Aletheia Today invites you to explore our Lent issue, where faith and science intersect during this season of reflection and renewal. This special edition examines the profound significance of Lent through process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays. Featuring insights from thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre, we delve into the spiritual and scientific aspects of fasting, repentance, and preparation. Discover the deeper meanings behind Lenten practices. Inside Our Spring 2024 Issue Philosophy Life is a Movie “Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” Happiness “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” Alphabet “Reciting the alphabet is like peeling layers off of a prize winning red onion.” What Is Time? An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... Theology 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.” The Theology of Science Fiction Can AI have a soul? Culture & The Arts Arithmetic “I want to repeal all the fundamental laws of Arithmetic.” We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Leviticus and the Fed "The Fed’s 2% inflation policy is a modern version of the Levitical program. It pays for the social safety net that is our way of redistributing wealth.” Marcel Proust “Who has not dreamed of reliving a cherished moment, not through the ghostly shadows of mind but, like Job, in the flesh?” Spirituality I'm Ageless and Timeless “I am a spy; I can sense it, but I have no spy craft, no Bond-tech, and no ‘should you choose to accept it’ mission.” The Fork in the Road "...And I'm ever grateful for His guidance." Is Techno-Optimism a New Religion? “This is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology.” The Journey to the Cross Is Ours Too Is the journey to the cross our stairway to Heaven? 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 03/18/2022 And then? What comes next? After 50 years of doing everything for everybody, you can do things for yourself…to the extent that you’re able–to the extent you’re not able. You must now learn to let other people do things for you. More later… -David And then? What comes next? After 50 years of doing everything for everybody, you can do things for yourself…to the extent that you’re able–to the extent you’re not able. You must now learn to let other people do things for you. More later… -David Previous Next

< Back Never Skip Over the Miracle Annie D. Stutley "Once upon a time, a grittier version of me roamed barefoot and luxuriated not in material but in emotional response. " Once upon a time my family vacation looked different – no fuss, no glamour, but full of all the classic summer substance that freckles childhood. Mom’s family had a lake house upon a hill that rolled down to the rocky shoreline of the then sleepy watering hole in Southwest Louisiana, Prien Lake. Prien, as we called it, was another of my childhood constants -- as important as church and as ritual as fireworks on the Fourth. If Bay St. Louis (the Bay) was the shiny, sandy string by which my upbringing was pulled, Prien was the frolicking, mucky highlight, smack dab in the middle of each summer. Unlike the Bay, there was nothing remotely fancy about the house at Prien. Built in the early 1900s by my great-grandparents, it was never intended to be a year-round residence. There was no air conditioning except for one unit in the living room, no television but a tiny black and white screen with rabbit ears, no telephone, and the only bathroom was a small one off the sparsely appointed kitchen. Prien was surrounded by lush vegetation, trees and shrubbery that came with an array of critters. Lizards, skinks, bugs, spiders, and an occasional snake were fairly normal visitors. But there were also fireflies at night, blanketing the lawn as we played board games like Mad Magazine and Win, Place, or Show in the front room, and dragonflies in the morning that zoomed about the hammock hanging from the branches of a big Magnolia tree. While the Bay had one large, Greek revival porch, Prien was almost entirely encircled by porches, some open, some screened, and one a glassed-in sunroom. Upstairs was a balcony and three bedrooms. All of the furniture was old–wrought iron bed frames and turn-of-the-century marble-topped vanities that would cost a fortune today, and all of it etched with a natural shabby chic finish from the damp lake air. The house remained locked up most of the year. So our trips always began with Mom and me at the nearby laundromat washing sheets and towels. I’d sip a Pop Rouge soda on the stoop of the laundromat, watching cows in the adjoining pasture while we waited for the sheets to dry. Before long though, we’d settle in, the year’s dust swept out and a summer breeze blowing in like a trumpeter: Vacation had begun. Today my vacations look very different. We stay in hotels overlooking huge, zero-entry, sparkling swimming pools with tumbling waterfalls, or we book luxe condos where laminate countertops are considered slumming it. I never clean upon arrival. Everything shines, even the bathtub, on a stage under a spotlight. Champagne can be icing beside me with just the press of a button. I mean, really. What the hell, Annie? At Prien, I’d swim all day in murky water, the slimy bottom of the lake nothing more than an afterthought. I’d shower on the back steps of the house with a bar of Ivory soap I kept on a rock. I caught crabs and trapped bugs. I followed lizards in between the leaves of the aspidistra. I lived a little filthy and slept a little sweaty. Yet, I remember it as idyllic. I believe that it actually was idyllic, that I’m not remembering it through child’s eyes. But it wasn’t so because of freedom at my fingertips, nor because of the sweeping view, and not because it was all captured in a brief, fleeting moment each year either. My present vacations are all those things. Prien had something extra -- a certain magic that lay in the purity of its intention. That little pink cottage on the lake wasn’t in competition or tried to be anything more than the humblest representation of why we get away from our ordinary lives in the first pace–to gather, to listen, to pray, to wonder, and to rest. Over the years imposing waterfront mansions slowly took the place of the camps along Prien Lake’s shoreline as the area turned residential. The little house held on. And as I bobbed on a raft after boats zipped by, listening to the water lap against the wharf, the sky preparing a magnificent sunset, a subtle yet significant whisper came to me skipping off the lake: This is enough . It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t the chic sophistication that my children associate with vacation today, but it did the job well. I realized recently that I had never before written about Prien. Initially, I was disappointed in myself. How could something so important in my memory be overlooked? But perhaps it’s exactly because that place never beckoned attention. It lacked the certain drama of anywhere else I’ve known and kept a quiet simplicity in my mind over time, just as the house itself. When I was in high school, termites infested Prien and we stopped going. I was getting too busy for long vacations anyway and all my siblings were working by then. Prien was to Mom what Bay St. Louis was to me, and she’d been evicted. I was too snotty a teenager to notice her sadness. Then one day when I was in college, Mom was folding clothes and seemed strangely distant. “You okay, Mom?” I asked. “They’re tearing down Prien today,” she said softly. In an instant I saw the old, green furniture on the porches, the curious indoor window behind the sofa that overlooked the center hall, the dusty rafters atop the bedrooms, and I heard the buzzing vintage refrigerator. I remembered eating my weight in boiled crabs under the ceiling fans, the antique paper dolls I played with, paper dolls that my grandmother had played with too, nights of board games, coffee on the front porch as the sun rose, and the tattered, pink chaise lounge where I took the best naps of my life. I thought about Mom as a child. She, too, crabbed all day and waited for the fireflies at night. She, too, cartwheeled down the bluff and rested beneath the branches of the Magnolia. Like me, she didn’t want for anything more. My heart lurched. Mom was losing more than a house. Her childhood would lie in the rubble. It was the humblest of vacation homes, but it made our lives rich. And I thought how remarkable to have shared such a place as a family, a patch of earth that worked its miracle each summer and then receded until the next year, never changing, never relenting to the times, just remaining ever so. Prien was our Brigadoon. And it had vanished forever. I know enough to know that not all humans are so fortunate to keep the same simple taste we had as children. I traded in my Pop Rouge soda for the pop of a champagne cork. Critters, all of them, give me the creeps, and I am most happy immersed in nature when I know I can return at nightfall to my air-conditioned cabin. My vacations have matured into a luxury where my grown-up fantasies of swim-up bars and room service come true, and now my hearts skips a beat when I see that housekeeping has swept through my suite. But once upon a time, a grittier version of me roamed barefoot and luxuriated not in material but in emotional response. Prien was freedom. Prien was family. Prien was motivation to make it to the next summer. Prien was hope that one could always be so happy. Prien was immeasurable joy. But just like Brigadoon, Prien was remote from reality -- nothing lasts forever. This essay was written poolside in Lake Buena Vista -- another Disney trip. It’s the annual vacation my kids push through homework, exams, and practices to get to. It’s not cheap and we hustle all year to make it happen. But it’s also an artificial version of the real thing: Disney Polynesia, Disney Africa, Disney Europe. In fact, someone once told me, “Ya know for what you’ve paid all these years, you could have taken your family to actual Tahiti, not fake Tahiti.” Fake Tahiti is exaggerated -- remote from reality, transporting us to a make-believe world where everything is over the top. At first glance, it’s a stark contrast to Prien, unless I were to try to measure something immeasurable, something worth every penny and every unstamped passport page. Like Prien, our fake Tahiti elicits immeasurable joy in us. I’m too changed to stay at a Prien kind of place today, at least not without a professional cleaning crew and an exterminator. But once upon vacation, I was able to see past the torn paint and wear to the miracle Prien produced every summer. It was family that kept it going -- a shared love for place and each other that kept it from evolving into anything more than its purest intention, an immeasurable joy, a tie that bound us, and a reminder of what truly matters. Eventually my kids will outgrow fake Tahiti. But wherever they vacation and however they choose to experience that time, I hope they never skip over the miracle. Image: The little pink house on Prien Lake just before demolition. 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. Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Equality or Identity David Cowles Sep 7, 2025 “Both individual justice and collective survival require equality of opportunity; neither benefits from artificially imposed equality of result.” “All men (sic) are created equal.” So wrote our founding fathers (sic) as they birthed a nation that relied on slavery to drive its predominantly agricultural economy. It was a stunning act of hypocrisy! And yet, it is my belief that a majority of the men (sic) present at the signing of the Declaration were on balance reasonably ethical, at least by today’s jaded standards, and some perhaps even virtuous. They would not have condoned such hypocrisy in their private lives. Some were already calling for Abolition; others sensed a contradiction but resolved to live with it, however uneasily. The majority, however, saw no conflict between the language of the Declaration and social reality in the American South. We have rightly rejected the ethos of slavery and the moral hypocrisy that accompanied it. We are still working to dismantle its institutions and correct its social legacy. We are recommitted to equality , and we have learned to apply that concept to everyone, regardless of race or gender. In a justifiable reaction to abuses, historical and ongoing, we are skittish about any residual distinctions based on race or gender. (Look what happened to Larry Summers when, as Harvard’s Head, he listed gender differences as one of a smorgasbord of possible reasons why women statistically seem to lag behind men in STEM studies. He simply wanted to cover every logical possibility regardless of its physical improbability…and that act of intellectual honesty cost him his job.) In our zeal to eliminate any lingering vestiges of discrimination, we run up against a different problem: How do we make sure we don’t compromise the cultural diversity that makes our society, or any society, strong? How do we keep equality from degenerating into homogeneity? As we know from biology, the adaptations needed for species’ survival are normally not invented from whole cloth; rather they come from recessive traits already present in the population. Yesterday’s recessive trait is dominant tomorrow. A healthy genome, or a healthy culture, always has a bunch of untried adaptations on the shelf . In today’s commerce, ‘just in time’ inventory management is all the rage. That may work for Walmart, but it is not Mother Nature’s way. She (sic) was a Depression baby. She’s a hoarder; she hates to throw anything out: “Who knows? It might come in handy someday, e.g. if we need to recover from a thermonuclear holocaust.” Genetic and cultural diversity is essential to the long term survival of a species…or a civilization. Unfortunately, homo sapiens has an unusually low level of genetic variety; to survive we need to make up that shortfall with robust cultural diversity. So how do we avoid homogenizing society into a raceless, sexless monolith? How do we protect the cultural diversity we need to grow and adapt to changes in our environment? Look to Title IX as a paradigm. This 1972 law mandates ‘equal’ treatment in federally funded college athletic programs. Here’s how Claude from Anthropic describes it: “Requires schools to provide equal athletic opportunities for male and female students. This doesn't mean identical programs, but rather equitable treatment in areas like scholarships, facilities, coaching, and support services.” This does not mean that women are automatically allowed to play on men’s teams…or vice versa...or share showers, etc. It does require universities to provide students with ‘equal opportunity’ to develop athletically, regardless of gender. Oft times, government sponsored ‘social engineering’ ends in disaster. Consider, for example, court ordered efforts to achieve racial desegregation in primary and secondary public schools. Known as ‘forced busing’, these initiatives were center stage beginning in the 1960s and continuing well into the ‘90s. Most observers consider these initiatives a disaster. An entire generation of American youth had their educations disrupted and, in the end, it’s unclear whether busing contributed to any meaningful, sustainable, reduction in racial imbalance. Not so, Title IX . These programs have had massively positive effects on university life and the knock-on effects have led to explosive growth in women’s sports far beyond the confines of academia (e.g. the WNBA). Court ordered busing was grounded in Brown v. Board of Education , a 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools. A series of subsequent decisions (2000 – 2010) largely gutted Brown and ‘court ordered busing’ is now seen as a relic of an unhappier time. The Court’s decision in Brown overturned the principle of ‘separate but equal’. The Court quite correctly concluded that involuntary separation of students by race was inherently incompatible with equal educational opportunity. Brown was right, of course; and yet, many cherished educational institutions thrive on ‘concentrating’ their student populations based on race, religion, or gender. Few would suggest, for example, that faith-based schools (e.g. RCC parochial schools) or Historically Black Colleges or non-coed secondary schools be shuttered. Equality is a good thing, homogeneity is not. Mao is famous for saying, “Let 1,000 flowers bloom,” in response to China’s autocratic Cultural Revolution. But how do we ensure genuine equality of opportunity without undermining diversity and without drifting back to the abuses of ‘separate but equal’? Again, Title IX can be a guide. Requiring institutions to demonstrate verifiable equality of opportunity is preferable to enforcing equality of results. “Let 1,000 flowers bloom.” Lest this seem a bit New Agey, it is useful to note that the Title IX ethos goes back more than 3,000 years, to the Old Testament Book of Leviticus . This section of Torah includes a prototypical constitution and perhaps the first ever revolutionary political platform. Leviticus established the principle of Jubilee , the equal redistribution of all productive property every 50 years. Between Jubilees , the economy is laissez-faire , limited only by the ethical guardrails of Torah. This ingenious social program transformed the politics of the Middle East (and arguably of the entire Western world) and led to the establishment of what is still perhaps the longest and most successful theocracy (c. 1300 – 1050 BCE) in Western history. Joshua used the promise of Jubilee , and other social reforms embedded in Torah, to precipitate a popular uprising in Jericho so that its famous ‘walls came tumbling down’. The promise of equal opportunity is powerful, even when equality of result is not guaranteed. Case in point : The Lottery, specifically Powerball. At the time of this writing, the Jackpot stands at just under $2 billion. The eventual winner will have the option of converting the scheduled annuity payout to an immediate lump sum of about $1 billion. Not a bad ROI on a $2 ticket. Of course, the odds of any one ticket winning the Jackpot are 1in 300 million (but the odds of winning a smaller prize are 1 in 25). In Powerball, every $2 has an equal opportunity to win the Jackpot; but in all likelihood, one ticket will win it all. This is a paradigmatic case of rigorous equality of opportunity with no expectation of equal results. So what do we think of something like this? Well, in the last 3 days approximately 80,000,000 tickets have been sold. I guess most folk don’t have a problem with it…at all. Of course, our nannies are telling us not to bet: “It’s a fools’ game, the odds are terrible, you might just as well put a match to your money.” Let alone the fact that much of what they say is blatantly false! For example, because the Jackpot grows with every unsuccessful draw (while the odds remain unchanged), after a certain number of draws, the advantage flips to the players. But what’s more important, it’s not their $1 billion that I’d be risking if I don’t play. Bottom line : I already bought my tickets for the next draw and I suggest you stop reading this article and go do the same. But back to Jubilee. Compare Leviticus to the so-called ‘revolutionary’ programs of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. In a nutshell, these ideologies sought to guarantee ‘equality of result’ but did so at the expense of opportunity. Few of them succeeded and none of them survived, at least not in their intended forms. For better or for worse, today’s Vietnam is not Ho’s nor is the PRC Mao’s. If we are to survive as a species, we need to evolve, both genetically and culturally. Equality of opportunity gives evolution its best chance to succeed, quickly and efficiently; enforced equality of results hobbles evolution, effectively abolishing natural selection and reducing future variation to random fluctuations. Both individual justice and collective survival require equality of opportunity; neither benefits from artificially imposed equality of result. So go exercise your God and Constitution given right to equality of opportunity…right now. Invest in Powerball! *** Jacob Lawrence’s The Library (1960) portrays African American men and women reading in a structured, geometric interior, using bold colors and angular forms to emphasize order and focus. The painting highlights the library as a place of equality, where access to books symbolizes empowerment and collective progress through education. 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 Alice David Cowles In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now. You remember Alice – the girl who chased a white rabbit down a hole and almost got her head chopped off by the Queen of Hearts! But did you know that later, when she was a bit older, Alice had another, entirely different adventure? Whenever Alice was bored, and she was often very bored – remember, in her day there was no TV, no smartphones and no video games – she would spend hours staring into the big mirror that hung on her living room wall. (I wonder if her parents limited her ‘screen’ time.) As she gazed into that looking glass, she could see a room on the other side. It looked just like her own living room…well, almost just like it. It looked just like it except that on the other side of the looking glass, everything was reversed! That’s right, reversed! If Alice stuck out her right hand to shake hands with the girl in the mirror, the girl in the mirror would stick out her left hand. If Alice wrote a note (from left to right, of course), the girl on the other side of the glass would write the very same note…but from right to left. Otherwise, everything looked exactly the same. But Alice wondered, “was it really the same?” After all, if right and left were reversed, maybe other things were reversed too. But how could she find out? “How nice it would be if we could only get into Looking-glass house,” she thought. And then, a moment later, there she was…on the other side of the glass! As expected, whatever Alice had been able to see in the mirror was just the same in Looking-glass house as it was in her own home. But what about everything she couldn’t see from her side? That turned out to be as different as different could be! Alice had been right to be suspicious of the mirror, after all. The mirror did not ‘reveal’ a world; it hid one. Alice immediately headed out of Looking-glass house and into its garden. She was not at all surprised to find flowers…but she was VERY surprised to learn that these flowers could talk! “…Can all the flowers talk?” Alice asked. “As well as you can,” said the Tiger-lily. “And a great deal louder.” Alice noticed a high hill in the distance. “I should see the garden far better,” said Alice to herself. “If I could get to the top of that hill: and here’s a path that leads straight to it…” Only it didn’t! No matter how hard Alice tried, no matter what turns she made, she always ended up right back where she started. But Alice was a very clever girl, so she decided to try a new plan. Instead of walking toward the hill and always missing it, she decided to walk in the opposite direction, away from the hill, to see where that would take her. Her plan succeeded beautifully. She hadn’t been walking more than a minute when she found herself at the base of the hill. So, it’s not just right and left that are reversed in Looking-glass world; it’s also to and from, forwards and backwards. At the base of the hill, Alice met the Red Queen. After some polite conversation, Alice and the queen suddenly started running. They ran hand-in-hand, as fast as they possibly could, for as long as they possibly could. But while she was running, Alice noticed something strange: the trees and the other things around them never changed; they seemed to move right along with them. Finally, the queen stopped, and Alice flopped to the ground breathless beside her. Then she noticed, “…We’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!” Alice complained to the queen, “…In our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.” But the queen replied, “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Next, Alice encountered the White Queen and her majesty looked quite the mess. Alice did her best to help the queen tidy up, and then she suggested that the queen might like to hire a maid to help her stay neat and clean in the future. The queen offered the job to Alice, “Two pence a week and jam every other day.” Imagine getting by on an allowance of two pennies a week! I guess pennies could buy a lot more in Alice’s time. But Alice didn’t object to the low wage; instead, she protested that she didn’t like jam, “Well, I don’t want any to-day at any rate.” “You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the queen said. “The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today …” Alice objected, “It must come sometimes to jam today.” “No, it can’t,” said the queen. “It’s jam every other day; today isn’t any other day, you know.” “I don’t understand you,” said Alice, obviously puzzled. “That’s the effect of living backwards,” the queen explained. “It always makes one a little giddy at first.” Then the queen decided to tell Alice more about what it’s like to live on her side of the glass. “Memory works both ways,” she said. “I’m sure mine only works one way,” interrupted Alice. “I can’t remember things before they happen…What sorts of things do you remember best?” “Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the queen replied. The queen pointed to the King’s Messenger, “He’s in prison now, being punished, and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday, and of course, the crime comes last of all.” Before Alice could object to this unfair treatment, the queen began screaming. Alice rushed to comfort her, “What is the matter? Have you pricked your finger?” “I haven’t pricked it yet,” the queen said. “But I soon shall.” And sure enough, a moment later, she did just that! But let’s get back to the matter of the jam. Alice explained to the queen that she did not like jam, “Well, I don’t want any to-day at any rate.” Remember what the queen said? “’You couldn’t have it if you did want it…the rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today .” So, in Looking-glass world there is a past (yesterday) and a future (tomorrow), but never a present (jam today). Later, Alice found herself in a shop where every shelf seemed to be overflowing with interesting things to buy. But whenever she walked up to any particular shelf, that shelf was always completely empty. The shelves that are there are always full, but the shelf that is here is always empty! In Looking-glass world, it seems you can have all the jam you want…just not now ; and you can buy anything you want…just not here . The stores are always brimming with merchandise, but always out of whatever it is you want. In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now . Later, while visiting Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Alice sees the Red King. He is asleep. “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee. “And what do you think he’s dreaming about?” “Nobody can guess that!” Alice replied. Alice is depending on the difference between inside and outside to keep her thoughts, and the king’s, private. But Tweedledee knows better. The way Looking-glass world works, inner and outer could be reversed; or the distinction could be wiped away entirely. Either way, Tweedledee knows that in Looking-glass world, anyone can see what you’re thinking just by looking at you. “Why about you !” Tweedledee continued, returning to the content of the Red King’s dream. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “’You’d be nowhere,” replied Tweedledee. “Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’” (It seems that Shakespeare listened to Tweedledee’s podcasts because in one of his most famous plays, The Tempest , he wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”) “If the King were to wake,” added Tweedledum. “You’d go out – bang! – just like a candle!’” Toward the end of her stay in Looking-glass world, Alice met the famous Humpty-Dumpty. Like any good girl of her day, Alice knew her nursery rhymes backwards and forwards, so when she met Humpty, she was immediately worried about his safety. “Don’t you think you’d be safer down on the ground? That wall is so very narrow!” In response, Humpty Dumpty growled. “Of course, I don’t think so. Why, if I ever did fall off – which there’s no chance of – but if I did…the King has promised me – with his very own mouth…” Here Alice interrupted, “To send all his horses and all his men…” Moments later, a crash shook the forest from end to end and soldiers came running, first two or three, then ten or twenty, finally thousands. So many that they seemed to fill the whole forest! The king had kept his promise. But would his horses and his men be able to put Humpty together again? Maybe not on our side of the looking glass, but on the other side…who knows? At the end of her adventure, when Alice was once again safely back on her own side of the mirror, she thought about her experience and said to her pussycat, “’Now, Kitty, let’s consider, who it was that dreamed it all…it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream too!’” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back God Hypothesis David Cowles Nov 29, 2021 A much beloved friend and family member sent this to me T-day morning. Much appreciated! But I could not help but notice the care taken to avoid any reference to “God, the father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth”. I am not suggesting that everyone must believe in God. Far from it. But I am suggesting that substituting various ‘pagan’ alternatives does not work: “god (as if God could be anything else but a proper noun), universe, life, earth”. Imagining that any of these could be sui generis capable or creating all that is ex nihilo is absurd. If you don’t buy into the “God Hypothosis”, ok, well and good, but suggest a viable alternative. A much beloved friend and family member sent this to me T-day morning. Much appreciated! But I could not help but notice the care taken to avoid any reference to “God, the father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth”. I am not suggesting that everyone must believe in God. Far from it. But I am suggesting that substituting various ‘pagan’ alternatives does not work: “god (as if God could be anything else but a proper noun), universe, life, earth”. Imagining that any of these could be sui generis capable or creating all that is ex nihilo is absurd. If you don’t buy into the “God Hypothosis”, ok, well and good, but suggest a viable alternative. 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 The Myth of The Middle Class David Cowles Oct 22, 2024 “I would argue that there are really four classes in the United States, not three, and that none of those classes is what is historically referred to as middle class.” In America, everyone is ‘middle class’. My parents drilled it into us! They did so when we were borderline ‘poor’ and they did so when we were borderline ‘rich’. Over the course of my childhood, my parents traversed 80% of the economic spectrum, but we were always and only middle class . According to American folklore, there are three classes: Poor, Middle, Rich. Unfortunately, poverty in the United States is persistently above 10%. At the other end of the spectrum, even people in the 90th percentile don’t consider themselves rich. Today, rich is a term normally applied only to so-called one percenters , but that is probably too narrow. Presenting no evidence, I would suggest something like a 15-80-5 breakdown. If I’m right, 80% of Americans self-identify as middle class . But I would argue that there are really four classes in the United States, not three, and that none of those classes is what is historically referred to as middle class . IRL, the 80% who identify with the Middle Class actually fall into one of two other classes: Lower Middle (LMC) or Upper Middle (UMC). ‘15-80-5’ is in fact ’15-60-0-20-5’. No wonder our politics are so interesting. But this is not mere sophistry! Neither LMC nor UMC exhibit the behaviors and values legendarily ascribed to the mythical middle class (MMC). It is more than just ironic that in a country where most folks consider themselves middle class , no such class exists. It is said that ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’. Our analysis confirms this. Sometimes rich and poor battle as they did in Les Miserables , while other times rich and poor make common cause, as they also did in Les Mis . Looking at class this way shines an important light on American politics. If you identify as UMC, you probably have a four-year college degree, a white collar job with some management responsibility, a 401k, and a home you co-own with the bank. LMC…not so much. Tragically, the poor in America form a semi-permanent underclass. Some of this is a function of history, some is the result of misguided social policies, and some, sadly, is self-inflicted. Either way, Jesus was right when he predicted, “The poor you will have always with you.” Folks in this class have a unique interest in public policy and tend to vote in blocks. The rich may be considered ‘satisfied’ – not with their marriages or their ‘krazy kids’ but with the quality of life in general. Yes, more is always better, but first, don’t lose what you’ve got. And make no mistake, threats are everywhere: from rapacious politicians to disruptive innovators to ambitious middle managers. UMC on the other hand is ‘satisficed’. Life is still full of stress and worry but ‘we’ve made it’…at least for now. UMC is focused on extracting as much value and pleasure from life as possible and supports public policies in line with that objective. These are the soccer moms, voting to increase teachers’ salaries, modernize library facilities, etc. That leaves LMC, the wild card here…as I’m sure you’ve realized by now. And the fact that 60% fall into this category gives this class extraordinary political power. For LMC life is a perpetual struggle just to stay afloat! LMC are keenly aware that their share of the economic pie is disproportionately small; they aspire to be rich, but would settle for UMC, and some of them will achieve these goals. On the other hand, they already have just enough of the pie to be fiercely possessive. An analysis of class in America needs to consider not only class structure but also ‘class flow’. LMC dreams of being rich as they dread becoming poor. There’s a disproportionate focus on circumstances that do not yet and probably never will, but still might, apply. To make matters even more complex, the focus is not symmetrical. The LMC political agenda may be understood as inspired or demonic; in fact, both characterizations can apply. Simply put: dig a moat between you and the poor while building handholds on the climbing wall to prosperity. Ugh! What an image! Just like the quarterback who says, “Losing is not an option!” and so banishes negative thoughts from his mind, LMC ignores the prospect of poverty: It’s unthinkable! They are focused on the climb, not the fall, and they are surprisingly committed to making sure the brass ring will still be there, untarnished, when they get there. LMC are suspicious. What if we put in all the work and make it out of Dodge only to find that someone has moved the goalposts? LMC are largely alienated from the political process. They don’t believe that public policy impacts their daily lives. On the other hand, they are aware that government has the power to bridge their moat and/or to grease the handholds on their climbing wall. Surprisingly, when LMC votes, it votes less as an interested party and more as self-appointed guardians of the American dream. And what about the Mythical Middle Class? Comfortable and secure. Hardworking but not greedy. Thrifty but generous. Family focused but tolerant. In other words, the Andersons and the Cleavers, not the Kramdens or the Bunkers. If you know any of these ‘typical Americans’ can you please let me know? (I have a team of anthropologists, with their go-bags packed, waiting on the tarmac.) Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. 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< Back Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! David Cowles When you were very young, were you ever afraid of your mother’s vacuum cleaner? Most kids are. Were you scared it might suck you up? And, if so, what would happen then? Would you just vanish? Of course, you’re much older now, and you know that something like that could never happen…or could it? More than 50 years ago, a famous Rock and Roll band known as The Beatles made a movie called Yellow Submarine . In this movie, the four Beatles (John, Paul, George, and Ringo) sail from Liverpool (England) to a magical world outside of space and time called Pepperland. They made the voyage in a yellow submarine. But this is not like any family vacation you’ve ever been on. The Beatles travel across a Sea of Time and a Sea of Science (Space) into a Sea of Monsters. In this Monstrous Sea, the yellow sub is attacked by a bunch of fierce creatures and machines…but nothing is more frightening than the dreaded Vacuum Monster. Like most monsters, this creature looks a little bit human but where it should have a nose and a mouth it has instead a large cone-shaped funnel. This funnel looks very much like an attachment you might put on a real vacuum cleaner. And sure enough, true to its name, the Vacuum Monster uses this funnel to suck up everything in its path. First, it sucks up all the other monsters; then it sucks up the submarine itself. But it’s not done yet! It sucks up spacetime. Now there is nothing left in the whole universe except the Vacuum Monster. But it’s still not done! Now, it sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Why does it do that? Why does it suck itself up along with everything else? Because it can’t help itself! As long as it lives, it can’t stop sucking. It’s a vacuum cleaner, after all; sucking is what a vacuum cleaner does, no matter what the consequence. But unlike your mother’s vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t have an off switch. So, when there’s nothing left for it to suck up, it sucks up itself. We’re not like the Vacuum Monster. We have free will. We can decide what we want to do and when we want to do it. And we can stop doing it when we want to stop doing it. There’s nothing we can’t do (up to the limits of our ability) but there’s also nothing we have to do. There are things we should do and things we shouldn’t do, but whether we actually do them or not…is up to us! We get to decide, but the vacuum monster doesn’t. It does what it’s programmed to do, nothing more, nothing less. It has no choice but to suck itself into oblivion. What if it didn’t? That would mean that our world was really two worlds…a world of things that get sucked and a world of things that do the sucking. But that’s not the way our world works, is it? Our world is one world, not two. In our world, everything sucks, and everything gets sucked. If something sucks, and doesn’t get sucked up by another sucker, it will eventually sucks itself up too. In our world, what you do to others, you eventually do to yourself as well. You’ve probably heard of the Golden Rule. It goes something like this: “Do to others what you would like them to do to you.” If you would like to be treated kindly, for example, then you should treat others with kindness. If you would like others to be generous towards you, then you should be generous towards them. It’s a good ‘rule’ and most of the time things work out better for us when we follow it. In fact, Jesus himself taught the Golden Rule; however, there is another rule in the Bible called the Great Commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says it, St. Paul says it, St. James says it, but it was first said in the Torah (law), the first 5 books of the Old Testament. The Great Commandment is like the Golden Rule, only different. According to the Golden Rule, you do nice things for other people because it’s the right thing to do and because you hope they’ll do nice things for you. The Great Commandment says something a little bit different. According to the Great Commandment, when you do nice things for others, you also do something nice for yourself… immediately and automatically . And of course, when you do mean things to other people, you’re being mean to yourself as well. If you make another person happy, you make yourself happy, and if you make another person sad…well, you know what’s coming next, don’t you? Whatever you do to another, you also do to yourself. Your actions affect others…and yourself…at the same time. Yellow Submarine follows the Great Commandment, not so much the Golden Rule. The Vacuum Monster is a sucker. It sucks up its neighbors and oops, when it sucks up its neighbors, it sucks up itself too. What it does to others, it does to itself…automatically. I said the Vacuum Monster sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Not everything inside it, almost everything inside it. What survives? Just one thing: the yellow submarine and its crew! How come? Because the yellow sub doesn’t exist in Liverpool only; it also lives in the magical world called Pepperland. The yellow submarine is how people go back and forth from Liverpool (our world) to Pepperland. As far as we know, there is no other way! Going from Liverpool to Pepperland and back is quite a trek, but it is not a trek in space or in time. The yellow submarine travels in another dimension; it is always right here, always just now! So, when the Vacuum Monster sucks up everything ‘in Liverpool’ (our world), even the yellow submarine itself, the sub survives. Why? Because it exists in Pepperland as well as in Liverpool, and nothing in Pepperland can ever disappear. Pepperland is the ‘forever place’, the place of ‘evermore’! Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is, and it’s called a ‘Black Hole.’ Black holes exist throughout space, and one is even sitting right now at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. A Black Hole sucks up everything around it, yes everything, including space and time and subs and even the black hole itself. And just like the Vacuum Monster, eventually black holes even suck themselves into oblivion. According to the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, when a black hole sucks, it sucks up more than just things. It sucks up information (or knowledge) too. The things that get sucked up disappear…but the knowledge stays behind. But there’s a catch! The knowledge that survives is so jumbled and confused that you can’t make any sense out of it, much less use it for anything worthwhile. This very same thing happens in Yellow Submarine . After the Vacuum Monster sucks itself into oblivion, there is no more space and time. What’s left is a real ‘nowhere land.’ The Beatles find themselves alone in a totally empty world…empty, that is, except for Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Dr. Boob, – a real ‘nowhere man’ living in this nowhere land. He knows everything that has ever been known by anyone anywhere…but really, he knows nothing at all because he doesn’t know what he knows. It’s as if you memorized a speech in a foreign language that you don’t know how to speak. You might be able to recite it, but you would have no idea what you were saying. That’s how it is with Dr. Boob. And that’s how it is when a black hole vanishes. With the Beatles’ help, Dr. Boob begins to organize his information and slowly but surely, he learns to make use of it. Eventually, he joins the Beatles on board the sub and accompanies them for the rest of their voyage, through the Sea of Holes into the Sea of Green to Pepperland itself…but that’s another story, perhaps for another day. Now back to Liverpool. Would it surprise you to hear that there are stories in the Bible that sound a lot like this story? Take creation, for instance. Genesis says that the earth was once without form or shape; in other words, it was a real-life Nowhere Land. Then God said, “Let there be light and there was light…and God separated the light from the darkness.” God separated sky from earth, oceans from dry land, and day from night. In other words, God organized everything so we could make sense of it…and put it to use! Then on the seventh day of creation, God rested. Now our job is to continue to make sense of this world and to continue to organize it so that we can accomplish useful things. The same thing happens at the other end of time, when our world finally comes to an end…only it happens in reverse. Christ, the Son of God, finishes the job. He puts everything in “proper order” and he even destroys death itself. Then he draws all things to himself, and finally, he turns all things, including himself, over to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” Christ acts just like the Vacuum Monster, except that when he draws everything to himself , he does not draw everything into oblivion but into Heaven(Pepperland)! 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 Mythology Before Marvel Comics David Cowles “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” Most of what we know about Norse Mythology comes from Wagner ( The Ring ), Tolkien ( Lord of the Rings ), and Marvel Comics. Behind these secondary sources stand the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda . The former is a collection of poems, some dating back to the 9th century CE; the latter is the work of a single man, Snorri Sturluson of Iceland (c. 1220 CE). Unfortunately, these first written records date from a time when Christianity was already beginning to make a mark in the Northlands. It is a matter of scholarship to separate the original pre-Christian content from later Christian influences…and, happy you , we will not attempt that here! Sturluson’s singular contribution was to organize varied material from the Poetic Edda into a quasi-coherent narrative, but what makes the Prose Edda so important, and therefore our focus, is its mind-bending structure. Mythic thinking expresses itself in narrative. True to form, Sturluson sews together countless short stories into one overarching tale. It is no exaggeration to describe the Prose Edda as the first Autobiography of Everything, anticipating by 700 years the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Sturluson began by situating Norse mythology in the context of Hebrew proto history: “Almighty God created heaven and earth and all things in them, and lastly, two humans from whom generations are descended, Adam and Eve…After Noah’s flood, there lived eight people who inhabited the world, and from them generations have descended… “(But) the vast majority of mankind…neglected obedience to God and…refused (even) to mention the name of God. But who was there then to tell their children of the mysteries of God?” Wait, are we talking about the 13th century CE…or the 21st? According to Christian theology, God gave human being the gift of ‘reason’ so that even the ‘unchurched’ can discover Truth. Surprisingly, the same doctrine appears in Norse mythology: “(God) gave them a portion of wisdom so that they could understand all earthly things…what it could mean that earth and animals and birds had common characteristics in some things…They reasoned that the earth was alive. It fed all creatures and took possession of everything that died.” But at the same time, Sturluson also situated his Nordic narrative in an Hellenic context. Just as the New Testament is the merger of Jewish theology with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, so Norse mythology is the intersection of the Greek myth and Christian metaphysics: “Near the middle of the world was…Troy. We call the land there Turkey…Twelve kingdoms were there and one high king…He was married to the daughter of the high king, Priam…They had a son (Hector); he was called Tror; we call him Thor…When he was ten…he was as beautiful to look at when he came among other people as when ivory is inlaid in oak. His hair is more beautiful than gold. When he was twelve, he had reached his full strength… “Then he traveled through many countries, explored all quarters of the world, and defeated unaided all the berserks and giants, one of the greatest dragons, and many wild animals. (Hercules?) In the northern part of the world, he came across a prophetess called Sibyl, whom we call Sif, and married her.” Eighteen generations later, a descendant of Thor and Sif was born: “A son whose name is Woden; it is him we call Odin. He was an outstanding person for wisdom and all sorts of accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, whom we call Frigg. Odin had the gift of prophesy and so did his wife, and from this science he discovered that his name would be remembered in the northern part of the world and honored above all kings. For this reason, he became eager to set off from Turkey…” Note that 18 generations earlier, Thor had earlier left Turkey (Troy) and migrated to “the northern part of the world” (Scandinavia); now Thor’s descendant, Odin, recapitulates his ancestor’s journey. (Just as Jesus’ Flight into Egypt recapitulates the Exodus .) This will not be the last time that our narrative recapitulates. Mythic space is fractal space: patterns repeat - repetition at scale is the meta-pattern of process. Sturluson sees Troy as the cradle of civilization and is eager to associate it with Scandinavia. In this, he is channeling Virgil, whose Aeneid connects Troy with the founding of Rome. In fact, Troy is the mythological prototype for all cities. It is the City of Cain ( Enoch ), it is the City of Dioce (Ecbatana, Pound’s ‘city of patterned streets’), it is Midgard (Tolkien’s Middle Earth). It is worth noting that the two great powers of the first millennium CE both trace their origins to the defeated party in the Trojan War. “After that, he (Odin) proceeded north to where he was faced by the sea, the one which they thought encircled all lands, and set his son over the realm which is now called Norway…their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands.” When Gylfi (King of Sweden) entered what appeared to be Val-hall (Valhalla), “He saw three thrones, one above the other, and there were three men, one sitting in each…the one that sat in the lowest throne was king and was called High; next to him the one called Just-as-high, and the one sitting at the top was called Third.” The structure of divinity in the Prose Edda parallels, of course, the Christian doctrine of Trinity. There is one God (‘All-father’), but High, Just-as-High, and Third represent the three faces or personae of this one God. It is impossible not to see parallels with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Gyfli is invited to ask any questions he wishes; what follows reads something like the 1950s RCC Baltimore Catechism …or Chapter 17 of Joyce’s Ulysses : Q: Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods? A: He is called All-father in our language… Q: Where is this god, what power has he, and what great works has he performed? A: He lives throughout all ages, rules all his kingdom, and governs all things great and small…He made heaven and earth, the skies and everything in them…But his greatest work is that he made man and gave him a soul that shall live and never perish, though the body decay to dust or burn to ashes. Q: What was he doing before heaven and earth were made? A: Then he was among the frost-giants. Whaaaat? Before heaven and earth were made, there were ‘frost giants’? Yup! In Norse mythology, the ‘created’ universe as we know it (heaven and earth, Midgard ) is embedded in a much broader reality (a Norse ‘multiverse’). Q: What was the beginning? And how did things start? And what was there before? A: It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap ( Ginnungagap ) was, but no growth. Q: What were things like before generations came to be and the human race was multiplied? In answer to this question, High, Just-as-High and Third begin to set out the fundamental doctrines of Norse cosmology. The primal (‘uncreated’) cosmos consisted of a region of great heat ( Muspell ) and a region of great cold ( Niflheim ) with a chasm ( Ginnungagap ) between them (“the mighty gap”). Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor. Again, it is impossible not to see parallels, this time with the secular ‘something from nothing’ cosmologies of the 20/21st centuries: ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’. A: There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Ymir…and from him are descended the generations of frost giants…” Ymir lived on four rivers of milk (the four rivers that flowed through Eden?) that came from a cow ( Audhumla ) who fed herself by licking the salty rime stones found in Ginnungagap. As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones. Soon, “…there was a complete man. His name was Buri…He begot a son called Bor…(and Bor) had three sons. One was called Odin, the second Vili, the third Ve…And it is my belief that this Odin and his brothers must be the rulers of heaven and earth…” So this Odin…he was the son of Bor, the brother of Vili and Ve, and the grandson of Buri, who was ‘licked’ into existence by a cow. Ok I guess, but he is also the son of Thor and Sif (above). Norse Mythology requires a level of neuroplasticity that most of us have not enjoyed since kindergarten. Then again, the Book of Genesis also presents two distinct accounts of creation which differ in focus and detail. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss this as ‘child’s play’. It is just such neuroplasticity that Jesus says is necessary for one to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (e.g. Mt. 18: 3). We’re left to wonder: Are High, Just-as-High, and Third actually Odin, Vili and Ve? But we’re not done yet! Bor’s sons killed the giant Ymir. And…they drowned all the race of frost giants, except that one escaped with his household. Giants call him Bergelmir. He went up on to his ark (!) with his wife and was preserved there, and from them are descended the families of frost giants…” Noah? “They (Bor’s sons) took Ymir and transported him to the middle of Ginnungagap, and out of him made the earth; out of his blood came the sea and the lakes. The earth was made of flesh, and the rocks of the bones…They also took his skull and made out of it the sky and set it up over the earth…Then they took molten particles and sparks that…had shot out of the world of Muspell and set them in the middle of the firmament of the sky…” We ‘the enlightened’ think of life as a late stage epiphenomenal eruption out of inert matter. The Eddas reverse the relationship. ‘The heavens and the earth’ ( Gaia/Kosmos ) are fashioned out of living matter (Ymir). Life, not matter, is substructural. The Gospel of John (1: 1-4) testifies to a similar process: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.” So in Christian ontology as well as Norse mythology, life is the substructure of universe. The Prose Edda is like a Bach fugue: themes repeat, transformed. Note the complex ecosystem in place prior to creation, ‘before’ even the beginning of time. The primal entity, Ymir, feeds off of a pre-existent cow who produces milk from nourishment she receives by licking salty rime-stones. That process of licking in turn uncovers a second primal entity, Buri, from whom Odin, Vili and Ve are descended. These grandsons of Buri in turn kill Ymir, but they recycle his body as the raw material needed to create ‘heaven and earth’, i.e. space/time, matter/energy, the mortal realm. Care to stretch the envelope? Compare this process with the evolution of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells from their prokaryotic precursors. Essentially, two independent life forms ‘merged’ to form a single, symbiotic organism that became the basis for all animal and plant life on Earth. As above, this process happened only once in the history of terrestrial evolution. Q: How was the earth arranged? A: It is circular 'round the edge, and around it lies the deep sea, and along the shore of this sea they gave lands to live in to the race of giants. But on the earth, on the inner side, they made a fortification 'round the world against the hostility of giants, and for this fortification they used the giant Ymir’s eyelashes, and they called the fortification Midgard (‘Middle Earth’). Q. And where did the people come from who inhabit this world? A: As Bor’s sons walked along the seashore, they came across two logs and created people out of them. The first gave breath and life; the second consciousness and movement; the third a face, speech, hearing, and sight… This is a sophisticated Trinitarian model, similar to but importantly different from, the Christian model. First, the manifestations of God are allocated differently among the divine personae, and second, the phenomena associated with being human are grouped and segmented differently from how we might do it today. A (cont.): The man was called Ask, the woman Embla, and from them were produced the mankind to whom the dwelling-place under Midgard ( Middle Earth ) was given. After that, they made themselves a city in the middle of the world, which is known as Asgard. We call it Troy…In the city there is a seat called Hlidskialf, and when Odin sat in that throne he saw over all worlds and every man’s activity and understood everything he saw.” Humans build a city, Troy, which becomes the homeland of the gods (Aesir), who originally created heaven and earth, and the homeland of humans. The process of creation flows both ways: gods create for humans, and humans create for gods. Ontology is a Möbius strip: events recur even as orientations reverse. We find a close parallel in Ezra Pound’s Cantos : “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out; the bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan/City of patterned streets…” Here, a city built by human hands is intended to be a home for the gods. In another article in this collection , we connect this ancient Iranian city both to Cain’s city (above) and to the ‘patterned streets’ (circles) found in Dante’s Divine Comedy . Perhaps Pound also had Troy in mind…or should I say, Asgard? But back to the Prose Edda : “He (Odin) is the father of all the gods and of men, and of everything that has been brought into being by him and his power. The earth was his daughter and his wife. Out of her he begot the first of his sons…(wait for it)…Asa-Thor.” Ok, enough already! Our story began with Thor, grandson of the proto historical king of Troy, Priam. Eighteen generations later, Odin was born. Odin married Frigg and together they migrated to Scandinavia. Now we learn that this same Odin is ‘All-father’, the father of all gods and men, that Frigg, his daughter and his wife is really ‘earth’ and that the first of their sons is the very same Thor with whom our story began. Gimme a break! What are we to make of all these apparent contradictions? Absolutely nothing! There are no contradictions in mythology. (-A) ≠ -(A). The concept of contradiction arises in systems characterized by identity, quantity, causality, extension, duration, and logic, where the transitive and commutative properties rule. None of these concepts figures in any important way in mythological thinking. Myths are the first TOEs (Theories of Everything). Hawking meets Tolkien. Like Hawking, mythology searches for universal patterns; like Tolkien, it then struggles to communicate these patterns using the limited resources of language. You , dear reader, expect your patterns to be symmetrical, continuous, and orientable, but the world we’re modeling is not like that at all. It is stochastic, discrete, and non-orientable. You expect beginnings, middles, and ends, but such things do not exist on a Mobius Strip. You are expecting events situated in spacetime; mythology replaces spacetime with a hierarchy of fractals. Scale takes the place of extension. The order of events is immaterial, and ‘time loops’ are expected, perhaps even required, perhaps even universal. Mythic thinking has only one proper subject: ‘the pattern of patterns’. In spite of the important parallels with Judeo-Christian theology and Greek proto-history, the Norse cosmos is fabulously more complex. As we have already glimpsed, in addition to humans, there are many other humanoid races: frost giants (including trolls and, unexpectedly, wolves), light elves, dark elves ( aka dwarfs), and, of course, gods (Aesir). Each of these races has its own ‘homeland’, but there are other ‘uninhabited’ homelands as well: Muspell and Niflheim (above), Hel (the land of the dead), Val-hall (Valhalla, the home of fallen warriors), and Gimle (the resting place of the righteous): “…(Gimle) shall stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and in that place shall live good and righteous people for ever and ever.” Astoundingly, all of these ‘homelands’ are connected by the trunk of a single ash tree, Yggdrasil , that has three principal roots: one in the realm of the Aesir (Asgard), one in the realm of the frost giants, and one in Niflheim. These roots, in turn, may be associated with the three Norns who weave the history of the universe (fate) from skeins of string (not heterotic string…as far as we know). We learn from Third that “Odin is the highest and most ancient of the Aesir. He rules all things…Odin is called ‘All-father’ for he is father of all gods. He is also called ‘Val-father’ (father of the slain)…Hanga-god (god of the hanged) and Hapta-god (god of prisoners), Farma-god (god of cargoes, possibly to be understood as human cargoes, i.e., travelers, or even slaves)…” One of the Aesir, “…Loki or Lopt, son of the giant Farbauti…is pleasing and handsome in appearance, evil in character, capricious in behavior…There was a giantess called Angraboda in Giantland. With her, Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Lormungand (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. “And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland…All-father sent the gods to get the children and bring them to him. And when they came to him, he threw the serpent into that deep sea that lies around all lands, and this serpent grew so that it lies in the midst of the ocean encircling all lands and bites on its own tail. “Hel he threw into Niflheim…The Aesir brought up the wolf at home…” But as the wolf grew, the Aesir felt the need to tether it securely. So they went to the dwarves and asked them to make a bond that that wolf could not break…and they did! “It was made of six ingredients: the sound of the cat’s footfall and the woman’s beard; the mountain’s roots and the bear’s sinews; the fish’s breath and the bird’s spittle…” To prove this this story is true, we are told, “…You must have seen that a woman has no beard and there is no noise from a cat’s running, and there are no roots under a mountain…” Earlier attempts to fetter Fenriswolf all failed…because the tethers were made out of ordinary materials. No matter how strong they were at the outset, they were inevitably weakened by the wolf’s incessant struggles. They were ultimately subject to the law of entropy, and eventually, the wolf escaped them all. The dwarves’ “fetter was smooth and soft like a silken ribbon,” but it acted just like the strong force binding quarks in an atomic nucleus: “…When the wolf kicked, the band grew harder, and the harder he struggled, the tougher became the band.” This is a marvelous example of mythic reasoning. The text leads us to believe that a woman has no beard, for example, because the dwarfs used it to make Fenriswolf’s fetter. But there is another possible interpretation: What if the dwarfs made something (a fetter) out of nothing, out of things that do not exist (e.g. a woman’s beard)? ‘Something made out of nothing’ is, well, something else . The laws of physics would be suspended and entropy ‘need not apply’. My nine-year-old grandson said, “The fetter was made out of the opposite of everything.” Exactly so, and therefore it behaved in a way opposite to all other materials. A mythological model of anti-matter, perhaps. No bird's-eye view of the Norse cosmos would be complete without consideration of Ragnarök, aka the Apocalypse. Admit it, this is what you’ve been waiting for since you opened this post. So…back to the catechism, and just in the nick of time: Q: What information is there to be given about Ragnarok? A: There are many important things to be told about it. First of all, that a winter will come called fimbul (‘mighty’ or ‘mysterious’) winter. Then snow will drift from all directions. There will be great frosts and keen winds. The sun will do no good. There will be three of these winters together and no summer between. …The wolf will swallow the sun…the other wolf will swallow the moon…The stars will disappear from the sky…trees will become uprooted from the earth; mountains will fall; and all fetters and bonds will snap and break . Then Fenriswolf will get free…the Midgard serpent will fly into a great rage and make its way ashore…After that, Surt (a fire demon from the race of giants) will fling fire over the earth and burn the whole world. Q. What will happen then after heaven and earth and all the world is burned…will there be any kind of earth or sky? A: The earth will shoot up out of the sea and will be green and fair. Crops will grow unsown…And in a place called Hoddmimir’s holt, two people will lie hid during Surt’s fire called Life and Leifthrasir, and their food will be the dews of the morning. And from these people will be descended such a great progeny that all the world will be inhabited. And so ends the discourse on Norse cosmology…and now comes the really interesting and totally revolutionary part: “But the Aesir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him (Gyfli), and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there (in Sweden), so that when long periods of time had passed, men should not doubt that they were all the same , those Aesir about whom stories are told above and those who were now given the same names. “So someone there was given the name Thor…and to him are attributed the exploits that Thor (Hector) performed in Troy.” Wow! What else is there to say? Simply, wow! In Ulysses , James Joyce maps a day in the life of ordinary Dubliners onto events in Homer’s Odyssey . An incredible feat! But the Prose Edda goes much further. Sturluson begins by mapping Norse mythology onto both Jewish and Greek proto-histories. Then he maps Christian theology onto Norse mythology. Finally, he maps Norse mythology onto the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes and, for his piece de resistance , he maps the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes back onto events in Greek proto-history. To borrow a Judeo-Christian concept, everyone is ‘priest, prophet and king’. What Joyce (and Pound) demonstrated brilliantly, Snorri Sturluson had demonstrated with even greater power and complexity centuries earlier: the various ontological categories that populate human thought are really just different ways of experiencing and understanding the present lives of ordinary people. Everything that happens is happening right now! The past and the future only exist to serve the present and they exist only in the present. On the one hand, the Prose Edda is a literary triumph. But on the other hand, it is exactly what Mythology is all about. Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to Odin, he found them. Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. Yggdrasil, c. 1886. Illustration for Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen by Felix and Therese Dahn. This illustration of Yggdrasil captures the essay’s core idea of mythology as an interconnected, multi-dimensional structure that links various realms—gods, humans, giants—and weaves together different times and layers of meaning, symbolizing the fractal, cyclical nature of mythic storytelling explored throughout the essay. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Previous Next

“Hamlet was right: you either are…or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real!” < Back Why R U, U? David Cowles Sep 1, 2024 “Hamlet was right: you either are…or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real!” Cogito ergo sum . Decartes was trying to ground philosophy on the most basic and incontrovertible proposition possible, short of a tautology. He did good! But I have another candidate: U R U ( you are you ). Surely this is tautology at its worst! But no. The appearance of tautology is just an artifact of our language’s limitations. You are you but ‘you’ is not ‘You’. Hint: we are using one word (you) to express multiple concepts. First, there’s the ‘you’ that was born in Richmond, VA in 1972, graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale, yada, yada, yada. Then there’s the ‘You’ that ‘knows’ you’re an academic snob engaging with me now through the medium of this article. There’s ‘you’ the image and ‘You’ the reflection of that image. Does it matter which is which? Might not the relationship be reciprocal: A reflects B reflects A? Save that one for a rainy day. This ‘marriage’ of you and You is one of the great mysteries. “Why am I, I?” It’s a multi-part question: First, why is there such a thing as an I in the first place? Then, how is it that there is this particular I? And why do I reflect this I (me) and not that I (you)? And not a rice farmer in the Han Dynasty? And not his ox? And not a flea living luxuriously on ox hide? Or the unicellular animal about to be lunch for this flea? I could go on…and on (yes, I know , I can do that). You play the role of the subject and the indirect object of every event in your life. Like, ‘I gave myself a rose’? Exactly! However, once again, language fails: “I see myself a rock? I feel myself a pain?” are ugly…but you get the point The probability that you are you is ‘absolutely minimal’ and I don’t use those words lightly. According to conventional wisdom, being itself vanishes when temperature reaches Absolute Zero (0° K). Theoretically, 0° K is the limit of an infinite series of temperature reductions; one can get ‘infinitely close’ to 0 without ever reaching it. But there’s a problem with this! Being is not a continuous function. You either are…or you are not (1, 0) (+, -). Intuitively, we recognize an infinite gulf between something that is and something that is not. Counterintuitively, we’ve discovered that between the ‘smallest possible positive real number’ and 0, there are an infinite number of hyperreal numbers that can be collectively represented by the symbol ε, the infinitesimal. Nothing is less probable than something that is minimally probable (ε)…except something that is infinitely improbable, aka impossible, like 0° K. So the lowest possible temperature is not 0° K but ε° K. Likewise, the smallest possible unit of Being is you . Every you has the same probability of being, ε. The 20th century deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, applied a similar concept to language. He distinguished ‘difference’ from ‘ differ ȧ nce ’, a jeu de mot in French. Differ ȧ nce is the space between the least possible real difference and ‘identity’. Differ ȧ nce is a quantum of difference; it is naked differentiation. You are, then, a quantum of otherwise undifferentiated (i.e. potential) being! (Sartre?) It is estimated that the known universe consists of 10^80 bits (0 or 1) of information. Therefore, there are (10^80)^80 possible combinations of bits, i.e. states of the known universe. That’s all she wrote! You are one of those ‘infinitesimally probable’ combinations. So am I, so is the rice farmer, so is his ox… Why do we say, “infinitesimally probable” rather than “highly improbable” or “infinitely improbable”? If P = 0, then you don’t exist at all (0/n); and even if P is as small as possible, the numerator will change as a function of any change in the denominator (1/2 = 5/10). We say that the phenomenon known as ‘you’ is infinitesimally probable because the numerator is always 1 no matter the denominator (1/n). You are a ‘one-off’; they really did throw away the mold. The question of why you are this particular you is now obviously ridiculous. There are at least 10^160 potential ‘yous’. You can only be one of them; if you weren’t one of them, you wouldn’t exist at all. So, Hamlet was right: you either are, and then that’s who you are, or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real after all. Horry for Horatio! Being is binary. “Is you is, or is you ain’t…?” There are no intermediate or medial states. But every ‘you’ is ‘you’ in exactly the same way that ‘you’ are you. In this sense then, you are the undifferentiated minimal unit of being. You’re what’s left when you can’t be dissected any further…without ceasing to be you (i.e. alive). Remember high school chemistry? You are like an element, e.g. carbon. The smallest unit of carbon is one C atom. You can divide that atom further but then it’s not ‘carbon’ any more, is it? Same with you. You are indivisible! (I didn’t say indestructible or indomitable.) In another sense though, “You are everything and everything is you.” (The Stylistics). ‘You’ are whatever you, or anyone else, could ever possibly be. It has been suggested that every unique you is paired with a unique You; ridiculous! Poor Occam! Being is not wasteful like that. One You is all it takes to realize innumerable yous . How many Yous do you need to change a light bulb? There is only one You. You-ness is a singular phenomenon, like alterity (otherness), like differ ȧ nce . David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” David Cowles You know Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel, but do you know Boethius? My mappa mundi of Western Civilization is maddeningly simplistic. I divide it into three great and, so far at least, symmetrical epochs: Classical, Medieval and Modern. I date the Classical era from the 5th century BCE: the rise of pre-Socratic philosophy, the golden age of Greek theater, and the dawn of Athenian democracy (Pericles); it ended in the 5th century CE, one millennium later. The Fall of Rome (476 CE) kick-starts the Middle Ages. Another millennium passes and now Machiavelli and the rest of his ‘Renaissance gang’ are busy bringing down the curtain on the greatest social ‘experiment’ of all time, call it ‘Christendom’ or ‘Feudalism’ as you will. So, the Modern era begins (c. 1500 CE); are we still in its grip today? Precedent says that we are only halfway through this third epoch. Hope and prayer say otherwise! Perhaps history is unfolding according to an inverse Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5…). This would preserve intact the first two 1,000 year eras; but it would mercifully shorten the so-called Modern epoch to just 500 years, followed by a succession of much shorter post-Modern epochs: 333 years (now), 200 years, 120 years, etc. Who knows? Could happen! The rate of change does seem to be accelerating. We should be so lucky! Have we seen the backside of the ‘Enlightenment’? Are we on the cusp of something new? Is this “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” we heard so much about in the ‘60s? Ok, I’ll curb my enthusiasm! The 20th century borrowed liberally from the New Testament’s Apocalypse : two world wars, the holocaust, the atomic bomb, climate change… The grip of La Technique ( per Jacques Ellul) on our economy has never been tighter, while its first cousin once removed, propaganda, thoroughly dominates our intellectual, social, and political lives. Are there any promising counter indications (i.e., grounds for hope)? Well, in the art world, we celebrate the demise of representationalism and the return to the Gothic ideal in the work of Picasso, Kandinsky , et al. Now we are once again looking beneath the surface: we’re exploring what things are , not just how they look or how they work . In science, too, we have overthrown the tyranny of Newtonian spacetime. 20th century physics pulled off a spectacular trifecta: relativity (Einstein), quantum mechanics (Heisenberg et al.), and non-locality (John Bell). Finally, literature: Ulysses (Joyce) represents the rediscovery of syntagm (vs. system). Pound, Eliot, Stein, Becket, Robbe-Grillet, et al., joined Joyce in rotating the ‘world’ 90 degrees, from a horizontal orientation (sequence) to a vertical orientation (coincidence). The classical, medieval and modern epochs each produced a gaggle of philosophers, but out of that scrum, a man called Boethius unexpectedly emerges. He bestride the millennia like a Colossus - sorry Homer. Boethius was a Christian, but scholars are uncertain about the depth of his conviction. By the end of the 5th century, Christianity had become chic . It was the way forward for any aspiring philosopher. Jupiter and Juno were yesterday’s news ! Yet, his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy , though thoroughly monotheistic, makes no mention of Christianity or any of its differentiating doctrines. Instead, the work displays Boethius’ profound familiarity with Greco-Roman mythology and classical history. He was a prominent personal advisor to the Ostrogoth emperor Theodoric, an Arian (i.e., a heretic, at least by today’s standards). Yet, Boethius is venerated, with official sanction, as a Christian martyr in at least one region of Italy. Be that as it may, Boethius proposed solutions to mainstream philosophical problems, the like of which are not seen again until the late medieval/early modern period (1200 – 1950). Let’s explore: All events, to the extent that they are free, seek Good and shun evil. What else could events possibly do? By pursuing something, events automatically confer on it the moniker, ‘Good’. Emerging events assess the world as it is, evaluate that world according to criteria (i.e., values) we call ‘the Good’, and act to modify that world so that it more closely conforms to that ‘Good’. Not your cup of chai? No problem, Goodbye! Of course, in our spatio-temporal world, things don’t always turn out exactly as we intend. The best laid plans… and all that. “Everything that is good is so through participation in goodness.” “If there is something to which all things are inclined, it will be the sum of all good…” “Even things which are believed to be inanimate also desire, in a similar way, that which is their own… Furthermore, that which is suitable to each thing, they preserve, just as they destroy what is harmful.” It’s hard, even for Boethius, to describe Being from the perspective of a stone. Suffice to say, there is something about a stone that works to preserve its stoniness . Was Boethius, therefore, a proponent of panpsychism ? We don’t have enough evidence to make that call, but his ontology certainly does not rule it out. “… The end of all things is the good…namely God.” The final cause. “Mortal men travel by different paths, though all are striving to reach one and the same goal… It is the perfection of all good things and contains in itself all that is good.” “The chief point and reason, therefore, for seeking all things is goodness…all things are desired for the sake of the good in them… God is to be found in goodness itself and nowhere else.” Boethius demonstrates that Good, Being, Unity, Love and God are different names for a single concept. “When…objects differ (conflict) they are not good, but…it is through the acquisition of unity (harmony) that these things are good…” “Everything that is remains and subsists just so long as it is one, but perishes and dissolves immediately it ceases to be one.” To be is to be one; to cease being is to become ‘legion’. Think of your own body; it is made up of 35 trillion cells, but you experience those cells as one body. We use ‘the body is breaking down’ as a euphemism for death. “Men who give up the common goal (unity, harmony)…thereby cease to exist themselves.” We are only so long and to the extent that we keep our focus on the Good. 1500 years on from Boethius, we have memes of our own: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” (The Who) But this is not at all what Boethius had in mind: The more things change, the more they become one! Becoming one is just about the opposite of staying the same . “The world in constant change maintains a harmony… If Love relaxed the reins, all things that now keep peace would wage continual war.” “If you do away with perfection ( aka God), it is impossible to imagine how that which is held to be imperfect could exist…” Without some universal unifying force (e.g., God or the Good), the world would disintegrate into an ever-finer grained multiplicity, culminating in heat death. Imagine all the matter/energy in the universe, inert and spread out smoothly throughout the universe. Hmm, sounds a bit like Genesis before God’s creative act: “The world was without form or shape with darkness over the abyss and a wind sweeping across the waters, (1: 1-2)” aka the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background). “That which is the origin of all things is in its own substance supremely good.” An ‘origin’ qua origin can only be one . Once that unity is lost, so is the power of origination. “Evil is nothing, (so) it is clear that since they can only do evil, the wicked can do nothing.” Our choice is not merely between good and evil, it is between something and nothing. To be is to be good; not to be good is not to be. “We must see everything that exists as good…anything that turns away from the good ceases to exist.” Like all children, we initially understand freedom as ‘ freedom from’ – freedom from the ministrations of parents, teachers, and civil authorities. Later, we tack on ‘freedom to’ – freedom to speak, assemble, pursue happiness, etc. But there are even bigger fish to fry. External constraints can be annoying (ask any teenager), but internal constraints can be, and usually are, fatal. We are born free, not omnipotent, but free, free to be all that we can be. Anything that interferes with my ability to realize my full human potential is, in that instance at least, evil. Born free, most of us allow ourselves to be imprisoned, not by evil men (sic) but by our own attachments: “But if to care and want you’re prey, no king are you, but slave.” We are in prison, a prison of our own making; but incredibly, we know the way out of this prison. Exit signs abound and there are no locks on any doors, no gates are barred, and yet we huddle together in the prison yard, bemoaning the lot, calling out for a savior. We noted earlier that no one knowingly and freely chooses lesser good in preference to greater good; and yet we all do so, nearly all the time. Born free, we are no longer free. Each of us is in a prison of her own design. The wisdom of all cultures, east and west, is full of blueprints, maps and escape manuals. Arguably, these constitute the sum of all human reflection. Liberation is what the Buddha was all about; but perhaps the opening verse of the Book of Psalms says it best: “Happy is the man (sic) who does not follow the counsel of the wicked…the law of the Lord is his joy, and on his law, he meditates day and night.” We are ‘happy’ only to the extent that we participate in the Good, and participation in the Good is only possible in the context of Freedom. Luckily, we are free; we only just need to recognize that! “Submitting to His (God’s) governance and obeying his laws is freedom.” For Boethius, freedom and virtue are one and the same. Failure to act virtuously in a particular situation is testimony to the hold evil has over us. No one voluntarily does anything that is less than ‘good’; therefore, anyone who tries to do anything other than ‘good’ does so as a result of compulsion (imposed externally or internally). Compulsion is the manifestation of evil in the life of a human being (or any other entity endowed with free will). Boethius was a mere 1,400 years ahead of his time. Elsewhere in this issue of ATM, we looked at how Pope Leo XIII and Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre , both espoused similar views of freedom and compulsion. The popular Christian notions of Providence and Omniscience (foreknowledge) seem radically incompatible with this Freedom. Freedom suggests that we are the authors of our own acts. We might not control the outcome of events, but we are solely responsible for their initiation. We act! Providence , on the other hand, refers to God’s role in the unfolding of events (personal or cosmic). This is what Einstein meant when he asked if the universe ‘had a bias toward good’; it is also what the preacher means when she says that God has a ‘master plan’ for each of us and for the cosmos. It is under Providence that we’ll find the concepts of Divine Benevolence and Omnipotence. God acts! Omniscience refers to God’s foreknowledge of events. It assumes that God knows immediately and eternally every detail of cosmic history. This would appear to preclude all contingency and therefore eliminate any role for Freedom. We are presented with a ‘block universe’ in which everything that is to happen has ‘already happened’...in the mind of God. Nobody acts! Each of these concepts is vastly more nuanced than we have space to explore here. Each could consume volumes…and has. Still, based just on this thumbnail, it is hard to see how these three connotatively disparate concepts could apply jointly to a single reality. But perhaps that is the ‘consolation of philosophy’ – to see the synonym behind every antonym. The Consolation of Philosophy , Boethius’ masterwork, is divided into 5 books, each in turn further divided into chapters. The last chapter of the penultimate book and the entirety of the final book are devoted to one topic: “You are urging me to the greatest of all questions, a question that can never be exhausted…the oneness of providence, the course of fate, the haphazard nature of the random events of chance, divine knowledge and predestination, and the freedom of the will.” This area of inquiry remains a major focus, even today, of theological and religious speculation. In the end, if I understand him correctly, Boethius got it right, but his reasoning can be hard to follow. Rather than quote Boethius at length (as I did above), I think it would be more profitable for all concerned if I were to present an organized summary of his views on this topic. Boethius believed that Freedom, Providence, and Omniscience are, in fact, entirely compatible, but to see that we need to look at the world through fresh eyes: God is eternal ( aka timeless), God is good, God creates. The universe is real. It’s not a figment of God’s imagination, and because It is real , it is free. Real existence is only possible in the context of real freedom. To be is to be free. The created universe extends in both space and time. Even if that extension were infinite (Aristotle), that infinity would, in no way equal, or even resemble, eternity which is another name for God. ( See ATM’s Eternity vs. Immortality. ) From the perspective of the spatio-temporal universe (us), events may be sorted into past, present, and future . From the perspective of eternity (God), there is no past or future, just a single all-encompassing present. So, God ‘experiences’ all spatio-temporal events as happening immediately and simultaneously. From that perspective, events fit together perfectly. Each event makes a unique and irreplaceable contribution to the final pattern. Therefore, each event is ‘necessary’ in its relationship to other events and to the whole. There is no wiggle room here. On the other hand, a nexus of entirely different events could have generated the exact same pattern, in which case those events would each be ‘necessary’. The ultimate pattern harmonizes all events, regardless of their details, by resolving all conflicts into contrasts that perfectly instantiate God’s values. Therefore, we may say that the ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined. Human beings (and perhaps other entities as well) are free to act (in the real pursuit of Good, i.e. God) or not (in the imaginary pursuit of ‘pleasure’, i.e. idols). Freedom acts in pursuit of God’s values; Providence harmonizes those acts into a pattern that perfectly instantiates those values; God has eternal knowledge of that pattern . From God’s perspective, it is the pattern that is ultimately real. The specific acts that form that pattern are the province of the created (i.e., free) world. Let us fall back on the old metaphor of an oriental rug. God prescribes the pattern and monitors ‘events’ to ensure that that pattern is emerging from the weave. We are the five-year-olds, working up to 16 hours each day, in dimly lit spaces, tying knots. We know nothing of patterns; our only concern is to tie a good knot. Ultimately, though, our efforts, however painful, are redeemed in the magnificence of the final design. Boethius offers us this consolation, only days before he is bludgeoned to death. Thank you, Mr. B! Image: Boethius woodcut. Holbein. 1537. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Previous Next

< Back All or Nothing David Cowles Mar 31, 2022 Time is the spotlight of being. For a short while, we are in the spot; then we aren’t. We are merely ‘shadows of our former selves’ (shades). “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” – Douglas McArthur We are all old soldiers. We don’t die…but we certainly do fade away, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, but always inexorably. This was the consensus view of pre-Socratic philosophers and theologians (i.e.., Exodus 3), and it remains the view of Neo-Parmenideans today (i.e.., Emanuele Severino). Now take a look at Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey , the so-called Nekyia (‘tale of the dead’). This is one of the oldest extant Ancient Greek texts, older certainly than most of the rest of Homer’s famous epic. In Book XI, Odysseus visits Hades, the abode of the deceased. There, he encounters ‘shades’, shadows of all those who came before him. According to Homer, Parmenides, et al., whatever is, is, and whatever is, cannot not be. Being is not something that can go away. Ontology is an all or nothing game! Either it is or it is not. It is ‘illogical’ (Spock) to think that things that come to be, or cease to be, are. If we are, we are, otherwise we aren’t, and if we aren’t now, then we never were and never will be. What we call ‘coming to be’ and ‘ceasing to be’ is really just a function of a thing called time. Time is unrelated to being. However, we do experience time. Time is the spotlight of being. For a short while, we are in the spot; then we aren’t. We are merely ‘shadows of our former selves’ (shades). Have you ever watched an episode of perennial TV favorite “Big Brother”? Typically, each week one houseguest is ‘evicted’ from the Big Brother house. When that happens, the evicted houseguest’s full color headshot fades to gray. CBS stole that idea…from Homer! (I doubt Homer minds, but just in case, he should surely check the intellectual property laws in your jurisdiction.) Image: Marble terminal bust of Homer. Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic original of the 2nd c. BC. Thoughts While Shaving is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below and never miss a new Thought! 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.