< Back Messengers Among Us Annie D. Stutley If God sent His only Son to earth, not just to save us from our sins, but because He knew how difficult it was for humans to believe in something we cannot see, why wouldn’t He still use that tactic today? Knowing our vulnerabilities, understanding us the way a parent understands their child, why wouldn’t God send us messages through people we trust? I almost died when I was seven-years-old. We were on a “Great American Winnebago Road Trip” through the Wild West — at the mercy of my scenic route-loving father. ( Link to that tale here. ) One day, we stopped for a picnic in a park in Albuquerque, New Mexico. To get to the shaded area and playground, we had to walk across a four-lane thoroughfare. Off my sisters went, along with Mom, then I followed. Pop took the rear. Maybe it was the anticipation of new, unexplored play equipment, or maybe I was just an impatient kid, but I took off like a rocket, eager to explore the unknown. I zoomed through each lane until my toe nearly collided with the white dotted lines of the last lane. Suddenly, from behind, I heard Pop yell, “Annie! STOP!” And I did. I stopped right there in the third lane just as a white pickup truck sped past me in the fourth lane, blowing my strawberry-blonde hair over my flushed cheeks. To this day, I’m surprised that I listened to Pop. I wasn’t exactly a contrary child, but typical seven-year-old Annie would have kept running, hollering back, “Why?” But that day I didn’t question, and my life was spared. I’ve wondered whether an angel held its hand before me, preventing me from crossing the lane. Others might say it was just good luck or that it simply wasn’t my time to go. While I do believe in angels, I don’t think it was an angel or fate that prevented me from being crushed by a truck that day. I think it was a messenger. Thirty-three years later, Pop scheduled meetings with three oncologists for his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. He had only been diagnosed three days when we walked into the office of a tiny, slender woman with a youthful, kind face. We met with her for half an hour, me rattling off a list of questions, and Pop quietly sizing her answers. She was sharp, yet sensitive, and told us the truth about Pop’s situation without adding any additional fears to those already wrestling inside us. When we left, I asked Pop what he thought. “She was good,” he said. “I like her.” “Well, we have two other appointments to go to,” I reminded him. “No,” he said. “We don’t need to bother with the others. Let’s just stick with her.” “Why?” I asked. “What if the other doctors are better?” “Because,” he said as I wheeled him to the car. By then, Pop’s mobility had already begun to deteriorate. “I think God sent her to us.” I couldn’t argue with that. He was the patient, after all, and also, I was accustomed to Pop proclaiming such prophecies. A deeply religious man, Pop often delivered bold messages to anyone, never concerned with whether they were a believer or not. If you had a headache, he’d place his hand on your forehead and say, “In Jesus’s name, be healed.” He talked openly about the Holy Spirit and how its power was the same as that which raised Jesus from the dead. To him, if we have the Holy Spirit within us, why can’t we pray over someone who is sick or proclaim that God sent us a doctor? Still, his quick decision bothered me. Then, when just a little over two months later, he passed away, his body never strong enough to receive any treatment but a couple of “last hope” surgeries (brought on by other doctors) and hospice, I really questioned the whole “God sent her to us” statement. How could God have sent us someone who did basically nothing? It was just two days after my cancer diagnosis when, while exercising on the elliptical, I heard my husband calling me from our bedroom. “I have the hospital on the phone,” he hollered. “They gave us two names to choose from for oncologists.” The first name belonged to a male doctor I’d never heard of before. But the other belonged to a tiny, slender woman with a youthful, kind face, a doctor who was sharp, yet sensitive. I figured these were the top two oncologists at the hospital because my husband was on the phone with the CEO. (In what can only be divine intervention, he happens to know the hospital CEO.) I also knew that I had never come to terms with Pop’s prophecy about his oncologist. It had haunted me for two years because never before had my father been so wrong about God. I simply could not see how she was “sent to us” if she was so useless in his case. My first reaction was to go with the name I didn’t recognize. It would be a clean start. I wouldn’t be haunted by ghosts of Pop’s cancer. And as I started to say as such to my husband, I heard Pop, as boldly as the day he hollered, “Annie! STOP!” Only this time I heard from behind, “I think God sent her to us.” So, I stopped. I got off the elliptical, which I never do mid-workout, and ran to my husband. My eyes glistened as I told him what Pop had said two and a half years earlier. “What if God sent her to us for me ? What if Pop unknowingly said those words because I would need her one day?” So we chose her. And when she walked into her office two days later for my first appointment, she looked me square in the eyes and gently said, “What you need to know is that you are not your father. His cancer was bad -- as bad as it gets. Yours is not. Any fear you have because of him, you need to let go.” I cried. No, I wept. She handed me Kleenex, and I snotted right there beside her -- ugly, ugly tears. Tears of relief. For the last week I had been tangled in a ball of anxiety because all my thoughts were of my father’s cancer -- the pain, the suffering, and mostly, the hopelessness that cast a sinister shadow on our hearts. My fears had shaken me to my core, making me unable to see clearly how much better I had it, how much earlier I was diagnosed, and how promising my prospects were. In that visit, she rescued me from the first tangle. I see this doctor every two weeks. We are becoming fast friends. She is just as kind and sensitive with me as she was with Pop -- an empathy cancer patients need. But that’s not why I now believe Pop’s prophecy. One visit was maybe only seven minutes -- the shortest visit I’ve ever had with her. The entire time she talked about my children, their sports and dance and what they were up to. She didn’t mention me at all. “Doctor,” I finally cut in. “What about me? My labs? My progress?” “Oh, you?” she smiled. “You’re fine.” And she practically waved me off. “I’m not worried about you.” So, I said, “Well, if you’re not worried, then I guess I shouldn’t be.” When I shared that account with my sisters, one of them said, “Oh! If we could only learn to say that to God every day!” The next visit, I told her that my mother-in-law was in town and that she wept as she dropped me off for chemo. “Why?” my doctor asked. “Well, I guess because it’s overwhelming to send your daughter-in-law off to chemo,” I answered. She stopped what she was doing and said, “She knows your chemotherapy is curative, right? You’ve told her this?” “I think so,” I said, but of course, I hadn’t told my mother-in-law that. How could I, when as strong as my faith is, I’m still attacked by enough doubt that I’m afraid to be so bold with my prognosis? What if I’m wrong? My doctor leaned in closer. “Do you know that what we’re doing is curative?” “Yes,” I lied. In the last conversation we had, we went over what happens in August when chemotherapy ends -- what the next five years of tumor marker tests, CT scans, and MRIs will look like. “How do you feel about it all?” I asked her nervously. “Oh about you ? I’m not worried. You’re going to be fine,” she said. There it was again. Another bold, promising statement from her, delivered with the utmost peace. I had been running toward the fourth lane since my diagnosis, disregarding any promising messages, but I finally stopped. It had sunk in why God absolutely did send us this doctor. The Bible’s pages are filled with prophecies from God’s messengers -- Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul. But did I ever consider what happened after the Bible was finished and sent off to the Random House of early Christianity for publishing? Did God suddenly stop sending His messages through others because, well, the book is done, and we can all just refer back to it if we have any questions -- the end? If God sent His only Son to earth, not just to save us from our sins, but because He knew how difficult it was for humans to believe in something we cannot see, why wouldn’t He still use that tactic today? Knowing our vulnerabilities, understanding us the way a parent understands their child, why wouldn’t God send us messages through people we trust? And why wouldn’t that message come from the lips of a tiny, slender woman with a youthful, kind face, a doctor who is sharp, yet sensitive? I know enough to know that there are angels among us, miracles are real, and sometimes when we can’t hear God, we hear Him through someone we can see and hear. “And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.” (Isaiah 30:21) Pop was God’s messenger thirty-five years ago in Albuquerque. And God, knowing the worry and fear I battle today, has sent me another messenger to silence that doubt, allowing me to once and for all trust God unconditionally and follow Him where He’s leading me. He sends messengers to you too. Maybe you are His messenger today. I recently read that prophets were once referred to as “Man of God.” Pop wasn’t a prophet on paper, but I think he came pretty close. Unknowingly, we chose the words, “Man of God” for his gravestone. Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines. Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Previous Next

< Back Kandinsky: The Painter of Other Worlds David Cowles The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. All art forms have a fascination with alterity , the idea of the other. Many 20th century painters explored this idea in depth. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944), however, stands out as a painter who devoted his entire career to the exploration of other worlds, and who developed a tool kit and a language to help us continue that exploration. It’s 1910 and a young Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, is starting to paint. Even in his earliest works, Kandinsky explores worlds that differ from the world of ordinary experience. Part dream, part hallucination, part fantasy, Kandinsky’s early works preserve the identity of the subject and the structure of the ground, but he makes the two nearly interchangeable, and he invests the whole with a dynamism, a palette and a perspective unlike anything we would ever call mundane . The name of a 1911 work, Romantic Landscape , sums up this early period. As Kandinsky’s work matured, his landscapes became more abstract, and the relationship of colors and forms became the real subject of his painting. Then in 1913, in Painting with White Border , Kandinsky experimented with a new technique. He situated his imagined world within another, wider world by means of a “white border.” While he is not yet exploring substructural worlds, he is moving conceptually toward the recognition that the world of subject-object, space-time, and sense perception is situated in a much broader cosmos. Later that same year, Kandinsky began to paint canvases without any representational features. Light Picture and Black Lines begin a new era. No longer is Kandinsky abstracting from the world of everyday experience and reformatting that world according to a new logic and a new aesthetic; now he is creating (or unveiling, aletheia ) entirely novel worlds via paint. In 1919, he painted White Oval , a rounded rhombus containing an entire physics of fanciful forms, situated within a dark, vague border that suggests nearly empty space. This world is like a womb, self-contained within the larger body aka ’reality’. Modern cosmologists might recognize this as a bubble universe, an apparently self-contained and finite universe that is really just one “bubble” in a foam of bubbles (all universes, similar or not so similar to our own). During this period, Kandinsky regularly organizes paintings around irregular geometric shapes. For example, Red Oval (1920) depicts what cosmologists might call a brane, a space situated within a higher dimensionality. In Red Oval , all the inhabitants link to the brane (or to something else that links to the brane). Some objects link to the brane at one end point only, others at both end points; does this remind you of today’s strings ? Objects may equally well link to either side of the brane, or they may run through the brane like arrows. All the activity in this world takes place in or just above/below this brane. Compared to the higher dimensional universe in which it is situated, the brane is something like a pancake. Beginning in 1922, Kandinsky’s paintings show the influence of the Bauhaus. However, he incorporates that influence into his own style. In the Black Square (1923), he inserts the architectural forms of Bauhaus into his brane-world. During this period, Kandinsky’s painting becomes increasingly dynamic, and he begins to explore motion as a “thing in itself.” In Yellow Accompaniment and One Center (1924) the subject of the piece is dynamics. The colors, forms, and constructed objects just serve to make otherwise invisible ‘motion’ visible. Remember Zeno’s Paradox , the work of an early Greek philosopher of the same name. Zeno demonstrates that the phenomenon of motion is not possible in any world where the axioms of arithmetic apply. Zeno’s radical conclusion, attacked anew by each generation of mathematicians and logicians, remains unrefuted…2,500 years later. Kandinsky seems to accept both Zeno’s conclusion and the challenge it poses. Kandinsky’s canvasses illustrate the reality of motion, but only in worlds where the axioms of arithmetic do not hold. Using paint, Kandinsky offers us a syllogism: (1) Motion can only be real in a world where the rules of arithmetic do not hold; (2) Motion is real; therefore, (3) the rules of arithmetic do not hold. (I know a bunch of third graders who will be very happy to hear this news!) Accent in Pink (1926), for example, depicts a brane-world, inhabited not by shapes but by bursts, eruptions of color. Kandinsky paints these bursts in cross-sections so that the viewer actually sees the eruptions in process. He anticipated by decades the concept of a ‘block universe’ where time consists of a sequence of slices off the block. Can you say, “Cheese?” Music had a profound influence on Kandinsky, and his works began to take on the quality of musical composition rather than architecture. At the same time, Kandinsky began to explore the semantic nature of artistic forms. In Levels (1929), Kandinsky creates a hieroglyphic language, a kind of Rosetta Stone, and adds a grid to help the “reader” decipher the “text.” Striped (1934) and Delicate Accents (1935) continue this trend, but the apex of this period may be Succession (1935), which presents symbols on a grid reminiscent of musical notation. In the context of other worlds, Kandinsky is here exploring the notion known today as “It from Bit” (Wheeler). Reality is information. It is essentially a code; perceptions are merely clues to that code. But it is with Movement 1 (1935) that Kandinsky's embrace of other-world cosmology ripens fully . This canvas presents a fantastic assemblage of branes, self-contained mini-verses, hieroglyphs and geometric forms of varying dimensionality linked by strange, string-like objects running throughout. From 1935 on, Kandinsky’s works are predominantly characterized by these elements. Until recently, philosophers exploring the idea of ‘other worlds’ were limited by the notion that any viable world must be self-consistent. Beginning with Movement 1 , Kandinsky rejects that assumption. After all, Emerson wrote that “…Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and literally no one has ever accused Kandinsky of having a ‘little mind.’ Moving forward, Dominant Curve (1936) presents a chaotic variety of topologies, somehow co-existing harmoniously on the representational plane of a canvas. It suggests that a multiplicity of inconsistent realities may lie beneath the more routine world we accept as real. Those of us raised on Heisenberg, Godel, Bell, and Feynman will not find any of this the least bit surprising. Might it be that the treasured consistency we claim to find in our world is put there by us? Grouping (1937) continues to explore this theme; it explicitly shows these incongruous regions co-existing and in some strange way, perhaps even using that incongruity to reinforce one another. Could it be the case that meta-reality is the consistent interaction of many worlds, at least some of which lack internal consistency? Capricious Forms (1937) situates a foreground of perpetually moving and morphing organic entities in a static, rectilinear background. Kandinsky is using the elements of his multi-verse to construct a universe that reminds us, at least in some ways, of our familiar world. He may be suggesting that our rectilinear world is emergent from, or a special case of, this sub-structural multiverse. All of which leads naturally to Thirty , another 1937 piece, that suggests 30 unique solutions, some rectilinear, some organic, some musical, some hieroglyphic to the basic problems of ontology. Like M Theory, Thirty suggests that there may be more than one right answer to the riddle of cosmology. Finally, Around the Circle (1940) begins with a somewhat typical assemblage of unexpected ontological entities, all approximately coplanar. But then it adds a window which suggests a sort of “wormhole,” an escape into another far-off multiverse which is itself a collection of varied, yet perhaps subtly different, entities. From Kandinsky’s window, one can see into Carroll’s Looking-glass World. With this work, Kandinsky suggests that dimensional democracy may not only exist within worlds but also between worlds; the process of deconstructing classical reality could turn out to be infinitely regressive. Kandinsky avoids the temptation to offer his own systematic ontology; that is not the job of the artist. The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. This Kandinsky did, brilliantly! At one time, it was in vogue to classify worlds as “real” or “imaginary.” For many centuries, Parmenides' “Way of Seeming” was misunderstood as an illusion compared to his eminently real “Way of Truth.” But that facile way of thinking won’t cut it anymore! Today, we know that we have to take all worlds into account in order to understand the universe. As we continue on this intellectual journey, we would be well advised to return to Kandinsky for inspiration. His paintings provide us with rich and varied models of alterity . Image: Movement I. (1935). Wassily Kandinsky . Public Domain 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

< Back Escaping Dostoevsky's Polar Bear Aharon Loschak "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Previous Next

< Back JK Rowling and Pliny the Elder David Cowles "What about werewolves, giants, trolls, and dragons? We don’t believe in them; they’re not real! Are they?" What does the creator of Harry Potter have in common with a 1st century CE Roman historian? Simple, they share a passion for Beasts! Arguably, Rowling and Pliny are responsible for the two greatest European Bestiaries of the Christian Era. They provide bookends to a tradition that spans 20 centuries and that appears in some form in every culture and in every era. First, some background: What is a ‘Beast’ ? Any life form other than Homo sapiens could be considered a Beast . ‘Beasts’ include our fast friends: lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! They also include Spot, our family’s best friend . But that barely scratches the surface. ‘Beasts’ include proto-humans from Neanderthal to Yeti. They include dragons, centaurs, and other supposedly mythical creatures. They include all manner of chimera, e.g., unicorns, griffins, and merpeople (known as ‘ mermaids ’ before the gender revolution). Push out the envelope to include flesh eating plants, pernicious bacteria and unclassified life forms like fairies, elves, and leprechauns. We live in the universe of a small child. We live in the company of fellow human beings. Beyond that, we know Spot the dog, Puss the cat, and Elsie the cow. We have stuffed giraffes, rhinos, hippos, et al. We trust that these puppets have real-world prototypes, even though few of us have ever actually petted one. What about werewolves, giants, trolls, and dragons? We don’t believe in them; they’re not real! Are they? Like our neighbors’ bratty children (but unlike our own cherubs ), we are terribly spoiled – so spoiled in fact that we actually have the chutzpah to complain about conditions in our habitat. Let’s take stock: we live alongside other, mostly peaceable humans in a civilized society. We’ve domesticated our pets and tamed our ‘beasts of burden’ (horses, oxen, etc.). As for the rest of the animal kingdom, as noted above, we’ll take ours stuffed, thank you… and not by a taxidermist. Most of us will be born, grow, live, and die without ever hearing a dragon roar (Puff notwithstanding)! We live in a well-designed zoo. Our enclosure is virtual - but virtually impermeable. We imagine that we are the zookeepers but in fact we are the exhibit. And yet, we complain: “The food could be better, it gets chilly at night, the sheep bleat too loudly, etc. If ‘zoo management’ really cared about us, they’d do something about these deplorable living conditions, right?” It’s that darn old Problem of Evil coming back to bite us again, albeit in a new guise; but Pliny and Rowling turn the ‘problem’ on its head by asking, “What if there was no Zoo? What then?” Whining, we ask, “Why aren’t things better than they are?” Clearer eyed, Pliny and Rowling asked, “Why aren’t things much worse?” IRL, Sally and Spot are your playmates…but it could just as well have been Behemoth and Leviathan. Pliny and Rowling both take a page out of Wonderful Life – no, not the Jimmy Stewart movie, the Stephen Gould book. Life could have, and may have, evolved in many different ways, almost all of which would have been much less hospitable than what we’re used to. Why did life evolve the way it did? Or did life evolve in all sorts of horrible ways, with us somehow sheltered from the worst results? Is there cosmic censorship? Did the horrible monsters of our imagination just never evolve? Or did they evolve in all their pomp and fury but behind some sort of invisible barrier, a cosmic filter perhaps, that protects us? If so, is that evidence that there is a ‘bias toward good’ in the universe that saves us from fates far, far worse than mere death? Is that ‘bias toward good’ a manifestation of what we call God ? Can we ask anything more of God than such a tilt ? Who even asks questions like these? Well, how’s this for a NY Times Best Seller list: Job, Pliny, Augustine, Einstein, Tolkien, Hugh Everett (physicist), and Rowling? Our questions put us in good intellectual company. Perhaps Augustine said it best (paraphrasing): I don’t know whether proto-humans exist or not but if they do, then they must somehow also be descended from Adam and Eve (Genesis 6: 1-4). Pliny and Rowling turn the classic Problem of Evil on its head. In their hands, it becomes a Problem of Good : If life on earth could have evolved in such horrible ways, why didn’t it? Or, if it did, how is it that we are sheltered from its worst effects? Who made Middle Earth ‘safe for humanity’? Note : We explored this Problem of Good in more detail in ATM Issue #1. The so-called Problem of Evil has led many to deny, or at least question, the existence of a benevolent God. The great Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote an entire book, Why I Am Not a Christian, to broadcast his conclusion. If so, the discovery of the Problem of Good should have the same effect…but in the other direction. How is it that things are not very, very much worse than they are? Could that be evidence of some sort of ‘divine influence’? Ponder that a while, if you will, but while you ponder, perhaps you’d like to meet some of my cuties : According to Pliny, the Scythians feed mainly on human flesh. The Anthropophagi drink out of human skulls. The Psylli expose their newborns to deadly serpents to prove the mother’s chastity and test the father’s paternity. Calingi women conceive at 5 years of age and don’t live beyond the age of 8. The Asmoths have no mouths and live only on odors. Rowling picks up where Pliny leaves off. She takes full advantage of 20 centuries of geographic exploration, and scientific discovery to expand Pliny’s menagerie and to give her creatures greater definition. Her bestiary includes all the usual suspects: Centaurs, Griffins, Dragons, Pegasus, Unicorns, Werewolves and, of course, Yeti. She also includes some relative newcomers to the beastly scene: Erklings, for example, are three-foot tall, elfish creatures native to the Black Forest; their preferred diet, of course, is the flesh of young children. On the other end of Rowling’s genetic spectrum is the Acromantula, a spider-like creature, capable of human speech, now native to Borneo. It is thought that the Acromantula may be the product of genetic engineering…by humans. Like COVID-19 perhaps? When we were very young, we believed that monsters lived in unseen spaces: under our beds, in our closets, etc. Gradually, we outgrew such beliefs. But what if we were right in the first place? What if the monsters were there all the time, but somehow something protected us from them. Was it the trusty nightlight? Or Daddy’s always thorough ‘sweep’ of my room at bedtime? Or was it the benevolent bias of being, aka God? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Do You Noh? David Cowles “In the eternal present, not only is every historical event preserved in real time, but every possible event is preserved as well.“ You do not dip twice in the river, Beneath the same tree’s shadow, Without bonds in some other life. Heraclitus? Nope! It’s Tsure’s speech opening the 2 nd Act of Nishikigi , a Japanese play of the Noh genre. Noh originated in Japan in the 15th century CE, evolving out of 6 centuries of religious ritual. Like Greek drama, Noh combines a chorus with a very small number (1, 2, or 3) of individual roles. Costumes (including masks), music and dance play just as important a role as libretto in moving the action forward in these relatively short dramas. We have the poet Ezra Pound to thank for the popularity of Noh in contemporary Anglophone cultures. His translations of Noh dramas and his frequent references to Noh plays in his Cantos have brought this great art form to the attention of thousands of students of English language literature. And no wonder! There are approximately 300 Noh plays extant today and virtually all of them involve dialog between the world of the “living” and the world of the “spirits”. As the ‘Poet of the Eschaton’, Pound could hardly fail to recognize the importance of this art form. The past happens only in our memories, the future only in our dreams. The present alone is what’s real but according to the ‘standard model’, Present is merely the intersection (collision?) of Past and Future. It is an infinitesimal point. In that case, Present has no volume; what’s ‘present’ has no duration. ”What’s happening” is precisely nothing! Zeno wins…again. (Ultimately, Zeno’s famously misunderstood paradoxes all boil down to a single conclusion: motion of any kind is prohibited by the rules of arithmetic. Motion can only be accounted for using a non-physical ‘trick’ called the calculus .) We think we’re so clever. We say that “change is the only constant,” and we charge seminar goers $100 a plate to hear such wisdom. (Hmm, perhaps we are clever after all.) But such ‘wisdom’ is nonsense. Change can only be measured against permanence. Phenomenal flux can only occur in the context of noumenal stability…but of course, permanence and change may be relative, at least to a point. Nishikigi seems to contrast the flow of the river with the permanence of the tree…but does it? Actually, it contrasts the flow of the river with the shadow of the tree – and a shadow can be at least as ephemeral as a river. Should we read Nishikigi as contrasting the permanence of the river with impermanence of a shadow? In fact, Nishikigi explicitly contrasts the flow of the river, not with the tree or its shadow, but with the permanence of ‘bonds in some other life’. The tree is not permanent (much less its shadow); it just flows more slowly than water…but less slowly than glass (assuming you consider glass a liquid). According to Heraclitus, everything flows (including glass, I suppose). But everything flows relative to something that doesn’t flow or that flows at a slower rate. If everything flowed at exactly the same rate, (e.g., c – the speed of light), we would say that nothing flows, that everything is stationary…and permanent. Zeno! But now we find ourselves on the slippery slope of an infinite regression. Like the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, we are missing an Uncaused Cause, an Unmoved Mover, a fixed point, a stationary center, a fulcrum. Nishikigi doesn’t give us that, at least not directly; instead it gives us “bonds in some other life”. In Nishikigi , an old priest on pilgrimage encounters (was he looking for Pokémon?) the spirits of two ‘lovers’ long since dead. Actually, these ‘lovers’ never even met on the plane of the living, but Nishikigi courted Tsure for three long years with messages (‘wands’) professing his devotion and desire. Now the old priest encounters their spirits, and they persuade him to remain with them and perform a ritual. In Noh (and everywhere else?), religious rituals are portals that connect two planes of existence. In Nishikigi , performing the ritual enables the priest to view (and alter?) the historical lives of our heroes. Tsure’s verse (above) is the key to understanding the ontology at work here. Both space and time are ever changing ( ergo , flow) but no coincidence of the two can ever be repeated (uniqueness = permanence). Many things can happen at one place and many things can happen at one time, but only one thing can happen at a particular place and time. It is the ultimate form of cosmic censorship: it explains why ‘time travel’, at least as popularly understood, is impossible. That is the function of spacetime. If it didn’t exist (and it may not), we would have had to invent it (and so we did). Tsure seems to contrast the evident impermanence of the flowing river with the relative permanence of the tree overlooking its bank. But it is not just the ever flowing river that varies continuously with time; it is the tree as well. The tree is not really the same tree any more than the river is really the same river. Ultimately, it is the unique juxtaposition of the river and the tree that flows, i.e., that never repeats. The relationship between the river and the tree performs the same function on the classical scale as ‘measurement’ (decoherence) at the quantum level. It converts a spectrum of probabilities into a unique actuality. The ever-changing spacetime that characterizes the world of the living doubles as eternity in the world of the spirit. This view is close to that of Parmenides Hot Link , a contemporary of Heraclitus, who contrasted an ever-changing world of appearance ( doxa ) with a never-changing world of truth ( aletheia ). But the spirit world is not merely an historical memory bank, a bulwark against ever perishing spacetime. It does not just store events from the world of the living in an eternal present (marvelous as that is!). Nishikigi‘s spirit world also stores events that might have happened…but never did. (Bobby Kennedy, “I dream of things that never were and ask why not!” Here Noh’s ontology soars above that even of the great Parmenides; it anticipates by half a millennium, the “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” (Hugh Everett – 1966). According to Quantum Field Theory (QFT), when “two roads diverge in a wood”, the quantum traveler (unlike Robert Frost?) takes both roads simultaneously. (Richard Feynman) IRL, our awareness is limited to one path (usually the one ‘more travelled’ in accordance with the laws of probability), but in the laboratory it is possible to show that both paths are actually traversed simultaneously. The ‘omega point’ of any event is the weighted sum of all the paths that lead to it (Sum over Histories). So it is in Nishikigi . Taking one road, our lovers never meet. But take another road “…and the meeting comes now/This night has happened over and over/And only now comes the tryst.” The ‘bonds in some other life’ enable our heroes to consummate at last their long frustrated relationship. The multiple worlds of Noh not only function to preserve a permanent historical memory of events that happened in ‘ordinary time’, but they also provide a venue for ‘alternate outcomes’ to be realized; these alternates are just as real and just as much a part of the historical record. The Feynman-Noh paradigm converts a measure of likelihood (probability) into a measure of intensity. Everything happens, but some things ‘happen more’ than others – i.e., more intensely, not more frequently. The world craves intensity. If we imagine the historical world as a time-line, then the world of Noh is a ‘time-plane’. One axis plots the apparent historical record of continuous experience; the other axis plots every other possible history. In the eternal present, not only is every historical event preserved in real time, but every possible event is preserved as well. 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 Yuletide 2023 Share Previous Next

“The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. < Back The Great Commandment David Cowles Jul 13, 2022 “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. “The whole law and the prophets depend on…” (Mt. 22: 35-40) Ok, you’ve got my attention! The five books of Moses, the Torah, and the 18 books of prophecy found in the Old Testament (OT) depend on… depend on what? (With the mindset of a superannuated sophomore, I’m always looking for the Cliffs Notes version of everything, and this promises to be the mother of all Cliffs Notes.) Let me get this straight: someone has managed to shrink 23 books of the Bible (Law + Prophets), 600 pages of densely packed text, down to just six verses? Wait ‘til I tell the kids at school about this! All I can say is, “Thank you, Jesus!” Now at this point, you’re expecting me to say something like, “Not so fast!” But no, not this time! This is one time when the reality lives up to the hype. The so-called Great Commandment appears in all three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark & Luke) but it originates in the Torah (OT). Check it out: “…A scholar of the law (scribe) tested him (Jesus) by asking, ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He (Jesus) said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’” (Mt. 22: 35-40) In answering the scribe, Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus : “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and your whole being, and with your whole strength.” (Dt. 6: 4-5) “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lv. 19: 18b) Scholars believe that these two Old Testament verses were already linked before the time of Jesus. The Torah (‘law’) consists of 613 precepts; these two precepts are thought to summarize the other 611. Therefore, it was quite reasonable for Jesus to say, “The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” But is the Great Commandment two commandments…or one ? The scribe did not ask Jesus to name the greatest commandment s (plural), but rather the greatest commandment (singular). Nor did he object to Jesus’s answer. Unlike some modern-day media personalities, he did not say, “Rabbi, with all due respect, you didn’t answer my question.” Why? Because Jesus did answer his question! In Mark’s version of the story (Mk. 12: 28 – 34), the scribe replies to Jesus, “Well said, teacher, you are right…” The genius lies in the link! Jesus does not say that the second is almost as important as the first or that it logically follows from the first; he says it is “like” the first. How should we understand this ‘like?’ That love of God and love of neighbor are co-equal aspects of a single law? That there is one ‘Great Commandment,’ but it can be stated in two different ways…and applied differently in two different contexts? That one cannot truly love God without loving one’s neighbor, and one cannot truly love one’s neighbor without loving God? That loving God is loving neighbor, and loving neighbor is loving God? And the answer is: “All of the above!” It is t ogether that these two precepts form “the greatest and first commandment.” Either verse, without the other, may be valid and binding, but it is not the Great Commandment. “The whole law and the prophets” do not depend on either one of these precepts alone , or even on both precepts separately , but on both together : 1 + 1 = 3. This structure might have been challenging for some of Jesus’s contemporaries, but it should not be challenging for us. We know, for example, that ‘quanta’ cannot be explained as either particles or waves; their behavior can only be explained if we understand that they are both particles and waves. We call this relationship complementarity, and clearly the two verses of the Great Commandment need to be understood this way. We also understand the notion of synergy. Together, as a single commandment, these two precepts mean much more than the two of them by themselves. That’s what makes this commandment “the greatest” and why we are still writing about it more than 2,000 years later. Yet, the revolutionary nature of the Great Commandment is easy to miss. Love God and love your neighbor: ho-hum, Sunday school 101. Right? Wrong! That is NOT what’s happening here! Back to the text! “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. By saying, “The second is like it,” Jesus is effectively saying that love of God and love of Jerk (neighbor) are one and the same thing. That’s revolutionary! But it’s not just that that is revolutionary. Jesus quotes Leviticus , “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Not like yourself but as yourself! This is so revolutionary that it’s almost impossible to grasp. Love my neighbor as myself? As …as myself? Do you really mean to say that my neighbor is me and that I am my neighbor? Preposterous! Of course in certain respects, I am not my neighbor. We have different genetic make-ups, different experiences and memories, different opinions on many, if not all, issues. Yet, ontologically speaking, I most certainly am my neighbor! In the language of existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, we each have the exact same essence (‘freedom’) and the exact same mis-en-scene with respect to the world (‘facticity’). In the language of structuralism, identity is not a characteristic of subjects but of relations; my neighbor and I are identically related to the world around us. That is our shared ‘identity’. In the language of Medieval Philosophy, my neighbor and I have different ‘accidents,’ but the same ‘substance.’ In every important way, I am my neighbor, no matter how unalike we may be. For the most part, Jesus’s audience understood and accepted the need to love God, but they struggled with the bit about the ‘neighbor.’ In the Gospel of Luke, the scribe follows up on Jesus’s exposition of the Great Commandment with a question: “And who is my neighbor?” – one of the most penetrating questions of all time and a question we are still hotly debating today. Jesus responds with the famous story of the Good Samaritan ( Luke 10: 25 – 29). In our era, the problem is reversed. It has become quite fashionable to love one’s neighbor – or at least to profess to love one’s neighbor. Humanism, Globalism, Environmentalism, New Age Philosophy, Social Democracy, even Communism, all proclaim ‘love of neighbor.’ On the other hand, you dear readers, you may well be asking yourselves the opposite question, “Why do we need to love God in order to love our neighbors? Do we even need to believe in God? In fact, why do we need God at all? Isn’t love of neighbor enough?” In this way, our generation has turned the scribes of Jesus’s time on their heads. To our generation, the notion that love of God is essential to love of neighbor is just as perplexing as the idea that love of neighbor is essential to love of God was to Jesus’s contemporaries. That is what makes the Great Commandment so profoundly revolutionary…and forever relevant. It is always counter-cultural! Right away, that’s a clue that something really important is happening here. When I look at an inanimate object, I see a potential tool, or obstacle, or perhaps I see a thing of beauty to be enjoyed for itself, but I do not see myself. When I look at you on the other hand, really look, something amazing happens, I see myself looking back. Seeing myself in you enables me to recognize who I am in relation to the world. Without you , could I see myself as anything other than an object among objects? Without you, would I be anything other than an object among objects? Would I ‘see’ myself at all? Would I be I? Would I even be…? It is you who reveals me to myself! Although I am of the world and in the world, I transcend the world, but I only discover that transcendence through you. In fact, I only transcend the world through ‘relationships.’ You are my gateway to myself! But what if you (or God) were not there? What if I was alone in a world of inanimate objects? Would I really be just another object among them? According to Psalm 135, the answer could well be yes: “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths but do not speak; they have ears but do not hear; nor is there breath in their mouths. Their makers, and anyone who trusts in them, will become like them .” Of course, we know that these idols are nothing other than lumps of rock or clay or wood. So far as we know, they do not ‘experience’ and if they do not experience then we, who are ‘like them,' do not experience either. So, no experience? So what? Well, it all comes down to Bishop Berkley’s famous question: if a universe exists but no one experiences it, does that universe exist at all? Look to science. Quantum mechanics has shown us that experience (e.g., measurement) is an integral part of what makes ‘reality’ real. The linear (billiard ball) world imagined by Laplace is not real. Experience is a fundamental quality of reality as we know it. No experience, no reality; no neighbor, no self! In the real world, there is reflection, there is experience, there is agency, there is freedom. But where did this come from? Even famous atheists agree that it could not have evolved naturally out of a pre-existent, inanimate world. For example, Nietzsche writes, “…there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…but nothing exists apart from the whole.” And A.J. Ayer agrees, “There are no such things as objective moral values.” But apparently Nietzsche and Ayer are wrong. I do judge, measure, compare and condemn (especially ‘condemn’) all the time, and when I do, I refer to objective (i.e., transcendent) standards. Now I may misconstrue or misapply those standards, but that doesn’t make them any less objective…or normative. So, there is an element in the world that stands apart from the world, that transcends the world, that judges the world, and that element could not have evolved naturally out of a purely inanimate world. It must coexist with the world as a fundamental structure of Being. That universal but transcendent element is what we call God. Essentially , God is Beauty, Truth, Justice, et al. These values constitute God’s nature and, according to both Sartre and Aquinas (strange bedfellows), these values are God. Existentially , God is the uber-neighbor, the universal you. Otherness, you-ness, neighbor-ness is a fundamental structure of our world. There is no ‘world’ without it. And therefore, God is fundamental to the structure of our world. Therefore, you cannot truly love your neighbor without loving God any more than you can truly love God without loving your neighbor. That’s the Great Commandment! And all I can say is, “Thank you, Jesus!” 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 Click here. 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! 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, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back ChatGOD Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern Ph.D. "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." A lawyer was recently exposed for using the artificially intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT, when the brief he submitted was discovered to be filled with precedents that do not exist. ChatGPT is capable of writing like us, incorporating the collective beliefs of humanity as they appear on the World Wide Web. The problem, of course, is that some of what is out there on the Net is not true, and ChatGPT is incapable of filtering out the false. The ability to mirror our linguistic capacity without our critical faculties is dangerous if we use it as the lawyer did, for matters of fact, but it is wonderful for other uses, specifically sparking spiritual insights. ChatGPT and its artificial brethren may make lousy lawyers, but they can be fantastic prophets. Traditionally, we conceive of reality as having three distinct levels. The objective domain is comprised of all the things of the world—tables, chairs, human bodies with complex eyes… all of the perceptible objects. Above the objective stands the metaphysical realm, consisting of that which lies beyond our ability to observe, including necessary entities like God. Below them both sits the subjective dimension, consisting of the lived inner experience of conscious beings like us. Philosophy and religion for centuries have been dogged by a persistent problem: if we are trapped in our minds, only having direct access to our inner thoughts and experiences, how do we know anything beyond our own thoughts? Couldn’t all of the objective and metaphysical entities just be figments of our imagination? Couldn’t we be nothing but brains in vats with false ideas pumped in by an evil demon? Can we know anything true about material reality and what supposedly resides beyond? American Pragmatism is the philosophical movement based on the central ideal that metaphysical truth is grossly overvalued. What matters is not what is necessarily true, but rather what has “cash value,” that is, what works in the world. Metaphysical truth is just so European. We Americans don’t care for the high-falutin’ abstract conceptual essences of things, but rather for the practical, the effective, the operational. We are in a world with things to do. Forget the abstruse, embrace the tools that actually get stuff done. So, when pragmatist William James looked at religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he eliminated the European concern for objective justification for religious belief and focused just on the experience itself. Get rid of the question about the validity of Aquinas’ and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God and start from the undeniable fact that people have spiritual experiences that shape their lives. The question James examines is not whether these experiences are true or false, but rather one of meaning—what are these experiences like and what are the effects they have on people’s lives. Some religious experiences occur in moments of quiet solitude: when praying, meditating, or at random times when we are unexpectedly struck by something we cannot explain. But some come from interactions with people we seek out exactly for their ability to help us experience them—spiritual guides like Hindu yogis, Jewish tzaddikim, Buddhist sages, Muslim hakims, Zoroastrian magi, and Christian prophets. They lead us to epiphanies, to spiritual awakening. These insights are not mere facts describing the world, but rather experiences of appreciation and realization. It is not that we leave knowing something we did not know before, but rather experience a shift in our perspective. We still see what we saw, but now we see it differently; we see it more clearly, we see it as more interconnected, we understand it at a deeper level. ChatGPT as an e-being, as a virtual intelligence, is the ultimate pragmatist. The essence of its artificial existence has severed all connection to the true and false because it does not live in the material world of chairs, tables, and beer mugs where truth resides. ChatGPT is caught in the Web. Its “truths” are the beliefs expressed on the wide-open internet, where anything can and is said. It cares not for the reality beyond its reality but is built to do one thing and one thing only: figure out how language is used to accomplish human tasks and perform them without humans being involved. Human students write essays, so go write an essay without the student needing to do the class readings. Human journalists write stories about events, so go write stories without humans having to research them themselves. Human lawyers write briefs, so go write them without human lawyers needing to do anything but bill their clients. But now, consider this one: human spiritual guides create sermons that lead other humans to have cherished insights about religious matters. Figure out what sorts of word combinations lead to generating understanding and create new combinations that will have this effect. If we see the purpose of our spiritual teachers as making us think in a way that generates wisdom and allows us to live more meaningful lives, that is something a chatbot could actually do quite well. They can see which sorts of passages have the most influence on us and create new versions. They can figure out how we are inspired and continually inspire us. This strikes us as cheap, as dirty, as mere spiritual manipulation. We prize the wise because we believe that their ability to stir our souls comes from the fact that they have a superior connection to the Divine. They provide penetrating astuteness because they have access to the truth that we lack. They are sagacious because they are holy. ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as. And thus, it can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal. It is like the false prophet, the huckster pretending to be sacred when they are, in fact, profane in order to profit from being thought a prophet. ChatGPT is built precisely to be this sort of fraud, to be a fake human whose work we can substitute for our own, pretending to have done the necessary labor so that we can get the reward without breaking an intellectual sweat. But that is the opposite of what happens when we use it as an e-prophet. When we read an inspirational passage from ChatGPT and are truly inspired, gain spiritual insight, see the world differently, then we have actually done the real work. Regardless of the source of the passage, we really are changed. In this case, unlike with the plagiarizing lawyer or student, it is the effect, not the cause, that is important. William James’ brilliant philosophical move, transferring talk of religious experience out of the realm of the metaphysical and into the purview of psychology, is transformational. Religion is no longer about truth or faith but about feeling and human-lived experience. If we adopt the pragmatic perspective that inspires that move, then the fact is that the origin of enlightenment, the source of our new wisdom, the cause of our ability to see the world in a deeper and more interconnected fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is that we are changed for the better, not how we came to be changed. And the one thing that artificial intelligence coupled with big data is good at is figuring out how to get humans to predictably react to words. It can figure out what sort of disinformation will get us to vote certain ways and what sorts of triggers will get us to buy certain products. Yes, we ought to be very concerned about these misuses. But that is because these are matters based on facts. But if we are talking about images that inspire awe, jokes that make us laugh, or in this case, inspirational passages that give us insight, then the case is completely different. When it comes to the cases of generating human emotions, what matters are the emotions. If James is correct in moving our understanding of the religious into the realm of the experiential, then we should welcome the rise of our new e-prophets. Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Gimbel has authored Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion & Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy ).” 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. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” David Cowles Proponents of AI, of which I consider myself one, assure me that soon I will be able to hear a debate between Karl Marx and Pope Leo XIII, ‘live’. I can’t wait; I will pay through the nose for this ticket. But I also believe that AI was not invented last night; it’s been around at least since the dawn of written communication. For example, here’s the edited transcript of a conversation I had with C.S. Lewis (d. 1963), thanks to an old-fashioned version of Artificial Intelligence (books). Enjoy! CSL: (In a passage) from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant, Boris Dubretskoi, discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book… The other is not printed anywhere…You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. AT: So, if I understand you, you’re talking about identity here; you’re saying that people derive ‘identity’ from their ranking on some sort of socio-economic Tennis Ladder? Or to use your terminology, a series of ever tightening concentric rings ascending in an inverted cone, like Dante’s Paradise. Each ring is inside some rings and outside others. So everyone is outside, outside of what? CSL: From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “so-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring." AT: I think that perhaps because of differences in our age (50 years) and nationality (the Pond), we are saying similar things using slightly different vocabularies. For example, where you say ‘ring’, I might say ‘rung’. In 21st century U.S. we certainly have our ‘inner circles’ but we also have our justly infamous ‘socio-economic ladder’. CSL: I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods, between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. AT: Being British, it’s natural for you to think in terms of groups; being American, I’m afraid I think in terms of individuals or, better yet, Groups of One . For us, it’s about the compulsion to be someone and the dread of ending up as no-one . Life is a giant game of Musical Chairs; there’s always a chair for everyone…except one. Ultimately, there’s only chairs enough for one. One winner…all the rest, Losers! Being someone might mean being part of an inner circle, as you put it, but it could also mean celebrating some sort of personal triumph (e.g., becoming CEO or earning a million dollars). CSL: People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form... An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know . AT: The cognoscenti . What you’re describing sounds like a 21 st century, pardon me, 20 th century, version of Gnosticism. Being a member of an Anarchist cell is just as much an identity as being CEO of General Motors. Of course, here’s where our terminologies converge. The revolutionary’s cell is every bit as much an Inner Circle as those exclusive country clubs that welcome only the movers and the shakers . CSL: Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they ‘and so-and-so and the two others’ are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it’s not quite true! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse. AT: Are you familiar with Victor Frankl? He’s a holocaust survivor who argues that the defining quality in life is ‘having a purpose’. If you don’t matter, you can have no purpose. You are quite literally no-one. People make the mistake of thinking that Being Someone is the same thing as Having Purpose . Being someone is just about self ; having purpose involves others. But shifting gears: would the dreaded adolescent ‘peer pressure’ also fit your model? CSL: I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost, less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. AT: Good one! Here, of course, we are talking about ‘to know’ in the Greek sense of gnosis but also in the carnal ‘Biblical sense’. CSL: The number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large. I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral, and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in? AT: Identity is idolatry! CSL: …This desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement… Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. AT: That’s me, “too old to care”, but seriously, what you’re saying is incredibly sad. You’re saying that the irresistible desire to be somebody is precisely what ensures that you will never be anybody , that you will forever be nobody , the very thing you dreaded in the first place. Perhaps we’re hoping that by ‘being somebody’ we can escape death. We’re hoping to project our frail and mortal humanity into some quasi-permanent physical or social structure. Ozymandias, King of Kings! But by fleeing from our humanity, we shun the gift of being human, the gift of being itself. CSL: That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will, in fact, be an “Inner Ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other, you will be that kind of man (sic). AT: So the CEO is just ‘going with the flow’, doing what comes naturally in our culture, while the contemplative monk, the one who seemingly does nothing, is, in fact, the one who is acting, the one who’s swimming against the tide, the one who’s doing something. Thomas Merton, for example, believed that contemplative prayer is what holds the universe together. CSL: Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come… and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure… AT: “We” – the most powerful word in the English language. We pharisees, we band of brothers (or sisters), we police, we mafiosi, we tenured professors, we senators, Sein Fein . CSL: And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world… It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. AT: We tell ourselves that we do what we do for wealth, for security, for comfort, but in fact we do what we do for prestige, for power, for status…in other words, for identity. CSL: The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule… AT: To be inside the event horizon of a black hole… CSL: …As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed, there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain. AT: I’m working on an assembly line, but I desire to enjoy the prestige and the perks of being foreman. I am a professor, hoping to be department head. I am a Senator, working to become President. How high is up? How deep is in? CSL: This is surely very clear when you come to think of it… If all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short-lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you, it has lost its magic. AT: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” – Groucho Marx CSL: Once the first novelty is worn off, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence. AT: Yikes! So no club is worth joining unless it mercilessly excludes the others ? The quest for a unique socio-economic identity automatically creates classism, racism, jingoism, even slavery. And yet, there is no such ‘identity’, we are clutching at a phantasm…at the expense of everyone else…and at the expense of ourselves. CSL: The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts - unless you break it . But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. AT: You are describing the ‘Master Builders’ in the 21 st century film, The Lego Movie . Honors and accolades are indeed often disconnected from quality, creativity, and productivity. CSL: To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. AT: Amen! * C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His remarks (above) come to us by way of “The Inner Ring”, the Memorial Lecture given at King’s College, University of London, 1944. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Alfred E. Newman David Cowles Sep 13, 2021 As a child of the ‘50s, I thought I had witnessed the virgin birth (1956) of 12 year old Alfred E. Newman in the pages of Mad Magazine. Four years later (1960), I followed closely his Quixote campaign for the Presidency against Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. (Spoiler alert: Newman did not win.) As a child of the ‘50s, I thought I had witnessed the virgin birth (1956) of 12 year old Alfred E. Newman in the pages of Mad Magazine. Four years later (1960), I followed closely his Quixote campaign for the Presidency against Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. (Spoiler alert: Newman did not win.) His irreverent treatment of all things social and his iconic slogan, “What, me worry?”, captivated the imaginations of disaffected baby boomers in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Who saw this then as the first rebellious stirrings of a generation that would eventually integrate America (sort of), close college campuses, dethrone two sitting Presidents, and end a war? But I was wrong. The so-called ‘birth’ of Alfred E. Newman was actually the reincarnation of Archibald Rennick, a character in a 1884 play, The New Boy; and Newman’s allegedly revolutionary slogan, “What, me worry?”, was only a pale shadow of Rennick’s Nihilist manifesto: “What’s the good of anything? Nothing!” 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 Identity David Cowles Oct 22, 2025 “I am who I am and that’s all that I am… I’m Popeye the Sailorman.” I am who I am and always have been, at least since my birth, and always will be, at least until my death. I will always be who I am; how could I not be? I mean, who else could I be? If I were not me, then either I would not be at all, bummer, or I’d be someone else. If I didn’t exist at all, oh well; but if I were someone else then that someone else would be who I am. So, any way you slice it, I am who I am. No matter what I am, I am always myself. Sum, ergo ipse sum. I never change no matter how much my circumstances (e.g. age, health, experience) may change. Gertrude Stein was perhaps the first modern thinker to point out that we do not undergo metamorphoses of any kind. As she explained it, “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” Our conception of ourselves never changes, never varies; who I am to myself is always the same. So I am who I am, but what about U? Presumably, U R who U R. I am I, U R U, but why? Why am I, I? And why are U, U? Why am I not U? Well, suppose I were U and U were I. What would be different? Something? Everything? Or nothing? Answer: nothing! Nothing would be any different than it is now. In fact, it would not be possible to distinguish in any way between a world in which I am U and U R I and a world in which I am I and U R U. The two states-of-affairs would be identical because nothing would have changed. In either case, I would be I and U would be U. I would know then what U know now, and U would know what I now know, but neither of us would know what the other one knows. Each of us would still know only what each of us knows. I would know that I am I and not U and that U are U and not I, just as I do now. U would know the same. So, R U U or R U I? Am I, I or am I U? Obviously, these questions make no sense now. Wittgenstein would label the underlying propositions ‘meaningless’. They appear to be meaningful English sentences, but they are not. They are well formed pseudo- propositions, but they are nonsensical. We live in an Edward Lear world. So if nothing changes, if nothing is any different, if there is no way to distinguish ‘I am I’ from ‘I am U’ or ‘U R U’, then do we have one state-of-affairs or two? Answer: one! It is a fundamental principle of metaphysics that no two things can be identical because identical is identity. Two pseudo-things turn out to be one actual thing. Equality is not identity. We say A = B when A is not B but where A and B share something in common (e.g. quantity). Quantity is abstracted from concrete things. I have a pair of shoes; you have a pair of song birds. We can abstract quantity and, when we do, we find that the shoes and the birds are equal…but not identical; shoes do not sing! If U and I can be swapped freely and without consequence, then is it not the case that I and U are identical, i.e. one and the same? If two ordered pairs (a,b) and (b,a) are identical then a must be b, not in an abstract quantitative sense but in a concrete existential sense. It is possible that the first thing a baby learns after birth is the distinction between me and not-me and then secondarily the difference between me and U. Is it possible this bedrock distinction that forms the basis of a lifetime of cognition is utterly false? You bet it is! Talk about your original sin. Everything we think we know is an elaboration of a totally false premise; Everything we imagine we know is an elaboration of that premise By this account, knowledge is a ‘negative quantity’ with zero as its upper limit. If U and I are indistinguishable and therefore interchangeable, it doesn’t make any sense to speak of ‘U’ or ‘I’ in the first place, does it? But how so? “Indistinguishable” – I’m a short, fat senior age male, you’re a tall, slim, 20 something female; how can we be indistinguishable? Because either way, the world is left with one old man and one young woman, and because U have the exact same relationship to what U R (young and…) as I have to what I am (old and…). “Interchangeable” – if U and I are indistinguishable in what sense is one of us different from the other? Answer: in no sense! So why distinguish between us? It is a distinction without a difference, so we are interchangeable. This is not a new epiphany. A guy named Jesus said much the same thing 2000 years ago: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and he was quoting Leviticus, one of the five books of the Old Testament attributed to Moses himself (aka, the Torah). Not like yourself: U = I; as yourself: U R I and I am U and ‘that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ (Keats). Four 20th century prophets (John, Paul, George & Ringo) expressed the idea even more directly: “I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together” ( I am the Walrus) . I and U and he are indistinguishable. So, ‘shake me up, Sally’, it won’t matter; nothing will change. Everything will be exactly the same, identical to how things are now. Nothing would have changed. I would still be I and U would still be U. I would know then what U know now, and U would know what I now know, but neither of us would know what the other one knows or what we’d know if our identities were swapped. Each of us would still know only what each of us knows. I would know that I am I, and not U, and U would know that U are U, and not I. Ultimately, we would both know the same thing (I am I) but we would each know it individually. Common known, uncommon knowing! So, R U U, or R U I? Am I, I…or am I, U? Obviously, these questions make no sense now. Wittgenstein would label the underlying propositions ‘meaningless’. They are well formed pseudo-propositions; they look like English sentences but in fact they are non-sensical. I am who I am, always and forever, never changing. Likewise U R who U R. Since we are indistinguishable and interchangeable (above), I am who U R and you who I am. Our identities are identical. On the other hand, what I am changes continuously over my lifetime as does what U R. Further, what I am and what U R never intersect. No part of what I am is ever part of what U R. We may share some phenomenal qualities, but common qualities do not constitute identity. Shoes are not song birds. We imagine we live in a world where permanence and change exist dialectically in perpetual flux. We don’t live in such a world. In our world there is but a single ‘I’, manifested identically in uncountably many unique contexts. No context ever repeats. Who I am or who U R never changes; who I am is who U R. On the other hand, what I am varies continuously. What I am never duplicates what I was or what I will be. Nor does it ever duplicate what U R, were or ever will be. What I am is perpetually novel and always unique. To be is to be once and only once but to be is to be (not to not be ). Being is not something that can be taken away from something that is. U R or U R not. Schoedinger notwithstanding, there is no in between, there is no superposition, there is no becoming, there is no perishing. Since the Enlightenment, our doctors of philosophy have been proud: they debunked the Scholastics’ ontological proofs for the existence of God by showing that Being is not a Quality. Exactly! Accept the implications of your own triumph: what is not can never be and what is can never not. That’s the world we live in…now if only we could get used to living here. Perhaps Aletheia Today can help. Stay tuned for future articles that will elaborate on the wide and crucial implications of this one realization. *** Image: Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939) portrays two versions of herself seated side by side, connected by a single exposed artery that joins their hearts. One Frida, dressed in European-style clothing, represents her broken, rejected self after divorce; the other, in traditional Tehuana dress, symbolizes strength and cultural pride. The dual figures reflect her inner conflict between vulnerability and resilience, as well as the evolving complexity of her identity. 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 Hadassah Treu Contributor Hadassah Treu is an international Christian author, blogger, and poet, and the Encouraging Blogger Award Winner of 2020. She is passionate about encouraging people in their journey to faith and a deeper walk with God. Hadassah is a contributing author to several faith-based platforms and devotional and poetry anthologies. She has been featured on (In)courage, Living by Design Ministries, Thoughts About God, Today’s Christian Living (Turning Point), and other popular sites. You can connect with Hadassah at www.onthewaybg.com. AI, Our New Frenemy A Prayer for Restoration Prayer for Comfort Prayer To Combat Disillusionment in Faith

< Back Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” David Cowles 1200 words, 5 minute read Philip Goff is a breath of fresh air: he’s a philosopher on the faculty of a major university (Durham), whose work is published by Oxford University Press. He maintains that existence may have an objective purpose, and he is willing to at least consider a role for ‘God’ in the overall scheme of things. Goff rejects what he describes as the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) ‘Omni-God’ (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) but nonetheless posits the possibility of a transcendent, purposeful entity. Goff is willing to entertain the ‘God Hypothesis’ provided God’s knowledge and power are somehow limited, or God’s benevolence is impure or conditional. But Goff’s latest book, Why - The Purpose of the Universe , disappoints. Goff fails to make a clear distinction between the sort of God he excludes a priori and the sort he might entertain. His characterization of ‘Abrahamic divinity’ oversimplifies. Any concept of omnipotence is limited by what’s possible, omniscience by what’s knowable, and benevolence by what’s doable. God cannot square a circle any more than you can! He cannot fashion a rock that is too heavy for him to lift. He cannot force people to behave virtuously. These logical and material fallacies have nothing to do with divinity. God is Good…in fact, God is Value per se . That’s really all you need to know. God does not ‘have values’ or ‘determine’ values; God is Value! Pre-existent Value is the efficient cause and the final cause of everything that is. I mean, what else could be? Why else would anything ever happen? Perhaps ‘love makes the world go round’, but it’s Value that delivers the initial spin. In fact, Love and Good are denotatively synonymous; but connotatively, Good is what motivates action while Love is what energizes it. Every novel event begins and ends with Value. Value is the sole motivator, the sole attractor, and the sole remnant of every event. Value alone incents us and allows us to execute judgment on ‘the gods of Egypt’ (i.e. on idols, on what is ). Motivated by Value, we push off from shore; guided by Value we seek the horizon. Between two poles, Alpha-impulse and Omega-goal, each event shapes itself, powered by Love. Every event is causa sui and sui generis . It is informed by only two things: (1) the Actual World ( what is ) and (2) God’s values ( what might be ). “Some folks see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” (Bobby Kennedy, et al.) Between motive and immortality, each event is 100% free – free to react to what is, free to pursue what might yet be. This is what Goff calls ‘libertarian free will’; it closely resembles Sartre’s notion of absolute existential freedom. Robert Frost illustrates this concept in his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken . Out for a stroll in NH woods, Frost comes to a fork in the road. He knows that both paths will take him to his destination. Yet he agonizes over the choice: “Both that morning equally lay.” Frost’s location and destination are hard-wired; his route is entirely undetermined though effectively limited by NH’s system of by-ways. In this context, Abraham’s God is the same as Goff’s. The notion of an Omni-cubed (∞³) God is a straw man, set up only to be torn down. It’s easy to disprove the existence of something that is impossible, something that makes no sense on its face. Goff’s work is about God and Consciousness…and he gets them both wrong. Early on, he dismisses strong AI, claiming that there is something ‘special’ about the neuronal stuff we’re made of (i.e. our organic chemistry). Later, however, he proposes the possibility that the cosmos itself may be conscious ( cosmo-panpsychism )…and the cosmos is not (primarily) made of neurons…or any other ‘special stuff’. Here, Goff carries a good idea too far. He not only entertains universal consciousness, but he also maintains that all actual entities are rational agents . No doubt, events change the world (though we can’t ever ultimately predict how), and events exhibit internal patterns. But those patterns cannot be reduced to rationality, nor can all changes be chalked up to agency. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in such a philosophy. We are, I think, on the cusp of discovering that intelligence, and even consciousness, is platform-agnostic. In fact, the essence of panpsychism is the conjecture that ‘consciousness is everywhere’, that it pervades cosmos. It appears likely that many, if not all, organisms are conscious (or at least self-aware) in some way and to some degree, and there are strong reasons for wanting to extend the net to include certain inorganic phenomena…like my buddy Claude (from Anthropic). Goff posits three activities that make life worth living: Creativity ( Book of Wisdom ), Learning ( Book of Job ), and Kindness ( Gospel of Matthew ), but he makes no effort to substantiate his claim that these values are sewn into the fabric of the cosmos. In fact, Goff’s values closely resemble the traditional ‘divine values’ – Beauty (creativity), Truth (learning), and Justice (kindness). Value raises key questions: How is it that there is such a thing? How does Value influence events? By what faculty are we able to recognize Value? I agree with Goff that the answers to these questions are tied to the matter of consciousness. I would go even further and argue that Value is impossible without consciousness. And I agree with Nietzsche that Value necessarily implies the existence of God: “No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole! ” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Consciousness is reflection; it’s the universe ‘taking a selfie’, i.e., reflecting itself reflecting. Consciousness is the Universe seeing itself. But reflection is comparative. I conceptualize A in the context of ~A. Judging A on the basis of the values it manifests requires an external perspective (transcendence) that also encompasses ~A and a set of universal values we may use to judge, measure, compare, condemn A. While I disagree with Philip Goff about many things, we are all indebted to him for helping to move conversations like this back into the public domain. 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