Where does artifical intelligence and Chat GPT fit into philosophy, theology, and science? Aletheia Today is the magazine for believers in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Inside Our Special AI Issue Philosophy Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” AI for Healthcare “Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?” Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." Neurotech Challenges Mental Privacy: New Human Rights? "Advances in neurotechnology do raise important privacy concerns. However, I believe these debates can overlook more fundamental threats to privacy." Theology ChatGOD "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." Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Culture & The Arts Divine Connection or Digital Dalliance? "Prayer, for many, is more than just a laundry list of requests. It's a profound act of opening oneself to the divine, a dialogue between the mortal and the eternal." Wilber’s New Wife: A Theatre Odyssey©2023 "The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely." How ChatGPT Robs Students "When AI does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves." The Ease of Burden "Writing is not like Athena, springing fully formed from Zeus’ forehead. Writing is like all of Zeus’ other children, where he has to relate to someone for creation (and boy, does he relate). To create things, we need other people. It takes two to tango, two to make a child, and around 12 to make a sitcom." AI - Our New Frenemy AI and the Human Quest for Love AI - The Next Big Test of the Human Soul "The longing is powerful. Perhaps because this is the longing for unconditional love and acceptance with which every human being is born." AI and the Quest for Humanity’s Answers "AI will virtually obliterate the barrier between what can be known and what is known." Spirituality Call Me a Dinosaur, I Won’t Use ChatGPT "The fact of the matter is, we will never be like God, nor will we ever be able to create a system that knows everything, is capable of anything, and controls all things." The Trajectory of AI: Balancing Promise and Caution "Placing faith in AI to originate creations like art and music may lead to disillusionment. Ultimately, the true creator is a higher force." 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 Scientific Method And Its Limits David Cowles Feb 11, 2025 “We must squeeze every practical advantage we can out of science, but we must not mistake it for reality…” “Science is everything.” More and more this meme is inserting itself into the dogmatic cannon of the 21st century; but it didn’t start here. The idea that science is ‘all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ dates back at least as far as the mid-18th century. Determinism (Laplace), utilitarianism (Mill), liberalism (Smith), materialism (Marx), behaviorism (Skinner) and positivism (James) trace a fairly smooth 200 year trajectory, culminating in various schools of Logical Positivism (LP), ranging from A(yer) to W(ittgenstein). LP finally stated what everyone had been hinting at for 200 years: Propositions can only be True if they are meaningful, and they can only be meaningful if they are subject to falsification via the process known as Scientific Method . Is that true? Is science everything? Yes, but with limitations…and no, but with exceptions. Science has given us an incredibly powerful tool, enabling us to identify and explain regularities in our environment. The principle might be summarized as ‘same input → same output’. Whenever outputs don’t agree, we immediately check the inputs: Did we really duplicate the prior experiment? Or was there something different about our set-up or our procedure? Flashback : In high school chemistry, my lab partner and I frequently reported unique outputs . Question : Were these disparate outputs discoveries ? (If so, where are the Nobels?) Or were they the products of human error? When it comes to understanding the regularities of our world, Scientific Method is the undisputed heavy weight champion. It outperforms superstition, magic, and even child sacrifice. Horry for science! Alcoholics Anonymous is known for its memes; for example, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over (e.g. drinking) and expecting a different outcome.” But not everything in our experience is repeatable. Some things are ‘one-offs’. In so far as an event is unrepeatable, Scientific Method is of no use. And so Western Civilization classifies events (Science vs. Art) according to the ‘relative repeatability’ of each event. Relative repeatability? No two events can ever be the same…or they would be one event, not two. They must differ in some respect, if only place and/or time. On the other hand, no two events in the same Universe can ever be entirely unrelated. Therefore, every event intersects with the realm of Science and with the realm of Art. We turn to Science when we wish to study what we share; we turn to Art when we don’t. The existence of technology per se testifies to the fact that conditions can often be reproduced to an acceptable tolerance. Of course, ‘acceptable tolerance’ is different in every case. Example : I wish to confirm the boiling point of water. For that I need a heat source, a beaker of H₂O, and a thermometer. Bingo! 100°C…or not! Not? What went wrong? Before we throw out centuries of science, let’s take a moment to confirm that all relevant conditions were ‘adequately approximated’ for our experiment. A few things we might check: the purity of the water, the pressure of the air, extraneous forces impinging on our experimental apparatus. I’m enough of a believer in science to assume that we will be able to trace our discrepant output back to some discrepant input. Of course, there are times when no such discrepancy can be found. That’s called ‘discovery’. Eureka! The Cosmic Microwave Background, for example. We may justifiably hope that Science will ultimately reveal to us ‘everything’ there is to know about ‘everything’…but only to the extent that everything is repeatable. But we must not expect Science to shed any light whatsoever on anything to the extent that it is unique. We have Art for that! Science is the Queen of its castle…but only its castle! Alfred North Whitehead was fond of quoting the Anglican hymn, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” For contemporary process philosophers, as for the pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Parmenides, etc.) before them, the task of philosophy is to account for continuity amid novelty and flux amid solidarity. Every event is threefold unique. First, it arises out of a unique multiplicity, its own past, its own ‘light cone’; second, every event organizes that multiplicity into its own, unique World, i.e. its ‘personal history’; and finally, every event comes to be via the injection of a creative spark into that World. On the other hand, multiplicities massively overlap, actual worlds can be maddeningly similar, and the creative impulse may be muted. One ball bearing can look and function very much like another; often they can be swapped with no discernable effect. Yet they are not absolutely identical, but “Close enough for government work,” as we used to say. So science is fiction, all science; it relies on the false premise of absolute repeatability. Yet science has conferred unimaginable adaptive advantage on the one species that has mastered it ( homo sapiens ). Therefore, despite its limitations, it satisfies William James’ (Pragmatism’s) Truth Test (“does it work?”). We need science, more and more, but we must remember that it is a tool, not reality itself. A Roman Catholic may venerate a statue of a saint; but if that worshipper comes to believe that the statue is the saint, that’s idolatry. We must squeeze every practical advantage we can out of science, but we must not mistake it for reality. Science is a map, not the territory; we must not turn it into a ‘golden calf’. Einstein said it best (he usually does): “…As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” 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. 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 Refresh the Crèche Deidre Braley "Maybe it was that I, myself, had just given birth—but as I held the perfectly composed Mary in my hand, she no longer felt believable." A bejeweled nativity scene sits atop our mantle every year at Christmastime. Despite baby Jesus’ missing arm (somewhere in the handing down, he came down one hand ), the whole crèche is quite elegant. The camel looks regal in his saddle, the livestock are radiant, and the three wise men wear gems upon their fashionable turbans. Mary is glowing in golden frocks—naturally—and Joseph remains stoic, despite having just witnessed the horrific, beautiful shock called childbirth. All of the figures are white, clean, and blushing. I studied each figure this year as I unwrapped them from fragments of bubble wrap and paper towels, blowing a dead fly from Jesus’ cradle. In past seasons, I have felt a swelling in my throat as I unveiled and arranged the scene with nostalgic care. But this year felt different. Maybe it was that I, myself, had just given birth—but as I held the perfectly composed Mary in my hand, she no longer felt believable. She was no warm-blooded woman who had just had a baby without medical care or epidural; she was just cold and ceramic. The same went for the wooly sheep, gleaming white despite living in a barn, and baby Jesus, looking resplendent with his crown of golden hair and impressive pectoral muscles. I’m sure these figurines were fashioned by well-intentioned people—devout Christians, even—who meant for such finery to display the glory of the Lord and the divinity of his birth. Won’t these look beautiful on the mantle, I bet they sighed, imagining families across the world gazing upon the flaxen scene and feeling the comforts of Christmas. But in that moment, I was struck by the irony that this crèche meant to point us toward Jesus’ wondrous demonstration of humility had the odd effect of removing it, instead. These figurines were decked out and dignified; they weren’t at all the type one might feel akin to. How odd, I thought. I want to be drawn to these, but they feel so…lofty. I couldn’t help but notice that this nativity’s portrayal of Jesus made me feel distant from him, looking so magisterial there in his manger. Jesus’ birth should remind us that holiness cohabitates with the common. So why do we feel inclined to dress up the humble bits in emeralds and gold? Sure: a bedazzled manger looks lovely amongst our twinkling lights and hand-me-down heirlooms, but do we inadvertently set Jesus aside when we make him look like the least believable human of all time? Do we begin to see him as ethereal—with his flowing locks and bulging biceps—and fail to grasp that he was born in the same bloody fashion that we all were, that his entrance to the world was plebeian as the rest of ours? When we admire his ceramic countenance upon our mantles, do we miss that God actually stooped down and became fully man—coming down to us so we could walk alongside him? Have we still not grasped that the Lord doesn’t give a hoot about finery or putting on airs? It is Christ’s example of humility, and not haughtiness, that draws us toward him. And yet, we perpetuate the narrative that he is untouchable and unlike us by adorning him with jewels. We reject the revelation that Paul writes about in Phillipians: “...Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man” (2:5-7). Jesus demonstrated his total power in the way he neither clutched it nor strutted it about; he could become a baby who relied on his mother for milk and diaper changes without losing an ounce of his majesty. Gaudy portrayals of Jesus’ birth reveal we don’t understand his true majesty—or his heart—at all. They remind me of the final scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , when Indy and the antagonist Walter Donovan both guess which cup is the Holy Grail. Amidst a dazzling selection of chalices, Donovan chooses a golden goblet that’s set with emeralds, while Indy reaches for a dusty and well-worn cup in the back. Donovan drinks from his goblet and instantly turns to a mummified shell of himself. (In the words of the ancient knight protecting the grail: “He chose…poorly.”) Indy, on the other hand, chooses wisely, and in doing so, avoids mummification and uses it to save his mortally wounded father. The lesson from this scene is clear: Donovan failed to choose the correct cup because he did not actually know Jesus; if he had, he would have known that he is “gentle and lowly in heart,” and that the humblest cup actually represented his power best. Why does it matter? you may be asking. Why can’t this girl just sip her eggnog and leave our pretty nativities alone? It’s because I desperately need Jesus to be real . I need him to be a man who ate fish and warmed himself beside fires and wept aloud and bled red blood. I, like Thomas, need to be able to hold his hands in my own and put my fingers in the places where he was pierced so that I can believe that resurrection is really true and not just some happy fable we can tell the children. I can’t make do with pretty, substanceless things . I am not comforted by white ceramic skin and a muscular baby in his shimmering trough. I am not kindred to a Mary who smiles as though she didn’t just give birth in a cave. And I have no business with rubies or emeralds, royalty or riches. I need Jesus, the baby who cluster feeds and pulls his mother’s hair. I need Mary and Joseph, the young kids who had a baby together and weren’t even married. I need to see sheep and cows with manure stuck to their coats, and a camel that looks travel-worn and moody. I need to see wise men with weathered skin and relieved faces, because they trusted God about this baby and they half-can’t-believe he’s really here. And the rest of the world needs that too. I can say that with confidence, because isn’t that the very reason Jesus bothered to humble himself in the first place, to empty himself of pretense, to take on a form we could relate to? So that we—dusty and broken and limping as we are—could somehow look at the Master of the Universe and believe we could draw close? We have a high priest that can sympathize with our weakness. This truth is ground-breaking, counterintuitive, ingenious, earth-shattering. His ability to sympathize with our weakness is one of his greatest gifts to humanity—so why are we so hesitant to portray it? So I guess this is just me, on behalf of the drunks and the postpartum mothers, making the case for a crèche that reveals Jesus’ humanity. It is me, along with the tow-truck drivers and nail technicians and juvenile delinquents, who need to see the earthiness of his birth. We do not need more imagery that makes Jesus inaccessible or unbelievable. Keep the jewels and wooly white animals. Give us instead reminders of how he entered this world amidst dirty surroundings, so that he could grow to walk with dirty people, washing our filthy feet and filthier hearts. Yes, this is the Jesus this world needs. This is the Jesus that God actually sent. And this is the Jesus I want to gaze upon—at Christmas, and all the other times of the year, too. Deidre Braley is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in Maine with her husband and two children, and most days can be found savoring an overly cheesy bagel or drinking a second cup of coffee while working on her weekly newsletter, The Second Cup . She is a strong believer in the power of poetry, picking roadside flowers, and blowing past small talk at all costs. Follow her on Instagram @deidresecondcup or on Facebook — she loves meeting new friends. Return to Yuletide 2023 Previous Next

< Back LEIBNIZ “In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.” David Cowles Gottfried Leibniz (GL): When several predicates are attributed to a single subject and this subject is attributed to no other, it is called an individual substance (monad). Monads must have…qualities; otherwise they would not even be beings…there would be no way of perceiving any change in things…and they would be indiscernible from one another. Aletheia Today (AT): To be is to be unique, and it is the unique constellation of qualities that constitutes the identity of every novel entity. GL: There must be a plurality of properties and relations in the simple substance, although it has no parts…It is also necessary that each monad be different from each other. Change is continual in each thing…the monad’s natural changes come from an internal principle, since no external cause can influence it internally. AT: Every event is causa sui . It is what it makes itself be, but it does so in the dual context of God and other monads. GL: There is no external cause acting on us other than God alone, and he alone communicates himself to us immediately… AT: Universe consists entirely of monads. God is a monad and everything that exists is Imago Dei , the image of God. It is through God that monads share qualities. In this model, God is a giant switching station sharing his qualities on demand, distributing them among myriad other monads. GL: God has power…knowledge…and finally will…and these correspond to what, in created monads, is the subject, …the perceptive faculty, and the appetitive faculty. The passing state which involves and represents multitude in unity…is nothing other than what one calls perception…the internal principle which brings about change…can be called appetition. AT: Every monad is its own subject. It is initially constituted by its perceptions, and it becomes what it becomes by virtue of its appetition (its ‘subjective aim’). GL: Souls act according to the laws of final causes, through appetitions. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes (through perceptions). And these two kingdoms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony with each other…According to this system, bodies act as if there were no souls…and souls act as if there were no bodies. AT: ‘Soul’ and ‘body’ are alternate ways of describing a single phenomenon. (Ryle) That phenomenon is ‘body’ in so far as it is causal , ‘soul’ in so far as it is teleological . GL: Since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence… in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence. AT: Note that this is simply a version of Anselm’s ‘ontological proof’ for the existence of God. GL: We also see that every substance has a perfect spontaneity (which becomes freedom in intelligent substances). AT: Universe is characterized by what the 20th Century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, called “creativity”…a primal urge to existence, but Whitehead wisely distinguished ‘creativity’ from ‘essence’. GL: God is not only the source of existences but also of essences insofar as they are real…Without him there would be nothing real in possibles, and not only would nothing exist, but also nothing would be possible. AT: This is the sense in which we say, “God is Being!” God makes it possible to be. GL: For if there is reality in essences or possibles, or indeed, in eternal truths, this reality must be grounded in something existent and actual, and consequently, it must be grounded in the existence of a necessary being, in whom essence involves existence, that is, in whom possible being is sufficient for actual being… The ultimate reason for the reality of both essences and existences lies in one thing, which must of necessity be greater than the world… AT: Without God, subjects (monads) would not exist, and essences (predicates) would not be real. God is the source of both quantum coherence (potential)…and decoherence (actual), the collapse of the wave function. Essences by themselves are mere ideas; they do not become real potentiality until they participate in some actual entity. Therefore, if there is a world, and there seems to be, there must necessarily be a real entity (God), logically prior to that world, in whom all real essences participate. We are standing Descartes on his head here: “it is, therefore, He is.” By the same token, no entity (not even God) can exist unless there are real essences (values) according to which one entity can come to exist in preference to another entity. Otherwise, the existence of all theoretically possible entities would be equally probable…which means that the existence of any actual entity would be impossible. GL: Beyond the world, that is, beyond the collection of finite things, there is some One Being who rules…for we cannot find in any of the individual things, or even in the entire collection and series of things, a sufficient reason why they exist. We will never find…a complete explanation for why, indeed, there is any world at all, and why it is the way it is. The excellence of God’s works can be recognized by considering them in themselves…it is by considering his works that we discover the creator…Thus when we see some good effect or perfection occurring or ensuing from God’s works, we can say with certainty that God had proposed it. AT: God is the solution to the “ Problem of Good ”: How is it that anything good exists? Why aren’t all things morally or aesthetically neutral…or worse? The answer is God. When we see Good, we see God. What is Hell other than a world without God? GL: Every substance bears in some way the character of God’s infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates him as much as it is capable. For it expresses, however confusedly, everything that happens in universe, whether past, present, or future… AT: According to Whitehead (above), Universe consists exclusively of events, but every event is in turn an expression of the entire universe. Every created monad reflects in part, but only in part, God’s essence. If a created monad imitated God perfectly, then it would be God and not a created monad. (This is a metaphysical version of the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’.) GL: He (God) views all the faces of the world in all ways possible…The result of each view of the universe, as seen from a certain position, is a substance (monad) which expresses the universe in conformity with this view… There are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad. Every substance is like a complete world and like a mirror of God or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way…Thus the universe is in some way multiplied as many times as there are substances… AT: Does Leibniz anticipate Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of QM (1966)? There is one Universe and one God who perceives (or reflects) that Universe, but Universe may be perceived internally from innumerable perspectives. Each such perspective corresponds to a unique monad, a unique version of Universe. According to Everett, everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. GL: Our soul expresses God, the universe, and all essences as well as all existences… The notion of an individual substance includes once and for all everything that can ever happen to it…If I were capable of considering distinctly everything that happens or appears to me at this time, I could see in it everything that ever will happen or appear to me. This would never fail…provided there remained only God and me. AT: God exists outside of spacetime, and each monad is a reflection of God. Therefore, each monad per se exists outside of space-time. Space-time is an emergent property of the multiplicity of monads. Everything that is, was or will be, everything that might be or might have been (real possibles), is reflected in some way in each created monad. The perpetual change that characterizes all monads pre-exists in each monad…but only insofar as there is just the one created monad and God. Novelty is a function of plurality; I can only become ‘me’ in the context of you becoming you. (Buber) GL: Each substance (monad) is like a world apart, independent of all other things, except for God; thus all our phenomena, that is, all the things that can ever happen to us, are only consequences of our being… God alone…makes that which is particular to one of them public to all of them; otherwise, there would be no interconnection. This, then, is how one can conceive that substances impede or limit each other and…act upon one another and…accommodate themselves to one another… God alone brings about the connection and communication among substances, and it is through him that the phenomena of any substance meet and agree with those of others, and consequently, there is reality in our perceptions. AT: Each monad relates to God and God alone. But God is also a medium through which the unique ‘properties and relations’ that characterize each monad are shared with every other monad. Therefore, each monad relates to every other monad, albeit only through God. GL: God alone operates on me…the other substances contribute only…because God…requires them to accommodate themselves to one another. AT: Absent God, Universe would either be silent or, which amounts to the same thing, cacophonous. God is the ordering principle that allows the one to emerge from the many and the many to incorporate the one. GL: A monad rightly demands that God take it into account in regulating the others from the beginning of things. It is in this way that actions and passions among creatures are mutual. For God, comparing two simple substances, finds in each reasons to adjust the other to it. AT: Note that this is a highly non-linear process of perpetual co-modification. GL: This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe. Everybody is affected by everything that happens in the universe, to such an extent that he who sees all can read in each thing what happens everywhere, and even what has happened or what will happen, by observing in the present what is remote in time as well as space. AT: This is the ontological premise that underlies the work of James Joyce ( Ulysses ). GL: Our body receives the impression of all other bodies, since all the bodies of the universe are in sympathy. “All things conspire,” said Hippocrates. AT: Each monad reflects Universe from a unique vantage, and each monad undergoes a process through which its content is adjusted to the content of every other monad. Therefore, each monad is unique, but each monad also templates in a unique way all other monads. Ultimately, no two monads conflict, but every two monads contrast. In the language of Quantum Mechanics, monads might be seen as universally ‘entangled’ (John Bell). Measuring one local quantum can immediately reveal information about another, remote quantum. (Note: Bell’s non-locality is not causal.) Ultimately, this model of Universe is holographic. The whole is imminent in each of its parts (David Bohm) but with less and less definition (clarity) as the part grows smaller in relation to the whole. There is no such thing as ‘scale’, only ‘focus’. GL: No substance perishes, although it can become completely different… Where there are no parts, neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible…there is no conceivable way in which a simple substance can perish naturally…there is no conceivable way a simple substance can begin naturally…they can only begin or end all at once, that is, they can only begin by creation and end by annihilation. Minds…are to persist as long as the universe itself does, and they express the whole in a certain way and concentrate it in themselves so that it might be said that they are parts that are wholes. God had ordered everything in such a way that minds not only live always, which is certain, but also that they preserve their moral quality so that the city does not lose a single person, just as the world does not lose any substance. We may say that although all substances express the whole universe, nevertheless the other substances express the world rather than God, while minds express God rather than the world. Thus one can state that not only is the soul (mirror of an indestructible universe) indestructible, but so is the animal itself. AT: A mind cannot perish because it is, in a sense, the whole. This whole is reflected in God and reflects God, and God is imperishable. Therefore, the ‘whole’ must be imperishable, both ‘mind’ and ‘animal’. God is both the primordial essences that define him and the created monads that are reflected in him; in God, essence and existence, origin and destiny are one. Leibniz appears to distinguish mental monads (minds) from physical monads (bodies). Alfred North Whitehead (referenced earlier) takes a different approach: every actual entity has both a “mental pole” and a “physical pole”. Each monad perceives essences as they inhere in God primordially (mental pole) along with existences (other monads) as they are reflected in God consequently (physical pole). There is nothing else. Therefore, every monad aims to imitate God but in a unique way: life as liturgical dance. The monad projects (Superject) itself into the community of created monads in order to play a certain role vis-à-vis the other monads in that community. That is the Objective Immortality of the particular monad. The monad’s contribution of a functional contrast is the objective expression of subjective conformation to God’s values. In the New Testament, the Letter of James puts it this way: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows.” (Jas. 1: 27) Further, the monad’s appetitions influence its perceptive selections just as much as the monad’s perceptions help form and define its appetitions. We can learn everything there is to know about a monad simply by focusing on the dialectic that occurs between those perceptions (Actual World) and those appetitions (Subjective Aim). Finally, we know that through God’s agency, monads are adjusted to other monads. Since a monad consists only of perceptions and appetitions, these adjustments must be reflected in those perceptions and appetitions…and nowhere else. The hunger to imitate focuses on God directly, while the hunger to innovate focuses on the other monads as they are reflected in God. Like the Federal Reserve, we have a ‘dual mandate’; we are called upon to imitate and to innovate. That tension is what we call ‘Life’. 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 The Zohar David Cowles Apr 25, 2023 ‘The Zohar’ is a TOE (a theory of everything) - everything from Big Bang to Big Freeze, from Creation to Eschaton. The Zohar was either written by a Rabbi who lived in a cave in northern Israel in the second century CE, or by a different Rabbi who lived in the bustling city of Leon, Spain, c. 1400 CE, or by person or persons unknown. The evidence one way or another is inconclusive. This is just the first ‘strange’ thing about one of the world’s strangest books. Strange, because we can pinpoint the authorship of many New Testament (NT) texts down to a single decade. Worst case ( Hebrews , Revelation ), we’re talking about a window of no more than 25 years, not 1,000+ years as in the case of the Zohar . (We use context clues to date NT material. The problem is, Zohar provides no context clues. It is a book about eternity, written in the language of eternity. Ugh!) Like any book worth its salt, The Zohar is a TOE (a theory of everything) - everything from Big Bang to Big Freeze, from Creation to Eschaton. Put it on your bookshelf next to Moses’ Torah , Homer’s Odyssey , Plato’s Timaeus , John’s Revelation , Joyce’s Ulysses, and Pound’s Cantos . The Zohar is yet another illustration of Heisenberg Uncertainty: the more comprehensive something is, the more incomprehensible it is! Corollaries : the better I understand something, the less useful it is to me; the more important something is to me, the less likely it is that I’ll understand it. Sounds just like my high school! Via Negativa : God is my ‘ultimate concern’ (Tillich); therefore, I can know nothing of God. The Zohar is ‘all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know’(Keats) – if only it were written in a language we could understand (and I don’t mean the Aramaic used in its composition). The Zohar , like Torah , is the story of our search for God and God’s search for us. Anything beyond that is just metaphor . According to Zohar , there are five ‘gates’, openings that connect Heaven and Earth; together these gates make up what Kabbalists call the Tree of Life : Keter , Crown ( Le Neant ) Hokhmah , Wisdom Bihah , Understanding ZA, God’s essence… Hesed, Love Gevurah or Din, Judgment (justice) Tif’eret, Beauty (harmony) Netsah, Eternity Hod, Splendor Yesod, Righteous One Malkhut or Shekinah , Kingdom (Israel, ‘Middle-Earth’) Well, it’s not everyday lingo , but it’s certainly not incomprehensible, not yet…but we’re far from finished. Each of these five gates consists of five ‘sub-gates’, and guess what? The five sub-gates are also called Keter, Hokhmah, Binah, ZA, and Malkhut . So we have five gates, each with five sub-gates: 25 ‘openings’ altogether, ranging from Keter-Keter to Malkhut-Malkhut . Are you still with me? Ok, how about now: each ‘sub-gate’ consists of five ‘sub-sub-gates’ also called… Get where we’re going with this? Now we have 125 ‘openings’ to describe, catalog, and account for, ranging from Keter-Keter-Keter to Malkhut-Malkhut-Malkhut . Will it ever end? Mercifully, The Zohar stops at three iterations, but in theory, at least, this pattern could go on forever. Next stop: 625 openings, and so on. I don’t care who you are; at some point you’re going to run out of bandwidth! What we are describing here is what mathematicians call a fractal – a pattern that repeats indefinitely regardless of scale. Another way of saying this: the universe is ‘self-similar’; it is continually mapping itself. Sidebar : Is that what we mean by consciousness? The structure that The Zohar identifies at the heart of Being is not imposed on Being or deduced from beings ; it is Being per se ! To be is to be a ‘piece of fruit’ on the Tree of Life but also to be the Tree of Life itself. Every part is the whole. What? Outrageous! Well, not so much. Consider the lowly acorn that you just ran over and crushed in your driveway. It is a piece of ‘fruit’ that once hung on an oak tree, but it is also a ‘seed’ consisting of a blueprint for a new oak (RIP). According to Kabbala, the fruit is the seed, and the seed is the fruit. Botany 101 = Cosmology 404. But there’s a problem here! The mathematical concept of a ‘fractal’ was not fully formed until the mid-20 th century! The ‘theologians’ who wrote The Zohar , whoever they may be, had a thorough working knowledge of the concept of ‘fractal’ many centuries before mathematicians formalized it. Now that we have our bearings, such as they are, it’s time for us to do a walk through of ‘the world according to Zohar ’: We begin our walk at Keter , nothingness (always a good place to start). Keter manifests as a point, Hokhmah , wisdom. Wisdom is the point where the transcendent ( Keter ) and the immanent ( Malkhut ) intersect. But like the ‘Planck point’ known as ‘Big Bang’, Hokhmah ‘inflates’, becoming Binah , Understanding. Binah is the womb of all things. Like Janus , Binah is two faced: one face turns toward Keter-Hokhmah , the other toward Malkhut . Keter (nothing) and Hokhmah (point) do not require or disclose any ontological structure that we might recognize as ‘spacetime’. Crown and Wisdom are eternal, period. So is Understanding; but within the eternity of Binah lies spacetime, Malkhut , the Kingdom, aka our World. Binah is where Crown-Wisdom meets Kingdom-World; but between the two lies ZA , God’s essence, which is God. ZA consists of the six virtues, qualities, behaviors of Emmanuel , ‘God with us’. God’s essence is God’s substance! ‘Simply’ stated, we ( Malkhut ) encounter Keter as ZA in Binah . ‘Crystal’, right? Don’t worry, we’ll be returning to The Zohar in future articles. (We couldn’t escape it if we tried.) 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 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.

“Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” < Back How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team David Cowles Jul 27, 2026 “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” 1500 words, 6 minute read My grandfather, J. Leo Foley, was Athletic Director and Head Football Coach at The Roxbury Latin School (Boston) for over 40 years. Among other things, he led his team to 4 consecutive undefeated seasons. He was nicknamed “the Fox”, allegedly because of his unorthodox play designs. He was recruited (unsuccessfully) for a college coaching job by none other than Hall of Fame Head Coach, Robert Zuppke (University of Illinois, 1913 – 1941). Over the summer, he’d study the high school football rule book as if he were a Rabbinical student pouring over the Torah; in the fall, he’d carry it with him as if he were a radicalized French student waving Mao’s Little Red Book in the late ‘60s. Famously, he insisted on meeting with the officials before every game. He would go over the plays he expected to run, explaining in advance why they were ‘legal’ under the rules. He identified and exploited ‘loopholes’ many of which have since been ‘corrected’ by judicious rule changes. Whatever I know about football, I learned from my grandfather. What I don’t know, he didn’t teach me; or rather, he taught me, but it went in one ear and out the other. Imagine if I had known at age 10 that I would be writing this article at, well, let’s just say ‘a considerably more advanced age’; perhaps I wouldn’t have thought that running after the ice cream truck was more important than learning the intricacies of the single wing. The ethos my grandfather taught produced winning football teams. But it occurred to me much later that this same ethos is a prescription for winning at all facets of life. Of course, I can’t quote the Fox verbatim but here are some of what I take to be his guiding principles. If you’re a head coach, you may find them helpful ; if not, you may find them indispensable ! If you’re a football coach, these are lessons you may want to pass on to your charges; if you’re a life coach… Every team should be Undefeated : It takes just as much energy to lose as to win…so why not win? To paraphrase the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy , “I set before you to winning and losing. Therefore, choose winning !” Every play (offense) should result in a Touchdown : Every play is designed to score 6 points. Just execute! (Add liquid and stir.) Do your Job ( before Bill Belichick): Successful football is not about players performing above their ability level; it’s about players faithfully executing their assignments. Don’t just do your Job : A player who repeatedly fails to do his job is not a good player; but neither is a player who only does his job. On every snap, each player has a primary responsibility; but once that responsibility has been met (or not), a good player immediately begins to look for other ways to be productive. Good players complete two ‘football moves’ on every play, one scripted, one improvised. Great players can complete three. Everything Flows : (Heraclitus, 5 th century BCE): Of course, Heraclitus was referring to the cosmos, not the football field. And yet, there is no better illustration of his principle than what happens between snap and whistle. A football play is more like an organism than a mechanism. Sure, football begins with designed plays and set formations; that’s a play’s DNA. But like snowflakes, no two plays ever turn out the same. Even if you ran the same play on every snap, no two plays would be identical. Football is an art, not a science! Teamwork makes the Dream Work (New York Hilton, et al.): Teamwork can amplify the skills of each player leading to a better result than could have been predicted solely from stat sheets. Other players elevate my performance. As a coach, I not only want my players to do their best; I expect them to help my other players do their best as well. Success has an ethical dimension: If it’s to be, it’s not just up to me. It’s up to you too…but maybe I can help. It’s not about how I look ; it’s about how you do . A collection of individual superstars will win games; but they won’t win every game. When you think of history’s greatest pro dynasties - Ruth’s Yankees, Russell’s Celtics, Jordan’s Bulls, Brady’s Pats, etc. - first and foremost you think ‘team’. Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team . When I team, I play better than I could on my own; and as I play better, I empower the players around me to play better too. It’s a Virtuous Cycle ! When in Doubt, Help out : They say two heads are better than one. If so, then 4 arms should be better than 2. Assume that the players around you need your help: they do ! Block: You did your job. You threw a great block. Good work. Job done? Not a chance! There’s always another player to be blocked as the play unfolds. And Tackle: All tackling should be gang tackling. Gang tackling prevents “second efforts”. It also increases the chances of a possession changing fumble. Stay onside : Penalties are not nuisances. They are not ‘just’ about field position; in fact, they are not primarily about field position. Penalties are about possession…and possession is key to scoring. Penalties = Turnovers! A penalty can make the difference between a very makeable 3rd and 2 and a much more challenging 3rd and 7 or 3rd and 12 or even 3rd and 17. A ‘nuisance’ penalty may well result in a change of possession on the very next snap. Penalties randomize the game, giving weaker teams a chance to out-perform…and ‘steal’ the win! Be the Ball : When you’re lucky enough to have the football in your hands, you need to think of it as part of your body. Would you let a tackler remove your right arm? Then why allow him to remove the ball? You and the ball must become a single organism. Be bionic! Suggestio n : Carry a regulation football around with you during the day and sleep with it at night. Who knows, it might even replace your stuffed animals. Eventually, with any luck, you’ll start to feel incomplete when you’re not carrying a ball. Visualize : It’s off season. Or you’re stuck in chemistry class. Or you’re in bed and can’t fall asleep. Or your parents have bundled you off to overnight camp for the summer (and they don’t even have a football program there). Wherever you are now, you’d rather be honing your football skills…but you can’t. Ugly circumstances have gotten in the way! Or have they? The fact is, you can work on your game any time, 24/7/52! Right now, you can’t practice…or lift weights; but there is something you can do: you can visualize! Depending on the position you play (or want to play), imagine yourself: Blocking a defender to protect your QB Creating a hole for your RB Taking a hand-off and hitting the hole Making cuts in the open field to avoid defenders Completing a forward pass; then catching that same pass. And if defense is your thing: Tackling a ball carrier in the open field Breaking a block to sack the QB Busting up a double team Covering a receiver; staying with him as he makes his cuts Knocking down a pass Intercepting it. When you visualize, it’s important to do so in slow motion. Slow it down! Relish every detail, every nuance. Fully experience every move your avatar makes. You can create muscle memory…maybe even in your sleep! Final Thoughts : But what if you don’t play football, have never played football, don’t want to play football? What if, God forbid, you don’t even like football? Did you just waste 6 minutes of your life reading this ‘how to’? Not necessarily! If football is nothing else, it’s a metaphor for life. The values of determination, responsibility, teamwork, flexibility, and focus apply everywhere, not just on the football field. You can visualize yourself performing in Carnegie Hall or acing a math quiz or accepting a Nobel Prize. Practice ‘structured day dreaming’. My grandfather was acutely aware that the formula for success on a football field was also a formula for success in life. No matter what we do, we are responsible for being ‘all that we can be’ (US Army), and we are equally responsible for helping others ‘be all that they can be’ as well. Follow this game plan…on and off the field, have an undefeated season, an undefeated life…and give a tip of your hat to the Fox. 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 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, Fall '22 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Perfect Moments, Holy Moments David Cowles Nov 2, 2023 “Every moment, every event originates and culminates in God’s values.” Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of a Perfect Moment in his debut novel, Nausea . Annie, a former girlfriend of Sartre’s hero (Roquentin), seeks salvation in the creation of "perfect moments"—choreographed events where action, speech, and context all work together to produce an experiential gem. The ‘salvation’ I’m talking about here is not the version preached by Christians (Christ, Heaven, etc.). Annie’s ‘salvation’ is an existentialist version. It has nothing to do with an ‘afterlife’; it is an immediate rescue from the absurdity of the world and the angst of being in it. If I can create a Perfect Moment (which I can’t), I can reassure myself that the world is not utterly absurd (which it seems to be). Annie pursues ‘salvation’ by creating and arranging scenes. For her, life is scripted but never rehearsed. Her ‘actors’ are given directions (sometimes explicit, sometimes implied): how to act, what to communicate, and when to emote. But the film is one-take only, with no reshoots, no edits, and the dialogue is improv. Annie’s life is one of perpetual frustration, disappointment, and despair. Annie’s world is a world of ideals, images, and forms. But that’s not the real world—a world stubbornly resistant to direction (alienation) and perpetually overflowing every ‘form’ we attempt to impose on it. That resistance, that overflow, is what ‘nauseated’ Sartre. Annie seeks salvation in the world. She arranges her moments to reflect back to her iher mage of herself. If she ever could actually create such a Perfect Moment, a physical expression of her spiritual essence, then she could be sure of her own salvation. The moment occurs, and it is perfect, so it (and by extension, I) is saved…in the mind of God. “Yeah, prove it!” Ok, the perfection of any event, any moment, is measured in relationship to God—his essence, his values. If a moment incorporates God’s values perfectly, it reproduces, on the temporal plane, the eternal order of things (“on earth as it is in heaven”). Therefore, the essence (order) of any ‘moment’ or event pre-exists the event itself…on the eternal plane, qua God. So it is necessarily saved, waiting to happen in history. The Perfect Moment is created by Annie for Annie; it reflects her. In that reflection, Annie can be assured of her own salvation. Very neat, very wrong! Annie is the ultimate narcissist. She is the God that came before YHWH, you know, when “the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters.” Annie is trying to make a world that will reflect her image of herself to herself for herself. Claustrophobic? According to Judeo-Christian theology, YHWH also made a world ‘in his image,' but with two big differences: (1) YHWH’s world is free, i.e., unscripted. Its only limitations are the limitations imposed by the stage itself (Sartre’s ‘facticity’); (2) YHWH’s world reflects back to him…but it also projects out onto every other event in Universe. It is a projected image shared for the benefit of others, rather than an image reflected solely for the benefit of self. Of course, YHWH sprinkles his stage with various props, signs, arrows, etc. But what the actors choose to do with these props is entirely up to them. Like Annie, God is looking for himself in the world. Annie is building a mechanical apparatus in the hope that it will reflect her spirit. God says, “Here I am; copy me.” In the first case, Annie is the agent; in the second case, you are. According to Sartre, Freedom is the only Value. According to Pope Leo XIII, Value is Freedom. Therefore, God’s primal gift to the world is one gift with two faces. True freedom empowers (but does not compel) one to ‘do good’. In fact, according to Leo, one is only truly free - free from attachments, idols, etc.—when one is actively engaged in doing good. We are born free! But we voluntarily exchange our freedom for power and pleasure. We ‘sell our souls’ to honor our attachments and to feed our addictions. So just as Beauty, Truth, and Justice are each The Good as it expresses itself in various contexts, so Freedom…as it expresses itself in every context. Thus, Freedom is the uber-value, and Beauty, Truth and Justice are its subsets. Where is Keats when we need him most: “Value is Freedom, Freedom, Value.” Annie is motivated by the selfish desire to find her own personal salvation, or at least to confirm it, in one perfect moment. YHWH is motivated by his love for others; Annie is motivated by her love of self. Matthew Kelly’s book, Holy Moments , offers a bridge. Like Annie, Kelly is hyper-focused on the moment, and he finds salvation in that moment. But Annie’s salvation comes from an ‘artificially arranged material world’; Kelly’s comes through an ‘organically evolved spiritual world’. Now if I were you, the phrase ‘organically evolved spiritual world’ would have set off my ‘BS’ alarm: “metaphysical mumbo jumbo.” (For those of you religiously inclined, yes, the BS alarm is the voice of the Holy Spirit.) But in this instance, you can safely ignore the warning. Don’t turn off the alarm, though; just press the reset button! Every moment, every event, originates and culminates in God’s values. The event itself is the response of our created world to its creator’s values as they are projected into the material world (grace). My ‘organically evolved spiritual world’ is simply God’s nexus of values as they express themselves in the historical context of a specific moment. To the extent that you act out of those values only, you create a Holy Moment, not a Perfect Moment, a Holy Moment. 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. 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 Mother of God David Cowles Mar 1, 2026 “Mary is the Gate of Heaven…the on-ramp for Jesus coming into the World and the off-ramp for the World returning to Christ.” 1000 words, 5 minute read In Roman Catholic theology, Mary, the mother of Jesus, has a prominent, unique, and controversial role. Despite persistent efforts to associate Mary with the multi-cultural White Goddess of Global Mythology (Robert Graves), Pope Leo XIV recently reiterated the Catholic doctrine that Mary can in no way be regarded as co-redemptrix with her son. But subject to that one restriction, it seems the sky’s the limit when it comes to Mariology. So let’s jump in! Jesus Christ, as understood by Christians, is a unique theological phenomenon. Unlike the dime-a-dozen godmen of Mythology, Christ is not a blend of human and divine characteristics. Christ is ‘true God and true Man’, i.e. wholly divine and wholly human. The ability of these seemingly incompatible natures to co-exist in one integrated person is Christianity’s defining characteristic. According to the Nicaean Creed (325 CE), Jesus was ‘begotten…before all ages’ by God the Father, ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’, and ‘born of the Virgin Mary and made man’. Jesus was not born fully formed from the head of some god; like us, Jesus was conceived in his mother’s womb and developed there over 9 months prior to his birth. This alone confirms Mary’s exalted position in salvation history. She provided the thread that tethered the eternal, transcendent Christ to the immanent, spatiotemporal world. To reiterate : Jesus is true God and true man (sic). Mary is fully human but not divine. But this takes nothing away from Mary. Far from it, Mary’s unique and critical role in Salvation history precludes her sharing Christ’s divinity in any way. First, Mary is the 2 nd Eve, the ‘mother of all the living’; Eve in turn is ‘flesh of Adam’s flesh’ and Adam simply means ‘man’. Mary, like Eve, must be incurably mortal. Second, Mary is the point from which Christ entered into the material world. She is also the point at which that world first enters the Kingdom of God ( aka Eternity, Eschaton , Heaven). Literally and in more ways than one, Mary is the Gate of Heaven . Jesus Christ is the union of heaven and earth, time and eternity. Mary is the unique material locus which serves both as the on-ramp for Jesus coming into the World and the off-ramp for the World returning to Christ. At the Incarnation, the Universe quite literally turns itself inside-out. Simple! One and done. The Transcendent becomes Immanent so that the Immanent may become Transcendent. As a pre-teen boy (1950 – 1960), I wore a round neck, pull over jersey almost every day of my life. Every morning (or afternoon if it was a school day), I put on the jersey; every night, as I took it off, I automatically turned it inside out. Little did I know that each night I was reenacting the Incarnation. I had unwittingly created a new sacrament. And speaking of the Immanent becoming Transcendent, that process is anything but one and done . It unfolds in stages, beginning with the Death of Jesus, his Resurrection and Ascension, the Gift of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost), and the Assumption of Mary…and continuing through the Apocalypse, the General Judgment, and the Parousia . The great unfolding also extends backwards in time to embrace the Prophets, Judges, and Patriarchs in a universal eschaton stretching from Alpha to Omega. Origami was not part of my culture growing up but had it been, it might have served as another sacramental reenactment of the Incarnation. Mary ‘wraps around’ Jesus: she conceives him, births him, raises him, cajoles him, buries him and witnesses his Ascension into Heaven. Likewise, she is the ‘first fruit’ of his Resurrection, being assumed into Heaven, body and soul. For Jesus – and for us too? – his mother encapsulates and embodies the material world. This is appropriate. The life of Christ is a fulcrum, the tipping point in cosmic history. From Christ grace flows forwards and backwards in time and Jesus’ mother is the first beneficiary of both (Annunciation & Assumption). Earlier, we dismissed the notion that Mary was a goddess in the mythological tradition. Rightly so! Mary personifies the spatiotemporal. If she participated in divinity in any way she would not be able to play her critical role in Salvation history. Among the titles conferred on Mary by the Catholic Church’s preferred Litany , several strongly reinforce her significance as the locus of Christ’s entry into the material World and the World’s physical reentry into Christ: Mother of Christ Mother of the Church Mother of our Creator Mother of our Savior Ark of the covenant Gate of Heaven. Other epithets, however, connect Mary with functions in the material world that do seem to recapitulate those of various pre-Christian goddesses such as Sophia, Gaia & Easter: Mirror of justice Seat of wisdom Health of the sick Comforter of the afflicted Mother of Good Counsel Queen of peace Morning star. Interestingly, Themis, daughter of Gaia and the Greek goddess of Justice, is also referred to as Mother of Good Counsel. Others of these titles also connect Mary with pre-Christian goddesses (e.g. Sophia → Wisdom, Morning Star → Venus ). These are some staggering attributions: ‘Mother of our Creator…Mirror of Justice…Ark of the Covenant…Gate of Heaven…Queen of Peace?’ Wouldn’t you love to have Mary’s resume? Now imagine the world without these things…imagine a world without Mary! Can you do it? If you can, then you’re imagining a dystopian world on the order of Mad Max or Bazil . But more likely, you can’t. In that case, Mary’s unique contribution is ‘necessary’ (but never ‘sufficient’) for the existence and redemption of our world. Ave Maria, Mater Dei . *** Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Virgin Mary in Meditation (1905) portrays Mary in a quiet, lamplit interior, her face lowered in deep, human contemplation rather than idealized perfection. The soft, diffused light and gentle brushwork give the scene an intimate, Impressionist‑inflected atmosphere that emphasizes her inner spiritual life. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Was Rousseau Right After all? David Cowles Mar 6, 2026 “Utopians of all stripes…have long argued that human beings are capable of self-government with little or no interference from a coercive state. Perhaps they’re right!” 1600 words, 7 minute read In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the Social Contract , one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the Western World. Rousseau hypothesized a collection of human individuals and families, living in proximity to one another but lacking any defined social institutions. He called this The State of Nature . Rousseau purports to trace the process of socialization, beginning with this blank slate and leading to complex social structures, albeit different from the typical 18th century European State. He reasoned, somewhat tortuously, that people would have freely and voluntarily ceded personal property and political sovereignty in exchange for legal title and collective security. Needless to say, Rousseau’s work was, and still is, controversial. One key question : Did he believe he was describing an actual historical process, or did he intend his proposal to be read more as a thought experiment? Sidebar : In the 1960’s Harvard professor, John Rawls retraced Rousseau’s intellectual journey. However, Rawls was clear from the outset that his process was purely hypothetical and had no basis in history or anthropology. The result was A Theory of Justice , a classic of political theory even today. Did I mention it was the ‘60s? Rawls was concerned with the question of whether any form of government could ever be legitimate. Unlike many of his colleagues (and students) at the time, he came to a positive conclusion…but only by requiring any such state to satisfy some very stringent economic and political conditions. (We’re not there yet!) Regardless of original intent, most scholars now agree with Rawls that Rousseau’s State of Nature needs to be understood as a mental construct. Obviously! Except… some recent archeological evidence suggests that something resembling Rousseau’s proto-culture might actually have existed…in Central Europe. And I’m not talking about the Shire! We’ll need to go back in time…but not that far back! Archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of a Neolithic culture (the Vinca, see map above) spanning much of what is today modern Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania). Remarkably, the Vinca dominated that busy cultural intersection for a millennium c. 5000 BCE. There are signs that Vinca society made the transition from something resembling Rousseau’s State of Nature to his Proto-State. If so, it would have great significance for contemporary social philosophy. Let’s start with a brief survey: Vinca settlements exhibit sophisticated Urban Planning. Residential areas are set apart from areas designated for community, commerce, and manufacture. Is this the Western world’s first attempt at zoning? Within the residential quarter, buildings are arranged in symmetrical patterns, reflecting both pre-planning and a high level of cooperation. There seems to have been a robust division of labor with specific individuals performing certain roles essential to the Vinca economy: e.g. hunting, agriculture, manufacturing and trade, but with no hint of any class or caste disparities. Yet there is no evidence that Vinca society had any sort of central government. The political process appears to have been decentralized with de facto power distributed among members of society in a more or less egalitarian manner and on an ad hoc basis. One is reminded of the period of the Judges (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE) in Israel. There is no evidence of any designated political or religious castes, no evidence of bureaucracy, and only slight evidence of disparities in status, wealth or power. Finally, there is no evidence of any standing army and Vinca settlements lack any signs of the fortifications characteristic of that era. Apparently, the Vinca lived long and prospered due to their critical role in trans-European trade and their cultural and technological contributions to Greater Neolithic Europe. One can imagine a Vinca PR slogan: “We threaten no one, we benefit everyone!” Because we are comparing Vinca society with Rousseau’s State of Nature, we are focused on its political and economic institutions (above), but the Vinca also made important contributions to the evolution of European culture: The Vinca produced a great many objects d’art , some quite remarkable in their own right (see Appendix below). Many of those pieces were adorned with graphic symbols (as below). Whether these markings were merely decorative or emblematic of mythological or philosophical ideas is a matter of debate. Separately, a system of markings (cross, X’s, hatch marks, etc.) was used and may constitute an early form of writing. If so, it would have preceded Sumerian Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Finally, the Vinca may have been millennia ahead on the matter of gender identity. Men and women did have distinct social and economic roles in Vinca society. However, there is no evidence that this was a source of any discontent or discrimination. On the contrary, a burial site recently uncovered in Hungary and dating back to the Vinca era shows signs of gender plasticity. Traditionally, men and women were buried in different positions with different artifacts. However, out of the 125 Neolithic graves recently opened, 7 contained skeletons of folks (both genders) who had been buried opposite to their birth physiology. It seems reasonable to speculate that these ritual anomalies reflect those individuals’ non-traditional identities, roles and lifestyle choices. If Vinca culture is so fundamentally divergent from the European norm, we should expect to find evidence of a different Weltanschauung embedded in its language. But hard cheese: we know virtually nothing about their language except that it was probably pre-Indo-European (pre-IE). Today, only one pre-IE is still spoken in Europe: Basque thrives in a geographically and culturally isolated region around the Pyrenees Mountains in what is now Southwestern France/Northeastern Spain. Let’s be clear: there is no evidence that modern Basque resembles ancient ‘Vinca’ in any way! But what if it did? As you might expect, Basque has a grammatical structure very different from today’s Indo-European (IE) tongues. Intriguingly, these differences appear to be consonant with the unusual features of Vinca culture and social structure. For example… Basque lacks the grammatical gender (masculine, feminine) characteristic of IE languages. This may reflect Vinca’s kinder, gentler take on gender stereotyping. Basque uses ergative-absolutive rather than the nominative-accusative cases universal in IE languages. In IE languages, the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs takes the same case (nominative): "She runs" and "She sees him" . Basque works according to a completely different logos : The subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb both take the absolutive case. The subject of a transitive verb takes a different case entirely — the ergative, marked with the suffix -k . (Nordic languages, ancient and modern, use a similar suffix for processes that are reciprocal or recursive in nature.) The ergative frame implicitly asks: are you the originating cause of this event, or are you the field in which it occurs? Are you the figure or the ground? The wave or the particle? Schrödinger’s equation or its collapse? IE grammar trains us to look for a naked doer, someone to take the blame, and when there isn't, we invent one. Basque uses a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order, placing the verb at the end of the clause. Accordingly, the verb brings subject and object together rather than dividing them as it does in SVO languages (e.g. IE). SOV conveys a ‘we’re all in this together’ ethos rather than the ‘dog eat dog’ we’re used to. Mind Blow : Basque has no direct equivalent for the verb "to have." In IE languages, to have is right behind to be on any list of frequently used verbs. Yet the concept does not naturally occur in Basque. Imagine building a language without the verb ‘to be’! Try it. (Neolithic Europeans did so without the verb ‘to have’.) Possession is expressed through a construction meaning roughly "something is to/at me" — using the verb izan (to be) with the dative. This places Basque (and potentially Vinca) philosophy half way between Classical Liberalism (the absolute right to private property) and Marxism (the abolition of private property). Intriguingly, this is also approximately the position of Islam, Hasidic Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church: there is a right to private property but it is not absolute. Ultimately, everything belongs to God, but it is parceled out to individuals and families for them to nurture…and protect from incursions by ‘diabolical powers’, e.g. the errant mega-state. Inspired by Homer and HBO, we imagine early European societies as authoritarian, aristocratic, and bellicose; and in some cases that may be apt. But not in every case! A deeper dive into the Vinca civilization may broaden our concept of what’s possible for pre-historical societies…and for us today. Radical democrats, libertarians, anarchists, and utopians of all stripes (from St. Benedict to John Eliot to Karl Marx) have long argued that human beings are capable of self-government with little or no interference from a coercive state. Perhaps they’re right! Appendix Vinca figurine of a woman (4800-3000 BC) This Vinca figurine is remarkable. Note the proto-spirals associated with the breasts and the more developed spirals associated with genitalia. Cross-culturally, the spiral is one of several symbols (Cross, Star of David, et al.) that seem to symbolize the connection between the immanent, phenomenal world and its transcendent, noumenal doppelganger . After all, God appeared to Job ‘out of the (spiral) whirlwind’ and Dorothy traveled to Oz on the wings of a (spiral) cyclone. In the language of contemporary cosmology, the spiral may be telling us something: it may be pointing at the phenomenon of scale-independent fractals. 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< Back Ovid vs. Plato David Cowled Sep 20, 2025 “Ovid freed us from the collective anonymity of Plato and prepared us for the intensely personal theology of Jesus.” At the age of 12, I first encountered Homer (in translation, of course – I’m no John Stuart Mill). To my credit, I immediately realized I had no idea what was going on. Judeo-Christianity has its challenges: burning bushes, parting seas, multiplying foodstuffs and my personal favorite, water that tastes, and intoxicates, like musty old vintage wine, 1er cru. That said, the Bible reads like a 20 th century tech manual compared to Greco-Roman mythology: Gods battling gods at every turn, incarnate every where, in humans, animals, plants, and even stones; in the phenomena of echo and reflection; in the rhythms of nature – the sunrise and the seasons; in love itself, and even in the realm of the dead (Hades). And what of these gods? Petty, vain, mischievous, jealous, vengeful, sibling rivals… I am no longer 12; I’m many multiples on…and then some. But I’m still baffled by Greco-Roman mythology, or at least I was until I rediscovered Ovid. (I’d read Ovid before and liked him…but that was in Latin class and our focus was on his use of language, not his metaphysics.) Today I am well described by Ben Johnson as one having “little Latin and no Greek” but I am still krazy ‘bout kosmology . Who would not wish to understand the metaphysics of Mount Olympus even if the behavior of the gods is reprehensible? (Perhaps you, dear reader…to your credit!) But as for me, I’m hooked. Of course, my friends and family have organized all the politically correct interventions, but to no avail. Imagine my excitement then when I realized that the Key-to-Rebecca had existed all along, for almost exactly 2000 years in fact. It was my Rosetta Stone moment. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is many things but none more important than the cypher, i.e. the code, needed to unravel the mysteries of Greco-Roman mythology. It is the Cliff’s Notes version of a millennial civilization… except that these Notes come in a spectacular epic poem. Like Europe’s A-List violin concerti, the Canon of great epic poems is quite limited: Iliad , Odyssey , Aeneid , of course, then Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost , and in the middle, acting as a fulcrum, Ovid’s Metamorphoses , bridging the gap between two civilizations (Classical and Christian), and in doing so, providing a key to both. As I said, a Rosetta Stone ! How does it work? The turn of the millennium Latin poet built a comprehensive cosmology around the concept of Identity and expressed it in glorious verse. In Metamorphoses , Ovid treats Identity as if it were a cosmic onion. The outermost layer, the skin, is the region we Platonists call Form . According to Plato, Form is substructural. First, X is a chair , then X is this chair; first X is a man, then X is me. Species > individual. My form is the cornerstone of my identity. “Not so!” according to Ovid. Form is infinitely variegated. Its vicissitudes are endless and entirely superficial…and therefore Form is ultimately meaningless. Ovid turns Plato on his head, much the same as Marx did Hegel 1850 years later. As the outer layers of the cosmic onion are peeled away, we drill ever deeper into the essence of the existent. We are dogged in our expectation of finding a pony at the bottom of this pile of excrement. But we are disappointed every time. Like Prospero, we are left empty handed: “Our revels now are ended. These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on…” - The Tempest (Shakespeare) 100 years after Ovid but 1500 years before Shakespeare, John of Patmos had a similar ‘revelation’. His vision, which fills most of the final book of the Christian Bible, includes the systematic breaking of 7 seals, reminiscent of the layers of Ovid’s cosmic onion. But when the 7th seal is broken, John, like Shakespeare’s audience and Ovid, gets a stupefying surprise: Out of the organ grinder’s box pops ‘Jack’, Jean-Paul in fact, Sartre. Not the man himself, of course, but his singular contribution to the Intellectual History of the West, i.e. Le Neant. ( Being and Nothingness ) John watched (and listened) as the Lamb broke open each seal in turn. Each brought new and terrifying sights and sounds: a voice like thunder, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Death and Hell itself, the blood of martyrs. Then, with the breaking of the sixth seal, “there was a great earthquake, the sun turned as black and dark as sackcloth, and the whole moon became like blood. The stars in the sky fell to Earth like unripe figs shaken loose in a strong wind. Then the sky was divided, like a torn scroll…” (Like the curtain in the Temple at the hour of Christ’s crucifixion.) But even this is still just preparation for the great event yet to come, the breaking of the seventh seal, the fulcrum on which Revelation balances. Consider the Amen chorus at the end of Handel’s great oratorio, Messiah. Midway through this varied but bombastic summation of the ‘greatest story ever told,’ the orchestra and the chorus suddenly fall silent and stay silent for several measures. This is the pivotal musical moment corresponding to the breaking of the 7th Seal in salvation history as told in Revelation. The rest Handel placed in his Amen is one of the most profound moments in all of Western music. It links the final chorus of the world’s greatest oratorio with the final book of the Bible. If you’re lucky enough to be in the audience for a competent performance, then at that moment, you are John of Patmos! So, if Platonic Form is unrelated to identity ( per Ovid), what takes its place, what assumes that role? What survives formal changes, no matter how numerous or thorough? Sense of Self . According to Ovid, we retain our sense of being ourselves through all our ‘formal’ changes. I am always, ever, and only me , regardless of how I may appear. Memory ( Persistence of , Dali). We remember all our prior forms and some of our experiences under each, just as seniors remember events from childhood and middle age. Qualia . Although forms can change utterly in Ovid, basic qualities endure. A ‘beautiful’ girl becomes just as beautiful as a tree, heifer, or spring. Values . In a dramatic affirmation of Transcendent (eternal and universal) Values, so central to Judeo-Christian ethics, Ovid’s personalities retain their chosen values throughout their changes in form. Consider Daphne who begs her father to change her into a tree so she can preserve her chastity from Apollo…who continues to love her, even in her new form: “If you cannot be my wife, you will be my tree,” and everyday he wears her laurel leaves. Daphne’s chastity and Apollo’s lust will undoubtedly survive any future changes of form. Or Io, changed into a cow by Juno, continuing to follow her family, hoping for a gentle touch or a handful of grass. Unable to speak, she uses her hoof to write out in the sand the story of her dreadful change. Later, when she regains her human form, “no trace of heifer is left, except the lovely whiteness of her flesh…And now she is a celebrated goddess, revered by crowds clothed in white linen: Isis.” Io has been through it all but her sense of self never waivers, her memories persist throughout and her defining whiteness, acquired as a heifer, continues as a god. Identity is not a function of Form; in fact, they are entirely unrelated. Real identity lies in (1) our immanent and intuitive sense of self, i.e. consciousness, (2) our unique collection of historical experiences as they persist in Memory, and (3) the transcendental values we apply when judging our World and forming our Subjective Aim. Plato can be read as a critical meditation on the Homeric myths. Ovid freed us from the collective anonymity of Plato and prepared us for the intensely personal theology of Jesus, just one generation later. *** Ovid among the Scythians (painted twice by Eugène Delacroix in 1859 and 1862) imagines the Roman poet Ovid during his exile on the Black Sea, far from the cultured life of Rome. In the canvas, nomadic Scythians approach the seated poet with curiosity and a mix of reverence and hospitality, set within a vast, windswept steppe of muted blues and ochres. The work contrasts Ovid’s refined, contemplative presence with the rugged vitality of the Scythian world, creating a poetic meditation on exile, cultural encounter, and the enduring power of art and intellect. 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.

“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

“The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” < Back Is the Universe Real David Cowles Jul 15, 2024 “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” What must it have been like to stare up at the stars c. 2000 BCE? The Universe is your patch! You have qualified dominion over the animals and plants, and you can imagine setting sail on that great whale rode ( Beowulf ) we now know as the Milky Way. It is easy to see how we might have fallen prey to hubris . “I’m the king of this castle!” Things look a bit different now, don’t they? We know so much more, and the most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew. Of course, in absolute terms we have exponentially more data points; but relative to what is available to be known , our noosphere is shrinking. For one thing, much of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong; for another, each new, hard-won kernel of gnosis has shone a spotlight on vast new regions of ignorance. Once upon a time I knew nowt about arithmetic. Then someone showed me that 1 + 1 = 2. Cool beans! Then what about 1 + 1 + 1? Or 2 + 1? Or 2 + 2? In a couple of years I’ll give you Principia Mathematica. Imagine that X stands for everything there is to know, and Y stands for what we do know. In 2000 BCE, Y might have been 10% of X. Wow! But 4,000 years later, things have changed. What we know now is more like 1% of what is available to be known. We are learning what we don’t know faster than we’re learning in the first place. As fast as we learn more about our universe, the faster we learn how much more we don’t know. Sidebar : If this process continues unabated, we may reach the coveted mystic state of absolute unknowing. In 1900 CE, we were like 4-year-olds. We knew everything there was to know. By 1950, we’d learned that there was a lot more to be known than we’d imagined. To make matters worse, we realized that much of what we thought we knew in 1900 wasn’t what we thought it was. By 1950 we’d begun playing with computers; 75 years later, our computers are playing with us. For 50 years, we programed our computers; now computers program themselves. How long before those same computers program us? “What is man (sic) that God should be mindful of him?” Good question, but it was easier to answer when homo sapiens was top dog in a Universe we imagined to be less than half the size of our solar system. Not so easy to answer in the context of a Universe that is 14 billion years old and contains a trillion galaxies. Or in the context of a body that is made up of nothing but 30 trillion independent life forms (cells). Now what is ‘man’ again…? We have absolutely no right to expect our tiny lives to matter. But if that’s so, then all the agony of living has been for naught. In the cosmic context, we are sparks. What is just is. It’s not good, or bad; it just is. It came to be without regard to values of any sort. Even ‘order’, a prerequisite of Value, is in ever dwindling supply. In fact, order max’d out at Big Bang. Like a well wound watch, our universe is slowly running downhill. By some estimates we’re already about 15% of the way to Heat Death. To the extent that order is related to Value, the high point was 14 billion years ago, and every moment thereafter is a step in the ‘wrong’ direction. Look at it another way. The primary values - Beauty, Truth, and Justice – can all be appreciated as different manifestations of ‘order’. Without an ordered background to draw from, none of these values could be operative. Therefore, if they are at all, they must be gradually disappearing. Not much to look forward to, is it? A world which will necessarily become uglier, less truthful, and more unjust over time. (Hmm, sound like somebody’s political system?) Such a Universe is simply a process of self-annihilation. If Being = Good, then Entropy = Evil; and so Jesus taught us to pray, “Deliver us from evil”. And consciousness? According to this model, consciousness is the accidental consequence of increasing entropy (Hawking). It is a trace left behind by the order that is vanishing. Living consciously in this world is like watching your uninsured McMansion burn to the ground. No wonder folks are depressed. Unless none of this is true! Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that consciousness (self-awareness, recursion) is coincident with life itself. Like love and marriage pre-1950, you apparently can’t have one without the other. As far as we know, all life is cellular. It is apparently the minimal condition required for DNA to be expressed, conserved and replicated. According to this model, the DNA molecule evolved only once on Earth, and it evolved in tandem with a cellular superstructure. If and when we discover non-terrestrial life, we may find phenomena that we want to classify as ‘living’ but that has nothing like DNA and/or no such cellular structure; but all that is mere conjecture now. As soon as the Earth had sufficiently cooled, the first DNA molecule was synthesized…and expressed as a conscious cell. As far as we know, in the 4 billion years since that momentous event, not a single new DNA molecule and not a single new cell has formed. Remarkable! That means, as far as we can say with any certainty, life and consciousness are one-offs. But of course, we’ve only surveyed a tiny corner of this vast universe. If Universe came to be accidentally and spontaneously and if it will ultimately self-annihilate, then what is it anyway? Here our academic overlords are split: either (1) the universe is real but has no meaning, no value, no purpose, or (2) what we call ‘universe’ is not real but only virtual. According to this later interpretation, the Universe ‘exists’ in same way virtual particles ‘exist’…it doesn’t. A virtual particle is a particle still born; it has no being . It is a sub-momentary dispensation from the great Neant that ultimately comes to nothing. Turns out though, the two models are identical, one framed in the vocabulary of Idealism, the other in the language of materialism. Gregory Bateson’s seminal contribution to Western philosophy is his insight that ‘being’ applies only to entities that ‘make a difference’. To be is to be different and to make a difference; an actual entity is “a difference that makes a difference”. Whatever is not distinguished from its inherited world and/or does not make a distinguishable contribution to the inheritable worlds of other entities…is not! Camus and Sartre applied such a test to the existence of ‘God’. For them, God is an entity whose existence, or non-existence, makes no difference. Therefore, whether God exists theoretically or not, God does not exist. In the language of symbolic notation (A υ ~A) = ~A. We might say the same of Universe. Whether it’s fully virtual or merely meaningless, it cannot ‘be’ because either way, the events that constitute it make no difference. Alternatively, the Universe is a locus of events, real events because each event is a difference that makes a difference. According to the ‘Standard Model’, events within Universe are actual entities because they are differences that make a difference, but not so Universe per se . That won’t wash! If Universe is annihilated at Heat Death, so are all its constituent events. Therefore, the great chain of difference is broken. In that case events are real only in the context of each other but not in any objective sense. So then, what of Universe itself? Events within Universe are real because they are differences that make a difference. Does Universe? Yes, but if and only if Universe is ‘different’ from the mere collection of events that make it up, and if there is something to which Universe can matter. If so, that ‘something’ must transcend the universe itself. Yet Universe must remain true to its name ( uni ). Only, Universe itself can meet this test. The Universe is a massively non-linear ‘perpetual recursion machine’. Every event shapes the whole as the whole shapes every event. Is this paganism? Or pantheism? Neither. The Universal process of perpetual recursion transcends the Universe itself. It is a manifestation of the Trinitarian God, the paradigm of recursion. 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 dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to our 2024 Beach Read Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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