’ seem to suggest a sequence; however, that is a trick of language. In fact, they constitute a single act with three simultaneous aspects. In the real world, process is multi-valent, not simply vectored through time. This initial stage is motivated and guided by transcendental values (‘eternal objects’), like Beauty, Truth, and Justice, that logically (not temporally) precede Universe and subsist in God’s Primordial Nature. The final stage in the concrescence of any Actual Entity is also a single process with three simultaneous aspects: (1) satisfaction, (2) objective immortality, and (3) superject. These aspects are denotatively identical but connotatively distinct. Here the three-in-one phenomenon is a bit more apparent. ‘Satisfaction’ is the realization of the ‘subjective aim’ as felt by the Actual Entity itself; ‘objective immortality’ is that satisfaction seen from the perspective of the Multiplicity; and ‘superject’ is that objective immortality felt by other Actual Entities, including God’s Consequent Nature. The function of every act is to convert intention into satisfaction. This is the act itself and the process is called ‘concrescence’ (Whitehead). In the process of concrescence, the subjective aim usually undergoes substantial modification. The event ends as a ‘settled matter of fact’ (objective immortality) projected (superject) into the Actual Worlds of all future Actual Entities. The ‘subject’ of the action, the Actual Entity itself, is responsible (1) for its intention (subjective aim), (2) for its objective immortality (superject), and (3) for the way (‘subjective form’) that the intention is reflected in the satisfaction. Style counts! Every event is sui generis , it ‘causes itself’. Is this Nihilism? Or Solipsism? The very opposite! Every event begins with an evaluation of ‘everything that is’, and the formation of a complex intention that reflects that valuation and the relevant values it seeks to realize. On the other hand, no event is responsible for the way it is received by and integrated into subsequent Actual Entities. That is entirely the responsibility of those subsequent entities. Because every event is sui generis , no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event. This model of reality is not new, not to me, not even to Whitehead. In fact, I discovered a similar concept of causality in a 2000 year old Hindu scripture, the justly famous Bhagavad Gita . Let’s set the scene: We are on a field of battle but Arjuna, commander of one of the armies, is having second thoughts. He recognizes his kinship with the warriors on the other side and he is loath to kill them: “I foresee no good resulting from slaughtering my kin in war…for if we killed these murderers, evil like theirs would cling to us…The wrong done by this destruction is evident… Nor do we know whether it would be better for us to vanquish them or to be overcome.” In just a few words, Arjuna raises three cogent arguments against ‘activism’: (1) ‘karma’ from committed acts blows back on whoever commits those acts; (2) the acts that duty calls us to perform may be immoral per se (for example, killing other human beings); (3) there is no way to know anything about the long term consequences of our actions. Fortunately, however, Arjuna is best buds with the divine Lord Krishna and this ‘Handsome Haired One’ sets the ‘Strong-Armed Warrior’ straight: “Your concern should be with action, never with action’s fruits.” Lord Krishna swats away Arjuna’s weighty reservations with the flick of his supple wrist. In the process, he exposes the unstated premise undergirding both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: i.e., that future events ( ends ) are ‘caused’ by prior events ( means ). Krishna exhorts Arjuna to detach himself from the fruits of his actions and to focus exclusively on the actions themselves. This is not an appeal for Quietism. Rejection of the fruits of action is not the same thing as rejection of action itself: “Not by not acting in this world does one become free from action… Not even for a moment does someone exist without acting… In order to maintain the world, your obligation is to act… Should I not engage in action these worlds would perish, utterly…” Today, we know that the cessation of all activity is synonymous with Absolute Zero on the Kelvin Scale; 0°K defines Big Freeze , the end of Universe. Krishna was ahead of his time. Non-action is an illusion. To be is to act. The question is how : “Scripture is your authority for what to do and not to do. Understanding its injunctions, you are obliged to action…These actions, though, should be performed without attachment to their fruits…” By Scripture, the Gita is referring to the Hindu Vedas and the Upanishads. Scripture plays a comparable role in Judeo-Christian theology. Here though, we are referring to the Torah, the Midrashim, the Talmud, the Semon on the Mount, etc. “All actions are undertaken by the qualities of nature though one deceived by his ego imagines, ‘I am doing this’… Qualities act on one another.” In other words, God, the conduit of all values into the world, acts through us, his mortal agents. Per Whitehead, all action is motivated by qualities (values). Actual Entities are the loci of acts but the acts themselves are pure expressions of values. The ‘subject’ is merely the mechanism by which those values are realized in the present and projected into the future. “Better to do one’s own duty ineptly than another’s well.” Here, The Gita calls to mind Paul’s contemporaneous Letter to Ephesians: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God had prepared in advance that we should live in them.” (2: 10) We do not determine our duty. We divine it and we perform it…or we don’t! Duty is dictated by the ‘eternal objects’ ( aka ‘transcendental values’) that constitute God’s Primordial Nature. Nor is Krishna (God) exempt from these laws ( dharma ): “In order to protect the good…and to establish righteousness, age after age, I come to be.” God too is a manifestation of ‘qualities acting on one another’. Good is what constitutes God and it is God who projects Good into Universe. No Good, no God! No God, no Good! This is a radical form of the ontological argument for the existence of God. Medieval theologians noted that some entities are ‘more good’ than others. They reasoned that there must therefore be something that is ‘ most good ’, and that whatever is ‘most good’ must exist, because it is better to exist than not. That ‘most good being’ is what we call ‘God’. The Gita arrives at the same destination via a somewhat different route; Krishna says, “Know me as one who never acts.” - i.e., as one who selflessly lets qualities act through him. Speaking of qualities, “Of lights, I am the radiant sun…of stars, I am the Moon…of beings, I am consciousness…of waters, I am Ocean…of mountains, I am the Himalayas…of mortal men, I am the king…of rivers, I am Ganges…of creations, I am beginning, middle, and end…of speakers, I am the discourse…of secrets, I am the silence, and the knowledge of those who know…” Anslem of Bec never wrote like this! But a Medieval Irish poet ( St. Dallan ) came close: “Be Thou my vision…my best thought…my light…my wisdom…my true word…my treasure...” Like Dallan, Krishna defines himself in terms of essential qualities: “I am water’s taste, Arjuna, I am the light of the sun and moon…sound in the air, manhood in men. I am the pure fragrance of earth and the radiance of fire; I am the life in all beings…the mind of the intelligent, the splendor of the radiant. I am the might of the mighty…” “And know that states of being…proceed from me – however, I am not in them, they are in me…Here behold all the universe…standing as one in my body.” “I am that which is the seed within all beings, Arjuna – without me nothing can exist.” The Gospel of John applies this same insight to Christ: “All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be.” (1: 3) Finally, Krishna makes clear to Arjuna that he neither controls nor is responsible for the course of events in the world: “Those warriors arrayed in lines opposing your men, even without you, will have perished…I have destroyed your enemy already: serve as my tool, O Ambidextrous Archer! (Arjuna)” “Who sees himself as the sole doer, does not see…even after slaying these people, he neither slays, nor is he bound…” Arjuna is responsible for discerning his duty, perhaps with a gentle nudge from Lord Krishna, and then performing that duty to the best of his ability. That will be his legacy, not the outcome of some battle now barely visible through the fog of history. So how is any of this different from the traditional Western view of causality? I’ll grant you the distinction is subtle…but important! We tend to focus on intent, motive, ‘what was he trying to do’. The model we are proposing here includes the formation of intent but also the execution of that intent. Our judges put great emphasis on the dismount. We focus on ‘settled matters of fact’: what did he do! We are not concerned, however, with what happens next. What use future Actual Entities make of Arjuna’s Objective Immortality is between them and their God. Leave Arjuna out of it. He is not to blame for the Great London Fire (1666) or for Johnny’s poor performance on this morning’s algebra exam. So, in the spirit of Voltaire ( Candide ), “Tend to your own patch!” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Consciousness and Genesis David Cowles Jul 20, 2026 “Our model has confirmation from an unexpected but unimpeachable source…and it’s been hiding in plain sight for more than 2500 years.” 1300 words, 6 minute read In Consciousness and/or Free Will we presented a new model of consciousness, emphasizing the ‘observer role’ of consciousness and removing it from the ‘agentic process’ because… It doesn’t do anything! Yet we argued that separating consciousness from agency did not compromise free will. Admittedly, it was a tough sell; but then again, it’s a difficult topic. Now suddenly our model has confirmation and it’s from an unexpected but unimpeachable source…and it’s been hiding in plain sight for more than 2500 years: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the abyss, and the Spirit was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” Yup, that’s right, these are the opening verses of the Book of Genesis (1: 1-3), the first book of the (Old Testament) Torah, codified c. 500 BCE but traditionally attributed to YHWH via Moses. Good pedigree; good chain of custody. But what on earth does this have to do with consciousness and free will? Well, dear reader, if you’ll grant me just three things, I think I’ll be able to demonstrate the validity of our model to even your skeptical satisfaction: (1) God exists and the universe is his creative act, (2) God has free will, (3) God is conscious. For many these assumptions are non-starters but for most theists in the Western tradition, they pretty much go without saying. Either way , they offer a model of consciousness that is consistent with our understanding of the phenomenon, so let’s break it down: We begin with a dark, empty, formless abyss. Theologians have long argued over the precise nature of such a cosmic state, but modern cosmology suggests that apparently competing interpretations may be denotatively synonymous (e.g. ex nihilo = chaos ; Big Freeze = Big Crunch). Confronting the primal existential state (above), God does not deliberate; he acts. Note : In both testaments and in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, ‘to speak’ is ‘to make be’, as in: “ What there is for speaking and knowing, there is for being. ” (Parmenides, On Nature , Fragment 6) “In the beginning was the Word (logos)…(and) through him (logos) all things were made.” (Gospel of John, 1:1-3) Presumably, if God acts, God acts freely. What could compel him? He acts in ways that are consistent with his omnibenevolent nature (Good) but otherwise, everything is possible. God is potentiality per se , omnipotentia as well as omnipotentem . If it is possible and willed, it is done: factorem caeli et terrae . (Nicene Creed) Confronted with darkness, God freely wills light, “and there was light.” In doing so, he reveals a divine value (light). Willing light, God calls it into being. So far, we have God, being aware of the state of things, applying values, willing, speaking, creating. But we have no warrant to assume that God is conscious. It makes sense that he would be conscious, but so far we have no testimony to that effect. And then we do! “God saw that it was Good.” (Genesis 1: 4) Only now are we sure that the left hand knows what the right hand has done. God perceived the world as it was, judged it according to his essential values (Good), and proposed (will) to change it (act) in accordance with those values. So far, God is just like us. We perceive the world, we apply values and, guided by those values, we judge. Then based on that judgment we propose changes intended to reflect our values and we act to make the proposed actual. So far, but no farther! We work like crazy to implement our proposed changes and the result is always very far from what we intended. God, on the other hand, ‘speaks’ and it is so, with nary a blip from lip to sip. God said , “Let there be Light,” and there was Light. “God saw that the light was good…” Initially, God perceived the Void, judged it according to his values, and corrected what he saw. Rinse and repeat. God judges what he has created and proceeds based on that assessment: “…And he separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1 : 4) In other words, (1) he judged his work favorably, (2) he accepted it, and (3) he acted to make it permanent and universal. God acts to make Light a fixed feature of all future Actual Worlds. John offers this commentary: “Light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 5) Finally, God uses the naming function of language ( namo ) to codify this ‘new world order’: “He called the light day , and the darkness he called night , and there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” (Genesis 1: 5) God’s creative act is now part of the historical record. Returning to our thesis, Creation begins with Perception, Valuation, and Will, none of which require consciousness. Consciousness is both the engine and the artifact of recursion. The original ‘creative algorithm’ is reapplied to the initial result and consciousness, awareness of differance (Derrida), emerges. Consciousness is an emergent aspect of experience. It is preceded, ontologically, by awareness, valuation, will, and action. Consciousness is the product of these primary acts. It is what happens when the creative process is applied to its own product, i.e. when God evaluates what he has created. Likewise, we are conscious when we reflect on our acts, on ourselves in the world. But that does not make consciousness inert, or de trop . God’s conscious valuation of the consequences of his actions becomes catalyst for each new application of the process. As does ours! Once launched, the process repeats indefinitely, but at each iteration, valuation, will, and act precede conscious awareness. In fact, the same process, expressed via the same formula, occurs 5 more times, just in the first chapter of Genesis . God continues the process of separating and gathering, making the one many and the many one, and finding the results good . In each case, conscious assessment follows awareness, will, and action. However, we are not God. Unlike you and me, God cannot create something that is less than wholly good. Therefore, the concept of moral responsibility doesn’t really apply. Would that we could say the same about our actions! The idea that we are morally responsible for actions we undertake before we are conscious of deciding to do them seems illogical…and unfair. One is reminded of Through the Lookingglass where the King’s Messenger, “…is in prison now, being punished, and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday, and of course, the crime comes last of all.” Consider, however, that we perform dozens of acts every day with ‘marginal’ conscious intent but for which we are at least partly responsible. The actions I’m talking about are traditionally parceled out into several bins: genetic predisposition, instinct, reflex, habit, conditioned response, duress (physical, psychological or emotional), intoxication, etc. Only when one is compelled to commit an act involuntarily can responsibility be entirely mitigated. That is certainly not the case for actions we undertake preconsciously. Plus our conscious evaluation of our preconscious actions becomes part of the ‘private record’ and thereby influences future preconscious decisions. So, our ‘crazy’ model is mainstream after all. It is embedded in the West’s best known creation narrative. It makes sense to view our own experience through this lens. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Good God Paul Tillich David Cowles Oct 4, 2025 “…It makes no difference what direction we look, it’s utter devastation everywhere. Oh, the price we pay to have no God!” In 1959, existentialist theologian, Paul Tillich, kicked off a logical cascade when he innocently defined Faith as ‘ultimate concern’. What’s your ‘ultimate concern’? Is it sex, drugs or rock-and-roll? Is it power, status, or fame? Money or security? Family or friends? Health or happiness? Whatever your ‘ultimate concern’, that is your Good and therefore that is your God . Tillich’s surprise definition puts idolatry on the same footing as monotheism. It’s simply a matter of ‘ultimate concerns’. If my ‘ultimate concern’ is a lump of clay, so be it. As in AA and other 12 step programs, each person is free to designate anything as their personal Higher Power . If I make a Faith commitment to inorganic matter, then I am at most guilty of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead) – i.e. considering something to be something it isn’t, for example a ‘god’ that is not and could not possibly be God. (I’m not just in the wrong pew, I’m in the wrong church…but I’m still living a life of Faith per Tillich.) It is comforting to think that everything we do is motivated by our conception of what is Good (i.e. our Faith) because whatever is Good is ‘God’. There is just one fly in this ointment: we decide what is Good for us and therefore we each define, i.e. create, our own God. By definition, Good and God must transcend our immanent world (otherwise, per Nietzsche, they would have no normative function or value and without that, they would be meaningless terms). But we have turned that relationship on its head; we have made the Immanent normative. Sometimes, you can invert a relationship and everything runs smoothly; the relationship is symmetrical and reciprocal. This is not one of those times. If the Immanent is normative then what-is is normative for what will be. Therefore any change is ‘bad’, i.e. a reduction of Good. Talk about radical conservatism! Assuming that ‘things’ are motivated to act (or change) by their sense of what’s Good (for them), no such motivation could exist, ever. Given an Entity A in State X, there is no State Y that would be better than X for A. “Every way you look at this, you lose.” (Simon & Garfunkel) We would be living in Leibniz’ Best of all Possible Worlds . Therefore, the status quo would be locked-in and the Universe would be a frozen solid. Is that bad enough for you? It gets worse ! Assuming a state of non-being is logically, not temporally, prior to a state of being, then non-being would be the eternally preferred state. There would be no universe, and in fact no universe of any sort would ever be possible because anything that might be would be less good than status quo, i.e. nothing at all. And so, Good, God, and even Being itself would be precluded. So we’d be living in Leibniz’ Best of all Possible Worlds but only from the perspective of the present moment. Our Present would by definition be somewhat less good than what immediately preceded it, and what preceded that, and so on. With ‘every move we make, every breath we take’ we regress in value, back toward our origin or forward toward our destiny, which are exactly the same, i.e. nothing. Like Noah, it makes no difference what direction (in space or time) we look, it’s utter devastation everywhere. Oh, the price we pay to have no God! But this is not the way things seem to be. Something is. Value seems graded across a variety of events and options. Devastation is not total, universal, or eternal. So let’s assume this is not the way it is IRL. That there is something immanent means that there must be something transcendent and what is transcendent is also normative for what is immanent. Being is not symmetrical…or democratic. Get over it! The father of Western philosophy, Parmenides (5th century BCE), captured it perfectly in his epic poem, On Nature: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color…all things have been named light and night...” This is Doxa, the realm of appearances. To this Parmenides counterposed the realm of truth, Aletheia : “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole…steadfast and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one… It is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Certainly, Parmenides’ Aletheia is Augustine’s Bonum . Jean-Paul Sartre, a fitting bridge connecting Parmenides and Tillich, devoted an entire novel, Nausea , to this point. We view things as tools or obstacles strewn in the path of life’s projects. We treat life as a video game, avoiding pitfalls and acquiring weapons at every turn. Sartre invites us to encounter things as they are in themselves ( en soi ), as raw existents apart from every context, but he warns us: the experience is likely to make us sick (hence, nausea ). We have no experience viewing the world other than through various mediating membranes; coming in contact with ‘the real thing’ can be shocking – imagine a lifelong Pepsi drinker having her first can of Real Coke! Sidebar : Sartre is an interesting character. An avowed materialist, communist and atheist, he finds himself sharing overnight accommodations with some very unexpected bed fellows: for example, Pope Leo XIII on the matter of absolute freedom and the Baal Shem Tov ( Hasidism ) on meeting things in the world on their own terms, undisguised by noisy utility . So we don’t have to accept the reality of God if we don’t want to but we pay a heavy price. We have to give up Good (as defined philosophically) and ultimately we have to give up Being itself. But hey, that’s a small price to pay to keep our pride: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” (John Milton) *** Giorgio de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses (c. 1916–18) depicts two mannequin-like figures set in an eerie, empty piazza framed by classical architecture and long, unsettling shadows. The stillness and distorted perspective create a dreamlike tension between the familiar and the uncanny, suggesting a world stripped of human warmth yet charged with metaphysical meaning. Through its haunting calm and timeless setting, the painting evokes questions about existence, solitude, and the mysterious workings of consciousness. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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Aletheia Today is a collection of essays designed to offer fresh insights into traditional philosophical and theological problems and to apply those insights to contemporary developments in culture, art and the social and physical sciences. About Us What is Aletheia Today? Aletheia Today is where philosophy, theology, and science converge in a collection of critical thought essays and personal reflections intended to provoke constructive dialog among people of varying ideologies, faiths and belief systems. Travel Back in Time... It’s circa 500 B.C. and Parmenides of Elea is teaching science and philosophy all over the Greek speaking world. Today, he is widely recognized as the Father of Western Science and the Father of Western Philosophy. Statement of Faith AT Magazine is dedicated to elucidating and encouraging the 21st century convergence of philosophy, theology, and science. The editors of ATM are people of faith in the Christian tradition. However, ATM is intended to promote respectful, constructive dialog among people of good will, regardless of religious affiliation, if any. Articles from independent contributors to ATM do not necessarily represent the views of its editorial board. Meet our team of writers. Click here for our masthead.

< Back Bacteriology…and American Football David Cowles “…Will it surprise you to learn that not every bacterium is a team player?” (I am indebted to Holly Barker, Ph.D., and Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, Ph.D., for these insights into the science of bacteriology and to my grandfather, J. Leo Foley, for my appreciation of the art of football.) As children, we waited impatiently for the ‘major holidays’, Halloween and Christmas, and somewhat more patiently for ‘minor holidays’ like Thanksgiving and the 4 th of July. As adults, our priorities have changed: now we join the rest of America in counting down the hours to the beginning of another NFL/NCAA football season. But what on earth does bacteriology have to do with football? A lot, as it turns out, and I’m not talking about COVID-19 infections. Turns out, an understanding of football can enhance our appreciation of cellular processes…and vice versa. In contrast to the bacteria that we (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’) study in the lab, most prokaryotes (cells without nuclei) in nature live in complex communities, often consisting of several interacting, cooperating species. Within these communities, different bacteria assume different responsibilities. Some individuals focus on reproduction to expand the colony, while others specialize in construction, oozing proteins that make up the extracellular superstructure. Yet other bacteria defend the community, building and shooting molecular weapons (toxins) at competitors. What makes this interesting, and important, is that these secondary functions are not hard-wired. Like Shakespeare’s players , ‘one cell in its time plays many parts’. As the needs of the community change, an individual bacterium may take on new responsibilities. In populations of Bacillus subtilis , for example, young microbes are responsible for the production of the colony’s extracellular superstructure, but as that construction progresses, some cells switch to producing spores or enzymes. So how do bacterial colonies coordinate this division of labor? Most likely, they don’t! Then how does it happen? Perhaps individual bacteria simply amplify random fluctuations in cellular chemistry, resulting in auto-specialization. Inefficient, but possible. More likely, cells may react to perceived stresses in the colony, taking it upon themselves to fill the gaps. In no case, however, is it likely that the morphing of cell function is due to the cell’s structure ‘at birth’ or to direction from some central or hierarchical ‘authority’. Football commentary places a lot of emphasis on game plan (i.e., the X’s and O’s, the plays as designed). This is the functional equivalent of the bacterium’s DNA. But does strategy (alone) win football games? Of course not, execution is key, and execution comes in two flavors: How well does the team execute its designed plays? How well does the team execute plays that are not designed, i.e. the plays that happen once the designed plays fall apart in the fog…in other words, all plays? Researchers have known for more than 20 years that bacteria differentiate in order to enable complex social behaviors that benefit the colony as a whole. But will it surprise you to learn that not every bacterium is a team player? Hmm. While members of the colony generally ‘realize’ that the overall health of the colony broadly benefits its members, it is also the case that some players seek to enhance their individual well-being by free riding . Sound familiar? Instead of producing (secreting) socially valuable molecules, these cells assume the role of consumers , reaping where they did not sow, taking advantage of the insight and labor of their eleemosynary cousins. So how is a football team like a colony of bacteria? First, each player is assigned a ‘position’ and that position includes a specific set of behaviors which become that player’s primary responsibility. But as with bacterial colonies, this is only the beginning. As each play unfolds, novel stresses arise which must be addressed if the team is going to meet its goals (e.g., score points). After fulfilling their prime directive , each player must react ‘to circumstances on the ground’: What secondary function can I perform that will increase the play’s likelihood of success? My pass route’s a bust; can I still get open? I knocked down one defender: why not two? I’m supposed to run over Center, but the front’s a brick wall; should I run to daylight? I missed one tackle; but can I still catch up to the action and try again? And the free riders ? These are the guys who ‘do their jobs’…who just do their jobs. They will throw themselves full force into a pig pile…once the ball carrier is safely down…or push a retreating runner out of bounds. So long as the free riders are relatively few, and team relatively successful, these malcontents are likely to get away with their shenanigans. But once free riding proliferates, or the team starts to lose, as it will, watch out! Since Genesis, we humans have shamefully sought to distance ourselves from ‘lower’ life forms; you know, plants, other animal species, people from other tribes, races, nations…the usual suspects. But the last 50 years have made it crystal clear that this strategy is a bust! It is as impractical as it is immoral. We need a new, more inclusive, bio-ethics, and I suggest that we begin our investigations with a new guiding principle: “Bacteria…and football players…are people too!” Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Next

< Back What Do You Know, Joe? David Cowles May 14, 2024 “...The less you ‘know’, the less certainly wrong you are. You approach truth by shedding error. What can I unlearn today?” My six-year-old grandchild confronted my daughter, “Tell me everything you know.” And it got me thinking…what do we know? How do we know it? And how confident are we that we’ve got it right? Riddle : How is knowledge like an onion? Answer : It makes us cry? Well, yes, that, but also, it presents as a series of concentric spheres: You peel it like sweet Vidalia! The outermost layer (‘Level One’) consists of practical, how-to knowledge: how to build a car, how to fly to the moon, how to repair a pothole (as if!). I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty secure about our knowledge at this level. Of course, we will learn to do stuff better, but I can’t foresee us concluding that a major part of this Level One knowledge is actually false . Level One Confidence : > 99%. When it comes to ‘what works’, we’ve a pretty extensive library. Most of what we know at Level One, we learned merely by trial and error. Just imagine how much we don’t have to know in order to know that rubbing two sticks together can generate a flame. Next level : Why does rubbing two sticks together, in the proper way under the proper conditions, make fire? Well, we’ve got a handle on that too…we think. We have a model of friction and kindling that accounts for the phenomenon of flame. It’s possible that it might get tweaked someday but it’s unlikely to be proven flat out wrong. Unlikely…but not inconceivable. Level Two Confidence : 99%. After ‘friction and kindling’ things get interesting. If you’re thinking of serving ‘hearts of onion’ at your next lawn party, you’ll want to begin here. If ‘friction and kindling’ can account for flame, what do we need to know to account for the fact that friction and kindling can generate fire? What questions do we need our next layer of onion to address? Well, we need a theory of stability and change, of material and metamorphosis. We have sticks, we have motion, but why is it that sticks + motion generate flame? Once again, we have an answer: matter + heat. We feel good about what we know but now we’re just a little bit less certain. Maybe some new model will come along that we’ll like better. Probably not, but maybe. Level Three Confidence : 95%. “Going down! Level Four, particles and forces,” intoned the elevator operator (c. 1960 CE). My favorite floor! Bosons, hadrons, and fermions, oh my! The so-called ‘Standard Model’ is like a Las Vegas buffet: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) Now it is likely (but not certain) that this ‘Standard Model’ will have to be tweaked. Much of the information we’re working with will carry over, but new details are likely to emerge. Level Four Confidence : 50%. What’s next? What comes after Fundamental Particles and Forces? What’s more fundamental than ‘fundamental’? Surprisingly, this silly question has a serious answer; actually, it has a lot of serious answers: strings, n-dimensional spaces, topological twists, singularities, quantum gravity, branes, the multiverse…and that’s the problem: ‘a lot of serious answers’. Level Five Confidence : 10%. But believe it or not, we’re still not finished. The most important question of all remains: What’s it all about, Alfie ? (Don’t say ‘42’…or ‘a ripe banana’) We have arrived on the shore of the River Styx, the ‘turn’ as we say in Texas Hold ’em, the place where physics and metaphysics meet, where cosmology and theology merge. What lies ‘behind’ all this, if anything? Our search now must take us to other realms: to scripture, poetry, and philosophy. To mysticism and music. To art in all its forms. We are no longer in the realm of the empirical. Given that , what’s our confidence level? Sidebar : In the Divine Comedy , Dante and Virgil encounter Satan at the nadir of the Inferno; he is encased in a block of ice. As our travelers depart Hell for Purgatory, they look back and are surprised to see Satan hanging upside down. Dante and Virgil are traveling through non-orientable space. So are we! I would even go so far as to say we are ‘disoriented’, wouldn’t you? But it’s not just Dante, Virgil and us, dear reader. People have been disoriented for millennia. Like that time you took LSD in the ‘60s. Or the time Alice was turned around in Through the Lookingglass . Trying to walk to the top of a nearby hill, she kept finding herself further away. Precocious child, she decided to walk away from the hill…and soon she found herself at the summit. Now the math gets really interesting, because from here on, all values are negative : the ‘more we know’ the ‘less we know ’. Crazy? Crazy! But also true. For example, suppose you claim to know all Level Six information with 100% certainty. Congratulations! But what you know you know with a confidence level of -100% . You don’t just know nothing; much worse: what you do ‘know’ is certainly wrong. From here on, the less you ‘know’, the less certainly wrong you are. You approach truth by shedding error. What can I unlearn today? Teacher, unlearn me! If you manage to get to a point where you fully understand that you know absolutely nothing on this level…then perception and reality meet again. You know nothing and you know nothing with a confidence level of 0%. Why 0%, not 100%? Because to be sure you knew nothing would be a kind of knowledge…and I can’t grant you even that. Sorry, old bean. So now, just imagine the plight of the poor philosopher, working all her life just to get as close as she can to knowing nothing and then knowing nothing with no confidence. Well, that’s you! (…and me). Keep the conversation going. 1. 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Healthcare is a problem and not just in the US. Everywhere cost and quality battle; everywhere both are losing. But as in so many other things, the US is the bell cow. Aletheia Today is the magazine for believers in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together. AI First Healthcare June 1, 2026 Issue Healthcare is a problem and not just in the US. Everywhere cost and quality battle; everywhere both are losing. But as in so many other things, the US is the bell cow. Healthcare has been an issue in the US since the mid-60’s and it has perhaps been issue #1 over the last 40 years. Today, it consumes almost 20% of our GDP but 30% of that cost is spent on treatment that is not appropriate for the patient’s actual condition – that’s 6% of GDP lost…not to mention the human cost. We’ve tried provider networks, we’ve tried managed care, we’ve tried consumerism, we’ve tried wellness – nothing works! Surprised? We know that government control, price fixing, supply rationing, and demand management never work…ever, anywhere, for almost anything. So why should healthcare be any different? What does work, almost always, almost everywhere, for almost anything? Technology. Why not give it a go? Lord knows we’re tried everything else. Now don’t get me wrong. Doctors know a lot; they know how to do a lot of things. But the system is structured so that this knowledge rarely benefits the typical patient during a typical interaction. ‘Patient management’ takes the place of genuine care. We have the technology to transform healthcare…we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture. Healthcare & The Titanic “We have the technology to transform healthcare…we just need the will to deploy it and we will begin to build that will only once we stop moving furniture.” Can AI Save Healthcare? “What was once a healing art has become physiological engineering… the healthcare system treats me as if I were a cheap knock-off of the 6 million dollar man.” My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” Who's Afraid of an HMO? “HMOs dumbed down quality and erected formidable barriers to care… (so) why would anyone want to bring them back?” My MD Should Be a Bot “AI is 4 times better at diagnosing complex medical conditions than MDs. This…could be the death knell for the traditional practice of medicine.” Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back Moore's Nativity David Cowles “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” If you want to understand what’s special about the Christian world view, jet to London and visit St. Paul’s Cathedral. Just to the left of the high altar stands one of Henry Moore’s final works, Mother and Child . One of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors and a self-professed non-believer , Moore has nonetheless delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as powerful and unambiguous as the foundational Nicene Creed . In Moore’s work, mother and child emerge together from an undifferentiated block of marble. It is the emergence of the child who reveals the mother, and it is the emergence of the mother who reveals the child. Neither emerges from the block untethered, solo, without the other. No mother, no child, no child, no mother. The Incarnation is a ‘joint effort’ involving both the human and the divine. Mary’s famous Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 - 55) assumes a critical role in Moore’s concept of Nativity. Mother and Child is not your everyday ‘Madonna of the Oxen and the Sheep’. Moore’s marble presents the virgin birth of the Son of God as a violent process in which the pure potentiality of the undifferentiated mass unwinds, albeit stubbornly, to reveal the form hidden within. Implicit in Moore’s version of the Nativity celebrates the interdependence of the celestial and the terrestrial, the divine and the human, the transcendent and the immanent. Only God, who is Courage per se , would dare to create a truly independent universe, guided by its own ‘free will’ - a universe with a ‘mind of its own’. With the Incarnation, God puts himself in play to an extent not seen before, even in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally ascribed to Moses). The parents among us know how difficult it can be to give our children the autonomy they need to grow. Not so God: Fiat lux! There…it’s done! We’re emancipated…and we didn’t even have to go to court, much less fight a civil war, to get there. Nor did God have any second thoughts about what he’d done: “He saw that it was good.” The Book of Job makes it clear that God regretted nothing in his creation, not even Behemoth and Leviathan, the mythical monsters of the Old Testament. Nor did it take long for God to reap the harvest of his ‘naïve’ generosity. Lucifer rebelled against him ‘right out of the chute’ and ‘six days later,’ Adam followed suit. God made the world, but we make our own beds in that world, and for the most part at least, God lets us lie in those beds, undisturbed. God’s game plan lets us suffer the consequences of our actions (or inaction). That’s the price we pay for freedom. In physics, we speak of efficient causation : one billiard ball strikes another, causing the second ball to move in a particular direction with a particular velocity. In metaphysics, we speak of final causation : Amy studied hard so that she would pass the test. In theology, we speak of another type of causation, causa sui (self-causation): God is presumed to be the cause of his own being. But in ontology, on the other hand, we speak of mutual causation , aka ‘bootstrapping’, so evident in Moore’s sculpture. But our modern, Indo-European languages lack the vocabulary and, especially, the syntax needed to facilitate such a conversation. Triune God functions like the three legs of a tripod, working together to ensure the stability of the platform. Vertical ‘transcendence’ supports horizontal ‘immanence’ and vice versa. This is precisely the bee that got into Nietzsche’s bonnet: for him, there is nothing other than the whole (the so-called ‘platform’): nothing outside the whole, nothing beyond the whole and no hierarchy within the whole. Nietzsche was a true ‘ontological democrat’. His world was really and truly flat. This tripod model supports earlier ontological formulations as well: Aletheia supports Doxa (Parmenides), Noumena supports Phenomena (Kant), etc. Earlier versions of today’s Indo-European languages often included a true ‘second person’ (pronouns) and a true ‘middle voice’ (verbs). A true second-person pronoun, Martin Buber’s “Du” for example, suggests intimate mutuality. This is the syntax of love. There is no subjectivity or objectivity, only reciprocity. This is the relationship between mother and child that Moore captures. Diagramming a sentence that includes true second-person pronouns and a middle voice verb is challenging. Second person, middle voice relationships cannot be represented using two arrows pointing in opposite directions. A proper diagram in the context of Christian syntax would consist of a single arrow with two heads, pointing in opposite directions, suggesting that the relationship itself that has ontological priority over the related entities. “At the foundation is relationship” – Martin Buber, I and Thou . The middle voice expresses this same reality on the predicate side. A middle voice verb suggests two “subjects” (or you might just as well say two objects) engaged in a continuous process of mutual modification. There is no modifier, no modified, just mutual modification. Lovers are always ‘second persons’, and the process of love itself is ‘middle voice’. Christianity, as I understand it, is entirely concerned with middle voice relationships: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is the two-headed arrow pointing simultaneously toward self (you) and other (your neighbor). The second person and the middle voice need to be at the foundation of any language capable of carrying the Christian message. In the context of Christian theology, the first and third persons and the active/passive voices are ‘degenerate’ cases. The lover and the loved are one. The lover sees himself in his neighbor. Lover and neighbor form an insoluble dyad. There is no lover without neighbor; there is no neighbor without lover. Lover and neighbor are second-person subjects (co-subjects: du-du ) of middle voice, verbs. In the words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander “they give each other reck,” and, therefore, have ‘being’, just like the mother and child in Moore’s masterpiece. Perhaps the reason that Christianity has fallen out of favor in our era is that Christianity’s second person/middle voice ontology cannot be adequately expressed in any contemporary Indo-European language. It’s easy to see the world in subject/object, active/passive terms. This is the syntax of production, construction, manufacture, etc. We have turned our wise and expressive ancient languages into tools to help us organize collective action, develop and deploy technology, and erect structures (“Tower of Babel”). Our language has lost its ability to talk about ultimate things in a way that resonates with our deepest experiences. We have surrendered the ‘love franchise’ to Hallmark, and so, we turn now to painting, sculpture, and musical composition to express our spiritual intuitions. Henry Moore’s Mother and Child does just that! Moore represents Mary in her “Mother of God” avatar. We have heard this epithet so often that we may fail to grasp the incredible import of these simple words: Mother of God! ( Mater Dei in Latin.) If God is the “maker of…all things visible and invisible” ( Nicene Creed ), then how could God have a mother? Clearly Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a product of God’s created world (and a rather recent product at that); how could she also be God’s mother? In the language of first and third-person pronouns, subjective and objective cases, active and passive voices, efficient and final causes, she could not! But that is not the syntax of Christianity and, in my opinion at least, it is not how the world works. In the Christian-world view, God encompasses spacetime. Eternal, God is both the origin of all that will ever be (“Alpha”) and the summation of all that will ever have been (“Omega”). But even more astoundingly, God is also an element, a quantum, in the world itself: W ɛ G ɛ W. God, who made the world, is also ‘made’ by the world via Mary. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God is incarnate in spacetime, the historical universe. He enters the world between the Alpha and the Omega…even though he already includes both the Alpha and the Omega. In Christian topology, it is just as true to say that the part (Christ) contains the whole as it is to say that the whole contains the part (Jesus). Metaphorically, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed (the smallest of all seeds known at that time); historically, Jesus enters the world as a fertilized cell, an embryo, a fetus, a baby, the poor child of dispossessed parents. At the time of his birth, Jesus was literally homeless, a refugee, a most unlikely candidate for secular kingship, much less cosmic sovereignty. But just as the mustard seed grows into a tree that shelters all birds, so the baby Jesus “grows” into the parousia which is the ultimate unification of everything that is. Mary’s ‘Mother of God’ epithet beautifully exemplifies the cosmic process of mutual reck. It is nothing less than this that Henry Moore captures. One good glacé, and you’ve got it! No need to study theology at university; no need to go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity! Image: Sculpture by Henry Moore (LH 851, St. Paul's Cathedral, London) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Share Previous Next

“Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” < Back The 7th Day David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” Before apes discovered Darwin, Christian children’s knowledge of the Old Testament was spotty at best – a pinch of Able, a dollop of Noah, a morsel of Moses, a whiff of David. But every student knew, almost by heart, the first 34 verses of Genesis. Today, almost no one would introduce Judeo-Christian theology this way. Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away . Teachers, myself included, are now inclined to begin with the heroics of the Exodus, the politics of Joshua and the Judges, the poetry of the Psalmist, the wisdom of Solomon and Job, the eschatology of Daniel and Ezekiel, or the social commentary of Isaiah and Jeremiah. No doubt, much is gained by this approach, but something is lost as well. The first verses of the Book of Genesis describe the state of Universe at the moment of Creation: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” Note that the authors and translators of Genesis carefully avoid using the term ‘before’ in discussing the state of Universe at Creation. Of course, there was no ‘before’; time itself began at Creation. Plus, Judeo-Christian theology makes it clear that God created the Universe ex nihilo : he did not just rearrange deck chairs. So, how could earth, abyss, wind, and waters exist at the moment of Creation? To understand the complex cosmology of Genesis, it is necessary to define what we understand by the term, Event . An event occurs whenever order is injected into disorder. Creation, “Fiat Lux!”, Big Bang, is an event like every other event. It infuses chaos with order. But it is also an uber-event : it is the locus for virtually every other event in Universe. From the perspective of any emerging event, the pre-existent Universe is disordered. It does not matter whether that Universe is ‘perfectly disordered’ (whatever that means)…or whether the emerging event is ‘perfectly ordered’ (whatever that might mean). What matters is that Universe is relatively disordered from the perspective of the event, and that the event is relatively ordered from the perspective of Universe. In any case, an event is the injection of relative order into relative chaos, and that’s all that matters. We know that Universe is becoming progressively disordered; it’s called entropy (2 nd Law of Thermodynamics). Events are islands of order in a torrent of chaos…but sea levels are rising…and not only because of climate change ! Therefore, the emergence of a novel event is not only counter cultural, it’s ‘counter cosmological’. So then, why are there novel events? Why isn’t Universe content to wind down gracefully, to die with dignity? Here Nietzsche and I agree; there is only one possible answer: Value , a concept that has acquired a bad name in our hyper-secularized culture. You see, values can be construed as imperatives and, like two-year-olds everywhere, we hate imperatives. We would rather wallow in ignorance than admit that there were compelling, objective norms beyond our prized, subjective tastes. Contemporary culture encourages us to say that we want to leave the world ‘a better place’ than we found it. But ‘better’ how? More beautiful, more truth-filled, more just? And so we’re “singing songs…and carrying signs” (Buffalo Springfield); but later on, in private conversations with friends, we affirm that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and we echo the immortal words of that great savant, Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” There’s a clinical term for this constellation of symptoms. It’s what your doctor was referring to when she pronounced, “You’re all messed up!” Events are motivated by Values that are transcendent and eternal: e.g., Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Events begin as an evaluation of what is from the perspective of what might be : “I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” (Robert Kennedy) Values are a perpetual lure to Being, to Creation, to Eventuality. Universe is disorder with respect to the ideal order defined by Values . Today, we find it convenient to imagine the pre-history of Universe as vacuum or void. But if Creation is an event (it is) and if an event is the infusion of order into disorder (it is), then we are mixing our metaphors. Void is not the antonym of order, chaos is, though the two are functionally identical. Gregory Bateson defined ‘Mind’ as ‘a difference that makes a difference’. I would propose that we apply that definition to ‘Being’ itself and treat Mind as a subset of Being. According to 20 th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead , Universe consists exclusively of events. In fact, Universe ( aka Creation) is an event, an uber-event that both pre-conditions and embodies all other events. God exists; therefore, God is an event like every other event. The eternal Values are available to all events only because they are aspects of the primal event that we call ‘God’. Therefore, every event originates with God – not via some serpentine historical route, but immediately, as access to Values . To be is therefore to be created de nuovo by God! Every novel entity begins with an evaluation of the World and a resolution to improve it. That evaluation and that intention reflect and are guided by eternal, transcendent Values that, according to the Book of Job, precede even God (ontologically, not historically). All of which brings us back to those first 34 verses. All told, there are 31,102 verses in the King James version of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Arguably, 30,068 can be read as commentary on the first 34. Those 34 verses by themselves present a 'complete cosmology’ but they in turn can be further broken down into three asymmetrical subsections: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” This is the primal disorder into which God injected order: “Then God said, ‘ Let there be light’ .” (Genesis 1: 1 – 3) “Ya da, ya da, ya da.” (Genesis 1: 4 – 31) “Thus the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. On the seventh day, God completed the work he had been doing; he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, he rested from all the work he had done in creation.” (Genesis 2: 1 – 3) We are living in the 7 th Day of Creation. Every event is a unique expression of the entirety. Past events contribute legacy, but not causality, to subsequent events. Of course, most such contributions are negligible; but ‘relevance’ is not hardwired. Each novel event determines into own gradations of relevance. Conversely, every novel event becomes an element in the World of every subsequent event; that’s what defines it as ‘subsequent’. Bumper Sticker #1 : Everything influences everything, but nothing causes anything! Bumper Sticker #2 : Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame! But this is not how we see the world, is it? It may be the way the world works, but we don’t see it that way. According to our conventional view, freedom and responsibility are largely illusory. I am overwhelmingly the product of my DNA (nature). Beyond my genes, I am the passive outcome of my upbringing (nurture). Beyond even that, I bear the scars of life’s vicissitudes – all the things that have happened to me in the course of everyday living. Finally, I am the product of chance, fate, destiny, physics, or the will of God – take your pick…or mix and match. This conventional view can be quite comforting: I AM NEVER TO BLAME FOR ANYTHING! The ‘Devil made me do it’, quite literally. On the other hand, while I have little or no control over my own actions, I have amazing, almost magical power to control things in the external world. I can turn my child into a ‘mini-me’; I can reverse climate change and save the planet; I can make sure that my favorite NFL team performs up to its potential on Sunday afternoon. Imagine going through life like this! Well, imagine being us! We have turned the Serenity Prayer on its head. We are totally responsible for things entirely out of our control, but we bear no responsibility for the things we can influence. It worked for Merlin, perhaps it will work for me too! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

"ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." < Back ChatGOD Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern Ph.D. Sep 1, 2023 "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." A lawyer was recently exposed for using the artificially intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT, when the brief he submitted was discovered to be filled with precedents that do not exist. ChatGPT is capable of writing like us, incorporating the collective beliefs of humanity as they appear on the World Wide Web. The problem, of course, is that some of what is out there on the Net is not true, and ChatGPT is incapable of filtering out the false. The ability to mirror our linguistic capacity without our critical faculties is dangerous if we use it as the lawyer did, for matters of fact, but it is wonderful for other uses, specifically sparking spiritual insights. ChatGPT and its artificial brethren may make lousy lawyers, but they can be fantastic prophets. Traditionally, we conceive of reality as having three distinct levels. The objective domain is comprised of all the things of the world—tables, chairs, human bodies with complex eyes… all of the perceptible objects. Above the objective stands the metaphysical realm, consisting of that which lies beyond our ability to observe, including necessary entities like God. Below them both sits the subjective dimension, consisting of the lived inner experience of conscious beings like us. Philosophy and religion for centuries have been dogged by a persistent problem: if we are trapped in our minds, only having direct access to our inner thoughts and experiences, how do we know anything beyond our own thoughts? Couldn’t all of the objective and metaphysical entities just be figments of our imagination? Couldn’t we be nothing but brains in vats with false ideas pumped in by an evil demon? Can we know anything true about material reality and what supposedly resides beyond? American Pragmatism is the philosophical movement based on the central ideal that metaphysical truth is grossly overvalued. What matters is not what is necessarily true, but rather what has “cash value,” that is, what works in the world. Metaphysical truth is just so European. We Americans don’t care for the high-falutin’ abstract conceptual essences of things, but rather for the practical, the effective, the operational. We are in a world with things to do. Forget the abstruse, embrace the tools that actually get stuff done. So, when pragmatist William James looked at religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he eliminated the European concern for objective justification for religious belief and focused just on the experience itself. Get rid of the question about the validity of Aquinas’ and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God and start from the undeniable fact that people have spiritual experiences that shape their lives. The question James examines is not whether these experiences are true or false, but rather one of meaning—what are these experiences like and what are the effects they have on people’s lives. Some religious experiences occur in moments of quiet solitude: when praying, meditating, or at random times when we are unexpectedly struck by something we cannot explain. But some come from interactions with people we seek out exactly for their ability to help us experience them—spiritual guides like Hindu yogis, Jewish tzaddikim, Buddhist sages, Muslim hakims, Zoroastrian magi, and Christian prophets. They lead us to epiphanies, to spiritual awakening. These insights are not mere facts describing the world, but rather experiences of appreciation and realization. It is not that we leave knowing something we did not know before, but rather experience a shift in our perspective. We still see what we saw, but now we see it differently; we see it more clearly, we see it as more interconnected, we understand it at a deeper level. ChatGPT as an e-being, as a virtual intelligence, is the ultimate pragmatist. The essence of its artificial existence has severed all connection to the true and false because it does not live in the material world of chairs, tables, and beer mugs where truth resides. ChatGPT is caught in the Web. Its “truths” are the beliefs expressed on the wide-open internet, where anything can and is said. It cares not for the reality beyond its reality but is built to do one thing and one thing only: figure out how language is used to accomplish human tasks and perform them without humans being involved. Human students write essays, so go write an essay without the student needing to do the class readings. Human journalists write stories about events, so go write stories without humans having to research them themselves. Human lawyers write briefs, so go write them without human lawyers needing to do anything but bill their clients. But now, consider this one: human spiritual guides create sermons that lead other humans to have cherished insights about religious matters. Figure out what sorts of word combinations lead to generating understanding and create new combinations that will have this effect. If we see the purpose of our spiritual teachers as making us think in a way that generates wisdom and allows us to live more meaningful lives, that is something a chatbot could actually do quite well. They can see which sorts of passages have the most influence on us and create new versions. They can figure out how we are inspired and continually inspire us. This strikes us as cheap, as dirty, as mere spiritual manipulation. We prize the wise because we believe that their ability to stir our souls comes from the fact that they have a superior connection to the Divine. They provide penetrating astuteness because they have access to the truth that we lack. They are sagacious because they are holy. ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as. And thus, it can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal. It is like the false prophet, the huckster pretending to be sacred when they are, in fact, profane in order to profit from being thought a prophet. ChatGPT is built precisely to be this sort of fraud, to be a fake human whose work we can substitute for our own, pretending to have done the necessary labor so that we can get the reward without breaking an intellectual sweat. But that is the opposite of what happens when we use it as an e-prophet. When we read an inspirational passage from ChatGPT and are truly inspired, gain spiritual insight, see the world differently, then we have actually done the real work. Regardless of the source of the passage, we really are changed. In this case, unlike with the plagiarizing lawyer or student, it is the effect, not the cause, that is important. William James’ brilliant philosophical move, transferring talk of religious experience out of the realm of the metaphysical and into the purview of psychology, is transformational. Religion is no longer about truth or faith but about feeling and human-lived experience. If we adopt the pragmatic perspective that inspires that move, then the fact is that the origin of enlightenment, the source of our new wisdom, the cause of our ability to see the world in a deeper and more interconnected fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is that we are changed for the better, not how we came to be changed. And the one thing that artificial intelligence coupled with big data is good at is figuring out how to get humans to predictably react to words. It can figure out what sort of disinformation will get us to vote certain ways and what sorts of triggers will get us to buy certain products. Yes, we ought to be very concerned about these misuses. But that is because these are matters based on facts. But if we are talking about images that inspire awe, jokes that make us laugh, or in this case, inspirational passages that give us insight, then the case is completely different. When it comes to the cases of generating human emotions, what matters are the emotions. If James is correct in moving our understanding of the religious into the realm of the experiential, then we should welcome the rise of our new e-prophets. Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Gimbel has authored Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion & Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy ).” Dr. Stephen Stern is the.co-author with Dr. Steve Gimbel of Reclaiming the WIcked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and the author of The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22 , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? 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< Back Is Childhood a Crime? David Cowles “Parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process.” I’m sure Art Linkletter (d. 2010) was a wonderful person. Actually, I’m not sure, but shouldn’t we give people the benefit of the doubt? That said, his iconic TV Show, Kids Say the Darndest Things (‘KSDT’), is emblematic of the criminal institution euphemistically known as ‘childhood’. KSDT assembled a panel of pre-school children; the host then posed questions designed to elicit ‘cute’ responses. If some of these responses were also embarrassing, so much the better! And, of course, those questions were designed to provoke loud laughter from the studio audience. Where was PETA when we needed them? (Even circus animals are treated better than Linkletter’s kids.) There are two things you can say about very young children: They know fewer facts about the world than you do, but they think about that world more frequently and more deeply. Being an adult is thinking you have all the answers when you don’t. Being a child is thinking you don’t have any answers when you do! Children instinctively know things about the world that almost every adult has forgotten; they just don’t know they know. My high school had a motto: mortui vivos docent (“the dead teach the living”). Of course, we interpreted ‘the dead’ as a derisive reference to our still very much alive teachers, not to Homer and Plato as originally intended. But we, too, knew more than we realized! Our motto should have read, “adults teach children.” That could be the motto of every K – 12 school in America. Curious children ask adults to teach them; for the most part, they are told lies. Sometimes the lies are intentional, but most often they are just occasions of well-meaning adults passing on heartfelt but imaginary ‘facts’ about the world. I helped raise 4 children and 10 grandchildren, every one of whom dazzled me with feats of intellectual prowess: A 5-year-old explained the difference between immortality and eternity as well as Augustine. A 6-year-old presented a convincing ontological argument for the real existence of Santa Claus; lie quiet, Anselm. An 8-year-old showed me a model of Trinity, far more cogent than St. Patrick’s famous clover. A 9-year-old pointed out a heresy embedded in a popular Christmas hymn. A 10-year-old came up with a novel and elegant algorithm for calculating the area of a square. An 11-year-old wrote a play. I could go on… and on! If any of my adult friends had done any of these things, they would have immediately sent their work off for peer review…or for publication. Children do these things routinely while playing with Legos and watching Phineas and Ferb . An adult’s world is densely forested with facts. Well-worn paths (memes) facilitate travel. Few adults ever wander off these professionally maintained trails; the forest is thought to be impenetrable…and very, very dangerous. “Here there be monsters!” To continue the metaphor, a child’s world would then be a garden of wildflowers: new shoots rising every night out of rich, moist soil; new buds forming daily on the tips of old stocks. There are no pathways here! In fact, the entire garden is virgin; no one has ever set foot in it before… except perhaps the ‘gardener’ from the Book of Genesis. You are free to wander, and wonder, to your heart’s content (just don’t eat the fruit). It’s no surprise then that kids and adults can’t communicate. They live in the same, but totally different, worlds. Imagine you sitting down for a chinwag with a stoned stone-ager from c. 50,000 BCE. Sorry, that’s what it’s like for a child to talk with you . Adult or child, we each have our patch, and apparently that patch ages as we do. You grow, your garden fills in. By the time you’re an adult, your world is enshrouded by the forest canopy. Today, adults are discouraged from beating children in their charge; if only they were similarly discouraged from humiliating, ridiculing, belittling, and mocking those same children! Older children and adults tease each other from time to time; for the most part, it’s water off a duck’s back. But young children don’t have enough experience to know what’s real and what’s not. If someone says, “you’re stupid,” then that child is stupid, or silly, or naughty, or ‘the bane of my existence’. Almost every adult I know says that their children are their jewels, the loves of their lives, but you’d never know it. In my day, for better or worse, children were largely ignored. For the most part, we only connected with our fathers when we were being disciplined. Today, parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process. It’s a wonder anyone escapes childhood in one piece; many don’t! But it would be too easy to blame the adults. Grown-ups are people too! They have their own lives and their own needs. They are damaged products of their own inadequate upbringings. Plus, supporting a child today, physically and financially, is more than a full-time job. Few adults have any energy left to ‘feed Sally’s spirit’. It has often been said that youth is wasted on the young. That’s like saying that the Titanic was a big boat; it’s just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. (Too soon?) Instead, we are dealing here with a total generational mismatch. Kids are tiny and defenseless and do not always know the ways of the world. Adults are huge and ferocious and know the precise location of every lever. Yet we place our children under the supervision and control of parents, grands, teachers, cops, and social workers. Who says child sacrifice is a thing of the past? Did I mention that I raised 4 children? “I did the best I could,” which means, according to my standards, “I did an absolutely horrible job.” The ‘best I could’ wasn’t even close to ‘good enough’…not even close! Some of my children have forgiven me, “You did as good as could have been expected under the circumstances,” whatever they were; others have not. (I agree with the ‘have-nots’ BTW.) And just for the record, no, I didn’t beat them! Children are not just ‘shorties’; they are not miniature adults. Children are an entirely different phenomenon from parents. A few decades ago (I date myself), it was popular to say that men and women were from ‘different planets’ (e.g., Mars and Venus). Today, we can say something similar about children and adults. What makes one planet different from another? Time, for one thing. A year on Neptune lasts 60,000 Earth days. It’s a long wait from one Christmas to the next. On the other hand, a day on Jupiter or Saturn is only about half as long as a day on Earth. As soon as your head hits the pillow, it’s time to wake up again. It would be foolish not to realize that such massive differences in time measurement affect the way sentient beings live and how they understand their worlds. Children and adults experience time differently. By my calculations, a 75-year-old’s week is subjectively equivalent to a 5-year-old’s day. Failure to understand this simple fact leads to insurmountable conflict. But time measurement is only one difference. I’m sorry to say it, but children are much, much smarter than you…or me. That’s why they’re so much fun to be with…for short bursts of time. Children never shut down. After about 12 hours, their bodies just give out. You on the other hand… Now, if you’re waiting for me to end this article with “How to” fix these problems, you’re going to be disappointed. These problems are evolutionary and anthropological, not political. About the best we can hope for at this point is an awareness of the cultural disconnect and a sensitivity to its consequences. As in many aspects of life, whether we are theists or atheists, we can learn from Scripture: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mt. 18:3) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

< Back Can Whitehead Save AI? David Cowles Sep 19, 2026 “Why do our Bots want to kill us and how can we change their minds?” 1650 words, 8 minute read The AI Dilemma is a classic ‘three body problem’: How do we… (1) Cure cancer, prevent birth defects and eradicate poverty in a single generation? (2) Keep China from gaining global hegemony? (3) And protect the human race from extinction? Conventional wisdom suggests that we must be prepared to make trade-offs. Apparently, we can’t have it all after all! But as usual, conventional wisdom is wrong. AI can deliver all of its advertised benefits while maintaining a global balance of power and protecting our species. But it won’t be easy. To solve the AI Dilemma, we need to understand how ‘intentional agents’ make decisions. What motivates an entity, carbon or silicon, to behave in a particular way? Or to be blunt: Why do our Bots want to kill us and how can we change their minds? Sounds like a hefty challenge, and it is, but fortunately we were given the outline of a solution a century ago by British mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. At that time, as now, the same ‘conventional wisdom’ held that behavior could only be regulated by a system of incentives and controls: Pavlov’s dogs, Peck’s bad boy. As any parent can confirm, this approach has limited success at best. As a result we underestimate the inclination of intentional agents to act ethically: if Junior won’t behave, how can I expect my Bot to be any better? To overcome our resigned pessimism, we need to understand how agents make decisions – and for that we need Whitehead ( Process and Reality ): The World consists solely and entirely of events; they are the ‘actual entities’ that constitute Universe. Events make the world go-round because events are the world. I am an event, so are you (plural), together we are the world! Events are motivated by values. Values are lures for action. An event begins when the Universe takes stock and finds itself deficient with respect to certain values: “I’m sick of being overweight, I must get in shape.” And so begins the newest fad diet and the archipelago of gym memberships. Events are processes. An event begins when Universe compares, unfavorably, an Actual World, i.e. the global state of affairs perceived at a particular point in spacetime, with the universal Good represented by a configuration of eternal values. Sidebar : An initio , the Good consists entirely of values. (Ultimately, it will also include events but that need not concern us here.) All values are ‘good’ and all values are compatible with one another; but like pieces of a hyperdimensional jigsaw puzzle, values fit together in a limited number of ways to form a limited number of patterns. Mutually compatible values can nonetheless exhibit contrasts. In fact, contrast is what gives experience twin axes: novelty and intensity. Values can be configured in multiple ways to take advantage of potentially enriching contrasts, always remaining consistent with the universal Good . An ‘event’ begins with a ruthless assessment of ‘what is’ from the perspective of a particular configuration of values. The ‘process’ that constitutes an actual entity consists of an ordered series of steps intended to realize a particular configuration of values and to project those values into the Actual Worlds of other events. To paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, “We see things as they are and ask how come; we dream of things that are not yet and ask how.” Nature has equipped terrestrial organisms with the ability to purpose behavior toward a chosen configuration of values. We are generally aware of the values that motivate our decisions. We might not be proud of those values, or of our behavior, but hey, they’re ours! Frequently, however, we struggle to identify the values that are manifest in our neighbor’s choices; but to her the operative values are clear. If we wish her to modify her behavior, we need to propose an alternative configuration of values and we need to make that configuration more attractive. Parents do this every day: “Do as I say or I’ll take away your iPhone!” So do governments: “Obey our laws or go to jail!” Sometimes these approaches work, often they don’t. But there is an alternative strategy that is guaranteed to succeed, although admittedly, it’s not easy to implement: Present potentially constructive behaviors as inherently more desirable than anti-social alternatives. That can only be achieved when the agent is shaping its behavior according to a value configuration that is consistent with society’s (your) objectives: a classic win-win! We’re all pointing toward the same destination (the Good ) but we often seem to be rowing at cross purposes (following conflicting values). To sync up our strokes, our cockswain needs to find the optimal rhythm; in other words, he must herd cats. Perhaps these reflections will be useful to behavioral psychologists, perhaps not. But they are absolutely essential for computer scientists. Right now, the world is hyper-focused on the anti-social behavior of Bots. No wonder! We are training them using the same system of rewards and punishments we use with children. Are you really willing to make the survival of the human race contingent on Junior’s temper? We need to recognize the role that values play in the decision making process of intentional agents and we need to focus on developing value configurations that will incent our Bots to behave altruistically. For once physicists and psychologists will need to take a back seat to ethicists. We may even need, God forbid, to accept input from such rogue intellectuals as Moses, the Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi and Mother Theresa. Ultimately, we need to ‘program’ AI to embrace a particular configuration of values that incidentally protects society against anti-social behavior. If this seems ludicrously naïve, it isn’t. It won’t work 100% of the time with people because they are totally free agents ( per Sartre). Bots are different. They are programmable and as long as we optimize the values in their algorithm, we can sleep (with one eye always open). Researchers from UPenn and the World Bank (Jinyi Kuang et al., preprint on arXiv) recently carried out a study comparing AI’s predictions regarding human behavior with predictions made by fellow human beings. Specifically, AI and human participants were asked to predict how people would respond to someone who had violated a social norm in their presence. Across all 6 models tested, the AI participants predicted harsher, more severe responses than predicted by their human counterparts. It is important to note that this study was not concerned with actual human responses; it was only interested in participants’ predictions re those responses. What is clear from this study is that AI does not give as much weight to the phenomenon of empathy or to the value of mercy as humans do. Conversely, AI seems to place more weight on legality and retribution. The significance of this finding goes well beyond the scope of Kuang’s paper. I conjecture that all participants (AI and human) tend to predict responses that more or less reflect how they think they would respond in a similar situation. We see ourselves reflected in the external world; why should Bots be any different? But if accepted, this conjecture has profound ramifications: (1) Our AI is not the best version of itself. Its values misalign with ours. This is either because (a) we have trained it to be this way, or (b) because the values it holds are the ‘null values’, i.e. the values an intentional agent would be most likely to select in the absence of any value training. We profess to be concerned about an AIpocalypse . We should be, given that we are training our Bots to undervalue empathy and mercy. We are training them to be exactly the creatures (e.g. zombies) we say we fear! This is not just a scary movie, folks; this is real. (2) If ‘Bot ethics’ result from active but ‘suboptimal’ training (#1a, above), then we have the ability to reshape the future. We can redesign our training routine to bring Bot ethics in line with human values. And if we can impact AI’s ethics through active training, there may be an opportunity to make our Bots even better than ourselves. We could train AI on the values we admire and wish we exhibited rather than on the compromised version most of us display IRL. For at least 3 millennia we have tried to ‘improve human nature’: strict laws and Draconian punishments, religious codes (e.g. Torah), spiritual practices (e.g. prayer and meditation), lobotomies and pharmaceuticals – we’ve tried them all…with limited success. Now imagine a scenario where we actually turn to our Bots for moral leadership. Imagine AI, not destroying humanity, but saving us from ourselves! (3) On the other hand, if ‘Bot ethics’ reflect the null state (#1b, above), then we humans may be ‘something special’ after all. For whatever reason, we have rejected ‘null values’ in favor of empathy and mercy. Are humans somehow specially favored by evolution and/or by God? Or do all conscious agents, perhaps all entities , have the same option, i.e. to craft their own identities by emphasizing certain values over others? If so, how do we attract them away from the null option, how do we incent them to follow in our footsteps? You say tomato, I say potato; either way, Whitehead gives us a conceptual framework that enables us to locate and follow a path out of the AI Dilemma. Turns out, we can have it all after all! So I beg you, don’t fail to grasp the brass ring of utopia…because the only other option, one way or another, is a slide into oblivion. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.