< Back Quantum Theology Mark D. Stucky Spirit filled the formless void before matter and energy were born, before infinitesimal became infinite, when, from a singularity, a speck of nothing, the biggest bang birthed everything. And still the Creator of the quantum realm, on a vast yet subatomic scale, casting loaded dice of probability, nudges particle positions, tuning endless interactions. Apparent uncertainty, indeterminacy, and random chance ultimately collapse into incarnate intentions and divine designs. Causation cascades through the cosmos until: Revealing transcendence, a bush blazes unconsumed, reorganizing natural order, a sea splits asunder, reversing cursed decay, death falls defeated, redeeming moral corruption, hearts strangely warm, and recreating creation continually, heaven and earth entwine. And now…entangled photons…and entangled hearts… commune across distances infinite, yet immanent and intimate, with the Quantum Mechanic, the Cosmic Creator, the God of Abraham, the Spirit filling us. Image: The Creation of Adam, painted by Michelangelo around 1512, is a fresco on ceiling plaster. The artwork measures 280 cm by 570 cm (9 feet 2 inches by 18 feet 8 inches) and is located in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Mark D. Stucky has degrees in religious studies, pastoral ministry, and communications. After being a pastor, he moved into communications and was a technical and freelance writer for decades. During his day job, he documented diverse technology products. In free time, he’s written many articles, stories, and poems on a variety of (usually spiritual) topics. He has received four dozen writing and publication awards. Previous Next

< Back Ecclesiastes – One Book or Two? David Cowles Jul 9, 2024 “It seems that we are not only permitted to dance in the face of death, but that God expects us to do so.” We do not expect our philosophers to be right, but we do wish they’d at least try to be consistent. Unfortunately, that’s a wish often unfulfilled IRL…nowhere more so than in the Old Testament book of wisdom known as Ecclesiastes . A friend of mine decided it was time for him to undertake the Christian equivalent of the Haj . One summer, he committed to reading the Bible from cover to cover. When he was done, I asked him, somewhat foolishly, which book was his ‘favorite’. To my surprise, he said, “ Ecclesiastes , of course.” Ecclesiastes ? Maybe. Of course? No way! But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Like me, my friend was a child of the ‘60s and even in that anti-clerical era, Ecclesiastes had its fans ( The Byrds ). Plus, Ecclesiastes is crammed full of jaw-dropping insights into the human predicament. So, what’s not to love? These realizations might have originated in virtually any corner of the world at virtually any time in its cultural history. Some of the ideas sound like they come from the Vedas or even the Tao Te Ching . Some look like they were lifted off of a 20 th century hand-out for a survey course on Existentialism. Still, the book sometimes reads as though it was an amalgamation of two texts culled from two very different traditions. On the one hand, Ecclesiastes offers a searing indictment of the human condition - vintage existentialism, full of angst and anxiety. In the spirit of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Camus, the emphasis is on the futility and absurdity of life. The mood is dark, the language strident! But on the other hand, there is a quietist thread running perpendicular throughout the text; it’s a blend of Epicurus, Voltaire, and Norman Vincent Peale. There is little doubt that Ecclesiastes is the work of more than one hand. Verses have almost certainly been added to the original text. That said, it would be a bridge too far to suggest that Ecclesiastes is really two books edited into a single text. We will need to find another way to resolve this dilemma. So, let’s consult the text: “Emptiness, emptiness…all is empty. (‘Emptiness’ is one translation of an Aramaic word that also denotes ‘absurdity, futility, vanity’.) “All things are wearisome… There is nothing new under the sun… I have seen all the deeds that are done here under the sun; they are all emptiness and a chase after wind… “The wise man is remembered no longer than the fool…all will be forgotten. Alas, wise men and fools die the same death!... Everything is the same for everybody; the same lot for the just and for the wicked…there is one lot for all… Men have no advantage over beasts, for everything is emptiness…all came from the dust and to the dust all return… “Better the end of anything than its beginning…The day of death is better than the day of birth. Better to visit the house of mourning than the house of feasting. “Time (entropy, mortality) and chance (quantum uncertainty) govern all.” Cheery stuff! Koheleth (the Speaker), once thought to be King Solomon himself, has taken us down an ontological path from which there is no logical escape. At this point, who could imagine that the book would end with everyone singing ‘Kumbya’ and dancing around a May Pole? And yet… Ecclesiastes has the temerity to suggest just that: “I know that there is nothing good for man except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself in return for all his labors is a gift of God… “Go to it then, eat your food and enjoy it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for already God has accepted what you have done… Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might.” Here Ecclesiastes dips into a Biblical thread suggesting that God has pre-ordained a specific set of tasks for each of us to complete. We see it in Jeremiah and the prophets, but it is most clearly summarized in Ephesians 2:10 : “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them.” In this view, we do not create our lives, we step into them (or not). We are invited to do the Will of God , to participate in universal salvation. Of course, God marches on, with or without our cooperation. We can jump on the bandwagon and play our scripted role in salvation history, or we can stand off to one side. We can let life pass us by…literally. “It is good and proper for a man to eat and drink and enjoy himself… He will not dwell overmuch on the passing years because God has filled his time with joy of heart.” Et voila - a full-throated endorsement of bad faith? Joie de vivre is intended by God to distract us from our existential predicament? Faith really is the opiate of the people after all! It seems that we are not only permitted to dance in the face of death, but that God expects us to do so. “Living well is the best revenge!” ( The Great Gatsby , BCE edition) Such an interpretation is rooted in what, I believe, is a misreading of Judeo-Christian theology. Contrary to popular opinion, salvation does not require us to thread a needle: “Every breath you take and every move you make…I’ll be watching you” ( The Police ) …not! As stated in Ephesians (above), God does not dictate a plan; rather, he lays out a smorgasbord of options: “Pick a path, any path; they all lead home. Just stay out of the brambles.” To whatever extent we do not directly oppose God’s values (Beauty, Truth, Justice), we participate in eternity. God is infinitely merciful and he created the cosmos so that everything in it might be saved. It is his intent that events in the spatiotemporal, entropic world should participate in eternity…and God will out. Only that which explicitly rejects salvation will be expunged at the end of time. Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, is motivated by our appetite for God as he is manifest to us, i.e. as the Good, as Beauty, Truth, Justice, et al. To whatever extent our actions resonate with those values, they are eternal. Only the destruction of God’s ‘goods’ (above) cannot, by definition, be saved. Clear? Well, when all else fails… I turn to symbolic logic to compound my confusion: B є A for all B, provided B ≠ -A. In other words, everything (B, events) is part of A (eternity) except -A. -A, the negation of A, cannot be an element of A. And how do we know -A when we meet him? Fortunately, we can turn to the Bible, or better yet Dante ( Inferno ) & Milton ( Paradise Lost ), for a paradigm: Satan! Imagine Robert Frost ( The Road Less Traveled ) and Hugh Everett ( Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ) had babies: We’d be they! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Keep the conversation going. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back ‘Happy Holidays’ vs. ‘Merry Christmas’: A Twist Dr. Stephen Stern "The argument for the “Happy Holidays” greeting is that because Christians have been imperialistic, and have erased everyone else (including Jews) from American culture, they now need to include us." Before Omicron directed my social life, I went to a Christmas party. a.k.a. “holiday party,” at which everyone was boosted and outside. It was brisk, but not cold enough to keep friends from being together. The hosts greeted me with, “Happy Holidays,” to which I said, “Merry Christmas,” and held them hostage to my lecture on why I hate the greeting, “Happy Holidays.” I was the only invited Jew. Their flustered faces and stutter conveyed that “Happy Holidays” was to help me feel included. I apologized too late. I had ruined their greeting. How should they greet me? Better yet, if one doesn’t know I’m Jewish, is it offensive to wish me a Merry Christmas? Yes and no. It’s complicated. Here’s what is going on for me. “Happy Holidays” confuses inclusion with equality. The idea behind replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” is that there are minority groups in America, e.g., Jews, who are not included. “Happy Holidays” makes Hanukkah the Christmas-equivalent. But this is a false equivalence, and it not only does a disservice to Jews, in wrongly elevating Hanukkah to the sacred, but also by diminishing Christmas, robbing Christians of something that is valuable to them. The argument for the “Happy Holidays” greeting is that because Christians have been imperialistic, and have erased everyone else (including Jews) from American culture, they now need to include us. But does including us demand that Christians must be punished by not being allowed to have anything Christian in the culture anymore? If we want Christians to stop erasing us Jews, Muslims, Hindus among others, does the greeting “Happy Holidays” erase the Christians themselves? Is the general wishing of Merry Christmas an assault against Americans of other traditions or no traditions? Many Jews in my world wish to hear “Happy Holidays.” Greeting them should have nothing to do with Christmas. They want no association with a tradition celebrating the robbing and distorting of Judaism’s face. For example, a colleague’s dog received Merry Christmas wishes on Facebook. My colleague responded: “My doggies don’t celebrate Christmas, but they would like to wish you a happy belated Hanukkah!” At another spot on the December-Jewish-greeting spectrum, Jews with trees seem fine with Merry Christmas. Like Halloween, they explain, Christmas is a secular holiday. One might say that their celebration of Christmas is old school. It has nothing to do with Christianity. Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa are not similar holidays. Conflating Kwanzaa with Christmas in the US seems misguided. Southern enslavers justified enslaving black people through the story of biblical Ham violating his father, Noah; antebellum southern whites argued it destined black people to be enslaved as descendants of Ham. Crazy, right!?! They justified white Christian genocide in the name of a Jew, brown Jesus of Judah. Ham was also brown, but not Jewish. Sarah and Abraham spark the origin of the Israelites. Hanukkah comes over a thousand years later. It celebrates the re-creation of the fourth Jewish state in 166 BCE, when Jewish rebels killed a lot of assimilated Jews. We don’t mention that when we light our hanukkiahs to bring light into the world. Furthermore, it’s not a religious holiday. Jews do not make religious/sacred holidays out of military victories. Jews thus do not desist from ordinary activities and work on Hanukkah. So, what we should say at this time of year to Jews? The party hosts said, “Happy Holidays” to be inclusive. However, more inclusive inclusion knows the holidays at the time those around us celebrate. Hanukkah has been over for a month. It is Christmastime in the states, not Diwali, not EID, not Rosh Hashanah, not Bodhi day. It’s Christmas, a US federal holiday. A great majority of Americans from differing ethnicities celebrate it. Ironically, Jews are now included as a December holiday player, just as I was greeted at a Christmas party with “Happy Holidays.” Chabad (a Hasidic sect) lights an annual hanukkiah on the White House lawn, some Jews have trees, a Fox News host recently said a Christmas tree is also a Hanukkah bush, etc. Is it any wonder Christians and non-Jews think Hanukkah is the Jewish Christmas? Let’s stop pretending it is. Let’s wish Christians and atheists who descend from Christianity a Merry Christmas. As for Jews with trees? If you want them, Tu Bi Shvat is coming. And for Jews like me, “Hi!” This was republished from The Times of Israel with permission from the author. Dr. Stephen Stern is the.co-author with Dr. Steve Gimbel of Reclaiming the WIcked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and the author of The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22 , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Previous Next

“In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.” < Back The Meaning of Life David Cowles Apr 15, 2024 “In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.” I am a sucker for any book written by an avowed ‘non-believer’ who claims to have found a meaning to life that does not require God…or any transcendent reality. Friedrich Nietzsche (c. 1880) ‘proved’ that no such meaning is possible; but that doesn’t stop me from following-up on every credible claim to the contrary. I’m like the Patent Office clerk assigned to evaluate Perpetual Motion Machines! For example, I followed breadcrumbs left by A. J. Ayer and Albert Camus …right into the witch’s oven. Recently, I was persuaded to try again. Michael Ruse is a philosopher, born in 1940; in 2019, he published A Meaning to Life . I just spent two enjoyable evenings exploring Ruse’s take on evolution in general, natural selection in particular, and on the boosters and critics of both. His book begins inauspiciously enough: “You are born. You live. Then you die.” But believe it or not, it’s all downhill from there! In fact, it isn’t until page 158 (out of 171 pages), that we even get to the subject of meaning ! No judgment! This is how we all write today. We experience a blast of insight – a meme that would be at home on a billboard or a bumper sticker or in a Chinese fortune cookie. Then we write an entire book leading up to and celebrating that insight. “Hooray for me! I own a Magee!” (1950’s advertising slogan) According to Ruse (spoiler alert), three things give life meaning: Family: “An eternity without Lizzie (spouse) is too awful to contemplate.” Friends: “…The only truly happy person is the person giving to others.” Mind: “I cannot imagine a life without Charles Dickens.” I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I should have listened to Nietzsche; I’m always sorry when I don’t listen to Nietzsche. Ruse was born in Birmingham , England. He earned his undergraduate degree and his doctorate at the University of Bristol . He has 4 honorary doctorates and published more than two dozen books and articles. He taught at the University of Guelph in Ontario , Canada for 35 years, and after that at Florida State University where he is currently a full professor. But back to the meaning of life. Ruse cites family, friends, and mind as his three logoi . I’m happy for Michael; but hasn’t he totally missed the point? An eternity without Lizzie, friends, or Dickens is just exactly what he does have to look forward to, as do all the rest of us. If these are the things that give life meaning, then Hello! Unlike most ‘secular seekers’, Ruse seems to allow the possibility that he might in some way be conscious of his loss. He talks of a residual consciousness which he likens to “dreamless sleep”, perhaps thinking of Eliot’s “patient etherized upon a table.” If this was intended to help, it didn’t work. I am with Hamlet on this: nothing is more terrifying than the thought that consciousness might somehow persist post mortem . Turns out, Ruse’s 2019 book has absolutely nothing to do with finding life’s meaning; it answers a very different question: In the light of certain oblivion, is there any way for rational human beings to salvage a modicum of ‘happiness’ in their lives? Ruse concludes that there is, and he lays out his not so very revolutionary recipe; of course, it’s ‘Family, Friends and the Life of the Mind’. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what Ayer and Camus did (above). It’s also what Wally Shawn’s character proposes in My Dinner with Andre . What’s this thing between philosophers and ‘happiness’ anyway? People are unhappy! Maybe, God forbid, even you. Deal with it! Not all people all the time, but most people some of the time and some people most of the time. And if someone is not unhappy at this particular moment, it doesn’t mean that they are deliriously happy either. Truth is, most of us are guided by other concerns (needs, duties, responsibilities, urges, etc.); happiness barely enters in. After 25, who has time to worry about being happy? Most of us would trade ‘happiness’ for ‘satisfaction’. Of course, satisfaction can make us happy, but that insight threatens to turn Ruse’s proposition into a tautology: ‘I am happy because whatever I choose to do I do because it makes me happy’. But what if happiness is my ‘ultimate concern’ (Paul Tillich meets J. S. Mill)? Am I entitled to make the purpose of my life be my own personal happiness - happiness that perfumes portions of an 85 year life span, and then evaporates, unremembered, at least according to the Standard Model of Ontology? Fleeting happiness is a poor substitute for eternal Value. Is Ruse channeling Gatsby: ‘Living well is the best revenge’? But what if I made the happiness of others the purpose of my life? Better? I suppose, but now haven’t I just kicked the can down the road? If my happiness is not a valid purpose, is someone else’s? Thought experiment : On my way home from work I swing by my favorite French bakery to pick up a warm baguette to enjoy with my dinner. As I leave the shop, I see someone obviously homeless and hungry on the sidewalk. What should I do? Proceed home and eat hearty (makes me happy); give my unfortunate friend passes to a local cinema (makes him happy…maybe); or give him my baguette (meets his needs…and perhaps secondarily makes one or both of us happy in the process)? In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd. Then the meaning of life is that it has no meaning and the meaning of ‘anything’ is literally ‘nothing’. That makes more sense than might seem. A can mean B only if A ≠ B and ∉ B; the only thing not equal to anything is nothing . Is there any way to ‘make peace’ with such a fate? Is there any way to extract value from a world that is apparently value free ? Nietzsche thought he had resolved this question once and for all. His argument is elegant and, I believe, irrefutable: There is only this world, B; there is no other. A can ‘mean’ B only if A ≠ B and ∉ B. But if B is the whole world and there is no other, then can Ǝ no such A; therefore, Ǝ only B and its elements and therefore B can have no meaning. Are you getting nervous? Are you afraid I’m going to ask you to say the ‘G word’? Relax, the G-word is optional. What’s not optional is the ‘T word’ – Transcendence. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, mano a mano . But The Book of Job takes a different tack. Job recounts in painful detail a contest of minds between God and his ‘servant’. First, Job battles God’s self-selected proxies (so-called ‘comforters’); then God himself tags-in! For millennia, the Book of Job has stumped commentators. After 40-plus chapters, it seems like we should know who won the argument. But the text is ambiguous. After page upon page of soaring rhetoric and intricate argument, the author decides to get cute with the verdict. But maybe that was the point? Like some sort of avant-garde 20th century novel, the ending is left up to the reader. Most commentators, wrongly in my view, give God the victory on points; others, myself included, have Job winning by TKO. Job gets the trophy , but God gets a nice ‘participation ribbon’. In the story, God huffs and puffs about how great he is, but what really makes God great in this story is that he agrees to participate in the legal process and abide by the verdict…whatever that might be. Is this God acknowledging his own Higher Power, Value (e.g. Justice)? Is this recognition a precursor to Incarnation? The omnipotent God becoming a helpless infant, a suffering servant , a human sacrifice. So, the real winner here is Justice! In Job , Justice triumphs, even over God’s will. But Justice is a transcendent value (lie quiet, Nietzsche). You can’t buy a cup of Justice at Starbucks; nor can you use Justice to pay for your latte. Justice is not fungible. Like gravity, Justice shapes events, but it’s also a yardstick by which we measure and judge those events. It’s non-linear, i.e. recursive. Justice evaluates the world…and then it evaluates itself. It recapitulates God’s creative process in Genesis: “Let there be…saw that it was good.” It is Values (e.g. Justice, Truth, and Beauty - ‘JTB’) that give meaning to life. But these values are not a function of the spatiotemporal world (STW). Values are universal and eternal; they apply in all places, at all times, in this universe or in any possible universe. STW is made up of events, related to one another via shared qualia (values). Values are general , related to one another via shared events ( Proust ). Values have no home in STW…and so they are at home everywhere in STW. They are logically prior to any ‘when’; they form the logos , the glue between beings that ultimately constitutes Being itself. JTB are values that the noble Nietzsche foresaw but that accommodationists imagine they can tease out of STW. IMAHO, Ruse made mistakes in his effort to find meaning. First, he wrote a book about ‘meaning’ that had nothing whatsoever to do with meaning ; that’s a bit of a bother. But he also made a critical error regarding Sartre’s doctrine of human nature. According to Sartre, there is no human nature beyond the non-thetic, non-essential, existentialist exclamation: “I am (and therefore I am free); I am free (and therefore I am).” Being and Freedom are synonymous. Descartes on steroids! It stands to reason, doesn’t it: if you’re not free, what are you? Perhaps you’re inert; your actions have no consequences IRL. Or perhaps you are just mechanically executing the will of others. In either case, you can lay no claim to Being . To bastardize Gregory Bateson, ‘Being is a difference that makes a difference’. In these scenarios, either you are not different, or you make no difference. Either way, you fail…loser! BTW, this is the paradox of determinism. If everything is determined, then nothing is …or only one thing is (the initial state). Everything else is just a mechanical unfurling of that one thing. In light of this, determinists who are revolted by the notion of a world created and influenced by an all-powerful deity might want to give their position a bit of a rethink. Ruse disputes all this. He believes that human beings do have a specific, identifiable nature. For example, he says that our desire to give to others is part of that nature. In this, he falls prey to what Alfred North Whitehead called , The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness . Of course, there is such a thing as ‘human nature’ and yes, it includes an eleemosynary component, and yes, it’s written in our genes. But our genes are not us ! Our genes are part of the objective, material world we inherit and inhabit. That world is mediated to us through our genes, our senses, our bodies, our brains, none of which is us. We are a product of our DNA; so is a tree. In fact, we share more than half of our DNA with trees. Of course, we experience the world differently than a tree does and ultimately that different experience is a function, at least in part, of our different DNA. That said, we are not DNA, nor is a tree. We permeate the experiences that genes, bodies and minds mediate, not as passive observers or mechanical operators, but as perpetually active negators . We selectively negate what is in order to bring about what might yet be. In Sartre’s terms we are the Neant (nothingness) that gives Etre (being) meaning. While Etre is many faceted (like Parmenides’ Doxa ), Neant is simple, featureless (like Aletheia ); it haunts you and me and Sherwood Forest. It’s neither one nor many: not ‘one’ in contrast to many nor ‘many’ in contract to one. It’s simple; it simply is. And so it is in you just as it is in me and just as it is in every sentient being. Neant is no respecter of species. Meaning defines a relationship between two distinct entities. The signifier cannot be coincident with the signified, nor can it be an element of the signified. What ‘means’ must transcend what is ‘meant’; otherwise the phenomenon of meaning is impossible. If Life is to have meaning, we must search for it, not ‘among the living’ but in eternity. 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 image to return to Holy Days 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. 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One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. < Back The Sultan and the Sea David Cowles Jul 12, 2022 One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. (The events in this story happened a long time ago. We know about them only because the story has been passed down over the centuries by members of a religious group known as the Sufis.) Once upon a time, a young but very wealthy Sultan lived in a luxurious palace. He lived alone, but he was well taken care of by the palace staff - the folks who took care of the palace and kept things humming - including the Sultan’s Trusted Assistant and best friend, a man who had cared for the Sultan since birth. The Sultan’s life was lavish, but lonely…and, oh so boring! I mean, nothing ever happened. Nothing. No? Ok, did you ever see the movie, Groundhog Day ? Well, that’s what life was like for this Sultan. Each day was a nearly perfect copy of the day before. Things were so monotonous that the Sultan never knew whether it was Monday or Thursday, or even if today was still today and not yesterday…or tomorrow. “Who cares? What’s the difference anyway?” he thought. Today would begin for the Sultan just like every day began. Oh, did I mention that today was the Sultan’s 25th birthday? No matter, birthday or not, nothing would change, nothing ever changed, no matter what day it was. Sure enough, shortly after dawn, his assistant woke him up and poured a pitcher of warm water into a large basin so that the Sultan could wash his face and hands. Every day, the Sultan would immerse his face in the water for a few seconds; then his assistant would hand him a dry towel. “Today, will be just like every other day,” the Sultan thought, sighing. Did he just think that? Or did he mumble it under his breath just loud enough for his assistant to overhear? We’ll probably never know for sure. As expected, this day did begin just like every other day…until it didn’t! Something happened. Even though nothing ever happens in the Sultan’s world, something happened today! The Sultan immersed his face in the water as he did every morning, but today, when he lifted his face out of the water, he realized that he was no longer in his palace… not by a long shot. The Sultan found himself wet, naked, and gasping for breath on a deserted and unfamiliar beach. All alone – no Trusted Assistant to wipe his wet face. After laying there a while, trying to figure out what was going on and trying to gather his strength for whatever was to come, he spotted three young women walking up the beach towards him. Would these women be friendly or hostile? Or even worse, would they just ignore him and walk on by, unconcerned? But as it turns out, this might have been the Sultan’s lucky day after all. The women did stop, and they were friendly. One of them even-handed the Sultan her scarf so that he could tie it around his waist to cover his private parts. Of course, the women were all questions and of course the Sultan told them his story and of course they didn’t believe him, not one word. I mean, would you? They whispered among themselves and concluded that he must have escaped from a prison transport vessel as it passed through near-by waters. Even so, the women invited the Sultan to follow them home, and of course, he eagerly accepted. And what a home it was! It was a palace even grander than the Sultan’s own. Turns out, one of the women on the beach was a princess. As a guest of the King, the Sultan was bathed, fed, and offered a place to rest from his incredible adventure. But if the Sultan thought that this was going to be his new home, he was sorely mistaken. The King and the Princess had no idea their visitor was a fellow royal. Remember, they thought he was an escaped prisoner. He might have been a thief, a murderer even, or worse yet, a revolutionary…or God forbid, an anarchist. Yikes! Anyway, he was not welcome to stay for long in the King’s palace. Instead, the Princess took him to a small cottage at the outskirts of town. There, the Sultan met a couple whose business was making and repairing the large nets used on the island for fishing. At the Princess’ urging, they agreed to take him in and teach him their trade. In exchange, the Sultan agreed to stay and work for them for 10 years. Turns out, the Sultan was a good learner, and soon he was tying nets as proficiently as the other members of his newly adopted family. Thanks to the Sultan’s skill and hard work, his new family became quite prosperous. 10 years passed quickly, and the Sultan was finally ready to begin his new life. The net-makers were grateful to the Sultan for his hard work, and they gifted him a tidy sum upon his departure. The Sultan and the net-makers said goodbye, but only after a long and tearful embrace. The Sultan thought to himself, “This is the way goodbyes should be. I wish I had had a chance to say goodbye like this to my Trusted Assistant, my friend.” But there was no looking back for the Sultan. He hiked into town, rented a small room, and used the net-makers’ gift to open a small shop below it. The Sultan proved to be a gifted trader, as well as a skilled net-maker, and soon his shop was bustling; once again, the Sultan was prosperous. One day, while he was puttering around the shop, a woman walked in who would later become his wife. She walked straight up to the Sultan and began to ask very intelligent questions about his merchandise. It was love at first sight…for the Sultan! Not so much for the bride-to-be. But the Sultan had been through a lot. Though still young, he was beginning life from scratch, for the third time! He had finally found love, and he wasn’t about to give up on it now. Sure enough, his favorite customer soon became his fiancée. Once married, she gave birth to 6 children, 3 boys and 3 girls. The children grew, and eventually, they began having children of their own. Soon the Sultan was surrounded by a pride of children and grandchildren…and he loved every one of them with an intensity he never thought possible back in his Palace. One day, his 75th birthday as it happens, the Sultan decided to do something he hadn’t done since he arrived; he decided to go for a swim. It was the Jubilee (50 year) anniversary of his unceremonious arrival on the island. He invited his retinue of children and grandchildren to accompany his wife and himself as they retraced the Sultan’s first steps on the island. Now, one of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they swim at all. And that is how it was on this island. The Sultan had not been back to that beach, or any beach, since the day he arrived. Soon they were at the very beach where the Sultan had washed ashore 5 decades earlier. The Sultan walked slowly into the waves. Once the water was up to his waist, he dove in headfirst, but when he went to lift his head out of the water… We have all had unexpected, and sometimes unwelcome, experiences in our lives. They startle us at first, but for the most part, we muddle, though. The Sultan had two such experiences. The first occurred on his 25th birthday, when he put his face into the basin of water, only to find himself stranded on a foreign shore. I mean, has that ever happened to you? The second is happening right now. On this 75th birthday, surrounded by his family, the Sultan dove headfirst into the sea; but when he pulled his head up out of the water, guess what, he found himself back in his old Palace, a full wash basin in front of him and his assistant standing by with a dry towel…as usual. Suddenly, the Sultan caught a glimpse of his reflection on the surface of the water. What did he see? Challenge Answer the five questions below and be entered in a drawing for a $100 gift card. ( Hint : there are no right or wrong answers.) We will report the results in Issue #3 of AT Magazine (9/1/2022). The gift card drawing will occur on Labor Day 2022. 1. The Sultan disappeared from his Palace on the morning of his 25th birthday; he returned on his 75th. How old do you think the Sultan was when he got back to his Palace? (Choose one answer only.) He was 25 when he put his face into the basin of water, so he must still be 25 when he lifts his face back out. _____ He lived on the island for 50 years. He was 75 when he dived into the waves, so he must still be 75 when he picks his head back out. _____ Other (please comment): ________________________________ 2. How do you think the Sultan feels about what’s happened to him? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) He’s happy to be home in his palace at long last. _____ He’s angry that his life was turned upside down like this. _____ He misses his wife and kids and his life on the island. _____ He is grateful for this chance to live two full lives. _____ 3. What do you make of the Sultan’s Trusted Assistant? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) He had nothing to do with the Sultan’s disappearance from the Palace. _____ He is responsible for the Sultan’s disappearance? _____ He did it because he was angry with the Sultan. _____ He did it to teach the Sultan a lesson. _____ It was his 25th birthday gift to the Sultan. _____ When the Sultan returns to the Palace after 50 years, how old is the Trusted Assistant? He’s the same age he was when the Sultan was 25. _____ He’s 50 years older now than he was on the Sultan’s 25th birthday. _____ 4. Now that the Sultan is back in his Palace, will his life be different from it was before his great adventure ? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) No, nothing will change; things will go back to being just as boring as they were before the Sultan disappeared. ____ Yes, he will leave his Palace every day to look for the family he left behind on the island. ____ Yes, he will leave his Palace every day, looking for new romance, hoping to start a new family? _____ Yes, will adopt orphans to live with him in the Palace. ____ Yes, he will learn a useful and productive trade. ____ Yes, he will move out of the Palace entirely and turn it into public housing for the homeless citizens of his realm. ____ Yes, he will turn the Palace into a $1,000/night luxury resort. ____ 5. Our story occurs in two places: in the Sultan’s Palace and on the Island. Which is real and which isn’t? (Check one answer only) Only the Sultan’s palace is real; the island is not: _____ Only the island is real; the Sultan’s Palace is not: _____ Both the island and the palace are real: ____ Neither the island nor the palace is real: _____ Please feel free to elaborate on any of your answers (optional): Please submit your answers to editor@aletheiatoday.com. Be sure to put Sultan and the Sea Challenge in the subject line and tell us who you are and how we can reach you (name, email address, and phone number) so that your name can be entered into the $100 gift card drawing to take place on Labor Day. 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? 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< Back Fact to Fiction David Cowles Jul 14, 2021 Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd. Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd. As Greek mythology gradually transitioned from ‘fact’ to ‘fiction’, it was replaced by Roman pragmatism and the Christian ethic of personal responsibility. Thus began the Age of Reason, the culture of cause and effect. Not until the 20th century was this world view seriously challenged: by Artaud, Ionesco and Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”), by the short stories of Sartre and Camus, and by the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. 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 Zeno Meets Einstein David Cowles Dec 15, 2022 “Photons do what frazzled parents can’t; they can be in two places at once. Better yet, they can be in all places at once.” Remember Zeno, that crazy Greek who thought a Tortoise could beat Achilles in a road race? Well, to be fair, he didn’t say that the Tortoise would beat Achilles, he simply said that Achilles couldn’t beat the Tortoise. Not quite the same thing. Despite many claims to the contrary over the past 2500 years, no one has succeeded in proving Zero wrong. But how much would you be willing to wager that you, not the great Achilles, but you, could smoke that arrogant amphibian in a road race? There’s a major disconnect here. We all know that Achilles, or you, would win any such race, but we can prove that such a victory is impossible. “This is a fine mess you’ve gotten me into, Ollie.” If there are any ‘Zeno literalists’ reading TWS today, shout out; but be prepared to back up your sophistry by wagering some serious bread. Strange, suddenly I can hear the crickets in my backyard. So, if the math says that Achilles is a loser, but ESPN says he’s a winner, something must be wrong with the math because ESPN is never wrong. Specifically, it must be the axioms of arithmetic that are wrong. At any rate, that is the conclusion we reached in Achilles and the Tortoise in Issue #4 (10/15/2022) of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM). But what if we were wrong? What if the ‘Zeno literalists’ were right all along. It’s ok, you can come out now! Perhaps Achilles really can’t beat the Tortoise? But everyone knows that’s absurd. Well, everyone except a guy working in a Swiss patent office by the name of Albert Einstein. He proposed a funny little theory known as Relativity, and it included the idea of a spacetime continuum. According to Einstein, there is no proper time, no proper space, only spacetime. And guess what! In spacetime, everything moves at exactly the same speed. So, if Achilles gives the Tortoise a head start (as agreed), he can never catch him. In fact, Relativity goes even further. According to Einstein, Achilles can’t even gain on the Tortoise. This is Zeno on steroids! I won’t attempt to prove this here, but Zeno’s Paradox and Einstein’s Relativity are ultimately compatible. They both predict a motionless universe. Crazy! But Zeno and Einstein are not alone; in fact, they’re in rarefied company. Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy, gave us the first ‘European’ model of Universe, and guess what, it was motionless. Cutting edge 21st century cosmology has resurrected Parmenides (and Zeno and Einstein in the process). The hot new model is called Block Universe, and it is identical to Parmenides’ Aletheia with one addition. The new model explains ‘apparent change, motion, etc.’ as diagonal slices of the block. Imagine you’re a photon. I’m not sure you can get there on the Atkins diet, but it’s worth trying. Anyway, imagine, ok? Are you imagining? You are moving at the speed of light: distance/time, as we learned in 7th grade. But in the case of the photon, the distance is infinite, so the time is zero. Photons do what frazzled parents can’t; they can be in two places at once. Better yet, they can be in all places at once. Now imagine you’re not a photon, imagine you’re something with mass, like me. You experience inertia, so it’s very easy for you to stay in one place. In fact, it’s easier to stay in one place than it is to move. Just ask my couch on an NFL Sunday! So, here is our imaginary universe. It consists of something massive and something massless. I am stationary by nature; it takes energy to move me. My photon is mobile by nature; it takes energy to slow it down. Bottom line, my photon moves timelessly through space, but I move only through time. In fact, I move through time at the same speed as my photon moves through space. No wonder I’m aging so quickly! My wife says I need to exercise more if I want to live longer (i.e., slow down time). She’s right, of course. Olympic athletes probably do add a few seconds to their lifespans, but I have a feeling that is not what my wife has in mind. In reality, most things move through space and time. The faster they move through space, the slower they move through time, but the sum of the two speeds is always the same, c – the speed of light! So, it turns out Zeno’s Paradox has another confirming solution. With this solution, the axioms of arithmetic remain intact, but Achilles does not gain a single inch on the Tortoise, no matter how much time is allowed to elapse. 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 Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence Joseph Hinman "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." I am tired of hearing atheists say "faith is believing things without evidence." No definition of faith in Christianity says that. Let's Get this out of the way up front. Heb 11:1: faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the argument (argumentum) of things that are not apparent. Most translations say "evidence of things not seen."This does not say faith is belief without evidence it says faith itself is a kind of evidence because it points to the reality that caused one to have faith. The most important dictionary in theology is the Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology. There are two kinds, one for theologians and one for ideas. Let's consult the latter. faith (Gr. pistis, Lat. fides, “trust,” “belief”) In Christianity, belief, trust, and obedience to God as revealed in Jesus Christ. It is the means of salvation (Eph. 2:8–9) or eternal life (John 6:40). Faith affects all dimensions of one’s existence: intellect, emotions, and will. See also salvation.[1] According to that definition there is nothing like a lack of evidence. There Is no hint that faith involves a lack of evidence. Consulting the same source for different uses of the term "faith:" Faith, explicit (Lat. fides explicita) Faith in that of which one has knowledge. Thus the term may be understood as referring to what one professes to believe because of what is known.[2] Here faith is equated with knowledge. Since evidence involves knowledge and builds on knowledge it would seem that faith is actually dependent upon evidence rather than being without it. Faith, implicit (Lat. fides implicita) The Roman Catholic view that one believes as true “what the church believes,” even without certain knowledge. It was rejected by the Protestant Reformers as a true faith because the element of knowledge was lacking.[3] The Catholic view seems closer to being without evidence, but not an exact fit. In any case that view was rejected by the reformers and is not really compatible with the Protestant view.The Protestant view rests upon knowledge, which again, would have to involve evidence at some point. Thus direct contradiction to the atheist bromide. Then we turn to the protestant notion of "saving faith." That is faith that saves. Remember Paul tells us salvation is by Grace through faith:“For by grace you have been saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8).[4] Faith, saving. The gift of God through the Holy Spirit whereby one accepts and believes the promises of the Gospel as the reception of salvation through the life and the work of Jesus Christ. One is incorporated into Christ, participates in his benefits, and is an heir of eternal life. [4] No indication is given that there is no preliminary basis for belief which might involve evidence.Before one can trust God one must believe that God is. None of these definitions preclude basing that initial belief upon evidence. It is after one accepts the conviction that God is real that faith might supersede evidence in matters such as trusting God for salvation. Let's turn to some major figures in Christian theology to see if they define faith as belief without evidence: St. Augustine Faith, to Augustine, is a humble posture of seeking and confession, in which the individual confesses their sin and brokenness before God, and by his Grace, is cleansed. The individual surrenders to the God who is already present in the soul. This initial work begins the process of cleansing the soul so that it can see clearly. As the individual continues to seek God, the soul is continually cleansed as a gracious process, which slowly flakes away the filth of the Fall. Augustine believed that much could be known through Platonic meditation: eternal things and God’s presence could be apprehended, but God could be known only for a moment.[5] Thomas Aquinas Popular accounts of religion sometimes construe faith as a blind, uncritical acceptance of myopic doctrine. According to Richard Dawkins, “faith is a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence...Such a view of faith might resonate with contemporary skeptics of religion. But as we shall see, this view is not remotely like the one Aquinas—or historic Christianity for that matter—endorses. To begin with, Aquinas takes faith to be an intellectual virtue or habit, the object of which is God (ST IIaIIae 1.1; 4.2). There are other things that fall under the purview of faith, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation. But we do not affirm these specific doctrines unless they have some relation to God. According to Aquinas, these doctrines serve to explicate God’s nature and provide us with a richer understanding of the one in whom our perfect happiness consists (Ibid.).[6] Here again knowledge, an intellectual thing, compatible with evidence. How could faith be based upon knowledge and be an intellectual act and yet without evidence? By intellectual he means one consciously assents to belief. Marin Luther ... faith is God's work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn't stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words. Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.[7] John Wesley With a deep conviction, Wesley repeatedly stresses the necessity of faith. ‘Saving faith is a sure trust and confidence which a man has in God, that by the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven, and he is reconciled to the favour of God.’1 It is also clear that Wesley sees faith as a gift of God, although he does not emphasize that very much.[8] There is an initial coming to faith where one decides "I do believe in God." In that stage evidence is not a contradiction to belief. Most of the activity of faith involves personal trust in God's salvation and his providential care. In this regard evidece is irrelivant, unless we want to think of the content of personal experience of God as evidence.It is evidence of God's goodness. I think for the most part evidence is irrelevant to faith. Faith is not belief without evidence, it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love. Source: This originally appeared in Metacrock's Blog and is seen here without any edits. Notes [1] "Faith," The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms,SECOND EDITION, Revised and Expanded,Donald K. McKim ed.,Louiscille Kentucky:John Knox Press, 2014. https://www.mybibleteacher.net/uploads/1/2/4/6/124618875/the_westminster_dictionary_of_theological_terms_by_donald_k._mckim__z-lib.org_.epub.pdf [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] Mark Hansard, "Faith and Reason, Part 2 Augustine," Intervaristy: Emerging Scholars Network, (August 18,2018) https://blog.emergingscholars.org/2018/08/faith-and-reason-part-2-augustine-summer-2018-series/ [6]Shawn Floyd,"Aquinas Philosoph8ical Theology,"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosphy, https://iep.utm.edu/thomas-aquinas-political-theology/#SH3a [7]An excerpt from "An Introduction to St. Paul's Letter to the Romans," Luther's German Bible of 1522 by Martin Luther, 1483-1546. Translated by Rev. Robert E. Smith from DR. MARTIN LUTHER'S VERMISCHTE DEUTSCHE SCHRIFTEN. Johann K. Irmischer, ed. Vol. 63 Erlangen: Heyder and Zimmer, 1854), pp.124-125. [EA 63:124-125] https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/martin-luthers-definition-faith [8]J. W. Maris, "John Wesley's Concept of Faith," Christian Library taken from Lux Mundi 2010 https://www.christianstudylibrary.org/article/john-wesleys-concept-faith https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982408765 Joseph Hinman's new book is God, Science and Ideology. Hinman argues that atheists and skeptics who use science as a barrier to belief in God are not basing doubt on science itself but upon an ideology that adherer's to science in certain instances. This ideology, "scientism," assumes that science is the only valid form of knowledge and rules out religious belief. Hinman argues that science is neutral with respect to belief in God … In this book Hinman with atheist positions on topics such as consciousness and the nature of knowledge, puts to rest to arguments of Lawrence M. Krauss, Victor J. Stenger, and Richard Dawkins, and delimits the areas for potential God arguments. Click above to return to Winter 2024. Previous Next

< Back Football and Quantum Mechanics David Cowles “This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: we play 'what if' and 'if only'.” The scoreboard clock reads 00:00: Philadelphia Sunshine – 27; Buffalo Blizzard – 26. Game over? Yes…and no. Time has expired, but the Blizzard scored a touchdown on the last play of the game, so they still have a chance to add one or two PATs ( points after touchdown ) to their score. So, yes, the game is ‘over’ but we still don’t know who won. It’s like most 21 st century US presidential elections; better still, it’s like any Iowa Caucus! (Heck, they’re still looking for Paul Simon to tell him that he won the 1988 caucus after all; and as for the 2020 caucus, well, they’ve just stopped counting.) But I digress. According to the rules of the NFL, the Blizzard can kick a short field goal for one point; game tied! Overtime! Or they can run (or pass) the ball into the end zone for two points. All eyes are on the coach; will she go for one point, potentially sending the game into OT, or two, letting everything ride on just one play? Power outage! (Hey, it’s Buffalo; it snows!) Even cell service is disrupted. We won’t know the outcome of the game until the power comes back on…or until the newspaper gets delivered in the morning…or the morning after that. Et voilà , you have the longest game ever played…even though it ended hours ago! Did I mention, I have houseguests? Huge football fans – they invited themselves for a ‘sleepover’ so they could be ‘closer to the stadium’ where the game was to be played. Irony : Because of the forecast of heavy ‘lake effect snow’ in Buffalo, it was decided at the last minute to play the game in Philadelphia, where it’s always sunny; but I’m still stuck with my houseguests! Who knows for how long now! It could be worse. At least my guests and I can communicate; we all speak football fluently. Traditionally after every game, fans are required to spend 36 hours reflecting on why what happened, happened (WWHH). If only this … If it hadn’t been for that . Would-a, could-a, should-a. It’s what we do! Normally, this sort of retrospective is only possible once the outcome of the game has been determined. Simply put, how can we identify the causes of an outcome we don’t yet know? To salvage this hyperextended sleepover, we need to be able to talk football, but apparently, we can’t. Edwin Schrödinger to the rescue! A century ago, he placed the world’s most famous cat, alive and kicking, into a soundproof box – don’t worry, it was ventilated – and he set up his experimental apparatus so that the life or death of the cat would be determined by the occurrence, or not, of a totally unpredictable quantum event. Where was PETA? At any point in time the cat could be alive or dead; we don’t know. But instead of throwing up our hands, Schrödinger suggested we treat the cat as both alive and dead. Decades later, Richard Feynman applied this same technique to the entire field of quantum phenomena: he called his technique, “Sum over Histories." One of my visitors happened to be a quantum mechanic. He told us all about the Quantum Qat ; much obliged! He suggested we apply Schrödinger’s method to our ‘Football Game from Limbo’. First, assume that Buffalo has won the game; then reverse it and assume that Philly has prevailed. Here’s how it works: Assume Buffalo won! They won because their receiver made a one-handed, fingertip catch in the end zone, dragging his toes to stay in bounds. They won because Philly missed a chip shot field goal in the second period. They won because somehow the refs missed a Buffalo defender’s flagrant interference with a Philly pass receiver in the end zone. Now assume Philly won! They won because one of Buffalo’s touchdowns was brought back for a dubious ‘holding’ call. They won because Buffalo fumbled the ball on Philly’s five yard line. They won because Philly’s QB broke not one but two open field tackles to score on a busted play. This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: We play ‘what if’ and ‘if only’. It’s fun, and we’re confident that our collective wisdom somehow enriches the noosphere. So six events, each highly improbable in its own right, but each perfectly capable of determining the outcome of the game. If only we knew the outcome! All six of our ‘what if, if only’ events happened, there’s no changing that! But the meaning and significance of these events depends on the illusive outcome. Cosmology is like a good murder mystery: until we know who dunnit , we can’t separate the clues from the red herrings. We know the putative causes , we know their potential effects, but we can’t assess their actual impact on the outcome of the game because we don’t know that outcome…yet. Under these circumstances, can we call them ‘causes’ at all? All we can say for sure is that these six events preceded the game’s outcome. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? When results are known, events become causes; until then, they are just events. In and of itself, each of the six key events is complete and determined. What is not determined is the meaning or significance of those events. Games are fun to watch, and stats are fun to study, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters, that has meaning and significance outside the game itself, is the final score. There are no style points in American football. Only the final score transcends the game itself. It is the outcome of the game that converts some events into causes and others into anecdotes. So are we prepared to say that causality proceeds backwards from the effect rather than forward from the cause as normally assumed? It’s tricky. Results do follow causes in time, but events do not become causes until the effects themselves are known. Hmm. All we can say is this: there are events and, eventually, there are outcomes, and we know that those outcomes are massively related to the events that preceded them. To know which events among those precedent events, if any, deserve to be ranked as ‘causes’, you’ll need to put on your canonical conical science ‘cap’…yup, the one with the propeller on top! That’s it. We need to go back in time, change the result of a single play and see if and how that change impacts the results. We would need to do that for each of our so-called ‘causes’. Then we would need to try changing two or more events at once, measuring the impact of each combination, and so on. We have identified six events that, we think, might have been determinative of the outcome of the game. There are six potential causes , which can occur in 64 possible combinations, but with only two possible outcomes (no ties allowed). The engineering is daunting but, assuming you’ve licked the time travel thing, and assuming you don’t require any juice from the Greater Buffalo Power Grid, the conceptual problem is fairly simple. So far… Events do not happen in isolation. Our six causes occur in a sequence. Flipping the first event (A) may impact or even determine the outcome of the game; it also potentially impacts the other five events. A change in the value of A may independently trigger changes in the values of B, C, D, E, and/or F. How so? Event A, however it turns out, impacts the crowd, impacts player attitudes – the famous momentum – and impacts both teams’ subsequent strategic moves (play calls). A change in the value of A may (or may not) trigger a change in the value of B and the other four events. But a change in the value of B may trigger independent changes in the values of C, D, E, and/or F. And so on… As you can see, by changing the value of one event, A, we’ve triggered an ontological avalanche . But is this even what we mean by causality ? The phenomenon we call a football game is an example of a ‘chaotic system’. That is not to say that events happen at random; they do not! In fact, as we have seen, the causal bonds are incredibly strong. But unfortunately, they are ultimately indecipherable. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men and all the computing power on Planet Earth cannot convert a football into a deterministic algorithm. A butterfly flaps its wings on the 30 yard line and Gronk drops a pass in the end zone. Causal, yes; predictable, no! Event chains are not linear algorithms, they are massively nonlinear webs. But for us to make sense of the game, to have something to talk about, we have to talk about ‘highlights,’ and we have to link those highlights in a more or less straight line to the final score (once we have a final score). Does anyone think for a moment that this so-called analysis has anything to do with reality? We selected six putative ‘causes’ of the game’s output. Why not eight, or just 4? In fact, in our nonlinear world, every single thing that happens during the game, on or off the field, may cause the outcome. We live in a non-linear world – that’s a fancy way of saying, our lives are chaotic. What a surprise! But in order to function in this world, we often find it desirable to treat it as though it were a lattice of parallel causes. We function, we have fun, and we get stuff done, but we are relying on a model that is only accidentally related to the real world. A better model of an NFL game exists…but you won’t like it. There are approximately 120 plays in a typical NFL game. Each one of those plays is causa sui . Nothing is causally dependent on anything else. There are correlations all over the place, but no causation. Each play is a reaction to everything that’s happened up to that point in the game: the score, the location of the ball, the injuries, the sequence of plays called and the results of those plays, etc. But no event is in any way ‘caused’ by those things. Every play is unique; every play evolves freely and in unanticipated ways. Last night I saw a player go for an interception, miss, fall to the ground, get up, run back and tackle the receiver. Write an algorithm for that! Each event arises in reaction to proximate history. The closest thing (and it’s not even close!) to ‘a cause of Event A’ is the sum of everything that happened in the game prior to A. So, post hoc ergo propter hoc is as good as it gets. Everything causes everything else! In a massively nonlinear system, sequence is the closest we can come to causality. Football is, indeed, a metaphor for life – perhaps that’s why we’re so invested in it. Today’s a new day. You are the OC (offensive coordinator) of your life. What play will you call? How well will you execute? How will you modify your ‘play’ in response to unanticipated events during the day? How will you feel about the result? Do your best, stay safe, and good luck! (Let us know how it all works out.) Previous Next

< Back Who Are the Antichrist, the ‘Man of Lawlessness’, and the Beast? Ian Paul "Clever schemes and novel doctrines won't save us. Stay faithful to the truth of God in Jesus and live with confidence, even in these shaky times." For those engaged in end-times speculation, whether provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, global warming, or war in Ukraine, there has been another rash of speculation about the identity of the Antichrist—that end times personal figure who is now somewhere secretly in the world but who will very soon be revealed. (It is worth noting, for the sake of perspective, that every perceived crisis since at least the 1960s has provoked such speculation. For earlier modern end-times expectation, see the example of the followers of William Miller , who predicted that Jesus would return in 1844.) I am not sure that anything I write here will persuade those committed to end-times schemes, in which the Book of Revelation predicts in detail our age alone (as if we are the most important generation that ever lived), but I think a lot of ordinary readers of the Bible are unsettled by such theories, and are not sure how to respond. Part of the reason for this is that such schemes look so coherent. Here is one, influential, example , part of Dispensational Premillennialism based on the teaching of J N Darby : The man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12 is the Antichrist who will come on the world scene at the beginning of the Day of the Lord. This Day, sometimes called the “end times,” starts after the rapture of the church in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 (cf. 1 Thessalonians 5:1–11 ). It is good to note that the Day of the Lord is not a twenty-four-hour period of time; rather, it is an extended period of time that includes the seven-year tribulation, the return of Christ to put down all rebellion against Him, the 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth, the final defeat of Satan, and the Great White Throne Judgment. This looks very convincing—until you realise that the coherence of this scheme belongs entirely to the writer, and bears little or no relation to what the Bible actually says! The New Testament nowhere identifies the ‘man of lawlessness’ with the ‘antichrist’; it does not describe a ‘rapture’ of the church ( this arises from a poor misreading of 1 Thessalonians 4 ); nowhere does the NT mention a ‘ seven-year tribulation ‘; the 1,000-year reign of Christ is a literal reading of a symbolic text in Rev 20; and the ‘Day of the Lord’ which is everywhere in the NT described as a specific moment at the end of history has now been extended, in this scheme, to a period of more than 1,007 years! One of the key proponents of this kind of scheme in a previous generation, Hal Lindsay (who wrote The Late, Great Planet Earth ) actually admits that this is a ‘hopscotch’ approach to reading the Bible, taking one bit from one place and another from another in order to put together a picture like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But look at the wonderful picture that results, is his defence! So it is worth noting from the outset the basic assumptions of this kind of approach. First, the Bible doesn’t actually make sense as a narrative as it is written; it needs some mysterious key to open up its meaning. Secondly, the truth about the ‘end times’ and Jesus’ return is a great big puzzle, and the truth of what will happen has been missed by most people in history—indeed, it continues to be missed by most people who simply read the Bible. Thirdly, we therefore need an authority figure who will help us put together the different pieces of the otherwise unintelligible text of the Bible, and we then find what we need to know not in reading the Bible, but in reading the writings and teaching of this important person. All these features make this approach perfect for an age of conspiracy theories—and offer a potential publishing bonanza, since all faithful Christians will need to buy their book! The best answer to all this is to return to the text, and what it actually says. So let’s look at the text of the Bible, and the passages about each of these three figures, and see what we can learn. The ‘man of lawlessness’ is only mentioned in one short passage, 2 Thess 2.1–12 . Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendour of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness. There are some things here worth noting. First, Paul clearly thinks that, whoever this mysterious ‘man of lawlessness’ (ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῆς ἀνομίας) is, he is ‘already at work’. This is clear from the fact that he ‘will set himself up in the temple’ which was still standing when Paul was writing (I am convinced by the arguments that 1 and 2 Thessalonians are early, are by Paul and not forgeries, and were written in quick succession to one another); there is no suggestion whatever in the text that ‘the temple’ here is used symbolically to refer to the people of God. Something is currently holding him back—and he is clearly a human figure, and not an angelic or demonic power. Secondly, Paul is referring rather obliquely and in summary form to something that he has explained in more detail to the Thessalonians, and we will never know the full explanation that he has already given. Like many issues in Paul, we wish that he has said more! But we need to face the reality that we do not know any more details, so have to decide whether it is worth speculating. But thirdly, and in answer to the dilemma of our ignorance, we can know the purpose of Paul’s teaching in this area—and it is not in order to encourage speculation or the drawing up of end-times calendars! On this, I think John Piper’s exposition is really helpful: But persecution and suffering are not the only issue at Thessalonica, and Paul, now in chapters 2 and 3, takes his instruction about the second coming to a new level of detail in dealing with this second issue. The issue is that some in the church have ceased to do their ordinary vocational jobs, and started to make a nuisance of themselves as busybodies, mooching off the other Christians, since they’re not earning any money. And evidently, though Paul doesn’t say so explicitly, this delinquency is owing to a kind of hysteria in the community that the day of the Lord is not just near, but is already present. In other words, Paul is saying to them: don’t panic; you have not been left behind; there is no need to speculate; get on with living your lives, working with your hands, instead of dropping everything for the sake of end-times speculation. You can trust God who will ultimately triumph, no matter how bad things appear to be getting. As Martin Luther is believed to have said, ‘If I knew Jesus was coming tomorrow, I would still collect the rent and plant an apple tree’. Or we might say ‘Jesus is coming; look busy!’ It is also worth noting that this is a very minor point in Paul’s teaching about ‘the end times’. In Romans 8, he talks about the longing of the created order to be redeemed; in 1 Cor 15, he offers a long and detailed discussion about the implications of the resurrection at the end; all through his writings there is a constant sense of expectation, and the hope that confidence in the ultimate victory of God in the return of Jesus. And yet, only in this one passage is the ‘man of lawlessness’ mentioned. So it can hardly be claimed to be central to Paul’s teaching. The ‘antichrist’ is only mentioned in four verses in the NT, all in the letters of John: Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. 1 John 2:18 Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Messiah. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son. 1 John 2:22 …but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. 1 John 4:3 Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist. 2 John 7 Again, there are several things worth noticing simply by reading the text carefully. First, although the author does talk about ‘ the antichrist’ at several points, he is also clear that there have and continue to be many such people. Many ‘antichrists’ have already come; every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is of the antichrist, and ‘any such person’ who denies Jesus came in the flesh ‘is the antichrist’. Secondly, the eschatology of these passages is highly ‘realised’—that is, the writer talks as though he and his readers are already in the ‘end times’ when he says several times ‘it is the last hour’. This might look as though there was an expectation that Jesus would return in his lifetime, an expectation that was mistaken. But in fact it matches the language of the Fourth Gospel, which talks about ‘life of the age [to come]’ or ‘eternal life’ as though is starts now, rather than being something we have to wait for. This also agrees with Peter on the day of Pentecost, who quotes Joel 2’s description of the ‘last days’ and says that it is what is happening in the outpouring of the Spirit (‘This is that… Acts 2.16 ). And it agrees with Paul’s description of those who put their faith in Jesus: ‘If anyone is in Christian there is new creation’ ( 2 Cor 5.17 ). Thirdly, the concern here is (once more) nothing to do with ‘end times’ speculation and timetables, but to do with sound doctrine. The writer is encouraging his readers to stay true to the faith. Overall, the letters of John have two concerns: that his audience hold onto the truth about Jesus, and that they live out that truth in lives of love. We also need to note that the description of [the, many] antichrist[s] appears to have little or nothing in common with Paul’s description of the ‘man of lawlessness’ other than the theme of ‘deception’ and the concern that the believers should not be deceived by those who do not tell the truth. This is hardly a concern uniquely related to the ‘end times’…! With mentions in four verses, in two short circular letters, again this is hardly central to the theological concerns of the writers of the NT overall. Lastly, the beast is a central figure in the drama of the Book of Revelation. Although there are anticipations of the figure earlier in the text, the ‘beast from the sea’ is fully introduced in Rev 13 as one of an ‘evil trinity’ along with the dragon/Satan, and the ‘beast from the earth’ ( Rev 13.1 ) which later in the text is described as ‘the false prophet’. The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can make war against it?” ( Rev 13.1–4 ) The beast from the sea look very much like the dragon which is described in chapter 12—and both together combine the features of the four beasts that emerge from the sea in Daniel 7, which many commentators believe symbolise the four great world empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. And far from making this beast future and mysterious, he appears to go to some lengths to help his readers understand who this beast is, by asking them to ‘calculate’ (the Greek term psephizo ) or work out, the number of the beast, which stands for a man’s name. For some time, there has been a strong scholarly consensus that 666 refers to Nero by means of a numerology known as gematria or isopsephism —adding the value of the letters in a word so that every word has a value, and equating two words with equal value. We know that Nero’s name was sometimes spelled with a final -n; ‘Neron Caesar’ when written in Greek, but transliterated into Hebrew letters adds up to 666 (see the image to the right for the sums). There are several significant pieces of supporting evidence for this. First, when you write the Greek for ‘beast’, therion, in Hebrew letters, you also arrive at 666, making it clear that 666 is the number of ‘the beast’. Secondly, when you do the same with ‘angel’ in Rev 21, you get the number 144. Third, an early manuscript from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt corrects 666 to 616, which you would do if you understood the gematria, but thought that ‘Nero’ should be spelled without the final n. (There isn’t really any other plausible explanation for why this variant should arise.) This ‘beast’ is identified with neither the ‘man of lawlessness’ in Paul nor the ‘antichrist’ in John, and in fact neither of these terms occur anywhere in Revelation. So where does this all get us? First, it is clear that the three terms belong to quite different traditions within the NT, and none of these three traditions attempts to make any specific connections with the others in terms of language—despite the fact that the later writers (of the Johannine letters and of the Book of Revelation) almost certainly knew Paul’s writings. But it is also clear that there is some kind of connection, particularly since the concern of all three writers appears to be to encourage his readers to stand firm in the truth of the apostolic teaching in the face of pressures from outside the Jesus community to renounce faith and pressures from within to distort the truth about Jesus. Here, Piper makes an interesting observation, but I think then reaches the wrong conclusion from it: Therefore, the man of lawlessness will be unparalleled in his ability to deceive, as 2 Thessalonians 2:10 says, “with all wicked deception for those who are perishing.” It really could be “in all deception of unrighteousness,” because we are going to see in just a moment that the way he deceives is by making unrighteousness seem pleasurable. (Notice how the word adikia is repeated in verses 10 and 12.) Again, I would argue, Paul is unpacking the prophecies made by Jesus. Jesus said, Then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. . . . For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. . . . So, if they say to you, “Look, he [one person!] is in the wilderness,” do not go out. If they say, “Look, he is in the inner rooms,” do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. ( Matthew 24:21 , 24 , 26–27 ) At the close of this climactic period of lawlessness and a great deception led by a person, Paul is saying, the coming of the Son of Man will be unmistakable. Like lightning flashing from horizon to horizon. Piper is noting the connections between Paul’s language in 2 Thess and Jesus’ teaching in the first half Matt 24. But what he does not notice is that Jesus’ teaching here is not about the distant (for him) future and a remote ‘end times’ that we might be living in, but what the disciples he is teaching will face in their lifetime . He makes this crystal clear by stating emphatically: Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. ( Matt 24.34 ). It is only in the second half of the chapter, from Matt 24.36 , that Jesus turns his attention to issues around ‘the end of the age’. There are connections too between Paul’s discussion of the man of lawlessness, who will ‘use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie’ ( 2 Thess 2.9 ) and the ‘signs and wonders’ performed by the second beast on behalf of the first in Rev 13.13–14 , but this is a description of magical tricks and propaganda performed by Roman rulers of which we have documentary evidence. In other words, both Paul and John are writing about things already happening in the world of their readers. The concern of all these texts is to encourage their readers: don’t be deceived by clever schemes and novel doctrines; don’t get caught up in ‘end-times’ speculation; stay faithful to the truth that God came to us in Jesus, and has made our salvation secure in him; and continue to live lives of industry, generosity and grace as you wait with confidence for his return in a world that is looking very shaky. We need the same encouragement! To find out more about what the NT says about eschatology, the end of the world, and living in hope, you might be interested in my Grove booklet on Kingdom, Hope and the End of the World . To find out more about how to read the Book of Revelation, see my Grove booklet or my commentary on Revelation in IVP’s Tyndale series . The image at the top is a detail of The Deeds of Antichrist by Luca Signorelli (1505). Published previously. This is a republished blog in full agreement with www.psephizo.com , the official website of autor Ian Paul. Ian Paul is a theologian, author, speaker, and academic consultant. He serves as Adjunct Professor for Fuller Theological Seminary ; Associate Minister for St Nic's, Nottingham , and Managing Editor for Grove Books . He is member of General Synod, a Mac user, and a chocoholic. He tweets at @psephizo . For a complete list of books he has either written or contributed to, go to https://www.psephizo.com/publications/ . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

Get paid to write. Calling all writers with critical thoughts and ideas about theology, science, philosophy, Christian educacation, culture, and prayer. Aletheia Today is online magazine where science, theology, and philosophy converge. Submission Guidelines Write for us! As we step into a new year, Aletheia Today is thrilled to announce our refreshed publication schedule for 2025! Our new approach allows us to better align our content with the ancient seasonal celebrations we honor. Here’s what’s coming up: February 1 – “Groundhog Day”: Revisit overlooked “Hidden Gems” from AT’s archives. April 1 – “Resurrection” - Life…it’s what’s happening! June 1 – “Summer” - The seeds are sown; we await the harvest. August 1 – “Lammas” - First harvest, first fruits, Transubstantiation, Eucharist. October 1 – “Harvest” - Second harvest, The Kingdom of God. Football. December 1 – “Yule” - Celebrate the triumph of light over darkness. We’re excited about the opportunities this schedule creates for deeper collaboration with independent contributors and more focused content for our readers. Thank you for being part of this journey as we continue to explore the intersection philosophy, theology and science. Specs for All Submissions: All completed work must be submitted through the online submissions form. (See link below.) All submissions must include a title and credited image. All submissions must include a headshot and a short (100 words or less) author bio with social handles. All work must be original. We will republish the author's previously published essays with credit to and permission from the original publication only. We will not use any images without a credit. Submission Due Dates: We accept unsolicited submissions throughout the year. Writers’ Comp (paid for original work only, not republications): For feature length articles and short stories, $250 per published article or short story plus a $100 bonus once the author’s work has reached 100 unique views. For original prayers and poems, $100 per published piece plus a $50 bonus once the author’s work has reached 100 unique views. For questions about submissions, email editor@aletheiatoday.com . Feel free, but not required, to email us a proposal, pitch, or query to the email address above prior to submitting your completed work. To becomes an AT Contributor, submit your work online; click here .

“Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” < Back Life is a Movie David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” Have you ever been to the movies? Nothing’s better than a high-speed car chase projected on the big screen ( French Connection )…unless you prefer, like me, to watch Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory eating dinner in a fancy Manhattan restaurant for two hours ( My Dinner with Andre ). Either way, you experience motion as continuous…just like in real life. But that’s an illusion. In fact, you are seeing 2,000,000 static ‘frames’, uniquely ordered and sequentially displayed at a pace that creates the impression of continuous motion. You’ve just paid $18 for the privilege of being fooled. Real life isn’t like that at all… …Is it? What if the ‘continuous motion’ we seem to experience IRL is itself a cinematic illusion? What if the world actually consists of discrete events, somehow ‘edited’ into the unique order that we call spacetime? 2,000,000 distinct frames can be ordered in an unimaginable variety of sequences, only one of which corresponds perfectly to what we recognize as RL. According to Stephen Hawking, RL tracks the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it arranges events along a scale that reflects a steady increase in entropy. The events themselves are sui generis , free; the arrangement of those events in spacetime is not. So, life’s not a beach after all; it’s a movie ! And a ‘film’ is nothing but its 2,000,000 frames, presented at standard speed, in a unique order. The writing, acting, directing, staging, etc. are only relevant in so far as they are manifest in the frames. The director breaks up the continuous motion of ‘real life’ into discrete frames; the projectionist reintegrates those frames to generate the illusion of continuous motion on the screen. Over the millennia, a handful of philosophers have questioned this ‘spacetime centric’ model of reality: Parmenides, Zeno, Democritus, Whitehead, and Severino come to mind. According to them, it is…or it is not! If it is, it’s a matter of fact, an ‘actual entity’. If it’s not, it’s not. Seems straightforward enough, yet almost no one believes it. Instead, we sign on to the Heraclitan fallacy that everything is in the process of becoming, i.e., coming to be…and coming not to be. Unlike Hamlet, Heraclitans say, “To be is not to be.” Everything that is…also is not. But they do not hold that everything that is not…is. Therefore, there will come a time when the universe will be empty and once empty, always empty. This too is Nihilism. Alessandro Carrera (b. 1954), writes about “the pervasive nihilism of a civilization embracing the unquestioned belief that ‘all things must pass’.” Emanuele Severino (b. 1929), adds: “Being is, while Nothing is not…Being is that which is opposed to Nothing, it is this very opposing.” If Severino is right, Being itself is sui generis : Bootstrapping! It creates itself by not being not-being. A = ~(~A). We think of ‘nothing’ as the negation of ‘being’, but Severino suggests that we have things upside down: Etre is the negation of Neant . The poet and theologian, John Donne (d. 1631), reflected: “I am re-begot of absence, darkness, death: things that are not…” He anticipated Sartre (d. 1980): “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.” Since all Being is good (Augustine et al.), not-being is the absence of good, i.e., evil. Then “deliver us from evil” is a primal scream…for Being! Nihilism is the worship of time and, synonymously (Hawking), of entropy, disorder. “Now I am become time, the destroyer of worlds. ( Bhagavad-Gita ) Now I am become death...” (Robert Oppenheimer) Time = entropy = death. Et voilà , the true identity of ‘Satan’ is revealed; he is entropy, he is death, he is disorder, he is time itself. Nihilism and Satanism are one and the same! We live with the fear of death, of nothingness. In Carrera’s view, Nihilism is despair and therefore the ultimate, unforgivable sin, a sin against the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’ ( Nicene Creed ): “Greek philosophy (after Parmenides)…engenders the most dreadful and terrifying meaning of death, that of going into nothingness.” Sometimes Christianity can seem convoluted. I get that! But not this time. This is a case of Christianity being crystal: non-being = evil → despair = sin…a vicious cycle. We are mesmerized by time. Generation and decay link Past and Future: what’s ‘not still’ and what’s ‘still not’. But we’re missing what-is, we’re missing Presence. In the immortal words of Walter Mondale (and Wendy’s ), “Where’s the beef?” Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping. Neither Past nor Future exist. Only the Present is. So what of generation and decay? Well, can you construct a model of generation or decay that does not include a reference to the non-existent Past or Future? Then to base an ontology, like Heraclitus, on generation and decay would be to ground what is on what is not. Generation and decay are spatiotemporal concepts; they have no meaning in the context of the eternal Present. The thing itself, on the other hand, exists only in the Present. What is, is…period! The Past and the Future, by definition, both consist solely of what is not: not yet, not still. The Present does not exist ‘between’ Past and Future; it does not exist on the timeline at all. Instead, it exists entirely outside of time. It is a-temporal…‘eternal’. ‘Eternity’ and ‘Presence’ are denotatively synonymous and entirely different from Immortality. In fact, eternity (no time) and immortality (infinite time) are antonyms, even though they are often used interchangeably in ordinary discourse. The Present is where the thing itself lives. In Kant’s terms, noumena are Present, phenomena are traces of the Past, images of the Future. Qualia are ways in which the Present ‘feels’ the past and ‘projects’ the future. Qualia are inherited; they are never created. Our job is, quite literally, to rearrange the deck chairs (qualia) on The Titanic . Alessandro Carrera: “Every slice of reality is , and therefore is permanently, since whatever is cannot come into being or cease to be.” “Go ask Alice!” There is the World and then there is the Looking-glass World. That’s space. The mirror is the limit of both worlds, but it is part of neither world. Now rotate 90° off of the real number line. That’s time, represented mathematically as an ‘imaginary number’ (i). The Present is the mirror (membrane) separating and connecting the Past and the Future. But as Alice knows, everything that happens, happens in the mirror. Therefore, a thing either is – or is not. It does not come to be or cease to be. It either is, whole and entire, or it isn’t. Coming to be and ceasing to be happened in time but have nothing to do with the thing-itself which happens only in the Present. This is not to say that actual entities are static. In fact, they are pure processes; it’s just that the process is a-temporal, outside of time. Along with Yahweh (Exodus 3:14), every actual entity ‘asserts’ “I am”. Mark 12: 26 – 27: “…‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living…” From God’s perspective, there are only ‘actual entities’, and all actual entities are Present. Unfortunately, we have come to accept the coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be of entities as reality rather than projection/abstraction. We view the thing itself as a ‘projection of’ or an ‘abstraction from’ the process of becoming and decaying, not the other way around. In our ‘philosophy’, what is not is what is. No wonder; we live in the age of Nihilism. While understanding Being in terms of Presence rather than Spacetime has not been popular in recent centuries, it is not at all new. 2500 years ago, Parmenides of Elea, often called both the ‘father of Western science’ and the ‘father of Western philosophy’, wrote an enigmatic poem called On Nature . The poem consists of three parts: a brief Prologue, the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Appearance” ( Doxa ). Regarding the Way of Truth, he wrote: “ 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...Whence did it grow? Not from what is not…It must be completely, or not at all… How could what-is be in the future, and how could it come to be? For if it came to be, it is not… Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of… Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike…it is full of what-is … It is not right for what-is to be incomplete. For it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything.” Regarding the Way of Appearance: “It has been named all things that mortals have established, trusting them to be true: to come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color. Thus, according to belief, these things were born and now are, and hereafter, having grown from this, they will come to an end. And for each of these, did men establish a distinctive name?" The simplest, and probably least accurate, analogy is the mirror (above). A better metaphor treats Doxa (Spacetime) as a holographic projection of Aletheia (Presence). Perhaps even better, we might think of Doxa as the rainbow projected from an apparently featureless prism. Plato and Aristotle moved philosophy away from Parmenides’ vision, but Christianity restored it. We find a familiar affirmation of the Christian rediscovery of Parmenides and the other Eleatic philosophers (e.g., Zeno) in the Lord’s Prayer: “…on earth as it is in heaven.” Our true being is not in spacetime, but in Eternity. To be (earth) is to be eternal (heaven). A movie passes before our eyes; it is an illusion. Each of the 2,000,000 frames is eternal in the sense that it lives forever in the medium in a way that is not dependent on the projector. Likewise, we live our lives in spacetime; it is an illusion. Each event is eternal in a way that is not dependent on Past or Future. 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 Spring 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