< Back God David Cowles Oct 12, 2021 The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. Consider music (or art or literature). When we say that Beethoven ‘created’ his 9th Symphony, we understand that Beethoven retains no control over his ‘creation’. It now belongs to its conductors, musicians, audience and critics. Is God any less of a Creator than Beethoven? However, unlike Beethoven, God may still be able to interact with his creation, not in his role as creator, but in his role as comrade-in-arms. In Marxist terms, God is the ultimate ‘fellow traveler’. According to 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, every event impacts God’s ‘Consequent Nature’ while that same ‘Consequent Nature’ influences every event. In Biblical Judaism, this is represented in the constant dialogue between God and the Patriarchs, Moses and the Prophets. In Christianity it is represented in the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. In Hasidic Judaism, it is represented in the Shekinah (sparks of divinity resident in every actual entity, i.e. event or object). In contract to Determinism and Deism, Judeo-Christian theology allows God to play an active role in the unfolding of history and the evolution of the cosmos without compromising in any way the ultimate freedom of that cosmos. 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 Candelamas David Cowles Feb 2, 2022 Today is the feast of Candlemas, aka Groundhog Day. Candlemas is a Christian holiday commemorating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple. In accordance with Leviticus 12, it falls on February 2nd, which is also final day of the Christmas–Epiphany season. In some countries, Christians don’t remove their Christmas decorations until the day after Candlemas. Today is the feast of Candlemas, aka Groundhog Day. Candlemas is a Christian holiday commemorating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple. In accordance with Leviticus 12, it falls on February 2nd, which is also final day of the Christmas–Epiphany season. In some countries, Christians don’t remove their Christmas decorations until the day after Candlemas. Many Christians bring their candles to their local church on Candlemas, where they are blessed and then used for the rest of the year; these blessed candles serve as a symbol of Jesus Christ, the ‘Light of the World’. Candlemas falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. It represents the ‘turning of the tide’, the end of the quarter of darkness (11/1 – 2/1 in the Northern Hemisphere) and the beginning of the return of light. But long before the advent of Christianity, ancient societies celebrated this same ‘return of light’. In fact, ancient cultures celebrated all 4 days of the year that fall between the two solstices and the two equinoxes (2/2, 5/1, 8/1, 11/1) as well as the solstices and equinoxes themselves. It is tempting to think of the solstices and the equinoxes as anchor points on the calendar, tokens of stability and permanence in the universe; if so, then the interstitial days might represent the ubiquity of change, the process of becoming. But this is mere conjecture. In any event, later Western culture ‘Christianized’ 3 of the 4 interstitial days: 2/2 as Candlemas, 5/1 as May Day, and 11/1 as All Saints Day. But the pagan celebrations on or near those dates did not disappear (e.g., Halloween and Groundhog Day). For a thorough review of pre- and post-Christian celebrations of May Day, check out www.aletheiatoday/may-day). Without any religious associations or connotations, our modern Groundhog Day is a secular celebration of Candlemas. It singles out 2/2 as a ‘turning point’. If the Groundhog (or other designated animal such as the badger or the bear in German culture) does not see its shadow (cloudy day), then the promise of Candlemas is fulfilled, and we may look forward to an early spring. But if the groundhog sees his shadow (clear day), we must wait 6 more weeks for the end of winter. In either event, however, daylight time in the Northern Hemisphere lasts longer and longer every day, right through the Spring Equinox and up to the Summer Solstice. 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 Electricity “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world. From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception. Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour? The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable. In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come? Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable. We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world. David Cowles Share Previous Next

< Back Alphabet David Cowles “Reciting the alphabet is like peeling layers off of a prize-winning red onion.” We all know the letters A, B, and C - they sponsor episodes of Sesame Street . We learned ‘ABC’ as the beginning of an alphabet; but later we generalized the moniker to apply to any 3 distinct ‘states of affairs’ that follow one another in an inexorable sequence, A → B → C. We reduced that pattern to a song, making it possible for very young children to learn the entire alphabet. Using the same technique, I was able to teach the ancient Greek alphabet to one of my grandchildren when she was no older than 7. On the other hand, imagine that a police officer pulls you over on suspicion of DUI. He asks you to recite the alphabet and you’re happy to oblige; but a few letters in, he stops you, “No, I want you to recite the letters randomly, making sure that you include each letter once and only once and that no two adjacent letters are in alphabetical order.” Sounds impossible but actually it’s at least theoretically doable, but you’d need to fit the elements into a non-alphabetic pattern. For example, “A C B E D”. No? Ok, prepare to kiss your DL goodbye, even if you haven’t had a drop of alcohol in 20 years. Imagine our alphabet as 26 autonomous, unconnected symbols distributed randomly across a semantic plane. For the most part, that’s what an alphabet is; but we have transformed it into something quite different by giving it an invariant linear order: A → B → C → … Z. As though somehow H belongs after G. The purpose of an alphabet is to enable the formation of words that can then be ordered to communicate meaning. Encumbering those letters with any extraneous semantic baggage reduces their symbolic power by many orders of magnitude. Yet we do it! We have imposed an utterly capricious order on an inherently disordered string of symbols. After all, the letters of the modern English alphabet have no semantic connection to one another; do they? Sidebar : The much respected (here) science and practice of Kabbalah is based on precisely opposite assumptions. In Kabbalah, letters are laden with meaning per se and ‘order is everything’. An adept can literally read the story of the universe by reciting the Hebrew alphabet. I have argued (above) that letters and their arrangement in an alphabet should have no intrinsic meaning whatsoever; Kabbalah argues that all meaning resides in that alphabet. Can it be that we are both right? Idea : If we allowed every letter in an alphabet to associate freely with every other letter in that alphabet, how many letters would we need to express all the information contained in all earth’s written words? The difference is a measure of ‘semantic waste’ on a base 26 log scale. We create on our own the sense that A somehow ‘leads’ to B, that B is somehow ‘implicit’ in A. Reciting the alphabet is like peeling layers off of a prize winning red onion. Each layer corresponds to a letter, embodied in a prior letter and embodying a subsequent letter. We are born with the task of constructing a Mappa Mundi (world map), a logos incorporating the “signs of all things we are here to read” (James Joyce). Today, just two such maps are culturally pervasive. Logic links its elements via a daisy-chain of deductions. Science does the same based on the repeatability of experimental results. Note the 90° shift in orientation. Logic links elements horizontally, sequentially; science links elements vertically, hierarchically. Two different maps generated by two unrelated algorithms; they are like the various projections we use to create our maps of the world. Perhaps then we may be forgiven for imagining a deeper resemblance, not to say an identity, between our two logoi . Strange bedfellows, these! Logic is data-agnostic while Science is data-driven. Logic (deducibility) confers validity on reason; Science (repeatability) confers validity on observation. Logic is atemporal; Science presupposes, at least ab initio , a spatiotemporal continuum. (Therefore, ‘true science’ was not possible before calculus.) But something’s missing! It’s called Real Life . IRL, nothing can be deduced, nothing can be repeated! Our two ‘maps’ have no organic relationship with the ‘territories’ they represent. The stuff of Logic and Science is identity ; the stuff of Real Life is distinction . IRL, the closest we can get to identity is congruence: “My son looks just like George Clooney.” A = B is an oxymoron IRL. Scale is the new ‘spacetime’. RL is the search for scale invariant patterns (fractals) to replace spacetime extension and logic gates. Like → Like. RL is much closer to magic than it is to science. RL relies on scale to order experience. For example, most high school students notice congruent elements in Copernicus’ model of the solar system and Bohr’s model of the atom. William Blake saw deeper patterns; ultimately, he saw ‘a world in a grain of sand’ and ‘eternity in an hour’. For Blake, everything is congruent with everything else. Every part of every whole is congruent with the whole itself. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation lends additional structure to Blake’s insight. One ‘part’ ( Cristos ) is perfectly congruent with the ‘whole’ ( Theos ); all other parts ( onta ) are imperfectly congruent with both. Congruence is commutative. Cosmos is what lies between Theos and Cristos . Christmas celebrates ‘Emmanuel, God with us’, the mind bending fact that the entirety (YHWH) is incarnate in one of its quantum elements (Christ). Christ and YHWH are perfectly congruent: “The father and I are one.” (John 10:30) As above, so below: the Star of David. The Lord’s Prayer: “On earth as it is in heaven.” Ask a naïve realist to make a model of A, B, C, and you might be handed a beaded necklace with three larger beads separated from one another by two smaller beads. Each large bead represents a distinct event and occupies a region on the timeline, i.e. a duration. A, B, C means A ≠ B ≠ C. Therefore, in the cosmology of naïve realism there must be a region on the timeline where A is no longer A and B is not yet B; there must be a ‘region of transition’: ~A ᴜ ~B. But following that logic, it makes no sense to posit ~A ᴜ ~B as a ‘region’ from which B rises, unheralded. That is the currency of the miraculous, not the real. On the other hand, from the perspective of Process Philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead), ~A ᴜ ~B rises from oxymoron to tautology. According to Whitehead, et al., every B originates as a rejection of an A - a rejection that nonetheless conserves and propagates certain aspects A in the concrescence of B. B has the power to line item veto any aspect of A. ~A ᴜ ~B corresponds to Whitehead’s ‘creativity’, the crucible of unrest at the core of Being that perpetuates the primal act of creation. According to this school, God did not so much ‘create the Universe’ as he implanted ‘creativity’ in the Universe. A → B → C suggests sequence, temporal as well as logical. Where the sequence is temporal (science), we assume that A, B, and C each have duration, i.e., they each occupy a certain region on the timeline. Likewise, the transition states, call them x and y, that separate A from B and B from C will also have duration, however minimal; they too occupy a certain ‘region’. So we can rewrite our fundamental formula as ‘A x B y C’, where A, B, C, x, and y all occupy regions on the timeline. But as you can see, we’ve been forced to infect our ontology with a bunch of dubious and in any event superfluous assumptions (e.g., that x and y are real entities). So, let’s start over. A → B. There is no reason to suppose that there is a gap in time between the two states. Asking how long it takes A to transition into B is like asking how long it takes for an electron at one energy level to ‘transition’ to another energy level: it’s not called a quantum leap for nothing. It does not have a temporal dimension. Instead of hypothesizing regions of transition, x and y, we may just as well assume that A and B and B and C are tangent (‘ABC’). The state of A is felt by every point in A, but one point of A also belongs to B. Therefore, any change in the state of A would be instantaneously reflected in the state of B and so on. Therefore, of course, any change in the state of A would also be instantaneously reflected in the state of C…and in the state of Z. The naïve realist in all of us understands the ‘tangency’ of A and B (and Z) in terms of a chain mediated by some sort of physical proximity, but it need not be so. As John Bell proved (1964), and Alan Aspect demonstrated, A and B may be on opposite sides of the universe and still function as ‘tangent’, though we say they are ‘entangled’ to distinguish this from ‘geographic’ tangency. Whatever you chose to call it, a change in the state of A is instantaneously reflected in the state of B…and of Z. In this model, events are like gears. In some configurations, A and B both move clockwise; in other configurations, one moves clockwise, the other counterclockwise. According to this model, the universe is a fabric of entangled particles. Spacetime represents a tear in that fabric, the introduction of an arbitrary interval between events; ‘c’ is the measure of the extent of that tear. Hassidic Jews understand their function as restorative, Christians as redemptive, Secularists as entropic. Call it what you will, the rip in the fabric that was Big Bang is ‘under repair’. The Kingdom of God will be restored pristine, but we’ll experience that restoration as Heat Death . 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. Previous Next

< Back Christology Without Christ? David Cowles Feb 14, 2023 “But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘Jesus is just all right with me,’ but what if he’s not all right with you?” In ATM Issue #1 (6/1/2022), we presented a Christology that dates back to the very early days of the Church. Paul cites it in his Letter to Colossians (1: 15 – 20): “He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation , for in him all things were created… All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together … He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" We argued that this early Christology became the pattern for future Christologies, and in turn, future theologies and cosmologies. This is important because it substantiates Christianity’s claim to be apostolic , i.e., directly descended from the Apostles themselves. Most Christians today believe more or less exactly what Christians believed c. 50 CE. Can you think of any other subject on which a significant portion of the Western World believes today what it believed 2000 years ago? But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, “Jesus is just all right with me,” but what if he’s not all right with you? Can Colossians still provide a valid cosmological framework for folks who don’t follow Jesus, or even believe in God? The answer is, “Yes!” (Or at least that’s what I’m about to argue.) Jewish and Roman Catholic thinking has consistently affirmed a role for observation and reason in the discovery of truth. While Revelation is the crown jewel of gnosis , observation and reason by themselves can still lead someone to a reasonable facsimile of Aletheia (truth). Judeo-Christianity is an empirical religious tradition (vs. a magical one). In a recent Thoughts While Shaving, we cited Pope Benedict’s claim that faith and reason are symbiotic, that neither is valid without the other. In that spirit then, can the theological language of the Colossian’s text (above) be ‘translated’ into a secularized equivalent and still deliver a sufficient , and perhaps even necessary , cosmology for our 21 st century? Let’s start with three of the fundamental problems of philosophy: How is it that there is a world at all? (“something rather than nothing”) How is it that the world is both One ( uni verse) and Many (entities)? How is it that the world is both stable (permanence) and in flux (change)? Every important Western philosopher has taken a swing at this three-headed piñata… generally with no more success than most children have at their birthday parties. From Parmenides and Heraclitus through Whitehead and Sartre, these problems have been center stage; and any cosmology worth the toner it’s printed with has to address these problems. Borrowing from a liturgical hymn, Paul’s “Christ”, an object of worship for Christians, also functions as a philosophical concept. Neither I nor Paul claims to have proven anything about the historical Jesus or the cosmological Christ. For Christians, the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of Jesus is that proof. What Paul has done is to show that ‘Christ’ offers a sufficient solution to the 3 fundamental problems of cosmology listed above, i.e., that it adequately accounts for the phenomena we call ‘world’. The Christ Hypothesis accounts for the world as we experience it: that it is, that it is both one and many, that is both stable and in flux. To show this, we return to the cosmological elements, presented by Paul in the Letter to the Colossians , but this time desacralized : “Our World is a manifestation (the phenomenal ‘image’) of what is otherwise unmanifest (noumenon). The primal manifestation (‘world as world’) precedes (ontologically if not empirically) all contingent manifestations (‘things as things’) because it is through that primal manifestation, and for it, that things come to be and hold together. This primal manifestation is the origin of all things; it lends ‘being’ to each thing and reconciles for itself everything that is.” English please : “The World exists for its own sake, as the manifestation of Being itself. The World is one, but it is populated by many entities. Those entities come to be in the World for the sake of the World. They immediately cohere and ultimately harmonize, so that ‘world’ (multiplicity) may be World (unity).” Good enough? If I’ve done my job, I’ve convinced you that the Christ Hypothesis is sufficient to account for the ‘world’ as we experience it. Believe it or not, as you see fit. But have I also proved that it is necessary , i.e., that there is no other way to account for the ‘world’ as it is? Well, for that I’ll have to defer to you: Christology 101 (6/1/22) closed with a challenge: Can anyone come up with a model that adequately accounts for the key features of the empirical ‘world’ but that cannot be mapped onto the ‘Christ model’ as presented by Paul in Colossians ? Nine months later, no one has taken me up on that challenge. How about now ? How about you ? (If we publish your response, you’ll be compensated as for any other article we publish. Find our writer's specs here. ) Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

What is the most important book in the Old Testament (OT)? That’s easy: The Book of Job. But s almost universally misunderstood. Aletheia Today is the magazine for believers in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together. The Book of Job August 1, 2026 Issue What is the most important book in the Old Testament (OT)? Genesis for cosmology, Exodus for history, Leviticus for law, Joshua and Judges for politics, Psalms for poetry, Ecclesiastes for philosophy, Isaiah for polemics. But what’s the most important? That’s easy: The Book of Job. “Who is God? Who am I? Who is God in relation to the World, who am I in relation to God, and who am I in relation to the World?” If any of these questions has ever occurred to you, Job is your book! Job is equally relevant to Judaism and Christianity and the story appears independently in the Koran and other Mid-Eastern sources. The book contains some of the oldest texts in all of Scripture and includes material in 6 different languages. Plus, it is the foundational text for Ecotheology (the Green movement). Oh and one last thing: The Book of Job is almost universally misunderstood. Happy reading. The Riddle of Job For a good all-round introduction The Comedy of Job For an analysis of Job’s comic elements: Job versus God: The Trial of Epoch For a ‘verbatim transcript’ of Job v. God (I wonder who has the movie rights): Job & the Prime Directive For the relevance of Job in the age of Space Travel: Job is My Superhero And for our young (and young at heart) readers: Job and the Problem of Evil Job is usually understood as a meditation on the Problem of Evil; it isn’t: AI, Justice and Job Can Job guide AI to support the value of Justice! Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance Shalvi Waldman "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back What Are Farm Animals Thinking? David Grimm New research is revealing surprising complexity in the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. You’d never mistake a goat for a dog, but on an unseasonably warm afternoon in early September, I almost do. I’m in a red-brick barn in northern Germany, trying to keep my sanity amid some of the most unholy noises I’ve ever heard. Sixty Nigerian dwarf goats are taking turns crashing their horns against wooden stalls while unleashing a cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails that make it nearly impossible to hold a conversation. Then, amid the chaos, something remarkable happens. One of the animals raises her head over her enclosure and gazes pensively at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd, rectangular pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection. It’s a look we see in other humans, in our pets, and in our primate relatives. But not in animals raised for food. Or maybe we just haven’t been looking hard enough. That’s the core idea here at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. On a campus that looks like a cross between a farm and a small research institute—with low-rise buildings nestled among pastures, stables, and the occasional dung pile—scientists are probing the mental and emotional lives of animals we’ve lived with for thousands of years, yet, from a cognitive perspective, know almost nothing about. To read the rest of this article for free, click here. David Grimm is the Online News Editor of Science . He also writes for the magazine, where he covers animal welfare, animal rights, and the science of cats and dogs. He received a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry and cell biology from the University of California, San Diego, and a Ph.D. in genetics from Yale University. Grimm is the winner of the 2010 Animal Reporting Award from the National Press Club. In 2009, one of his stories for Science , "The Mushroom Cloud's Silver Lining," was published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 . His writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Washington Post , Slate , BuzzFeed , and a variety of other publications. He teaches science journalism at Johns Hopkins University. Grimm is the author of Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs , which traces the evolution of pets from wild animals to members of the family. Click above to return to Winter 2024. Previous Next

< Back Beyond Pascal's Wager “Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we?” David Cowles A Hasidic folk tale, possibly dating back to the Baal Shem Tov himself, tells of a certain Rabbi on his way home from Schule who comes across an elderly widow crawling on her hands and knees under a streetlamp. Not wanting to play the part of passer-by in some future production of The Good Samaritan and eager to perform one last mitzvah before going to bed for the night, the Rabbi offers to assist. "I've lost my shiny penny, the only thing I have left in the world," the widow wails. "And is this where you lost it?" the Rabbi inquires innocently. "No," she replies. "I lost it over there." The quizzical Rabbi, still hoping to be helpful, asks, "Then why are you looking for it here?" "Because the light is better...," the exasperated widow sighs as she continues her search. But under her breath, she mutters with all the derision she can muster, "... Obviously!" This story is often presented as a commentary on the widow's folly, but in fact, the widow is the hero of the story. She defies conventional wisdom. Why look for a lost penny in pitch darkness where there's no hope of finding anything? Pennies can be funny; they have a tendency to bounce and roll. They often end up in the places you'd least expect to find them. Possibly, the widow's penny rolled under the lamp, probably it did not. In any event, it would make no sense to look for it anywhere else because, even if it were there, we would have zero chance of finding it. Let’s recap. It is unlikely that the woman and the Rabbi, now both on hands and knees, will find the penny under the streetlamp; but it’s possible. On the other hand, were they to look in the probability-rich darkness, they would have no chance whatsoever of finding the coin. Real searching is not just idle gazing; searching presupposes a target and a method of getting to that target. I’m making myself a bowl of cereal and I need milk. I open the refrigerator door and look in…for several seconds; then I call out, as we all knew I would, “Are we out of milk?” At which point, my wife gets off the couch, walks to the fridge and pulls out a brand new, unopened half gallon. I gazed; she searched. We look for rainbows; we search for intelligent life…extra-terrestrial and otherwise. This story reminds me of ‘Pascal's Wager’ (1650 CE). Faced with the God Question , the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, employed a forerunner of what is today called ‘Game Theory’. Conceptually, Pascal divided a sheet of paper into four quadrants. Across the top of the page, he wrote, “I believe that God exists;” down the left-hand margin, he wrote, “God does exist.” Then he filled it in: (N/N), (N/Y), (Y/N) and (Y/Y). Got it? Of course not. Would it be easier to understand if we expressed it in the language of computers, i.e., binary numbers? (0/0), (0/1), (1/0) and (1/1). No? Ok then, (0*0), (0*1), (1*0), (1*1). Now? Ok! Pascal looked at the ‘God Question’ hyper-objectively . He reasoned that one of four things must be true: (1) I do not believe that God exists, and he doesn’t; (2) I do not believe that God exists, but he does; (3) I believe that God exists, but he doesn’t; (4) I believe that God exists, and he does. Flash back : I’m standing at the craps table ( Bellagio , Las Vegas) and I’m holding one $25 chip in my hand. It’s all I have left after a week of heavy drinking and gourmet dining. This is my very last chance to recoup. The ‘felt’ offers me more than a dozen possible wagers, but I need to know my best bet, objectively speaking. Where do I put my last $25 to give myself the best chance of winning? (It’s not as easy as it looks. Different bets come with different odds but also with different payouts.) Back home : (Don’t ask me what happened in Vegas, that stays in Vegas .) I’m still looking to optimize my chances, but this time I’m playing a different game; it’s called the Game of Eternal Life . My options: God does not exist, and I never thought he did: Winner! I believed in God but, as it turns out, I was wrong: Loooser! I did not believe in God, but I was wrong; God does exist: Loooser! God exists and I knew it all along: Winner! Defining Terms - Belief in this context does not refer merely to our intellectual assent to a certain proposition; we are not talking about some sort of creedal affirmation here. Far from it! Believing X means living life as if X were true. So, if you choose one of the “I believe that God exists” options, you are committing yourself, not just to the recitation of a creed but to the adoption of a lifestyle, even if it turns out that you’ve guessed wrong. How about God ? An old man in a white robe living on a cloud? Maybe…but probably not. Then, what does it mean to say, “I believe in God?” What I call the God Hypothesis runs something like this: (A) an objective universe, more or less consistent with experience, exists, and embodies or reflects values that transcend* it; and (B) those values are normative for the way I live my life and the way I live my life, ‘makes a difference’: somewhere, somehow, on some level. *A value is transcendent if and only if it is valid throughout the universe, in all places, at all times, regardless of circumstances, and would be valid in any possible universe (don’t leave home without it) and would still be valid even if there was no universe to reflect or embody it. And finally, universe . Here we must make a distinction. By ‘universe’, I mean what science means: the sum of all events that occur relative to me in spacetime. But we also need to talk about universe, an entity in its own right, not just the totalization of other entities. Everything that happens in the universe happens in spacetime; but universe itself does not. Universe per se transcends spacetime. Nothing limits it. Nothing is beyond it. Therefore, in its own way, it is infinite and eternal. Payoff : So, two winners, two losers. I should break even over time, right? I guess it all comes down to a coin toss after all, which is what I thought in the first place. But not so fast: Remember, different bets come with different payouts. Option (1), “God does not exist, and I never thought he did”, is a winner… Cue confetti! What’s my payout? Zero… Did you just say, “Zero?” What a rip-off! I suppose I have the satisfaction of knowing that 75 years of depression and anxiety have been warranted…but that still leaves me $2.95 short of a Grande at Starbucks. Cold comfort on a winter’s morning. Options (2) and (3) are obvious losers, so “no payout for me – you loooser!” That leaves option (4). Like option (1), (4) is a winner…but this time, hold the confetti until we check the payoff. I’m expecting the dealer to put a few chips down in front of me (I’m hoping for black ones). Instead, he hands me a sheaf of papers. What the heck? – OMG, it’s the deed to the casino. The Bellagio . I’ll confess I’ve always wanted to own the Bellagio , but that’s not this. This isn’t the deed to the Bellagio …it’s the deed to the entire Universe: “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” Who needs confetti? You’re not convinced. You think you’ve found an error in my reasoning: “Your calculations assume that all 4 outcomes are equally probable: P = 25% across the board. But that may not be the case.” “What if the probability that God does not exist is a 99.99999% and the probability that God does exist is only 0.00001%? What then? Nothing then, that’s what! Odds don’t matter! (1), (2) and (3) payout nothing – it doesn’t matter the odds. Only (4) offers a positive payout, so who cares what the odds are? Is P(4) > 0? (Few would assert otherwise.) 0.00001 is a pretty lousy average payout, but hey, it’s better than 0.00000. So, there is nothing to do but to go ‘all in’ on (4)…and pray. Since (4) pays out ‘the entirety’ and the other three options pay out ‘nothing’, I really have no choice, do I? And that , my friends, is Pascal’s Wager…or is it? Face the facts : our world is incomprehensible and frankly absurd. Sure, we can hit a rock, hurtling through deep space at breakneck speed, with a rocket launched years earlier from Earth. But that’s the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic . On the surface, reality is somewhat intelligible and highly manipulable, but only on the surface. Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we? Could the world have been created by a super-intelligence? I suppose so. Could it have just arbitrarily sprung into being? So they tell me. Will anyone ever know for sure? Probably not. Will anyone ever know for sure that they’ll never know for sure? Again, probably not! “Daddy, you know everything : why is the sky blue? Why is water wet? How many seconds are there is a year? Daddy, who am I, really?” I was doing so well; I was on a role…and then I hit the wall. We can answer a million questions but the ones we can’t answer are the only ones worth answering. So what to do? Lapse back into agnosticism, skepticism, or nihilism? We are confronted with an epistemological barrier: we can’t use deductive reasoning to prove existential propositions; neither can we rely on induction. But we can use Game Theory to our advantage…and we just did. What if the implications of Game Theory could take us ‘beyond Pascal’s Wager’? Let’s revisit our base equations. Options (1), (2) and (3) pay out nothing; that’s certain. There’s no phenomenological difference between options that pay zero and options that don’t exist at all. Option 123 is equivalent to null-universe. Now let’s take a look at option (4). We’ve called the payout ‘1’ and so it is… in our two value number system. Therefore, the expected payout is just 0.000001. But what is the meaning of ‘1’? It’s not ‘half of 2’ because there is no 2; and half of 1 is still 1. There is only one and none, and one is any x where x > 0. But we’ve seen above that one is everything (Universe) and Universe (everything) is infinite (eternal). In a bizarre mathematical twist, if P(4) > 0, no matter how small P(4) is, then P(4)*∞ = ∞. This is the ultimate ‘participation trophy’. Just playing the game guarantees you an infinite payout…as long as you put your paltry pile of chips on #4. Winner, winner, cosmic dinner! Now, that’s what I’m talkin’ about, Willis! 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 . 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< Back A Universal Quantum Computer Is Possible! David Cowles Sep 10, 2024 “We are living in a version of Universe in which some quantum bits are still in superposition (potentiality) and others are already ‘decohered’ (actuality).” In a recent edition of Thoughts While Shaving (August 8, 2024) , Aletheia Today (AT) proposed that the Universe might itself be a giant Quantum Computer with every bit in superposition. Now scientists have released new findings that support that possibility. Physicists have created a new model for quantum computers that could more easily scale them up to make them more powerful than previously thought possible. The new theory, outlined in a recent study published in the journal PRX Quantum , proposes linking qubits, the fundamental workhorses of quantum computers, over vast distances to work as if they were part of a single super-powerful machine . These qubits can then be stitched together through quantum entanglement , linking their data across vast spans of spacetime, to process calculations in parallel. The more qubits are entangled, the more exponentially powerful a quantum computer can become. According to our (AT’s) version of this model, there is one ‘Universe’ with 10^80 bits, all potentially in a state of quantum superposition (i.e., not 0 or 1 but 0 and 1). Accordingly, there are 10^160 possible ‘universes’, i.e. unique combinations of decohered (0 or 1) quantum states. Perhaps unexpectedly, the Book of Genesis captures this model explicitly. Prior to the primal creative act ( Fiat Lux! ), “…the earth was without form or shape with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters” (1: 2). What better metaphor could there be for ‘universal quantum superposition’? At any given moment in time, we are living in a version of Universe in which some quantum bits (Q-bits) are still in superposition while others have already decohered. (Time is not an element in Universe if decoherence is either 0% or 100%.) Imagine a bucket of water. As the temperature cools, the water will gradually, not suddenly, transition from a liquid to a solid (ice) state. Like the surface of a shallow pond, ice first forms at the surface and along the edges and then gradually spreads until the entire body of water is frozen solid. The constituent molecules, randomly jumbled in the liquid state, gradually assume a fixed alignment according to the principles of crystallography. Our Universe is currently in such a process of crystallization. We experience that process as ‘time’, the gradual transition from ‘pure potentiality’ (Aristotle) to total actuality. This model potentially resolves the perennial philosophical challenge of reconciling stability with flux. This problem fascinated the founders of Western philosophy (e.g. Parmenides and Heraclitus, 5th century BCE) as well as its last great systematic thinker, Alfred North Whitehead (c. 1930 CE). The challenge is transmuted into a prayer in an Anglican hymn: “Abide in me, fast falls the eventide.” Permanence amid flux! From here and now, we would expect additional Q-bits to decohere, ultimately resulting in a universal and eternal steady state. Could that be the much anticipated Kingdom of Heaven (Whitehead)? Or much dreaded Heat Death (Penrose)? Or the Block Universe we hear so much about these days? Our model, however, raises an additional question: If the Universe is in a state of superposition, how is it that any of its Q-bits ever decohere? According to standard quantum theory, decoherence only happens when a Q-bit comes in contact with an outside agent, a measurement tool, e.g. a nosey physicist. Decoherence, like ice, is contagious. But if the entire Universe is in a state of superposition, how is it that any portion of it can decohere? Traditionally, the role of universal outside agent, the cosmic other, has been assigned to God. But for those of you who are ‘enlightened’ and therefore God-phobic, we don’t need that hypothesis. The phenomenon of universal, reciprocal Incarnation will do the trick. The Universe is incarnate in each of its component entities just as each such entity is incarnate in the Universe. Anaxagoras realized this 2500 years ago. Pan in Panti he called it. Therefore, everything has the potential to function as an outside agent relative to anything else. The end is implicit (not necessarily determined) in the beginning. Bertrand Russell notwithstanding, just as ø is a member of every set, so every set must be a member of itself. Universe is maximally recursive. Universe is recursion. What we experience as ‘time’ (above) is the process of the Universe decohering. This model reflects our everyday experience in realms far removed from icy lakes. For example, assume 20 legit candidates announce plans to run for President of the United States in the next cycle. The outcome is highly uncertain. Gradually, the number of possible ‘final states’ (outcomes) reduces. On Election Day, the remaining Q-bits ‘collapse’ and we are left with one bit with a value of 1 (all others are 0). We call that Q-bit POTUS. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“1,500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life.” < Back The Living and the Dead David Cowles Jun 1, 2024 “1,500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life.” An article by Paul Sutter (12/3/2023), republished on space.com , makes an intriguing contribution to the age-old debate over the boundary between ‘the living’ and ‘the dead’. No, I’m not talking about seances or Ouija boards or long Celtic twilights. Sutter proposes that we define as ‘living’ anything that is subject to the process of evolution . 150 years ago, we were debating whether any organisms were subject to evolution. Now Sutter proposes we make evolution the defining characteristic of Life itself. What a difference a day makes! 1500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life. How did we know? The Bible told us so! Life was created by God, on Earth only, less than 10,000 years ago as a well-defined set of largely visible organisms thriving in reasonably hospitable ecological niches. Now we know some things we didn’t know 1500 years ago, or 150 years ago for that matter. We know that life probably emerged just once (on Earth); and so far, at least, it has proven to be indestructible. We know that life is ubiquitous on Earth, that it populates nearly every nook and cranny, no matter how hostile. We anticipate the end of the world. We’ve been doing so for millennia. Recently, nuclear weapons, biological warfare, climate change and even AI have considerably advanced the timeline suggested by the Book of Revelation. We now know that speciation is just a series of rest stops on the trail. Check out the view from Tiger ! It’s burning bright. We know that living organisms adapt, genetically, epigenetically, culturally, to almost any conceivable set of environmental stresses…and we’re still pushing that envelope: Don’t like it on Earth? Try Mars! Don’t like oxygen? Breathe methane instead! And if that means you can never be more than 1 cm away from some tree’s root system, so be it! I didn’t want to see the world anyway; did you? 1,500 years ago, few conceived that the order of species might undergo modification other than as a consequence of divine intervention. Nor did we imagine that independent life forms might exist elsewhere in the cosmos. Since Darwin, the field of astrobiology has boomed…but at a cost. We have lost control of our subject. At one extreme, we now have pan-vitalists , folks who believe either (1) that the Universe itself is a living organism (Gaia) or (2) that life suffuses the cosmos as if it were a field …like EM or Gravity or God. Pan-vitalism may or may not have the final word. Regardless, it has contributed a new perspective. Universe contains innumerable (but not infinitely many) environmental niches. Given that life has emerged once, in one such niche (Earth), we can speculate that it must have emerged innumerable times in innumerable other niches. At the other end of the spectrum, there are ‘lunatics’ like me who still think there’s a slight chance that life ‘evolved’ once and only once - on just one planet, in just one solar system, in just one galaxy, not so very far away. We reason, the probability that life emerged anywhere, even here on Earth, is infinitesimally small (є), but life did emerge on Earth. Absent that information, the chance that Life emerged independently in more than one niche is astronomically smaller: є² or less. Read literally, є is smaller than any real number: є = 1/∞. Then how small is є²! One advantage of this argument is that it resolves two great cosmological scandals : Why is the Universe so big (or so old)? Answer : It needed to be that big for Life to have at least a 0.5 probability of emerging. If Life did emerge 4 billion years ago, as is generally believed, then perhaps we can say that the half-life for Life to emerge is 10 billion years…in which case we should not expect any cosmic company for a while yet. Why would life evolve on Earth and nowhere else? Answer : Why not? One is one! Think of what I call a ‘proto ice cube’ (you call it ‘water’). The liquid does not transition to ice all at once. The phase change begins at one or more nodes and spreads from there through the entire volume, but the location of the node(s) appears to be entirely random. Between these two poles, there are folks who think that life commonly evolves but just as commonly dies out. Their bumper sticker reads, “Frequent but Fleeting”. Therefore, the current state of bio-diffusion is entirely uncertain. And then there are those who think that extra-terrestrial life is likely limited to a relatively small number of Earth-like exoplanets. Finally, still others think we may find independent occasions of life on various moons and planets in our own tiny solar system. As a result, we are sending a probe to Venus to look for life in the Venusian atmosphere. Presumably, the lifespan of any such organism would be the time it takes to fall from the edge of Venus’ atmosphere to the surface of the planet. And they say our lives vanish like the dew! Sutter (above) stops just short of pan-vitalism . “How short is he?” About 2 seconds short! Sutter maintains that life could have emerged just a few seconds after Big Bang. He believes that we should push the boundaries of life at least as far back as prebiotic molecules. But he’s not done yet! “ Some physicists have hypothesized that in the earliest moments following the Big Bang, the forces of nature were so extreme and so exotic that they could have supported the growth of complex structures. For example, these structures could have been cosmic strings , which are folds in space-time, anchored by magnetic monopoles. “With sufficient complexity, these structures could have stored information. There would have been plenty of energy to go around, and those structures could have self-replicated, enabling Darwinian evolution. Any creatures existing in those conditions would have lived and died in the blink of an eye, their entire history lasting less than a second — but to them, it would have been a lifetime.” The fundamental (Planck) unit of time is 10^-42 seconds. The Cosmos is expected to reach an age of at least 10^11 years before it ‘chills out’. (There are c. 10^7 seconds in a year.) Therefore, the scale of time encompasses c. 60 orders of magnitude. It is hard to imagine that any ‘objective durations’ have real meaning on such a scale. I mean, now what counts as ‘fleeting’? It’s also a bit odd that time would have a minimum and a maximum value. Is there something significant about the 60 orders of magnitude spread? Would the same spread apply in any feasible universe? Is this spread a defining characteristic of ‘Universe’ per se ? (As Leviathan is a defining characteristic of our world - Book of Job.) But this article is not about time! It’s about scientific reasoning. We have viable conceptions of life, ranging from the cosmos itself to a single, primal DNA/RNA molecule. I suppose we could even go further and argue that Life itself is ‘not a thing’, that biology is just mechanics. Any model that can’t discriminate between values ranging from ‘all’ to ‘nothing’ is in serious trouble. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the model is wrong, that it will be falsified. Rather, it may be subsumed as a subroutine under a broader theoretical framework. And when a single term (e.g. ‘life’) can be applied to such a broad spectrum of phenomena, it is a good bet that we don’t understand the term itself as well as we thought we did. Bottom line : we can be sure that we’re not at the end of this tunnel yet, no matter how well lit the corridor may seem. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Summer 2024 Share Previous Next 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! 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< Back The Rosette – God’s Kaleidoscope David Cowles Sep 17, 2024 “Its sole function is to convey Beauty, one of the primary manifestations of Divinity in our World.” Next time you visit a Roman Catholic Church, especially an older cathedral, turn around…and this time, do look up! Chances are you’ll be looking at a large, circular, stained glass window, often referred to as a ‘Rosette’. If you’ve timed your visit right, light may be streaming through, filling the interior with an eponymous rosy glow. Elsewhere in the church you may find other stained glass windows, usually depicting scenes from the Bible, or from the life of a particular saint. Unlike these, the Rosette is most often purely a design. It has no thematic content; its sole function is to convey Beauty, one of the primary manifestations of Divinity in our World. After the riot of color, the most striking feature of a Rosette is the symmetry of its design…usually at least hexagonal but often dodecagonal. Why did Christianity settle on the Rosette as one of its defining symbols? First, the circular form symbolizes the unity, wholeness, and perfection of God. It suggests God as the source of light, symbolizing the act of creation and the illumination of revelation. The symmetrical design reflects the order of the cosmos created by God. The number 12 is important in Christian theology, so it is no surprise that larger Rosettes often display dodecagonal symmetry. 12 apostles, for example. The 12 baskets of scraps collected after Jesus fed the 5,000. Of course, 12 is also the number of signs in the Zodiac and, as every third grader used to know, it is the product of 3 x 4: the three persons of the Trinity and the four corners of the Earth (i.e. the material world). Finally, in Roman Catholic spirituality, the Virgin Mary is often portrayed as the Mystic Rose (Rosa Mystica). The lack of a thetic image allows the Rosette to sample, and be sampled by, other spiritual traditions. For example, some observers have detected a similarity to the Great Mandala of Tibetan Buddhism. As such, the Rosette recalls the cyclical nature of birth, death and eschatological rebirth, contrasting the simple eternal unity of God (circle) with the variety and variability of life on Earth (colors). Roman Catholics do not shy away from spiritual aids. Unlike some other faiths, Catholicism makes generous use of statues and images to focus the worshiper’s mind on given spiritual themes. Thank goodness! The result is some of the world's greatest artistic achievements. And it’s not always necessary to travel to a museum or cathedral to have such an experience. Many Catholics carry rosary beads in their pockets, wear medals, place icons in their homes. On the other hand, carrying around a huge architectural feature like a Rosette is hardly practical, is it…or is it? Actually, those of us born before the age of video games routinely had Rosettes in our bedrooms growing up. We called them ‘kaleidoscopes’, but unless our parents were particularly perspicacious, we were unaware of their potential as spiritual aids. They were just ‘fun’. In fact, however, $9.99 kaleidoscopes embody many of the same features as Rosettes. Obviously, they display light, refracted into a rainbow of colors. They do so without resort to thematic images and they also exhibit symmetry, usually hexagonal (because of the size limitations imposed by their portability). And they are portable! Unlike some people I know, you can take them anywhere. You could even hitch one to your belt or belt loop like a 1960’s engineer’s slide rule. You could put one on your bedside table. You could carry one in your glove box (not to be used while driving). Point is, you’re never more than 3 seconds away from an experience of God’s glory. Is that worth $10? Ok, let’s get real. Even the best kaleidoscopes fall short of the Rosettes we see in the great cathedrals of Europe. On the other hand, they have a feature that no medieval architect could have even imagined. They move! Take a scope in one hand and look through the eyepiece located at the far end of the cylinder. What do you see? A gorgeous pattern of shapes and colors. Now slowly rotate the ‘nose cone’. The initial pattern morphs gradually, and then suddenly, a ‘phase change’! An entirely new pattern emerges which does not appear to relate in any way to the previous pattern, or to any prior pattern for that matter. I have the impression at least that every pattern is novel, that no pattern recurs. My kaleidoscope captures a feature of God’s glory that no Rosette could possibly match: the forever newness of his creation! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.