< Back AI and Marxism “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” David Cowles It is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy that we form a dynamic template with our technological environment; but unlike passive templates, this one is not symmetrical. To borrow from Genesis , we shape technology in our image while technology forms us in its likeness. Since Alan Turing, the goal of AI has been to build a machine that can fool a trained and conscientious operator into believing that she is interacting with a human being. We build our technology to reflect our own image back at us. We even give our gadgets nicknames. But at the same time, less obviously, technology is shaping us , its operators. According to philosophers from Marx to McLuhan, we become extensions of our technology, but philosophers notwithstanding, no one demonstrated the impact of technology on its operators and beneficiaries better than Charlie Chaplin, especially in Modern Times (1936). I am tempted, of course, to find an analogy here with the Eucharist. I mean, who wouldn’t? Is it my Roman Catholic background, or the influence of James Joyce ( Ulysses is one long Eucharistic analogy), showing here? No matter, the image is the ‘bread and wine’; the likeness , the ‘body and blood’. The ‘image’ enables us to approach the Eucharist, to interact with it, to consume it, but it is the ‘likeness’ that works below the surface to transform us into members of Christ’s mystical body. The Eucharist appears to us in a form we easily recognize but changes us into something we would not recognize so readily. Have I gone too far this time? Maybe. But back to Marx! (From Mass?) Today, everyone is worried about the impact of AI on social inequality. Understandably so! Every new technology does favor the well-to-do…temporarily: Who could afford a car in 1915? A TV in 1950? Or a personal computer in 1985? Maybe the one-percenters . Today, the average American family has all these things, often several times over. Initially these technologies created new divisions between haves and have-nots ; ultimately those same technologies resolved those differences: we all became haves (ok, limited haves , but haves nonetheless). In my day, it was Ford vs. Foot, Chevy vs. Shank’s Mare, Deisel vs. Deez’ll; today it’s Lexus vs. Corolla. In 1960, access to transportation determined access to the ‘means of production’. Today, we all have access to the loci of wealth…but some of us get there in leather seats. Of course, this leveling doesn’t happen overnight. It took 50 years for the automobile to ‘democratize’, 15 years for the TV, and 10 years for the personal computer; but AI will be fully democratized in less than 5. Caveat : There is more to socio-economic inequality than the number of TVs in your home. Inequality has many causes and many manifestations that have little to do with technology. That said, most every new technology does temporarily widen economic gaps but later works to narrow them, and again, AI will be no exception. The future requires no crystal ball. We live in an information age, powered by an information economy. Soon wealth will be measured in ‘bits’ rather than ‘its’. (My father’s generation had a saying, “Whoever has the most toys wins.” Not so then, not so now!) Today, access to information is still correlated with economic advantage, but tomorrow , virtually every person on Planet Earth will enjoy the same access to the same information as everyone else. That’s the promise of AI. From Moses ( Leviticus ) to Matthew (Jesus) to Marx to modern Scandinavia, curbing socio-economic inequality has been on the agenda of social reformers. Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission accomplished ? As history has shown, this is difficult to accomplish in an agricultural or industrial economy where productive assets require massive amounts of capital. It is hard to imagine funding a profit making farm or factory with less than $1,000,000; and how many of us have a spare $1M on hand? Various Marxist theoreticians have proposed various solutions; I think it’s fair to say that none of them has worked…so far. But is it possible that we are growing our way out of Marx’s dilemma? The information superhighway is a toll road, to be sure, but the cost of entry is a $500 computer and a $50 internet connection. Well within reach of families with 2 cars and 3 TVs! Of course, inequality will persist, driven by race, education, gender, etc. But the biggest single driver of inequality, access to capital, is about to disappear. ChatGPT is the new SVB! Who needs venture capital if you have a smart phone, a laptop, and a highspeed internet connection? Capitalism and communism converge; who’d a thunk it? ( Hairspray ) Aletheia Today Magazine is devoting its entire Fall Issue (9/1/2023) to the philosophical, theological, cultural and/or spiritual implication of Artificial Intelligence. Do you have some ideas you’d like to share? We’d love to add you to our growing list of authors; check us out: https://www.aletheiatoday.com/submit . 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 . Share Previous Next

< Back Philosophy’s 10 Fatal Fallacies David Cowles Aug 19, 2025 “We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality.” Western philosophy is sick. It’s coming up on 100 years since Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre published the last great comprehensive philosophical systems ( Process and Reality and Being and Nothingness ). They did so at a time when most of their contemporaries had concluded that ‘systematic philosophy’ was an oxymoron and that the proper purview of philosophy was limited to analysis . No wonder! 2400 years after Plato, we were still debating the same tired issues…with no resolution in sight. It is only sensible that folks began to ask whether the very notion of philosophical inquiry was flawed, whether ultimate or even relative truth was discoverable, whether metaphysics could ever be meaningful. My own superannuated contemporaries, the ones who kept me up all night in college dorm room bull sessions, have apparently given up. They are content that existence has no extrinsic meaning : “Cultivate your own garden.” (Voltaire) “A man should eat and drink and enjoy himself.” ( Ecclesiastes ) The fault, however, lies not in the stars but in ourselves. We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality! The intellectual and spiritual diseases of the 21 st century – cynicism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism, secularism, relativism, hedonism, et al. – stem in large part from 10 fundamental philosophical fallacies. Scattered across multiple academic disciplines – math, topology, physics, logic, ethics, linguistics, theology et al., these fallacies share one feature in common: they are all intellectually descended from Horatio…not Hamlet. Fallacy #1 – Geometry Euclid taught us that parallel lines do not intersect; well and good! But in the real world, all lines intersect. What originates at a singularity (Big Bang) converges at a singularity (Heat Death: Big Crunch or Big Freeze). Frost’s two roads both lead home and ultimately all roads do lead to ‘Rome’. Euclidean geometry is orientable . A sheet of paper has two sides that never meet. Even if we join two ends of the sheet to make a loop (a BK crown), obverse and reverse remain distinct. In fact, now they also permanently split the world in two: ‘inside the loop’ vs. ‘outside the loop’. Closed geometric figures (circles, triangles, etc.) divide 2 dimensional planes into inside and outside areas separated by an impermeable one dimensional perimeter. Likewise, spheres and polyhedra divide 3-d space into inside and outside volumes, separated by a two dimensional surface. We’ve trained ourselves to take these things for granted. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like this. At least since Heraclitus (5 th century BCE), we’ve known that in the real world ‘everything flows’. Nothing corresponding to Euclid’s orientable model exists anywhere ! Every ‘impermeable’ boundary is in fact a dissipative membrane: Ultimately there are no insides or outsides. All bifurcations are local (temporary) and ‘imperfect’: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Frost) Even protons eventually decay. Consider a living cell, for example. It takes 30 trillion of them to form just one adult human body. Each cell is separated from every other cell and from the rest of its external world by a membrane we misleadingly call a ‘cell wall’. We have developed a complex science to account for the dissipative behavior of this membrane: once thought impermeable, more than a billion molecules cross it every second. The cell ‘wall’ is biology’s Maginot Line…or its ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. In the Real World, all lines intersect, therefore all planes form loops. Conforming to the fundamental topology of the Universe, all loops ‘twist’ to form one-sided Mobius Strips, and every higher dimensional ‘object’ (e.g. a Klein Bottle ) includes an embedded Mobius Strip. The geometry of the Real World is non-orientable . Orientable , Euclidean Geometry assumes 360° symmetry. Rightly so, but only in certain ‘special cases’, e.g. circular shapes and electromagnetic fields. Let X be a point on a circle. Move X 360° in either direction, et voila , X-again. More fundamentally, though, the Real World exhibits 720° symmetry, a characteristic of non-orientable geometries. Tetrahedra, the foundation of all structure (Plato, Fuller), consist of 4 triangles whose interior angles each add up to 180° (180 x 4 = 720). A tetrahedron is the union of two 360° circles (360 x 2 = 720), twisted relative to each other, so that it is impossible to trace the sides of the tetrahedron without going over one side twice. Fermions, the building blocks of all matter, exhibit symmetry only after rotating through 720°. 360° symmetry gives us access to only half a world (one circle) – we’re like Alice before she stepped through the looking-glass. The Higgs Field creates a ‘mirror world’, unknown to the pioneers of Western mathematics: Euclid, Archimedes, et al., through which all matter must pass. Orientability (flatness) is a fundamentally ‘local’ phenomenon. Just as the round Earth appears locally flat, the non-orientable Cosmos appears locally orientable . If you smashed any globally non-orientable Klein Bottle into pieces, each piece (local) would be orientable …but the whole is not. What is true of the Whole is not true of any of its so-called Parts. Parts are always orientable , Wholes never are. (This distinction may define Wholes vs. Parts.) But as we shall soon see ( Fallacy #2 ), there are no Parts, only Wholes exist, Wholes embedded in other Wholes. Fallacy #2 – Topology We are accustomed to thinking of the material world as a hierarchy of Wholes and Parts: “A whole is equal to the sum of its parts”, or is it “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, or “the sum of the parts is greater than the whole?” But in the case of a Klein Bottle ( Fallacy #1 ), what is true of the Whole is true of none of its so-called Parts, taken individually or even collectively. This degree of ambiguity alone should be a clue: something is wrong with this picture! If contradictory propositions about Wholes and Parts are all true, then everything is ‘true’ and therefore nothing is True . In fact, there are no Parts, only Wholes. To be is to be whole and to be a Whole. Some Wholes are embedded in other Wholes but embedded Wholes are not Parts; they are Wholes in their own right, symbiotically embedded. The nucleus of a cell is an independent organism, symbiotically embedded in its host. Same with mitochondria. A human cell in turn is not ‘part’ of a body, it is an independent organism, a Whole, embedded in a broader Whole. These observations lead to four wildly counter-intuitive corollaries: (1) “No two events intersect” unless one is entirely embedded in the other. Unless B and C are entirely disjoint, either B is embedded in C or C is embedded in B. But if one event is embedded in another then they function as a single event. (2) However, if B and C are disjoint, each may be embedded, independently, in A. But in that case, there is no consistent arithmetic relationship (common metric) spanning the volumes of C, B, and A. Even though B and C are embedded in A they are not ‘parts’ of A; so it is not necessarily the case that A > B or A > C or A ≥ (B+C). A, B, and C are independent Wholes, each with its own unique metric. Therefore, the volume(s) of B and/or C and/or (B+C) can be greater than A. The volume of A can even be infinitesimal (hyperreal), or zero, or negative while the volumes(s) of B and C and (B+C) ‘stay positive’…and real. (3) B and C can influence A and A can influence B and/or C but B and C cannot influence each other except through the intermediation of A. A causal relationship ( Fallacy #4 ) is the only relationship between entities (B ↔ C) that is not permitted IRL. The Real World is truly the inverse of the Euclidean World in which all of us live our daily lives. (4) “…it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” (O. C. Smith) We imagine that the Universe pulls itself up by its ‘bootstraps’, that fundamental particles assemble themselves into ever more complex structures: electron → atom → molecule → cell → organism → community → society → the United Federation of Planets ( Star Trek ). In fact there is no pulling up, there are no bootstraps and nothing assembles. There are only Wholes that construct themselves by incorporating qualities manifested by other Wholes. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, “It’s Wholes all the way down.” Fallacy #3 – Space, Time & Scale We are transfixed by the enormity of space and time and by the c. 60 orders of magnitude separating the cosmic event horizon from Planck’s measurements. In fact, however, space, time and scale are just three different axes on which we can conveniently arrange events to illustrate various pathways of inherited order. Time, for example, allows us to arrange events on a grid that corresponds to a desired ordering principle, e.g. increasing entropy. Until 1964, following Einstein et al., we were certain that the speed of light placed an absolute bound on the degree of integration possible in any universe. In fact, we now know that most events (particles) are entangled with other events across vast tracts of spacetime; and between entangled events, spacetime is annihilated – not that information travels faster than ‘c’ but that spatiotemporal separation is simply irrelevant. It is epiphenomenal in relation to substructural entanglement. Space is an ordering principle that allows us to quantify the strength at which various forces are felt by various entities. Re Scale , 60 orders of magnitude may be just what we need to house all the bits of information that currently constitute the universe. Fortunately, the universe is making room for more; it’s expanding. Speculation : Does the rate of cosmic expansion put a limit on our ability to generate new bits of information? Or does the rate of information generation determine the rate of cosmic expansion? Does the advent of AI mean that we could be headed for a new period of hyperinflation? But all of this is purely relative. According to George Macdonald, “Form is much but size is nothing.” And before him, William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” But just exactly how ‘relative’ is it? According to Roger Penrose’s CCC model of cosmology, the isolated photons characteristic of the Big Freeze may be the primordial fluctuations in the CMB that become/became the seeds that drive/drove the formation of galaxies. In fact, the fundamental structure of the World is neither spatiotemporal nor scalar; it’s fractal . There are patterns that occupy regions of spacetime and repeat over and over again with slight variations - at every scale, in every place, in every timeframe. The rotations of the galaxies around their black holes recapitulate the revolutions of the solar system; the nucleated structure of the Eukaryotic cell recapitulates 20 th century models of the atom. Patterns persist; the universe is a many layered onion. Fallacy #4 - Causality “Everything has a cause.” From physics to theology, this premise was virtually unchallenged (lie quiet, David Hume) prior to the 20 th century’s discovery of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos and entanglement. Causality and Ontogenesis have become virtual synonyms. In fact, however, there are no ‘causes’, and therefore no ‘effects’; there are only events . Every event is causa sui and sui generis . Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. in the context of its own unique Actual World. “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot) Every event is a cosmos-filling field, a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for The Good, i.e. for Eternal Values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The probability of any specific event occurring in the Real World is infinitesimal. Yet events do occur. Is this not just another way of saying that every event is miraculous – not a suspension of physical law but the most dramatic possible expression of that law? In every event, the Actual World is both the subject and the object of the event, but it is never the event itself: “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!” (Carroll) But without Causality , how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First , all events are motivated by a bundle of shared values (above) that naturally lead toward a convergent future. Second , while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the Eternal Values. Third , while every event is novel, no event is entirely new. As noted above, every event is causa sui and sui generis , but no event (except God?) creates ex nihilo . No two events are entirely the same: Creativity is the spark of difference. No two events are entirely different: Solidarity provides a shared foundation. Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are massively enhanced by Stability and Continuity. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values while maximizing Intensity of Experience. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity) as it meets the objective interests (value) of the wider World. The two interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. Intensity and value both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.” Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives: Value, Intensity, Consistency. What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethics: “Accomplish as much as possible by changing as little as possible!” Qualia are conserved without the phantasm of Causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. Fourth , we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). Within that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. But we don’t see things that way. We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy. We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. Sometimes we affix labels like ‘intention’ or ‘tone’, ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ to various frame sequences. But in reality these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon (the event itself). Finally , we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ with ‘cause’. It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and backtrack through an imagined sequence of ‘quantum changes’, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached the ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. Fallacy #5 - Set Theory Around the dawn of the 20 th century, logic and sets met…and it was love at first sight. Suddenly, everything had to be described in terms of sets. By the time my children were ready for school, even basic arithmetic was taught as set theory. They learned symbolic notation before they learned addition. This was not necessarily a bad thing! Set Theory is a powerful tool. But then Bertrand Russell discovered an apparent ‘paradox’ in ‘naïve set theory’ and ‘fixed it’ by adding a ludicrous new axiom (The Axiom of Foundation). AF states that no set can be a subset (or member) of itself. There are valid sets that are not members of themselves. For example, the set of Real Numbers is not itself a real number. But these sets tend to be inert collections, baseball cards gathering dust on a closet shelf. More fundamentally, the Universe consists of sets that are recursive, i.e. that are members of themselves. Example : the set of physical laws is itself a physical law (a meta-law ). Criteria : (1) Changing the ‘value’ (defined as broadly as possible, perhaps similar to ‘qualia’) of any one member normally changes the ‘value’ of the set itself; and (2) changing the ‘value’ of the set potentially changes the ‘value’ of every member of that set. Rule of thumb : Recursion is characteristic of sets that model organic processes. A universe without recursion is sterile…and very likely impossible. What does it mean ‘to be’, Prince Hamlet? To be a difference that makes a difference. (Gregory Bateson) To be many in one and one among many. (Whitehead); all for one and one for all (Dumas). In pursuit of consistency, Russell sacrificed relevance. IRL, every action is recursive, every action is self-modifying, every action acts on the actor. Fallacy #6 - Arithmetic The rules of arithmetic are powerful, but they are also pernicious. 2500 years ago Zeno proved that arithmetic cannot account for even the simplest real world phenomenon (e.g. the flight of an arrow). The next 2000 years of Western intellectual history may be understood as a coordinated assault on Zeno, triumphantly culminating in the simultaneous discovery of Calculus by Leibniz and Newton c. 1700 CE. Alleluia! The multiplication tables, scourge of 8 year olds everywhere, were finally vindicated. Until they weren’t. 200 years after Newton, Bertrand Russell pointed out that calculus does not resolve Zeno’s paradox after all. Both arithmetic and calculus assume that the real world is continuous, which it is not; it’s discrete, it’s quantized. It’s a foam, not a fluid! Later Godel showed that arithmetic is also incomplete: it inevitably labels certain well-formed propositions ‘undecidable’. I wish I had known about Godel’s work when I was in 3 rd grade. Whenever I encountered a problem too big for my Pooh brain I would have written ‘undecidable’ on the answer sheet (with predictable consequences). According to the rules of arithmetic, ‘operations’ are transitive, commutative, associative and distributive. Translation: a quantity is a quantity is a quantity…regardless of its context. Of course, this is only true in the classroom. IRL, the order of operations makes a big difference. Whenever X + Y = Y + X, it is strictly a matter of coincidence. IRL, nothing is ever divorced from its context and no operation is oblivious to its order. Fallacy #7 - Language We take it for granted that language provides a reasonably accurate map of the real world. It doesn’t! Our contemporary Indo-European languages are almost entirely dependent on action/passive verb forms: i.e. action divorced from reaction. In fact, we’ve known for centuries that “every action entails an equal and opposite reaction” (the very same Mr. Newton), that “what goes around comes around”, that “karma is a b*tch”. Action isolated from reaction imitates the sound of one hand clapping. Once upon a time our Indo-European languages were dominated by a verb form that expressed the reflexivity and interactivity of real process (i.e. the Middle Voice ). However, the technological advances of the bronze and iron ages coopted language into the service of engineering and Middle Voice verb forms atrophied. Who needs the interpersonal when we are exploring the interplanetary? As described in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), we are left with languages that no longer communicate anything of existential significance. Bummer! Fallacy #8 – Consciousness Some of us imagine that consciousness is a feature of experience unique to human beings. Some think it is associated with an ephemeral substance like the ‘soul’, Gilbert Grape’s famous Ghost in the Machine (Ryle). Still others think that consciousness can be reduced to electrochemical processes. None of these models is even remotely on point. Consciousness occurs whenever one discrete region of the ontological field becomes aware of another such region. I am aware of the people, places, and things around me. A cell is aware of the molecular bath in which it is immersed, a nucleus is aware of the cytoplasm surrounding it, a proton is aware of its companion electron, two entangled photons are simultaneously aware of one another even ‘across the universe’. (Beatles) Contrary to pre-20 th century assumptions, there is no such thing as unconscious awareness (sensation, perhaps, awareness, not). Tweens, relax, there are no zombies! Whenever one region of the ontological field is aware of another region, it automatically becomes aware of itself being aware of that region. Ultimately, all awareness includes self-awareness, so all awareness is conscious. In the real world every ‘actual entity’ (event) is both directly and indirectly aware of its environment – indirectly through being aware of itself being aware. There is an infinitesimal difference between the object of direct awareness and the mediated object of indirect awareness. This is equivalent to what Jacques Derrida called differance . We see the world stereoscopically, resulting in two slightly skew images with a quantum of difference between them. That is where consciousness lives; this is what we call ‘identity’. Therefore, consciousness does not reside in any subject, object, or process; it transcends them all. It is Sartre’s universal Neant (Negation). When Roger Penrose (c. 2010) first proposed that consciousness was a quantum phenomenon, he didn’t know the half of it. We have grown up with the assumption that awareness and consciousness are two different things – and that’s right, sort of. Being conscious is not the same thing as being aware; but awareness automatically entails consciousness. Every action acts on both its subject and its object. An ‘act of awareness’ is no different. When I am aware of X, I am the apparent subject (active voice) of that awareness and X is the apparent object (passive voice). ( Fallacy #7 ) But in fact, as I am aware of X, X is also ‘aware’ of me (Middle Voice). But since I have no access to X’s subjective experience, I experience X’s experience of me as me being aware of myself being aware. I become ‘self-conscious’; I am shy . I channel ‘the other’ (Sartre). Therefore, a conscious being is inherently interpersonal, even if ‘the other person’ turns out to be a stone; been there! (Anaximander, Buber, et al.) The object of my awareness (the world) is in a state of perpetual flux (Heraclitus’ flow); it is coincident with time. The subject of that awareness (‘I’) is in a state of permanent stasis (Parmenides’ Aletheia ); it is atemporal. The object of my awareness is perceived through its qualia ; the subject of my awareness has no qualia : it is one, simple, featureless, eternal. I (object) am different than I was a nanosecond ago; I (subject) am the same as I was at the moment of my conception, the same as I will be at the moment of my death. There is no ‘preferred time’. Self-help gurus notwithstanding, Now is no more real than Then . I am simultaneously and instantaneously who I was, who I am, and who I will be at every moment of my life. I do not need to die to ‘see my life flash before my eyes’; I live that, here and now. YHWH said, “I am what am” (Exodus 3: 14). Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum.” I say, “ I am I” period, a quantum manifestation of eternal, universal Being. I have no ‘hair’ (Hawking). I am Odysseus, I am Nemo, I am Everyman ! I am Consciousness per se but only as it is experienced over a certain ‘defined set of related events’ which Whitehead called a Personal Society…or a Person. Fallacy #9 – Ethics Admit it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment and so we are direct descendants of Machiavelli, no matter how many ‘times removed’. Regardless of what we profess, we all behave as if ‘ends justify means’. And perhaps they would…if they existed. We’ll work a 60 hour week at a job we detest if it enables us to feed our families…or go to Disney World; but would we do so if we learned that our spouse had just won the lottery…or that Disney World was closing? We’ll move to a Ritzy neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to the best schools. Would we do so if we learned that the school committee was about to fire all the teachers and open a series of open air academies in the Athenian tradition? (Well, maybe I would do that!) And unfortunately, some of us will shoot a passer-by in the street if it gives us the cash we need to feed our tastes, habits, or addictions. But even we might think twice if we knew the passer-by was skint . In fact there are no ends…and so there are no means. Of course, there are prior events and subsequent events but that doesn’t make the former a means or the latter an end . Without Causality ( Fallacy #4 ) nothing can be a means to anything. “Evening came and morning followed, the first day,” (Genesis 1: 5) doesn’t mean that the darkness caused the dawn. But even if you insist on preserving the idea of causality, Machiavelli won’t wash. For something to be a ‘means to an end’ there has to be some sort of ‘intentionality’, i.e. the end must be in sight, if only virtually, at the moment of means . But in fact, the relationship between specific prior events and specific subsequent events is chaotic and therefore essentially unproveable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Would you raise a colony of butterflies in Borneo so that a certain Cubs game would be rained out? Neither would I. And yet, unlike Indianapolis, it does rain in Chicago in the summertime! It is entirely possible that Bornean butterflies cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series but there is absolutely no way to know that, much less predict it, much less control it. All we can say is (1) there are butterflies in Borneo, (2) a Cubs game got rained out in the 4 th inning with the Cubs leading 10 – 0, (3) the game had to be replayed, and the Cubs lost, (4) the Cubs missed the post season by a single game. So, “Mission Accomplished, Butterfly?” Because there is no knowable, predictable, controllable relationship between prior events and subsequent events, there are no ends . Therefore Ethics , at least since 1500, is not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘absurd’. Imagine a frustrated parent trying to rein-in a houseful of mischievous preteens. Dad decides to post a new set of house rules on the refrigerator door, and he warns of dire consequences if even one of the new rules is broken. However, the rules are purposely written to ensure they will be unintelligible. Welcome to the Enlightenment! There is only one valid ethical imperative: Create beauty, disseminate truth, act justly…all regardless of any so-called consequences. Fallacy #10 – God Our final faux pas, Fallacy #10 , is fittingly a catch-all for a google of fallacies, i.e. the set of all affirmative propositions, actual or potential, that identify God with any specific predicate. The list is endless, because God is ineffable. That said, it is possible to make meaningful statements about God using metaphorical language. It is as if God were Being, Good, Beauty, Truth, Justice, Love, Freedom, etc. Reason allows us to identify these as Divine Qualities and experience shows us that these qualities permeate, however incompletely and imperfectly, the material world. Therefore, they are an epistemologically valid way for us to talk about ‘ineffable God’ using metaphors grounded in human experience. That said, the millennia old debate, “Does God Exist?” is misconceived. First, God is not an existent among existents; ‘God’ is what all existents share in common, God is their foundation. Second, God does not ‘exist’ so much as ‘occur’; like everything else, God is an event. ‘God’ is the name we give to the ‘Bundle’ of ontological features that all actual entities exhibit, i.e. that underlies the phenomenon of Being itself. ( Grammatical Note : All actual entities share certain ontological features, but it is the Bundle itself that underlies Being per se .) Of course, this turns the matter of God’s existence into a tautology. Est ergo Deus Est , or for the Narcissists among us, Sum ergo Deus Est , and for the more spiritually developed, Es Ergo Deus Est . But is that a good thing or bad? Can ‘analytic’ propositions be meaningful? How many angels do stand on the head of a pin? The entire Bible can be read as God’s ongoing but often unsuccessful effort to communicate his nature to the world, climaxing when his “Word (logos) became flesh ( Xpristos ) and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 14) In the end, no one is more misunderstood than God. We pray for signs, for miracles, for God’s intervention in history and in our personal lives, and when we don’t get what we think we’re due, we accuse God of suborning evil . In point of fact, we have substituted an avatar for God, and we have fashioned it in our own image and likeness. We have set up a straw man (‘God is like us’ replaces ‘we are like God’) so that we can indict God when he does not conform to our own ‘high’ standards of conduct. But “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55: 58 – 59) We are agents, we act, we make stuff happen. God does not make things happen; he removes barriers so that good things can happen of their own accord. God is a liberator, not an engineer; like Jeremiah and John the Baptist, we are God’s engineers. Look at Genesis . God said, “ Let there be light;” then God “ saw that it was good.” And only then “evening came and morning followed, the first day.” This is not to limit or demean God in any way. God is everything God could possibly be…consistent with the created world being what it is, i.e. totally and completely free (Sartre). I am not speaking here only of human free will ; I am talking about the existential freedom enjoyed by every single event in Universe. It is through the intermediation of God that the Eternal Values are available to the World as lures for feeling and motives for action. But only we can answer, “Yes!” History is entirely in our hands…and what a mess we’ve made so far. The Eternal Values, God’s essence, are why (not how) there are events. And it is in so far as those fleeting events manifest Eternal Values that the events themselves are timeless. God motivates actions, curates experiences, and redeems results. Cain founds cities, Noah builds boats, Moses leads an insurrection; Joshua fights battles, Solomon builds a temple, Jesus saves! Judeo-Hellenic civilization goes back almost 3,500 years. Ironically, some of the most philosophically impactful works came early: The Book of Job , Ecclesiastes , Parmenides’ On Nature , Plato’s Timaeus , the Gospel of John , and a selection of canonical Epistles, including Colossians , Ephesians , Corinthians , Romans , Hebrews , James , and the letters of John and Peter. A case can be made that the Golden Age of speculative philosophy ended with Augustine of Hippo c. 500 CE. 1500 years later, we’re still debating a lot of the same issues: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Who R U? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad or morally indifferent people? And, of course, why is there something rather than nothing? What else would you expect? We’ve been looking at these problems through some seriously dysfunctional lenses. Coke bottle bottoms would work better! It’s no wonder that academic philosophy is held in such low repute. For the most part, it takes for granted characterizations of reality that are obviously (above) false. We pretty much need to start over again. But first somebody has to say it out loud, “The Emperor is seriously underdressed.” *** Rodin, Auguste. The Thinker. 1902. Bronze sculpture. Musée Rodin, Paris. 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 Speaking Piraha David Cowles The hidden grammar censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag. (This article is dedicated to three high school classmates whose abiding interest in, and respect for, other cultures helped me form my own view of the world. Thank you: Tom, Geoff, and Joe M!) We met the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe, in the August 18 Issue of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS ). Once again, just when we were sure we knew everything, we discovered we know nothing. Science and its pesky Scientific Method! It’s an outrageous inconvenience to have to study things as they are rather than as we think they should be! Piraha culture is one such example. We thought Noam Chomsky (20th century, MIT) had taught us everything we’d ever need to know about language; then along comes Daniel Everett, anthropologist, linguist, Christian missionary. Everett makes the case that Chomsky’s entire theory of language has been falsified by the confirmed discovery of just one ‘aberrant’ language, Piraha – a language that today has only a few hundred native speakers. Sorry, but that’s the nature of the Scientific Method. It admits no gray. One single ‘counter-example’ is all we need to show that we must broaden our hypothesis. In Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (2008) Everett tells the story of his years living with the Piraha tribe in Brazil’s Amazon Rain Forest. The Piraha have a most unusual language. So far as we can tell, it is not directly related to any other language, living or extinct. Piraha has features that are rarely, if ever, found in other human languages. For example, Piraha has no words for numerals (1, 2, 3) or colors (red, green, blue). They do have quantitative concepts like ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ and they do have words that describe an object’s visual appearance - just no words for numerals or colors per se . Example: I have a ‘whole fish.’ I start cutting the fish into pieces so that I can share it with my friends. When I’m done, I still have a ‘whole fish’ but now each of my friends has a ‘whole fish’ too. There are a number of indigenous cultures that have what we would consider ‘truncated’ number systems. For example, we find many cultures that distinguish only three quantitative states: 1, 2, > 2 (or ‘many’) – a far cry from Sister Mary Martha’s 3rd grade multiplication tables. If only! Yet, the mathematically inclined among us will correctly point out that we can reconstruct the entire set of rational numbers from just these three elements (1, 2, > 2). After all, computers do it with just 0’s and 1’s. But not so among the Piraha. The Piraha have no numerals, period. They just have fish, whole fish ! Even more esoterically, Piraha lacks the syntactic structure known by linguists as ‘recursion.’ Example: “The man, who was tall, played basketball.” Pretty simple concept, right? Not for the Piraha! This every day English sentence has no equivalent in their language. Of course, the Piraha could say, and do say, “The man was tall. The man played basketball,” but notice the difference. In our language, the juxtaposition of ‘being tall’ and ‘playing basketball’ emits a faint whiff of causality, or at least coincidence, even if the speaker has no such connection in mind. Our sentences regularly combine apparently unrelated predicates, suggesting connections that may not have been intended. Does that ever cause any problems? What do you think? The hidden grammar censor in our Indo-European brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag. Connecting ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ is not the worst thing we could ever do. Although plenty of shorties have played the game brilliantly, there is certainly some statistical correlation between height and success on the court. And if, as my JHS coach said to me, “Sonny, you stink”, well, it’s probably not the end of my world. An advocate for Piraha might pile on, pointing out the obvious, “If there’s no necessary connection between being tall and playing basketball , why put the two ideas together in the same sentence?” Why indeed! In Piraha , being tall and playing basketball would simply be presented as the serial attributes of a single human being, not necessarily connected in any way. We could copy the Piraha. We could craft sentences like “John is tall, he likes Bach, he reads comics, and he snores when he sleeps.” The sentence enumerates certain facts about John without in any way suggesting that they are linked. This way of speaking might impoverish literature, but it would certainly simplify interpersonal relations. Perhaps we should require our politicians to ‘walk like an Egyptian and speak like a Piraha,’ at least while they are campaigning. Our language is a petri dish for the growth of stereotypes. Its recursive syntax encourages us to confuse statistical correlation with physical causation: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc – a logical fallacy, enshrined more or less forever in the structure of the language we call English . In a recursive language like ours, attributes have a tendency to ‘bleed’ into substances . Wassein (what we are) is often mistaken for Dasein (that we are). Our view of the world is cockeyed, oops, I meant to say, Popeyed : “I am what I am and that’s all that I am, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” 80 years ago, Jean-Paul Sartre provided a crucial correction. He showed Popeye that all our attributes belong to Wassein , none to Dasein . He called our Dasein , Le Neant , and he distinguished L’etre pour soi (I, you, s/he) from L’etre en soi (it). When I was growing up (the ‘60s), we were all on a quest to find ourselves . Beatniks, hippies, reformers, and revolutionaries, we were all asking, though few of us realized it at the time, to identify those aspects of our Wassein that were also part of our Dasein . What are the things about me that are hardwired, i.e., from which I cannot escape? It all seemed so self-evident ( it isn’t ). Of course, we should be whoever or whatever we are ( we shouldn’t )! It makes sense ( it doesn’t ) to think that problems may arise if we are not who we are ( we aren’t ). Fortunately, in this matter as in all others, Sartre had an answer: you can’t escape from the world you’re in. That’s your ‘facticity’…but it’s not you ! In fact, you are ( Dasein ) precisely because you are not ( Wassein ). ~W = D: You are not what you are, Popeye; you are what you are not! So, by extension, you can’t ‘find yourself’ either. You can’t find yourself because, turns out, there’s nothing for you to find. You are Le Neant (nothingness). Furthermore, you are ‘freedom,’ not just free but freedom . You are never what you are ( en soi ); you are always what you are striving to be ( pour soi ). To ‘search for yourself’ is equivalent to playing hide-and-seek in the woods… all by yourself ! Remember when you were a kid, and you thought you were playing hide and seek only to find out later that your friends had moved on to another game…or gone home for supper. Not a good feeling! But it was only a game, a warm-up for life. Now, there is never anyone coming to find you, and no one is hiding for you to find. There are not two people, one hiding, the other seeking. There is just one person, neither hiding nor seeking, but just being! My generation’s foundational myth was the belief that ‘finding ourselves’ would somehow make us happy, give our lives meaning, help us judge right from wrong, and point us in productive and satisfying directions. How’d that work out? (Don’t worry, the question is rhetorical.) The belief that people are ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’ lies at the root of all social conflict, especially war. We must kill the Hun (WW I), not because he (sic) is ( Dasein ) but because he is a certain way ( Wassein ). Now replace ‘the Hun’ by any group of people you don’t like and see what happens. Do I really need to spell it out? The illusion of identity is the root of social strife, and the Piraha have no identity. They aren’t someone or something , they are not even themselves ; they just are! And they have their language to thank for that. 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. Previous Next

< Back The Journey to the Cross Is Our Journey Too Deborah Rutherford Is the journey to the Cross our stairway to Heaven? We need to be reminded of the promise of Jesus from the cradle to the grave to Heaven because not only has Jesus saved us in this life, but his death and Resurrection changed the course of mankind's eternal destiny. It is here where we find Heaven's celestial stairs. Reflect on the one (Holy) week that changed the world. The week started with joy and praise and ended with Jesus on the Cross—every moment from innocence to betrayal to shouts of crucify him—nails hammering, blood spilling, thorns tearing, linen hanging, and women weeping as the sky darkened. The earth quaked, the temple rumbled as the veil tore, and God in the flesh died a human death. Imagine the sorrow of Jesus' mother, disciples, and followers. It was as if all creation held its breath for three days, which is what it is like today, isn't it? We have Good Friday, and while we may be finalizing weekend plans or at a lunch spot with friends, we feel the gravity of God's love for us. Then, on Saturday, we wait, and although we are planning our menus, preparing Easter baskets, or dying eggs, we know what this Saturday really is. It is the day that we wait. We wait in anticipation as our sorrow turns into joy, like the night before Christmas (we know what is coming). We will run to the tomb with Mary on Sunday morning and find it empty. Envision running into Jesus as he asked, "Why do you weep. I have risen." When she said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and she did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?" John 20:11-13 NKJV Not only was Jesus, the disciples' best friend, whom they loved, gone, but what of all Jesus' teachings? What were they supposed to do? How could they continue? The wonderful thing about Jesus is He never leaves us alone to figure these things out. Just as Jesus showed up to the women outside the tomb, doubting Thomas and on the road to Emmaus, He shows up to us when we need Him. And that is what the Holy Days are. We intimately get in touch with the awe and wonder of our God, who loves us so much that He sent His only Son to die for us. To make a way for us, to bring us home forever. Jesus is forever. Our Salvation is forever. This is not a passing conversation, a decade, or even a lifetime. This is an eternal commitment. The Holy Days of Christmas transform into the Holy Days of the Resurrection. Our joyfulness is uncontainable because Jesus has risen. Hallelujah shouts across the heavens. Glory be to God in the highest. All creation sings jubilantly for the poor dying, unfallen world no longer must die. God is not one to do the normal — Always doing the unexpected, like being born from a virgin birth (Isaiah 7:14). (Although it was expected by God, who prophesied Christ's coming down to the last detail.) Dying on the Cross—again, it was prophesized (Psalm 31:5), but the Apostles did not expect it. Then Jesus rose from the dead, and although He said he would, no one expected it ( Matthew 17:22-23 ). This tells me that Jesus does more than I could ever expect or imagine. He is ever full of wonder, surprises, and unlimited delight. But we who live after the Resurrection can expect more resurrection power, the Second Coming. It is not will, or can it happen because the King is coming. We were never meant to live fallen — " Nicodemus said to Him [Jesus], "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" (John 3:4) Can a baby be born again? Nicodemus asked Jesus, not grasping the miracle that would soon be. Not yet seeing the plan God had made and orchestrated since the garden when he told the cunning serpent, "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel," (Genesis 3:15KJV). It has always been about you and me. Our innocence was stolen in the garden, our unfallen fell, and we are born into this world as fallen. But God has offered us a way to return to our innocence—a wonderful rescue plan. He would send an innocent, His son Jesus, an unblemished Lamb who would be slain for our sins. In Jesus's Resurrection, God makes a way for us to follow and return to innocence. When we trust Jesus as our Savior and step onto the Pilgrim's path back to our innocence, Savior, our God. One day, we will enter the unfallen garden, the new world, the celestial City, and sit at the feet of the Lamb. With Jesus, we get to live this every day—we live in Resurrection joy, in the safety and security of our Salvation. Our deliverance to the Holy City to unfallen Eden. As we walk through the Holy Days on our journey to the Cross, never forget God's love—sending His Son to die to make a way to bring us home. We were never meant to live forever unfallen; we were always meant to live unfallen with God himself. The journey to the Cross has everything to do with us because our Salvation is the most beautiful thing ever. What could be more exciting than celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus? Deborah Rutherford is a Christian wife who loves to write stories, devotionals, and poetry. She is also an award-winning makeup artist. Deborah shares her journey of faith, joy, and beauty on her blog at www.deborahrutherford.com and social media. She is a contributing writer for Aletheia Today Magazine , Kingdom Edge Magazine and Gracefully Truthful Ministries and has a devotional in the book “Shepherd on Duty: Promises of God you Can Trust ” (Arabelle Publishing) and the Calla Press, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Click the image to return to Spring 2024. Previous Next

< Back Time Crystals and Pepperland David Cowles Nov 19, 2025 “The Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy; then along came…Rondeau Time Crystals.” The plot of the Beatles’ iconic movie, Yellow Submarine , relies on a cosmology that has only just now (October 14, 2025) been found to be operational IRW. Previously, the Beatles’ Pepperland could have been considered mere fantasy. Then along came Leo Joon Il Moon & team ( Nature Physics ) with their discovery of Rondeau Time Crystals . Remember the film? The Beatles are living lonely and unsatisfied lives in Liverpool. Like Eleanor Rigby, they are prepared to “lie alone in their grave(s).” They know nothing of an alternate reality known as Pepperland . Well actually, they know all about Pepperland … they just don’t know that they know (“a bit like you and me”). Ringo is being Ringo on a rainy Thursday morning when he finds himself pursued by something unexpected: a yellow submarine, captained by a newly commissioned, superannuated admiral, paradoxically known as Young Fred . Bottom line : There’s trouble in Pepperland and only the Beatles can help. But it’s a tall order. To reach their destination, the Fab Four, Young Fred, and an over-educated hitchhiker (JHB PhD) they pick up along the way, must cross their version of Ginnungagap (the ‘Gap’), a chaotic hole in the well-ordered fabric of the Old Norse cosmos . According to Snorri Sturluson of Iceland , compiler-author of the Prose Edda (c. 1220 CE), “It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap ( Ginnungagap ) was, but no growth… Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor…There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man…” As in Genesis (“ the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters” 1: 2 ), the Norse Creation Myth begins with chaos and ends with human beings (a humanoid in the Edda ). But how do you portray primal chaos on a movie screen? The creators of Yellow Submarine came up with an ingenious solution: They distilled ‘the gap’ into a series of constituent branes (or ‘seas’) each constituting a virtual world of potential entities. The result is a succession of ‘seas’ (Seas of Time and Space, Monsters and Minds, et al.), ending in a sea of ‘negative being’, the Sea of Holes, and a monotone sea of pure potential, the Sea of Green. Taken together, these branes function as a series of ‘filters’ that, superimposed, yield an end product that captures the chaos of Genesis and the Edda . But the ‘chaotic uber-sea’ is not untethered: it begins at the Pier in Liverpool and ends on the monochrome plane at the entrance to Pepperland . Now a series of events ends with the restoration of order in Pepperland and the conversion of the Blue Meanies, a race of hominoid miscreants terrorizing Paradise . But that is secondary! The essential event in this segment is the Beatles’ recognition that they are and always have been co-located : ‘musical mops’ in Liverpool, a ‘trim and tidy’ bandmates in Pepperland . In Remembrance of Things Past , Marcel Proust describes his own realization of co-location. For Proust, it was the tactile feel of cobblestones that stimulated awareness. For the Beatles, it is music. Turns out, music is the universal language: it means the same thing in Liverpool, Pepperland , and everywhere in between. Cute story but just a story, right? So wrong! You might have gotten away with such fuzzy thinking back in 2024…but not in 2025! Not now that we know what we know about Rondeau Time Crystals . To understand what’s happening we first need to understand ‘ordinary’ Time Crystals . Here patterns repeat across time , forming a regular, repeating cycle that returns ‘home’, i.e. to its original position, over and over again, without any input of energy or any output of heat (entropy). Time as we know it is effectively frozen. Yes, Jim Croce, you can put time in a bottle! Fascinating as this idea is, its applications are limited. The cyclical progression in an ordinary time crystal is completely deterministic. Therefore, it is a poor model for most real world phenomena – i.e. any phenomena that include a random or an intentional (free will) element. Rondeau to the rescue! Time crystals of this newly discovered type include an element of indetermination, i.e. chaos, in their constitution. As in Norse Mythology, there is a chaotic ‘gap’ separating two ordered bookends (call them Alpha and Omega, Muspell and Niflheim , or Liverpool and Pepperland ). The strange, fecund, and highly entertaining seas separating Alpha and Omega have been specially chosen to culminate in negation and chaos, void (Sea of Holes) and monotony (Sea of Green). However, each sea has its own logos , its own unique rules of order, and those logoi build on each other. Within each brane, there is the capacity to encode information (order). But in the end, these branes are like the sets and scenes in Shakespeare’s Tempest : “… 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.” Welcome to “Nowhere Land” and the featureless Sea of Green. Why choose green for the monotone? Perhaps because it is the color of spring, of new life, of the slime from which we all sprang. It symbolizes Aristotle’s pure potentia . And what of the sub itself? It is the insubstantial (ever mobile) medium linking the potentially ordered states of Liverpool and Pepperland across the chaotic Gap. It is the ‘bridge over troubled waters’ (chaos), the virtual link between Ringo’s Pier and Khan’s Pleasure-dome . It is the Milky Way linking Earth to the stars; it is Kermit’s rainbow and Dorothy’s Yellow Brick Road. In Judeo-Christian terms, it is Torah, Covenant, Eucharist, and Church. Fundamentally, it is the superposition of what was, what is, and what is to come. It is eternal Presence, per se . *** Van Gogh’s Die Zugbrücke depicts a quiet rural drawbridge near Arles, where bright sunlight, clear skies, and strong, rhythmic brushstrokes create a vivid sense of movement and everyday life. The painting emphasizes the connection between people and their landscape, turning an ordinary bridge into a scene of harmony, color, and human activity. 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 Our Three Horrible Years David Cowles Jul 15, 2026 “Puberty is death and birth, the death of a child and the birth of an adult.” 1250 words, 5 minute read By most accounts, my parents had tolerable lives: average longevity, average health, above average income, a suboptimal offspring (but that’s a subject for another day). In both cases, however, the last year of their lives was pretty awful, not the worst possible, but bad, really bad. They were warned! Nature came calling years before their final demise, but they elected, or someone elected for them, to soldier on. With the ‘help’ of modern medicine, they put the Reaper on hold…and he was not well pleased. Why hang on? Did they anticipate some marvelous event that would make up for a year’s worth of suffering? Or were they, like all of us, understandably afraid of death? No less a figure than Hamlet considered whether it was better “to be or not to be.” He got his answer centuries later from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, “Life is worth living!” But neither Hamlet nor Sheen was in his last year of life. (Well, actually, Hamlet was…but he didn’t know it at the time!) *** I am 78 years old and in ‘suboptimal’ health (there’s that word again). I can hear Eliot’s bar man calling, “Hurry up please, it’s time.” I’m in no rush; but I’m prepared to let nature take its course. I mean, what am I waiting for? Another Patriots’ Superbowl? I’ve done it all…more or less. I have a forever spouse, the best, and wonderful children; and my grands and greats are just beginning to make their marks in the world. I had a career that allowed me, don’t puke, to ‘do well while doing good’. So what am I missing? The meaning of life? (For that I have Aletheia Today .) Yet when I tell my doctors that I wish to be listed as DNR, they are shocked and appalled. “You have years of life left.” Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but it is almost certain that the sentinel event of those years will be my death. Can anything top it? (Maybe a Lynwood pizza…but other than that) I doubt it. I expect and accept that the last year of my life will be my worst. Should kindly Nature offer me a quicker resolution, I certainly won’t say, “No.” I won’t do anything to shorten the runway but I won’t extend it either. *** This will not be my first rodeo. 78 years ago, I exited my mother’s hopefully nurturing womb and entered your world as a tiny, helpless, mucus covered blob, unable to articulate my needs or to address them on my own. Plus, “What is this? Where am I? What am I?” I am told that I cried most of my first year. Things only improved once I was able to move around on my own and utter my first words. Makes sense: I haven’t stopped moving, or talking, since. Case in point! You’re probably not surprised to see the last year of life on my list of anni horribiles and the first year of life makes sense too when you think about it. But I promised you 3 horrible years. Where’s the third? Is it age 6 when you start school, 21 when you have your first hangover (as if), 35 when your first divorce is finalized, or 65 when they drag you kicking and screaming out of the office where you’ve worked for 40 years at a soul destroying job? None of the above… something much worse! The magic number is 12 (give or take) and the event is full onset puberty! Ok, not great memories, but is puberty really in a class with death and birth? Yes, it is! In fact, puberty is death and birth, the death of a child and the birth of an adult. You’ve been trained to think of age as a continuum; it’s not! We age in stages . Quantum like, we leap. Age 12 marks the end of one such stage and the beginning of another. And because this is our first re incarnation (second incarnation), it is the most traumatic. Adolescence is our version of metamorphosis Once a caterpillar entombs itself in a chrysalis, it does not then ‘grow’ into a butterfly as children imagine. Rather, it dissolves into a biotic soup, reorganizes into a fresh organism, and emerges as the proud Monarch of the garden. You should be so lucky! Unlike the caterpillar who gets to reincarnate in the privacy of its chrysalis, your chrysalis is Middle School. Plus when the butterfly emerges, it enjoys all the perks of adulthood. When you emerge from puberty, you’re still a child, at least in the eyes of society. Every child is unique. That said, up to the age of 12 children share a lot in common. Every child is a polymath bursting with imagination, creativity, and energy. After 12, differentiation accelerates. Just look at the social organization of any large suburban high school: Athletes, mathletes, freaks and geeks, drama kids, drama queens, and just queens, s/h/it and they, goths and sweat hogs. It is no accident that cultures throughout the world celebrate the onset of puberty with a variety of initiation rituals. Consider the Jewish rite of Bas/Bat-Mitzvah. It marks your becoming an adult in the eyes of the religious community…except of course you’re still treated as a child on everyday matters. After puberty you are physiologically able to start a family, hold down a job, and care for yourself, and many young teens do so, even today; but sociologically, you’re still ‘just a kid’. The cognitive dissonance is literally unbearable and an adolescent’s reaction to the disconnect is likely to be life-defining. We constantly read about young teens starting businesses (or charities), performing in Carnegie Hall, leading political movements, etc. Sadly, we more often read about substance abuse, delinquency, and self-harm. Jack and Jill grew up together and they sit next to each other in 7 th grade homeroom. “Peas in pod”, their proud parents/teachers say, approvingly. Unbeknownst to everyone, Jill will graduate MIT at 20 while Jack will drop out of school immediately following his 16 th birthday. When the time comes for Jill to celebrate her 10 year high school reunion, she already has a Fields Medal to her credit while Jack is still working on his GED…following a brief stint in jail and two rounds of rehab. Society has a problem; it’s called adolescence . How do we get our pre-teens across the roiling waters relatively unscathed? We build bridges, of course: activities meant to mimic adulthood but without the irreparable consequences: High school sports, science club, debate team, model UN, volunteer work, summer jobs and internships, and even ‘college’ itself. Unlike sandlot pick-up games, these socially sanctioned activities have a certain ‘importance’… but normally they are not life defining. Rabbit notwithstanding, you can drop a forward pass and still go on to own a successful car dealership in your home town. But on the flip side, these activities can appear fake…which to some extent at least, they are. So how do we fix it? After all, “philosophers only interpret the world…the point is to change it.” (Karl Marx) So…how do we fix adolescence? Well, tell me how we fix ‘birth and death’ and I’ll let you know. But step one is to recognize age 12 as our ‘third horrible year’. 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 God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” < Back Proof of God: The Empirical Argument David Cowles Jun 1, 2024 “Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” In the this Issue of ATM (6/1/2024), we attempted to resurrect a 12th century Ontological Proof of God’s existence . We performed our feat of prestidigitation by standing Anselm of Bec on his tonsured head. Anselm et al. argued that ‘existence’ is a ‘perfection’, that being is an improvement over not-being. (Lie quiet, Hamlet!) Since God is perfect by definition, God therefore exists by definition, i.e. among all his other perfections, God must possess the ‘perfection’ of existence. Anselm argued God’s case logically. We rescued Anslem by showing that it is not necessary to treat ‘existence’ as a ‘perfection’ or even to posit God as ‘perfect’. All that is required is the ability to recognize gradations of Value. Whenever you can say that A is objectively ‘better’ (more beautiful, more true, more just) than B, you are saying, “God exists,” because without God, no gradations would be possible. At the end of the day, God is Value and therefore the ground of all values. God is Beauty, God is Truth, God is Justice. Therefore, if we say that one painting is more beautiful than another, one proposition more true than another, one law more just than another, we implicitly assert the existence of God. As long as ‘actual entities’ manifest varying gradations of various values, they testify loudly to the existence of God. Of course, if all things perfectly reflected God’s Value (Good), they would still testify to the existence of God…but we wouldn’t hear it. A world in which everything is maximally Beautiful, True, and Just, i.e. maximally Good, is called the Kingdom of Heaven . Had we been born directly into the Kingdom , we would be co-terminus with God. We would enjoy God, but we would not ‘know’ God. We would be ‘reduced to the state of Eden’, i.e. ‘Eve before Apple ’, forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Or reduced to the state of a fish in water. A fish cannot prove the existence of water empirically. It is only by contrast that we perceive and for a fish, water is ubiquitous. Likewise, it is only by variations in value that we can detect the universal presence of God. A bit of a paradox, this! Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere* in our World, we are able to perceive God everywhere in that World. (*exceptions may apply) According to Genesis, Adam and Eve ‘paved paradise and put up a parking lot’ (Joni Mitchell); they traded Eden for gnosis and ended up with techne (technology). What is the first thing the first family did after leaving Eden? You guessed it: Cain went East and built cities. We did the same at Babel. Seeking to be ‘more like God’, we built infrastructure and became less like God in the process. “The nearer your destination the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.” (Paul Simon) Do these stories seem far fetched to you? Then how about our own very recent so-called Enlightenment ? We set our caps for gnosis and, like the Babylonians before us, we ended up with techne . Before I turned 25, I thought I knew everything; since turning 75, I realize I know nothing now...and knew even less then. In 1900, the cognoscente thought they knew almost everything about almost everything. Spoiler Alert : They didn’t! In retrospect we see that they knew almost nothing about anything – anything important that is. Conjecture : The more important something is, the less sure we can be of it. (Call it the ATM Uncertainty Principle ?) Therefore, the most we can know about the most important subject, God, is nothing. Wittgenstein labeled a certain family of propositions, Important Nonsense – a rare example of redundancy on the part of this great thinker. The more important the info the less likely it is that the proposition will be meaningful according to our criteria; therefore, Wittgenstein’s famous meme is redundant. Knowledge is like the Cosmos. The frontier is receding from us so rapidly that no matter what we do, our patch will continue to shrink relative to the whole. Metaphorically speaking, the noosphere is imploding at about a billion km per hour. We occupy an increasingly small fraction of spacetime…and of the noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin). What we know is an increasingly small fraction of what is knowable. Like various non-human life forms from the Star Trek franchise, the citizens of Eden were willing to accept the horrors of mortality to gain knowledge. But you don’t need to belong to the Q-Continuum or the Borg Collective to value knowledge. We find the same spirit in a very human story that dates back almost 4,000 years. Of course, I’m speaking of the Book of Job. Bereft of family and fortune, Job, covered with boils, taunted by neighbors, living on an ash pile, has the incredible courage to say that the worst fate that could befall a person is to ‘die without knowledge’. Sidebar : When a university professor (sorry, profs), whose closest encounter with pain was a hangnail, ranks ignorance as the worst fate, we are entitled to a bit of an eyebrow lift. But Job has street cred – as does Jesus after him! When Job confronts God at the end of the epic, he does not ask God to restore his fortunes; he simply asks for knowledge. Whether or not he gets that knowledge is a matter of debate . In any event, I wonder how many of us would sacrifice ‘paradise’ for knowledge. When confronted with a choice, a challenge, or a problem today, how many of us ask the appropriate question, “ WWJD – What would Job do?” Speaking of knowledge, what is it that we know? We know contrasts. We know A because we are not A and because A is not B (~A). A is the classic Neti, Neti (Not this, Not that). And what is the currency of contrast? Attributes, qualities, values. When we say A contrasts with B, we mean to say that A and B manifest various qualities in differing proportions. If God is Value, and if Value characterizes every actual entity and manifests as a variety of values in those entities, then God is manifest in every actual entity. We just need to find him, to recognize him. When we do we release the spark ( Shekinah ); literally or figuratively, we reunite the mortal world with the eternal godhead. Now at last, we can restore poor Anselm (above) to his upright position…but we need poor Descartes to take his place. His famous Cogito ergo sum is reconceived: Percipio ergo Deus est . “I perceive, therefore God exists.” This is the famous, elusive, empirical proof of the existence of God. I perceive because there are contrasts. There are contrasts because God exists. A world without God would be monochrome; neither we, nor any sentient being, could exist in such a world. So have we done what no one has seriously attempted to do since before Socrates? Have we proven the proposition, ‘God exists’, empirically rather than logically? Take our Reader Survey here. 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 Summer 2024 Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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< Back Everything Exists! David Cowles Mar 25, 2026 “Intelligent agents (us)…decide what exists. But defining what ‘what exists’ is – that’s another matter entirely.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Was it a million years ago or just yesterday? As usual, my 5 year old grandson is debating with his older brother. The proposition this morning? Resolved : That Santa Claus exists. I won’t take you through the intricacies of the argument, but jumping to the conclusion, the younger one ends the debate with, “Everything exists! QED” (Ok, so I added the QED part; I mean, he’s precocious but even that has its limits). In an earlier article on this site we discussed the Dark Universe . No one knows what it is. That’s why we call it dark . But most everyone agrees that it does exist. But according to Stevie Wonder (1972), “When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” We are used to reasoning from a known cause to a projected effect. Depending on the precision of the projection, we are talking infinitesimal chance, real number probability, or super-determinism. In the case of the Dark Universe we reason from a known effect (gravity) to a retrojected cause. All that we really know is that we can’t account for observed topology relying solely on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. There’s got to be something more, even though we have no idea what. There’s always got to be something more! A fancier bottle of wine, a faster car, a fatter 401k. Once upon a time, there had to be gods to account for celestial motion and the processes of nature, there had to be empty space (a receptacle) to permit the emergence of matter/energy, there had to be a universe-pervading aether to hold things together, and there had to be hidden variables to account for ‘spooky action at a distance’. (Einstein) Except, as far as we know, there are none of these things…and we’re ok with that, now . *** Imagine you are God. According to the English language translation of Genesis 1:3, you said, “Let there be light and there was light.” According to most interpretations, there was void and the word of God created energy/matter. But the full text also supports a minority interpretation: There was an insensible, chaotic medium out of which God culled related elements, which he labeled ‘light’, thereby injecting primal order into primordial chaos. The remainder of Genesis 1 details the unfolding of that order into the many splendored worlds we love. Defenders of this minority view have found themselves on the wrong side of Roman Catholic dogma: i.e. creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. But that doesn’t have to be so. The eminent 20th century theologian, Bill Clinton, summarized the dilemma: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Is chaos something…or nothing? Without order, does anything exist? We believe, for example, that entropy (disorder) was minimal at Big Bang and that it will be maximal at Heat Death. We have no problem saying that nothing ( nihilo ) existed ‘prior’ to Big Bang, not even time itself; we should have no problem saying that nothing will exist ‘after’ Heat Death. Therefore, maximum entropy can be synonymous with nihilo and so the two interpretations of ontogenesis converge…in orthodoxy. Light exists because God said it exists. Same for sky (1:8), earth and sea (1:10), plant life (1:11), celestial bodies (1:14), and animal life (1:24). In Genesis 2, God shares his power of creation (i.e. ordering, naming) with humans, resulting in speciation (2:20) and socialization (2:23), in other words, the world as we know it today. The Dark Universe exists because we say it exists. Light, etc. exists because God says it exists. Society exists, again, because we say so. Working with God, we too inject order (local) into the chaotic medium (universal); we are co-creators. The Dark Universe exists, God exists, Santa Claus exists! We know they exist because we see their effects. Gravity exists, the universe exists, and once every year presents appear under the Christmas tree. We know nothing of the Dark Universe, God, or Santa Claus per se . We only know that there are phenomena we cannot currently account for in any other way. Most adults will tell you that they don’t believe in Santa Claus. They say that because they believe they can account for the annual appearance of presents under a tree by other means. They cite an unholy (secular) trinity (Family, Amazon, and MasterCard) to explain the unmistakable phenomena we know as Christmas . They might just as well say, “Of course Santa Claus exists. What we call ‘Santa Claus’ is a confluence of kinship, commerce, and finance.” But out of respect for Occam’s Razor, they don’t. But in 1897, Francis Church, looking at exactly the same phenomena, did! He famously wrote, “ Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound…” Mr. Church looks at a confluence of love, generosity, and devotion and chooses to call it ‘Santa Claus’; other adults look at the same phenomena and find no reason to ‘name’ an additional entity. Likewise, folks who ‘don’t believe in God’ claim they can explain the existence and character of our universe without hypothesizing a responsible entity. They combine physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology to account for “Heaven and Earth and all things, visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed) The Dark Universe poses a slightly different problem. There are currently no proposals that convincingly account for cosmic phenomena based solely on today’s catalogue of particles and forces. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be. So my grandson was right, the younger that is: everything does exist! The Dark Universe, God, and Santa. The challenge is defining what it is that exists. When we use language to describe reality, we arbitrarily shatter the uniform glass sphere into a million shards. In the end, it doesn’t much matter how the crystal crumbles…as long as we can reassemble the pieces to recreate a smooth globe. A jigsaw puzzle might be an even better analogy. One image, divisible into indefinitely many, randomly shaped pieces that can be reassembled to recreate the image on the box. We , i.e. intelligent agents, aka ‘God, his angels, and (us) his saints’, decide what exists ( Dasein , Heidegger). But defining what ‘what exists’ is ( Wassein ) – that’s another matter entirely. *** Rembrandt’s 1632 oil on canvas uses dramatic chiaroscuro to depict a scholar seated in a vast, sun-drenched interior, symbolizing the light of human reason amidst the shadows of the unknown. The composition is anchored by a prominent winding staircase that suggests the complex, spiraling depths of philosophical thought and the search for hidden truths. While a second figure quietly tends a fire in the background, the painting remains a profound meditation on the internal struggle to understand the nature of existence and the divine. 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 BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson "Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control." As we prepare to close the Book of Leviticus, the Torah’s pinnacle, we are left with a message of responsibility, consequences, and possibilities. God presents us with the benefits of making wise choices and the consequences of choosing poorly. Then the Torah provides for the funding of the sanctuary and its staff: our participation with monetary support, pledges of animals or homes. But when it pivots to pledges of land, the Torah shifts gears entirely. Land, you see, is ours to borrow and to use. But humans presume they can own land. In reality, the land makes its claim on us, and we can either open ourselves to its ground rules, or we risk a rootlessness that leaves us clinging when the next sandstorm swirls. We are, as the book reminds us, “resident strangers ( Leviticus 25:23 )” on earth. The Land precedes us and the land will bury us when we no longer need our bodies. We are dust, and we return to dust ( Genesis 3:19 ). On some deeper level of reality, it is all just dust, earth, soil. Judaism directs our attention to the centrality of earth through the regular rhythms of Shabbat (seven days) Shmita (seven years), and Jubilee (seven Shmita cycles). In this last parasha of Leviticus, we are told that when we think we are selling the land, we are actually letting someone else live on it or use it for a finite duration of time. At the next Jubilee year, the land reverts to its designated, original family of caretakers. Land is inalienable, and we are meant to be too. If one consecrates their land after the jubilee, the priest shall compute the price according to the years that are left until the jubilee year, and its assessment shall be so reduced. And if one who consecrated the land wishes to redeem it, they must add one-fifth to the sum at which it was assessed, and it shall pass back to them. But if they do not redeem the land, and the land is sold to another, it shall no longer be redeemable. When it is released in the jubilee, the land shall be holy to the Lord, as land proscribed; it becomes the priest’s holding ( Leviticus 27:18-21 ). There is a holiness inherent in the land, a quality not subject to human dominion and not vaporized by human standards of utility. It is that holy something extra that means were are residents visiting the land, and its only really owner is God, who is also holy, meaning beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Jubilee comes every 50 years to remind us that the worth of creation is beyond our evaluation and does not emerge from ways we find it beneficial. “Proclaim release to all the inhabitants of the land ( Leviticus 25:11 )” because it is in recognizing that worth and value spill beyond the constraints of practical utility or human benefit that we, too, are released. Our worth and value spill beyond how we can be used too. Published with permission and minimal edits from hazon.org. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson is the Roslyn and Abner Goldstine Dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and Vice President of American Jewish University. He is also Dean of the Zachariah Frankel College at University of Potsdam, training Conservative/Masorti rabbis for Europe. Previous Next

< Back Trickle-Down Economics David Cowles Aug 1, 2024 “Forests have turned ‘trickle-down’ economics, literally, into an art form. By sharing resources, trees ensure that the tide will raise all boats.” Economists, politicians, ideologues, and demagogues all love to disparage trickle-down economics . The phrase itself is pejorative. On the other hand, if someone says, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” we’re ok with that. Denotatively, they are saying the same thing; connotatively, they are expressing polar opposites. Dispensing with the aquatic metaphors, the real issue here is the relationship between the health of the economy as a whole and the well-being of its individual members. We are still living in the shadow of Karl Marx. We like to pretend that economics is a zero sum game and that one player’s gain must come at the expense of other players’ losses. But economics is not poker. The game has a wide range of possible outcomes in which the total wealth available for distribution is variable just as is each player’s share of that wealth. For example, let’s assume we have an economy with just 10 participants. Our job is to divide the wealth in 10 ways. For the sake of the arithmetically challenged (me), let’s assume that the estimated total wealth is $55. We could just give every player 1/10th of the total. That’s socialism. Or we could give 9 players the minimum ($1) and direct all residual wealth ($46) to the one remaining participant. That’s robber baron capitalism. Between these two extremes there are more than 8,000,000 possible ways to divide up a $55 pot so that every player receives a whole dollar amount (no pennies). To make matters worse, or better, there is no guarantee, indeed no likelihood, that the total pot will be the same under different distribution scenarios. Economies are organic. We believe that distribution impacts production. One distribution scheme will produce more aggregate wealth than another; we just can’t agree on which one gets us to the max! Experience has taught us that neither of the two extremes (socialism or robber baron capitalism) is likely to maximize the pot. We imagine that there is a sweet spot somewhere between these 2 extremes; finding that sweet spot is what keeps economists employed. Not that ‘more’ should be the only criterion! Justice is at stake here as well. But once again, we don’t necessarily agree on what’s just. Is it ‘just’ that everyone gets the same regardless of their relative effort and contribution? Or is it ‘just’ that some players get only the ‘minimum’, even if their contribution is marginal? There’s a lot to consider. One branch of economics concerns itself solely with production. What is the distribution formula best calculated to maximize production? Another branch looks at the social implications of the distribution scheme. What is the cost of strict meritocracy? We rely on professional economists to quantify our alternatives but we alone, acting through our chosen political representatives, can balance values to make the final decision. Not sure? Need help? Let’s ‘phone a friend’. Does it matter that our friend is a fungus? Homo is not the only civilization on this planet. Single and multi-species ecosystems are all around us. The Serengeti has settled on a different distribution formula than the Mariana Trench. Each has worked out its own algorithm for maximizing production subject to its unique set of ‘ethical’ constraints. Our forests (plants and fungi) offer a particularly successful example of a non-human economy. Vegetation covers most of the habitable zones on Earth. Absent human intervention, trees can live hundreds of years, fungi thousands. While forest life is not conflict free, sorry Snow White, it comes close. How does it work? Fungus runs the show. The ‘wood-wide-web’ links trees of the same and different species in a resource and information sharing network. Are predator insects in the area? News travels from one end of the forest to the other, quickly and efficiently, so that trees can deploy their chemical armor. Are we in for a drought? Or a blizzard? The entire forest prepares together. Does a particular tree ‘look’ a bit peaked? The fungal network will divert water and life saving minerals to that member. If nature favors a particular tree with great height, exposure to sunlight, and a healthy root system, that tree will seek out opportunities to share its wealth, first to its ancestors and descendants, then to the entire forest. How come? Is fungus better than us? Maybe, but the forest has also run its own algorithms. It has determined that an unhealthy forest is an existential threat to even its most robust members. Likewise, every plant, every fungus is most likely to flourish in a healthy environment. Forests get what we often don’t – we’re all in this together! Forests have turned ‘trickle-down’ economics, literally, into an art form. By sharing resources, trees ensure that the tide will raise all boats. Next time human society faces an economic dilemma it would do well to ask, “WWFD?” (What would the forest do?) 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 Henry Moore’s Madonna David Cowles Mar 11, 2026 “Henry Moore, one of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors, has delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as unambiguous as the Nicene Creed.” 1250 words, 5 minute read It has to be the most depicted subject in all of Western art: Mary, the Mother of God , holding her infant son, Baby Jesus. Think about it. Could there be a more emotive moment across the entire scope of human experience? There are two things we can say with certainty about the extensive ‘Madonna & Child’ corpus: (1) the works exhibit striking structural similarity; and (2) every work is different. Each piece explores the common theme with its own unique emotional register. No two Madonnas and no two Infants react the same – to the moment, to each other, or to their dimly felt destinies. The Mother of Christ is alternately pictured as adoring, nurturing, wondering, hoping, worrying, lamenting, grieving or suffering. Jesus is pictured as a new born, a wee babe, a toddler, or a youngster. Jesus’ features range from soft and infantile to angular, mature, and sometimes even sclerotic. Am I looking at a 6 month old or a 60 year old? Depends on the artist. Next time you’re in London, don’t fail to swing by St. Paul’s to take in Henry Moore’s famous sculpture, Mother and Child . What? You’re in London now ? You live in London? Well…I think the church is still open. Your first trip to St. Paul’s? Prepare to be overwhelmed. But as you catch a glimpse of Moore’s masterpiece, ask yourself, “Am I looking at a verse from a 1st century Christian Gospel, or a fragment of Anaximander’s 6th century BCE philosophy…or both?” Either way, Henry Moore, one of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors and a self-professed non-believer , has delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as unambiguous as the Nicene Creed . In Moore’s work, mother and child emerge together from an undifferentiated block of marble. It is the emergence of the child that reveals the mother and it is the emergence of the mother that reveals the child. Neither emerges from the block solo, untethered, or without the other. Mary’s militant Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 - 55) assumes an essential role in Moore’s concept of the Nativity. His Mother and Child is not your everyday ‘Madonna of the Shepherds and the Sheep’. Moore’s marble presents something as momentous as the virgin birth of the Son of God as you’d expect – as a violent process in which pure potentiality unwinds, albeit stubbornly, to reveal its fundamental truth: Incarnation! Implicit in Moore’s vision of Nativity is the interdependence of transcendence and immanence, divinity and humanity. Mother and Child perfectly captures the intersection of two perpendicular realms. Who but God would dare to create a truly independent universe, guided by its own ‘free will’ - a universe with a ‘mind of its own’? The parents among us know how difficult it can be to give our children the autonomy they need to grow. Not so God: Fiat lux! There it is, one and done! World created, emancipated, and we didn’t even have to go to court. Nor did God have any 2 nd thoughts: “He saw that it was good.” The Book of Job makes it clear that God regretted nothing in his Creation, not even Behemoth and Leviathan, two legendary Old Testament ‘monsters’. Nor did it take long for God to reap the harvest of his naivete . Lucifer rebelled against him right out of the chute and ‘6 days later’ Adam (i.e. mankind) did the same. God made the world, but the world makes its own bed, and for the most part at least, God lets the world lie in that bed, undisturbed. In physics, we speak of Efficient Causation : one billiard ball strikes another causing the second ball to move in a particular direction with a particular momentum. In metaphysics, we speak of Final Causation : Amy studied so that she would pass her exams. In theology, we speak of another type of causation: Causa Sui (self-causation). But Moore presents a different ontology: Mother and Child speaks of Mutual Causation , aka bootstrapping. And thank God for Moore! Our modern, Indo-European (IE) languages lack the syntax ( Middle Voice )needed to conduct such a conversation. Henry Moore takes us backstage, beyond the reach of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, into the rarefied company of Anaximander, the 6th century BCE grandfather of Western philosophy, and Martin Buber, a prominent 20th century existentialist. “(Coming to be) they give each other reck” – Anaximander Fragment. “At the foundation is relationship” – Martin Buber, I and Thou . A proper diagram in the context of Christian syntax would consist of just a single arrow with two heads, pointing in opposite directions, suggesting that it is the relationship itself that has ontological priority over the related entities: A ↔ B. The lover and the loved are one. The lover sees himself in his neighbor. Lover and neighbor form an indissoluble dyad. There is no lover without a neighbor; there is no ‘neighbor’ without a lover. Perhaps the reason that Christianity has fallen out of favor as a cosmology is that its inherently middle voice ontology cannot be readily expressed in contemporary IE grammar. We have traded our ancient, natural language for a more functional but less expressive dialect; we have swapped Ovid for IKEA. Our language has lost its ability to talk about ultimate things in a way that resonates with our deepest experience. So, we turn to painting, sculpture, and musical composition to express our spiritual intuitions. Let’s explore theology more deeply. Henry Moore’s Mother and Child represents Mary in her “Mother of God” avatar. We have heard this epithet so often that we may fail to grasp the incredible import of these three simple words. Mother of God! Mater Dei in Latin. If God is “maker of…all things visible and invisible” (as the Nicene Creed tells us), then how could God have a mother? Clearly Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a product of God’s created world (and a rather recent product at that); how could she therefore be God’s mother? In the language of first and third person pronouns, subjective and objective cases, active and passive voices, efficient and final causes, she could not! But that is not the syntax of Christianity and, in my opinion at least, it is not how the world works. In the Christian world view, God encompasses spacetime. Eternal, God is both the origin of all that will ever be (“Alpha”) and the summation of all that will ever have been (“Omega”). But even more astoundingly, God is also an element, a quantum, in the world itself. God, who made the world, is also ‘made’ by the world via Mary. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God enters the space-time continuum, the historical universe. He enters between the Alpha and the Omega…but he already includes both the Alpha and the Omega in his nature. Incarnation turns Being inside out! In Christian topology, it is just as true to say that the part (Christ) contains the whole as it is to say that the whole contains the part (Jesus). Metaphorically, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed (the smallest of all seeds known at that time); historically, Jesus enters the world as a baby, the child of displaced parents. At the time of his birth, and perhaps throughout his early years, Jesus was literally homeless, a refugee, possibly ‘undocumented’. He is a most unlikely candidate for secular kingship, much less cosmic sovereignty. But just as the mustard seed grows into a tree that shelters all birds, so the baby Jesus “grows” into the parousia which is the ultimate unification of all things. Mary’s ‘Mother of God’ epithet beautifully exemplifies the cosmic process of mutual causation. It is nothing less than this that Henry Moore captures in Mother and Child . And that’s Christianity! *** Henry Moore’s Mother and Child theme distills the bond between parent and infant into powerful, simplified forms that feel both tender and monumental. By reducing the figures to sweeping curves and solid masses, Moore turns an intimate relationship into a timeless symbol of protection and emotional connection. 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.

Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. < Back Magesh Contributor Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Navigating Easter to Pentecost Choices that Lead to D eception The Trajectory of AI: Balancing Promise and Caution Mentoring for His Kingdom Credit Where Credit is Due The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music Drumming to Inner Peace