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 Square Pegs in Round Holes David Cowles May 6, 2025 “2,450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we…stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs.” It began I suppose with Plato (c. 375 BCE)…like most everything else. His Timaeus , which Alfred North Whitehead dubbed the foundation of all Western philosophy, sought to explain the World in terms of the 5 aptly named ‘Platonic Solids’. The faces of each of these solids can be constructed from planar triangles. Plato’s concept of a triangle involved a flat construction, consisting of three straight line segments, intersecting at three nodes (vertices), and forming three internal angles, the sum of which is always 180°. No surprise here: Plato was ‘bookended’ by Pythagoras ( Pythagorean Theorem ) and Euclid ( The Elements ). Even today, when folks refer to a ‘triangle’, they most likely mean exactly what Plato meant 2450 years ago. Most likely…but not necessarily. The concept of ‘triangle’ inherited uncritically by, and then from, Plato has been expanded by more recent ‘discoveries’ in geometry and topology. Plato’s triangles are defined in the context of what is now known as Euclidean Geometry. However, certain ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries are internally consistent and externally relevant, at least in some applications. Generally speaking, non-Euclidean geometries apply to curved rather than flat surfaces. As a result, either parallel lines do not exist or, if they do, they intersect. The internal angles of a non-Euclidean triangle will not necessarily total 180° (may be more or less depending on the curvature of the surface) and the shortest distance between two points may be an arc. Most importantly for our purposes, a non-Euclidean cube will have curved edges. These newly discovered geometries still describe intuitively recognizable configurations of reality. We are all familiar, for example, with the surface of a ball. Whether your geometry is Euclidean or ‘non’, whether your topology is level or curved, whether you’re a flat-earther or a round-earther, certain generally accepted principles still apply; for example: If you’re walking from Boston to Detroit, you can expect to have many adventures along the way; keyword: along the way ! There is one kind of adventure you do not expect. You’re not concerned, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses , that you are about to step off into Eternity, or what amounts to the same thing, that you’ll suddenly and unexpectedly find yourself in Memphis. That’s because any path along any surface will be continuous. I call it the One Foot in Front of the Other property; Mathematicians call it the ‘Archimedean Property’. Translation: no one just ‘suddenly shows up’ in Memphis. It turns out that there are interesting and internally consistent geometries that don’t include the Archimedean Property and where people do suddenly ‘materialize’ on Beale Street. But not today; keep a look out for future TWS on that subject. Euclidean geometry is just a special, degenerate case (zero curvature) of more general non-Euclidean geometry. Just as we use the positive term ‘Entropic’ to represent a loss of actual order so we can use the positive term ‘Euclidean’ to represent a loss of potential variety. Why limit yourself to boring old 180° triangles when the angles of non-Euclidean triangles can add to any positive number up to 540°, depending on the curvature of the surface? Ok, I can smugly pose that question today…prior to c. 1800 CE, it was assumed that there was only one geometry… and that it was Euclidean . Imagine. For more than 2 millennia, Euclid was the only game in town. That’s 2000 years in a row that Euclid won all 4 PGA majors (the Masters, the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the ‘British’ Open)…and he wasn’t even a very good golfer. (You’d be embarrassed to show up at your posh country club with his handicap.) How’d he do it? Simple. He was the only golfer on the course. He was the GOAT, albeit a very lonely goat. Today, Euclid is just one entrant in a crowded field…and he struggles every week just to make the cut. We should keep Euclid in mind whenever we’re tempted to think ‘we know it all’. Remember: the thing you’re most sure of in all the world may turn out to be completely wrong! I am reminded of Sir Roger Penrose. A precocious lad, he was middle school age when his math teacher presented the class with a classic problem in geometry: “There is only one solution to this problem. No one has been able to prove that there’s only one but we’re sure that’s true.” Never say ‘sure’ to a rebellious teenager. Them’s fightin’ words, especially to a kid who would one day become ‘the smartest man on earth’. Next day, he arrived at school with a second solution to the problem. Then he discovered other solutions. Today, we know that there are an infinite number of solutions to the so-called ‘tiling problem’. So what? Who cares? Euclid was a genius with the best of intentions and his ideas no doubt did a lot of good; but he also took Western metaphysics down a rabbit hole from which it is still struggling to emerge. For two millennia we assumed that we lived in a ‘flatland’ made up entirely of straight lines; we don’t. On the contrary, everything curves! You’re 14 years old and you’ve just enrolled in your first high school physics class. Day one, your teacher (you go to a progressive school) takes the class to a billiards parlor (pool hall to you) so that you can observe first hand ‘cause and effect’ in action. Balls collide, momentum is transferred, angles of incidence determine angles of reflection, etc. It’s all very neat and clean…and linear. The real world is rarely neat and clean and it’s never linear. In fact, it is massively non-linear and recursive. Everything affects everything else. Worse, everything that ‘acts’ acts on itself at the same time. Think karma . Whatever you’re doing to another, you’re doing the same to yourself. “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.” Ultimately, the foundation of all ethics will turn out to be self-interest…once we understand what those interests are. This gives the meme, ‘whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword’, a whole new meaning. Unfortunately, Euclidean linearity has infected every corner of our thought process. We are determined to describe the world in terms of discrete entities (subjects) acting on (verbs) other discrete entities (objects); we are committed to viewing all ‘transmissions of influence’ as straight lines. Welcome to the modern Indo-European language family. As a result, what we know, or at least what we knew before 1800, conforms to the straight-edged geometry of a Euclidean cube. Let’s suppose we know everything we can know, not everything there is to know, but everything we can know. Suppose we model everything there is to know as a sphere, dense with information; everything we can know would be a subset of that sphere. But because of our Euclidean blinders, whatever we do (or can) know must conform to the geometry of a straight edged cube. Suppose you say, “We already know everything we can know…or close to it.” Ok, I’ll spot you that. As a Harvard professor (c. 1896) told graduating seniors re physics, we know virtually everything that it is possible to know. Whatever we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. According to this model, the cube of what we can (and do) know must fit inside the sphere of what is knowable; it’s a subset after all. Obviously, we want as much of the volume of the sphere as possible to lie inside the inscribed cube. But we are ultimately limited by the fact that our sphere is round while our cube must have straight edges. So, the 8 vertices of the cube, and only those 8 points, will lie on the surface of the sphere. Still as long as the volume of what we can know is close to the volume of the sphere of what’s knowable, we’re ok for most purposes, right? I mean, nobody likes a know-it-all. A little bit of uncertainty ( aka ignorance) keeps life interesting, don’t you think? I’m fine with this as long as the cubic volume of knowable information includes most of the spherical volume of all information. So how close is it? Is it a 90% match? Surely it can’t be less than 80%, right? Would you believe it’s slightly less than 37%? By confining our thinking to phenomena that can be modeled via Euclidean geometry, we limit what we can know to less than 3/8ths of what is available to be known. A dismal performance! On the other hand, putting the same problem in a non-Euclidean context allows the edges of the cube to bow and extend so that they template the inner surface of the sphere. By analogy, our insistence on treating the non-linear universe as if it were an assemblage of linear forms leaves us 63% blind. 2450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we free our thought process from its Euclidean play pen and stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs. Image: M. C. Escher. Relativity. 1953. Lithograph print. 27.7 cm × 29.2 cm. 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 So You Want to Live Forever? David Cowles Aug 15, 2026 “Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem.” 2000 words, 8 minute read If you’ve always craved immortality, your time has come at last…maybe! A group of individuals who call themselves Vitalists believe that death per se is humanity’s core problem. (And just like that, I’m back in middle school!) Influencer Bryan Johnson, for example, speaks of plans to create a new religion in which “the (human) body is God.” At last, God made in our image and likeness! “Who’s a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) Recently, Johnson added psychedelics to his “God is us” tool kit. No, it’s not psylocibin or LSD; it’s venom from the Bufo Toad. And you don’t smoke it, snort it, or shoot it; you lick it! Right off of the back of your new favorite amphibian. How fun is that ! Caveat : The licked frog does not turn into a member of a royal family. Apparently, ‘a lick is not a kiss’. However, you may find yourself living in a palace (i.e. you may find that your current residence is in fact a palace…and always has been and you just didn’t notice). Molecule 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘active ingredient’ in the venom, does double duty: it reveals our spiritual divinity and it promotes our physical immortality. *** Vitalism is gaining ground worldwide! A popup city in Montenegro (Zuzalu, 2023) was created by people who wanted to establish a “longevity state” - a jurisdiction dedicated to lifespan extension, which would also facilitate access to unproven but potentially life-extending drugs. A similar effort in Próspera, Honduras, has created a permissive environment for biotech companies to perform unusual clinical trials. ZuVillage in Georgia (the country, not the state); and Zelar City in Berlin (Germany, not NH), offer their own spin on the original formula. And every May, ‘Vitalist Bay’ pops up somewhere in the SF area. Putting the dubious science of immortality to one side for now, does the more realistic goal of ‘life extension’ make sense? “Of course it does,” you say. “Who doesn’t want to live as long as possible?” Well, you do, apparently; but most people don’t – but that’s another subject for another day. Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem. The problem? We don’t heed our own advice. We behave as though prior results do guarantee future performance. At 20 we cannot be convinced that we will not live forever. And who can blame us? The first twenty years went by so slowly that 80/20 → ∞. Subjectively, time seems inexhaustible. 20 years of adult living corrects our perspective: 80/40 = 2, but then 80/50 = 1 and 80/80 → 0. Believe it or not, this bizarre scenario can be expressed by a very simple mathematical function (where f(x) = subjective life span and x = the ratio of ‘average life span’ to ‘years lived’): *** Riddle me this : What do you and I have in common with every other human being who’s ever lived? Don’t say ‘death’ because death is not something we have ; in fact death is defined precisely as the absence of a we . I don’t have my own death, and I certainly don’t have yours …and you certainly don’t have mine (I hope). According to the local sage, Pop Wisdom, death is one stage in the process we call ‘life’. It isn’t! Death is the limit of life, not an aspect of it. Just as Achilles is forever infinitesimally short of the finish line, so you are always infinitesimally short of being dead. You cannot ‘be dead’ and be you ; therefore you cannot experience death. The sentence ‘I am dead’ (or even ‘I will die’) is oxymoronic. For Achilles to break the tape, or for you to be dead, it is necessary to employ a computational device called Calculus . Fortunately, the real world doesn’t obey the conventions of arithmetic. Less fortunately, when I explained this to Sister Mary Martha in 3 rd grade, I got something other than the Fields medal I was expecting . No, the correct answer is not death . Give up then? Ok, here goes: “Every human being who’s ever lived had, has, or will have a lifespan of one day…or less.” No, not all at the same time…at least I hope not. Someday it will happen that you will have a lifespan of one day or less (of course you almost certainly won’t know it at the time). Most of us believe we have lifespans of more than one day. But no one born alive fails to have a life span of ‘one day… or less’ . Of course, by now you’ve realized that there’s nothing sacrosanct about one day : it’s just a placeholder. It would be equally true to say that every human being has a life span of ‘one second or less’ …or ‘one millennium or less’ . Whatever, it’s always true! The key is ‘or less’. When it suits us, we think of periods of time as if they were beads on a string, one day following the next ad nauseum . But time is more like the Tower of Babel: each floor rests on the floor beneath it. Your top floor penthouse is essentially the sum of all the floors (and their occupants) below: Enjoy…and don’t worry about all the folks you had to climb over to get to the top. Although the circumstances of our births may differ, O Prince, the being born of it is the same for both of us…and for every other human being (every other living organism?) that ever lives. We diverge from a shared singularity into a solipsistic multiplicity , from undifferentiated potentiality into unique actuality. I am other than others. I am not not ! YHWH’s “I am what am” = “I am not what’s not.” (Exodus 3: 14) The circumstances of our deaths may differ. You may die, surrounded by loved ones with flights of angels singing you to your rest; I may bleed out in a ditch somewhere, waiting in vain for a good Samaritan to rescue me. Regardless, in the end we will once again be equal, identical, one. The becoming dead of it is the same for both of us. So ‘being born’ we diverge and live out our respective lifespans in perfect isolation only to remerge when ‘becoming dead’. Being born and becoming dead are limits and we all converge toward those limits. Shorter lifespans continually succeed longer ones; gradually, lifespan differentials (actually, all identifying differentials) collapse as we approach our common singularity. *** My life is defined by its limits: I am by I am not . What is ‘being’ other than ‘not-not-being’? Once upon a time I did not exist and someday I will exist no more. You too! In between our birth day and our death day we will each have what we call ‘a life’, and every such life is radically unique (i.e. no elements in common). But, as our respective lifespans shorten, our common fate begins to eclipse our unique experience. Two prayers are foundational in Roman Catholic spirituality: the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary . There we pray to ‘Mary, Mother of God ’, asking her to ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’. In fact this is that hour! The hour of our death is always now and every now is that hour. There is but one birth and one death and every human being (certain mystical figures potentially excepted) approaches both as a limit. The end of all process ( doxa ) is identity ( Aletheia ) – Parmenides At the beginning and at the end we are not just equal, we are identical (but of course we are no longer we ); and if we are identical, then we are one , i.e. a single entity. The limit of every unique ‘I’ is a common ‘not-I’. There is but one ‘not-I’ but every ‘not-not-I’ is unique. You and I are entangled organisms (like Bell’s entangled particles). Birth is our Big Bang, death our Heat Death. Between these universal Bigs , each of us lives ‘my so-called life’. No two lives are the same. In fact, no two lives have even a single element (event) in common, but all lives diverge from and converge toward a common limit. Exception : God! By definition God stands outside the warp and woof of spacetime. If God is an element in any life, then God is an element in every life and constitutes our single, common point of contact with ‘the transcendent other’; that shared contact accounts for the Solidarity of the Universe ( aka the Mind of God). Intellectual History consists primarily of the search for analogies across lives…and of course analogies abound - they form the basis of language, art, society, and all culture - but there are no identities (other than being born and becoming dead ). We do not intersect, i.e. we share no experiences. From the moment of birth each of us lives out a totally unique, subjectively isolated life…right up to the moment of death; along the way we are comforted – and alienated - by our reflection as seen in the billions of surrounding mirrors we call ‘other people’. All of which makes the contemporary Vitalist movement especially perplexing. I mean, life extension to what end? Live an hour or less, live a century or more, ultimately you share a common (albeit infinitesimal) lifespan with every other human being who has ever lived. Does the long lived Sea Turtle experience life differently from the May Fly? (They experience different lives, but their experience of life is the same.) The arrow of mortality goes in one direction only. All our ‘lifespans’ continually shorten until they converge at non-entity; but what of our so-called lives? Do they count for nothing? Just so… unless you believe that experience somehow transcends death, i.e. entropy, spacetime. No matter how varied our lives may have been, dying is the ultimate leveler. Death is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is not to say that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is death, Comrade Lenin). Any experience, by definition, must differ from an alternative (real or imagined). That’s what experience is: differentiation. Those aspects of being that are common to all (e.g. birth and death) are not ‘experienced’; they simply constitute the human condition . *** “ We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest ) Dreams can be complex experiences, crammed full of action and emotion and inter-personal relationships, yet within a second of waking up, all that has vanished without consequence and often without memory. If being is ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson) then our dreams do not necessarily meet that criterion…neither do our lives! So life extension ? What’s to extend? Dream time? Unless events transcend spacetime, they are nothing but ‘ice cream castles in the air’. All dreams are the same at the moment we awaken; likewise all lives converge at the moment of death. If you were a precocious preschooler, some well-meaning buttinsky might have tried to comfort you following the death of a loved one (or pet) by analogizing: “Now we are caterpillars, but when we die, we become butterflies! ” Exactly so! Caterpillars (generally) do not ‘grow’ into butterflies; their genetic material totally reorganizes. They undergo the equivalent of a phase change. They both are, and are not, what they were (or what they will become). Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but nothing is the same. But does the butterfly know that once upon a time it was a caterpillar? Does the caterpillar know that it is on its way to becoming a butterfly? When the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, does it even know that anything has changed? Will we? 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 Christianity David Cowles Jun 11, 2021 In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. For example, I own a pair of socks. For the most part, I wear them “outside-out and inside-in”. But thanks to the miracle of topology, we have the option to reverse this relationship. If we choose, we can wear our socks “inside-out”. My grandfather, for reasons known only to him, did this on a daily basis; and I must admit I’ve done it more than once merely out of carelessness. On a much deeper level, the topology of the sock is also the topology of the universe. ‘God’ (however you understand that term) is either the totality – not the sum – of all the entities and events that we call universe OR God is a transcendent being in whom that we call universe subsists. This formulation is characteristic of almost all the world’s religions. Christianity, however, turns the sock inside out. God (“The Father”) is still the entity that transcends or totalizes the events we call universe. But God (“The Son”) is a quantum entity within that universe. That is why Catholics, rightly in my view, call Mary “the mother of God”. Here’s where complementarianism comes into play. Christian theology ‘asks’ (or demands) that believe that the sock is at all times simultaneously both outside-out and inside-out. That reality itself is also God (“The Spirit”), which is God manifest (not always perfectly but always to some extent) in each and every event in our universe. 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 Exists! David Cowles Mar 25, 2026 “Intelligent agents (us)…decide what exists. But defining what ‘what exists’ is – that’s another matter entirely.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Was it a million years ago or just yesterday? As usual, my 5 year old grandson is debating with his older brother. The proposition this morning? Resolved : That Santa Claus exists. I won’t take you through the intricacies of the argument, but jumping to the conclusion, the younger one ends the debate with, “Everything exists! QED” (Ok, so I added the QED part; I mean, he’s precocious but even that has its limits). In an earlier article on this site we discussed the Dark Universe . No one knows what it is. That’s why we call it dark . But most everyone agrees that it does exist. But according to Stevie Wonder (1972), “When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” We are used to reasoning from a known cause to a projected effect. Depending on the precision of the projection, we are talking infinitesimal chance, real number probability, or super-determinism. In the case of the Dark Universe we reason from a known effect (gravity) to a retrojected cause. All that we really know is that we can’t account for observed topology relying solely on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. There’s got to be something more, even though we have no idea what. There’s always got to be something more! A fancier bottle of wine, a faster car, a fatter 401k. Once upon a time, there had to be gods to account for celestial motion and the processes of nature, there had to be empty space (a receptacle) to permit the emergence of matter/energy, there had to be a universe-pervading aether to hold things together, and there had to be hidden variables to account for ‘spooky action at a distance’. (Einstein) Except, as far as we know, there are none of these things…and we’re ok with that, now . *** Imagine you are God. According to the English language translation of Genesis 1:3, you said, “Let there be light and there was light.” According to most interpretations, there was void and the word of God created energy/matter. But the full text also supports a minority interpretation: There was an insensible, chaotic medium out of which God culled related elements, which he labeled ‘light’, thereby injecting primal order into primordial chaos. The remainder of Genesis 1 details the unfolding of that order into the many splendored worlds we love. Defenders of this minority view have found themselves on the wrong side of Roman Catholic dogma: i.e. creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. But that doesn’t have to be so. The eminent 20th century theologian, Bill Clinton, summarized the dilemma: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Is chaos something…or nothing? Without order, does anything exist? We believe, for example, that entropy (disorder) was minimal at Big Bang and that it will be maximal at Heat Death. We have no problem saying that nothing ( nihilo ) existed ‘prior’ to Big Bang, not even time itself; we should have no problem saying that nothing will exist ‘after’ Heat Death. Therefore, maximum entropy can be synonymous with nihilo and so the two interpretations of ontogenesis converge…in orthodoxy. Light exists because God said it exists. Same for sky (1:8), earth and sea (1:10), plant life (1:11), celestial bodies (1:14), and animal life (1:24). In Genesis 2, God shares his power of creation (i.e. ordering, naming) with humans, resulting in speciation (2:20) and socialization (2:23), in other words, the world as we know it today. The Dark Universe exists because we say it exists. Light, etc. exists because God says it exists. Society exists, again, because we say so. Working with God, we too inject order (local) into the chaotic medium (universal); we are co-creators. The Dark Universe exists, God exists, Santa Claus exists! We know they exist because we see their effects. Gravity exists, the universe exists, and once every year presents appear under the Christmas tree. We know nothing of the Dark Universe, God, or Santa Claus per se . We only know that there are phenomena we cannot currently account for in any other way. Most adults will tell you that they don’t believe in Santa Claus. They say that because they believe they can account for the annual appearance of presents under a tree by other means. They cite an unholy (secular) trinity (Family, Amazon, and MasterCard) to explain the unmistakable phenomena we know as Christmas . They might just as well say, “Of course Santa Claus exists. What we call ‘Santa Claus’ is a confluence of kinship, commerce, and finance.” But out of respect for Occam’s Razor, they don’t. But in 1897, Francis Church, looking at exactly the same phenomena, did! He famously wrote, “ Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound…” Mr. Church looks at a confluence of love, generosity, and devotion and chooses to call it ‘Santa Claus’; other adults look at the same phenomena and find no reason to ‘name’ an additional entity. Likewise, folks who ‘don’t believe in God’ claim they can explain the existence and character of our universe without hypothesizing a responsible entity. They combine physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology to account for “Heaven and Earth and all things, visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed) The Dark Universe poses a slightly different problem. There are currently no proposals that convincingly account for cosmic phenomena based solely on today’s catalogue of particles and forces. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be. So my grandson was right, the younger that is: everything does exist! The Dark Universe, God, and Santa. The challenge is defining what it is that exists. When we use language to describe reality, we arbitrarily shatter the uniform glass sphere into a million shards. In the end, it doesn’t much matter how the crystal crumbles…as long as we can reassemble the pieces to recreate a smooth globe. A jigsaw puzzle might be an even better analogy. One image, divisible into indefinitely many, randomly shaped pieces that can be reassembled to recreate the image on the box. We , i.e. intelligent agents, aka ‘God, his angels, and (us) his saints’, decide what exists ( Dasein , Heidegger). But defining what ‘what exists’ is ( Wassein ) – that’s another matter entirely. *** Rembrandt’s 1632 oil on canvas uses dramatic chiaroscuro to depict a scholar seated in a vast, sun-drenched interior, symbolizing the light of human reason amidst the shadows of the unknown. The composition is anchored by a prominent winding staircase that suggests the complex, spiraling depths of philosophical thought and the search for hidden truths. While a second figure quietly tends a fire in the background, the painting remains a profound meditation on the internal struggle to understand the nature of existence and the divine. 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 “ It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." (Ex-9:12) What is our excuse? Deborah Kornfeld Apr 4, 2023 "...despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us?" I always look forward to the plagues. That part of the Haggadah recited in a singsong ritualistic manner is accompanied by the small thrill of putting my finger into the wine cup and marking my plate. It carries with it a memory that despite the power and might and Technicolor special effects accompanying our redemption, we need to be mindful that the Egyptians suffered. In the exquisite theatre of the Seder, every participant has an active role in this custom. To make out seders lively and fun for the children, we often decorate our table with frogs and beasts and lice- a real table-top menagerie. Yet despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us? Consider the first plague- “blood”. The Torah reads: “God said to Moses,” Tell Aaron to take his staff and extend his hand over the waters of Egypt- over their rivers, their canals, their reservoirs, and every place where water is kept- and the water shall turn into blood. There will be blood throughout all Egypt, even in wooden barrels and stone jars. Moses and Aaron did exactly as God had instructed, and Aaron held the staff up and then struck the Nile’s water in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials. The Nile’s water was transformed into blood. The fish in the Nile died, and the river became so polluted that the Egyptians were no longer able to drink the Nile’s water. There was blood everywhere in Egypt…. The Egyptians dug around the Nile for drinking water, since they could not drink any water from the river. After God struck the Nile, it remained that way for seven full days (Ex 7:19-231). They could have certainly applied for extra aid and qualified as a national disaster. It must have been horrific. People and wild life must have died. How could Pharaoh have been so stubborn and entrenched in his way of thinking? How could he have ignored this beginning of such a great wave of suffering? Now the answer regarding Pharaoh is found in Exodus 9:12-“It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." There are many explanations and interpretations concerning the plagues. A midrash suggests that the Egyptians were punished measure for measure for the cruelty and indifference to the suffering of their Israelite slaves. Rav Kook explained that God brought the plagues upon the Egyptians in order that they should understand the essence of God’s presence in the world. His influence over everything. His intimate relationship with His world and His ability to do anything.” Another modern scholar explains the plagues as emblematic of our greatest fears. Shai Zarhi, an Israeli Educator, writes: “The plagues Gode visited on the Egyptians in Egypt seem to be a parade of people’s greatest fears. They are a mythological show of the power of the living vs. primal fear. Starting from the blood of birth and of death, through primal human fears of small creatures (lice) and large ones (wild beasts), fear of financial ruin (locusts), fear of the dark (losing direction and meaning), we face the greatest fear, the fear for our children’s lives-loss of the future. Tonight, a night to commemorate the past, we see the mercy of God’s protections, look out from our places at a world full of fears and dangers and pray for another quiet year.” The term used to describe Pharaoh’s indifference in the face of these disasters is “Kaved Lev “which is translated as meaning obstinate, stubbornly refusing to change his opinion or course of action despite the attempts to persuade him to do so. We are told in the Torah that God made Pharaoh obstinate so that this redemption would be spectacular with an abundance of special effects and everyone involved would know that it was God himself who orchestrated this redemption. In the time of the Egyptians, many of the plagues were reversible. The bloody Nile was returned to clear potable water, the boils disappeared, and the frogs went away. We are not so lucky with our man-made plagues. When we pollute the waterways or impact on our climate or waste precious resources simply because of greed and/or indifference, we cannot always reverse the consequences of our actions and the consequences might endanger our most precious commodity, that being our future. This year when I dip my finger into my wine cup as we recite the names of the Biblical plagues, I will remember that these plagues did have grave consequences on the Egyptians, but I will also see each stain on my plate as a promise of action to protect the next generations. Unlike Pharaoh, I can’t blame God, this time it is in our hands. This is a republication with permission from The Jewish Pluralist . The author of this essay, Deborah Kornfeld, is a retired pediatric occupational therapist, aspiring climate and social justice activist, occasional essayist, shul chesed coordinator, loving mother, and safta. 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 And Then... David Cowles Apr 19, 2022 This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Back to the year 1000 AD! Millennial years are special years…I mean they only come once every thousand years or so…so they’re pretty rare. Most folks never experience a change of Millennia during their lifetimes. I did, and no doubt many of you did too. Think back to the year 2000 AD! Planes fell from the sky, the power grid collapsed, virtually all electronics, including computers, failed. Except, of course, none of these things actually happened. December 31 went, and January 1 came…thud. December 31, 999: it is likely that the majority of Western Europeans believe that the world would end in the coming hours. Huge crowds filled the Vatican and the streets of Rome; they awaited the Apocalypse. But AD 1000 is important for other reasons. Otto III, the boy king, is Emperor. Riding into battle at the age of 6, leading an army at the age of 12, crowned king of the Germans at 14 and Holy Roman Emperor at 16; Otto was still only 20 years-old in the year 1000. Otto’s lifelong tutor and mentor, Gerbert, sits on the Papal Throne, reigning as Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert was pope, but he may have been better known as the leading scientist and mathematician of his age. This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Church and state, the sacred and the secular, science and religion, faith and curiosity all flowed together and co-existed peacefully. And then… Image: Otto III from The Gospels of Otto Thoughts While Shaving is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To subscribe to our newsletter, complete the form below (bottom right) and never miss a single Thought. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” David Cowles On Friday, September 1, Aletheia Today Magazine will be releasing our Fall Issue dedicated exclusively to AI – its philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications. In researching material for this issue, I came across something terrifying online ( quelle surprise! ): “Prompt engineering involves more than just typing in a query. It's about understanding the AI's underlying logic…and sometimes even 'thinking like the AI'… (For example) Generate five innovative product ideas for the eco-friendly industry focusing on renewable energy." Why frightening? First, as human beings, we like to think that we create technology to serve our purposes; we bristle at the idea that it is technology that creates us. But over the past 10,000 years or so, it has become increasingly obvious that we are products of our own technique . According to Genesis, God created the world in 6 or 7 ‘days’ (or epochs); technology is creating us in a similar succession of stages. The first transformation occurred with the rise of spoken language. Originally invented to help us accomplish our projects, language has increasingly worked to determine the nature and scope of those projects. Imagine a Stone Age father lecturing his teenage son: “If you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Perhaps surprisingly, our Stone Agers were not entirely unaware of their dilemma. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an early, if somewhat confused, attempt to showcase the relationship between speech and act. Minimally, the story makes it clear that ‘saying and doing’ (language and production) are intimately related. Next came the invention of writing. It only happened once in human history, but like Pokémon, Kid Rock, and Pet Rock, it caught on. Written communication greatly expanded the scope of enterprise…but at the same time it further limited the scope of that enterprise. Imagine a Bronze Age mother lecturing her teenage daughter: “ If you can’t write it , you can’t say it, and if you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Now technology is about what we can’t do rather than what we can. Our modern Indo-European (IE) languages are semantic minefields seeded over-generously with nouns (subjects & objects) and active voice verbs. If your project doesn’t fit comfortably within this syntactical framework, you’re S.O.L. That’s not a problem for you? Perhaps that is the problem! Have you lost the ability (or inclination) to conceive of a project outside the limits imposed by IE syntax? Writing kept us busy for several millennia. I mean come on, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe! What more could anyone want? Then came the next great tectonic shift – the Industrial Revolution (IR). The technique involved in large-scale manufacture, and its impact on human life, has been identified by countless individuals and celebrated (or castigated) in various media. To cite just a few examples: Prudhomme, Marx, Legere, Chaplin, Brazil , McLuhan and Ellul. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “Today, we measure out our lives with coffee spoons.” Following IR…DR, the Digital Revolution. Consider the massive change in communication that has occurred since ‘I’ invented the internet. E-mail, Text, Excel, PowerPoint have all changed the way we express our thoughts…and therefore how and what we think. Begin with the obliteration of orthography (spelling) and grammar, the atrophy of sentence structure, the disappearance of complex verb forms, and, of course, the rise of internet slang and emojis. We’ve witnessed the reduction of mathematics to spread sheeting and rhetoric to bullet points. When PowerPoint first came out, I was resistant. I didn’t like the oversimplification and non-sequiturs I noticed in others’ work products. I wouldn’t use it…until I couldn’t not use it. Now, of course, I use it every day. “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Now we appear to be riding on the first swell of another technological tidal wave: first language, writing, manufacture, computerization, and now…(drum roll please) Artificial Intelligence. All of which brings us back to what I found so terrifying : “…thinking like the AI.” We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential, of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…but that may be exactly what we’re doing…which leads me to my second concern: “Generate five innovative product ideas.” Talk about begging the question. Can AI truly innovate? That may be the dominant intellectual question of our time; but according to the quote at the beginning of this article, it’s already a settled matter of fact: AI can innovate! If so, we need to consider our Bots conscious …and therefore entitled to certain civil rights; if not, we need to consider how far we’ve dumbed-down our understanding of innovation . Implicit in ‘in/nova/tion’ is ‘novum’, new. Rearranging deck chairs is not new, but I don’t doubt that AI can do it brilliantly. That’s not the same thing as inventing a new, iceberg-proof hull. On the other hand, where do we draw the line? When does mere novelty become true innovation? Is there any fundamental difference? What a time to be alive! We are at the ‘question forming’ stage of a new anthropological era. Should aquatic organisms colonize dry land? The Iron Age is history; welcome to the Age of Bots. I can’t wait to see where we go from here! 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 AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next

< Back Naomi S. Baron Contributor Professor Baron is interested in language and technology, written language, reading, the history and structure of English, and higher education. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her books include Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (which won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008), Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (2015), and How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio (2021). Her newest book (forthcoming) is Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing. Professor Baron taught at Brown University, Emory University, and Southwestern University before coming to American University in Washington, DC, where she has served as associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, chair of the Department of Language and Foreign Studies, Director of the TESOL Program, and executive director of the Center for Teaching, Research, and Learning. Professor Baron has appeared extensively in the media, including interviews on Good Morning America, ABC News 20/20, CNN, The Diane Rehm Show, All Things Considered, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, New Yorker, Fortune, and Time. How ChatGPT Robs Students

< Back Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! David Cowles When you were very young, were you ever afraid of your mother’s vacuum cleaner? Most kids are. Were you scared it might suck you up? And, if so, what would happen then? Would you just vanish? Of course, you’re much older now, and you know that something like that could never happen…or could it? More than 50 years ago, a famous Rock and Roll band known as The Beatles made a movie called Yellow Submarine . In this movie, the four Beatles (John, Paul, George, and Ringo) sail from Liverpool (England) to a magical world outside of space and time called Pepperland. They made the voyage in a yellow submarine. But this is not like any family vacation you’ve ever been on. The Beatles travel across a Sea of Time and a Sea of Science (Space) into a Sea of Monsters. In this Monstrous Sea, the yellow sub is attacked by a bunch of fierce creatures and machines…but nothing is more frightening than the dreaded Vacuum Monster. Like most monsters, this creature looks a little bit human but where it should have a nose and a mouth it has instead a large cone-shaped funnel. This funnel looks very much like an attachment you might put on a real vacuum cleaner. And sure enough, true to its name, the Vacuum Monster uses this funnel to suck up everything in its path. First, it sucks up all the other monsters; then it sucks up the submarine itself. But it’s not done yet! It sucks up spacetime. Now there is nothing left in the whole universe except the Vacuum Monster. But it’s still not done! Now, it sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Why does it do that? Why does it suck itself up along with everything else? Because it can’t help itself! As long as it lives, it can’t stop sucking. It’s a vacuum cleaner, after all; sucking is what a vacuum cleaner does, no matter what the consequence. But unlike your mother’s vacuum cleaner, it doesn’t have an off switch. So, when there’s nothing left for it to suck up, it sucks up itself. We’re not like the Vacuum Monster. We have free will. We can decide what we want to do and when we want to do it. And we can stop doing it when we want to stop doing it. There’s nothing we can’t do (up to the limits of our ability) but there’s also nothing we have to do. There are things we should do and things we shouldn’t do, but whether we actually do them or not…is up to us! We get to decide, but the vacuum monster doesn’t. It does what it’s programmed to do, nothing more, nothing less. It has no choice but to suck itself into oblivion. What if it didn’t? That would mean that our world was really two worlds…a world of things that get sucked and a world of things that do the sucking. But that’s not the way our world works, is it? Our world is one world, not two. In our world, everything sucks, and everything gets sucked. If something sucks, and doesn’t get sucked up by another sucker, it will eventually sucks itself up too. In our world, what you do to others, you eventually do to yourself as well. You’ve probably heard of the Golden Rule. It goes something like this: “Do to others what you would like them to do to you.” If you would like to be treated kindly, for example, then you should treat others with kindness. If you would like others to be generous towards you, then you should be generous towards them. It’s a good ‘rule’ and most of the time things work out better for us when we follow it. In fact, Jesus himself taught the Golden Rule; however, there is another rule in the Bible called the Great Commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says it, St. Paul says it, St. James says it, but it was first said in the Torah (law), the first 5 books of the Old Testament. The Great Commandment is like the Golden Rule, only different. According to the Golden Rule, you do nice things for other people because it’s the right thing to do and because you hope they’ll do nice things for you. The Great Commandment says something a little bit different. According to the Great Commandment, when you do nice things for others, you also do something nice for yourself… immediately and automatically . And of course, when you do mean things to other people, you’re being mean to yourself as well. If you make another person happy, you make yourself happy, and if you make another person sad…well, you know what’s coming next, don’t you? Whatever you do to another, you also do to yourself. Your actions affect others…and yourself…at the same time. Yellow Submarine follows the Great Commandment, not so much the Golden Rule. The Vacuum Monster is a sucker. It sucks up its neighbors and oops, when it sucks up its neighbors, it sucks up itself too. What it does to others, it does to itself…automatically. I said the Vacuum Monster sucks itself up and vanishes, along with almost everything inside it. Not everything inside it, almost everything inside it. What survives? Just one thing: the yellow submarine and its crew! How come? Because the yellow sub doesn’t exist in Liverpool only; it also lives in the magical world called Pepperland. The yellow submarine is how people go back and forth from Liverpool (our world) to Pepperland. As far as we know, there is no other way! Going from Liverpool to Pepperland and back is quite a trek, but it is not a trek in space or in time. The yellow submarine travels in another dimension; it is always right here, always just now! So, when the Vacuum Monster sucks up everything ‘in Liverpool’ (our world), even the yellow submarine itself, the sub survives. Why? Because it exists in Pepperland as well as in Liverpool, and nothing in Pepperland can ever disappear. Pepperland is the ‘forever place’, the place of ‘evermore’! Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is, and it’s called a ‘Black Hole.’ Black holes exist throughout space, and one is even sitting right now at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. A Black Hole sucks up everything around it, yes everything, including space and time and subs and even the black hole itself. And just like the Vacuum Monster, eventually black holes even suck themselves into oblivion. According to the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, when a black hole sucks, it sucks up more than just things. It sucks up information (or knowledge) too. The things that get sucked up disappear…but the knowledge stays behind. But there’s a catch! The knowledge that survives is so jumbled and confused that you can’t make any sense out of it, much less use it for anything worthwhile. This very same thing happens in Yellow Submarine . After the Vacuum Monster sucks itself into oblivion, there is no more space and time. What’s left is a real ‘nowhere land.’ The Beatles find themselves alone in a totally empty world…empty, that is, except for Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD. Dr. Boob, – a real ‘nowhere man’ living in this nowhere land. He knows everything that has ever been known by anyone anywhere…but really, he knows nothing at all because he doesn’t know what he knows. It’s as if you memorized a speech in a foreign language that you don’t know how to speak. You might be able to recite it, but you would have no idea what you were saying. That’s how it is with Dr. Boob. And that’s how it is when a black hole vanishes. With the Beatles’ help, Dr. Boob begins to organize his information and slowly but surely, he learns to make use of it. Eventually, he joins the Beatles on board the sub and accompanies them for the rest of their voyage, through the Sea of Holes into the Sea of Green to Pepperland itself…but that’s another story, perhaps for another day. Now back to Liverpool. Would it surprise you to hear that there are stories in the Bible that sound a lot like this story? Take creation, for instance. Genesis says that the earth was once without form or shape; in other words, it was a real-life Nowhere Land. Then God said, “Let there be light and there was light…and God separated the light from the darkness.” God separated sky from earth, oceans from dry land, and day from night. In other words, God organized everything so we could make sense of it…and put it to use! Then on the seventh day of creation, God rested. Now our job is to continue to make sense of this world and to continue to organize it so that we can accomplish useful things. The same thing happens at the other end of time, when our world finally comes to an end…only it happens in reverse. Christ, the Son of God, finishes the job. He puts everything in “proper order” and he even destroys death itself. Then he draws all things to himself, and finally, he turns all things, including himself, over to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” Christ acts just like the Vacuum Monster, except that when he draws everything to himself , he does not draw everything into oblivion but into Heaven(Pepperland)! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next

< Back Uranus Meets Erik Erikson David Cowles Oct 23, 2025 “The uber-pattern of the world is the logo that liberates us, that turns our free will into agency.” No, this is not the title of a Bevis and Butthead episode, nor is it a Wayne’s World retrospective. It is an article about the intriguing astronomical behavior of the ‘7th ice chip from the Sun’, the planet Uranus. Discovered in 1781 with the aid of a telescope, Uranus orbits the Sun once every 84 Earth years. During that ‘year’, the planet passes through all 12 signs of the Zodiac, effectively taking 7 years to transit each ‘house’. Of course, 7 is a prime number (3+4), closely related to its composite number, 12 (3 x 4). In many numerological systems, the #3 is associated with the divine and the #4 with the terrestrial, giving #7 (3 + 4) and #12 (3 x 4) their special significance. The numbers 7 and 12 have outsized importance in various human sub-cultures: The 7 days of creation The 7 day week The 7 sacraments (RCC) The Sabbath (7th day) The Sabbatical (7th year) The Jubilee, the year immediately following the 7th sabbatical year 7 fat years followed by 7 lean The 7 visible bodies in the ancient ‘solar system’ The 7 year itch A ‘natural’ (winner, winner, chicken dinner) in the game of Craps. The 12 signs of the Zodiac The 12 tribes of Israel The 12 apostles The 12 days of Christmas The 12 members of a jury A dozen eggs. The ‘Science of Astrology’ specifically studies the motions of celestial bodies relative to the signs of the Zodiac. It seeks to identify macrocosmic patterns in the behavior of those celestial bodies that harmonize with the microcosmic patterns we encounter in everyday life. The examples listed above span a gamut ranging from the large scale structure of the cosmos to familiar events in the lives of ordinary human beings. There is no claim here that one ‘causes’ the other; in my view, they don’t. As David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, causality is overrated. However, looking at phenomena on multiple scales allows us to use patterns evident on one scale to locate patterns, often less evident, operative on other scales. In this way, the Science of Astrology helps us discover scale-agnostic patterns that can enrich our understanding and appreciation of life’s experiences. In that context, the symmetries exhibited by Uranus’ orbital path help us identify patterns with similar symmetries on other scales. Let’s apply this ancient discovery to contemporary phenomena to see if patterns well identified and understood on one scale can help us identify and understand patterns on other scales. Let’s introduce the Three Wise Guys (Zoroastrian Astrologers from Persia) to Erik Erikson, a 20th century psychologist. We previously pointed out Uranus’ 7 year journeys through each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac. Erikson developed a theory of human development that identified distinct stages ‘scheduled’ to unfold at certain critical junctures over the course of Normal Life Expectancy (NLE). At first glance, the two models have little in common: While 84 years might be a valid approximation of NLE, Erikson’s model consists of just 8 stages, some as short as 18 months, others at least as long as 22 years. Worse still, Erikson’s model human ‘completes’ 5 stages in just 18 years and takes 66 years to complete the last three. Clearly, these models have nothing in common; or do they? What happens if we apply Uranus’ 12 ‘stages’, each lasting approximately 7 years, to Erikson’s theory of stages in human development? We might end up with a revised model of human development based on 12 stages of 7 years each. Would that shed any useful light on actual experience? You bet it would! Such a project would direct us to look for flex points in the development of a human being spaced by reasonably uniform 7 year intervals. Does that help elucidate reality? Let’s take a look: If there is a genuine harmony between these patterns, we’d be looking for flex points in the development of a human being that correspond to the following birthdays: 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th, 35th, 42nd, 49th, 56th, 63rd, 70th, and 77th. Wow! Can anyone fail to see the remarkable co-incidence of these specific birthdays with empirically identified developmental plateaus? Age 7 is the traditional ‘age of reason’ and the age at which immersive, structured ‘education’ often begins. Roman Catholic children are introduced to the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist and for the first time become subject to the Laws of the Church. It marks the end of infancy. The organism (child) sacrifices some of its neuroplasticity, native curiosity, and unfettered imagination in exchange for certain perceived advantages - the status and ‘privileges’ associated with ‘growing up’. Age 14 marks the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. It often corresponds with full sexual maturity and the final development of gender specific organs. A cascade of hormones often leads to reckless and rebellious behavior. Curiosity and creativity endure but they are now more likely channeled toward specific projects. Then comes the much awaited 21 st ! Ah, my first legal bone dry martini. Extra olives, please, to help me cope with the taste! By now I can drive (preferably not after drinking) and I may have completed my formal, or at least my state mandated, education. I can live on my own, I can get a job, I can enter into legally binding contracts, taking on Student Loans and Credit Card debt. I am a taxpayer now, a productive member of society. I have arrived…sort of. In reality, the 21 – 28 stage remains a period of intense development at least in modern cultures. At 21, there is still a lot of play left in life. By 28, I need to have thought seriously about such issues as marriage, children, and career. Now I am 35. Everyone expects me to be settled and on a charted life course. At 35, one may, perhaps, answer for the first time the age old question, “What will you be when you grow up?” You may wish to say, perhaps for the first time, “ This is who I am.” Terrifying! I must open a 401k and take up the game of golf. 42 now…it’s time to take stock: What’s my career (advancement) path? Am I saving enough? Will my kids ‘amount to anything’? Do I still want to be married? By 49, you’d better belong to a posh country club, sport a single digit handicap, and drive a Jaguar (if not a Lamborghini, you Loser!). By now, you should be working on your second marriage. 56, just checking-in. On course? 63, the process of aging begins in earnest. Whether it’s changing a tire or shooting b-ball with the neighborhood kids, you’re not 21 anymore, and now you know it; heck, you’re not even 40! It’s amazing! By the age of 14 most of us realize that we will eventually grow old and die. Yet when the aging process begins to affect us in perceptible ways, we’re always caught completely off-guard. Somehow we fall into the trap of believing we can age without changing. When you’re 7, you anticipate and welcome the changes promised at 14 and 21, but when you’re 63 you have no idea what’s in store for you. 63, 70, and 77 represent somewhat arbitrary breakpoints but the decline they catalogue is all too real. And it’s not a continuous process; you age in chunks. There is an enormous difference between being 63 – 70 and being 77 – 84, a difference most of us are not even slightly ready for. Of course, 77 – 84 is a lot better than what comes next! Using Uranus’ 84 year trek through the Zodiac to reconfigure Erikson’s stages of human development has suggested a pattern which has proven (above) to have significant heuristic value. This is the sense in which Astrology can be called a science and can be applied to enhance our lives and expand our horizons . Yet there is an obvious fallacy here; have you picked up on it yet? Astrological projections are typically linked with the date (and time) of one’s birth. That time is unlikely to coincide with the moment of Uranus’ transit between signs of the Zodiac. Therefore, if the stages of human development were perfectly aligned with Uranus’ itinerary, each of us would have a unique 7 year cycle. Where I am focused on my 7th and 14th birthdays, you might be looking at your 5th and 11th birthdays. Nonsensical! In my defense, I simply point out that patterns do not have to be identical to be instructive. We are only looking for congruence and the progress of Uranus forms a pattern that is congruent with the stages of human development, regardless of any one person’s DOB. The alternative, to approach life’s experiences as if they occurred chaotically would be utterly paralyzing. Free will notwithstanding, my fate would merely be the by-product of the Brownian motion around me. That changes, however, once we start to recognize congruent patterns in our world. Patterns allow us to create tools, to imagine and accomplish projects, and to measure their results. The uber-pattern of the world is the logos that liberates us, that turns our free will into agency. We should search for its reflection in everything we encounter, from a grain of sand to a drop of water, from the roar of a crowd to the smell of a bonfire, from the motion of the solar system to the structure of the cosmos itself. That’s Astrology! And we are grateful to Uranus for the lesson. *** The Copernican World by Andreas Cellarius is a 17th-century celestial illustration that beautifully presents Copernicus's heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center and planets, including Earth, orbiting around it. This work blends scientific innovation with artistic detail, reflecting the shift from geocentric to heliocentric understanding in the history of astronomy. 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.

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 II In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight! The Nature of Time Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. Philosophy Imagine! Ridding the world of values comes at a very great price: “…they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot!” Parmenides I Who says there was no Facebook before Zuckerberg? It was just called ‘philosophy.’ Speaking Piraha The hidden grammar censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag. Seen or Unseen, why the Background Matters If a tiny thread had the power to ruin a movie, what in my own life, deep in the background, bears such importance to my bigger picture? And if it’s so important, why isn’t it front and center? Theology Corinthians How is it that God can perform the miracle of Incarnation? Or to put it more accurately, how is it that God is the miracle of Incarnation. The Final Psalms Ultimately, the Kingdom of Heaven is the transfiguration of the historical realm into the eternal realm, according to God’s values. Culture & The Arts Learn to Swym “Language Endures. We Don’t” – now that is a bumper sticker! Social Dynamics Pulling that off was more artistic in his opinion than any of the “new age” stuff out there pushing the envelope. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Alice In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now. Xiako Can't Count So, what’s up with the Piraha? How can they get by without numbers? Spirituality Judas Taught Me the Beatitudes This nasty turn unnerved me, so I gathered myself together and drew a table with my comfortable beatitudes on one side and my uncomfortable ones on the other... BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control. The Serenity Prayer Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? Prayer to Combat Disillusionment in Faith Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.