< Back Cause, Effect, and Global Warming David Cowles Jan 4, 2024 "Every day, we set out in search of an Undiscovered Continent (e.g., India); every night, we end up on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping umbrella cocktails.” A recent article by David Gelles in the New York Times underscores the intellectual bankruptcy of any ethical system based either on the consequences of the act or on the intentions of the actor. (Wow! That doesn’t seem to leave much, does it?) For 50 years, scientists and politicians have been focused on the issue of air quality. Are you old enough to remember those dense clouds of smog that regularly settled over our City of Celluloid Angels (LA)? I know you’re not old enough to remember the great London Fog (1952)! These days are gone, hopefully forever, but they are certainly not forgotten. I’d just as soon not choke to death; how about you? The sharp reduction in air pollution over the last half century represents a great achievement, owing to a happy (did you say, “Unusual?”) convergence of science, technology, and public policy. “But there’s a catch,” according to Gelles. “Some of the particulate matter in all that pollution was actually exerting a cooling effect on the climate by blocking solar radiation… As we clean up the air, we also seem to (be) making global warming a bit worse… “Less pollution is a good thing. Particulate matter — stuff like soot and sulfates, much of which comes from burning fossil fuels but also from forest fires and other sources — contributes to more than 4 million early deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization. “The tiny particles can become lodged in the lungs and even enter the bloodstream, causing problems in the heart and beyond. But as air pollution falls, so too does the concentration of that particulate matter that happened to be deflecting a not-inconsiderable amount of solar radiation… the reduction in particulate matter is also letting more solar radiation in, contributing to global warming.” So I can choose the manner of my own execution. I can roast…or I can choke to death on the ashes! What better example is there of the Law of Unintended Consequences? We have been raised to believe that ‘unintended’ means ‘unusual’. In fact, every action has unintended consequences. Most consequences are, in fact, unintended, even unnoticed. You could make the case that all consequences are unintended, in the sense that nothing ever happens exactly as planned. We should approach the future as Columbus approached the New World: “I know there’s something out there, but I have no idea what.” Every day, we set out in search of an Undiscovered Continent (e.g., India); every night, we end up on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping umbrella cocktails. We cannot say that the result is unrelated to the objective, but they are certainly not identical. Did Columbus set out with the intention of committing genocide and ‘cancelling’ Native American culture? Probably not. He didn’t have to. He simply acted as the person he’d been brought up to be…and that included ugly Eurocentrism, racism, cultural chauvinism, etc. Columbus was just being Christopher , ‘the Christ bearer’. Sidebar: Columbus and Machiavelli were contemporaries – their ends ‘justified’ their means. Postmodernists would say that Columbus was merely a ‘pass-through entity’ – like an S Corp in the US. He did not so much act as the culture and the ethos of his era acted through him. Pity! Things didn’t have to be this way. Columbus was not unaware of divine values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. He just misapplied them. He allowed his Renaissance ethos to hijack God’s values. He did not allow himself to see the Beauty in Native Americans’ Art, the Truth in their Cosmology, or the Justice in their socio-economic structures. He was pre-programmed to see the world the way he saw it. Please don’t make a fetish of the aboriginal. Europeans have no monopoly on cruelty. Every civilization fails in its core mission: to know, love, and serve God - to instantiate transcendental values in the spatiotemporal world. Everyone in every culture feels the tug of Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Disagree? Ok, imagine a serious political party (other than the Monster Raving Loony Party) with a platform advocating Ugliness, Untruth, and Injustice. How would such goals even translate into specific policy proposals? IRL, the ‘ugly’ would morph into a new aesthetic (Dada?), the ‘false’ would give rise to a new intellectual paradigm (Galileo?), and ‘injustice’ would be recast as revolution (Stalin?). Try as you might, you cannot turn the Satanic, however real, into an ideal. But everyone also feels competing tugs: self-interest, civic duty, family values, moral code, personal security, etc. These secondary tugs are powerful and, for most of us, overwhelming, but for all that, we never stop feeling the tug of the divine. James Joyce brilliantly captures the struggle of well-meaning actors, trying to heed that call in the midst of bigotry, provincialism, addiction, lust, etc. In the process, he tells the story of the whole ‘human race’. In fact, Ulysses telescopes the entire saga into the events of a single day (Bloomsday) in a single city (Dublin). So what’s left? Ethical nihilism? Not necessarily. Put your good intentions back in the drawer, throw your ‘consequential calculations’ in the wastebasket. “Tend your own garden” (Voltaire), “Do the right thing” (Spike Lee), “Just do it” (Nike). Instantiate Beauty, Truth, and Justice everywhere you can, and trust the future to take care of itself (or not – there’s nothing you can do about it anyway). 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 LLMs and Language David Cowles Jan 9, 2024 “The written word itself is a form of AI…it’s been around for about 10,000 years.” We devoted the Fall 2023 Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine to the implications of Artificial Intelligence for philosophy, theology, culture, and spirituality. We regard the rise of AI as one of the defining events of our era, but we need to view it in context, lest we create another Golden Calf. Recent work by Yiu, Kosoy, & Gopnik reported in Perspectives on Psychological Science does a good job of putting things in perspective: “In its current state of development, AI relies on so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) to decode reality.” So, how are LLMs like (or unlike) everyday Language? How does Artificial Intelligence compare with Native Intelligence?” “Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation… While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way…” “AI language models like ChatGPT are passively trained on data sets containing billions of words ( Large Language ) and images produced by humans. This allows AI systems to function as a ‘cultural technology’ similar to writing that can summarize existing knowledge…but unlike humans, they struggle when it comes to innovating…” (italics mine) “Instead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine. They effectively summarize and communicate the existing culture and knowledge base (back) to us.” Hmm, ‘they effectively summarize and communicate the existing culture and knowledge base to us’…like all technology! What is that ‘vast wasteland’ (Newton Minow) known as television other than an idealized reproduction of everyday life? And with rare exceptions, the same may be said of contemporary theater, film, and popular music. Roland Barthes referred to media as "mythologies,” while Jacques Ellul went further and labeled media’s products, “propaganda." But according to 20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, these concerns reflect the nature of all language per se , especially written language. Homer’s epics organized and reported back to Achaeans the collective knowledge of his time, but it was plastic. Because it was oral literature, it was subject to modification over time and place and from bard to bard. Homer’s epics were cultural records, but they were living cultural records. As with a $500 bottle of vintage wine, breaking the seal freezes the product in the moment and kick-starts its gradual but inexorable deterioration. We drink wine ‘at the hour of its death’. A written manuscript is like a corkscrew; we can drink no wine before or after its time. Then Guttenberg’s printing press came along and ushered in intellectual history’s version of the ‘screw-top era’. The written word itself is a form of AI…and it’s been around for about 10,000 years. Yiu, Kosoy, & Gopnik compared the performance of various AI systems against that of children (ages 3 to 7) and adults. 88% of children and 84% of adults were able to pick, out of a group of objects, the two that would “go best” together. 85% of children and 95% of adults were also able to repurpose everyday objects (innovate) to solve novel problems. Wait! So children (3 to 7) outperformed adults on the mix-and-match test? Yup! It’s like we’ve always said here at AT, “ Children are smarter than you; deal with it .” Then, Yiu & Co. tested five popular AI systems on the same tasks. No model outperformed either the children or the adults in either test! On object pairing, the models ranged from a low of 59% to a high of 83%. But on the innovation test, AI scores ranged from a low of 8% to a high of 75%. So, it’s children: 1, adults: 1, AI: 0. “Children can imagine completely novel uses for objects that they have not witnessed or heard of before…,” Yiu said. “Large models have a much harder time generating such responses.” In a related experiment, most children were able to figure out how a new machine worked just by experimenting and exploring. But when the researchers gave the same problem set to selected LLMs, AI failed miserably. AI relies on statistically predicting linguistic patterns; so do you! That’s why it’s so difficult for you to converse in a foreign language, even if it’s familiar: you don’t have enough experience with the language to be able to predict its phonetic sequences. That’s why people speaking foreign languages seem to be talking much faster than you. But sorry, AI, statistically predicting linguistic patterns is not enough to generate new discoveries about the world. “AI can help transmit information that is already known, but it is not an innovator,” Yiu said. “These models can summarize conventional wisdom, but they cannot expand, create, change, abandon, evaluate, and improve on conventional wisdom in the way a young human can.” “The development of AI is still in its early days, though, and much remains to be learned about how to expand the learning capacity of AI,” Yiu said, adding: “Taking inspiration from children’s curious, active, and intrinsically motivated approach to learning could help researchers design new AI systems that are better prepared to explore the real world.” 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. 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< Back Punctuation David Cowles Jul 26, 2021 Classical Western languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek and Latin) for the most part lacked anything we would recognize today as ‘punctuation’. When marks did appear in texts, they were merely to guide actors and orators in their declamations. The same is true of Medieval languages (e.g. Old English, Old French and Old Norse). Classical Western languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek and Latin) for the most part lacked anything we would recognize today as ‘punctuation’. When marks did appear in texts, they were merely to guide actors and orators in their declamations. The same is true of Medieval languages (e.g. Old English, Old French and Old Norse). What we recognize as punctuation today, marks in the service of meaning rather than rhetoric, did not become widespread until the invention of the printing press. Ever since then, punctuation has been the bane of every schoolboy’s and schoolgirl’s existence. Today, most writing happens on a cell phone or tablet. The typewriter’s single keyboard gives way to the multiple keyboards (screens) characteristic of electronic devices. The inclusion of punctuation marks in a text is no longer a seamless process; it requires the writer to switch screens which is inconvenient and time consuming. I predict that in a generation or two our written language will revert to the punctuation poor style of the ancients. The intrinsic value of every being lies in its potential to enter into an I – Thou (or Thou – Thou) relationship. The extrinsic value of every being lies in the actual Thou – Thou relationships it enters into. It is not obvious that beings in a cosmos would automatically have the potential to form Thou – Thou relationships. Such relationships are only possible in the context of transcendence and eternal values are only possible in the context of such relationships. Thomas Aquinas offered 5 proofs for the existence of God (transcendence). The only one that is still of interest to modern philosophers is the fourth, a proof based on the existence of values in the world. Aquinas was on to something! 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 Shame Too David Cowles Sep 28, 2023 “Feel shame when it is appropriate, but never regret what you’ve done, and certainly never regret who you are.” Shame has a bad name these days…and deservedly so! “You should be ashamed of yourself,” was a common refrain of authority figures in the 1950s. Translation: you are shameful; it’s not just something you did that’s shameful but who you are . I can’t think of anything more devastating, especially if you’ve invested your accuser with some sort of moral authority (e.g., a parent, teacher, rabbi). When we feel shame, our first instinct is to cover our faces, even though we fully well know we’d still be seen…and look even more ridiculous. We want to crawl into a hole, just like the hole we’ll ‘crawl’ into at the end, and ‘pull the earth over us’. Bottom line, we want to disappear, to melt into the background, to become undifferentiated dust. In Thoughts While Shaving ( December 13, 2022 ), we distinguished episodic shame from existential shame. Now let’s contrast episodic shame with regret. Thirty years ago, I bought a book ( Zen and Hasidism ) for a friend. He was Jewish (not observant) and professed a keen interest in Zen Buddhism, so the book’s title suggested itself. At that time books cost about 50% more in nominal dollar terms than they do now, that’s 500% more in real (inflation adjusted) dollars…and we were all ‘church mice’ back then. So buying books for people was not an everyday event. Nevertheless, I bought it…and placed it on my bookshelf…where it sat. You see, I hadn’t given the book to its rightful owner when I first had the chance and after that, it always seemed a bit awkward: Why this book, why this time? Compounding the problem, my friend heedlessly moved to the ‘wrong coast’, and in those days, mailing a package was an expensive and generally unpleasant (no FedEx then) experience. A couple of years ago, my friend passed away – at the age of 80; he’d had a good run, I suppose. Guess what? His book was still on my shelf. Half out of guilt, half out of curiosity, I pulled it down a few days ago and thumbed through it. In retrospect, I’m not sure this book was right for my friend after all; but on the other hand… I was reading my friend’s book when I came across a line that seemed apropos : “Feel shame, not regret!” I am ashamed of the fact that I did not deliver the book to my friend on a timely basis, but I don’t regret it. I am ashamed of the fact that I was not my ‘best self’; but ‘regret’ implies that I would change what happened in the past, thereby potentially altering what is happening now, in the present. I am unwilling to roll those dice. The world has moved on. Wonderful things have happened – in my life and in his – and I wouldn’t do anything to change that. So no regrets! Every event triggers a cascade of mostly unpredictable subsequent events. To change any one thing is, potentially at least, to change everything, and I’m not prepared to do that , are you? Things are as they are. That’s not to say that they might not have been better. That question is ‘above my pay grade’ (Barack Obama). Suffice to say, I am not willing to sequester the last 30 years in a ‘blind trust’ while I go back and change something I did (or didn’t do) three decades ago. The risk far outweighs any possible reward. Events are funny things. Obviously, they are linked, but no one event causes any other event. Every event changes the world. Great; that’s just what we wanted, isn’t it? In fact, the event is the change; it constitutes the change, and that event in turn becomes part of the changed actual world of every subsequent event. ‘A’ changes the world, but that change is not an effect of A; it is A. A becomes a novel element in the actual world of all ‘subsequent’ events; an event B is subsequent to an event A, if and only if A is part of B’s inherited actual world. This is one way to measure universal time: ‘before A’ vs. ‘after A’. In no event, however, can any A ever be said to cause any B. A causes itself, period. Ditto B, except that B causes itself in the context of a world that includes A. A changes the actual world; in fact, A is a change in the actual world. B causes itself, but it does so in the context of its actual world, which includes A. You can easily see how folks might confuse ‘A then B’ with ‘A therefore B’, and you can just as easily see that such is not the case. So, I’m not ashamed of myself. I am very ashamed of some of the things I’ve done (worse even than ‘book hording’) but ‘merely’ doing shameful things does not make me a shameful person. Sorry Mom, Dad and Sister Mary Martha! I am more than the sum of my actions, certainly more than any one act. Most of us (not you, of course, dear reader) do shameful things from time to time, but none of us, I hope, is a shameful person . To the Western mind, the world is a giant chess set. Before we move a single piece, it behooves us to think several moves ahead. What are the projected consequences of my intended move? But life is not chess! Our ‘moves’ do have consequences, but there is no way for us to control or even anticipate those consequences. What we call planning is just daydreaming . We can only do our best. Act rightly and accept the consequences. Feel shame when it is appropriate, but never regret what you’ve done, and certainly never regret who you are. 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. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of an AI-powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!” < Back Do We Need ‘God’? David Cowles Dec 1, 2023 “Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!” When I was growing up, very few people outside of academia would state categorically, “I don’t believe in God!” – i.e., I don’t believe that God exists. Today, that number has risen sharply, and ever fewer people are willing to state without reservation, “There is a God; I’m certain of it!” Since the so-called ‘Dawning of the Age of Enlightenment’, there has been a consensus among the cognoscenti that it is impossible to ‘prove’, logically or empirically, that ‘God exists’. Human beings are a marvel! The things we can make ‘intelligence’ do for us! Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away! And we’ve done just that: “God’s dead!” in case you hadn’t heard. It’s completely understandable. Over the past 300 years, we’ve learned orders of magnitude more than we knew before about human physiology, neurology, and psychology. We understand now that we are the product of astrobiology and evolution. We understand that we are a speck on a speck on a speck in an unimaginably vast cosmos. We understand that we are not unique and that we share the planet with millions of other species, some of them very much like us (> 90% DNA match). We’ve taken off the training wheels; we think we don’t need God (or parents) anymore, and maybe we’re right. Whatever it is that we are, we can pretty much explain it in terms of other things that are. What we still can’t explain is how it is that we, or anything else for that matter, are at all! I’m not talking meiosis and mitosis, the birds and the bees, and I’m not talking about ‘negative vacuum pressure’ either. I’m talking about something much more fundamental. I’m talking about Being per se , the existence that must necessarily underlay every essence – It is ! The existentialists, perhaps unwittingly, solved this dilemma for us. Heidegger contrasted Wassein (what it is) with Dasein (that it is). Sartre expressed roughly the same concept by contrasting Etre (being) with Neant (negation). After ‘Aquinas and the Scholastics’ broke up, the world literally lost interest in ‘existence’. It was the day, the music, and the magic, died. Humanity decided to go all in on ‘essence’. ‘Pseudo-Machiavelli’ says it best: “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead! Make it work, make it work now, and make it work efficiently. Slavery, colonialism, war, climate change and species extinctions – they’re simply means to an end. Besides, they’re existential concerns, so who cares? Excuse me now; there’s a shipment of human cargo I must inspect. If all goes well, I’ll make a ton on this lot.” For 300 years, we lost our heads. It took ‘Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr’ to rediscover the music of the spheres. Things are better now, but the Enlightenment still casts a long shadow – get it, ‘en light enment, long shadow’? But back to God. Of course, God exists! I mean, “Hello!”…but it’s become unfashionable to point to the beauty and complexity of the world in an effort to ‘demonstrate’ the reality of God. It smacks of Creationism and Intelligent Design , and no one wants that , do they? So let’s just see how it all plays out: Look, I’ll spot you Wassein (‘the kingdoms of this world’): you can have every what-is that is, but you’ve got to give me just one thing in return: Dasein , that it is. (Note: there is only one Dasein , shared by all entities; unique expressions of Wassein are innumerable.) So where does this leave us on the matter of God? Here’s where your Wassein comes back into the picture. Check it out. What’s happening right now is the product of what once was on its way to becoming what will be. ‘Be Here Now’ (Ram Dass) doesn’t cut it in your world. You can’t account for your Present without bringing in Past and Future; in fact, your Present is just a vanishingly small and ill-defined region separating the two. It is not ‘the ground of all Being’, it is ‘the absence of all Being’, the null set ø that is a subset of every set. As we shall soon see, all pasts are separated from all futures, but not by some sort of fuzzy, mystical Present. Every event is separated from every other event: Event A ends with its ‘objective immortality’, its ‘superject’, its ‘face’ projected onto the world; Event B begins by executing judgement on Event A as part of everything that is (B’s world). So your Present belongs both to the Past and the Future…as a terminal point of each. In your world ( Wassein ), Past (what once was) and Future (what will be) do not exist here and now , yet your world could not exist without them. So where are they? Wassein only happens in the context of a real past and a real future. So again, “Show me!” Science Fiction is confronting this problem with the concepts of time travel and wormholes. But Judeo-Christian Scripture solved it millennia ago. In the Book of Exodus (3:6), YHWH says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus quotes Exodus, then adds a gloss: “He is not the God of the dead but of the living.” (Matthew 22: 32) Therefore, from God’s perspective, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are just as much alive as Moses. From God’s perspective, the entire course of cosmic history, from Bang to Whimper (Eliot), occurs in the Present. God is no respecter of time. Why should he be? God exists outside of time; he is eternal. To God, Past and Future are both Now! God is the ‘eternal Present’ in which all things are. What to us appears spread out over many billions of years is simultaneous to and in God. Therefore, God ‘is’ Dasein , not ‘what it is’ but ‘that it is’. This is the sense in which we can say that God is Creator. Dasein is ineffable; it admits no predicates. The first rule of Fight Club is that you can never talk about Fight Club. The moment you posit a predicate, you re-enter the realm of Wassein. Pretty radical, I’ll grant you…but at least we’re in good company. Moses, Jesus, and now Parmenides: the father of Western science and philosophy came to a similar conclusion independently…2500 years ago. Paramenides posited two realms of Being, Doxa , the world of appearances ( Wassein ), and Aletheia , the world of truth ( Dasein ). Doxa rests on Aletheia . Like Dasein , Aletheia is ineffable. My precocious but sexist little brother pastes it on his bedroom door: ‘No Predicates or Girls Allowed’. Science has made enormous strides toward describing our world ( Doxa ) and explaining how this world came to be the way it is, negative vacuum pressure and all. Roger Penrose calls it The Road to Reality . But we’re asking an entirely different question. We’re asking how it is that anything , regardless of what it is, is - including negative vacuum pressure. Anyone can tell you ‘How the tiger got its stripes’; but not everyone can say how it is that there are such things as ‘tigers’ and ‘stripes’. More basically, how is it that there is such a thing as ‘is’? (We could ask Bill Clinton.) We are looking for the universal ‘is’ that logically precedes every ‘it’. We ask, “What is it to be , period?” Proposed: “If you could abstract ‘being’ from everything that ‘is’, you’d be left with God.” Dasein without Wassein . The sound of one hand clapping. To be is to be present, and to be present is to be ‘present’ both to self and to others. Presence to oneself is what we call consciousness, however dim it may be. Presence is existence. To God, everything that is…is here and now . God doesn’t give a dime for time! Embedded within God’s ‘universal and eternal Now’, there are innumerable ‘local nows’ and embedded in many of those ‘local nows’ are other ‘local nows’; the process continues ad nauseum , like Russian Nesting Dolls. For example, the process of typing out this essay is what’s ‘now’ from my perspective. This ‘local now’ automatically designates its own Past (assignment or inspiration) and its own Future (publication or rejection). But whatever lies outside my ‘now’, i.e., my Past and my Future, exists nonetheless because it is present to God, i.e., it is part of God’s Now…even if it is not part of mine. That’s why we can say that there is (not was or will be) a Past and a Future! That’s what we mean by ‘God’. When we say that God created the heavens and the earth, we mean that God is the Eternal Now (heaven) that is the precondition of every local now (earth). If there is no God, there is no Eternal Now, and then there are no ‘local nows’, and then there is no World. Every local now is a subset of the universal Now. To be an element in any local (spatiotemporal) now is to be an element in the universal (eternal) Now. Therefore, as Parmenides, Moses, and Jesus realized, there is no such thing as coming to be or perishing. Everything is or is not, period. “O Death, where is thy sting?” So, of course, we can know that God exists! To those who say we can’t prove it, try this: Every event (every now) must intersect with its past and its future, i.e., it must at least be tangent to both. By definition, neither Past nor Future exist now . Therefore, no event (no now) can occur, and there can be no world. But we know that events do occur and that there is a world. Therefore, there must be an event in which all other events are embedded and whose past and future are both ø. This Uber-event will include the events that form the pasts and the futures of all other events, freeing those events to happen. Descartes famously wrote, “I think therefore I am.” He was right, but he didn’t go far enough. He should have said, “I think therefore I am; I am, therefore God is.” Still not convinced? Ok, then, do you endorse the teachings of Pseudo-Machiavelli (above)? Of course not, but then how do you combat them? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Yuletide 2023 https://www.aletheiatoday.com/philosophy/parmenides- Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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< Back These Are The Dark Ages David Cowles Aug 4, 2021 A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America. A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America. Perhaps Nietzsche best expressed the ethic of our era: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!” Ever since the dawn of the so-called “Enlightenment” (c. 1700), we have been desperate to model a universe that is sui generis. No matter what the cost we are determined to make homo sapiens the apex of reality and to exclude any possibility of a “higher power”. Our quest has led to an explosion of scientific progress to the point where we can now talk about “creation” in terms of Big Bang, Virtual Particles and negative vacuum pressure. But we cannot overcome the ultimate obstacle: despite our overarching hubris, we cannot believably derive something from nothing. It is no longer politically correct to describe the period from 500 AD to 800 AD in Europe as the ‘Dark Ages’…and rightly so! These centuries hosted enormous advances in social organization, philosophy, theology, music, art and architecture. They formed the basis for the Carolingian Renaissance (800 AD) and the 13th century confluence of Islamic, Judaic and Christian thought. But it would be a mistake to retire the concept of “Dark Ages” prematurely; we are living in just such a period right now. These are the Dark Ages! 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 Pico della Mirandola David Cowles Oct 12, 2025 “we find ourselves at a fork in the road…AI will either complete the mechanization of human culture…or liberate us from the tyranny of machines altogether.” “Somewhere, a place for us, a time and place for us!” ( West Side Story ) First came Caesar (we have no king but…), then came God (I am what am), and now the Age of Infernal Machines. Where do we fit in? When is it our time? The Good News: Every dog has its day! The bad news: We’ve apparently already had ours. Sorry you missed it. You’re only 550 years late to the party. Humanism , the celebration of You , thrives in the border regions separating the Middle Ages from the Renaissance (e.g. 1450 – 1500 CE in Florence). Fortunately, however, we can relive those halcyon days in Northern Italy through the writings of its chief philosopher-chronologer, Pico della Mirandola (1463 - 1494). PdM was perhaps the first philosopher since the original trio (Peter, Paul and John) to understand correctly the nature and status of human beings. We are not the slaves of despots nor the puppets of divine caprice; nor are we merely prototypes of future machines. We are us and we occupy a special, if not unique, place in cosmic ontology…a place that Mirandola ‘nosed out’, like a wild boar foraging the Italian countryside for its precious truffles. You doubt me! Then consider this: “He ( homo sapiens ) is the interpreter of nature, set midway between timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world.” ( Oration on the Dignity of Man ) In contemporary ontology, the border region between chaos and order is the realm of ‘complexity’ and we humans are nothing if not complex. I mean, members of what other species spend tens of thousands of dollars ‘to find themselves’? Only we get psychoanalyzed, walk the 200 mile Camino de Santiago , or go on lengthy prayer retreats. “Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man (sic) to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!” Here PDM anticipates the 20 th century existentialist meme: “I know who I am, and I know I can be whoever/whatever I want to be.” In fact, there is direct line of philosophical descent from PdM to JPS (Jean-Paul Sartre): “(God) set the infernal dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life… (Then) he bethought himself of bringing forth man (sic). Truth is, there remained no archetype according to which he might fashion a new offspring… All space was already filled… (So) this creature (human), to whom he could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature… “…Upon man, at the moment of creation, God bestowed seeds, pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life… because he (man)…assumes the characteristic power of every form of life.” Unlike God, whose essence is hardwired and precedes even his existence, human beings have no essence, other than what we choose for ourselves. We have within us ‘the seeds’, the potential for every possible realization. Like Sartre, PdM understood Being ( etre ) as compact and dense: a solid. Human beings are the neant (nothingness) that creates space for free choice and agency. “We have given you, Oh Adam, no visage (image) proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts, you may with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision…in order that you may, as free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer… “This is why Evantes the Persian…writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many that are extraneous and adventitious… We have been born into this condition of being what we choose to be…since if we will, we can… “ Know thyself invites and exhorts us to study the whole of nature of which the nature of man is the connecting link.” Mirandola presents a view of homo sapiens that projects us half a millennium into the future as it simultaneously reached back almost 2500 years, to the time of King David: “You have made them (humans) a little lower than the angels…you made them rulers over the works of your hands, you put everything under their feet.” (Psalm 8) The evolution of modern human beings did not end with the emergence of homo sapiens . It continued through the more rapidly adaptive medium of culture. In less than 100,000 years we emerged from being merely ‘a primate among primates’ to being ‘the apex primate’. We distinguished ourselves by impressive advances in technology (our use of tools), arithmetic (our ability to compute) and language (our ability to communicate using symbols). Just as importantly, we began to ask new questions culminating in 1966 with " What's it all about, Alfie? ” followed in 1968 by Yellow Submarine which hazarded an answer. Nor did we fail to turn the spotlight of inquiry onto ourselves: Are some acts ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’ and which are which? We found that the emergence of personal morality (e.g. the 10 Commandments) had consequences for our conception of social order (e.g. the 250 year period of Theocracy in Israel following the Exodus). Regardless of its cosmological bona fides , the Bible gets its anthropology right. It brilliantly encapsulates the evolution of the human community from abject, virtually anonymous, slavery under ‘Pharaoh’ to the concept of self-rule…and back again. In a famous chapter (8) from the First Book of Samuel , the Israelites trade their God-given right of self-rule for the yoke of monarchy. Fast forward 500 years, Israel has been conquered by a series of foreign invaders and its leading citizens have been reduced to the status of slaves in Babylon: “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.” YHWH gave the people of Israel dignity and liberty; they consciously traded that great gift for what turned out to be occupation and slavery. Surely Bible literate humans would never make that mistake again! Or would they? Fast forward 2000 years, leap-frogging Jesus and the Caesars: “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation…” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) to Florence and Environs. First in philosophy (PdM), then in theology (Savonarola), then in the arts (Davinci, Michaelangelo, etc.), the election lights fell on humanity. Suddenly, once again, “Man is the measure of all things.” (Protagoras, c. 450 BCE) But not for long… It’s 1500 now and Machiavelli is on the move! At first glance, his instrumental ethics seem fairly innocuous. After all, don’t we teach our children that actions have consequences? Well, as Job found out to his dismay, sometimes they do…and sometimes they don’t. Newly ‘enlightened’, our post-humanist culture traded a distinctly human ‘right for right’s sake’ ethos (virtue is its own reward) for one more conducive to enslavement (ends justify means). It no longer matters what we do as long as it works . By this logic, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during WW II was ethical because it hastened the fall of Japan and helped bring a terrible war to a close. The 200,000 civilian deaths were just so much collateral damage. Doctrinaire Marxism notwithstanding, we no longer need Pharaoh, or a ruling elite, to keep us in line. We have willingly subordinated our birthright, our existential liberty, to an exo-culture of mechanization. Productivity and efficiency are the new values by which we measure our lives. You painted a masterpiece that hangs in the Louvre. I developed technology that increases the speed of assembly line processes by 0.2%. Which of us has had the most impactful, the most consequential, life? Which of us has made the most important contribution to the welfare of our species? And which of us is ‘the better person’ as a result? It’s been a half-century since Machiavelli presented the Medici with a blueprint for the industrial enslavement of the human race. Once again, as in 1000 BCE, 500 BCE, and 1500 CE, we find ourselves at a fork in the road. Artificial intelligence will either complete the mechanization of human culture once and for all…or it will liberate us from the tyranny of machines altogether. It’s yesterday once more. We hold our future in our hands. What path will we choose this time? *** Image: Umberto Boccioni — The City Rises (1910), oil on canvas Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) is a blazing vision of urban construction and energy, capturing the spirit of early twentieth-century industrial progress. Workers, horses, and scaffolding swirl together in a rush of color and motion, symbolizing humanity’s drive to build a modern world. Yet the same intensity that celebrates innovation also hints at chaos and struggle, revealing both the exhilaration and the turmoil of industrial growth. 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.

“Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way.” Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of adventure and non-conformity - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about? < Back Robert Frost David Cowles Jan 15, 2024 “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way.” Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of adventure and non-conformity - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about? The Poem: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. Recently, a new friend invited me to tell him my “life’s story” and, of course, I was more than eager to oblige. As I told my tale, I felt as if I were a character in My Dinner with Andre , but later, when I’d left the restaurant, I realized that the man I had just described in nauseating detail was a mash-up of St. Augustine and Che Guevara. (Are we all just mash-ups of our heroes?) Not that anything I told my friend was untrue. It was just that every story had been edited to emphasize the creative and the courageous at the expense of the bumbling and the befuddled. “It’s my story; I’ll tell it the way I want!” Apparently, the extruded lives we think we live are more like braided twine. What passes for ‘a life’ is actually many lives woven together. For the most part, these different lives happily coexist and even reinforce one another…until we are forced to reduce them to a single, linear narrative. To narrate is to select and to order and thereby to destroy and distort. Of course, there’s a parallel here to Quantum Mechanics (QM). (Isn’t there always?) According to most interpretations of QM, the state of a physical system is unsettled until it is observed or measured. That way, Schrödinger’s cat can be both alive and dead…until Little Tommy Thin cruelly opens the box. Until I am asked to tell my life story, I am many different people to myself and a different ‘different person’ to each person I encounter. Taken together, ‘I’ > 1 person. But when I narrate, I select the events I wish to include and the colors I wish to give them. The ‘narrated me’ can only be one person, and, because narrative is necessarily selective, the narrated me (ok, say it, just like the actual me) is always a few cents short of a dime (< 1 person). While we narrate effortlessly and almost unconsciously every minute of every day, the process is deceptively complex. We must first break down our undifferentiated stream of consciousness so that it discloses discrete events, then clothe each event with an appropriate subjective form (‘feeling’) and then link these events together so that what emerges has the degree of unity one needs if one is to be regarded as a ‘person’…and not locked up. Sidebar : Even defining an event is a challenge. The Universe expresses itself solely in ‘events’ ( logoi , words) so whatever I want to designate ‘an event’ has to possess the universal characteristics that define events per se . However, if I plan to include an event in a narrative, it also has to be expressible in a language my interlocutors can understand. Much as I might like to tell my tale in Klingon , I couldn’t count on being understood outside the city limits of ‘the two Cambridges’. And if, God forbid, my interlocutor speaks only Indo-European languages, I’ll need to find a way to describe my event in terms of nouns, verbs and their modifiers. Autobiography is the most difficult form of writing, and, in my opinion at least, it is rarely successful. Usually, what passes for autobiography is more slideshows, clippings and souvenirs than biography . A narrative is not so much a succession of events with a variety of aspects as it is one single event fusing innumerable overlapping aspects into one overarching superject. Like DNA! Each base pair is a ‘bit’; coding for phenotypical traits is distributed throughout the genome. Narrative is teleology: the tail wags the dog. ‘And they lived happily ever after (or not)’ is already embedded in ‘once upon a time’. In narrative, I am now and always have been what I will someday become. (Could anything be more alien from real-life experience?) As a newborn lying helplessly in my crib, I am also the ‘fierce warrior’ I became (in my mind) and the ancient ‘drooling husk’ I am today. When my friend asked for the story of my life, there were many different versions of myself I might have shared. There’s the ‘always anxious, socially awkward’ version you know. Then there are the ‘calculating, manipulative sociopath’ and the ‘hardworking family man’ versions. But of course, without thinking, I chose the ‘creative intellectual and courageous revolutionary’ option. After all, that’s the version best calculated to entertain. So what if it happened to paint me in my most preferred colors? Everyone likes a good swashbuckler, and I can write one as well as the next guy! (Well, actually, I can’t…but saying so wouldn’t read as well.) The version of myself I decided to share with my friend is the one that best reflects the values that I wish had governed my life and that I now wish to ‘superject’ into your world: duck and cover! When I tell my story, I naturally invest that story with those values. Had I different values now, I would tell a different story. But would I have lived a different life? It is clear from the text of the poem that Frost had adopted non-conformity as a value. What makes The Road Not Taken such an existential triumph, however, is that in this poem, Frost admits that these values are adopted and that adopted values provide the subjective form of his life and constitute his persona . In other words, in classic existentialist prose, “We choose the person we are to be.” Frost imagines himself a taker of roads less traveled; it’s a crucial piece of his identity, i.e. who he is to himself. But the text itself tells a very different story: “…The passing there had worn them both about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” IRL, there is no road less traveled; one path is no more, or less, ‘adventurous’ than the other. Frost recognizes that, objectively speaking, there is no difference between these roads; still, subjectively, it is important for him to seem to be choosing the less popular option. Like me (above), Frost knows he’ll have to tell this story years later, and he wants his story to reflect his adopted values, not just his lived life. Perhaps Frost means to go even further. Perhaps he is suggesting that all of life’s potential paths lie equally before us. And why not? Each of us can only take one sequence of ways, and none of us will ever have traveled any of those ways before, so aren’t all paths the same to us? They’re just paths and we are just ‘such entities as paths are made for’. Nor are we likely to revisit any of those paths. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted I should ever come back.” Therefore, in a certain sense, the paths before us must always lie equally. To paraphrase Heraclitus, we never walk the same path twice. And since we can’t reliably predict a book’s contents from its cover, all paths are pure potentiality …until we actualize one version of one. But what if it turns out that the roads are not evenly worn after all? What if Frost was right in the first place? Is he now saying that at the core, it just doesn’t matter? Whether the path is a federal superhighway or a virgin trail hacking its way through the Amazon makes no difference? Gertrude Stein might offer, “A road is a road is a road.” Stephen Hawking could opine, “Roads have no hair.” Truly, we only know three things about these roads: (1) they diverge from one another at forks; (2) they converge with one another at a common destination; and (3) we have no idea, really, what we will encounter along the way. On one road, ‘there may be dragons’…but we have no idea on which . The development of psychoanalysis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries presents us with a different and perhaps more comforting model. According to this view, our decisions are conditioned, or even determined, by our prior experiences. In some sense, then, we are not responsible for those decisions; they are determined for us. My parents are to blame for all my bad decisions - writing this article, for example - not me. “The sins of the parents…” and all that jazz. This notion resurfaced in the latter half of the 20th century as Postmodernism . We do not act: our race, our gender, our class acts through us. 20th century Existentialism poses a radical challenge to both these ‘devil made me do it’ ideologies: No decisions are ever determined or conditioned or even influenced. If they were, they wouldn’t be decisions at all, would they? A ‘decision’, from the Latin for ‘to cut’, must be a clean and complete rupture of the continuum. It must be a totally free act; otherwise it would be importing foreign influences . And for the same reason, the ‘cut’ must be decisive : it can leave no trace of the prior connection. The scientific notion of cause and effect , for example, does not qualify as decisive . By definition, the present affects a continuum of past and future and allows traces of each to be manifest at every now . “Causality is hegemony!” Responsibility for an act rests solely with the one who decides it. ( Hint : that’s not your parents, even if you were helicoptered!) If we seem to choose but then tell ourselves that there were reasons, or even causes, for our choices, then we didn’t choose after all; we just executed a decision made elsewhere. Or perhaps there was no proper decision at all. We stretched, weakened and frayed the cord but we did not cut it. When we avoid responsibility for making choices, we either credit those choices to external agencies or we accept the fact that no choices are made. Either way, we are guilty of what an existentialist would call ‘bad faith’. “To justify is to alibi !” But if decisions are never determined or even conditioned, are they just random? If so, if each choice is unrelated to any other choices, have we not drifted into nihilism ? Robert Frost avoids bad faith by admitting that the paths “equally lay”. But he also avoids nihilism by attributing his decisions only to values he has freely chosen. Transcendent influence, yes, foreign influence, no! What ultimately gives meaning to Frost’s life is not the choices he makes, but the narrative that connects those choices. It is that narrative that projects his chosen values, theoretically, into the future. ‘Frost’ is not really the sequence of the decisions he makes; he is the narrative he weaves using values as his thread. Frost’s ‘superject’, the footprint he impresses on the world, is the ‘subjective form’ of his life’s narrative…turned inside out. And that ‘subjective form’, of course, consists entirely of the values Frost adopted. Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way . ‘Frost’ is like a switching station ; he selectively adopts values from his ‘actual world’ and he projects those same values, reconfigured via a novel narrative, into the actual worlds of others. ‘Frost’ is like a virus ; he ‘infects’ concrete events (parent cells) with his genes (values), thereby ensuring that those values will pass on into the actual worlds of future events (daughter cells). Being is good; it is Potentiality for Value. Non-being is the absence of that potentiality. Being (or doing) ‘good’ is a matter of projecting Value. ( Note : all values are ‘good’. What is ‘not good’ is the absence or diminution of Value.) How simple is that? God’s ultimate contribution to the consequent world is his weaving of each and every unique story into a single Universal narrative. That meta-narrative has God’s primordial values as its unadulterated subjective form. This is where the theological notion of judgment comes into play. Just as I must pare down my many selves to one self, so God must meld our ‘many worlds’ into a single Universe. As far as is ontologically possible, God does this inclusively. Potentially destructive conflicts are harmonized into enriching contrasts. This is ‘divine mercy’ – that God saves whatever can be saved. The divine nature defines the absolute limit of harmonic inclusion. Nevertheless, even God cannot make a stone too heavy for him to lift, i.e. even God cannot harmonize irreconcilables. Realistically, certain parts of certain narratives probably won’t make it into the ‘final edition’ and this is the solution to the Problem of Evil – it’s what’s left on the cutting room floor. 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 above to return to Winter 2024. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Science & The Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Jesus Meets Mister Spock Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Genesis Wins Nobel Prize Traditionally, Nobels are awarded only to ‘living recipients’ and only for work completed in the preceding year. In its statement, the committee said it felt an exception was needed in this instance “in order to right a grievous wrong.” Hows and Whys How vs. why... Science stands in the present and looks back in search of causes. Religion stands in the present and looks forward in search of reasons. Theology The Riddle of Job If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three." You’ll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who’ll listen. Christology 101 Why is this Christological formulation so important for the development of Christian theology? Philosophy The Problem of Good The purpose of this essay is not to resolve, or even rehash, the Problem of Evil, but rather to situate the Problem of Evil in the context of an even broader problem that I call, ‘the Problem of Good’. Eternity vs. Immortality Do our lives have meaning? You bet they do! But what is that meaning, and from where does it come? Culture & The Arts The Meaning of Music God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. Mary Poppins, Sufi Master The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! Parshat Emor: Making It All Count “Counting the Omer – like the shemitah cycle – invites us to believe that each day, week and year is count-worthy, valuable and unique.” Haiku Corner Does this formal rigor seem like it would be inhibiting? The reverse is true. It’s liberating! Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! Quark Soup “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Education, Evangelization, & Prayer Messengers Among Us If God sent His only Son to earth, not just to save us from our sins, but because He knew how difficult it was for humans to believe in something we cannot see, why wouldn’t He still use that tactic today? Knowing our vulnerabilities, understanding us the way a parent understands their child, why wouldn’t God send us messages through people we trust? Faith Chaplain in a Secular World As a chaplain, I am allowed to talk about faith or pray with a client if that is what he or she wants. Like many people in our secular and even religious society, I am to be there for ‘those of all faiths or none.’ Drumming to Inner Peace The biggest connection I made between music and spirituality was that they both focus on the present moment. When I managed to stay in the present moment in both the song and in life, I realized there was no time for anxiety. Prayer For Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm My timing can lead to stress and striving, but God says not so fast, my daughter. Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine. Challenges The Haiku Challenge Join the Haiku Challenge and have your 17-syllable poem shared in a a future issue of AT Magazine. The Faith Chaplain Challenge Do you have a story about sharing your faith in a secular workplace? Send it to us, and you may see it in a future issue!

< Back Decline of the West David Cowles Jun 7, 2021 As a teenager, I became aware of a book by Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West, written c. 1920. Like any intellectually inclined adolescent of the ‘60s, I was drawn to the title. But throughout high school and college I was warned off of Spengler by teachers, mentors, etc.: “He’s a racist, he’s a Nazi, etc.” All false claims. In fact, his books were banned by the Nazis. As a teenager, I became aware of a book by Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West, written c. 1920. Like any intellectually inclined adolescent of the ‘60s, I was drawn to the title. But throughout high school and college I was warned off of Spengler by teachers, mentors, etc.: “He’s a racist, he’s a Nazi, etc.” All false claims. In fact, his books were banned by the Nazis. He does talk a lot about “race” in ways that would make us all uncomfortable today, but he defines “race” in a very different way than we do. Once you get what he’s talking about, there’s nothing offensive implied; on the contrary, he denounced Hitler’s regime precisely because of its anti-Semitism. Flip side, his 1,000 page, two volume work offers new ideas about the intellectual history of the West on almost every page! Spengler predicts the collapse of Western civilization c. 2200. Like a modern Book of Revelation, he offers “signs” that the end time is near: the cities will depopulate (this has been going on since 1945), people will stop reading books (hello!), etc. I won’t lie. It’s not an easy read. I can only do about 10 pages a night. But it’s unbelievably rewarding if you can get through it. Spoiler alert: he has no use for most western philosophers, starting with Plato right up through Kant. He especially hates Euclid because he gave us a linear, static model of reality. On the other hand, he loves Dostoevsky and tolerates Leibniz. Give it a try. 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 & the Prime Directive David Cowles May 19, 2026 “Are we growing into a civilization governed by the Prime Directive? Or are we finally heeding Jesus’ call to keep off the grass?” “The Prime Directive, or Starfleet General Order 1, is the foundational, non-interference principle of the Star Trek United Federation of Planets. It prohibits personnel from influencing or intervening in the natural, cultural, and technological development of alien civilizations…” (Wikipedia) Wisdom is universal and eternal; but expressions of that Wisdom vary by culture and era and, who knows, perhaps by species, chemistry, planet or galaxy as well. In that light, Starfleet General Order 1 makes a useful contribution. But we should not lose sight of the fact that it restates an expression of Wisdom at least two millennia old: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” ( Lord’s Prayer ) If it is not immediately obvious why these two statements are semantically equivalent, you may be forgiven – forgiven because these two pearls connect only through the mediation of an obscure 6 th century BCE Greek philosopher (Anaximander) and his less obscure 20 th century avatar (Heidegger). Intrigued? Homo Sapiens did not evolve in isolation. We exist only in the context of community and community comes about only when you and I grant each other ‘reck’ (i.e. recognition, deference). We grant reck when we sublimate our own interests to those of another. I ‘make space’ for you; and when you, simultaneously and without any expectation of reciprocity, make space for me, then voila , we have community ! The unobvious opposite of ‘reck’ is ‘trespass’. Instead of making room for you to emerge and grow, I impinge upon you, stunt your growth, expropriate your property and perhaps cut short your stay or even abort your arrival. In short, I ‘trespass against’ you. We ask God to overlook, to overcome, to forgive all our trespasses, i.e. all the ‘days and ways’ we use to limit others’ being, growth, or optimization (“be all that you can be”). “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiving others’ trespasses is granting them reck, granting and forgiving being two sides of the same coin. “Whatever you bind on earth (in time) will be bound in heaven (eternally) and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 18: 18) God operates in the world through the world. Granting reck and forgiving trespasses, we become co-creators and co-redeemers with God. When we forgive, we operate in loco Dei . We realize God’s eschatological objective in a concrete context. What happens in spacetime ‘happens’ (potentially at least) in eternity: “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” Forgiveness of others is Step One in the process of universal reconciliation and redemption. We’ve come a long way since Anaximander, 2500 years to be exact, but our progress has not been entirely fortuitous. The local (in space & time) successes of our engineers and our generals have convinced us that qualia (values) are best realized when imposed externally, not cultivated internally or agreed mutually. We have built an entire language around this ethic. Sentences are our ‘quanta of meaning’ and in modern Indo-European (IE) languages, most sentences connect a subject with an object through the mediation of an active (or passive) voiced verb. In the raging ‘60s, Marshall McLuchan famously said that ‘the medium is the message’. Extending that insight, we can say that the structure of language (medium) determines what is communicated (message) through that language. Example : A baseball bat and ball are lying together on the ground. We immediately imagine someone using the bat to hit the ball which we would express as “the bat hit the ball” (subject-verb-object) or “John hit the ball with the bat”. We do not consider that the two artifacts might have an entirely different relationship: Perhaps we are playing a darts-like game where the object is to throw the ball from a distance to hit the bat. Or the object of the game is to balance the ball on the knob of the bat for as long as possible or to use the bat as a chute, seeing how far you can roll the ball at a 45° angle before the ball hits the ground. Inquisitive? Use the bat as a tool to crack open the ball so you can explore its rubbery core and the clump of elastic string tightly wound around it. Hostile? Attach the ball to the end of the bat and use it as a mace. Cheeky? Place the objects in the royal nursery and watch them instantly transubstantiate into orb-and-scepter. Pragmatic? They form a clock ‘hand’ worthy of Big Ben…or a measuring rod for surveyors. Add a swivel and you have ‘spoke and rim’ construction. When writing a message on a deserted beach for a passing plane to read, use our combo to create the letter ‘i’ or better yet, as the exclamation mark ‘!’ at the end of “Help!” But to fully understand the semantic range of a ‘sphere and cylinder’, hand the ball and bat (taking all necessary precautions of course) to a 3 year old; she will show you things you can do with them that neither you nor I could possibly imagine. Civilization evolves organically and holistically. Our need for tools and weapons prompts us to scan the environment for suitable objects. We name those objects, we transform them, and we create a language around their role in hunting, herding and construction. Language, in turn, draws our attention to additional objects that might thrive in our technosphere. Like the set of a Disney movie, our ho-hum world is instantly transformed into a wonderland of obstacles and tools, somehow magically suited to our projects; our language itself is one such talisman. The traditional values of Beauty, Truth and Justice are reinterpreted in context as Efficiency, Efficacy and Economy. We have embedded this ethic in our language; we have divided the world into intentional actors (subjects), passive ‘beneficiaries’ (objects) and their transformations (verbs). *** It doesn’t have to be like this…and it isn’t. Ancient IE languages and some modern non-IE languages have a much richer and more deeply expressive syntax. Ancient Greek and Old Norse, for example, had a dominant Middle Voice that interprets events as products of mutuality rather than agency. In such a grammar, nouns are co-subjects and co-objects, verbs are recursive, and process is reciprocating. A variety of non-IE languages, some perhaps with Neolithic roots (e.g. modern Basque), solve the problem of Active Voice bias by different means. For example, Basque uses ergative-absolutive alignment (rather than the nominative-accusative system universal in IE languages). In ergative grammar, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb both take the absolutive case, which has no suffix — it's the bare form of the word, the root. The implication is that this is the primordial case: being, not doing. The subject of a transitive verb (doing) takes a different case entirely — the ergative, marked with the suffix -k . Ergativity is found in other languages worldwide (Chechen, Tibetan, many Australian languages, some Mayan languages) but is completely absent from the IE family. Another grammatical feature characteristic of Basque and, perhaps, certain Neolithic languages, is polypersonality - a single verb form simultaneously encodes the person and number of the subject, the direct object, and the indirect object. The verb also encodes the tense, aspect, mood, and the social register (formal vs. informal, and in informal speech, the sex of the person addressed). Polypersonality is found in other unrelated language families, perhaps most notably, in the indigenous languages of North America and the Arctic Rim. Let’s revert to our original example: ‘John hit the ball with the bat’. There is just one event here; it is a singularity in space and time. But our IE syntax breaks down that event into its participants and presents it as something that unfolds in time. Our language draws attention away from the event itself and focuses instead on its various parties (John, bat, ball; it distorts a quantum event so that it appears to occupy a region of spacetime. This is a highly structured view of reality that requires a library of metaphysical assumptions. Ergative, polypersonal, and middle voiced languages are more respectful of the ontological integrity of the event itself. This cross cultural analysis of language shines a light on a familiar problem: the chicken or the egg! Ergative, polypersonal, and middle voiced languages see the event as primary and its participants as secondary. On the other hand, our modern IE languages reverse the gestalt: participants are primary, events secondary. Who am ‘I’? An intentional subject who makes things happen…or the distillation of a process? Philosophically, the Middle Voice paradigm is reflected in the philosophies of Anaximander, Buber, and Whitehead (among others). But how does any of this connect to Jesus or the Prime Directive? Modern IE is the language of imperialism – military, political, economic, cultural and spiritual. That is why our ‘Enlightened’ civilization (1492 – 1969) was so determined to convert ‘savages’ and ‘heretics’ to the ‘right shade’ of Christianity…and to exterminate all others. After Columbus and Machiavelli at least, all history is the history of trespass . Our so-called ‘explorers’ raised cultural, and sometimes ethnic, genocide to an art form, all in the name of God and civilization. Columbus was the anti-Kirk. Far from preserving indigenous culture, its extermination was Job One. It was not until the global Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s that diversity was recognized as something worth preserving. The advent of political liberalism in the second half of the 18 th century extended only to propertied while males of European extraction, the guardians of modern Indo-European. It became the life’s work of the post WWII generations to extend the franchise to people of different classes, races, genders, cultures and even perhaps to some non-human life forms; we are still in the middle of this process with no defined end in sight. Are we growing into a civilization governed by the Prime Directive? Or are we finally heeding Jesus’ call to keep off the grass, i.e. to avoid trespassing against others and to forgive those who trespass against us? Either way, we are hopefully in the throes of the greatest cultural transformation in 500 years…or not! 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 Purpose of Civilization David Cowles Feb 4, 2025 “We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom!” It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it: civilization! It’s more or less what separates human beings from horseshoe crabs. In fact, the emergence of ‘civilization’ may be close to a defining trait for our species. No doubt, civilization confers reproductive and survival advantages, but it does so at a cost: environmental degradation and nearly perpetual warfare, for instance. But civilization has another, even more important function: It is said that only homo sapiens have a clear sense of universal mortality. Many species, even plants, feel the ‘loss’ of a departed mate. A few even mourn for life (e.g. swans). But few species appear to understand what’s happening when a mate dies. Trees will attempt to revitalize, sometimes successfully, near-by stumps and elephants follow quite elaborate rituals when caring for their dead. But only humans have Theater of the Absurd (Artaud): Jeremiah could not have been a bullfrog…nor could Ionesco. As far as we know, only humans have the concept of ‘apocalypse’, only humans study ‘eschatology’. So we are most truly human when, like St. Jerome (or Hamlet), we stare at a long-buried skull and remember, “I too will die ( memento mori ), everyone I love will die, everything I cherish will disintegrate.” Not easy to live with, but civilization to the rescue! We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom! Civilization provides each of us with a dizzying array of obligations and opportunities tailor made to focus our attention in the here and now. Sometimes, that can be a good thing, e.g., in meditation. Not here! The distraction known as civilization is so successful than even mature adults (50 – 70) go through life only dimly aware of the rapidly approaching singularity. Friends of mine in their 70s and 80s proclaim their intention to die at their desks and they are proud of it. They choose to live as though they were immortal, knowing they are not. I know, I was one of them. Is this ‘bad faith’ on a species level? You bet it is! Is it unforgiveable? Not at all. We are not just fleeing from the prospect of personal death; we are fleeing from the certainty of cosmic annihilation. It may be possible to face personal death with a modicum of grace if one feels that one’s life has served ‘a greater purpose’. Are there things you value above your own longevity? Beauty, Truth, Justice? A loved one? Then it may just be possible to approach personal mortality with equanimity, confident that meaning endures. Cosmic annihilation is another kettle-of-fish entirely. Now no meaning can endure because there is nothing left to ‘mean’ or to be ‘meant’. Apocalypse does not limit cosmos; it expunges it. Meaning cannot survive because (a) nothing survives and (b) it never existed in the first place. In their 1967 movie, Yellow Submarine , the Beatles used a ‘vacuum cleaner monster’ to illustrate this eventuality. The ‘dreaded vacuum’ sucks the very fabric of being into oblivion. Apocalypse does not mark the ‘boundary’ of something, it represents the ‘evaporation’ of everything. According to Victor Frankl, meaning (purpose) is a prerequisite of human sanity. With all possibility of meaning removed, one can only remain sane by shielding oneself from this realization, i.e. only by bad faith . Civilization exerts both a centripetal and a centrifugal force on us. Begin with the seemingly benign centripetal attraction of ‘belonging’. As a baby, family is my first experience of belonging, then my neighborhood, classroom, posse , etc. Later, parish, church, town, high school, college. These identities are more or less handed to us at various junctures during the game of life. They get some of us through adolescence. But then we are adults! We suddenly find ourselves alone in an even wider world, heading straight toward the edge of an abyss. To separate us from that inevitability we build our own Maginot Line. We dig moats and raise earthworks. We create relationships of ‘belonging’ to isolate ourselves in enclaves of order, i.e. to overcome entropy, to suspend time. We wrap ourselves in layer upon layer of false identities. We practice being oblivious to the absurdity of a world that ends with personal death and cosmic annihilation. As adults, we find belonging through our jobs: we identify with our companies, our unions, our work groups. Then we join country clubs and bowling leagues, PTA (or PETA) and the Neighborhood Watch. We designate a certain tavern as our local . Cheers, mate! Everybody knows your name. But at work, from the mailroom to the C-suite, there is order: people report to me, I report to people. All the time I am looking to advance, to claw my way up the socio-economic ladder. Position in the corporate hierarchy creates a sense of belonging too. Now I belong because I am not just like everyone else: I occupy a unique (and ‘indispensable’) position in the social mobile. Unimportant as I am, I imagine I cannot be replaced. I am an anonymous cog but without that cog there is no wheel. My unique position in the cosmic mobile defines me. And not just at work: my country club has a ladder too, a tennis ladder, and all golfers are required to maintain a ‘handicap’, a numerical expression of one person’s proficiency compared to all others. Disjunctively, centrifugally, I occupy a defined position in various social hierarchies. So I belong to the extent that I am like others, and I belong to the extent that I am unlike others. How can anyone escape this prison? “…When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” - Eliot Stay tuned. Watch for Escape from Civilization , coming soon to Thoughts While Shaving . 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.