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< Back R U Orientable? David Cowles Apr 18, 2024 This is why I was never a track star in high school; I was the only kid running on a non-orientable race course.” Do you believe the Earth is round? “Round? Why? Does it look round to you?” Even before Socrates, philosophers and scientists debated the shape of our planet. There are many theoretical reasons to think that the Earth might be round ish . Against this, however, is the evidence of naive sense perception: it looks flat! I can drive from Boston to Seattle without ever having to consider the overall curvature of the federal highway system. Even if it isn’t flat, it might as well be. Yet, you probably answered my opening question with a full-throated “Yes!” Most of us are convinced that the theoretical arguments for the roundness of our planet override the immediate testimony of our eyes. For the most part, the debate has moved from the shape of the planet to the shape of the U niverse; but on this later question, the jury is ‘still out’. I won’t go into all the open issues; I’m only interested in one: Is the Universe orientable…or not? When I first started contemplating this problem, the textbooks were unanimous: the Universe is orientable, period. This is a big claim since the presence of a single embedded non-orientable topological feature (e.g. a Mobius Strip) is enough to make the entire Universe non-orientable. So it doesn’t matter how the Universe looks from (N – 1) perspectives; we need to know how it looks from the Nth perspective. There are precedents. 400 years ago, the Universe looked Newtonian; we accepted the ‘fact’ (sic) that Newton had captured the ultimate order of things. 300 years later, the work-a-day Universe still looked Newtonian, but by then we had learned to look further and deeper. In the process, we discovered that the Universe was not ultimately Newtonian after all. It still looked Newtonian at most scales, but now we knew it wasn't—it was Relativistic. Newton’s model turns out to be just a very useful approximation of Einstein’s. But we’re not done. Now we are struggling to fit Einstein’s Relativity into an even broader conceptual framework that includes Quantum Mechanics and Non-Locality. It’s a work in progress. Again, on most scales, the Universe looks relativistic, but now we know that ultimately, it can’t be. Which brings us to the matter of topology. Imagine an extra-long cash register receipt like the one the cashier at Target handed you the day after you got last year’s tax refund. Yeah, like that! Stretch it out. It’s bounded on 4 edges, and it’s two-sided. Your receipt is like an episode of Stranger Things . If you live on the obverse side, you have no knowledge of the reverse, and vice versa. You can write a short story on one side and draw a landscape on the other. You can even join the two ends together to form a corral or ring. Obverse/reverse becomes inside/outside; still, the twain can’t meet. Now instead, twist your paper (receipt) 180° and then join the ends together. What a difference a twist makes! Now there’s no inside/outside. In fact, there are no sides at all; your 4-bounded register tape just became 2-bounded. God sure had some fun creating this universe! But is this your world? Well, your world is twisted (in more ways than one), and it can seem a bit one sided , at least according to some contemporary news channels, but we need to dig much deeper. Place a triangle pointing up (˄) on the Mobius strip and slide it 360° along the tape until you get back where you started. Easy-peasy! Except it’s not. You have not restored its initial position. Something’s happened to your triangle; now it’s pointing down (˅). What goes around still comes around, but it comes around upside down. Objection : If you continue to slide your triangle along the Mobius strip, it will eventually come back right side up. Answer : Exactly! Every 360° spin around the ‘strip’ reverses your orientation; the point is that you no longer live in a world with 360° symmetry. This non-orientable space exhibits 720° symmetry. So, is ‘orientable cosmology’ the contemporary analog of Newtonian physics? Are there reasons for thinking that the Universe might not be orientable after all? First, massive elementary particles (e.g. quarks, electrons) have non-integer spins – which means that they exhibit symmetry other than 360°, e.g. 720°. As with our Mobius Strip, it takes two laps around the track for these buggers to go from the start to the finish line upright. This is why I was never a track star in high school; I was the only kid running on a non-orientable race course. Also, in one- and two-dimensional systems, it has been shown that the properties of some particles simply express the topology of their space. For example, electrons can have fractional charges (e.g., 1/3 or 1/5 rather than 1), and these quantities are derived directly from topology. While particles in orientable space can sometimes be teased into ‘exotic states’, those states exist naturally in non-orientable spaces. Riddle : How is Particle Physics like the Dick Tracy movie? Answer : They both call their villains things like ‘Full Face’ (360° Photon), ‘Two Face’ (180° Graviton), and ‘Half Face’ (720° Fermion). Riddle : How is the Standard Model of Particle Physics like Roman Mythology? Answer : They both have a two faced God ( Graviton, Janus ) in their Parthenon. The idea that the stuff of Universe is a function of its underlying topology is not new. Plato advanced the idea in his Timaeus as did R. Buckminster Fuller in Synergetics . There’s a lot more to explore here but as a bartender once said to me, “Sir, are you orientable?” Keep the conversation going... 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 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 Jesus Christ Pantocrator David Cowles Apr 26, 2026 “Take the AT challenge: Maintain eye contact with the Pantocrator for one full minute.” 1200 words, 6 minute read I dare you, in fact I double dog dare you: Take the AT challenge. Maintain eye contact with the Pantocrator (above) for one full minute? Couldn’t do it? Didn’t think so. I’m not surprised. I haven’t been able to do it either. I’m working my way up…but I’m still well short of 60 seconds, well short. You can practice. Find a pre-school child. Please don’t abduct her! Lock eyes instead. Same experience, but some folks find a baby less threatening than the Creator of Heaven and Earth; some don’t. Call it education, acculturation or just plain growing-up: we are practiced in the art of putting on masks to protect ourselves from the penetrating gaze of others. Maybe you let a significant other cross your mote…on occasion (or maybe not); but otherwise, your defenses are impregnable…to everyone, that is, except the Pantocrator …or any rando baby carelessly left by her ‘weekend warrior’ dad in his overstuffed supermarket shopping cart. *** Post-classical Western art (painting) sorts itself, very roughly, into 3 major periods: Byzantine/Gothic : God sees into our hearts (icons) and/or we view the world through God’s eyes. Either way, God is the implied subject of every proposition. Renaissance : God gets the hook - exit stage right . From DaVinci (1500) to Manet (1860), we paint the world as we see it, through our eyes. Now I am the subject of every proposition. I have even arranged the objects on the canvas so that I am now the focus (perspective). Either God doesn’t exist, or he is irrelevant, or he has abandoned us, or he’s dead. Who needs God anyway? I am the captain of my ship, the arbiter of my truth, warden of the cosmos, judge of my fellow human beings. I am all three branches of government conflated in a singularity. Thanks to Galileo, the Earth is no longer the center of the universe but, spoiler alert, neither is the Sun. I am the center of the Universe, my universe at least, and that’s all need matter ( to me )…right? And there’s absolutely no one to tell me otherwise: no parent, no priest, no professor, no pope. “Look here God. I am rebuilding the Tower of Babel…a million times over, all across the Globe. What are you going to do about it? Wipe us out with a plague of locusts? We’ll shoot ‘em down before they can sting us! Technology, God, not Miracles! Gnosis , Lord, not Mystery! “We don’t need you, God, and as a matter of fact, we don’t need art either, except as decoration to break up the relentlessly repeating pattern of our wallpaper. ‘Get that Rembrandt out of here; it doesn’t go with the furniture. If only that imbecile had used blue instead of green! Oh well, his loss; he won’t be gracing my walls anytime soon.’ Now dogs playing poker – that entertains me.” Flash : If you’re so anxious to see the world through your own eyes, why don’t I just invent a camera? And so the mask of Renaissance is removed revealing the culprit’s real identity, Enlightenment ! Modern . Beginning c. 1870 with the first Impressionists and then exploding into a cornucopia of Constructivist styles (including Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction), so-called modern art has turned the world inside out…again. Once more, we see the World (and ourselves) as God sees it (or excuse me, as a transcendent entity would see it if such an entity existed). Our artists are looking beneath the phenomenal surface and showing us the noumenal world below. Cubism is the new iconography. Leger is the new Giotto, etc. *** We are used to looking at paintings. Sometimes the experience is exhilarating; but be honest, often it’s tedious. Sometimes it reveals something new and unexpected about the World and our presence in it; sometimes it’s just ‘same old/same old’. We are less used to paintings looking at us. For the most part, it’s icons that have that quality. And yes, it’s unsettling…in the extreme: “U lookin’ at me ?” Well, I don’t like it…I am very happy being anonymous. Like Adam, I am anxious to hide from God…and from Eve (fig leaf in hand). Next to the Madonna, Christ – The Creator of All (Pantocrator) is perhaps the most painted theme in all of Western art. The first such image still extant (above), was painted in the Sinai desert during the 6th century CE, not long after the sack of Rome. It is a fitting symbol (as well as vehicle) for the integration of Christianity into various cultural media (including art). The Sinai iconographer captured something absolutely vital about the human experience: We are more seen than seer! More object than subject. Modern Western Civilization is characterized by its flatness: the cosmos is flat, time is linear, cause precedes effect, “things fall apart” (entropy). (GM Hopkins) We have evolved an entire language family (Modern Indo-European) to encode this vision: subject – verb (active) – object. Such a view would have been incomprehensible to early Christians. They understood that the life of Jesus (Incarnation – Ascension) forever changed the topology of Being. Effectively, it turned the world inside out. The whole (God) becomes a quantum part (one person) of that whole. The fundamental topology of Being is circular (or spiroid), not linear (or flat). We are not the subject of Being; God is. Art is not about what we see – we have ourselves for that. Art is about what God sees – Beauty, Truth, Justice – in the world…and in us. We need art to show us the world and we need icons specifically to show us ourselves. Now, go back to the Pantocrator . Take the AT Challenge and let me know if you can do it. 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 Election Day 2022 David Cowles Nov 8, 2022 “Whatever we do, each of us is commenting on the current state-of-affairs, advocating for some future state-of-affairs, or rejecting the political process altogether.” Today is the day when every citizen of the United States (age 18+) makes a declaration. Today, you and I will go to the polls and vote, one way or another, or we have already voted so that our votes can be counted tonight; or we will not vote at all. Whatever we do, each of us is commenting on the current state-of-affairs, advocating for some future state-of-affairs, or rejecting the political process altogether. In preparation for today’s vote, Aletheia Today (AT) published two Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) last week, both reflecting on Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and focusing on Lincoln’s call for government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’: The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg Too Today, in consideration of the hurt and anger that today’s results will inevitably generate, it might make sense to return to Mr. Lincoln one more time: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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 Shroud of Turin David Cowles Apr 12, 2026 “This article has nothing to do with the Shroud of Turin!” 1750 words, 8 minute read The piece of cloth known as the Shroud of Turin allegedly bears the image of Jesus of Nazareth. However, carbon dating suggests the item is only 700 years old and for 500 of those years it has been kept under lock and key. Yet in the course of testing the cloth, researchers found that it was now, or once had been, home to a virtual Noah’s Ark of life forms native to various spots on the globe. But this article has nothing to do with the Shroud of Turin ! Rather it’s about the way influences propagate in our world. A March 30, 2026 article in New Scientist summarized recent findings: “The sources of genetic material include domestic cats and dogs, farm animals including chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and horses, and wild animals such as deer and rabbits. The team also found traces of some fish species, including the grey mullet, Atlantic cod and ray-finned fishes. “Marine crustaceans, flies, aphids, and arachnids like dust and skin mites and ticks were also identified. Some of the most common plant species whose DNA was preserved on the shroud are carrots and various wheat species, as well as peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes – plants probably brought to Europe after explorers began travelling to Asia and the Americas… “The team also found human DNA from many individuals who have handled the shroud, including the 1978 sampling team… (but) nearly 40 per cent of the human DNA found on the shroud is from Indian (Indian subcontinent) lineages…” Astounding! *** We imagine ourselves living on a grid . Blame Descartes for this - his system of rectilinear coordinates, etc. Also, the Apostle John for his concept of logos (pattern, scaffolding, weir). Hold Homer accountable for Penelope’s endless weaving (Laertes’ shroud), and praise Mondrian for Broadway Boogie Woogie - all manifestations of life on the grid ! We must blame ourselves too! We have worked the notion of grid into every nook and cranny of contemporary culture. The football field is a grid iron . A superannuated hippie is said to ‘live off the grid ’ and we are concerned today about the strain that AI is putting on the electrical grid . Grids are useful. They allow us to keep track of process by imposing a strict order of operations, designating (arbitrarily or otherwise) certain events as causes and others as effects. When we need to write (or re-write) history, the grid hands us a pre-recorded tape. When we need to fix a problem, the grid provides a schematic that lets us quickly zero-in on the trouble spot. But all this convenience masks a serious problem: this is not how the real world works…not even close. But we’re used to that! We manipulate the material world based on patterns given to us by Euclidean Geometry…even though there are no straight lines or smooth curves in nature. This is not mere sophistry. It has a critical relevance to contemporary civilization. The Cartesian grid may be an appropriate model for the repetitive, atomized motions of an industrial Technosphere, but it breaks down utterly in today’s information rich, holistically inclined Cybersphere. *** The Shroud of Turin turns out to be a better model of real process than anything Descartes or Newton could have imagined. Just look at the record it has kept of its journey through spacetime. The cloth we have today includes traces of the many humans who have touched it and the multiple life forms that have been touched by it, across continents and over centuries. Change does not occur in uniform increments, and it is rarely vectored; more often, it bursts forth like dye packs in a robber’s satchel, tainting everything in its reach. Heraclitus (5th century BCE) is celebrated for linking being with process, process with flow, and flow with water. But even water has viscosity; it resists its own flow. When your favorite rugrat spills milk on the kitchen floor, it does not immediately cover the surface and flow into the adjoining rooms. Instead it creeps along, running in rivulets, inexorably but gradually carrying out its annoying mission. It begs for Bounty (or Brawny )! But paper towels, no matter the ply, are useless in the face of dye packs exploding into a medium of low, no, or below zero viscosity. Below? Below zero? So, negative viscosity! Is that a thing? Turns out, it is, and it applies here. “Show me!” you say? Ok, how about RCW 86, the remnants of a white dwarf star that exploded c. 180 CE. It has expanded with a velocity highly atypical of supernovae. The current consensus: RCW 86 is exploding into an ultra-low density (viscosity) ‘cavity’ in space. *** What kind of world do we live in? Does change evolve at a measured pace, like spilt milk, allowing us to anticipate and manage its course? Or does change erupt, often violently, without warning, and in ways we could not possibly have predicted? The Shroud of Turin is many things; among them, it’s its own historical record. We’re not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. According to accepted physics, all the information associated with a Black Hole resides on its surface. That is one book you can only judge by its cover! The cover is the book…well-suited perhaps to today’s short attention spans. Same for the Shroud. Its entire record as an historical artifact lives on its surface. And when we take the time to look, we realize that the cloth is not an object, subject to a chain of custody (chain = grid), but a whirlwind (negative pressure) attracting influences from every corner of the world. Anthropocentric as we are, we have arbitrarily set the viscosity of water to be 1.0. On that scale, the viscosity of olive oil is 80: it is 80 times more resistant to flow than water. Best wean Junior off milk: “Let him drink oil!” At the other end of the spectrum acetone is 70% less viscous than water: an acetone spill spreads even faster than water from Junior’s sippy cup. But we’re not done yet! Exotic materials like liquid Helium and Quark-gluon Plasma have viscosities approaching 0. And when viscosity is negative, the rate of dispersion accelerates over time. According to most current models, the phenomenon we’ve labeled Dark Energy exhibits negative viscosity. If confirmed, that negative viscosity will ultimately…and literally…rip apart the universe and every particle in it. Of course, the Second Law of Thermodynamics must be obeyed; therefore, an input of energy from an external source is generally required. According to (Anthropic) Claude, “True negative viscosity is forbidden in equilibrium systems. But effective negative viscosity — where an energy-driven system behaves as if its viscosity were negative — is a real, experimentally confirmed phenomenon… and it tends to produce the same striking signature: order and large-scale structure spontaneously emerging from chaos .” It is as though you were watching your dad’s 1950’s home movies…backwards. Surprisingly, there are a number of real world phenomena that appear to exhibit negative viscosity. The two dimensional event horizons of black holes (above) exhibit negative viscosity, as does the turbulence within Jupiter’s GRS. (The latter feeds off energy injected by smaller ‘storms’ in the planet’s atmosphere.) Closer to home, imagine some bacteria suspended in a drop of water. They swim around like kids in a backyard pool; nothing to see here! But now add more bacteria to the same volume of water. When the density of bacteria in the water reaches a critical tipping point, the random motions of the individual bacteria coordinate…like synchronized swimmers at the Olympics. Once synchronized, the individual bacteria inject their proprietary energy into the ensemble. Result : the bacterial suspension itself behaves as if the viscosity of the medium was negative. And speaking of the Olympics, how about those cyclists? Cyclist B camps out in the wake of Cyclist A. Cyclist A experiences the medium (air) as resistance while that same medium delivers acceleration to Cyclist B, allowing the latter to conserve energy. *** Our models of the everyday world assume substantial positive viscosity (resistance): Ideas disseminate subject to the resistance of various unexamined assumptions ( sacred cows ); empires expand and revolutions spread subject to the resistance of existing geo-political structures (institutions). But what if, on a more fundamental level, micro-influences spread unimpeded? What if the foreign particles that litter the surface of the Shroud and record its history have effectively disseminated in a medium of ultra-low (< 1, 0 or even < 0) viscosity? Is that possible? Answer #1 : Yes, the Shroud itself functions as an ‘accelerator’? The travels of the cloth inject additional ‘outside’ energy into the system so that overall, influences disseminate as they would in a medium of ultra-low viscosity. As micro-influences propagate, they become enmeshed in various macro-objects which themselves travel through spacetime. The combined rate of dissemination is indicative of an environment with ultra-low viscosity. Answer #2 : Yes, we are not interested in the remnants of cats or carrots per se . We are concerned only with what they signify: specific spacetime locations. Building on John Wheeler’s great insight (“it from bit”), we can treat the Shroud and its contaminants as pure information and we hypothesize that information naturally spreads as it would in an ultra-low viscosity medium. And so the saga of the Shroud of Turin takes a new and unexpected turn. Now we understand the cloth and its contaminants as, among other more important things, a vehicle for recording and propagating history, i.e. information, and we understand that the information per se flows as if in a medium of ultra-low viscosity. So what! Who cares? Well, you do because the shift from an algorithmic grid to a chaotic explosion undermines the whole notion of causality. Mondrian becomes Jackson Pollack. Hume’s preference for multi-dimensional correlation vs. linear causality seems ever more prescient as we recognize and explore more ultra-low viscosity environments. *** Image: The Holy Shroud by Giovanni Battista della Rovere This 17th-century oil painting depicts the Shroud of Turin being held aloft by a group of saints, presenting the cloth as a sacred object of public veneration. The composition focuses on the physical presence of the relic, using the dramatic lighting and rich detail typical of the Baroque period to emphasize its spiritual importance. By surrounding the Shroud with religious figures, the artist highlights the connection between the physical remains of the past and the enduring faith of the community. 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 What (or Who) R U? David Cowles Jun 19, 2025 “Celebrate what you are, knowing that it is ever changing, but embrace who you are, knowing that it is immutable.” “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That question was the bane of the Boomer generation, and I still hear adults ask it today. I can scarcely imagine a more damaging question! The assumptions it makes, communicates, and reinforces about life are spirit-robbing at the least. Based in part on memes like this, my generation conceived of life as a series of stages: you grow until you become what you will be; then you are what you are until you are not. Life, neatly packaged! Somehow, at some magic moment tucked in somewhere between your 16th birthday and your 31st, a bell rings, and you declare, “I am Spartacus and I will be Spartacus until the day I die.” You have found yourself! You have an identity! Congratulations! You know who you are, and you know where you fit into the jigsaw puzzle called ‘society’. You’ve taken your place on the Great Mandala. How awful for you! You might say your life ended before it began, except… Real Life doesn’t always follow IKEA’s schematics! But when it doesn’t, our reaction often includes anxiety, depression, even self-loathing. We are charting our own course, but we feel that we are not living up to someone else’s expectations for us.” When an adult asks you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the expected answer is doctor , firefighter , or astronaut . A somewhat more thoughtful answer might be kind , creative , or wise . But either way, you are being asked to place yourself in a straitjacket. The pernicious assumption, of course, is (1) that you will someday become some thing , possibly just one single thing , and (2) that you will remain that thing throughout the remainder of your sad life. How far we’ve deviated from the existentialist ideal: “I know who I am, and I know that I can be whatever I want to be!” Our categories reflect the intuition that there is something about us that is variable and something that is fixed. According to ‘the standard model’, I am variable until I become fixed but, once fixed, I remain fixed for the duration. I am like molten metal being poured into a mold and left to harden. Molten, I am uber-plastic ; the choice of mold is a variable but from a very limited inventory of options; once poured, however, I am eternally inert. Our intuition is correct but our application of that intuition is fatally flawed. In fact, who you are and what you are completely disconnected. Who you are is fixed. You are who you are from the moment of your birth (or before) to the moment of your death (or after). Doubt me? Think about an early childhood experience. You were there then, weren’t you? Just like you are here now. Then is now but you is you! Who you are does not change because there is nothing to change. “We are the stuff that dreams are made of.” (Shakespeare) Like Odysseus, you are Nemo, no one; or in the words of M. Sartre, “You are not what you are, and you are what you are not .” You are the negation of what is in pursuit of what isn’t. You are the third leg of Bobby Kennedy’s famous triangle: “You see things as they are and you dream of things that never were.” That’s who you are. What you are is an entirely different animal. What you are is ever changing. In the language of Eastern spirituality, who you are is atman (soul), what you are is maya (attachment). According to the pre-Socratics, who you are is permanent, what you are is always in flux. According to the great heavy metal band known as Thomas (Aquinas) and the Scholastics , who you are is singular and ‘simple’, but what you are is ‘legion’ and complex. Across the globe and throughout recorded history, the intuition of permanence-in-flux is nearly universal. But we know better! The so-called Enlightenment flipped the script. Ground is now figure and figure ground. Who we are has become multifarious but what we are is now fixed. Should we be surprised then that identity is now fragile…but destiny immutable? The same cultural mutation that brought us bipolar disorder and schizophrenia also brought slavery, the assembly line, and the proverbial gold watch at retirement. We are all Daniel Webster, we are all Faust. We need no devil, no Mephistopheles; we have parents and teachers, influencers and role models enough for that. We will sell our souls ( who we are) for fame and fortune ( what we are): ‘Getting and spending’, we’ll ‘lay waste’ our powers (Wordsworth). And we will pretend to feel good about it, from the first graduation party to the last retirement send-off. We become what others expect us to be; we become what others want us to be. We live their lives, not ours. In Paul’s Letter to Ephesians (2: 10) we read that we are created to perform “the good works that God has prepared in advance that we should live in them.” Well and good, but we, our ‘enlightened selves’, have replaced God with Mammon. We allow others, the secular system , to define who (what) we are. But who are we really? We are the image and likeness of the ineffable God. Therefore, we too are ineffable. But we spend nearly every waking moment identifying ourselves with the labels others place on us, describing us as if we were a what and not a who . “I am…” is an oxymoron. Sartre’s existential anthropology (above) recapitulates Parmenides’ pre Socratic cosmology. According to Parmenides, Being consists of Divinity (goddess), Aletheia (truth), and Doxa (appearance). Re Aletheia , Parmenides wrote: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable, whole…and complete. Nor was it once nor will it be since it is now all together, one, continuous…Thus coming to be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of. Nor is it divisible since it is all alike.” That’s who you are! But he characterized Doxa as “to come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to change place (motion), and to exchange bright color.” That’s what you are! You can never alter who you are just as you can never preserve what you are. Instead, you leave behind fossil remnants of what you were…the detritus known as ‘your works (Ozymandias), your legacy’. So celebrate what you are, knowing that it is ever changing, but embrace who you are, knowing that it is immutable. Image: René Magritte, The Lovers I, Oil on Canvas, 54×73.5cm, 1928 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 Everything IS Possible David Cowles Nov 4, 2021 Yesterday, my 8 year old grandson told me, quite authoritatively as usual, “Nothing is impossible, everything is possible.” My first thought was, “Hmm, that doesn’t seem right.” But I should have known better; whenever I disagree about anything with any of my grandchildren, I am usually wrong. In this case, I started coming up with examples of things that are impossible. For example, a circle that is also a square. But then I realized, it’s not that a ‘squared circle’ is impossible, it’s that it’s not a thing. Despite riddles to the contrary, you cannot have something that is black and white at the same time. The meaning of the concepts themselves, the words ‘black and white’, preclude something that is both. (White is the sum of all colors; black is the absence of any color.) On the other hand, a unicorn, even if does not actually exist, is certainly possible. There is nothing about the attributes of a unicorn that would make its existence an impossibility. So, historically we’ve gotten this all wrong. Everything IS possible! But not every random combination of attributes constitutes a thing. Yesterday, my 8 year old grandson told me, quite authoritatively as usual, “Nothing is impossible, everything is possible.” My first thought was, “Hmm, that doesn’t seem right.” But I should have known better; whenever I disagree about anything with any of my grandchildren, I am usually wrong. In this case, I started coming up with examples of things that are impossible. For example, a circle that is also a square. But then I realized, it’s not that a ‘squared circle’ is impossible, it’s that it’s not a thing. Despite riddles to the contrary, you cannot have something that is black and white at the same time. The meaning of the concepts themselves, the words ‘black and white’, preclude something that is both. (White is the sum of all colors; black is the absence of any color.) On the other hand, a unicorn, even if does not actually exist, is certainly possible. There is nothing about the attributes of a unicorn that would make its existence an impossibility. So, historically we’ve gotten this all wrong. Everything IS possible! But not every random combination of attributes constitutes a thing. 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 Can Happiness Be Measured? David Cowles Apr 9, 2024 “How much beauty is there in Dali’s Last Supper?” In the Spring Issue (3/1/2004) of Aletheia Today Magazine , we explored the concept of ‘ Happiness ’. Is the concept even meaningful? If it is, how do we define it, where do we find it, how do we create it? Well, now we know! Happiness, the Summum Bonum of life according to J. S. Mill, et al., is nothing but an algorithm…at least according to a company called WalletHub ( WH ). ‘Happy’ is one of a handful of predicates that cannot be combined meaningfully with any negative particle. Huh? Ok, no one can meaningfully say, “I wish that painting was less beautiful , I wish our knowledge was less true , I wish our laws were less just , (or) I wish I was less happy .” Of course, you can say all these things…but you can’t mean them, not literally any way. Why not? Well, to make a painting ‘less beautiful’ would make it ‘more beautiful’…in your eyes, or you wouldn’t do it. Same with ‘happiness’; how many people do you know who make themselves ‘unhappy’ because in the long run, they are ‘happiest’ when they are ‘miserable’? To suggest without a hint of irony or humor that ugliness is better than beauty, falsehood better than truth, exploitation better than justice, and misery better than happiness constitutes a failure to understand the terms themselves. Beauty, Truth, Justice, and I suppose, Happiness are absolutes. ‘Desirability’ is embedded in the denotative meaning of each. In fact, they define desirability ; they stimulate all desire. They are what makes ‘the desirable’, desirable, i.e. that it is beautiful, true, or just (objectively), or that it makes you, or me, happy (subjectively). WH measured the ‘average happiness’ of residents of 182 large U.S. cities. Stop right there! To ‘average’ something, you must be able to quantify it and it must be subject to the operation known as ‘division’. Beauty, truth, justice, and happiness cannot be reduced to a real number, they are not divisible (even by 1), and they cannot be arranged on a linear scale. How much beauty is there in Dali’s Last Supper ? Which is more beautiful – the Mona Lisa or Guernica ? What is half a Van Gogh? These questions are not ‘well formed’; they are absurd. But that did not deter WalletHub: WH linked ‘happiness’ to a set of parameters chosen for their collective ability to measure a person’s overall sense of well-being - physical, emotional, financial, and social: Physical Health, Adequate Sleep, Participation in sports, Life Expectancy. Metal Health, Rates of Depression and Suicide, Life Satisfaction, Use of Marijuana, Use of Opioids. Food Security, Income Growth, Household Income, Job Satisfaction, Job Security, Job Opportunity, Rates of poverty, unemployment, underemployment, and bankruptcy, Hours spent working, commuting, and at leisure. Public Policy, Charitable Activity, Community Spirit, Rate of Separation & divorce, Hate-Crimes per capita, Acres of Parkland per capita, Weather. WH assigned different weights, some positive, some negative, to these different parameters. Although the authors cite various ‘studies’, the selection and weighting of these parameters was ultimately subjective. Honolulu has better weather than Buffalo…unless you like snow and dread tsunamis. Or perhaps you don’t give a fig about the weather! Leisure time is good…unless you’re anxious, or easily bored. A long commute is undesirable…unless you use the time to listen to audiobooks…or just to decompress. The conclusion of the study is clear: If you live in Cleveland or Detroit, move out! If you live in San Jose, CA or Madison, WI, bliss out! I’ve never been to Madison, but I can assure you that there are plenty of unhappy people in San Jose ( Stress much? )…and many happy people in Cleveland (home of the Cleveland Browns, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and best Eastern European food this side of the Krakow.) What more could you want? Oh, right, parkland. Well, you can’t have everything…even in Cleveland. This WH study tells you everything you need to know about one thing and one thing only: the values of the folks conducting the study, and per Jacques Derrida, the values of the culture from which they sprang. Heck, you can do this at home! Make a list of 5 things that you think would make you happy. Then make a separate list of 5 places you think you’d be most likely to experience those 5 things. Bingo! Now you know what happiness is and where to find it. If you’re still unhappy after that, it’s your “own damn fault”. (Jimmy Buffet) Alcoholics Anonymous has a term for this: it’s called ‘the geographic cure’. A friend of mine said it best 50+ years ago: “I’d love to see the world…if only I didn’t have to bring myself along.” In my experience, people in Boston complain about the weather incessantly. People in San Diego…not so much! But that certainly doesn’t mean that moving to San Diego will make you happier. It doesn’t work like that, WH notwithstanding. Like Beauty, Truth, and Justice, Happiness is holistic. It is not the sum of parts; it is a Gestalt . That’s not to say that objective factors don’t play a part, they certainly do! It just means states of happiness cannot be ordered linearly and that there’s no straight line linking specific variables to overall contentment. On the one hand, speculation of this sort ( WH ) can be viewed as an innocuous parlor game. It’s fun to see where your city ranks. On the other hand, such exercises reinforce cherished fallacies: If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. (Positivism ) If a > b, and b > c, then a > c ( Transitive Property ) “…There exists nothing which could judge…the whole…(because) nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Nietzsche ) Bottom line: If you live according to WH ’s Happiness Algorithm, you will one day lament, “I measured out my life with coffee spoons.” (Eliot) Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 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 End of All War David Cowles Jun 22, 2026 “ It is a pleasure to announce that we are the generation that ended warfare once and for all on Planet Earth.” 1000 words, 5 minute read It’s official. Our 5 millennia love affair with ‘intertribal’ warfare is finally over. The first recorded war was about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but it is likely that there were wars before then, probably going back all the way to the time when Homo Sapiens (HS) crowded out the more dovish Neandertals and Denisovans . In any event, since the first recorded arrow was shot into the air, it is barely an exaggeration to say that we have been continuously at war. So much so that we classify conflicts by their duration: the 100 Years War, the 30 Years War, etc. The US apparently has a preference for 20 Year Wars: Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan. Peace has come to mean those rare periods of rest, reconstruction, and rearmament that inevitably punctuate martial history. War by whom, against whom, for what? Hardly matters! By everyone against everyone for only temporary advantage. We have met the enemy and he is us . - Pogo So it is a pleasure to announce that we are the generation that ended warfare once and for all on Planet Earth. All those peace signs, sit-ins, and protest marches from the ‘60s and ‘70s apparently paid off. To quote the infamous Neville Chamberlain: We have “peace in our time!” This doesn’t mean that all shooting will stop tomorrow, or that new skirmishes won’t break out. It does mean that war is no longer a viable, long term foreign policy option. It would be nice to think that humanity has at last acquired wisdom and virtue, that we have heeded the call of the prophet Isaiah to turn our swords into ploughshares; it would be nice… but it would be wrong. Sadly, our appetite for battle has not subsided, not even a little bit. (Does the discovery of recoverable Neandertal genes in our DNA offer hope?) And no, the international football pitch has not taken the place of the local battlefield. Sport, even American football, has not sublimated, much less satisfied, our thirst for blood. The ‘problem’ is much more practical. The wave of warfare empowering technology has finally crested. Social scientists debate whether war is the mother of technological progress or whether technological progress whets our appetite for conflict. Most probably, warfare and technology constitute a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a vicious cycle . Putting on our best imitation of Karl Marx, we can say that material conditions conducive to war no longer exist. Much as we might like to obliterate our neighbors, we lack the technology to do so effectively . Hmm, that sounds strange, doesn’t it? Certainly, if I want you gone, I have more ways to accomplish that today than ever before! But if CSI is to be believed (and why wouldn’t you believe something that’s on TV?), I would almost certainly be caught, tried, incarcerated or executed. So I can kill you…but it’s no longer an effective way for me to deal with the nuisance you’ve become. Similarly, our technical ability to wipe out another nation has never been greater but our practical ability to do so has been permanently compromised. (Those who decry the advance of technology, take note!) Consider the evidence. Since World War II, major wars have rarely had unambiguous outcomes. Korea, for example, ended with armistice and partition, Vietnam with a temporary peace, Iraq I with Al Quada, Iraq II with ISIS, Afghanistan with the Taliban. As always, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Our ultimate weapons of mass destruction are too expensive to build, maintain, upgrade, and replenish; and their consequences make them too expensive to deploy. Our technology has made itself obsolete. At the other end of the spectrum, for the price of a used car I can buy technology that will take out an entire neighborhood. Unexpectedly, war has democratized. Marx’ means of destruction are finally in the hands of the proletariat. The Carnegies and Vanderbilts of warfare (US, Russia) have become ineffectual figureheads, worthy of a deferential nod but little else. Consider Russia’s war with Ukraine, two sides killing each other, soldiers and civilians alike, in the most horrible ways possible. But Chernobyl is off limits and fighting must stop from time to time for grain ships to leave Odessa (or the world would starve), for oil and gas to pass through pipelines (or Europe would freeze), and, most of all, to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant safe and operational (or the entire region would risk annihilation). Consider the US war with Iran, massive damage to infrastructure, assassinations of political and military leaders, retaliatory strikes on civilian neighborhoods, but the main focus is on getting oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The local human and material losses take a distant back seat to the global economic cost. And that cost is borne by people who have no interest in the war whatsoever, as well as the combatants. We still have the illusion that the physical impact of wars can be contained in small corners of the planet; we conceptualize war as if it were a movie and we the passive but blood lusting audience. We have no such illusions about the economic costs. They affect Norwegian fishermen and Argentinian ranchers alike; and the costs are not minimal…or sustainable…or even supportable. Ergo , it is no longer economically feasible to engage in warfare. War has become, not impossible, but impractical! Animals kill members of other species for food. They may fight with members of their own species over conjugal rights, etc. but those conflicts are rarely group affairs, and they rarely result in death. Plants and fungi have a symbiotic relationship. They can’t live without one another. Plus, animals and plants are engaged in a planet wide symbiotic pageant as they recycle each other’s carbon and oxygen. Homo has been the odd genus out… until now! 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 Butterflies and Human Development David Cowles Apr 17, 2026 “Our personalities dissolve into a soup, just like a caterpillar’s DNA, then reassemble according to an entirely different schematic, just like a butterfly.” 1750 words, 8 minute read You’ve heard about the famous Borneo Butterfly, the one who flapped its wings and closed O’Hare Airport for 4 hours. It’s called the Butterfly Effect; and this is not that! Nature is a many-splendored thing! All life on Earth is descended from a single DNA molecule, synthesized about 4 billion years ago. That single molecule is responsible for the enormous variety of life forms, from primates to parrots and poplars to plankton, in our biosphere. Some of us breathe oxygen, some carbon dioxide; a few of us prefer methane. Different strokes! 30 trillion cells, representing more than 200 distinct cell types (tissues), coordinate their activities to create a symbiotic environment for themselves and to support a single meta-organism, i.e. you! The individual cells reproduce and the meta-organism they support also reproduces. The key to life’s success is its ability to adapt and evolve as it reproduces. It all begins, of course, with the auto-reproductive double helix, but after that the world is only limited by the breadth of Nature’s imagination: meiosis and mitosis, sexual and asexual reproduction, symbiosis and endosymbiosis, etc. But nothing is more inventive than the lowly butterfly whose maturation process includes old fashioned Ovidian Metamorphosis …the transformation of a frog into a prince, a girl into a tree (Ovid), a caterpillar into a butterfly, or as we will see shortly, a cherubic child into a teen terror. Here’s how Claude (Anthropic) describes the process: “It all begins when a butterfly lays an egg on a plant. The egg contains all the genetic instructions for the entire life cycle. When the egg hatches, out comes a caterpillar — the larval stage. It munches on leaves almost constantly, shedding its skin (molting) several times as it grows. “Once the caterpillar has eaten enough and grown sufficiently, it forms a protective casing around itself called a chrysalis (not a cocoon — that's for moths). Inside, the caterpillar's body essentially dissolves itself . When the caterpillar seals itself inside the chrysalis, it releases digestive enzymes that break down most of its own body tissues — muscles, organs, and fat — into a nutrient-rich liquid, a kind of biological soup. “This process is called histolysis (histo = tissue, lysis = breaking down). At its most extreme, the interior of the chrysalis really does become something close to a cellular slurry. Remarkably, certain clusters of cells survive this process and use the nutrients from the dissolved tissue as raw material to build entirely new structures: wings, antennae, compound eyes, legs, and all the other features of an adult butterfly. “Once histolysis is complete, the reverse process — histogenesis — begins. After one to several weeks (depending on the species), the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. It pumps fluid into its crumpled wings to expand them, waits for them to dry and harden, and then takes flight. The adult's main purpose is reproduction — finding a mate and laying eggs to start the cycle again. “Some studies suggest butterflies retain memories from their caterpillar stage, hinting that despite the dramatic physical overhaul, there is some biological continuity between the two forms. “True histolysis — where tissues are broken down into a nutrient slurry — appears to be exclusive to holometabolous insects: butterflies, flies, beetles, bees, wasps, ants, and fleas; this specific mechanism doesn't appear to have evolved independently in any other animal lineage that we know of.” However, there is at least one other organism that relies on a species of metamorphosis as a key component of its maturation process: Homo Sapiens . We enter the world like a house on fire. As they say in Texas, we’re ‘all process no content’…but we absorb data quickly and we sort it continuously. As we grow, we develop a functional map of the world and we come to understand our place in it – just in time for puberty to shake the etch-a-sketch, wiping out the image entirely. We start over but now with a different focus. Before puberty, we’re all about Nature, i.e. the World. We drink in data like a sponge and build ‘ice cream castles in the air’ (Joni Mitchell). There is no proposition too outlandish for us to entertain and if those propositions are logically contradictory or physically impossible, so what? It’s our Golden Age…if only we were old enough to enjoy it. Puberty turns us inside-out, literally! We are no longer interested in ‘this stupid world’; we are now hyper focused on the Self. The data we funneled during our first 12 years is now laser focused on just one subject: me! (What else?) Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is to become of me ? And oh yeah, Who am I ? Twelve agonizingly introspective years later, just as we’re perfecting our Narcissism – and loving every minute of it - the mirror shatters. Somehow and without realizing it, you’ve let the nose of an ‘Other’ into our hermetically sealed tent. You have a life partner, maybe children, a job, perhaps even a career, and bills to pay. Congratulations, you made it onto the treadmill; welcome to the rat race! We no longer see ourselves (↓), we still can’t see out into the world (↑), now we can only look side-to-side (↔); we can only see ‘other people’ – i.e. folks who share our predicament. Our focus now: Society! If your level of mental activity going forward is not what it once was, you are to be forgiven. There are contacts to be made, clubs to join, a golf swing to perfect; there are diapers to change and children to educate; there is a ‘check book’ to balance, a mortgage to pay, and a 401k to grow. There are career and corporate ladders you must climb all the while preparing your own teenagers to become responsible adults, just like you. The whole scenario would be horrific…if you were conscious of it. Be thankful for little mercies: you’re not! You party hardy ( Wayne’s World ). You exact revenge by living well ( The Great Gatsby ). You root for the home side and take pride in their triumphs. Meanwhile, without a shred of malice you screw up your marriage, your children, your career and oftentimes your health. And then what? And when what? You’re more than ready for Stage Four, but here things get tricky. Some folks get to Stage Four in midlife; I’m in awe. Many others, I am afraid to say, never get there at all or, if they do, when they do, they don’t realize they’re ‘not in Kansas (Stage Three) anymore’ ( Wizard of Oz ). Most of the rest of us get there but much later than we would have liked...at least in retrospect. So a belated Welcome to Stage Four ! Your mission now, should you choose to accept it, is to focus on God (substitute ‘higher power’, Gaia , or negative vacuum pressure, if you prefer). I say ‘God’ because I mean to refer to what is beyond this fickle World, this sorry Self, and even this Other but includes, integrates, transcends, and perhaps even redeems them all. You began life focused on Nature, the World; you matured past that on to an unholy obsession with your Self. Then, for better or worse, something distracted you. Was it a glint of light off a gemstone, the sparkle of gold, or the allure of an attractive member of your preferred gender? Something made you lift your head and so for the next umpteen years you looked only to the right or to the left. “No more cosmos, no more self!” You found Society! So far, we’ve marched in lock step with our cohort. 12 years of the World, 12 years of the Self, and now Society – but for how many years this time? Let’s break it down. A very few of you will make the transition to Stage Four as young adults, many more will opt-in as part of a midlife crisis. Society tells us that we ‘owe it 40 years’ so Age 65 is a popular stepping off point. But lately 65 has become 72 and 72 has become 80. How come? Economics plays a part, of course; but also, many people resist the transition from Stage Three to Stage Four. Even after Society has lost interest in them and moved on, they embarrass themselves by clinging to the last vestiges of their social identities. It is truly pathetic but eventually even they succumb. Then there’s Team Alamo! These dinosaurs both dread and despise Stage Four. They do not believe that the contradictions of the early stages can be resolved in a higher synthesis. They are content to leave things as they are. Live and die, one and done, end of. We have mistakenly treated the Stages of Human Development (e.g. Erikson) as a product of steady organic maturation. We need to jettison that model. What’s going on here is genuine metamorphosis, a repeating cycle of histolysis-histogenesis. We are holometabolous – not on the DNA level of course; but at each of life’s phase changes, our rigid personalities, like a caterpillar’s genes, dissolve into a soup, where the traits are reassembled according to an entirely different schematic. We are just like a butterfly…or a Transformer: one minute we are Optimus Prime, next we are his supersonic spacecraft. After birth and before dying, most of us will undergo three nearly total reassemblies (c. ages 12, 25, and 65). We are likely to experience each as a catastrophe…and so it is; but each is also an opportunity. This is especially so of the final reshuffle. Now for the first time, we are empowered to take charge of our own evolution. We’ve waited (albeit unknowingly) for 65+ years for this. We should welcome, not avoid it, cherish, not resist, and make the most of it we can. After all, now that you know the World, the Self, and Society, why not get to know God (or a vegan substitute)? “The chance won’t come again!” (Bob Dylan) *** Odilon Redon Butterflies (1910) is an oil‑on‑canvas painting in which Redon presents butterflies as delicate, dreamlike forms floating in a luminous, atmospheric space, reflecting his shift toward vivid color and contemplative natural subjects. The work embodies Symbolism, using butterflies as metaphors for transformation and poetic reverie, and is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 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 Abraham and Sarah David Cowles Jan 24, 2023 “We would not expect to find every human being alive today sharing DNA inherited from one particular ancestral couple, and yet, they do!” In Issue #6 of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM, 1/15/2023), we introduced the concept of particularity , and we distinguished the particular from the systematic and the random . ( You can read it here .) Events are ‘systematic’ to the extent that they conform to the 3R’s (reason, regularity, and repeatability) but ‘random’ (the 4 th R?) to the extent that they are independent of any causal background. We posited the possibility of a third classification: the ‘particular’ (the 1P?). Events are particular to the extent that they are not the products of specific causal chains but are dependent on the general causal background. We’ve been told that life comes in just two flavors: vanilla and chocolate ; not true. It comes in just one! May I invite you to take a tour of my soft-serve ice cream factory? We make just one ice cream product: it’s our fresh cream flavor, but this product is also used as ‘stock’ for all our other flavors, including vanilla and chocolate. Just as fresh cream forms the basis of all flavors, so particular events may form the basis of all events. Systematic and random events are first and foremost particular events - particular events that satisfy certain additional conditions. We cited an example of a ‘particular event’ from the world of genetics. We called this event ‘Adam and Eve’ but in retrospect, ‘Abraham and Sarah’ might have been a better choice. You see, in Genesis 26, God promises Abraham that his descendants would “become as numerous as the stars in the sky”…and so they have! Let me explain. There are 8 billion people living on planet earth today, just 200 times more than in 1500 BCE (an average annual growth rate of 1%...put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Malthus). Systematic thinking would lead us to expect that every one of our 8 billion co-habitants has DNA inherited from the 1500 BCE gene pool; and so they do. We would also expect today’s cohort to have some genetic information not found in the 1500 BCE gene pool, and that is correct as well. Such changes in the DNA code are the result of random mutations and natural selection. We would not expect to find every human being alive today sharing DNA inherited from one particular ancestral couple, and yet they do! Meet our ‘Abraham and Sarah’, nomads living unremarkable lives somewhere in Africa or the Middle East c. 1500 BCE. In all probability, they went about their business each day with little thought to the long term future; yet they unwittingly set off a cascade of events that directly impacts every single human being alive today. Kings and philosophers can only dream of having such reach or making such a difference. The event I’m calling ‘Abraham and Sarah’ did not disclose a particular causal pathway, but neither did ‘our common ancestors’ spring out of dust, de nuovo . Abraham and Sarah depends on the general causal background but not on a specific causal chain. The ‘event’ itself is neither systematic nor random; it is particular . Abraham and Sarah met, copulated, and gave live birth to offspring who, in turn, copulated and gave birth to offspring. As it’s worked out, this Abraham and Sarah now appear in the family tree of every human being living today. They are ancestors of us all. The event I’ve labeled ‘Abraham and Sarah’ is really a series of events reaching back to their births. The event includes their meeting, their mating, and their generating offspring who, in turn, lived to mate and reproduce. There is no sense in which we could say that this event was systematic . Any proposed causal chain would be frequently interrupted by random events: personal decisions, chance meetings, etc. Yet we cannot really say that the event is random either. A lot of unwitting cosmic preparation was required to make Abraham and Sarah even possible. Systematic events, to the extent that they are systematic, are caused by specific elements in the general causal background; random events, to the extent they are random, occur independently of any causal background. Particular events, on the other hand, are enabled by the general causal background but not caused by any specific elements in that background. In theory, systematic events are easy to cause and easy to prevent. Just mess with the causal chain. Random events, on the other hand, can neither be caused nor prevented. Particular events are also easy to prevent (just abort Isaac in the womb) but impossible to cause. The science of genetics includes a warehouse of particular events like Abraham and Sarah . Here’s another one of my favorites: Every single human being of European descent, alive today, has DNA contributed by Charlemagne (c. 800 CE)! “No, wait, that can’t be true. Now you’re just making sh*t up!” Sorry, no, not made up, true! The world is just not as neat as I, or you, or Horatio would have liked. ***** Image: Elements of image as seen in Messages in Christ short film “Abraham & Sarah.” 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 There Are No Theists in Foxholes David Cowles Feb 14, 2022 “There are no theists in foxholes,” at least not according to ‘conventional wisdom’. After all, even Dostoevsky had a death bed conversion! So, in this rare case, it turns out that conventional is, in general, correct. Or was he correct! I do not think it is correct any longer. Why not? What changed? “There are no theists in foxholes,” at least not according to ‘conventional wisdom’. After all, even Dostoevsky had a death bed conversion! So, in this rare case, it turns out that conventional is, in general, correct. Or was he correct! I do not think it is correct any longer. Why not? What changed? Prior to the late-20th century, most Westerners (Europe & the Americas) had strong religious upbringings. Or if they didn’t, their friends did! I’m not talking about the casual nod to ‘spirituality’ or ‘the force’ that passes for religion today. I’m talking about a set of beliefs and practices that permeated every corner of a young person’s life. While few of us were saints, none of us challenged the basic tenets of our faith. To us, they were as self-evident as the sunrise. And they came neatly packaged in their own language. I’m not talking about the ritual languages of Hebrew, Arabic and Latin. I’m talking about the rituals themselves, rituals marking life’s stages: Baptism/Circumcision, Ba-Mitzva/Confirmation, Marriage, and Death. I’m taking about the weekly (e.g., Sabbath) and yearly observances (e.g., Easter) that polka-dot each year’s calendar. I’m talking about daily prayer: both morning & evening, grace before meals, scripture reading or even the rosary at night. In my old neighborhood, the bells of the local Catholic churches (3 within walking distance of my house) rang out The Angelus, a Christian ‘call to prayer’, at 6AM, Noon & 6PM daily; and almost everyone stopped whatever they were doing in acknowledgement. I’m guessing that for most of us at that time, when push came to shove, these fundamental habits and beliefs would have trumped the lessons in philosophy and science that we learned later in life. Therefore, no atheists in foxholes! Not so today! For most of us, religion is no longer part of our existential core. We do not hold firm theological beliefs. We barely celebrate the ‘rites of passage’ and, for the most part, we ignore the annual, monthly, weekly, daily rituals…or we pay lip service to them. In their place, we have interiorized the assumptions and methods of science, the ethics of acquisition and consumption, and the language (most any modern Indo-European language will do) of subjects & objects (i.e., rulers & ruled, employers & employees, predators & victims, bourgeoisie & proletariat, etc.). Collectively, these habits of mind are now part of our existential core. Now, when push comes to shove and we crawl back into our core, it is science, not religion, that takes over. So today, for better or for worse, we may say, “There are no theists in foxholes!” 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.