< Back The Autumn of Our Own Existence Omid Safi "A lot of people celebrate fall season with pumpkin pie, sweaters, and taking in crisp mornings. I love all of those, but mostly fall is a season to meditate on colors, death, and divine presence." I’ve been blessed to live in places where the time of fall is magical. In upstate New York, North Carolina, and Iran, I’ve gotten to see streets paved gold and red, with leaves crunching under my feet. As a kid, I used to love to dive through piles of raked leaves. (OK, that was this week.) A lot of people celebrate fall season with pumpkin pie, sweaters, and taking in crisp mornings. I love all of those, but mostly fall is a season to meditate on colors, death, and divine presence. Before becoming a scholar of religion, like every Muslim student at the university, I studied medicine. I remember learning in a botany course about the reason that a deciduous tree’s leaves turn colors. The reasoning astonished me then, and I have since come to see more and more spiritual wisdom in it as I enter the autumn of my own life. Leaves are usually green because of chlorophyll. It is chlorophyll that gives leaves their distinctive green color, and it is (along with sunshine) the key ingredient in the magical, life-producing process of photosynthesis. The hidden secret of fall: the leaves don’t actually “turn” colors. With the winter season coming, and the process of photosynthesis being without the key ingredients of warmth and sunshine, trees begin to break down chlorophyll. With the “green” gone, the other colors that have been there all along — the magical reds, golds, and oranges — begin to express themselves. That’s the secret: there is no turning, no changing. There’s only the death of what has been masking the colors inside. The beauty has been there all along. And we as human beings are like this. Each one of us contains hidden jewels inside. Every breath of your life’s breathsis a jewel.Every new atomis a guide towards God. —Farid un-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds Each of us contains “colors” inside, which remain hidden by our mere humanity. I see the colors as being different divine qualities that are present inside each of one of us at all times: compassion, justice, kindness, forgiveness. Most of the time these divine qualities are masked, covered up, hidden by our ego self. Greed, lust, anger, selfishness mask these divine qualities. What masks the divines qualities (the colors) is not our humanity, something I see ultimately as a reflection of God but rather our ego, our tendency to see ourselves as a mere terrestrial creature. We see ourselves a mere flesh creature, cut off from God, cut off from one another, cut off from the natural cosmos. The hidden mystery of the fall season is that when one “life” dies, the colors inside are on display. And there is something similar that happens inside us when we let go of this ego self, of selfishness, of being cut off and isolated. To put in a religious language, we have to “die” to our ego, to our selfishness before we can become “born again” in a bigger, more interwoven, more compassionate, more divine reality. The Qur’an hints at this in a lovely, mysterious verse: (We take our) color from God,and who is better than God at coloring? —Qur’an 2:138 This fear of letting go of our notion of a limited self is real. We are all afraid of death. Any death. All death. Letting go of this earthly life is frightening. Letting go of any prejudice, any preconceived notion, any notion of identity is a form of death. As more wise sages have told us, we come into this world covered in feces, urine, and blood; we leave it naked covered in a cloth. The mere reflection on our own mortality frightens us. Most of us spend our life in denial, pretending that we are eternally immortal. What beauty there is in letting go and accepting. What wonder there is in embracing the colors inside. What loveliness there is in the death of one color, and the shining through of all the divine colors. How lovely is this human creature when the divine colors of compassion, kindness, mercy, justice, and forgiveness shine on through. It reminds me of the poem of the great, incomparable Rumi. I died as a mineraland became a plant,I died as plantand rose to animal,I died as animaland I was human.Why should I fear?When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as human,to soarWith angels blest;but even from angelhoodI must pass on:all except God doth perish.When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,I shall become what no mind e’er conceived.Oh, let me not exist!for Non-existenceProclaims in organ tones,‘To God we shall return.’—Rumi, Masnavi 3: 3901-03 Why fear one “death” when every death has revealed something more colorful, more luminous, more beautiful. The references to “mineral” and “animal” in the poem below is a reflection of the old Islamic (also Greek) philosophical insight that each of us contains within us the souls of all the beings. There is a level in us that corresponds to the mineral soul, an animal soul, a human soul, and so on. This Islamic model of evolution is not so much the evolution from shared biological ancestors, but a mythic, poetic notion of cycles of ascension into embrace of all the Divine qualities within. Bring on the sweater. Bring on the crisp morning. Bring on the pumpkin pie. And bring on the death of that ego self that masks those glorious, divine colors within. As I enter this autumn season — and the autumn of my own existence — I am growing slowly more comfortable with the becoming less and less, so that more and more can be revealed. Bring on this Autumn of the soul. Welcome these colors shining through. This piece is republished in its entirety from One Being . Omid Safi teaches online courses on spirituality through Illuminated Courses, and leads spiritual tours every year to Turkey, Morocco, and other countries, to study the rich multiple religious traditions there. The trips are open to everyone, from every country. More information is available at Illuminated Tours. He is a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He specializes in the study of Islamic mysticism and contemporary Islam and frequently writes on liberationist traditions of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and is committed to traditions that link together love and justice. He has delivered the keynote for the annual Martin Luther King commemoration at the National Civil Rights Museum. He has written many books, including Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism; Cambridge Companion to American Islam; Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam; and Memories of Muhammad. His most recent book is Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Traditions and has a forthcoming book on the famed mystic Rumi. Omid is among the most frequently sought out speakers on Islam in popular media, appearing in The New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, NBC, CNN, BBC, and other international media. He can be reached regarding speaking engagements at omidsafi@gmail.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

“Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?” < Back Parmenides I David Cowles Sep 1, 2022 “Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?” On Nature is the oldest work of European systematic philosophy still largely extant. The verse epic was composed in the 5th century BC by Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, widely regarded as both ‘the father of Western philosophy’ and ‘the father of Western science’. On Nature divides Being into two modes: the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Seeming” ( Doxa ). Most scholars hold that the realm of Aletheia is preeminently real…but Doxa ? Not so much! Commentators holding this view tend to understand Doxa through the prism of Eastern philosophy ( Maya ) or Jewish wisdom literature ( Vanity )…both perfectly valid perspectives, but not the only possible ones. In fact, Parmenides anticipated such a heterodox interpretation and took pains to confront it head-on: “But nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.” Doxa is real, genuine, and universal…as is Aletheia ! I will argue that there can be no adequate account of reality that does not include both Aletheia and Doxa (even though, as we shall see shortly, the two models appear to be mutually exclusive). I believe that view in consistent with Parmenides’ text and verified by our personal experience. Hold on tight! We know that Al Gore invented the internet , but who invented the concept of ‘Complementarity’ - the convergence of two mutually inconsistent models to account for a single phenomenon? We’d like to think we did! We ‘invented’, or at least discovered, complementarity sometime during the first half of the 20th century; only we didn’t! Examples of complementarity, unlabeled of course, dot the landscape of Western Intellectual History. To attribute the idea of complementarity to Parmenides seems crazy because it is so radically anachronistic. According to the standard model of cultural evolution, Parmenides should not have been able to conceive such an idea 2500 years ago. But he did! Res ipsa loquitur! Despite our self-congratulatory preconceptions, the text of On Nature clearly suggests an interpretation based on Complementarity. The cognoscenti developed a rigid, linear model of intellectual progress. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny! Just as a ‘young child’ should not be expected to grasp complex or abstract ideas, neither should an ‘earlier civilization’. Resurrection theology in the Book of Job? Anarchist political theory in the Book of Judges? Complementarity in Parmenides? Impossible! Hog wash! Children are able to entertain challenging ideas better than we can – their minds have not yet ‘seized-up’ like engines deprived of oil. Likewise, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece had a much deeper appreciation of ‘what-is’ than most of their modern counterparts. The venture we call Intellectual History begins with a massively non-linear network of ideas, competing for connections. Survival of the fittest, social media on steroids! Who says there was no Facebook before Zuckerberg? It was just called ‘the Academy’. Whatever memes make the most connections wins . But unlike Hall of Fame voting in most Professional Sports, memes can keep looking for connections until the end of time. The game isn’t over until an amply proportioned individual sings (God per chance?) Occasionally, a meme that has fallen on rocky ground surprises itself and starts to make connections. In that case we often say that this is an idea whose time has come . And as soon as a meme starts to make connections within a particular network, it begins to shape that network. The result is the non-linear process we know as ‘History’! On Nature spells out what it means to exist in the mode of Doxa : “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color.” To exist in the mode of Doxa is to exist relative to other existents, to be one among many. In the mode of Doxa , all being is contingent, just as in the mode of Aletheia , what-is is…necessarily. In the realm of Doxa , entities are engaged in the perpetual process of becoming and perishing; they never really are ! Events in the mode of Doxa can be variously analyzed: subject-predicate, substance-accident, existence-essence (Sartre), actual entity-eternal object (Whitehead), Dasein-Wassein (Heidegger), etc. Parmenides’ Doxa seems to ‘borrow a page’ from Heraclitus: everything flows! Everything is in perpetual flux. As we like to say today at our ubiquitous $199 self-help seminars, complete with a complimentary boxed lunch of course, “Change is the only constant”. What we used to call ‘stability’ is now just a measure of variations in the rate of change. At first blush, this model ( Doxa ) is very attractive; it seems to correlate well with everyday experience. But there is one problem. According to this model, there is no ‘Present’ and therefore no ‘Presence’, no ‘here and now’. To be ‘present’ we need to step out of Heraclitus’ River of Time, but Doxa has no off ramp. At best, ‘here’ and ‘now’ are infinitesimal ‘points’ abstracted from the continuous flow, but that is certainly not what we mean when we speak of ‘the Present’. In the mode of Doxa , there is only ‘then and there’, ‘past and future’. When everything is in flux, nothing really is. Understood this way, Doxa accounts for absolutely nothing! We don’t experience the then and there, the past and future. We believe that they are real, but we can only experience them indirectly, as they are felt through the Present. And if there is no real Presence… Aletheia to the rescue! In the mode of Aletheia , “…what-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of.” There is no generation or corruption. There is no space (here and there), no time (past and future), no extension (dispersing and gathering). There is only Presence: “For what coming-to-be of it will you seek? In what way, and whence, did it grow? Not from what-is-not…And what need could have impelled it to grow later or sooner, if it began from nothing?” The concept of ‘the past’ implies that there was once a stable state-of-affairs different from the current state-of-affairs; and the concept of ‘the future’ implies that there will one day be another stable state-of-affairs different from what is now. But in the mode of Aletheia , nothing can ever be different from what is and what-is is eternal, now…and forever. Therefore, in the mode of Aletheia , there is only Presence. Further, if there were a past and/or a future, that past would have to differ from this present and this present from that future. That would suggest that whatever-is is not always ‘complete’. But that too is impossible: “…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” While to exist in the mode of Doxa is to be one among many, to exist in the mode of Aletheia is simply to be one. The origin of ‘becoming’ is ‘the lack’ (Sartre). Therefore, what-is must lack nothing. To be is neither to become nor to perish; it is simply to be, eternally. Understood this way, Aletheia accounts for nothing either! We don’t experience permanence, eternity, wholeness, any more than we experience past and future. We only experience in the Present and what we experience are phenomena that are not present. Wrap your head around that one! How do we account for stability in the midst of flux, and how do we account for flux in the context of stability? This is one of the core problems of philosophy. We can see, I think, that any model of reality that is all flux or all permanence won’t account for much…or anything. Things that genuinely exist must be both stable and changing; but how is that possible? How can anything be ‘both stable and changing’? Only in the mode of Complementarity! Imagine a continuum ranging from absolute flux to absolute stability. What we call Being can only manifest itself in a narrow corridor located somewhere between the two extremes. Call it the ‘Being Belt’! To make this point, 20 th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead quotes a verse from a famous Anglican hymn: Abide in me! Fast falls the even’ tide. What is Being but the juxtaposition of stability and change? Given the fact that neither Doxa nor Aletheia by itself can account for every, or any, phenomenon of everyday experience, are we not entitled at least to conjecture that Parmenides intended us to understand the world using his two models together , effectively viewing the universe stereoscopically? The wave-particle duality in Quantum Mechanics is often cited as the paradigmatic example of a Complementary relationship. According to prevailing thought, the behavior of sub-atomic particles cannot be explained unless one assumes that they are both waves and particles, even though such an assumption appears to entail a contradiction. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Emerson). Apparently, God does not have a ‘little mind’! Nor do children. Now consider the poem’s narrative content. At the beginning of the epic, when Parmenides first comes into the presence of the goddess, she greets him: “Welcome, for it is no ill fortune that sent you forth to travel this route…but right and justice. And it is right that you should learn all things …” And later, “…It is all one to me where I am to begin; for I shall return there again.” Parmenides uses language that we recognize today as characteristic of non-orientable topology, another concept supposedly inaccessible to him at that time. It suggests that Doxa and Aletheia form a reality that is locally two-sided but globally one-sided, i.e., a Mobius Strip. As you pass along the Mobius Strip that is embedded in every non-orientable space, you keep coming back to your starting point (a bit like Alice in Through the Lookingglass ), but every time you return, you find that your ‘orientation’ has reversed. This is exactly what happens in Dante’s Divine Comedy . At the lowest rung of the Inferno, Dante encounters Satan, encased in ice, but standing upright. However, as Dante begins to climb Mount Purgatory and looks back, what does he see? Satan, still encased in ice, but now, upside down! Apply this model to On Nature . For every “spot” on the “strip”, there are two potential orientations: the extensive orientation of Doxa and the eternal orientation of Aletheia . Surprise: Doxa and Aletheia , supposedly polar opposites, turn out not to be so very different from one another after all. In fact, they turn out to be the same thing , just seen in two different orientations, i.e., from two different perspectives. What then really distinguishes the Way of Seeming from the Way of Truth? “…From here onwards learn mortal beliefs…they distinguished opposites in body and established signs apart from one another (language) …all things have been named light and night...” Alfred North Whitehead, in his seminal work of systematic philosophy, Process and Reality , concluded that any ‘processional’ model of reality must include at least three ‘undefined’ terms (i.e., terms whose meaning must be taken for granted without further definition); for Whitehead those terms are: ‘One, Many and Creativity’. We might attempt an even more general formulation. Every processional model of reality must include a principal of disjunction (‘or’ in the language of logic), a principal of conjunction (‘and’), and a transformative function: ʌ, ˅, ↔ The one becomes many and the many becomes one; it is Penelope’s great loom of Being. If this model is taken as the universal substructure of all processional models, Parmenides’ model passes the test. Aletheia is ‘one’, Doxa ‘many’; but what of the ‘transformative function’? Parmenides invokes the goddess herself for this role: “In the midst of these is the goddess who steers all things; for she rules over hateful birth ( Doxa ) and the union of all things ( Aletheia )…” But ultimately, the role of the goddess is not to rule, but to create a third mode of being that can unite the other two: “…She devised Love ( Erota ), first of all the gods…” Thus, Parmenides identified the minimal conditions necessary for ‘process’ to occur, and he did it 2,500 years before Whitehead. Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and19 th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™? We have found in Parmenides an ontology that respects the reality of phenomenal events but situates those events in the broader context of Eternal Being. This has been the Holy Grail of Western philosophy for millennia. Now we find out now that we’ve had the Grail in our possession all along, from the very outset in fact. Dorothy never left Kansas…and she just needed to click her heels together to see that. Image: Bust of Parmenides discovered at Velia , thought to have been partially modeled on a Metrodorus bust. [1] David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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“My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” < Back I Seem to be a Membrane David Cowles Apr 15, 2023 “My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” In the beginning there is I and not-I…and not-not-I. ‘I’ only reveals itself in the context of not-I, and vice versa; like quarks, ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ only occur together, as a pair. Not-not-I only reveals itself in the context of both I and not-I. In the creedal language of Nicaea, we’d say, “Not-not-I proceeds from I and not-I.” In the dialectical language of Marxism, we’d say, “Synthesis proceeds from Thesis and Antithesis.” The ‘I’ aspect of reality never changes; it endures, one and the same, now and forever, throughout the vicissitudes of spacetime experience. This is the famous ‘enduring personal identity’ (‘soul’ in some terminologies) to which we all cling as if to a life raft. On one hand, there is only one ‘I’ which we all share. On the other hand, every ‘I’ reflects a specific not-I and every not-I is unique. Any two I’s are exactly the same…and totally different! (In fact, only things which are totally different can ever be the same. Comparability is the enemy of identity.) ‘I’ never changes; it’s not the sort of thing that changes. It can’t change; it’s simple (Aquinas), it’s inert, a ball bearing (Laplace), a Monad (Leibniz), Aletheia ( Parmenides ): “ …what-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete, nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous…” Not-I changes continually (Heraclitus); it’s the sort of thing that changes. It’s not simple! Every not-I is composed of every not-I, i.e., everything in heaven and earth, Horatio, except of course, ‘I’. Your not-I and my not-I likely share many (most?) elements. What distinguishes ‘yours’ from ‘mine’ is the way the elements are arranged; individuality is mostly a matter of perspective. Our worlds massively overlap, but our perspectives are unique. ‘Not-I’ is Parmenides’ Doxa : “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, and to shift place and to exchange bright color.” My situation (not-I) changes, gradually. These changes create the false impression that I am changing - growing-up, growing-out, growing-old - but ‘I’ never changes. Not-I changes gradually; not-not-I turns over the money changers’ tables in the temple. In my younger days, I used to like to visit Las Vegas. Most times, I’d stay at the Bellagio . After a few trips, I learned a secret. The entire casino draws off a common wine inventory. Theoretically, every bottle of wine is available at every restaurant in the casino. Want to pair a 1982 Lafite Rothchild with a bacon cheeseburger? I can make that happen for you! IRL, however, each restaurant in the casino curates its own wine list, drawing exclusively, of course, from the casino’s master inventory. As a result, the wine list at Picasso looks nothing like the wine list at Michael Mina’s . You’d never know that they draw off a common inventory…unless I told you. Oops! The universe works the same way. The master set of overlapping not-I’s constitutes the shared inventory of elements (‘multiplicity’). Each not-I is like a restaurant-specific wine list (‘nexus’); not-not-I (‘event’) is what happens when I order a specific bottle off a particular restaurant’s curated list, taste it and pair it with steak tartar …or foie gras . ‘I’ is universal, not-I is communal, not-not-I is particular . Not-I is the intersection of ‘I’ and not-not-I, the universal and the particular. Every not-not-I is sui generis ; it’s pure novelty. Not-not-I is ‘not-I’, uniquely apprehended, experienced, and appropriated. Not-not-I becomes an element in not-I and is available to all subsequent not-not-I’s. That’s how we communicate: I share my particular ‘not-not-I’ and you share your particular ‘not-not-I’, and we both share through the medium of the common ‘not-I’. We communicate like trees! Trees sink roots into the earth. Through their root systems, Tree A and Tree X exchange fairly complex messages. Subject matter includes weather forecasts, predator alerts, disease prophylaxis, and the ‘just’ allocation of scarce resources (water, minerals, even sunlight). (We have no way to know if trees also talk about philosophical concepts; do trees believe in God?) However, this arboreal communication is never direct; it occurs through the common medium of unicellular fungi that permeate and enrich the soil that separates and links the roots. In the Western philosophical tradition, ontologies habitually fall prey to The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Whitehead). They fracture the ‘I’ and pretend to create a ‘split personality’; they talk of an ‘inner world’ and an ‘outer world’. According to various versions of conventional wisdom, my so-called ‘inner world’ may include my physical body and the cells, tissues and organs that make it up, my thoughts and feelings, my hopes and desires, my plans, my dreams, my dreads, my disappointments, and my disgusts. In fact, none of these things is part of any ‘inner world’. They are all firmly located in the ‘not-I’ on their way to becoming ‘not-not-I’ for me. My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it’s simple. It admits no change. Conventional wisdom agrees that I am a membrane, but a membrane that separates my so-called inner world ( me ) from my outer world ( not-me ). This ‘inner’ world has even been mapped - by biology (cells, tissues, organs, and organic processes), by chemistry (base pairs, amino acids, RNA), and by psychology (unconscious, pre-conscious, conscious; id, ego, superego). As usual, conventional wisdom contains a grain of truth: I am a membrane! But, no surprise, it misplaces concreteness. I am not the membrane that exists between my body and its environment. We already have a word for that; it’s called ‘skin’. I am the membrane that exists between world…and no world ! I am like Janus, the Two Faced God . ‘I’ can peer in (to my so-called body/mind) or out (to my so-called environment). Either way, it’s always the same ‘I’ that’s doing the peering and always the same ‘not-I’ that is the object of my leering. There is no inner world. I am ‘I’, remember? I am simple, I am incapable of change. Everything else changes. Heraclitus was 99.99% right: Everything flows, except me (and any other ‘I’ that might happen to be ‘eddying’ around with me). The me-membrane is not an inanimate barrier; it’s not even organic tissue. It is not a physical or material reality at all. It’s the principle of reflection, an irreducible aspect of Being per se . ‘I’ reflects the world, ‘I’ projects the world, and the world becomes what I project. The world is the collective ‘not-I’, the s uperimposition of the unique reflections and projections of each ‘I’. The world is my hodological map. It indicates to me the tasks that are to be accomplished and the tools available to me to accomplish them. Space and time are simply measures of ‘priority’ and ‘on handedness’. The world includes my whole body, my whole self - brain, brawn, and blood - and it includes your body, your whole self as well. But it does not include ‘you’. You transcend the world…just as I do. Each of us is the primary substance of our own universe. What I call ‘you’ is the in-breaking of your universe into mine. I know that I am not alone because I know ‘you’ (even if I can’t prove it). In fact, “Naught is all else to me save that thou art.” (St. Dallin re: God) I am the membrane that separates world and no-world…and so are you! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Why We Must Pray Michael G. Pravica "It is our prayers that will, God willing, save the world and our souls because God will know us." At fundamental level, our universe consists of quantum particles (integral spin bosons such as photons, deuterons and gluons, and ½-integral spin fermions such as protons, neutrons and electrons). One of the most fascinating characteristics of these particles is that identical particles are indistinguishable from one another (i.e. they cannot be labeled) [1] and follow laws of quantum statistics that are dramatically different from the laws of distinguishable classical particles/entities that we are more familiar with where objects (e.g. balls, playing cards or cars) can be labeled. For bosons, Bose-Einstein statistics governs their behavior [2], and for ½ integral spin particles, Fermi-Dirac statistics determines their behavior [3]. The strange behavior of tiny quantum particles is one of the most fascinating mysteries of the quantum world and it is from these principles that our classical world is constructed. As living beings who are made from these indistinguishable particles, it is easy to argue along a similar vein that we, too, are indistinguishable. Of course, this is not true at the classical level. Yet, our constituent particles (molecules, atoms, nuclei, electrons, etc.) all return to the immense reservoir of matter in our universe and remain respective indistinguishable particles when we die. Thus, there is something more about us that makes each of us unique in the universe (i.e. we are more than just the sum of our constituent parts): our soul. I have argued before [4] that the soul is likely an infinitely dimensional or at least higher dimensional gift from God, who is likely an infinitely dimensional being who made our four-dimensional universe and likely many more. Thus, God established a special connection between humans so they could be “God-like” which has nothing to do with the constituent quantum particles that assemble our physical bodies. However, after the Original Sin, God decoupled from humanity so that humans could understand that life without God (and obedience to God) will be extremely challenging. The essence of humanity’s struggle is to reconnect with our Creator. 1 Corinthians 8:3 states: “But whoever loves God is known by God [5].” Loving God takes many forms such as helping our fellow humans in need, glorifying Him and acknowledging His ability to help us through seeking Him (prayer). I will focus on prayer in this brief essay. God gets to know us when we pray to Him. It is God’s love that gives each of us our uniqueness and removes the degeneracy of “indistinguishable souls” as God knows each and every human being who loves Him and thus has Faith in Him. Satan is jealous of us because he lost this very special connection to God. Those who do not seek God end up becoming indistinguishable souls (at least to Satan) which God does not interact with. They get lost in the quantum mechanical chaos of our universe. We maintain our connection with God (which was created at conception) by praying to and believing in Him. This special connection enables us to spiritually transcend our universe and connect with our Creator just as Michelangelo depicted Man reaching out and trying to touch the hand of God in his Sistine chapel painting. This is the essence of the connection: mutual interaction via transcendent everlasting love. Love is the most powerful force in all of God’s Creation. Just as in pre-WWII times, we are on the precipice of a devastating conflict (WWIII) which will destroy humanity. More than ever, we need to bring God back into our world to illuminate, expose and ultimately vanquish the evil that Satan is perpetrating here to destroy us. God will save us if we pray to Him and demonstrate to Him that we love Him as He loves us. Satan seeks to disrupt our unique connection between the Lord and His children in the four dimensional spacetime world that He created for us to live, enjoy and glorify Him in. Satan is trying to turn us away from our Creator by tricking us into worshipping inanimate elements inside this universe that constitute indistinguishable particles (e.g. the Golden Calf) and focusing on cold materialism instead of on our God-like essence by dissuading us from following Jesus Christ. Prayers to God are transmitted via the super dimensional transcendent Holy Spirit which not even Satan can stop as he is trapped in this four dimensional spacetime. It is these prayers to our Father that will, God willing, save the world from its self-destruction and at the least save our souls because God will know us. This is why, more than ever, we must pray. This was originally published on Medium. References: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statistics 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics 4. https://english.pravda.ru/science/129528-soul/ 5. https://biblia.com/bible/esv/1-corinthians/8/3 Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Mythology Before Marvel Comics David Cowles “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” Most of what we know about Norse Mythology comes from Wagner ( The Ring ), Tolkien ( Lord of the Rings ), and Marvel Comics. Behind these secondary sources stand the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda . The former is a collection of poems, some dating back to the 9th century CE; the latter is the work of a single man, Snorri Sturluson of Iceland (c. 1220 CE). Unfortunately, these first written records date from a time when Christianity was already beginning to make a mark in the Northlands. It is a matter of scholarship to separate the original pre-Christian content from later Christian influences…and, happy you , we will not attempt that here! Sturluson’s singular contribution was to organize varied material from the Poetic Edda into a quasi-coherent narrative, but what makes the Prose Edda so important, and therefore our focus, is its mind-bending structure. Mythic thinking expresses itself in narrative. True to form, Sturluson sews together countless short stories into one overarching tale. It is no exaggeration to describe the Prose Edda as the first Autobiography of Everything, anticipating by 700 years the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Sturluson began by situating Norse mythology in the context of Hebrew proto history: “Almighty God created heaven and earth and all things in them, and lastly, two humans from whom generations are descended, Adam and Eve…After Noah’s flood, there lived eight people who inhabited the world, and from them generations have descended… “(But) the vast majority of mankind…neglected obedience to God and…refused (even) to mention the name of God. But who was there then to tell their children of the mysteries of God?” Wait, are we talking about the 13th century CE…or the 21st? According to Christian theology, God gave human being the gift of ‘reason’ so that even the ‘unchurched’ can discover Truth. Surprisingly, the same doctrine appears in Norse mythology: “(God) gave them a portion of wisdom so that they could understand all earthly things…what it could mean that earth and animals and birds had common characteristics in some things…They reasoned that the earth was alive. It fed all creatures and took possession of everything that died.” But at the same time, Sturluson also situated his Nordic narrative in an Hellenic context. Just as the New Testament is the merger of Jewish theology with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, so Norse mythology is the intersection of the Greek myth and Christian metaphysics: “Near the middle of the world was…Troy. We call the land there Turkey…Twelve kingdoms were there and one high king…He was married to the daughter of the high king, Priam…They had a son (Hector); he was called Tror; we call him Thor…When he was ten…he was as beautiful to look at when he came among other people as when ivory is inlaid in oak. His hair is more beautiful than gold. When he was twelve, he had reached his full strength… “Then he traveled through many countries, explored all quarters of the world, and defeated unaided all the berserks and giants, one of the greatest dragons, and many wild animals. (Hercules?) In the northern part of the world, he came across a prophetess called Sibyl, whom we call Sif, and married her.” Eighteen generations later, a descendant of Thor and Sif was born: “A son whose name is Woden; it is him we call Odin. He was an outstanding person for wisdom and all sorts of accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, whom we call Frigg. Odin had the gift of prophesy and so did his wife, and from this science he discovered that his name would be remembered in the northern part of the world and honored above all kings. For this reason, he became eager to set off from Turkey…” Note that 18 generations earlier, Thor had earlier left Turkey (Troy) and migrated to “the northern part of the world” (Scandinavia); now Thor’s descendant, Odin, recapitulates his ancestor’s journey. (Just as Jesus’ Flight into Egypt recapitulates the Exodus .) This will not be the last time that our narrative recapitulates. Mythic space is fractal space: patterns repeat - repetition at scale is the meta-pattern of process. Sturluson sees Troy as the cradle of civilization and is eager to associate it with Scandinavia. In this, he is channeling Virgil, whose Aeneid connects Troy with the founding of Rome. In fact, Troy is the mythological prototype for all cities. It is the City of Cain ( Enoch ), it is the City of Dioce (Ecbatana, Pound’s ‘city of patterned streets’), it is Midgard (Tolkien’s Middle Earth). It is worth noting that the two great powers of the first millennium CE both trace their origins to the defeated party in the Trojan War. “After that, he (Odin) proceeded north to where he was faced by the sea, the one which they thought encircled all lands, and set his son over the realm which is now called Norway…their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands.” When Gylfi (King of Sweden) entered what appeared to be Val-hall (Valhalla), “He saw three thrones, one above the other, and there were three men, one sitting in each…the one that sat in the lowest throne was king and was called High; next to him the one called Just-as-high, and the one sitting at the top was called Third.” The structure of divinity in the Prose Edda parallels, of course, the Christian doctrine of Trinity. There is one God (‘All-father’), but High, Just-as-High, and Third represent the three faces or personae of this one God. It is impossible not to see parallels with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Gyfli is invited to ask any questions he wishes; what follows reads something like the 1950s RCC Baltimore Catechism …or Chapter 17 of Joyce’s Ulysses : Q: Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods? A: He is called All-father in our language… Q: Where is this god, what power has he, and what great works has he performed? A: He lives throughout all ages, rules all his kingdom, and governs all things great and small…He made heaven and earth, the skies and everything in them…But his greatest work is that he made man and gave him a soul that shall live and never perish, though the body decay to dust or burn to ashes. Q: What was he doing before heaven and earth were made? A: Then he was among the frost-giants. Whaaaat? Before heaven and earth were made, there were ‘frost giants’? Yup! In Norse mythology, the ‘created’ universe as we know it (heaven and earth, Midgard ) is embedded in a much broader reality (a Norse ‘multiverse’). Q: What was the beginning? And how did things start? And what was there before? A: 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. Q: What were things like before generations came to be and the human race was multiplied? In answer to this question, High, Just-as-High and Third begin to set out the fundamental doctrines of Norse cosmology. The primal (‘uncreated’) cosmos consisted of a region of great heat ( Muspell ) and a region of great cold ( Niflheim ) with a chasm ( Ginnungagap ) between them (“the mighty gap”). Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor. Again, it is impossible not to see parallels, this time with the secular ‘something from nothing’ cosmologies of the 20/21st centuries: ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’. A: 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, and he was given the name Ymir…and from him are descended the generations of frost giants…” Ymir lived on four rivers of milk (the four rivers that flowed through Eden?) that came from a cow ( Audhumla ) who fed herself by licking the salty rime stones found in Ginnungagap. As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones. Soon, “…there was a complete man. His name was Buri…He begot a son called Bor…(and Bor) had three sons. One was called Odin, the second Vili, the third Ve…And it is my belief that this Odin and his brothers must be the rulers of heaven and earth…” So this Odin…he was the son of Bor, the brother of Vili and Ve, and the grandson of Buri, who was ‘licked’ into existence by a cow. Ok I guess, but he is also the son of Thor and Sif (above). Norse Mythology requires a level of neuroplasticity that most of us have not enjoyed since kindergarten. Then again, the Book of Genesis also presents two distinct accounts of creation which differ in focus and detail. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss this as ‘child’s play’. It is just such neuroplasticity that Jesus says is necessary for one to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (e.g. Mt. 18: 3). We’re left to wonder: Are High, Just-as-High, and Third actually Odin, Vili and Ve? But we’re not done yet! Bor’s sons killed the giant Ymir. And…they drowned all the race of frost giants, except that one escaped with his household. Giants call him Bergelmir. He went up on to his ark (!) with his wife and was preserved there, and from them are descended the families of frost giants…” Noah? “They (Bor’s sons) took Ymir and transported him to the middle of Ginnungagap, and out of him made the earth; out of his blood came the sea and the lakes. The earth was made of flesh, and the rocks of the bones…They also took his skull and made out of it the sky and set it up over the earth…Then they took molten particles and sparks that…had shot out of the world of Muspell and set them in the middle of the firmament of the sky…” We ‘the enlightened’ think of life as a late stage epiphenomenal eruption out of inert matter. The Eddas reverse the relationship. ‘The heavens and the earth’ ( Gaia/Kosmos ) are fashioned out of living matter (Ymir). Life, not matter, is substructural. The Gospel of John (1: 1-4) testifies to a similar process: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.” So in Christian ontology as well as Norse mythology, life is the substructure of universe. The Prose Edda is like a Bach fugue: themes repeat, transformed. Note the complex ecosystem in place prior to creation, ‘before’ even the beginning of time. The primal entity, Ymir, feeds off of a pre-existent cow who produces milk from nourishment she receives by licking salty rime-stones. That process of licking in turn uncovers a second primal entity, Buri, from whom Odin, Vili and Ve are descended. These grandsons of Buri in turn kill Ymir, but they recycle his body as the raw material needed to create ‘heaven and earth’, i.e. space/time, matter/energy, the mortal realm. Care to stretch the envelope? Compare this process with the evolution of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells from their prokaryotic precursors. Essentially, two independent life forms ‘merged’ to form a single, symbiotic organism that became the basis for all animal and plant life on Earth. As above, this process happened only once in the history of terrestrial evolution. Q: How was the earth arranged? A: It is circular 'round the edge, and around it lies the deep sea, and along the shore of this sea they gave lands to live in to the race of giants. But on the earth, on the inner side, they made a fortification 'round the world against the hostility of giants, and for this fortification they used the giant Ymir’s eyelashes, and they called the fortification Midgard (‘Middle Earth’). Q. And where did the people come from who inhabit this world? A: As Bor’s sons walked along the seashore, they came across two logs and created people out of them. The first gave breath and life; the second consciousness and movement; the third a face, speech, hearing, and sight… This is a sophisticated Trinitarian model, similar to but importantly different from, the Christian model. First, the manifestations of God are allocated differently among the divine personae, and second, the phenomena associated with being human are grouped and segmented differently from how we might do it today. A (cont.): The man was called Ask, the woman Embla, and from them were produced the mankind to whom the dwelling-place under Midgard ( Middle Earth ) was given. After that, they made themselves a city in the middle of the world, which is known as Asgard. We call it Troy…In the city there is a seat called Hlidskialf, and when Odin sat in that throne he saw over all worlds and every man’s activity and understood everything he saw.” Humans build a city, Troy, which becomes the homeland of the gods (Aesir), who originally created heaven and earth, and the homeland of humans. The process of creation flows both ways: gods create for humans, and humans create for gods. Ontology is a Möbius strip: events recur even as orientations reverse. We find a close parallel in Ezra Pound’s Cantos : “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out; the bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan/City of patterned streets…” Here, a city built by human hands is intended to be a home for the gods. In another article in this collection , we connect this ancient Iranian city both to Cain’s city (above) and to the ‘patterned streets’ (circles) found in Dante’s Divine Comedy . Perhaps Pound also had Troy in mind…or should I say, Asgard? But back to the Prose Edda : “He (Odin) is the father of all the gods and of men, and of everything that has been brought into being by him and his power. The earth was his daughter and his wife. Out of her he begot the first of his sons…(wait for it)…Asa-Thor.” Ok, enough already! Our story began with Thor, grandson of the proto historical king of Troy, Priam. Eighteen generations later, Odin was born. Odin married Frigg and together they migrated to Scandinavia. Now we learn that this same Odin is ‘All-father’, the father of all gods and men, that Frigg, his daughter and his wife is really ‘earth’ and that the first of their sons is the very same Thor with whom our story began. Gimme a break! What are we to make of all these apparent contradictions? Absolutely nothing! There are no contradictions in mythology. (-A) ≠ -(A). The concept of contradiction arises in systems characterized by identity, quantity, causality, extension, duration, and logic, where the transitive and commutative properties rule. None of these concepts figures in any important way in mythological thinking. Myths are the first TOEs (Theories of Everything). Hawking meets Tolkien. Like Hawking, mythology searches for universal patterns; like Tolkien, it then struggles to communicate these patterns using the limited resources of language. You , dear reader, expect your patterns to be symmetrical, continuous, and orientable, but the world we’re modeling is not like that at all. It is stochastic, discrete, and non-orientable. You expect beginnings, middles, and ends, but such things do not exist on a Mobius Strip. You are expecting events situated in spacetime; mythology replaces spacetime with a hierarchy of fractals. Scale takes the place of extension. The order of events is immaterial, and ‘time loops’ are expected, perhaps even required, perhaps even universal. Mythic thinking has only one proper subject: ‘the pattern of patterns’. In spite of the important parallels with Judeo-Christian theology and Greek proto-history, the Norse cosmos is fabulously more complex. As we have already glimpsed, in addition to humans, there are many other humanoid races: frost giants (including trolls and, unexpectedly, wolves), light elves, dark elves ( aka dwarfs), and, of course, gods (Aesir). Each of these races has its own ‘homeland’, but there are other ‘uninhabited’ homelands as well: Muspell and Niflheim (above), Hel (the land of the dead), Val-hall (Valhalla, the home of fallen warriors), and Gimle (the resting place of the righteous): “…(Gimle) shall stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and in that place shall live good and righteous people for ever and ever.” Astoundingly, all of these ‘homelands’ are connected by the trunk of a single ash tree, Yggdrasil , that has three principal roots: one in the realm of the Aesir (Asgard), one in the realm of the frost giants, and one in Niflheim. These roots, in turn, may be associated with the three Norns who weave the history of the universe (fate) from skeins of string (not heterotic string…as far as we know). We learn from Third that “Odin is the highest and most ancient of the Aesir. He rules all things…Odin is called ‘All-father’ for he is father of all gods. He is also called ‘Val-father’ (father of the slain)…Hanga-god (god of the hanged) and Hapta-god (god of prisoners), Farma-god (god of cargoes, possibly to be understood as human cargoes, i.e., travelers, or even slaves)…” One of the Aesir, “…Loki or Lopt, son of the giant Farbauti…is pleasing and handsome in appearance, evil in character, capricious in behavior…There was a giantess called Angraboda in Giantland. With her, Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Lormungand (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. “And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland…All-father sent the gods to get the children and bring them to him. And when they came to him, he threw the serpent into that deep sea that lies around all lands, and this serpent grew so that it lies in the midst of the ocean encircling all lands and bites on its own tail. “Hel he threw into Niflheim…The Aesir brought up the wolf at home…” But as the wolf grew, the Aesir felt the need to tether it securely. So they went to the dwarves and asked them to make a bond that that wolf could not break…and they did! “It was made of six ingredients: the sound of the cat’s footfall and the woman’s beard; the mountain’s roots and the bear’s sinews; the fish’s breath and the bird’s spittle…” To prove this this story is true, we are told, “…You must have seen that a woman has no beard and there is no noise from a cat’s running, and there are no roots under a mountain…” Earlier attempts to fetter Fenriswolf all failed…because the tethers were made out of ordinary materials. No matter how strong they were at the outset, they were inevitably weakened by the wolf’s incessant struggles. They were ultimately subject to the law of entropy, and eventually, the wolf escaped them all. The dwarves’ “fetter was smooth and soft like a silken ribbon,” but it acted just like the strong force binding quarks in an atomic nucleus: “…When the wolf kicked, the band grew harder, and the harder he struggled, the tougher became the band.” This is a marvelous example of mythic reasoning. The text leads us to believe that a woman has no beard, for example, because the dwarfs used it to make Fenriswolf’s fetter. But there is another possible interpretation: What if the dwarfs made something (a fetter) out of nothing, out of things that do not exist (e.g. a woman’s beard)? ‘Something made out of nothing’ is, well, something else . The laws of physics would be suspended and entropy ‘need not apply’. My nine-year-old grandson said, “The fetter was made out of the opposite of everything.” Exactly so, and therefore it behaved in a way opposite to all other materials. A mythological model of anti-matter, perhaps. No bird's-eye view of the Norse cosmos would be complete without consideration of Ragnarök, aka the Apocalypse. Admit it, this is what you’ve been waiting for since you opened this post. So…back to the catechism, and just in the nick of time: Q: What information is there to be given about Ragnarok? A: There are many important things to be told about it. First of all, that a winter will come called fimbul (‘mighty’ or ‘mysterious’) winter. Then snow will drift from all directions. There will be great frosts and keen winds. The sun will do no good. There will be three of these winters together and no summer between. …The wolf will swallow the sun…the other wolf will swallow the moon…The stars will disappear from the sky…trees will become uprooted from the earth; mountains will fall; and all fetters and bonds will snap and break . Then Fenriswolf will get free…the Midgard serpent will fly into a great rage and make its way ashore…After that, Surt (a fire demon from the race of giants) will fling fire over the earth and burn the whole world. Q. What will happen then after heaven and earth and all the world is burned…will there be any kind of earth or sky? A: The earth will shoot up out of the sea and will be green and fair. Crops will grow unsown…And in a place called Hoddmimir’s holt, two people will lie hid during Surt’s fire called Life and Leifthrasir, and their food will be the dews of the morning. And from these people will be descended such a great progeny that all the world will be inhabited. And so ends the discourse on Norse cosmology…and now comes the really interesting and totally revolutionary part: “But the Aesir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him (Gyfli), and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there (in Sweden), so that when long periods of time had passed, men should not doubt that they were all the same , those Aesir about whom stories are told above and those who were now given the same names. “So someone there was given the name Thor…and to him are attributed the exploits that Thor (Hector) performed in Troy.” Wow! What else is there to say? Simply, wow! In Ulysses , James Joyce maps a day in the life of ordinary Dubliners onto events in Homer’s Odyssey . An incredible feat! But the Prose Edda goes much further. Sturluson begins by mapping Norse mythology onto both Jewish and Greek proto-histories. Then he maps Christian theology onto Norse mythology. Finally, he maps Norse mythology onto the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes and, for his piece de resistance , he maps the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes back onto events in Greek proto-history. To borrow a Judeo-Christian concept, everyone is ‘priest, prophet and king’. What Joyce (and Pound) demonstrated brilliantly, Snorri Sturluson had demonstrated with even greater power and complexity centuries earlier: the various ontological categories that populate human thought are really just different ways of experiencing and understanding the present lives of ordinary people. Everything that happens is happening right now! The past and the future only exist to serve the present and they exist only in the present. On the one hand, the Prose Edda is a literary triumph. But on the other hand, it is exactly what Mythology is all about. Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to Odin, he found them. Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. Yggdrasil, c. 1886. Illustration for Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen by Felix and Therese Dahn. This illustration of Yggdrasil captures the essay’s core idea of mythology as an interconnected, multi-dimensional structure that links various realms—gods, humans, giants—and weaves together different times and layers of meaning, symbolizing the fractal, cyclical nature of mythic storytelling explored throughout the essay. 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 . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Previous Next

< Back Teaching Physics in the 21st Century David Cowles Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine. (Editor’s Note: ATM Issue #1 included a feature article, Science & The Yellow Submarine – Part I . As promised, Part II will be published in ATM Issue #3 (9/1/2022). In the meantime, schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the Fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades 4 through 8, all based on the Yellow Sub.) “Physics is too hard…and it’s oh so boring! Besides, when will I ever use it?” Sound familiar? These are the same complaints we’ve heard from students for generations. Heck, I probably said the very same things myself when I was in high school. 125 years ago, lack of formal training in the ‘hard sciences’ was no obstacle to understanding, appreciating, and participating in the world. After all, science still more or less accepted the tenets of ‘naïve realism’: i.e., the world for the most part is the way it appears to be. High school dropouts and Ivy League professors shared this same basic world view. The principal task of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment (1700 – 1900) was to explain how it is that things are the way they are and to explore how those things could be put to work for our benefit. It did not ask why because the assumption from the start was that there is no why; what is just is! Although he probably didn’t realize it at the time, the physicist Enrico Fermi blew the top off this Newtonian world view in 1900 after conducting a series of rather arcane experiments. Fermi asked how so-called ‘black bodies’ emit radiation. Commonsense suggests that radiation emitted by a black body should be made up of a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. Fermi’s experiments showed that commonsense was wrong. ( Side bar : At the time this conclusion was startling. Today, we would just say, oh well, commonsense is wrong again – as usual!) Fermi discovered that radiation emitted by a black body is emitted, not across a continuous spectrum of wave lengths, but at one of just a few discrete wavelengths. Radiation might be emitted with a wavelength of X or a wavelength of Y but not with a wavelength somewhere between X and Y. Of course, the scientific establishment’s initial reaction was to doubt the experimental results, and failing that, to tweak the Newtonian model as little as possible to accommodate the new data. The ‘academy’ responded in just this way to every new scientific breakthrough. First reaction, “there’s something wrong with the data”; and when that argument collapses, “how can we tweak the prevailing model as little as possible?” Prior to Galileo, and even afterwards in some quarters, each new astronomical observation was shoehorned into the Ptolemaic model, tweaking that model as little as possible to accommodate the new data points. Awful, right? Wrong! The scientific community is doing just exactly what it should be doing: responding to new data, first with healthy skepticism, and then by ‘minimally modifying’ its current models to accommodate the vetted new data. We wouldn’t have it any other way! Think of it as an extension of Occam’s Razor. But sometimes, this conservative strategy breaks down. Galileo and Copernicus, for example, realized that the new astronomical data could not be reasoned away or neatly folded into the Ptolemaic model. Sometimes, as the Cars pointed out in their hit song, Drive , “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong!” Sometimes, revolution is the only option. Who among us, sitting on his recliner, drinking a beer, and watching the game on TV, is anxious for revolution? But it happens, and when it happens, Katie bar the door: it’s open season and there are no sacred cows; the entire corpus of scientific ‘knowledge’ is opened to scrutiny. That’s just what happened, beginning in 1900. A year earlier, few scientists, if any, thought that Newtonian cosmology would ever be replaced by a different framework. Who could even imagine what such a framework might look like? The validity of Newton’s scheme seemed unassailable; today it lies in shambles! 20th century scientists painstakingly dismantled Newton’s model, unraveling the entire ball of yarn that was 19th century cosmology. First, Einstein showed that space and time, assumed to be ultimate physical constants, were in fact ‘relative’ to one other and to mass and to motion. Then another gaggle of geeks built a fresh model of the universe based on Fermi’s findings. The new model included discrete packets of energy (quanta) in lieu of a smooth spectrum of continuous values. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that pretty much everything we thought we knew in 1899 about the structure of the universe was wrong! So far, so good. It is entirely appropriate that new scientific paradigms should replace older theories and their retreads. But still, ‘something’s wrong.’ In 1899, a high school dropout had about the same view of the universe as a member of Harvard’s physics faculty. Today, only a handful of non-specialists understand the latest developments in theoretical and experimental physics, and this is a problem. Given a test, I wager that 95% of American adults would describe the universe in essentially Newtonian terms. Outside of science fiction (thank God for sci-fi), Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have for the most part not yet spilled out of the academy into the streets. As a result, we live in a world whose workings are understood by just a handful of people. “Danger, Will Robinson!” This state-of-affairs threatens the fabric of society. A tiny cadre of cognoscenti presides over the intellectual life of the planet. You might describe today’s scientifically educated as ‘Oligarchs of Information.’ In a democracy, ignorance itself can be dangerous. We ask our electorate to guide the ship of state; well and good, but are we entirely comfortable with this arrangement knowing that that guidance will likely be based on 300-year-old notions of what is real and what isn’t? For us as religious educators, the problem is even more acute. How do we teach young people about the majesty of God and the justice of his Kingdom when they are working with a mechanical model of reality? I believe the Beatles’ classic movie, Yellow Submarine (1968) can be a powerful teaching tool for students, especially for students in grades four through eight. “I know your game, Dealer! I know you’re using all this cool music and all these cool graphics just to get our kids hooked.” You’re absolutely right! That’s exactly what I’m doing. And let me tell you, if you are going to get a kid hooked on science, this is your chance! But how do we hook a kid on science if we can’t find a way to make it interesting? Not by teaching the properties of pulleys and inclined planes, that’s for sure. Fact : Science is fascinating! Young people instinctively love it. Idea : Instead of teaching science from the bottom-up (“Don’t worry, you’ll get to the interesting stuff in college”), let’s try teaching from the top down. Expose as many students as possible, as early as possible, to the mind-bending ideas of 20th century physics; then see what happens! This is the age when kids are most likely to be interested in comic books and graphic novels, and Yellow Submarine is the ultimate graphic novel (ok, film)! Are you ‘on board’ (pun intended)? Then take a look at this basic outline of a 10-unit lesson plan that turns the movie, Yellow Submarine , into a physics textbook no student can put down. ( Note : I have no preconception regarding the length or spacing of these ’10 Lessons.’ Each lesson could last an hour…or a lot longer. Each lesson could be taught in succession, one day one lesson. Or each lesson could be spaced over several class periods so that it would take 10 weeks to complete the program. The good news is, ‘It doesn’t matter!’ Any of these formats will work!) Welcome aboard! Lesson #1 : Welcome to the Yellow Submarine Introduce the Beatles, the film and the '60s culture. Watch the film together, if possible, otherwise in small groups or at home. Question: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” Question: “Ok then, do we live in Liverpool? How so, how not?” Note students’ initial responses to both questions and compare them with what they have to say at the end of the course. Lesson # 2 : The Pier Question: “How is life on the Pier different from the life we’re used to?” Introduce the basics of Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: roughly, whatever can happen does happen… somewhere (i.e., in some ‘world’). Introduce concepts from Stephen Gould’s book, It’s a Wonderful Life : roughly, species are the way they are, but they could just as well have been very different. Could there be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy? Question: “What happens to the world when we’re not looking at it?” Does it just continue on as is? Does it continue on, but not as is? Or does it simply vanish until we look again? How do we know? Lesson # 3 : The Sea of Time Question: “What is time?” Introduce the basics of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Question: “Can you imagine a world without time?” What would it be like? Would you like to live in such a world? Question: “Ok then, can you imagine a world with time but where time somehow works differently from the way it does here?” How could time be different? Can you design a world you’d like to live in? Introduce examples from Einstein’s Dreams Introduce the topic of time travel: what are the main problems? Question: “If you could travel in time , where (what year or era) would you most like to visit? Why?” Question: “If you could move back and forth in time, what age would you choose to be? Older? Younger? Or the same age you are now? Why?” Lesson # 4 : The Sea of Science (Space) Introduce basic concepts in Topology. Question: “Can you describe the topology of our world?” Question: “Can you imagine a world with a different topology? What would it be like to live in such a world? Introduce the Platonic Solids Introduce the Holographic Principle The information content of a space is proportionate to its surface area, not its volume. Lesson # 5 : The Sea of Monsters Introduce concepts from D’arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form . Revisit concepts from Stephen Gould’s It’s a Wonderful Life . Design a life form that incorporates organs from more than one species. Design a life form that incorporates both organic and mechanical features. In what ways have we already begun to break down the barriers between species and between the organic and the mechanical? Transplanting a pig’s heart into a human Installing a Pacemaker Installing an Artificial heart Lesson # 6 : The Dreaded Vacuum Monster (VM). Question: “Why is the Vacuum Monster ‘dreaded?’ Review the actions of VM: the sequence, e.g. Introduce the concept of Entropy. Question: “How is the Vacuum Monster like Entropy?” Introduce the concept of an ‘ouroboros.’ Question: “Is our universe an ouroboros? Is it fated to consume itself?” Question: “Why does VM consume itself?” Question: “Is anything left after VM does its worst? If so, what?” Question: “Why does the Submarine and its crew survive?” Introduce Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Lesson # 7 : Dr. Boob. Introduce the concept of Information: roughly, the difference between what is and what could have been. Analyze Dr. Boob’s dialog: “Do you speak English? ‘Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure.’ But do you speak English? "You know, I’m not sure.” Question: “What’s the difference between useful and useless information?” Question: “Does information need to ‘know’ itself to be useful?” Question: “Why do they call Dr. Boob, ‘the nowhere man?’” Question: “How does JHB go from being a ‘nowhere man’ to being a ‘somewhere man?’” “What makes someone be a somewhere person?” Lesson # 8 : The Foothills of the Headlands Question: “What would life be like if you had a mind but no body?” Question: “Would you rather be ‘embodied’ or ‘disembodied?’ Would you rather live in RL or in VR?” Question: “How is a mind different from a body? Can you have either one without the other?” Supplemental material: Max Headroom (TV Series), The Matrix (Films), Alice in Wonderland (The Cheshire Cat). Lesson # 9 : The Sea of Holes & the Sea of Green Introduce the concepts of ‘figure & ground,’ ‘being & nothingness.’ Introduce the concept of a ‘cosmic membrane,’ an ‘event horizon.’ Question: How is the Sea of Green like an event horizon? Question: “Why do you think the Beatles included a ‘Sea of Green’ on the way to Pepperland? What does it do? Why is it important?” Question: “Why do you think the Beatles made these two seas the last two seas on the journey?” Lesson # 10 :Pepperland at last! Question: “What are the main features of Pepperland? Question: “How is Pepperland like Liverpool? How is it different?” Question: “Would you want to live in Pepperland forever if you could? Why? Or why not?” Question: “Now that you know all about life in Pepperland, do you feel better or worse about your own life?” Repeat the questions from Lesson #1: “Do we live in Pepperland? How so? How not?” “Or do we live in Liverpool? How so? How not?” “Or both? If both, how both?” Let’s talk about the trip we’ve just taken: “Did you have fun?” “Along the way, did you learn anything about the world you live in?” “Can you use anything you learned from the trip to make your life better?” Provisional thesis : Like all great works of art, there will never be a ‘definitive interpretation’ of Yellow Submarine . That’s the beauty of masterpieces: they speak to everyone in every era, but they also say different things to different people – all of them valid, all of them true. My own, personal and, and totally tentative understanding? There is only one world: Pepperland, Liverpool and wherever your classroom happens to be located. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of reality; Pepperland is the eternal aspect of the same events. The branes (seas) are layers of reality (time, space, body, mind, information, le neant ). Both Pepperland and Liverpool can be broken down into these component branes. 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 Christ and the Cosmic Fractal David Cowles Dec 27, 2025 “A process is recursive when it applies to itself… (but) doesn’t every process apply to itself?” 1600 words, 8 minute read. Have you ever been to a Carnival? Did you visit the Hall of Mirrors ? You enter and all around you are, well you guessed it, mirrors . You shut the door behind you…and yikes, it’s another mirror! You are struck inside a polyhedron, the inside faces of which are all mirrors. Look into one mirror, any mirror, and you see yourself reflected endlessly but at ever smaller scale. The mirrors are reflecting each other’s images over and over again until the images are too faint for you to see…but know that they continue infinitely, albeit imperceptibly. They create the ‘illusion’ of adding another dimension to space. The mirrors have height, width, and thickness just as you’d expect; but now they also appear to have a 4 th dimension… depth . Adding this 4 th dimension does not increase the overall information content of the complex. The mirror images simply repeat, over and over again, what already is. They add nothing new. In the same way that all the information related to a Black Hole resides on its surface, so all the information related to a Hall of Mirrors resides in just 3 dimensions. The images are self-similar ( congruent if you’re currently sitting in a high school geometry class); only the scale changes! If you’re not too hung over after spending Saturday night at the Carnival, I’ll pick you up Sunday morning on my way to Mass (Roman Catholic Liturgy). I know you’re not into religion, but I think you’ll find this interesting. Christians believe that God (Father) made ‘the heavens and the earth’ but they also believe that God (Son) was ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ 2025 years ago. Ridiculous, you say! Who could believe that? How soon you have forgotten last night’s trip to the Carnival! ( Suggestion : Drink less next year!) May I remind you? Last night your image was incarnate in endless reflections of your reflection. ( Note : a reflection of reflection is recursive.) But you don’t need to wait for the carnival to come to town next year to be reminded. Fractals are all around us and they are a frequent subject of artists working in various media. For example, Escher’s Print Gallery (1956) depicts a city and in this city is an art gallery and on the wall of that gallery hangs a painting and, guess what, that painting is Print Gallery …a painting that depicts a city with an art gallery that has Print Gallery hanging on one of its walls. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea offers a literary example of this relationship. It chronicles a young intellectual’s anguished discovery of the principles of Existentialism, and it concludes with him deciding to write a novel based on those ideas. Of course, the intellectual is Sartre and the novel is none other than Nausea itself. Sartre’s novel is itself recursive. As such it joins a rich literary tradition stretching from Don Quixote to Neverending Story . In Volume Two of Don Quixote , our hero learns that he is the subject of an eponymous novel and he takes time to respond to critics’ comments on Volume One. The novel has become a ‘character’ in its own story. That’s recursion! When we first hear this idea, our instinctive reaction is to say, “No, that’s not possible! The whole cannot be one of its own parts. It’s illogical.” And yet, through carnivals, liturgies, paintings, and novels, we clearly see that it is not only possible but actual, perhaps even necessary… Bertrand Russell notwithstanding. We are used to vectored processes that impact things outside themselves but there is no good reason why a process shouldn’t act on itself as well, why it should not be recursive. In fact, most process is recursive. Processes directed exclusively at another, if they exist at all, are special cases of, or abstractions from, process generally. Sidebar : Does every process apply to itself? Is that the meaning of Karma ? It’s certainly the message of Judeo-Christianity’s Great Commandment: “…love your neighbor as yourself.” And of Newton: Every action entails an equal and opposite reaction. Every subject has itself for an object. There is ever increasing evidence that the cosmos itself is fractal in nature. The distribution of galactic groups in space is self-similar to the distribution of galaxies within those groups; that distribution in turn is self-similar to the distribution of stars within individual galaxies…which is self-similar to the distribution of quarks in an atomic nucleus. Many great works of literature (e.g. Joyce) and music (e.g. Bach) are structured as fractals. Fractals also have applications in math, logic, and computer science. But here we are exclusively concerned with metaphysical applications, applications in ontology, cosmology, and theology. The Christian world view suggests that Being itself has a fractal structure. Let’s start with God! Why not? The Christian idea of God is Trinitarian. God is three persons (Father, Son and Spirit). But these ‘persons’ are not ‘parts’ of God; they are God, individually and collectively. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. According to the Nicene Creed , the Son is “begotten not made, God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” The Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”, i.e. is the relationship between the Father and the Son. But the Spirit is also a ‘divine person’; the Spirit is also God. So according to Christian theology, God is ‘triple-self-similar’: Father ( est ), Son ( incarnatus est ), and Spirit ( procedit ). If we map Christian cosmology onto English syntax, God is the subject, the object, and the verb. What about the ‘world’ and God’s relationship to that world? Does the fractal structure of Trinity extend to the physical world? What are the fundamental things we can say about God’s relationship to the world? God creates the world, primordially ( Genesis ) and perpetually ( John ). God redeems the world ( I Corinthians ), immediately and eschatologically. God is incarnate in the world in the person of Jesus Christ. So the world, which God encompasses, encompasses God. The whole is part of itself. ( Colossians ). The fractal pattern we identify with Trinity extends at least one level beyond…to the relationship of God with the World. The pattern of Creation, Incarnation and Redemption is self-similar to the structure of Trinity. God incarnate (Jesus Christ) is one element of a whole (world) which in turn is encompassed by a higher order whole (God) which, of course, is also a part (Son) of the whole (world). While God “created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), it is through Christ ( Logos ) that “all things came to be…and without whom nothing came to be” (John 1:3). Christ the part ( logos ) on one scale is Christ the whole ( Logos ) on another. God and Creation are self-similar (not identical or equivalent); it is by the power of the Holy Spirit (God) that we are the image and likeness of God. While everything is ultimately subject to God, it is subjected to God through Christ. “When everything is subjected to him (Son), then the Son will be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him (Father) so that God may be all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28). Christ, an element on one scale, is Christ the whole on another: “Christ is all in all.” (Col. 3: 11) So at scale N, God creates and saves the world and is incarnate in that world in the person of Jesus. At scale N-1, all things are made through Christ and ultimately subjected to God through Christ. Christ (the whole) becomes Christ (the part) first through Incarnation and then through each of the Sacraments (especially Eucharist), i.e. reiterations of Incarnation. Christ is wholly present in every sacrament. In Eucharist, however, bread and wine (parts) are transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ (whole). We (wholes) in turn ingest that Body and Blood (whole) under the appearance of bread and wine (parts). In each of us, Jesus’ body and blood comingles with our own; Christ (whole) becomes a part of each of us so that we in turn each become the Body of Christ (whole). A part (Christ) of a part (us) is also a whole of which we are each a part. According to the theology of the Eucharist, when we (whole) ingest Jesus’ Body and Blood (part), we (part) are simultaneously uploaded into Christ’s Body (whole). St. Paul summed it up beautifully: “Now you are Christ’s body and individually parts of it.” ( I Cor. 12: 27 ) In Eucharist, Christ becomes part of us who become part of Christ who becomes part of us ad infinitum . Reminiscent of our Hall of Mirrors , wouldn’t you say? Eucharist is a special example of a fractal because it is not concerned with space (mirrors) but with time. It is a Time Crystal . Linear time is suspended and replaced by perpetual loops. Therefore, Eucharist is an indivisible quantum of time ; as such, it is the eternal now . Eucharist is a process which, fractal-like, repeats the Incarnation perpetually. So does Being itself have a fractal structure according to Christian theology? Q.E.D. *** The Heavenly and Earthly Trinities by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (c. 1675–82) juxtaposes the Holy Family (Mary, the Christ Child, and Joseph) with the divine Trinity (God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as a dove) to visually express Christ’s dual nature as both human and 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 Cosmic Crossroads David Cowles You say, "Big Bang;" we say, "Genesis." You say, "Constantine;" we say, "Ascension." 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

“Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a…tortoise; but at least we have a universe and…we can be assured that its ultimate trajectory is toward Good.” < Back Zeno's New Paradox David Cowles Oct 15, 2024 “Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a…tortoise; but at least we have a universe and…we can be assured that its ultimate trajectory is toward Good.” You know the story of the famous tortoise who beat the great Achilles in a road race, and you may have heard about the arrow that remains suspended in mid-air over Athens, but you may not know about Zeno’s latest paradox. Here’s how it came about: One day Zeno of Elea and I were reclining on freshly mowed grass in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Then Zeno had one of his bright ideas. (That’s when you knew that you could be in trouble. Another day without lunch!) “Let’s build a universe,” Zeno began. Zeno didn’t suffer from false humility. Naively I replied, half napping, “What will we use for materials?” “Our minds, of course, dear boy, our minds.” How foolish of me! BTW, he always called me ‘dear boy’ even though I was many years his senior. “Let’s make it a good universe,” he said. “Let’s fill it with variety and intensity. Everything’ll be a ‘happening’, an event. Let’s have people in this world, let’s give them freedom to do as they will but let’s make sure they’re aware of themselves and their surroundings at all times. And we’ll fill the world with other living things and with enduring objects to boot.” “Sounds good, Zeno,” I muttered as soon as I heard him pause for air; but he paused longer. I hate his pauses. Hope that he’s not working up another one of his famous paradoxes…but prepare to be disappointed. Finally, he broke the silence: “This won’t work!” Wait for it! Will he let it drop? Or will I, by which I mean you , have to listen to a long, boring lecture explaining just exactly why it won’t work – as if anybody cared . “There’s no incentive, we’re missing motivation!” Yup, we be doomed! “Why would a world like this ever will itself to be? Why would any event ever happen?” “I dunno, Zeno, why not create an incentive? Give events a reason to happen, like a reward or something… something ‘good’.” “That’s it! The ‘Good’. I’ll add goodness to my world. Everyone prefers what’s better over what’s worse. So that will work. Thank you.” Another pregnant pause. The rabbits stop hopping, the birds stop chirping, the meadow is in a state of suspended animation. “No it won’t; it won’t work!” “My friend,” Zeno began in an avuncular tone inconsistent with his youth, “In the real world, things do not follow straight lines. If I build Good into the world, like I did gravity, events in my world will naturally tend toward the Good so my World Line will have (-y/x) as its overall slope. But that slope will not be uniform. It will be more steeply negative (‘negative’ is a positive thing in this context, i.e. closer to Good) over some intervals, less so over others. “At some point(s) along the way, my World Line will arrive at a ‘local minimum’, a point from which all slopes are positive, i.e. uphill. To continue, my World Line would have to move away from the Good and that is not possible in my model. “Nothing can ever freely elect to move in any direction other than toward the Good (∞, є). All events must bring the world closer to the Good. Therefore, no event with a positive slope is possible. But my model inevitably includes such pseudo-events; therefore my model is defective. It won’t work.” Ever the optimist, I venture, “So, it doesn’t work all the time, so what? It works most of time; isn’t that good enough?” I’ve never seen Zeno more exasperated…and I’ve seen him exasperated many times, often with me, sometimes with other muggles . (Yup, there were ‘muggles’ even then, in the 5th century BCE.) “After all our time together, do you still not understand?” His Jesus’ complex was kicking in, 400 years before the Nativity. Some Advent! “Real numbers are continuous. 2 is ½ of 4, 1 is ½ of 2. Every interval on the Real Number Line (RNL) is a fractal of every other interval. So if there is even one point where the World Line can assume a positive slope, then any point on the World Line is potentially ‘slope-positive’. “Yes, it works most of the time, but we can’t know when it’s working and when it isn’t so it’s useless. Wherever slope > 0, my world ends; and if my world ends, it is as if it never began in the first place. Simply put: ‘It is not.’ But slope may be greater than 0 at any point on my trajectory. Therefore, since my world can ‘not exist’…it cannot exist.” This reminds me of the time many centuries later when my best friend’s family got the first TV in our neighborhood. Of course, I ran over to his house. We stared at the screen forever. Hmm, not much happening. “Is it turned on,” I ventured. “I don’t know,” he replied, “It always looks like this.” All of Zeno’s paradoxes take a similar form: “Either Real Number Theory and therefore the rules of arithmetic are wrong, or there is no world as we know it. But of course, there is a world, and it is as we know it (Descartes meets Wittgenstein), so arithmetic must be invalid.” What’s going on here? My Life Ball is rolling along the World Line, heading toward the Good. Suddenly, I hit a randomly occurring dip and enter a ‘local minimum’. My next step, in any direction, is ‘up’; it requires me to invest energy to overcome the gravity-like attraction of the Good. But that’s impossible according to my model. Therefore, the world as we know it is impossible,,,but the corollaries are even worse: Any world similar to the world we know is impossible if it allows even a single quantum of ‘anti-good’, a single point, t, where y/x > 0, a positive slope. A world in which there could be even a single quantum of ‘anti-good’ is impaled on the horns of Manichean, gnostic dualism. Any possible world, including our world and all worlds like our world, must uniformly tend toward Good. But that does not seem consistent with experience. Even Augustine, who did not believe in the existence of evil per se , did not insist that every moment, t, be uniformly good. Therefore, the world as we know it can’t be a real world; it must be some sort of grand illusion. So we’ve gone from trying to create a World to realizing that no World can exist. “This is a fine mess you’ve got us into,” Zeno. Surprisingly though, there is a way out (though Zeno might not have realized it); it’s called Quantum Mechanics (c. 1920 CE). Was Zeno 2,500 years smarter than Bohr & Co.? Maybe, maybe not; either way, here’s how it works: My Life Ball is rolling uniformly along the World Line, tending constantly in the direction of the Good. Then I hit a randomly occurring ‘pot hole’. My negative slope suddenly goes ‘super-negative’ and now I will need to travel on a positive slope to get back up to my World Line. According to classical physics, this is impossible. I have fallen into an ‘energy sink’, a spot where potential energy is minimized, aka a ‘local minimum’. Any next step must be ‘up’, but it can’t be because there is no ‘up’ in my world…according to classical physics. But in a quantum world, my Life Ball has a positive probability of being any where in its universe. So when my Life Ball seems to fall into a local energy sink, there is in fact a finite probability that that ball is not located in this cul-de-sac at all; it may still be on the World Line, or even above it. Of course, the probability is miniscule but that’s irrelevant. According to the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM, every event with a non-zero probability does happen…in some universe. Therefore, at any time, t, there is a finite probability that my Life Ball will be on or above the World Line. Therefore, there always exists an extension of the universe as I know it that conforms to my model. Athens still trembles under the threat of Zeno’s suspended arrow, and Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a lazy good for nothing tortoise; but at least we have a universe and it’s the universe we know and love. And, all evidence to the contrary, we can be assured that it’s ultimate trajectory is toward Good. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Existential Threats David Cowles Oct 8, 2024 “The risk of all-out war is greater today than at any time in the past 50 years, and it is reasonable to imagine that such a war might amount to ‘game over’.” Nobody wants to focus on the downside, certainly not Aletheia Today! We are committed to a vision of the future that includes global peace, space exploration, galactic colonization, the eradication of poverty, and the exponential expansion of economic and intellectual opportunities worldwide. Technological progress over the next 100 years could easily dwarf the accomplishments of the previous 10,000…or it could destroy Planet Earth and/or Homo Sapiens as we know them. While continuing to focus on the positive, it would be a mistake to ignore these risks. Among the existential threats we face, global war must rank #1 . The scope of the catastrophe, and the likely inability to course-correct once a tipping point is reached, place it at the top of our list. Plus, the risk of all-out war is greater today than at any time in the past 50 years and it is reasonable to imagine that such a war might amount to ‘game over’. In a rare display of bipartisanship, a specially appointed Congressional Committee (Commission on National Defense Strategy) recently released a chilling report on the risks of global war; it would be irresponsible not to reprint its most important findings and conclusions: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States…is not prepared today. China and Russia are major powers that seek to undermine U.S. influence. “The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) recognizes these nations as the top threats to the United States and declares China to be the ‘pacing challenge’, based on the strength of its military and economy and its intent to exert dominance regionally and globally. “The Commission finds that, in many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment. Without significant change by the United States, the balance of power will continue to shift in China’s favor…Russia possesses considerable strategic, space, and cyber capabilities and under Vladimir Putin seeks a return to its global leadership role… “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests. “This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war. China (and, to a lesser extent, Russia) is fusing military, diplomatic, and industrial strength to expand power worldwide…. “An effective approach…relies on a coordinated effort to bring together diplomacy, economic investment, cybersecurity, trade, education, industrial capacity, technical innovation, civic engagement, and international cooperation… “The Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat. It needs to do a better job of incorporating new technology at scale; field more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions; and deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better… “The Commission finds that the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) is unable to meet the critical minerals and goods needed to run the U.S. economy and build weapon systems. They could also hold at risk U.S. space assets, which underpin much of our daily lives… “The U.S. public is largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare. They do not appreciate the strength of China and its partnerships or the ramifications to daily life if a conflict were to erupt. They are not anticipating disruptions to their power, water, or access to all the goods on which they rely… “The consequences of an all-out war with a peer or near peer would be devastating. Such a war would not only yield massive personnel and military costs but would also likely feature cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure and a global economic recession…” While we’ve chosen to focus on the threat of global war, it is certainly not the only existential threat we face. Climate change, rogue AI, and genetic engineering cannot be ignored. The biggest risk of all, however, is collective myopia. If we refuse to face these threats as real, we make them more likely to occur and the consequences more catastrophic. People like you and me, people who seek peace, are particularly dangerous at times like this. Confirmation bias keeps us from seeing that not everyone in this world shares our values or our sensitivity to the consequences of bad policy. Remember 1930’s England? The leaders could not imagine World War II…until they were in it. We are tempted to think, “Who would launch the world on such a trajectory!” And when we think that, we make it more likely that we will find out. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. 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Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist. < Back Systematic Philosophy David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist. "Systematic Philosophy," makes you think of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre... The urge to understand the world we live in persists, but is academic philosophy the only approach? Or even the best approach? And what does it mean to understand ? We understand something in terms of something else . In other words, we find the relevant 'pattern' to explain the 'event.’ The cosmos is our 'territory' (event); we spend our lives searching for, or inventing, the best possible 'map' (pattern) of that territory. The collected works of each of the philosophers mentioned above constitutes 'maps,’ but are we limited in our search to such 'weighty tomes?’ (No, I am not speaking metaphorically. I mean 'weighty' - I challenge you to pick up all eight volumes mentioned above with one arm! Try it on TikTok or YouTube.) The Homeric epics, for example, also constitute a map. So does the fictional prose of James Joyce ( Ulysses ) and the epic poetry of Ezra Pound ( Cantos ). The music of Bach is a spectacular map ( Brandenburg Concenti ) ( Read ATM’s “The Meaning of Music.” ), as are the paintings of Kandinsky ( Read ATM’s “Is This Really All There Is?” ) The list goes on...and on. According to the Book of Job , the greatest tragedy that can befall a human being is to die 'without knowledge,’ i.e. without a satisfying map; but since by definition no map can ever perfectly reconstruct its territory, the search is never-ending. That said, I did not expect my search would take me to my dentist's office. (Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist.) It is often said, "No one ever wants to go to the dentist." I can confirm that by my own experience...except for now. I cannot not wait for my next cleaning, filling, extraction, etc. A trip to the dentist means a chance to get another look at the tapestry art pictured above. Ok, it's 'pretty,’ I guess, but that's not what attracts me. For me, it's part of the great quest (above). It's a map of the cosmos, every bit as compelling as anything Plato ever wrote, more detailed than anything we're likely to get from the Hubble. How so? It is both varied and uniform, dynamic and stable, undulating and rectilinear. It embodies the same paradoxes that make all of reality so difficult to decipher. Alfred North Whitehead, the last of the great systematic philosophers (not listed above...but just as unhoistable), illustrated this paradox when he quoted a traditional Anglican hymn: Abide with me, Fast falls the eventide. It is impossible, of course, to capture in mere words what is compelling about this quilted fabric. If it were possible, we wouldn't need the fabric, would we? On the other hand, I have never seen a piece of fabric that tells the story of The Timaeus . Reality is a mighty citadel. It takes all the weapons at our disposal to breech its towering walls. The verbal, the visual and the tonal - we need them all, and none can take the place of any other. That said, I feel compelled to try to tell you what it is that I find so compelling in this piece. The right thing for me to do would be to point and cry out, "Ecce rem' - Behold the thing! But of course, I have no intention of doing the right thing. So, caveats in place, here we go: The substructure of the piece is uniform but dynamic. We see it 'at the border' (on the 'frontier' so to speak), and we catch glimpses of it 'between the rain drops.’ Of course, it's a matter of gestalt . The ubiquitous pattern I'm seeing as background could just as easily be seen as the figure. What's figure, what's ground? That's in the eye of the beholder! Proceeding as if the pattern were background, our attention is drawn to the monochrome figures that sit atop it: white triangles and blue parallelograms (diamonds). They are organized into an alternating sequence of undulating and pulsating ribbons, a dynamic version of the red and white stripes on the American flag. Is this a New England quilt...or some Big Easy jazz? One thing for sure, the piece has both melody ('undulating') and rhythm ('pulsating'); but for me, the most interesting aspect of the work is its architecture. The disparate elements are not arranged sequentially or in monochromatic layers; rather, they are 'put together' in a distinctive and infinitely repeating pattern. This is how I imagine brains work, not as tiny lumps of neurons with hardwired functions, but rather as vast neural networks, capable of all sorts of mental gymnastics: factual memory, communication, counter-factual dreams. etc. This is more or less how information is stored in a computer (or on a hard drive or disk). On vinyl, the placement of the needle determines the output; on a CD, it is the address of the data. Also, the pattern of shapes on the quilt is fractal-like. It repeats with changes of scale as well as position. Plus, it has a focus, a great mystical rest, a Sabbath of the Land. Do you see it? Once you do, it's almost impossible to move your eye off from it. A recent breakthrough in mathematics may be helpful here. Imagine a three-dimensional lattice consisting of 100,000 points (or nodes). Now imagine injecting electricity into the lattice. Your job is to model the state of each node, n, at each moment of time, t. It had been assumed that it would take 100,000 equations to accomplish this task. Recently, a team of mathematicians demonstrated that it only takes four equations to do the job. Would you rather owe me $4 or $100,000? How can four equations describe 100,000 data points? Easy: it’s just a matter of seeing the patterns. At Aletheia Today, patterns are what we're all about. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. 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