< Back Church and State David Cowles Oct 25, 2022 I will write (my law) upon their hearts… At that time, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own mind. At a time when our Atlantic culture has shed almost every vestige of common values, one meme remains largely unchallenged: “The separation of church and state.” While even now, the elaboration and application of this principle remains a subject of controversy, the fundamental concept is widely shared: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Separation of Church and State is so thoroughly engrained in our political culture that it is rarely questioned. Yet, our modern Atlantic model is only one possible expression of this relationship. Let’s look at some ways Church and State may (or may not) co-exist: #1 No Church, All State Religion, any religion, is the ‘opiate of the people’. It is objectively wrong and therefore harmful. It thwarts scientific progress, pays only lip service to reason, and threatens to delay the coming of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It cannot be tolerated. #2 Separation of Church and State An impervious firewall must exist between Church and State. Church has no obligation to State, and State has no obligation to Church. In fact, State is to have no truc whatsoever with any religion or church. If Church is to ‘make it,' it must do so entirely on its own. For its part, State must adopt a strictly neutral position regarding religion in general and churches in particular. #3 Co-existence of Church and State States recognize that the voluntary practice of religion in no way undermines, and may even complement, the wellbeing of the realm. The position of Church is secure; churches enjoy all the same rights, privileges, and obligations as other institutions within the state. #4 Hypostatic Church and State Aka, the Carolingian model. Drawing on Christology, which holds Jesus Christ to be “true God and true man”, this view sees society as “true church and true state," Following the theological conclusions of the Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD), Charles the Great (Charlemagne) imagined the relationship between Church and State to be similar to the relationship between Jesus’ Divine and Human Natures. #5 : Constitutional Theocracy Both Church and State are necessary for the proper functioning of society. Church is sovereign in matters of faith. State, though sovereign in secular matters, governs under the umbrella of God’s Law (as interpreted by the Church). State is expected to promote (but not require) the practice of religion; Church is expected to promote loyalty (but not blind) to the State. Logistical and ideological considerations may lead the State to recognize one church as the “official state religion” without prohibiting the expression and practice of other faiths. #6 : Absolute Theocracy The Law of God, as interpreted by the Church, is normative in all things, civil as well as ecclesiastical. It is the entirety of the law. Therefore, the true theocratic state may have no legislative branch at all; or if it does, the legislative function can only apply to matters on which God’s law is silent, i.e., to the gaps between raindrops. #7 : All Church, No State “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” – Jer. 31:33 “In those days, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his (sic) own eyes.” – Judges 21:25 We seem to be living in a time when the question of church/state relations is once again taking center stage. We will all inevitably be drawn into the conversation. It may be useful to keep in mind that this is not a simple, binary choice between two discrete models. Church/state relations exist along a continuum. They are analog, not digital. Intellectual history is not a jukebox. You don’t just punch two keys together to play a record. A better analogy would be the hand turned dial (no button pushing, please) of an old-fashioned AM/FM radio. We move along the dial slowly but steadily. Along the way will encounter ‘islands of sound in a static sea’; that’s what we call ‘a station.' Like what you hear? Good, let’s hang out there. Feeling the need for something more, or at least something different, no problem. Just make your way up the dial to the next oasis of sweet sound. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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 Universal Theocracy David Cowles Nov 3, 2025 “The King (ruler) is responsible only to the people and the people are responsible only to God!” Democratic Republic, Constitutional Monarchy, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Tyranny (e.g. Dictatorship) – Constitutional Theocra cy doesn’t make the cut, at least not according to most 21st century textbooks. Perhaps that’s because every form of government is a Constitutional Theocracy ! Whether acknowledged or not, every government, regardless of its form , has built into it certain guardrails…and an escape hatch. These extra-constitutional devices base their claim to legitimacy on a power higher than any mere political process. Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich defined Faith as ‘ultimate concern’. Whatever your ‘ultimate concern’, that is the Good as you conceive it, that is where you place your trust, and therefore that is your higher power, your God . It is everyone’s court of last resort; it is the common venue for every final appeal. Applying Tillich geo-politically, every ‘state’ grounds its claim to authority on something beyond itself. For example, consider how King James I of England (VI of Scotland), articulated the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings : “Kings are justly called Gods, for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king…God hath power to create, or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none…And the like power have Kings...(to) make of their subjects like men at the chess, pawn to take a bishop or a knight…” Closer to home, consider the United States today. There is a complex system of checks and balances in place, a tri-partite separation of powers, a federal system of shared sovereignty with states, and a Bill of Rights bolted onto the Constitution itself. Even so, one wonders what would happen if these democratic processes produced a result that was perceived to be an existential threat to the nation itself or a radical and irredeemable violation of objective standards of Justice. Farfetched? Not at all! Turns out, the founders anticipated just such an eventuality…and provided several escape hatches : Private citizens have the right to bear arms; and They have the right to participate in well-regulated militias. Juries have the (much contested) right to nullify unjust laws at the time of their application. In fact, the Declaration of Independence , the nation’s birth certificate, confirms the right of people to take up arms against a government whose policies abridge divine principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men (sic), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it… it is their right, it is their duty , to throw off such Government…” According to this doctrine, the ‘King’ (ruler) is responsible only to the people and the people are responsible only to God! MMA Headliner : Jefferson takes on James for the soul of the millennium. (Catch it live on ESPN and ABC.) Speaking of the UK, a similar function is served by Common Law, the Magna Carta , the parliamentary system, and the constitutional monarch. Even so, freedom of speech was substantially curtailed during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and political participation by certain extremist political groups has recently been prohibited. In Iran, the secular authorities are subservient to the clerics. In Algeria, elections were cancelled when it appeared that a fundamentalist party ( FIS ) was poised for victory. In Germany, certain political parties have been outlawed and use of symbols and rhetoric invoking the Nazi era is considered a crime. In some countries, the military serves as the final court of appeal. Plus there is a trend, snowballing around the world, to bring legal actions, criminal and civil, against one’s political opponents. In some cases (e.g. France, Italy) certain politicians have been barred from participating in the electoral process as a result. Finally, during the death throes of the Soviet Union several ‘constitutional’ Eastern European governments simply stepped aside to allow a new wave of Western looking leaders to take charge. I pass no judgment, pro or con, on any of these arrangements. I cite them simply to demonstrate that all states, regardless of titular form, recognize some sort of ‘higher power’ to which their constitutional institutions are based and to which they are subject. In the perpetual shunting of the loom from process to policy and from function back to form, the space reserved for society’s constitutional organs varies…but it always exists within limits imposed by a transcendent standard from which they derive their ‘limited and contingent’ legitimacy. We all live in a Constitutional Theocracy . Acknowledge it! *** The Triumph of Marat by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1794) depicts the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat being carried triumphantly through a cheering crowd after his acquittal by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Painted during the height of the French Revolution, it captures the fervent idolization of Marat as a hero of the people and symbol of resistance against tyranny. Boilly’s composition, with its dense crowd and celebratory energy, reflects both the passion and the volatility of revolutionary zeal in a society on the brink of chaos. 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 Who Is Mary? David Cowles Aug 9, 2022 The relationship between Jesus and Mary is the relationship between God and the World, and the relationship between God and the World is the paradigm of all external relatedness. Most Christians have high regard for Mary, the mother of Jesus, but she plays a particularly important role in Orthodox, Anglican, and Roman Catholic cosmology: Gate of Heaven, Queen of the Angles, Mirror of Justice, Seat of Wisdom, Theotokos (God Bearer) Mater Dei (Mother of God) 4th century poet and theologian Ephrem the Syrian uses verse to explore further Mary’s role in the ‘economy of salvation’. Take a listen: (Jesus’) Mother, Sister, Bride, Daughter of Man, Thirsty Earth Fountain of Milk, Royal Palace, Holy of Holies. Mary’s epithets are not just terms of endearment. They are also a kind of code, and what they encode is what I call ‘The Marian Topology of the Cosmos’ or just ‘Marian Topology.’ Notice how Ephrem uses familiar kinship terms to describe Mary’s relationship with Jesus. No surprise there; she is his mother after all. But I think Ephrem is going for something more here. Mary is the Daughter of Man , not just the daughter of a man, but the daughter of all men (sic), i.e., the daughter of humanity and, by extension, the daughter of the entire Cosmos. Everything that is now, ever was, or is still to come, climaxes with Mary and her son, Jesus. I am reminded of the last scene in Act One of hit musical Les Misérables . Everything comes together at a point in a moment of time (Paris, June 5th 1832 in the musical), and that point is in Mary’s womb, late in the first century B.C. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world… I mean, who’da thunk it? 15 billion years old, 93 billion light years wide (and who knows what to come), all of it converged at a single point (or in a single infinitesimal region) in spacetime! Sounds more “out there” than it is! According to ‘Marian Topology,’ all events involve the Cosmos converging at or near a point. That’s what an event is! The universal realized in the incidental. Would you be surprised if I told you that that view is shared by many modern scientists and philosophers: Alfred North Whitehead, John Bell (I think) and David Bohm, to name just a few? What makes the Marian event so special is not the way it is structured (a structure it shares with all events), but the fact that this point of convergence is also the point of tangency between spacetime and eternity, between the immanent and the transcendent, between the profane and the sacred, between the mundane and the divine. Mary is the fulcrum of the Cosmos (Jesus is its lever); hers is the hidden chamber (womb) where God and Man become one. She is the mother of Jesus the Christ, but she is also his Sister and his Bride. Read one way, this is the paradigm of incent; read it another way, it is Cosmology 101. “To see the World in a Grain of Sand” (Blake) - easy-peasy! Even I can do it (and we do it together twice each week in Thoughts While Shaving and 8 times each year in Aletheia Today Magazine ). On the other hand, to see the Creator and his Creation in a single cell, well, that’s why God gets the big bucks. The relationship between Jesus and Mary is the relationship between God and the World, and the relationship between God and the World is the paradigm of all external relatedness. (Trinity is the paradigm of all internal relatedness.) Mary is Jesus’ progenitrix (mother), fellow-traveler (sister) and lover (bride); in fulfilling that role, she becomes the parent, the sibling and the soulmate of every event in the Cosmos. She is the Earth’s thirst (need, lack) but she is also instrumental in the quenching of that thirst (like Elijah and the other Prophets ). She is the Royal Palace where the King of the Universe dwells, and she is the Holy Holies into which only the eternal high Priest , Jesus the Christ, can enter. Marian Topology is non-linear, non-orientable, teleological, and recursive; we need to push awareness out of the theological faculties, into physical science, social science, biology and philosophy, and ultimately into the streets. Only there, in my view, can it Save our Planet . Image: Pieta, 1876 is a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau which was uploaded on May 10th, 2019. Public domain. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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 A Brand New Razor David Cowles Jan 26, 2023 “You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor… Occam gives disheveled, often bloated philosophy a good shave. But not good enough!” You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor . According to William of Ockham (c. 1340), given a choice between two equally accurate models (of reality), the simpler model is preferred . Occam gives disheveled, often bloated philosophy a good shave. But not good enough. Occam leaves stubble. I propose to give philosophy an even closer shave using a brand new ‘ ATM Razor’: “When a phenomenon can be modeled by two or more equally elegant and spare ( Occam ) hypotheses, the model that posits (or requires) the fewest fixed entities is to be preferred .” All models distort the events they model. That’s the nature of modeling. But using the ATM Razor we can minimize the pressure exerted on process in the modeling process. All living Indo-European languages break down the perceptual field according to a more or less common ontological grid. In English, we talk about nouns (including pronouns) and verbs and the adjectives and adverbs that qualify them. 20 th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead characterized all western philosophy by lifting a single verse from an Anglican hymn: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” – the interplay of stability and flux. In so doing, Whitehead was doing no more than sampling Parmenides, the father of western philosophy, who spoke 2,500 years ago of two realms of Being: Aletheia (Truth) and Doxa (Appearance). Being in the realm of Aletheia is monotone, motionless, unchanging and without space or time. Everything else is located in the realm of Doxa : qualities, motions, changes, and spatiotemporal relations. Whitehead has contributed many important ideas to western philosophy. His ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ is a philosophical reformulation of the first commandment of the Decalogue, the prohibition against Idolatry. Put simply, whenever human beings break down a perceptual field, there is a danger that they will over-seed those fields with nouns: ergo “misplaced concreteness." Example: as we ‘watch’ the process of evaporation and precipitation, we ‘see’ clouds of water vapor, but we call them ”ice cream castles in the air.” That is a paradigmatic example of misplaced concreteness, our tendency to over-nominalize. Nouns stick…and ultimately stink. Verbs don’t. Once you’ve named a phenomenon, you have conferred upon it a kind of immortality. In many cultures, the name (noun) of something is an acceptable substitute for the thing (or person) itself. Absent the application of some outside force, we expect our ‘nouns’ to endure...and rot. Want proof? Go to bed! After a bit of tossing and turning you’ll find yourself in a world where ‘named entities’ are much less durable. We don’t expect the people, places, and things we encounter in our dreams to maintain a fixed identity or even to endure once our imagination (attention) has moved on. In the dreamworld, at least, unobserved trees do not fall in unobserved forests and if they do, they don’t make unheard sounds. Dreamland is a cool place to visit for a few hours every evening…but I wouldn’t want to live there. If I did, you’d medicate me… or lock me up. Apparently, society cannot tolerate the complete dissolution of our nominals (i.e., the smashing of our pumpkins, aka idols). Verbs, on the other hand, are more forgiving. One size fits one! There’s a process and we ‘name it’ (or describe it) using a ‘verb’; but we don’t automatically assume (1) that that process will continue after we’ve moved on or (2) that we will encounter that exact same process elsewhere in other contexts. When we use verbs to model process, we are being more ‘data dependent’ (in the words of the Federal Reserve); we are being more faithful to experience. When we use nouns, we force ourselves to fit our perceptions into a fixed, enduring structure. We turn events into objects so we can better manipulate them. Mapping the perceptual field onto a Cartesian grid, we can call one axis ‘nominal’ (say, X) and the other axis ‘verbal’ (say, Y). We are interested in evaluating various models of P (‘perceived process’) where X and Y are variables, but the sum of X and Y is always constant. More X less Y, and vice versa. In such a world, absent other, overriding considerations, we should always favor the model that gives us the largest Y-value (and, therefore, the smallest X-Value). That’s our new ATM Razor. Any questions? 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 Horror Movies David Cowles Oct 15, 2025 “We are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified.” What is it about Horror Movies that so fascinates us? In a world where the Nightly News (“What’s that?” - Gen Z) is often more horrible than anything Steven King could ever dream up, why do we feel we need more of a bad thing? Well, to be clear, we don’t all feel that need. I don’t, for example. I am anxious enough about life without manufacturing something else to scare me. But that’s me and clearly, I’m not ‘normal’. (I can hear you, readers! Stifle!) For years, my fascination with the fascination of horror has securely occupied shelf #76 in my hierarchy of existential concerns. However, a recent encounter with Paul Tillich ( Dynamics of Faith ) has forced me deep into the stacks. Without realizing it, Tillich gave me the interpretive key I’d been missing. Tillich’s concept of the Holy (shared in part with Rudoph Otto, Idea of the Holy ), emphasizes the dual nature of the Transcendent breaking into our lives. On the one hand, we are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified. You have to go back 3,000 years to find the best expression of finitude confronting the infinite ( The Book of Job ). Job’s iconic expression of faith is timeless: “I know that my redeemer (infinite) lives and on the last day (finite) he will stand upon the earth and after my skin has been destroyed (finite), yet in my flesh I will see God (infinite).” (Job 19: 25 – 27) This is the fundamental existential crisis of human life. We explored it elsewhere on this site in The Human Predicament . We strongly suspect that there’s something beyond the curtain, not necessarily an ‘afterlife’ but an ontological context for this life: “This has been a fun visit but now, really, can you just tell us what’s really going on ‘cause this certainly isn’t it, or at least not all there is of it.” For 100,000 years human civilizations have pock marked Planet Earth. We are everywhere, but nowhere the same. Civilization is rapacious, adaptive, and resilient. Yet ours is the only civilization that has this as its identity defining motto: Freedom from Transcendence . Not that that matters. Consensus doesn’t constitute truth. But it does help to explain our obsession with this one conclusion (this ultimate concern - Tillich) and our eagerness to sift through ‘evidence’ to find just those nuggets that support that conclusion. We have Faith in the power of immanence; like Madonna, we’ve gone ‘all in’ on the material world. Of course in any civilization you will find ‘exceptional’ individuals and groups who deviate from the ideological norm. But as far as I know, we are the only civilization that has consciously reasoned from a pre-ordained, ideology-driven conclusion back to a logic, an epistemology, a cosmology, an ontology, and an ethics that support that conclusion. So we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. We are firmly encased in our finitude but our gaze is naturally fixed on the infinite beyond. We think of ourselves as empiricists but “Don’t look up!” Head down, go to school, get a job, have a family, accumulate a nest egg, and, when it’s time to die, exit stage right sans fanfare. If you must look up, cover your eyes, or put on a pair of reflecting goggles. At all costs, keep your eyes off the Prize ( aka the Pearl of Great Price)! We live schizophrenic lives. On the one hand, we are viscerally aware of the Transcendent; on the other hand, we are required to deny it. We are left with existential dread and nothing to explain it, account for it, mitigate it or sublimate it. We are left with untethered terror ( aka free floating anxiety). We need an outlet for that feeling; we need something we can connect to the fear that accompanies us every day of our lives. We must find a way to project our subjective fears onto something objective, to ground our internal terror in an external source. Enter, Nosferatu ! Got kids? Ever try telling them, “Ghosts are not real” and “There’s no such thing as monsters?” How did that work out? Kids are terrified by the solidity and the fragility of their existence. Well they should be! But just like us, they cannot deal with it on face value. They have to find a way to project their feelings onto something concrete and immanent (if ultimately immaterial and absent). We stand on the edge of the infinite; we are terrified. No use pretending we’re not. We are all Kierkegaard! There’s not enough Jack Daniels or Baskin Robbins in the entire world to keep a lid on existential dread. We are well curated fruit of the Enlightenment vine. Our skins are bursting with the sugars of democracy, technology, and science. Who needs anything more? The answer, of course, is “We do!” No, I’m not invoking the “G-word” here. God forbid I do that ! I’m just talking about some sort of context that might enable us to make sense of it all. All bravado aside, there is no one among us so insensitive that they do not peer into the darkness and wonder. Of course, we can bail out. We can hide behind nihilism (solipsism, skepticism, relativism, etc.) or just declare the world, “Absurde!” (Artaud) and walk away. Good on you if that works. I’m not so lucky. Our fascination with ‘what lies beyond’ is not explicitly religious. What’s just over the next ridge, beyond the borders of the sea, at the end of the rainbow, outside the observable universe? Or after death? Our ‘hyper-materialistic, immanence-obsessed’ civilization is characteristic of just one corner of the World during one short period of time, the North Atlantic since 1700 CE. Our age is characterized by an insatiable urge to account for the phenomena of daily living without resorting to any ‘transcendental’ influences. According to Tillich (above), Faith is the foundational human experience. It is our act of ultimate concern . It is the reaction of who we are to what we’re not; it is the response of the finite (us) to the infinite (Transcendence). We all have a million little concerns in our lives, but they are all just refractions of the one and only ‘ultimate concern’, the infinite. All art, from cave paintings to Finegan’s Wake , can be understood as a chronicle of humanity’s confrontation with the ultimate. The Bible is one long meditation on that experience: Moses’ Burning Bush, Elijah’s ‘still small voice’, Jesus’ Transfiguration, Paul’s Conversion, John’s Seventh Seal, etc. It is in that context that we need to evaluate the horror film genre…and grant some ‘reck’ to those folks, even in our own families, who seem addicted. What we might experience listening to a Mozart Requiem, they might get from hanging out with Chuckie and Freddie over a long weekend. We all have more in common than we think. *** Image: The Triumph of Death (c. 1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portrays a grim, chaotic world where skeletons wage war against humanity. The painting is densely packed with scenes of destruction, highlighting the universality of death across all social classes. Bruegel’s dark imagery reflects the fears of his time, shaped by war, famine, and plague. 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 Something or Nothing David Cowles Sep 19, 2024 “Nemo is not Odysseus’ name…or that of a fish…Nothing is not the potentiality of something; it is nothing.” It’s hard to imagine an easier question. Either it is…or it is not! But it turns out not to be so simple after all. Where to begin? How about with the opening verses of Genesis : “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth – and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” Something? Or nothing? The ancient Hebrew uses Tohu and Bohu , Chaos and Void, to describe the primal condition. Is that something…or nothing? Chaos is the absence of order; void is the absence of substance (matter/energy). Is the absence of something something…or nothing? Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy, is clear: “ What is, is ungenerated and imperishable…Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is now…” So is Genesis : “Then God said, let there be light and there was light…God then separated the light from the darkness.” What darkness? Presumably, the darkness that was over the abyss (above). God created the light and separated this light from darkness. Now is there something? You bet! Science tells us that light is waves and particles, substance and order. Creation is the creation of something . Whatever we imagine precedes the creative moment can reasonably be labeled ‘nothing’. According to Genesis , ‘something’ is walled off from all else, i.e. from darkness, Tohu and Bohu , Chaos and Void. It can’t be any plainer. Darkness and abyss, chaos and void, are not created by God; they are simply a way of saying “nothing”. But why does this matter? We are bedeviled by ‘dualism’, the idea that opposites are ontological parallels: hot and cold, wise and foolish, good and bad, being and nothingness. But there is no cold, nothing is foolish, nothing bad, and, it should go without saying, nothing that is ‘nothing’. Nemo is not Odysseus’ name…or that of a fish. What we call ‘cold’ is the absence of heat, ‘foolishness’ is the absence of wisdom, ‘bad’ the absence of good, ‘nothing’ the absence of something; ‘nemo’ is the absence of anyone. Christians believe that God created the Universe ex nihilo , out of nothing. Notice I don’t say post nihilo , ‘after nothing’, because there is nothing that precedes being, not even ‘nothingness’ per se . ‘Nothing’ is not ‘something in disguise’; it is nothing, no thing . ‘Nothing’ is not the potentiality of something; it is nothing. Some have suggested that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo contradicts the account of creation in Genesis . Nothing precedes creation. Tohu and Bohu , Chaos and Void, are metaphors for ‘nothing’ – the absence of any ‘thing’ (substance, matter/energy) and the absence of any ‘order’. We have built a whole cosmology around the ‘fake’ idea of nothing . We say, “Before Big Bang, there was nothing; after death, there is nothing.” But ‘there is nothing’ is not a well-formed English sentence; it’s meaningless gibberish. There is only one thing that can be said with absolute certainty: “It is!” Descartes notwithstanding, it’s not cogito or even sum , though these are important ideas; it’s est . You don’t need to have read philosophy at Cambridge (UK) or studied it in Cambridge (US). It was evident to Parmenides (above), and it was evident to the authors of Exodus : “I am who/what/that am.” (3: 14) It was evident to Jesus and John: “I am”. It was evident to a medieval Irish poet (possibly St. Dallan): “Naught is all else to me save that Thou art.” Now you may be noting that Jesus and Dallan are ‘personalizing’ being. Rightly so. What they call ‘God’, we are accustomed to call ‘Being’; God is Being, per se . BTW, defining God this way should eliminate any need for atheism or agnosticism. God is not a being among beings. God is Being, per se , through whom all that exist exist. Est , it is, he is. We have fallen in love with Real Numbers…and rightly so! They have taken us to the Moon and back. But the set of Real Numbers includes Zero and ‘0’ is a mathematical construct, useful, but a construct, nonetheless. Zero per se does not exist. How could it? It’s zero! Zero represents what does not exist! ‘Zero’ represents ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ is not something; ‘nothing’ does not exist. The Science of Probability fetishizes nothing . When something is impossible, we say its P = 0. ‘P = 0’ rolls off our tongues as if there is some sort of continuum between what is infinitesimally probable and what is absolutely impossible. Calculus notwithstanding, there is an infinite gap (filled with hyperreal numbers) between zero and ‘the smallest possible positive Real Number’. There is an infinite difference between what is unlikely (no matter how unlikely) and what is truly impossible. Proton decay is unlikely; a squared circle is impossible. Not the same thing! We are indebted to Jacques Derrida for the contemporary realization the being per se is quantized. Differánce is a quantum of difference, a quantum of est . Where does that leave our post-Parmenidean philosopher class? Pascal , for example, developed a complex logic to demonstrate the efficacy of belief in God; he needn’t have. God (as we use the term here) is, period. It is impossible to say otherwise. God cannot not exist, nor can anyone sincerely or meaningfully say otherwise. Perhaps God might not have been, I don’t know that, but he is. There is something rather than nothing. Something exists; nothing does not. It is undeniable. And Sartre? His Being and Nothingness ( Etre et Neant ) is the existentialist’s Bible, and justly so. But Sartre’s neant is ‘negation’; functionally, it’s a verb. It presupposes that there is something ( etre en soi ) to negate. The negation of something is still not nothing. In the Real World beyond the realm of Real Numbers, (~X) + X ≠ 0. Instead, Ι(~X) + XΙ = є. Or, in the words of my 5 year old grandson, “ Everything exists!” Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 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 Rethinking Democracy David Cowles Jan 23, 2025 “It is important we remember that ‘democracy’ is ‘authority’ by another name, employing other means, in response to different circumstances.” “Democracy! Democracy!” Everybody loves Democracy. But what is it? Is it a New England Town Meeting? A Russian Soviet? Or Pericles’ Athens? ‘Democracy’ (Greek) – Rule of the People. But what does that mean? Proposed : a regime or state is ‘democratic’ to the extent that its policies are sensitive to, and reflective of, the interests and opinions of its citizens. If you find this definition intuitively appealing, you might want to give it another thought! Otherwise, you might find yourself stumbling over some very disturbing implications. For example, an elaborate electoral and legislative superstructure does not necessarily translate as ‘democracy’. Think Venezuela. On the other hand, my grandfather’s fondest wish, a ‘Benevolent Dictator’, would qualify. The ‘will of the people’ could theoretically be discerned through any of the following: a process of consensus formation (e.g. Soviets) the leadership of a Vanguard (e.g. PRC) direct participation in the legislative process (e.g. referenda) elected representatives (e.g. Parliament) the intuition of a well-meaning ruler ( Old Testament Judges) the benevolence of oligarchs, clergy, and or nobility the consolation of philosophers (Plato, Augustine/Aquinas Hobbs/Locke/Rousseau, Bentham/Mill, Marx/Lenin, Rawls) the application of algorithms designed to produce ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ ( aka Economism/technocracy) the revelation of a divine authority (e.g. Torah). The casting of yarrow stalks (I Ching). Nor can we rely uncritically on the self-reported identity of nation states. For example, 7 countries currently include the word ‘Democratic’ in their name: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) Democratic Republic of the Congo Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal People's Democratic Republic of Algeria I will leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether these nations, true to their name, are especially good examples of Democracy in action. Almost all nation states today pay at least lip service to the idea of Democracy . It remains to be seen whether any state’s commitment to Democracy is absolute. Consider contemporary Europe and the recent rise in right wing sentiment: In Germany, for example, the AfD already has 77 members in the federal Bundestag and their share seems likely to grow. But this poses a problem for a Germany that considers anti-fascism to be an existential imperative. Accordingly 37 centrist parliamentarians are moving to have the AfD outlawed as a political party. Democratic? Carmen Wegge, a lawmaker with the center-left SPD argues, "In Germany, democracy has already once been abolished by democratic means, and our continent was plunged into ruin." Perhaps unwittingly, Wegge defines the dilemma. What happens when Democracy itself becomes anti-democratic? When the will of the people is that ‘the will of the people’ not be allowed to interfere with the determination of policy or the conduct of affairs of state? Most nations are willing, if not anxious, to let the camel’s nose of public opinion into the decision making tent. Some because it is ‘the right thing to do’, some because it will produce the ‘best’ aggregate result over time, some because they realize that engagement is an effective means of control. But the extent of that incursion varies from regime to regime. Few nations, for example, allow citizens to work toward the overthrow of the government by extra-constitutional means, even if such efforts would be popular. The closest thing we have to an exception comes from late 80’s Eastern Europe. The nations of the Warsaw Pact, one by one, allowed their recognized governments to be overthrown by various popular movements. Nary a shot was fired. These regimes either did not have, or elected not to deploy, a ‘kill switch’. It was an amazing example of the peaceful, extra-constitutional transfer of political power. It has not been repeated since. At about this same time, pro-democracy demonstrations were occurring in the PRC. At first it seemed that leaders there might be willing to compromise with the demonstrators; but then things took a turn, resulting in ‘Tiananmen Square’. China slammed the door on Western style democracy and the rest, as they say, is history. Bottom line, there is a consensus abroad in the world that some amount of popular political input is a good thing, but different nations have vastly different strategies for tapping, channeling, and ultimately, controlling that input. Few nations, for example, are willing to allow that input to pose an existential threat to the regime itself: “However, it is important that passengers on this cruise ship know that they are free to rearrange the deck chairs anyway they choose.” So what really defines a political system is not the style or extent of its democracy but the limitations it imposes, de jure or de facto , on democratic input. Presumably, every political system draws a line somewhere. If not, the Anarchist ideal would have been realized long since. In analyzing any regime, the key is to identify the limitations it imposes on democracy, the tactics it uses to enforce those limitations, and the point at which such limitations are triggered. As we self-adoringly navel gaze, It is important we remember that ‘democracy’ is ‘authority’ by another name, employing other means, in response to different circumstances. 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 Descartes David Cowles Oct 29, 2025 “To be conscious is to be aware of being oneself and to be aware of being oneself is to be aware of oneself as a potential object of another’s awareness.” Cogito ergo sum , ‘I think therefore I am’ - possibly the best known meme in all of Western philosophy. Who has not marveled at its simple wisdom? And welcomed the comfort of a stable launching pad for further philosophical speculation? It answers so many questions…especially when you’re in middle school. But like most easy answers, it’s flawed; and like most flaws, the devil is in the language. I think…I am. Simple. But the ‘I’ is deceptive. It suggests that the ‘I’ that thinks is the ‘I’ that is; it isn’t! ‘I think’ describes an action. It discloses an agent, and it makes some sense to call that agent, ‘I’. I mean, what else would you call it? Agency is an ‘I-experience’. We can impute agency to other subjects but the only agency I can ever experience directly is my own; only an ‘I’ thinks and knows that it thinks. The authors of the Book of Job understood this c. 3,000 years ago: “I know that my redeemer lives, and on the last day he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes him – I, not another.” (19: 25 – 27) Only first person experience counts, Alfred North Whitehead notwithstanding. This discloses something unexpected about the meaning of ‘I think’. I think only if I am aware that I think. Computers think…but as far as we know they are not aware that they think. This is not the ‘thinking’ Descartes has in mind. The ‘I’ of his cogito is not the ‘I’ that thinks. It is the ‘I’ that knows that it thinks. What Descartes called ‘thinking’ ( cogito ) is more like what we mean by ‘being conscious’. ‘I think’ discloses ‘I’ to Descartes, not because Descartes thinks, but because Descartes knows that he thinks. The Descartes that knows that he thinks is the Descartes that is ( sum ) and that is not the Descartes who merely thinks. Sum (I am) describes a state, not an act. There is no agent so there is no warrant to invoke the ‘I-word’ in this context. A better presentation of the existential reality would have been cogito ergo est (‘I think therefore it is’ or ‘I think therefore something is’). Alternatively, we can retain the ‘I-word’ ( sum ) if we remove it from the cogito : cogitator ergo sum (‘it is thought therefore I am’). That an entity thinks and knows that it thinks means that being has a subject after all and that subject is what I call ‘me’. When I say, “I think,” I am both the stated subject and the implied object of the act. Thinking, as Descartes uses to term, is an inherently recursive process. Being, again per Descartes, is not. Thinking and being are not the same thing…not by a long shot! Bottom line : what is essential is that we scrupulously respect the ontological (not just semantic) distinction between the ‘I’ of cogito and the ‘I’ of sum . But there is more. Being conscious is a process and, like all process, it is trinitarian: (1) I am aware of x (not-me); (2) I am aware that I (me) am aware of x (not-me); (3) since x is and x is not me, I must assume that x may be aware of me as I am of x. I cannot assume that I am ontologically special, much less unique. What goes around may come around! You may say, “I don’t believe that x is aware of me.” Ok, so what? First, I don’t care what you believe; second, I don’t care whether x is aware of you or not. The real nature of x is unimportant. To be conscious is to be aware of being oneself and to be aware of being oneself is to be aware of oneself as potentially the object of another’s awareness. Consciousness does not require the existence of ‘other’ minds; it requires the possibility of ‘other’ minds. It requires me to harbor a model of the ‘other’ inside my model of myself, like an incubus . I cannot be aware of x unless x is distinct from me. Otherwise, x is just part of me and my awareness of it is just an awareness of myself. But if x is distinct from me, then I must concede that it may be a copy, a reflection, of me and that would mean that x could be aware of me. I am aware of x-not-me. I am aware of me being aware of x-not-me. If x is x-not-me then x is ‘me minus me’ (equality, not identity). From the point of view of x, I am x’-not-x. I am ‘x minus x’. The idea that The Other is a fundamental category of ontology goes back to the birth of Western philosophy with Anaximander (6th century BCE). Anaximander apparently (evidence is fragmentary) believed that Being was inherently ‘mutual’ – I come to be by ‘letting’ another come to be. We are all monkeys with our hands stuck inside our own personal bottles. (Apologies to my Simian cousins.) We are only free to become ourselves if we are willing to let go of the prize we’re clutching. Who among us can let go? We can only become by letting another be. It’s counter-intuitive and counter-instinctual but it is the origin of Love and, by extension, of all Virtue. *** Maurits Cornelis Escher — Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935) Escher’s self-portrait shows him gazing into a polished glass sphere held in his own hand, where the entire room — including himself — curves and folds within its reflection. The image explores the act of perception itself, merging the observer and the observed into a single, infinite loop of awareness. It perfectly captures the Cartesian idea of consciousness reflecting upon itself — the mind as both subject and object in the search for truth. 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.

“Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” < Back The Probability of Nothing David Cowles Oct 15, 2024 “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Riddle : How is language like Willie Mays? Answer : It rules center field! Of course, I am referring to ontological ‘center field’: the tiny, daily transactions (like photon exchange) that bind society (or the world) together. But language can play tricks on us…especially when it deals with stuff at the ends of the ontological spectrum. Take the word itself, ‘nothing’, for example. ‘Nothing’ is a noun and, as we know from primary school, a noun represents a ‘person, place, or thing’. Which of these does ‘nothing’ represent? None, obviously. The word itself tells you all you need to know about its meaning: ‘nothing’ = ‘no thing’. Now we have a word that fails to meet the definition of a noun playing the role of a noun in ordinary speech. What could possibly go wrong? Well, because we use the word, ‘nothing’, as a noun, we could begin to think of Nothing per se as something (some ‘thing’). This is an instance of what Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” - the fundamental fallacy of Western metaphysics. Then what is ‘nothing’? Today, we have a number for it: zero. But we didn’t have that number until the 13th century (Fibonacci) and it wasn’t universally accepted into arithmetic until the 18th century (Leibniz). If zero is a real number like other real numbers, then is nothing something? We also have another mathematical symbol for Nothing, ø, the null set. This notation insulates Nothing from the domain of real numbers. We are used to the idea of ‘Ineffable God’: God so far transcends our world that nothing we say about God can be true or even meaningful. Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, “God is outside the numbers.” We’re not used to the idea of ‘Ineffable Nothing’. And yet, ‘nothing’ transcends all things just as God does. God, aka Being, Value, Love, is the ontological opposite of Nothing, which is the absence of ‘I am’ ( Exodus ), ‘it is’ ( Genesis ), ‘you are’ ( Gospel of John ). We begin, as all serious philosophical essays must, with Robert Frost , the ‘Quantum Poet’. In his best known poem, The Road Not Taken , he sets out the quintessential existential dilemma: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” Happens a million times a day, every day! Frost, subject to the human condition , must pick a path, ‘sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler’. Frost makes his choice, ‘I kept the first for another day’; but hero that he is, Frost realizes that this is a forever decision, that the universe bifurcates at this point: ‘Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted I should ever come back’. Nor does our hero hide behind the rationalization of ‘objectivity’; he knows that the road chosen is in no way superior to the other, for ‘both that morning equally lay’. Standing at the point of divergence, at the moment of choice, both roads are equally real, equally attractive, equally effective, and therefore ontologically identical. Frost’s choice is apparently unconditioned. He is as likely to choose A as he is B. Initially, each option has a probability of P ≈ 50%. Since each P > 0, both exist! But whenever Frost’s choice of one path becomes irrevocable (P = 100%), then the alternate route (P = 0) ceases to exist…for Frost. It is no longer part of his Actual World. Proposition : ‘X exists, iff P(x) > 0’. Once P = 0, the alternate path no longer meets Gregory Bateson’s existential criterion: it’s no longer ‘a difference that makes a difference’. When there was no longer an option for Frost to pursue ‘the road not taken’, it ceased to exist… chez Frost. Much of Western philosophy is based on a false conception of Nothing. When we say ‘nothing’ we often have in mind something: a void or a vacuum, ‘nothing’ relatively speaking, but not absolutely nothing . Our ‘nothing’ tends to be ‘something…dimly lit’, a bit like Hades in Homer’s Odyssey . It’s even been called ‘a receptacle’, ‘a womb’, an ‘ether’, ‘pure potentiality’. Today, the cognoscente call it ‘negative vacuum pressure’. Nothing can’t be any of those things, not even metaphorically. Nothing can only be nothing. Nothing has no hair. It’s not a depression left in the fabric by ‘something’ when it departs. It’s not negative space, negative energy or negative vacuum pressure; it’s not positive or negative, it’s nothing. It’s good to know that we are not alone in our thinking. Perhaps we’re not mainstream (yet) but we’re definitely not flying solo . In fact, we share our perspective with Parmenides of Elea, the father of Western philosophy: “It is not to be said or thought that ‘it is not’…It is or it is not…let go the one (it is not) as unthinkable, unnamable, for it is not a real route.” ‘The road not taken’ cannot be ‘said or thought’ or even named because ‘it is not a real route’. When Frost reaches his destination, he is surrounded by reporters all with a single question: “Why did you choose that path?” To which Frost answered, “There was more than one path?” Parmenides viewed the World as both the ‘Realm of Things as they Appear’ ( Doxa ) and the ‘Realm of things as they Are’ ( Aletheia ). In the realm of Doxa , Frost confronts an apparent existential choice. In the realm of Aletheia , the apparent ‘choice’ is without consequence and so does not ‘exist’; it’s not a ‘difference that makes a difference’ because ‘both that morning equally lay’ and both led to the same destination. There was no objective reason to prefer one over the other. So there never was an existential dilemma because there was really only ever one path (a path and its mirror image). This perspective pops up all across ‘the fruited plain’ of Western philosophy, but for now, let’s stick with Quantum Mechanics (QM)! Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ states (roughly) that everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. Corollary : Whatever did not happen could not have happened, because if it even might have happened, it would have happened. Try saying that 10 times! An entity’s worldline is its ‘route’ but apparent routes that pass through ‘counterfactual space’ are not real routes; their probabilities are all equal to 0. If it isn’t now, it never was, it could not have been, and it cannot come to be in the future. Only real routes are ‘real’. Everett channels Parmenides…2400 years later. There is ‘is’ and that’s all there is…no might, no should, no would, no could, just is. Let’s apply this way of reasoning to questions involving probabilities, beginning with a traditional Hasidic folk tale: Once upon a time, a certain Rabbi was on his way home from Schule when he encountered an elderly widow crawling on her hands and knees under a streetlamp. Not wanting to play the part of passer-by in a future production of The Good Samaritan and eager to perform one last mitzvah before going to bed for the night, the Rabbi offered to assist. "I've lost my shiny penny, the only thing I have left in the world," the widow wailed. "And is this where you lost it?" the Rabbi inquired innocently. "No," she replied. "I lost it over there." The quizzical Rabbi, still hoping to be helpful, asked, "Then why are you looking for it here?" "Because the light is better!" This story is often presented as a commentary on the widow's folly, but in fact, the widow is the hero of the story. She defies conventional wisdom. Why look for a lost penny in pitch darkness where there's no hope of finding anything? Unlit space is not part of the widow’s world; from her perspective it is Nothing. So the only ‘rational’ thing for her to do is to search under the lamplight where P > 0. Let’s rephrase: the probability of the penny being under the light is actually 100% (P = 1) because the penny has to be somewhere (P=1), and every other possibility has zero probability (P = 0): 1 – 0 = 1. But the probability of her finding the penny under the light is much, much less (P < 1)…but not zero (P > 0). Ok, this sounds officially crazy. How can the probability of the penny being under the lamp be 100% when we said earlier that the penny is probably not there? Once again, we find our answer in Quantum Mechanics. According to QM, everything is everywhere all the time and anywhere you look there is a finite possibility (however low) that you will find your quantum there…as long as you’ve confined your search to places that exist for you. Now that we’re comfortable applying Parmenides’ ontology to situations involving probabilities, we’re ready to apply it to the greatest floating craps game of all: ‘Pascal's Wager’ (1670 CE). Confronted with the God Question , French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, employed a forerunner of what is today called ‘Game Theory’. Pascal divided a sheet of paper into four quadrants. Across the top of the page, he wrote, “I believe that God exists;” down the left-hand margin, he wrote, “God does exist;” and then he filled in the appropriate truth values: (0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1). Pascal reasoned that one of four things must be true: (1) I do not believe that God exists, and he doesn’t; (2) I do not believe that God exists, but he does; (3) I believe that God exists, but he doesn’t; (4) I believe that God exists, and he does. So God is ‘free’ to exist or not and you are free to believe or not. Yet, scenarios 1, 2, and 3 are effectively identical. They amount to the same thing. Believe whichever one you choose; it makes no difference. They are interchangeable because they each produce the same incremental value: (0*0) or (0*1) or (1*0), i.e. Zero. Only #4 (1*1) is different; only #4 generates incremental value. Quadrants 1, 2, and 3 do not meet Gregory Bateson’s criterion (for ‘being’, above). They produce zero incremental value so there is no ultimate value difference among them and their contribution of value to the world is null (ø). Since all other options generate 0 incremental value, P(4) must be 100% (P=1): 1 – (0 + 0 + 0) = 1. To quote a medieval Irish poet, “Naught (0) is all else to me save than Thou art!” Centuries later, Pascal proved that this is not just a statement of subjective faith…it’s a statement of objective reality. 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 ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 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. 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< Back Give us your honest opinion, please. David Cowles Sep 15, 2022 Give us your honest opinion, please. Thank you for subscribing to Aletheia Today and Thoughts While Shaving. We’re thrilled to share our insights and opinions with you. In order to continue to serve you best, we kindly ask that you take a minute to provide us with your feedback. By answering these brief questions, you'll help us improve and better serve you. Thanks again, David Cowles, Editor-in Chief Enter the survey 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.

“It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” < Back Who R U? - The Caterpillar David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” I’m reading an innocuous book about DNA when I suddenly come upon a sentence that snaps my head back: “Many SNP (genetic) variants have no known consequence…but some can be crucial to who you are.” - DNA Demystified by Alan McHughen. If your head did not snap back, don’t worry; few heads would (snap or worry). But for me, this sentence is an epiphany…an epiphany of error! In fact, it would be a challenge to craft a sentence in ordinary English that was more broadly wrong than this one: “SNP variants…can be crucial to who you are.” Try, “The Patriots won every Superbowl ever played.” Wrong – it just seems that way sometimes; but this erroneous sentence is just narrowly wrong , so it doesn’t compete with McHughen’s much broader error. May I belabor the point? Telling someone they are something when they’re not is just plain cruel, even for us neo-Machiavellians. Example: In 2004, misread exit polls indicated a landslide victory for John Kerry (vs. G. W. Bush). I didn’t vote for John Kerry that year, but I have always sympathized with him. Cruel! Back to McHughen: My DNA is no part of who I am. It’s part of my world, the world I live in, but it’s not part of me : a crucial distinction. Let’s fall back on a ridiculously trite metaphor: a game of cards (doesn’t matter what game). The cards are dealt. My crowd is fond of saying, “It’s not a hand, it’s a foot.” Hand or foot, it’s what I was dealt, and it’s what I’m going to have to play. I was hoping for a “grand slam” (bridge or whist). IRL, I was hoping to play for the Boston Celtics. My hand is a jumble of 7’s and 8’s. My height is 5’ 9’’ on tip toes. I probably won’t get my grand slam, and I probably won’t play pro ball. (That doesn't mean I can’t try, but trying is not doing. I am guaranteed the unfettered right to try; I am not guaranteed positive results.) I am not those cards, and I am not this body. These are things I’ve been given to work with. So far so good, but here’s where the metaphor breaks down. In cards, I am the person behind the cards, actively playing them. IRL there is no ‘man behind the curtain’, no ‘ghost in the machine’. Let me explain. Most of the 30 trillion cells that make up my body contain a full ‘copy’ of my DNA (exception: red blood cells), but none of those cells is me. Obviously. But what about all those cells taken together? Are they me? What about the ever-evolving network of cellular interactions? Still not me. So, back to the Caterpillar’s question: “Who R U?” How about we begin with actual experience? After all, at the end of the day, there is nothing else. According to 20th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, to be is to experience and be experienced; so ‘experience’, let’s start there. So, how do you experience you ? Certainly not as the collection of cells we call a body (or a brain). But it’s not just that I am not a cell, a collection of cells, or even a network of cells. It’s that I am not even like any of these things! It’s not that I am ‘different’ from my cells; whatever I am is entirely unlike those cells. There are no parameters for comparison. A red ball is not a blue box. But we can compare them according to color, shape, utility, etc. No such comparison is possible between me and anything other than me (e.g., my cells). ( Sidebar : Imagine how long it must have taken civilization to convince our ‘best minds’ that the experience we call “I” is just a culture of unicellular organisms in a multidimensional petri dish! How do you do that? How do you make people believe something that silly? Why are we too anxious to think of ourselves as a ‘thing’; is this what Erich Fromm meant by “Escape from Freedom”?) Experience yourself. Take it in. Now nose around. Are you ‘like’ anything you hear, see, taste, smell, or touch? Of course not. You are an entirely unique phenomenon. So am I. In fact, you are not even like me …nor am I like you. Truth to tell, I have no idea what it’s like to be you, or a network of cells; I have no idea what it’s like to be anything at all or even what it’s like to be like something. I am, period. There’s nothing else. I am not even ‘experience’ itself; I experience experiencing. I am not the man behind the curtain: there is no man, there is no curtain, just Oz…and not-Oz. I am not the ghost in a machine: there is no ghost and no machine. It goes even deeper: I am that I am not something other than myself. My parents would be pleased: I am not like those boys who jumped off the bridge. Ok then, so what am I? Nothing? Precisely! Nothing, i.e., no thing. I am not a ‘thing’ and neither are you. Consider the alternative : Suppose I am like something else or, what amounts to the same thing, suppose I am something else. Either way, I am superfluous. The universe doesn’t need two of anything: “Lord, we don’t need another mountain…” The universe does not need carbon copies. To whatever extent I am something else or like something else, I am redundant, and the universe hates redundancy. “Idle hands”, you know… Being is a cosmic censor, relentlessly rooting out waste (e.g., duplication) before it can form. As a result, nothing is duplicative, nothing is superfluous. Again, according to Whitehead, to be is to be both novel and consequential. Mythology recapitulates cosmology. Being is Paradise, the Garden of Eden. (In Hebrew, Eden means ‘place of pleasure’; in Aramaic, it means ‘fruitful’.) But, as we know from Genesis , in Eden ‘one small step’ can turn into ‘one giant leap’ – out of Paradise. How so? A single instance of duplication would create a loop, and a single loop would freeze the universe in an endless and barren cycle of soul-numbing repetition. If anything repeats, then nothing is, was, or will ever be. My new political party will have as its slogan: “No novelty, no being!” Consider Dante’s Divine Comedy . Unwittingly, Dante ambles into the gated community we know as ‘Hell’: Dante’s Inferno , a spiral consisting of 9 descending levels (‘circles’) with the grand prize, Satan, waiting at the inflection point, the nadir of the funnel. Dante walks through Hell, past Satan, into Purgatory and eventually up to Paradise. Now suppose that just one of those infernal ‘circles’, makes no difference which one, doubles back on itself. Dante would be trapped in Hell forever, endlessly repeating the same journey. That’s the price of a single ‘error’. That’s what’s meant by the doctrine of Original Sin . Imagine living in a never-green world, bereft of all novelty, endlessly repeating itself until the ‘crack of doom’. Compared to this, Dante’s Inferno is a trip to Six Flags. One single loop, one single repetition, and all creativity is forever banished from the realm. Fortunately, there are no such loops; the universe makes no such error. We’re some 15 billion years into it and so far, not one error. Imagine you’re married to the same person for 15 billion years and never once have a fight. That’s what we’re dealing with here. The evidence is ‘merely’ inductive, but I am willing to go out on a limb and make a leap of faith (Kierkegaard beware): there will be no such error, ever! How can that be? We appear to be protected from error by some sort of omnipotent and infallible cosmic censor . Everything that is, in so far as it is, is unique. “How do I know? Occam’s Razor tells me so.” The fact that the cosmos has a censor should give us profound hope. It would take so little to make this world a living Hell. Just one error out of googles of transcriptions et voilà , ‘everlasting fire’. The very fact that there has been no such error, and apparently won’t be, can’t be, should encourage us to hope that Hell is empty (except perhaps for the Prince of Darkness) or even non-existent (good news for Lucifer, ‘light bearer’). We are offering a free tour of Hell in this issue of ATM . Sidebar : Non-believers (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Michael Ruse) make a lot of the so-called Problem of Evil. The real problem is a Problem of Good . How do you account for the fact that at the deepest possible level, the Universe is perfect? How’d that happen? Note : This is not a ‘best of all possible worlds’ argument. (Lie quiet Leibniz, I mean that is Gottfried Leibniz, c. 1600 CE) We do not live in the best of all possible worlds – far, far, far from it; but we do live in a perfect (error free) world. Memo to YHWH : There’s no more need for flood or fire. Just allow a single transcription error to slip through and walk away. Ah, but you can’t do that, can you? You tried to with Job , but that did not end well…for you. Thank you for being you! What we call ‘spacetime’ is the physical manifestation of cosmic censorship. The uniqueness of an event’s spacetime location certifies that it is not a duplicate; my coordinates are both my ‘X’ and God’s stamp of authenticity: “Inspected by #1 ”. Many things overlap with me in spacetime, but nothing else occupies the precise region that I occupy. What is co-incident with me, is me! Shift that locus a single nanodegree et voilà , something new. But note, and this is key, it is the uniqueness of events that creates spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique. Topology recapitulates ontology. So, what about this body, those cells, that DNA? None of that is me; but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. These things are part of the world I’ve inherited. My experience of the world is mediated through my genetic makeup, but I am not those genes or that world. It is not enough to say that I (ego) cannot be equated with me (id), that I am-not me. Instead, we need to say I am not-me . It is not just that there is some sort of displacement between myself as I and myself as me. Being I is not-being me . Being I is being not-me! I come to be only by negating (‘being not’) what is. This “I” is very misleading. It implies something ‘other’ than something else. In one respect, “I” is as different from everything else as anything can be; in another respect, it’s no different at all. There is no “I” apart from the world, there is no Wizard directing affairs on Oz. I-ness is embedded in the world, as it’s active negation. Ontologically speaking, ‘not’ is not an adverb or a conjunction, ‘not’ is an active voice, indicative mood verb! ~A ɛ A. ~A is the proverbial snake curled up at the core of being, A. So, “Who R U?” The caterpillar was so 19th century! He asked the quintessential question of his time, the era mislabeled as “The Enlightenment”, i.e., part of the nightmare (history) from which James Joyce says we’re struggling to awake. ‘Who R U’ is a meaningless string of vocables. I am no-who. Who-ness and I-ness are incompatible categories. Backed against a wall by his Christian and Communist critics, Jean-Paul Sartre reluctantly answered the caterpillar’s question: U R ‘Freedom’. ( Existentialism as a Humanism ) U R that you can be whoever or whatever you want to be. Whitehead coined the phrase, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. To understand our genes and our experiences as ‘us’, or even as part of ‘us’, is to succumb to this fallacy. Sidebar : Your DNA and my DNA are 99.9% the same. Yet, my experience of the world is radically different from yours, even adjusting for the fact that we experience objectively different events. Not convinced? Ok, my DNA is 50% the same as a banana’s. (Many people have told me that I am ‘bananas’ but I don’t think they meant that I experience the world the same way a banana does…or maybe that’s exactly what they meant.) We were born after 1750, so we are enlightened (whether we want to be or not); some would even say we’re woke . But woke to what? To the fact that we are star-stuff, that we are cogs in a mechanical universe, that our lives are determined by the forces of physics, sociology, psychology, et al? I am the sum of my gender, my race, my culture, my nationality, my socio-economic class, my upbringing, and the remnants of a host of more or less ‘accidental’ events that constitute my life story – NOT! I am anything but these things! No, I’m serious: anything but! I am the but ! “I am the Walrus.” If I were what the world thinks I am (above), there would be no need for me to be at all. I would be superfluous, and the universe could dispense with me. Occam’s Razor would require it. At most, I could be the nodal point of forces outside my control…or ken. But an intersection of beings is not itself a being. I am, I am nobody’s copy, I am not superfluous. To paraphrase Job, “If the cosmos cancels me, it will be the loser for it.” I am the Walrus (along with all ‘others’, of course); I am the universe’s source of novelty and its wellspring of intensity. “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.” Image: Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney Productions. 1951 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 Spring 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back We All Live in a Yellow Submarine David Cowles “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” (The Beatles’ iconic movie is our version of Homer’s Odyssey; it’s Mythology for the post-Enlightenment era.) We travel, but like Alice in Looking-glass World, we always seem to end up right back where we started. To go ‘some actual where’, you either need to hop the Hogwarts Express from Kings Cross Station, Platform 9¾, or book passage on a certain Yellow Submarine , embarking from Liverpool Pier. We’ll pass on Hogwarts this trip; we’ve chosen the Pier, a long corridor with a series of doors running along both sides like gates in a modern airport. Open a door, take a peek, catch a glimpse - you’re definitely not in Kansas…in fact, you can’t even get to Kansas from here. Liverpool Travel offers daily departures to exotic destinations around the globe – well not exactly around the globe, more off the globe. “Delve into the depths of your subconscious mind”…or “learn the secrets of the Multiverse”. Compared to this, the Odyssey is like a 35mm slide show from the 1960s. Prodded by the pleas of a refugee, Young Fred, the Beatles book passage on a submarine heading to the mysterious Pepperland . But wait! Newly appointed, Admiral Fred ( aka ‘Young Fred’), knows a short-cut. As in the classic scene from Goodfellas , Fred takes ‘the boys’ backstage. They – now you – get to see how the sausage ( aka the cosmos) is made. How would you build a Universe? Say you were offered the job of Director for a 21st century remake of the Truman Show ; how would you build your set? Perhaps you’d start with Time: “What time is it? …It’s time for Time! …Look, the hands are slowing down…Maybe time’s gone on strike.” You are looking at Time itself, pure temporality, before the adulteration of flow (rate and direction). In Liverpool, time flows in only one direction and at only one ‘rate of speed’, but in Pepperland … The Sea of Time is the ‘womb’ for all possible versions of time; it is ‘the mother of all Time,’ literally and figuratively. Einstein might have said, “It’s time for Time !” “I don’t want to alarm you, but the years are going backwards. If we slip back through time at this rate, we’ll all disappear up out of our own existence,” warns the Admiral. To ‘disappear up out of our own existence’ is not ‘just dying’. We think of death as a divorce, not an annulment. Yellow Submarine ’obluterates’ that comforting delusion. If time is reversible, even just theoretically, and it is, then existence can be erased… retroactively! You call it ‘corn’, we call it ‘the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ (entropy). In what sense then can I claim to be…or ever to have been? Apparently, everything is built solidly on a foundation of…nothing. Am I in a community theater production of The Tempest ? Whenever you’re out of your comfort zone, you need to entertain new options. What if time itself is nothing but the clocks we use to measure it? Our intrepid crew discovers it can in fact reverse the direction of time…just by manually adjusting the clock hands. Next Stop : The Sea of Science (Space + Tech)! This sea is characterized by its rectilinear grid and by the Platonic solids that populate it. It’s ‘Plato meets Descartes’ - The Timaeus . Against this background, various waveforms undulate. Similar to black holes and holograms, this sea can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a 2-dimensional surface or a 3-dimensional space. Figures emerge out of a flat background to enclose a 3D volume, only to undergo further deformation back to 2D surfaces. Long after Yellow Submarine was in the can, it was discovered during the study of black holes that 2-dimensional surfaces and 3-dimensional spaces can encode exactly the same amount of ‘information’. Likewise, a hologram is a 3D ‘image’ generated from a 2D scrap of film. In these applications at least, a 3rd dimension is ‘optional’. It is a hallmark of mythology that it not only summarizes what is known but it predicts things yet to be uncovered. Yellow Sub meets the test. Now the voyage to Pepperland moves from the objective realms of Time and Science (Space & Technology) to more the subjective. We are entering the Sea of Monsters (objective monsters) on our way to the Headlands (subjective monsters). The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore; or if we do, we don’t recognize them properly. We Liverpudlians have done a pretty good job of purging ‘monsters’ from our immediate vicinity…but only from the immediate vicinity. Believe me, monstrosity is alive and well, as John himself would tragically experience! The Sea of Monsters is populated by a variety of creatures that exhibit some physical traits that are similar to ours but others that are very, very different. Most striking is the way that Beatle Biology allows for unusual combinations and configurations of organs. In Liverpool, we are still just experimenting with Bionics. In the Sea of Monsters, most creatures combine organic and mechanical structures. In On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (d. 1948) outlined the many functional and structural similarities linking biological and non-biological mechanisms. R. Buckminster Fuller (d. 1983) did something similar in his two-volume work, Synergistics . Ultimately, technology and biology are not incompatible: if a certain form works well in one particular medium, it might very well work in the other. Isn’t that the fundamental assumption behind AI and all Computer Science? One of the creatures in this Monstrous Sea is the ‘dreaded vacuum.’ Like a black hole, this creature sucks into itself everything in its environment. “We’ll be sucked into oblivion…or even further,” says Young Fred; and sure enough, they are! The vacuum cleaner monster not only sucks up all objects in its path, including our sub and its crew; it also sucks up the fabric of spacetime itself. Ultimately, it even sucks itself, tail first, into oblivion: The Beatles’ universe is a vanishing ouroboros . The vacuum leaves us with precisely nothing, nothing that is, except Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD (JHB). But that’s ok because the Boob is ‘nothing,’ quite literally: 1 + (~1) = Boob Dr. Boob lives in the infinitesimal space Derrida calls ‘differance’. If Universe is a black hole, the Boob is Hawking radiation, pure information. In fact, Jeremy consists of all the information that existed in the universe prior to its implosion. Hawking codified what Ringo had demonstrated earlier: Information is conserved but confused in the Boob. Take this snippet of dialog, for example: “Do you speak English?” - “Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure.” “But do you speak English?” - “You know I’m not sure.” What else remains? The submarine itself. Even though the sub was sucked up by the vacuum monster, it avoids ‘oblivion’ because, turns out, the sub is the Eternal Present. It cannot be destroyed; it instantly regenerates itself. (We’ve been looking for this at least since the days of Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth.) Presence is sui generis . Next stop: the Foothills of the Headlands. Headlands is the domain of pure thought, taking the form of transparent heads, unencumbered by useless bodies. In the Headlands, thoughts lack orientation, consistency, coherence, purpose, and effect. (Hmm, sounds like we’re ‘inside the Beltway’!) In the Headlands, we see the consequences of an ‘all-in-the-mind’ ontology (e.g., Philosophical Idealism) and believe me, it’s not pretty. Bottom line: “mind matters but mind matter” - a bumper sticker? A souvenir from our trip? After the Headlands…the Sea of Holes! We’ve passed through brains & bodies, forms & ideas; what’s left? Nothing? Exactly, nothing , but that’s a good thing! Now we are passing into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure and ground is reversed. The sea itself is the ground, and the holes in that sea now constitute the figure. Nothing exists, something doesn’t! Nothingness ( Le Neant ) is what’s concrete…so concrete that Ringo is able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket. The Sea of Holes is the inflection point in our journey. The ‘figure-ground’ relationship has reversed; for the rest of the voyage, it’s ‘ground-figure.’ The topology of the Sea of Holes is radically non-orientable. There is no consistent directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s ‘Escher’ on steroids. In fact, the Sea of Holes is a paradigmatic example of non-orientability. Any system ( Pepperland ) that contains a ‘locally non-orientable’ component (like the Sea of Holes) must be ‘globally non-orientable’ as well. It turns out that our orientable universe is just a unique configuration in the infinite sea of non-orientability. In a non-orientable universe, there are no privileged vantage points or directions. In fact, there are no beginnings, middles or ends at all. However, every ‘point’ has two distinct and opposite orientations (like ‘up and down arrows’ on a Mobius strip). The Netflix series, Stanger Things , refers to the ‘Upside Down World.’ Now, we're ready to cross into Pepperland at last…if only we could find it. But first, we must pass through one more sea, the Sea of Green. There’s a catch: out of a seemingly infinite array of holes, only one hole connects the Sea of Holes to the Sea of Green and Pepperland . This is a problem for our Argonauts! As we know from the study of Black Holes, all holes look the same, they have ‘no hair’; so we can’t examine the holes for clues. There is only one possible way out: stochastic trial and error…which has an infinitesimal likelihood of success. Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the one and only hole that functions as a passageway to the Sea of Green, an almost featureless, ultra-thin membrane separating the other branes from Pepperland . So full speed ahead! Once the Beatles arrive in Pepperland , they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of its permanent residents, “the originals”, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, we later learn that the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper band! Initially, “the originals” are separated from the rest of Pepperland by a big glass dome. It is as if the cosmos were censoring itself. If the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, then both ‘copies’ cannot coexist in one universe; one copy must be confined on a separate mini-brane. The ‘big glass bowl’ maintains the ‘cosmic order.’ But that order is about to be shattered! Remember, Ringo has a ‘hole’ in his pocket (from the Sea of Holes). Ringo applies the hole to the side of the “big glass bowl” and through the agency of what-is-not , the ontological barrier dissolves and the two realities meet on the same extensive plane. Ringo’s hole (nothing) connects the temporal Beatles with their eternal alter-egos. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Beatles under the aspect of eternity while the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Band under the aspect of history. When Ringo’s hole connects the two realms, we learn that the division of the Universe into ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’ rests on a false distinction. Temporality and eternity are complementary aspects of a single phenomenon. Think waves and particles. So, it turns out that Liverpool and Pepperland are really the same place! We never left the Pier after all. I’ll expect a refund from Liverpool Travel . Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of Pepperland as Pepperland is the eternal aspect of Liverpool. Nothing that happens in Liverpool stays in Liverpool. Whatever happens in Liverpool happens in Pepperland …and vice-versa. In the language of the Gospels, “On earth as it is in heaven.” In the language of Quantum Mechanics (Bell’s theorem, 1964), Liverpool and Pepperland are ‘entangled.’ And what about the sub itself? That’s also Pepperland . It’s Presence. In the language of Christian eschatology, Pepperland is ‘the kingdom not yet’ while the Sub is ‘the kingdom already’. In the language of Christian ecclesiology, the Sub is the Church. Finally, in the language of Christian theology, Yellow Submarine is solidly ‘Trinitarian’: Temporality (Liverpool), Eternity ( Pepperland ), and Presence (the Sub) are the three facets ( personae ) of Being. In the end…it’s all Pepperland ! At Aletheia Today , it is our conviction that Science, Philosophy and Theology, long mutually estranged, are starting to re-converge. If so, Yellow Submarine might be seen as a shot across the Enlightenment’s bow, finally celebrating the official end of the real Dark Ages (1500 – 1900 CE, Machiavelli through Marx) and new synthesis that will characterize the ‘dawning Age of Aquarius’. 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 Groundhog Issue 2025 Share Previous Next