< Back Returning to Andromeda David Cowles “What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way!” It’s time for me to return to my home planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. For over a year now, I’ve been researching intelligent life on Earth and documenting suspected occurrences. I think I’ve done good work here, but I know my superiors are going to want a lot more from me than just a collection of anecdotes. They’ll want to know what intelligent life forms on Earth think about themselves and Universe and their place in that universe; and frankly, I’m at a loss to know what to tell them. Got a minute? Can I explain my conundrum? Maybe you can help! For the most part, Earthlings agree on the ‘data’, what happened and when, but the way they interpret that data sorts them into two possibly irreconcilable camps. First, the data: At the birth of time itself, an event occurred which everyone affectionately calls ‘Big Bang’. Then in the first fraction of a nanosecond, that universe ‘inflated’ by a factor of 10^26…to the size of a small marble. Over the next three seconds, all the forces of attraction and repulsion and all the known subatomic particles, in other words all the building blocks of the universe, precipitated . The Universe cooled from 10^32 degrees Kelvin all the way down to a chilly 10^9, still 100,000 times hotter than Earth’s Sun, but below its own ‘dew point’; and below its dew point, the universe rains fermions and bosons. Crazy, right? Well, hang on, we’re just getting started. As you know, the universe is incredibly fine-tuned. It depends on dozens of apparently unrelated parameters; a variation of less than 1% in the quantitative value of any one of these parameters would have aborted the universe sometime during its first three seconds. Over the next 14 billion years or so, the universe ‘gradually’ expanded to its current size (45 billion light years across); the subatomic particles and their related forces combined to form elements, then molecules, then galaxies, and finally, black holes. The first three seconds were incredibly eventful! Then, nothing much happened for the next 10 billion years. Oh, galactic sheets formed along with stars, planets, and moons; new, heavier elements emerged, and together with hydrogen, combined to form an inconceivably vast array of molecules, exhibiting many bizarre and unexpected properties. In other words, yada, yada, yada… Then came the next Big Day! I call it ‘Big Bang 2’. A little less than 4 billion years ago, precursor molecules (organic) combined to form the first (and only) living organism; et voila, biogenesis. Biogenesis happened almost as suddenly as cosmogenesis. One day lifeless, next day life! No wonder Earthlings are dizzy! At least as far as Earthlings know, reproductive ‘life’ can only occur in the presence of DNA, a single molecule painstakingly assembled from a ‘string’ (actually a ‘double helix’) of molecules. DNA is made up of just 4 molecules, bases, arranged ‘vertically’ in triplets and ‘horizontally’ in pairs. No big deal, right? Except that an average DNA molecule consists of three billion base pairs. A change in the composition or position of a single base pair may (or may not) impact the phenomenal characteristics of the host organism. So, kind of a big deal, after all! So far, so good, right? But here’s where things start to get interesting. Some Earthlings believe that ‘life’ arose independently on many different planets and moons across many different galaxies; they tend to underestimate the nearly incalculable precision required to generate a single living organism. Others believe that life evolved only once…on Planet Earth; they tend to underestimate the vastness and variety of the universe. Of course, Earthlings have no access to any real evidence either way. Here’s where you’d like me to step in and give my ‘study subjects’ additional information that might help clear things up for them but, of course, I can’t do that: I am prohibited by the Prime Directive from sharing any information with Earthlings that they have not already discovered on their own. I’m told, “Lose lips implode galaxies!” So my lips, unfortunately, must remain sealed. So this welter of seemingly disconnected ‘facts’ forms what Earthlings call their ‘Standard Model’ (of cosmogenesis and of biogenesis). These ‘models’ are widely accepted; but their interpretation is an entirely different matter. Sidebar : While most Earthlings accept the Standard Model , some prefer a version of that model that telescopes the entire process down to 7 days. Potato…potato! Now things get interesting. Consensus turns to conflict, sometimes armed combat, once the discussion moves from science to philosophy. So far, we’ve focused on the ‘what and when’ of things…that’s the easy part; but now that we’re starting to look at the ‘how and why’, it’s a very different story. Here, seemingly, the human population splits into two apparently irreconcilable camps. One crowd takes the science at face value. It is what it is. There’s no need to look further. Universe just is! WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get. We’ve pushed the envelope to the limit of its elasticity. In the language of Earth’s scholastic philosophers, Universe is causa sui . It has no proper cause; it is the product of no agency. You are your own grandmother. Shut up and enjoy! Or not, suit yourself. Perhaps this is the only possible universe (the Anthropic Principle), or perhaps it is the best of all possible universes (Leibniz), but in fact, no one knows, and no one can know, and no one could do anything about it if they did know. So all you can say is: This is how it is! The other camp takes a very different view of the same data. “ Causa sui …phooey!” Obviously, something as complex as Universe must be the result of an intentional act by a supremely creative intellect. Earthlings usually refer to this ‘creative intellect’ as ‘God’. The ‘God Hypothesis’, as I call it, is potentially useful; but perhaps it raises as many problems as it solves. Who is this God, and why did he exercise his creative intellect in just this way? If this impossibly intricate universe is the product of a creative intelligence, why is everything so messed up? That question splits itself into two versions. The first is the age-old Problem of Evil . As I write this report, tens of thousands of human beings have just died horrible deaths as the result of an earthquake in Turkey. Many were crushed to death, others smothered, others buried alive. The ‘lucky’ survivors had to wait to be rescued, immobilized and without food or water for as much as a week. If Universe is the intentional act of a creative intelligence, is that intelligence malevolent? As in Earthlings’ Book of Job , should God be brought to the dock to face charges of Crimes Against Humanity? (If you’re interested in the outcome of this ‘trial of the millennium’, I recommend an article in Issue #1 of Aletheia Today Magazine , " The Riddle of Job .") But I don’t want to get into the ‘Problem of Evil’ right now. If you’re interested, check out " The Problem of Good ." also in Issue #1 of Aletheia Today Magazine . In any event, it is the less challenging version of our problem. The second version is of much greater concern. If God is benevolent and created Universe, why did he do such a lousy job? I’m passing over God’s alleged crimes against humanity so that I can focus on a much more serious crime, cosmically speaking, the crime of Littering. What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way! Sidebar : What’s happening to me? Have I spent so much time on Earth that its values (or lack thereof) are rubbing off on me? What does it say about me that I condemn careless inefficiency over intentional cruelty? Anyway, according to the Standard Model, genesis is nothing but a bunch of wrong turns. It’s like a stopped clock – it’s only right twice a day. 24 hours of noise gets you two bits of information! For example, genes mutate randomly. Almost all such mutations are harmful to the host species and therefore do not pass on to future generations. Once in a great while, a particular combination of mutations works to produce a new phenomenal characteristic that confers a selective advantage on its host species. Such mutations may be conserved and passed on. The universe as is cannot possibly be the intentional product of a creative and benevolent intelligence… unless that intelligence has done a brilliant job of covering its tracks. But if so, for what purpose? Just to fool the already cognitively impaired members of Homo sapiens ? So, I am faced with the fact that Earthlings understand the common data in two diametrically opposed ways. The Standard Model, by itself, is hardly convincing, and it’s anything but beautiful. Some Earthling once wrote, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.” If that’s so, goodbye Standard Model! Where’s Occam’s Razor when you’re so desperately in need of a shave? At first glance, the so-called ‘God Hypothesis’ looks more appealing. For one thing, it allows for the operation of real, objective values (e.g., Beauty, Truth, and Justice) in the creation and maintenance of Universe. It allows Einstein to claim, rightly or wrongly, that Universe has a built-in bias toward Good . For another thing, it solves the problem of ‘particularity’ – how is it that something as precisely tuned as the cosmos and the biocosm came to be just the way it is? The answer is simple, “God made it that way.” But if so, why does it look like it came about by blind chance? As if this were not enough, I have another problem! Earthlings have a useful epistemological principle that could apply here; it takes various forms: “Actions speak louder than words; by their fruits you shall know them," etc. In other words, don’t tell me what you believe; show me! Is Universe the product of spontaneous generation, i.e., a random, purposeless accident? Or is it the brainchild of an intelligent, powerful, benevolent Creator? Naively, one would expect that people in Camp #1 would behave somewhat differently from those in Camp #2 – and so they do…but only on the margins. There are living members of genus nihilist, as there are of genus credulous . The problem is, there are only a few of each. The actions of the vast majority of human beings don’t betray an allegiance to either ideology. Some label themselves ‘theist, idealist, spiritual’; others prefer ‘atheist, materialist, secular’. Can you tell me who is in which group by examining the way they live their lives? I can’t! Avowed theists are capable of unimaginable cruelty. Avowed atheists are capable of incredible charity. Absent, the one-percent at either end of the spectrum, people don’t seem to care one way or the other about these issues. They deny the existence of God but behave like Mother Theresa; or they affirm the existence of God but behave like Josef Stalin. To the extent they care at all, human beings seem to wall off their cosmological ‘beliefs’ from their terrestrial ‘duties’: Church is for Sundays while business…is ‘just business’. Or do I have it backwards? Should I have said, ‘cosmological duties’ and ‘terrestrial beliefs’? Either way, there’s a disconnect. I am particularly intrigued by older Earthlings, many of them retired from what they call ‘the daily grind’. As far as I can tell, most of them are spending their final years perfecting their golf swings, travelling to exotic destinations, or seeking out hidden culinary gems. Few see ‘financial freedom’ as an opportunity to turn their attention from the ridiculous to the sublime. Recently, many have taken to enshrining their post-retirement activities in the form of something they call a bucket list , a compendium of things they hope to experience before... You’re 75 years old and now you want to see the Grand Canyon? Why? To check it off some imaginary list? To say you’ve seen it? After all, you’ve lived on Earth for 75 years. How can it be that you haven’t even seen the Grand Canyon, or eaten a meal in Paris, or shopped in a Kasbah! What a waste of a life…or not! The best explanation I can come up with is that Earthlings regard their lives as ‘works of art’. Prior to age 25, they are priming the canvass. From 25 to 65, they lay in the broad strokes. After 65, it’s time to add the finer details. To what end? Have they even read their own poets? “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works ye mighty and despair…nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) What is the purpose of this finished product humans call ‘a life’? It’s not for God, they’ve ruled that out; and it’s not for others, obviously. People seem hell-bent on making themselves for themselves . The competition characteristic of the commercial realm spills over into the existential. I am ‘better than you’ if I have ‘more’ experiences than you. But what does it mean to ‘have more experiences’ than someone else? Longer life? (Is life an endurance contest?) More variety? (Is life a travelog ?) Greater intensity? (Or should I say, “Cheap Thrills” ) ? I heard one person describe life as making memories : but memories for what? Making memories, some no doubt painful, that will shortly be erased? Is life a punishment? (A ‘bad boy’ is made to write 25 humiliating sentences on a blackboard, and then later that same day is made to erase them.) I am told that once upon a time, things were different: humans regularly devoted their later years to prayer, study, and various spiritual practices. Well, no more! Teenagers talk freely about ‘the meaning of life’, but not seniors! In fact, it is considered déclassé for an older person to raise such concerns, even in casual conversation. It is considered morbid, a memento mori for a society that has effectively lost sight of its mortality. So, I must report that human beings are split into two diametrically opposed factions when they consider ‘the ultimate question’: what’s it all about, Alfie? (Title of a movie from the 1960s.) But must I also report that they don’t really care about the answer? For the most part, they live their lives as they want to live them, with no regard for where those lives fit into the totality of things. Curious, don’t you think? This is the spot where you’re wondering if I know something that you don’t. Come on, admit it! Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but either way, as you know, I can’t tell you. I am prohibited by the Prime Directive from sharing any information that might prompt folks to change their behavior. So I’m afraid you’ll have to figure things out for yourselves…if there’s anything to figure out…and I’m not saying there is! BTW, I appreciate the hospitality you’ve shown me throughout my stay. I’ll find a way to muddle through my report. In the meantime, my thanks to all of you…and good luck with your quest! Image: Perseus and Andromeda (1720). Hendrick Jacob Hoet (c. 1693–1733). Credit: The Bowes Museum. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

“Popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious.” < Back I am the Walrus David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “Popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious.” Unraveling the ‘inner meaning’ of popular lyrics can be a full time job…and then there’s the question of whether you’re actually accomplishing anything worthwhile in the process. The majority of folks believe that our work is a waste of time: “It’s music, man, just enjoy it,” or “Lyrics are lyrics, they don’t mean anything,” or “Who are you to tell me what the artist means?” Literary criticism has fallen on hard times in this age of radical subjectivity and cultural relativism. And yet we labor on: “There has to be a pony at the bottom of this pile of…” In my view, popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious. Perhaps no popular song has more successfully resisted our deconstructive efforts than the Beatles’ classic, I Am the Walrus – in part because the Beatles themselves denounced efforts to analyze its lyrics. But there may be a deeper reason. These lyrics are just about the last thing you’d expect from the Beatles: a Christology that is as crisp and clear as anything you’ll find anywhere in the New Testament. After all, John Lennon himself would later write, “Imagine there’s no heaven…and no religion too.” Stunningly then, Walrus opens with a ‘translation’ of John 14: 20, “I am in my father, and you are in me, and I am in you:” I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together… Newly elected Pope Leo XIV has reprised this theme with the motto he chose for his coat of arms: In Illo Uno Unum (“In the One, One.”) Walrus also channels James Joyce, another ‘atheistic theologian’. We are immediately reminded of Buck Mulligan intoning the words of the Eucharistic rite while standing atop the Dublin Omphalos at the opening of Ulysses . ‘I’ (the Walrus), of course, is Christ. He is one with his father ( I am he ), as we are one with the Father ( as you are he ); we are also one with Christ ( as you are me ) e.g., in Eucharist; and we are all together as Christ’s Mystical Body, as Church, and in the Kingdom of Heaven. Ok, seems like we may be on a roll here… but we’re not! What follows next is a bunch of ‘dream imagery’, possibly intended to parody the ‘less transparent’ parts of the Roman Catholic Liturgy: See how they run like pigs from a gun; see how they fly; I'm crying. Sitting on a corn flake, waiting for the van to come, Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday, man you've been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long. Again one thinks of Joyce: “Rite words in rote order.” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) Clearly, any attempt at an ‘interlinear translation’ of the Walrus text is doomed to fail. But that does not mean that the lyrics are nothing more than a chef’s signature word salad . There’s plenty of ‘dog whistle’ philosophy woven into these verses. First, there is a profound contempt for ‘civil authority’ (the police) and its client and principal beneficiary, ‘corporate culture’; then there’s a nod to the ‘nun-of-this-and-nun-of-that’ morality of the Decalogue and the rest of the Torah. In the 1960’s boys were still expected to assume society’s leadership roles. ‘A long face’ was the first sign that a boy might not be adjusting to society’s expectations. Ditto ‘crying’. ‘Fake it ‘till you make it’ might have been our motto growing up. Remember, “You better not pout, you better not cry…” but there’s a whole lota cryin’ goin’ on in this song. Feeling adrift? Not to worry. The chorus will get you back onside: I am the egg man. They are the egg men. I am the walrus. As clearly as the opening verse expounds Christology , the chorus represents Ecclesiology . The ‘egg man’, of course, is Jesus and the ‘egg men’ are his disciples, specifically his 12 apostles, the cornerstone of his church. But why ‘egg man’ specifically? Just as an egg is the ‘incarnation of a chicken’, so Jesus is the Incarnation of God. The egg is a potent symbol of resurrection, rebirth, and regeneration (the Easter Egg). It is an apt symbol for the dawn of a ‘new age’. Remember, Jesus is said to usher in the Age of Pisces . It’s 0 CE, it’s springtime in the Zodiac. And then there’s that other ‘egg man’, you know, Mr. H. Dumpty. Like Humpty, Jesus was fragile. Humpty fell, Jesus was pushed (i.e. crucified), but like Humpty, he broke. But whereas “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”, Jesus rose in tact (‘body and spirit’) from the dead! And ‘the egg men’? Jesus’ apostles, of course. Why ‘egg men’? Because they followed the Big Egg and like the Big Egg, they were martyred (except for John…and Judas of course). Mister City policeman sitting, pretty little policemen in a row. See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run; I'm crying. The earlier symbols reappear. From the beginning, Christianity has had a love/hate relationship with civil authority. On the one hand, “my kingdom is not of this world,” but on the other hand, it was civil and ecclesiastical authority that crucified Jesus and martyred the apostles. According to Thoman Aquinas, civil authority is A-Okay as long as it doesn’t conflict with God’s Values: Render unto God what is God’s . I doubt if the antics of UK police c. 1967 met this criterion. Still, celebrating the police ‘running’ is on the revolutionary side for the Beatles. After all, we’re not talking Barry McGuire here! Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye, crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess, boy, you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down. Of all the controversial themes embedded in Walrus , it was this verse that got the song banned by the BBC. In Puritanical London the only thing more compulsory than male privilege was female propriety : ‘Keep your knickers on, girlie (sic)’. Yet there was one thing even worse than male petulance and female promiscuity and that’s gender ambivalence . In the immortal words of Archie Bunker, “Girls were girls and men were men”… on both sides of the Atlantic! Of course, the Egg Man and his Egg Men (sic) sublimate all such division in unity. No more male privilege, no more female propriety, no more rigid segregation (by gender…or anything else). “In the One (Christ), we are One.” – Leo XIV Here the chorus repeats, once again clawing us back from the edge of a semantic abyss; and then… Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun. If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain. “Waiting for the sun” is the lot of every English man and woman…and of every Christian. Intentionally or not, Jesus left the early Church with an expectation of Apocalypse Soon , i.e., the Second Coming of Christ. It hasn’t happened…yet! (Although current events do give rise to speculation that it may be closer than we think.) Christians have come to terms with this elongated time frame by recognizing ‘anticipation and patience’ as salvific in their own right. In the same way, English men and women have come to terms with their weather. The Beatles anticipated the Rolling Stones by 2 years: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find…you get what you need.” The chorus returns, but this time with an added twist: I am the egg man (now good sir) They are the egg men (a poor man, made tame to fortune's blows) I am the walrus (good pity). The chorus has a chorus of its own. In the background, someone is paraphrasing text from Isaiah (the ‘Suffering Servant’)…or is it from Shakespeare’s King Lear ? Or are they reimagining the conversations that took place at the foot of the cross on Good Friday? Expert, texpert choking smokers, don't you think the joker laughs at you. See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide, I'm crying. The first 4 words of this verse sum up the entire human condition at the end of the Industrial Revolution: fragmentation of labor, technocracy, industrial pollution, and our own unhealthy strategies for relieving stress (e.g., smoking). The Joker, of course, is none other than Satan himself; and why shouldn’t he laugh? An entire culture is effectively discarding God’s gift of life in pursuit of vain pleasures and empty honors. I’d laugh too…if I wasn’t one of those people. Semolina Pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel tower; elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna, man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve saved the worst for last! Referring just to this final verse, John Lennon himself called it gibberish . Reportedly, he was trying to thwart folks like us who tend to over-analyze his lyrics. Perhaps we should take Lennon at this word. Others, however, have found meaning in these words. Pilchard might be a reference to Sgt. Pilchard of the London Met, famous for his drug raids carried out against rock and roll celebrities. ‘Semolina’ (wheat flour) could be a disparaging reference to ‘Whitey’; but it could also signify a kind of anti-Eucharist, ‘the Eucharist of the anti-Christ’. References to the Eifel Tower, penguins, and Hare Krishna signal Lennon’s desire to extend the message of Walrus beyond the geographical and cultural limits of ‘Christian England’. And the alleged ‘kicking’ of Poe, quite possibly at the feet of the UK police (above), is emblematic of how post-industrial civilization treats its artists. Like the Egg Men before him, Poe is the victim of ignorance and intolerance. Satisfied? Ok, maybe, but does anyone think this is really what Lennon had in mind when he wrote Walrus ? How should I know…and does it make any difference anyway? Archibald MacLeish said that a poem (song) should not ‘mean’ but ‘be’. I agree. But if it ‘is’, then it has a life of its own, apart from the artist who created it. There are two ways that something can exist. It can ‘exist’ in reference to other things, in which case we say, “It means;” or it can exist by, in, and for itself, in which case we say, “It is”. If Walrus is, then it must be free to mean whatever it comes to mean, and then this exercise in literary criticism is not in vain. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

"I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." < Back A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance Shalvi Waldman Jul 15, 2023 "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back A Brand New Razor David Cowles Jan 26, 2023 “You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor… Occam gives disheveled, often bloated philosophy a good shave. But not good enough!” You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor . According to William of Ockham (c. 1340), given a choice between two equally accurate models (of reality), the simpler model is preferred . Occam gives disheveled, often bloated philosophy a good shave. But not good enough. Occam leaves stubble. I propose to give philosophy an even closer shave using a brand new ‘ ATM Razor’: “When a phenomenon can be modeled by two or more equally elegant and spare ( Occam ) hypotheses, the model that posits (or requires) the fewest fixed entities is to be preferred .” All models distort the events they model. That’s the nature of modeling. But using the ATM Razor we can minimize the pressure exerted on process in the modeling process. All living Indo-European languages break down the perceptual field according to a more or less common ontological grid. In English, we talk about nouns (including pronouns) and verbs and the adjectives and adverbs that qualify them. 20 th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead characterized all western philosophy by lifting a single verse from an Anglican hymn: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” – the interplay of stability and flux. In so doing, Whitehead was doing no more than sampling Parmenides, the father of western philosophy, who spoke 2,500 years ago of two realms of Being: Aletheia (Truth) and Doxa (Appearance). Being in the realm of Aletheia is monotone, motionless, unchanging and without space or time. Everything else is located in the realm of Doxa : qualities, motions, changes, and spatiotemporal relations. Whitehead has contributed many important ideas to western philosophy. His ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ is a philosophical reformulation of the first commandment of the Decalogue, the prohibition against Idolatry. Put simply, whenever human beings break down a perceptual field, there is a danger that they will over-seed those fields with nouns: ergo “misplaced concreteness." Example: as we ‘watch’ the process of evaporation and precipitation, we ‘see’ clouds of water vapor, but we call them ”ice cream castles in the air.” That is a paradigmatic example of misplaced concreteness, our tendency to over-nominalize. Nouns stick…and ultimately stink. Verbs don’t. Once you’ve named a phenomenon, you have conferred upon it a kind of immortality. In many cultures, the name (noun) of something is an acceptable substitute for the thing (or person) itself. Absent the application of some outside force, we expect our ‘nouns’ to endure...and rot. Want proof? Go to bed! After a bit of tossing and turning you’ll find yourself in a world where ‘named entities’ are much less durable. We don’t expect the people, places, and things we encounter in our dreams to maintain a fixed identity or even to endure once our imagination (attention) has moved on. In the dreamworld, at least, unobserved trees do not fall in unobserved forests and if they do, they don’t make unheard sounds. Dreamland is a cool place to visit for a few hours every evening…but I wouldn’t want to live there. If I did, you’d medicate me… or lock me up. Apparently, society cannot tolerate the complete dissolution of our nominals (i.e., the smashing of our pumpkins, aka idols). Verbs, on the other hand, are more forgiving. One size fits one! There’s a process and we ‘name it’ (or describe it) using a ‘verb’; but we don’t automatically assume (1) that that process will continue after we’ve moved on or (2) that we will encounter that exact same process elsewhere in other contexts. When we use verbs to model process, we are being more ‘data dependent’ (in the words of the Federal Reserve); we are being more faithful to experience. When we use nouns, we force ourselves to fit our perceptions into a fixed, enduring structure. We turn events into objects so we can better manipulate them. Mapping the perceptual field onto a Cartesian grid, we can call one axis ‘nominal’ (say, X) and the other axis ‘verbal’ (say, Y). We are interested in evaluating various models of P (‘perceived process’) where X and Y are variables, but the sum of X and Y is always constant. More X less Y, and vice versa. In such a world, absent other, overriding considerations, we should always favor the model that gives us the largest Y-value (and, therefore, the smallest X-Value). That’s our new ATM Razor. Any questions? 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 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! David Cowles Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part I explored the scientific implications of the Beatles’ iconic 1968 film, Yellow Submarine , a treasure trove of cosmological insights made to order for the 21 st century convergence of Science and Theology. We watched as the Beatles (or their writers) deconstructed our ‘Universe’ into a system of ‘branes’, called ‘seas’: Seas of Time (time), Science (space), Monsters (things), Headlands (thoughts), Holes ( Le Neant ), and the enigmatic Sea of Green. We set out on a voyage that will take us through each brane on our way to a place (or state of mind) called, Pepperland . We didn’t get far! In fact, we only made it through one sea, the Sea of Time…but oh what a ‘time’ we had there! 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! Note to Readers : In this essay I use ‘Pepperland’ to refer to Pepperland Proper, the last stop on our journey, and ‘ Pepperland ’ to refer to reality in its entirety, i.e., Liverpool, Pepperland Proper, and the Yellow Sub itself. When our journey ends, we will discover that Pepperland, Liverpool and the Yellow Sub are just three different manifestations, three different personae , of one reality. In the end…it’s all Pepperland ! So, next stop: the Sea of Science! If the subject of the Sea of Time was Time (“it’s time for time”), then the subject of the ‘Sea of Science’ should be Science, but it’s not! It’s Space. (Perhaps the editors didn’t like the sound of ‘Sea of Space’.) This sea is characterized by its rectilinear grid and the Platonic solids that populate it. It’s ‘Plato meets Descartes’. Against this background, various waveforms undulate. This sea can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a 2-dimensional surface or a 3-dimensional solid. Figures emerge out of a flat background and enclose a volume, only to undergo further deformations that turn them back into 2-dimensional surfaces. Years after Yellow Submarine , it was discovered during the study of black holes that there is no difference between 2-dimensional surfaces and 3- dimensional spaces. They both encode the same amount of ‘information’. A hologram, for example, is a 3-dimensional image generated from 2- dimensional film. For that purpose at least, the 3rd dimension is superfluous. Now the voyage to Pepperland moves from ‘time and space’ to ‘things and thoughts’; we are entering the Sea of Monsters, followed by the Foothills of the Headlands. The first two branes probe the world as we experience it (spacetime); the remaining branes explore us as the ones who experience that world. The ‘Monstrous Sea’ is populated, well, by monsters. The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore; or if we do, we don’t recognize them. We Liverpudlians have done a pretty good job of purging ‘monsters’ from our immediate vicinity…but only our immediate vicinity. Believe me, monstrosity is alive and well in our world, as the Beatles were only too well aware! The Sea of Monsters is populated by a variety of creatures that exhibit some physical traits similar to ours but others that are very, very different. Most striking is the wide combination of ‘organs’ that ‘Beatle-Biology’ allows. In Liverpool, we are still just experimenting with Bionics. In the Sea of Monsters, most creatures exhibit a combination of organic and mechanical features. D’Arcy Thomas in On Growth and Form found parallels between biological and non-biological patterns. R. Buckminster Fuller did something similar in his two-volume work, Synergistics . Ultimately, technology and biology are not incompatible: if a form works in one realm, there’s no reason it might not work in the other as well. Yellow Submarine is an example of ‘ontological democracy’: it treats organic and mechanical forms as equals. Form is form and that’s an end to it. Organic vs. artificial is a false distinction. Our jealously guarded ‘ontological categories’ are reduced to ‘ontological soup’. One of the creatures in this ‘monstrous sea’ is the ‘dreaded vacuum’. Like a black hole, this creature sucks into itself everything in its environment. “We’ll be sucked into oblivion…or even further,” says Young Fred, the newly appointed admiral aboard HMS Yellow Submarine; and sure enough, they are! The ‘dreaded vacuum’ not only sucks up all objects in its path, including our yellow sub and its crew, but it also sucks up the fabric of spacetime itself. Ultimately, it even sucks itself, tail first, into oblivion: The Beatles’ universe is an ouroboros . The vacuum leaves us with precisely nothing, nothing that is except Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD (JHB). But that’s ok because the Boob is ‘nothing’, quite literally, as expressed in this formula: 1 + (~1) = Boob At the time Yellow Submarine was produced, it was generally believed that black holes annihilated information as well as objects, fields, etc. Years later, Stephen Hawking suggested that information was not destroyed by black holes, but was conserved after all, albeit in a form that renders it useless for any ‘work’. Astoundingly, Yellow Submarine proposed the exact same theory, 6 years earlier. JHB is Hawking radiation! That’s what the Boob is! Information without order. If Stephen Hawking got his ideas from the Beatles, he should have given them proper credit…and maybe he meant to do just that when he famously said, “We stand on the shoulders of giants”. After the vacuum has done its worst, we are left with JHB. Jeremy consists of all the information that existed in the universe prior to its implosion. As Hawking proposed, information is conserved but disorganized in the Boob. Take this snippet of dialog for example: “Do you speak English? “Old English, Middle English, a dialect pure. “But do you speak English? “You know I’m not sure.” But back to our journey. We need to pick-up the pace if we’re to reach Pepperland by nightfall. The first three ‘physical seas’ have been wiped out by the vacuum monster. The ‘physicality’ of Liverpool served us well through the Seas of Time, Science and Monsters but it won’t be much use to us going forward. ‘Physicality’ itself has vanished. What remains? Information (Booby)…and the sub itself. Even though the submarine was sucked up by the vacuum monster, it avoids ‘oblivion’ because, turns out, the sub is the Eternal Present that we’ve been looking for at least since the days of Ponce de Leon. Therefore, the sub can never be erased, annulled, or destroyed. As long as there is anything that is, it is. Next stop: the Foothills of the Headlands. Do people tell you that you “live too much in your own head”? Or do you sometimes wish that you could live life ‘virtually’ rather than physically? Either way, this is the sea for you! Headlands is the domain of pure thought. It takes the form of transparent heads unencumbered by functioning bodies. In the Headlands, thoughts lack orientation, consistency, coherence, purpose, and effect. (Hmm, sounds like we’re ‘inside the Beltway’!) In the Headlands, we see the consequences of an ‘all-in-the-mind’ ontology (e.g. Philosophical Idealism) and believe me, it’s not pretty. Bottom line: “mind matters but mind matter” - another bumper sticker to buy as a souvenir of our trip. After the Headlands…the Sea of Holes! We’ve passed through bodies & ideas, forms & concepts; what’s left? Nothing…but that’s a good thing. In Beatle-World, something and nothing have a complementary and dialectical relationship. Now we are passing into the realm of ‘negative space’. The usual relation of figure and ground is reversed. The sea itself is the ground and the holes in that sea (ground) constitute the figure. Nothingness ( Le Neant ) has now become concrete…so concrete that Ringo is able to put a ‘hole’ in his pocket, quite literally. The Sea of Holes is the inflection point in our journey. The ‘figure-ground’ relationship has reversed; for the rest of the voyage, it’s ‘ground-figure’. Something similar happens in Dante’s Divine Comedy . There, the travelers (this time, Dante & Virgil), having reached the lowest rung of Hell (Inferno), witness Satan, encased in ice. Dante begins the ascent of Mount Purgatory, but when he looks back, he is surprised to see that Satan is now hanging ‘upside down’ in his block of ice. The topology of the Sea of Holes is radically non-orientable. There is no consistent sense of directionality, no spatial ordering. It’s like an Escher drawing on steroids. In fact, the Sea of Holes is a paradigmatic example of non-orientability. Any system ( Pepperland ) that contains a ‘locally non-orientable’ component (like the Sea of Holes) must be ‘globally non-orientable’ as well. It turns out that the orientable universe familiar to us muggles is just a special configuration within a sea of non-orientability. In a non-orientable universe, there are no privileged vantage points, no privileged directions. In fact, there are no beginnings, middles or ends at all. However, every ‘point’ has two distinct and opposite orientations (like ‘up and down arrows’ on a Mobius strip). “Go for a walk?” Ok, where do you want to go? “Doesn’t matter just head out.” Pretty soon we get to our ‘destination’ but there are a couple of problems: our journey has brought us right back to where we started except that now everything is somehow inverted or reversed. In the Netflix series, Stanger Things , they call this ‘Upside Down World’. “So, what now? Turn around and head back?” No need, just keep walking ahead. Sure enough, we’re soon back ‘home’ and this time everything is back to normal. We are in ‘Right Side Up World’ again…and ready to cross into Pepperland at last…if only we could find it. First, we must pass through one more sea, the Sea of Green; but there’s a catch: out of a seemingly infinite array of holes in the Sea of Holes, only one hole connects the Sea of Holes to the Sea of Green…and on to Pepperland. This is a problem for our Argonauts! As we know from the study of Black Holes, all holes look the same so we can’t examine the holes for clues. How about the surroundings? Any helpful signs there? Nope! Remember, the ‘surroundings’ are ‘nothing’. There is only one possible way out: stochastic trial and error…which has an infinitesimal likelihood of success. Infinitesimal…but not quite zero. Fortunately, our Argonauts do find the one and only hole that functions as a passageway to the Sea of Green, but the Sea of Green is not like the other seas. It’s merely a featureless, ultra-thin membrane separating the other branes from Pepperland. So full speed ahead! Once the Beatles arrive, they discover that they bear an “uncanny” resemblance to four of its permanent residents, “the originals”, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, we later learn that the Beatles are the Sergeant Pepper band! Initially, “the originals” are separated from the rest of the Pepperland by the dome of a “big glass bowl”. It is as if the cosmos were censoring itself. If the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, then both ‘copies’ cannot coexist. The ‘big glass bowl’ maintains the ‘cosmic order’. But that order is about to be shattered! Remember, Ringo has a ‘hole’ in his pocket (from the Sea of Holes). Ringo applies the hole to the side of the “big glass bowl” and through the medium of nothingness the ontological barrier dissolves and the two realities merge onto the same extensive plane. Just as the branes connect Liverpool with Pepperland, so Ringo’s hole (anti-brane?) connects the temporal Beatles with their eternal alter-egos. Is this an illustration of the Christian doctrine known as Resurrection of the Body – the ultimate unification of ‘heaven and earth’? Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Beatles under the aspect of eternity (Parmenides’ Aletheia ) while the Beatles are Sergeant Pepper’s Band under the aspect of history ( Parmenides’ Doxa ). When Ringo’s hole connects the two realms, we learn that the division of Universe into ‘temporal’ and ‘eternal’ rests on a false distinction. Temporality and eternity are complementary aspects of a single phenomenon. So it turns out that Liverpool and Pepperland are really the same place! We never left the Pier after all. Liverpool is the spatiotemporal aspect of Pepperland and Pepperland is the eternal aspect of Liverpool. Nothing that happens in Liverpool stays in Liverpool. Whatever happens in Liverpool happens in Pepperland and vice-versa. In the language of John Bell (Bell’s theorem, 1964), Liverpool and Pepperland are ‘entangled’. In the language of Jesus of Nazareth, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. And what about the sub itself? That also is Pepperland …in its aspect of Presence: Spacetime (Liverpool), Eternity (Sub), and Presence (Pepperland), the 3 faces of reality, Pepperland . If we were writing in the 4 th century CE style of the Nicene Creed , we might say that the Yellow Submarine ‘proceeds from Liverpool and from Pepperland’. The sub (Present) never leaves Liverpool…or Pepperland for that matter. Nevertheless, it continually shuttles between them. In any event, the ontology of Yellow Submarine is overtly ‘Trinitarian’. I hope you enjoyed our two part voyage to reality’s core. I apologize if the music and the graphics are not up to the Beatles’ original. But I hope my marginalia may have made your trip worthwhile. I hope to see you soon on our next all-inclusive cruise. 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 The Probability of Nothing David Cowles “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Riddle : How is language like Willie Mays? Answer : It rules center field! Of course, I am referring to ontological ‘center field’: the tiny, daily transactions (like photon exchange) that bind society (or the world) together. But language can play tricks on us…especially when it deals with stuff at the ends of the ontological spectrum. Take the word itself, ‘nothing’, for example. ‘Nothing’ is a noun and, as we know from primary school, a noun represents a ‘person, place, or thing’. Which of these does ‘nothing’ represent? None, obviously. The word itself tells you all you need to know about its meaning: ‘nothing’ = ‘no thing’. Now we have a word that fails to meet the definition of a noun playing the role of a noun in ordinary speech. What could possibly go wrong? Well, because we use the word, ‘nothing’, as a noun, we could begin to think of Nothing per se as something (some ‘thing’). This is an instance of what Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” - the fundamental fallacy of Western metaphysics. Then what is ‘nothing’? Today, we have a number for it: zero. But we didn’t have that number until the 13th century (Fibonacci) and it wasn’t universally accepted into arithmetic until the 18th century (Leibniz). If zero is a real number like other real numbers, then is nothing something? We also have another mathematical symbol for Nothing, ø, the null set. This notation insulates Nothing from the domain of real numbers. We are used to the idea of ‘Ineffable God’: God so far transcends our world that nothing we say about God can be true or even meaningful. Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, “God is outside the numbers.” We’re not used to the idea of ‘Ineffable Nothing’. And yet, ‘nothing’ transcends all things just as God does. God, aka Being, Value, Love, is the ontological opposite of Nothing, which is the absence of ‘I am’ ( Exodus ), ‘it is’ ( Genesis ), ‘you are’ ( Gospel of John ). We begin, as all serious philosophical essays must, with Robert Frost , the ‘Quantum Poet’. In his best known poem, The Road Not Taken , he sets out the quintessential existential dilemma: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” Happens a million times a day, every day! Frost, subject to the human condition , must pick a path, ‘sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler’. Frost makes his choice, ‘I kept the first for another day’; but hero that he is, Frost realizes that this is a forever decision, that the universe bifurcates at this point: ‘Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted I should ever come back’. Nor does our hero hide behind the rationalization of ‘objectivity’; he knows that the road chosen is in no way superior to the other, for ‘both that morning equally lay’. Standing at the point of divergence, at the moment of choice, both roads are equally real, equally attractive, equally effective, and therefore ontologically identical. Frost’s choice is apparently unconditioned. He is as likely to choose A as he is B. Initially, each option has a probability of P ≈ 50%. Since each P > 0, both exist! But whenever Frost’s choice of one path becomes irrevocable (P = 100%), then the alternate route (P = 0) ceases to exist…for Frost. It is no longer part of his Actual World. Proposition : ‘X exists, iff P(x) > 0’. Once P = 0, the alternate path no longer meets Gregory Bateson’s existential criterion: it’s no longer ‘a difference that makes a difference’. When there was no longer an option for Frost to pursue ‘the road not taken’, it ceased to exist… chez Frost. Much of Western philosophy is based on a false conception of Nothing. When we say ‘nothing’ we often have in mind something: a void or a vacuum, ‘nothing’ relatively speaking, but not absolutely nothing . Our ‘nothing’ tends to be ‘something…dimly lit’, a bit like Hades in Homer’s Odyssey . It’s even been called ‘a receptacle’, ‘a womb’, an ‘ether’, ‘pure potentiality’. Today, the cognoscente call it ‘negative vacuum pressure’. Nothing can’t be any of those things, not even metaphorically. Nothing can only be nothing. Nothing has no hair. It’s not a depression left in the fabric by ‘something’ when it departs. It’s not negative space, negative energy or negative vacuum pressure; it’s not positive or negative, it’s nothing. It’s good to know that we are not alone in our thinking. Perhaps we’re not mainstream (yet) but we’re definitely not flying solo . In fact, we share our perspective with Parmenides of Elea, the father of Western philosophy: “It is not to be said or thought that ‘it is not’…It is or it is not…let go the one (it is not) as unthinkable, unnamable, for it is not a real route.” ‘The road not taken’ cannot be ‘said or thought’ or even named because ‘it is not a real route’. When Frost reaches his destination, he is surrounded by reporters all with a single question: “Why did you choose that path?” To which Frost answered, “There was more than one path?” Parmenides viewed the World as both the ‘Realm of Things as they Appear’ ( Doxa ) and the ‘Realm of things as they Are’ ( Aletheia ). In the realm of Doxa , Frost confronts an apparent existential choice. In the realm of Aletheia , the apparent ‘choice’ is without consequence and so does not ‘exist’; it’s not a ‘difference that makes a difference’ because ‘both that morning equally lay’ and both led to the same destination. There was no objective reason to prefer one over the other. So there never was an existential dilemma because there was really only ever one path (a path and its mirror image). This perspective pops up all across ‘the fruited plain’ of Western philosophy, but for now, let’s stick with Quantum Mechanics (QM)! Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ states (roughly) that everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. Corollary : Whatever did not happen could not have happened, because if it even might have happened, it would have happened. Try saying that 10 times! An entity’s worldline is its ‘route’ but apparent routes that pass through ‘counterfactual space’ are not real routes; their probabilities are all equal to 0. If it isn’t now, it never was, it could not have been, and it cannot come to be in the future. Only real routes are ‘real’. Everett channels Parmenides…2400 years later. There is ‘is’ and that’s all there is…no might, no should, no would, no could, just is. Let’s apply this way of reasoning to questions involving probabilities, beginning with a traditional Hasidic folk tale: Once upon a time, a certain Rabbi was on his way home from Schule when he encountered an elderly widow crawling on her hands and knees under a streetlamp. Not wanting to play the part of passer-by in a future production of The Good Samaritan and eager to perform one last mitzvah before going to bed for the night, the Rabbi offered to assist. "I've lost my shiny penny, the only thing I have left in the world," the widow wailed. "And is this where you lost it?" the Rabbi inquired innocently. "No," she replied. "I lost it over there." The quizzical Rabbi, still hoping to be helpful, asked, "Then why are you looking for it here?" "Because the light is better!" This story is often presented as a commentary on the widow's folly, but in fact, the widow is the hero of the story. She defies conventional wisdom. Why look for a lost penny in pitch darkness where there's no hope of finding anything? Unlit space is not part of the widow’s world; from her perspective it is Nothing. So the only ‘rational’ thing for her to do is to search under the lamplight where P > 0. Let’s rephrase: the probability of the penny being under the light is actually 100% (P = 1) because the penny has to be somewhere (P=1), and every other possibility has zero probability (P = 0): 1 – 0 = 1. But the probability of her finding the penny under the light is much, much less (P < 1)…but not zero (P > 0). Ok, this sounds officially crazy. How can the probability of the penny being under the lamp be 100% when we said earlier that the penny is probably not there? Once again, we find our answer in Quantum Mechanics. According to QM, everything is everywhere all the time and anywhere you look there is a finite possibility (however low) that you will find your quantum there…as long as you’ve confined your search to places that exist for you. Now that we’re comfortable applying Parmenides’ ontology to situations involving probabilities, we’re ready to apply it to the greatest floating craps game of all: ‘Pascal's Wager’ (1670 CE). Confronted with the God Question , French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, employed a forerunner of what is today called ‘Game Theory’. Pascal divided a sheet of paper into four quadrants. Across the top of the page, he wrote, “I believe that God exists;” down the left-hand margin, he wrote, “God does exist;” and then he filled in the appropriate truth values: (0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1). Pascal reasoned that one of four things must be true: (1) I do not believe that God exists, and he doesn’t; (2) I do not believe that God exists, but he does; (3) I believe that God exists, but he doesn’t; (4) I believe that God exists, and he does. So God is ‘free’ to exist or not and you are free to believe or not. Yet, scenarios 1, 2, and 3 are effectively identical. They amount to the same thing. Believe whichever one you choose; it makes no difference. They are interchangeable because they each produce the same incremental value: (0*0) or (0*1) or (1*0), i.e. Zero. Only #4 (1*1) is different; only #4 generates incremental value. Quadrants 1, 2, and 3 do not meet Gregory Bateson’s criterion (for ‘being’, above). They produce zero incremental value so there is no ultimate value difference among them and their contribution of value to the world is null (ø). Since all other options generate 0 incremental value, P(4) must be 100% (P=1): 1 – (0 + 0 + 0) = 1. To quote a medieval Irish poet, “Naught (0) is all else to me save than Thou art!” Centuries later, Pascal proved that this is not just a statement of subjective faith…it’s a statement of objective reality. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Pronouns David Cowles Next time someone asks you for your ‘pronouns,’ try telling them, ‘you/you’…see what happens. I hadn’t thought much about the English language pronouns since third grade; now it seems I think of little else. Suddenly, the lowly pronoun is uppermost in everyone’s mind, be they eight…or 80. For more than a decade now, ‘they/them’ has been gradually replacing ‘she/her,’ ‘he/him,’ and ‘it.’ If this trend succeeds, and to a large extent it already has, English will lose distinctions of gender (M, F, N) and of number (S, P). Apparently, ‘case distinctions’ (they/them) will be retained. I said ‘case distinctions,’ not ‘class distinctions;’ but wait! Will “they/them” make it into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies? Or will it become another one of the many markers we use to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them?’ Eliza Doolittle was permanently excluded from the upper rungs of English society because of her accent, that is, until Henry Higgins came along and ‘fixed it.’ Thanks to the good professor, aided no doubt by the post-war ubiquity of television, accent is no longer reliable in the service of our deeply treasured, if much maligned, ‘snap judgments.’ Regrettable because there is no knowledge quite so satisfying as a good stereotype confirmed! I mean, “How am I supposed to know how to treat someone if I don’t know what social class they belong to?” It’s quite a dilemma! Well, you know, you’re posh . Will the pronoun war be co-opted by our social gatekeepers to keep old barriers in place…or even rebuild them where they’re worn with age and misuse? Only time will tell…but back to the task at hand. This is not the first time that our attention has been directed toward the lowly pronoun. 100 years ago, existentialist philosopher and Jewish theologian Martin Buber focused on the distinction between “I – Thou (you)” and “I – It” relationships, the latter appropriate for certain interactions with the ‘inanimate world,’ the former more appropriate to human relationships. Self-explanatory? But the problem comes when I impose an “I – It” structure onto an “I – Thou” opportunity. Ideally, my relationships with ontological equals will always be of the “I – Thou” sort…but of course, they’re not. Unfortunately, most of us do not have “I – Thou” relationships with our grocers, for example. Yet, most of us would accept the proposition that ‘grocers’ are our ontological equals. In fact, most of us today are comfortable with the idea that all (or almost all) human beings are our equals. This was not always so. Until very recently, in fact, it was entirely acceptable to consign other tribes, other races, other nationalities, etc. to an ontological level inferior to our own: “They’re not really human.” While the founding fathers were building a society “with liberty and justice for all,” they were also reinforcing the institution of slavery. In order to reconcile these apparently exclusive priorities, the southern slaveholders had to separate the concept of ‘slave’ from the concept of ‘all humans.’ Implicitly, or even explicitly, they dehumanized and reified their slaves. Slavery is a paradigm of ‘I – It’ relatedness. Commonwealth is, at least arguably, a paradigm of ‘I – Thou.’ But to quote the immortal Cars, “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong,” and sure enough, 75 years later, the institution of slavery was on the ropes: the institution, not its hateful legacy. Reification is like skunk: once it’s in the fabric, it’s almost impossible to get out. Buber challenges us to expand the ‘Universe of Thou.’ It’s not just our kids, our spouses, our Higher Power, as many of us would prefer. It’s the guy across the street, the woman on life support, the homeless family…you know the drill. Implicit in Buber, and empowered by our reluctantly expanded collective consciousness, is the call to push the envelope of ‘ontological parity’ (or ‘congruence:’ I’m not insisting on pure equality here) beyond the species barrier. What about sea mammals? Apes? Pets? What about bees…and forests? I could go on. (“Please don’t!”) What do Hasidic Jews and Native Americans have in common? They both live in an enchanted world. For them, and others, the earth, the entire universe in fact, is ‘Thou:’ a living entity for us to nurture and enjoy…not injure and destroy. Sticking with Buber’s terminology, we have an opportunity to have an ‘I – Thou’ relationship with the Universe, through its creator and through each and every entity in it. But most of us don’t come close to realizing this potential. We take the so-called inanimate world for granted and guiltlessly rape it to satisfy our own immediate needs. We carefully cultivate plants and husband livestock, but only so that we can harvest and slaughter them down the road. Worst of all, though, we allow the poison of ‘I – It’ to seep into relationships with our fellow human beings, even those closest to us. 100 years on, I suspect that society is no better positioned today on the ‘It – Thou’ scale than it was when Buber started writing. And yet, Buber didn’t go nearly far enough. Traditionally, English has distinguished pronouns according to three ‘persons’ and two ‘numbers’ (singular/plural): I, me, we, us (‘I’ for our purposes); You, including thou and thee (‘you’); He, she, or it (‘it’). Both of Buber’s dyads begin with the pronoun, ‘I;’ but that ‘I’ is only stable as a placeholder, a catalyst. Implicit in the concept of ‘I – Thou’ is the potentiality for reciprocity. Of course, we all know about ‘unrequited love;’ but even then, the possibility of reciprocity remains, albeit unrealized. That’s what makes these situations so tragic. A fully developed ‘I – Thou’ relationship must also be ‘Thou – I’. A reciprocal ‘I – Thou’ relationship is really a ‘Thou – Thou’ relationship. In the context of that relationship, I am because you are, and you are because I am. We are two ‘thees’ in a pod. When I enter into an “I – It” relationship with another entity (human, sentient or otherwise), I immediately preclude the possibility of reciprocity. I have substituted an active voice vector for the middle voice resonance arrow of ‘I – Thou.’ The communication is all one way, and when I relate to an entity in a way that precludes reciprocity, then I make myself inert, I turn ‘me’ into ‘it.’ So, whether it’s ‘I – Thou’ or ‘I – It’, the ‘I’ is unstable in every relationship. As soon as ‘I’ comes in contact with any potential relatum , it decomposes like a subatomic particle into either a ‘Thou’ or an ‘It.’ ‘I’ is the still coherent wave function in Quantum Mechanics: it decoheres ‘on contact’ to become a ‘Thou’ or an ‘It.’ This is an admittedly ‘off label’ use of C.S. Lewis’ notion of the “Great Divorce.” We are all living in two worlds, not one. One world is a world populated only by ‘It(s),’ the other only by ‘Thou(s).’ While the two worlds are entirely coincident, they do not interact. They are ships passing in the night. Between these coincident worlds, there lies an infinitesimal, non-orientable membrane (called the ‘Sea of Green’ in the Beatles’ 1968 movie, Yellow Submarine ). ( Read "Yellow Submarine Part II" here. ) When we pass from the ‘It – It’ universe to the ‘Thou – Thou’ universe, we pass from Liverpool to Pepperland (in the movie) and from ‘this world’ to the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘Thou – Thou’ relationships, to the extent that we can foster them on earth, are a foretaste of eternal life. This is precisely the state of affairs we long for when we pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Challenge : Next time someone asks you for your ‘pronouns,’ try telling them, ‘you/you’ or even ‘thou/thou;’ see what happens and let us know. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back May Day David Cowles “This one day converges mythology (Norse), cosmology (Pagan), theology (Christian) and ideology (Marxist) with ancient fertility rites. And for my next trick…” A very, very long time ago, when I was young, our favorite days of the year were Christmas and Halloween, not necessarily in that order. At Christmas, we were dependent on the kindness of others; but on Halloween we were allowed to make our own fun and express our primal pagan spirits, perhaps for the only time that year. So what is the most important day of the year? For lovers, it might be Valentine’s Day; for veterans, Memorial Day; for patriots, the 4th of July and for gourmands, Thanksgiving: all worthy to be sure, but perhaps all wide of the mark. A survey of western traditions suggests that the most important day of the year might be May Day. That’s right, May Day! This one day converges mythology (Norse), cosmology (Pagan), theology (Christian) and ideology (Marxist) with ancient fertility rites. And for my next trick… Quite a feat! Or is it? As we shall see, it is a common concern with economic justice that ties all of these May Day traditions together; but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The May Day tradition, in all its forms, is a celebration of Natural Law, a fundamental ordering principle in Universe that underlies astronomical phenomena, natural processes, cultural expression and ethical behavior. In recent centuries, the Zeitgeist has focused on ‘man’s conquest of nature’; this is far removed from the idea of Natural Law. In Judaism, the law is twice manifest, once in the Written Torah, once in the Oral Torah. The Written Torah consists of 613 mitzvah found in the first five books of the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to Moses. The Oral Torah is natural law. It is the same law as before, but instead of 613 precepts, it is inscribed in the processes of nature and on the hearts of men and women. According to the Hasidic tradition, there is one law (written and oral) and that law governs the cosmos, the earth and everything that happens on Earth. According to the pre-Christian calendar of Northern Europe, May 1 is the first day of summer (and November 1, the first day of winter). While this may not make sense from the point of view of weather, it makes great sense astronomically. The summer solstice falls right in between May 1 and August 1, so why shouldn’t that 91-day period be labeled “summer”? They are two of the Cross Days that divide the pagan calendar into its eight seasons. In pagan lore, the eves of May 1st and November 1st are special times because that is when the spirit world is closest to our physical world. On those two eves, it is as though a ‘portal’ opens that allows direct communication between the two realms. The Christian celebrations of All Hallows Eve, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are extensions of this theme. Many of the activities that we now associate with October 31 were once also associated with April 30: bonfires, wild merry-making, and trick-or-treating, for example. Robert Graves ( The White Goddess ) wrote: “Christmas was merry in the Middle Ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned maypoles…” And why not? Roughly, maypoles are to May Day what Christmas trees are to Christmas. Each links the respective festival to fertility ( phallus ). Like Christmas trees, a maypole may be a living tree or one that has been cut down for the occasion. It can even be ‘artificial’ in the sense that a bare log (or some aluminum wire?) may be decorated with greenery to suggest a living tree. Trees are powerful symbols and important examples of the fertility of the earth, and the Maypole’s shape connects human sexuality and reproduction with the more general fertility theme represented by trees. In Tudor England, it was customary for people to spend May Day Eve making love in the fields to promote the fertility of the land. Children conceived on such occasions were known as ‘Merry-be-Gots’. In Norse mythology, a single tree, Ygdrasil , structures the entire cosmos. Separate ‘homelands’ are allocated to humans, gods, elves, giants, trolls, and others, but the branches of one giant tree, Odin’s ash tree (Ygdr = Odin or Woden), link these semi-autonomous regions into a coherent universe. The Maypole symbolizes Ygdrasil, the mythological backbone of the world. Beyond mythology, the Maypole also expresses an important astronomical concept. Early on, humans discovered that the periods of Earth’s rotation and revolution were trivial compared to a cycle known as the Precession of the Equinox. Maypoles symbolize axis mundi , the earth’s axis, whose ‘wobble’ defines this 26,000-year celestial cycle. Does James Joyce reprise this theme in Ulysses , where Stephen Dedalus lives in a tower which he calls Omphalos , the belly button of the world? ( Sidebar : That S.D. lives inside the axis mundi, the navel of the universe, is a pretty good clue to the meaning of this supposedly impenetrable novel.) Finally, trees play a crucial role in early European religion and spirituality. Recall the oak-worship of Celtic Druids, for example. Across Europe, individual trees or whole species of trees were once regarded as divine and only later became associated with anthropomorphic deities alleged to live inside them (e.g. tree nymphs, hamadryas). Did this development in ontology mirror the of nominalization of Indo-European language? According to Sir James Frazer ( The Golden Bough ), Teutonic words for ‘temple’ actually derive from words denoting ‘sacred grove’, and the old word for ‘sanctuary’ is the Latin word, nemus , meaning grove or woodland glade. At one time, it seems, our groves and glades were our churches and our cathedrals. During the persecution of Roman Catholicism by the English government, Irish Catholics practiced their religion in the woodlands, reconnecting them with their pre-Christian spiritual traditions. More recently, the 20th century poet Ezra Pound recaptured the association between nature and spirit in his Cantos : “Aram vult nemus” (the grove needs an altar). This theme first appears in Canto LXXIV, the opening of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, the beginning of his Paradiso . From LXXIV on, Cantos is Pound’s blueprint for building (rebuilding?) “The city of Dioce” (i.e., Paradise). Perhaps anticipating by several decades our ‘Green movement’, Pound prescribes the reunification of nature and spirit. He would have been at home among the Druids. Along with fertility, mythology and cosmology, ancient May Day rites include an economic theme. Again, according to Frazer ( The Golden Bough ): “At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called Little May Rose, dressed in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song… In the course of the song, a wish is expressed that those who give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn…” “In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May, young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in praise of May in which mention is made of the ‘bread and meal that come in May’. If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and no bread to feed them.” “… In some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide…the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a bride… They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present, and tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they themselves will have something the whole year through; but if they give her nothing, they themselves will have nothing.” How should we understand this pan-cultural focus on May Day giving? In few, if any, cases are the gifts substantial. They seem to be symbolic, but symbolic of what? First, there is the magical element. It is spring and over the coming months; we will be expecting the earth to give of itself for our benefit. According to the ‘principles of magic’, like begets like. If we expect nature to give, we also must give; just as in England, May merry-makers reproduced (Merry-be-Gots) to encourage the land to reproduce. (Lie quiet Malthus!) On another level, the welfare of one is understood to be dependent on the welfare of all. In a society where everyone has the necessities of life, the overall economy will be more prosperous. Obviously, the practitioners of early May Day rituals were not trained economists, but they may have intuitively grasped the nature and necessity of social solidarity. It is only in recent centuries that we have lost sight of this essential truth. As the ‘natural economy’ (fertility) benefits everyone, so must the ‘human economy’ (generosity) benefit all. It is here, of course, that these early May Day rites intersect with later day Christian and Marxist versions. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, the month of May is dedicated to Mary, the mother (fertility) of Jesus. May 1st, May Day, stands at the head of Mary’s special month. In many Catholic areas, it has traditionally been a day of brightly colored, florid processions, reminiscent of the pre-Christian festivals (maypoles) mentioned above. Controversially, in 1955 Pope Pius XII designated May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, underscoring yet again May Day’s universal economic aspect. Mary speaks sparingly in scripture, but when she does, she packs a punch. In her Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 – 52), for example, Mary says of Yahweh, “He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, but the rich he has sent away empty.” Are we reading Luke…or Lenin? Mary of the Magnificat is every bit as radical as Marx of the Manifesto …in fact, much more so! Compared to Christians, Communists are wimps! (But I promised no politics, sorry.) Still, Communists and Socialists are primarily concerned with questions of economic justice, so it cannot be overlooked that they elected, ostensibly for other reasons, to schedule their own chief annual celebration ( May Day ) on the very day that pagans and Christians choose to celebrate their commitments to economic justice. We have drawn material from anthropology, mythology, cosmology, theology, and economics; out of all of these cultural expressions, we can, I think, distill a common core: there exists a body of natural law that spans ages, continents, and cultures…and economic justice is integral to that law. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

For centuries, many Christians have found support for their faith in the accounts of miracles worked by Jesus, and following Jesus, by various apostles, saints and martyrs. Others, however, have rejected these accounts as ‘impossible’ and therefore ‘unbelievable’ and this judgment has led them to dismiss all accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings as ‘suspect’. Miracles and Materialism Miracles “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” Loaves and Fishes “God is where he most needs to be, doing what he most needs to do.” Loaves and Fishes II “So was the feeding of the 5,000 a miracle? Yes…and no!” Loaves and Fishes III “…The evangelists outlined an economic doctrine challenging today’s Liberal (capitalist), Marxist (socialist), and Islamic (iqtisad) models.” Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back The SETI Paradox David Cowles Aug 28, 2025 “We’ve been searching for our reflection. I suggest a team of three to five year olds to help us imagine how ET might really look and act.” Historically, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has taken place between two rather bizarre guardrails: first, an almost religious faith that life must be abundant throughout our universe (lest we be thought of as special ) and second, a superstitious expectation that any such life will closely resemble life on Earth . A toxic cocktail by any mixologist’s standards! Where did we get such strange ideas? Surprisingly, these seemingly contradictory assumptions spring from the same shared fallacy: the myopia of the familiar . The argument for a ‘biotic universe’ is based on the observation that life evolved on Earth, i.e. on one planet (out of 10?) in one solar system (out of 100 billion in the Milky Way alone) in one galaxy (out of 100 billion in the observable universe). We couple this with an infamous maxim of illogic called the Why Me Principle . More technically known as the Scandal of Particularity , it is a refusal to accept the notion that we could somehow be special, much less unique. But this ignores the obvious. We are special, not because there is anything special about us , but simply because we’re the ones making the observation. In that sense everything is special in the sense that it is unique. Known as the Anthropic Principle , this maxim holds that ‘somebody had to do it so it might just as well have been us’. Recap : We exist. We know that we exist. Others may exist but we don’t know that. All we know is that we exist and, as far as we know, only we know that we exist. But we refuse to allow for the possibility that we might be special or unique. Therefore, we conclude that there must be life elsewhere. I am looking at the reverse side of a deck of playing cards. I draw one card. It’s the Ace of Spades. It is possible that this is the only Ace in the entire deck; it is also possible that every card is an Ace of Spades. A sample of one tells us nothing about the probability of two, absent other assumptions. Still, we make a fetish of what we know at the expense of what we don’t. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “ All people think thus and so” or “ all men feel like this”. Of course, he is simply describing his own thoughts and feelings. He is a chronic victim of ontological myopia . The same pathology leads us to the further assumption that all of this abundant inter-galactic life must be more or less exactly like life on Earth. As a result, we are searching the cosmos for carbon based life forms with cellular architecture, governed by a self-replicating mega-molecule (like DNA), breathing oxygen (or carbon dioxide), immersed in water, and behaving intelligently…at least sometimes. Talk about a lack of imagination! We have set up a diabolical chain of reasoning: There is life on Earth. We are not special or unique. Therefore , there must be life elsewhere in the universe. And if something has happened more than once it has probably happened more than twice. Life is life and therefore all life is like life on Earth. Therefore, ‘life like ours’ must be abundant in the universe! We have balanced the self-deprecation inherent in the ‘Scandal of Particularity’ with an overdose of hubris. On 6/18/2025, Mark Thompson, making a similar observation, wrote in Universe Today : “Scientists are revolutionizing the search for extraterrestrial (ET) life by challenging our somewhat Earth-centric assumptions about where and how life might exist in the universe. A new review argues that we must embrace the remarkable diversity of exoplanets discovered over the past two decades and consider a much broader range of environments that could potentially host life…” The assumption that all life is like ours ignores the role environment plays in evolution. There’s no reason, for example, to assume that life forms will be less varied than their climates. That said, with 10^22 stars, each with an unspecified number of planets and moons, we should expect variations that will test our imaginations. So, we should anticipate a similar diversity among life forms…but we don’t. Take Earth, for example. As far as we know, all life evolved from a single primordial DNA molecule. From that one, very specific cell incredible biodiversity has evolved. Life inhabits almost every nook and cranny of land, sea, and sky. We find life on mountain tops and in ocean trenches, in the artic regions and in the mouths of active volcanoes. We breath oxygen, I mean CO₂, I mean methane. If ‘God’ makes it, someone will breathe it. Imagine what evolution might do on a planet like Venus, or a moon like Europa. Or in a galaxy far far away. Check it out: how different is a sponge from a mushroom, a velociraptor, a Quaking Aspen, or an orca? Expect orders of magnitude more diversity in the universe! If, and that’s a huge ‘if’, there’s anything out there at all, what makes us think that we’ll even recognize the ET forms we do encounter as alive . Let’s listen to Thompson: “The traditional focus on finding ‘Earth twins’ orbiting Sun-like stars may be too narrow, given…the incredible variety of planetary environments that exist. “The research highlights how adaptable life on Earth really is. Bacteria can survive and thrive in atmospheres rich in gases like hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide, conditions once thought hostile to life. These extremophiles, organisms that flourish in physically or chemically extreme conditions, demonstrate that life's requirements may be far more flexible than previously assumed. “Perhaps most intriguingly…life might exist without any solid ground beneath it. In so-called ‘cloud biospheres’, life could potentially float in the atmospheres of planets where rocky surfaces are too hot to support traditional life forms. These aerial ecosystems might exist in the thick atmospheres of super Earths, in the cloud layers of gas giants… “The researchers also consider life in alternative solvents beyond water, and in hypothetical planetary global oceans where entire worlds are covered in (a non-aqueous) liquid (e.g. methane). “The shift represents a fundamental change in astrobiology from asking ‘Is this planet like Earth?’ to ‘Could this planet support any form of life we can imagine?’’ Any form of life we can imagine – Ah, there’s the rub: how much are we capable of imagining? How much will we let ourselves believe is possible? I suggest putting together a team of 2 – 5 years-olds to help us imagine what ET life forms must look and act like. “With thousands of known exoplanets showcasing remarkable diversity in mass, size, and orbits, this broader approach significantly expands our chances of detecting life beyond Earth.” No it doesn’t! First, the probability of our detecting ET life is entirely dependent on the existence of that life. Second, it is unlikely that any ET life form will resemble life on Earth. Third, if there is ET life and we do encounter it, there’s no guarantee we’ll know it when we see it. “As we stand on the brink of potentially discovering biosignatures in alien atmospheres, embracing this diversity may be the key to finally finding life in forms we never expected, in places we never thought to look.” Like Alice , we have been searching for our own reflection…we may find something unexpected on the other side of the glass. It may be as unlike our world as the Red Queen’s is unlike Alice’s; but it is just as likely that we will find that there is nothing there at all…once we too have traveled Through the Lookingglass . *** The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533, National Gallery, London. The painting illustrates how the familiar and the measurable coexist with the unexpected and unrecognizable, echoing the SETI Paradox’s challenge to assumptions about extraterrestrial life. 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 Curse of Immortality David Cowles Sep 7, 2025 “What if it is the final moment of my life…endures forever in my consciousness?” This essay is dedicated to my grandson, Owen Rotondi, whose insights about the nature of time led me to these ideas. It is fashionable these days to criticize Zeno (5th century BCE) and to make fun of his famous paradoxes. But not to worry: This has been going on for 2400 years and we’re in good company; Plato himself was among the first. Every generation of philosophers and mathematicians has conducted its own assault on Zeno’s Castle. After all, there is no way a tortoise can beat Achilles in a road race; there is no way that an arrow shot into the air can remain resting on its bow string. Something has to be wrong; but what? At the beginning of the 17th century two unrelated mathematicians (Newton and Leibniz) simultaneously ‘demolished Zeno once and for all’ when they discovered, independently, the Calculus. Well, not quite! It took none other than Bertrand Russell 200 years later to point out that Zeno’s castle still stands, as impregnable as ever, undamaged by the Enlightenment’s assault. Flashback: I spent a year of my life in a cold sweat. I had just realized that death is not something that any of us will ever experience. Of course, we may all be dead…but you’ll never know it because ‘death’ is defined as the absence of all awareness (consciousness). You cannot be aware of being dead. I reasoned, “If I don’t die, subjectively, then I must live, also subjectively, forever.” Sounds cool, but let me assure you, it’s anything but! The me that lives forever will not be me at the time of my greatest triumphs or at my one moment of clairvoyant lucidity; it will not be me “when I ruled the world.” (Coldplay) The me that lives forever will be me as I am during the final conscious moment of my life. Before Vatican II, Roman Catholics used to pray for ‘the grace of a happy death’. Appropriately so! Today, Catholics still entreat the Mother of God, “Pray for us…at the hour (i.e. moment) of our death.” Objectively, of course, I do not really expect to live forever. I expect to die just like everyone else (and too soon). But what if, subjectively, I never die? And what if it is the final moment of my life, the pain, the confusion, the regret, the despair, the fear that endures forever in my consciousness? This universal fate is literally ‘Hell’ as it was preached in some churches before Vatican II. Suddenly, I’m back in 2nd grade, hearing for the first time about the flaming Inferno, the stench of rotting flesh and brimstone, the shrieks of the damned and the cacophony of Bedlam. My life can’t end; what would come next? I cannot imagine myself not being. Once born, I can never die…to myself. I approach death, but as a limit, not as a destination. Just as Achilles is forever racing toward, but never reaching, Zeno’s finish line, so I may be hurtling toward my death, every instant ever closer, forever. Over a Sunday feast of pulled pork, sauteed field greens and corn on the cob, Owen pointed out to me that my existential problem was simply a new version of Zeno’s famous paradox. I had not yet thought to connect my own fear of dying with Achilles’ fear of humiliation at the hands of Zeno and his pet reptile. Owen made the connection for me…and an eschatological cloud was lifted. Zeno’s paradox cannot be resolved using Arithmetic (including calculus) and the set of Real Numbers…despite 2400 years of trying. Real Numbers are ‘dense’, i.e. continuous; between any two Real Numbers there is at least one other Real Number. Every interval is continuous. There is, however, a very simple, and as far as I know uncontested, solution to Zeno’s Paradoxes! But it requires us to throw Arithmetic and the set of Real Numbers out the window…or at least to put them on a shelf. And no, I’m not just reading from some naively hopeful 4th grader’s Christmas letter to Santa. Suppose instead we approach Zeno’s dilemma assuming that the number line is not continuous but made up of a sequence of discrete units. Let’s further suppose that this set of Discrete Numbers, and the new math it inspires, adequately models the real, physical world, i.e. Zeno’s race track. No matter how small we make the distance between these units, there will come a point at which the Tortoise will run out of runway; it will no longer be possible to cover half the distance to finish line because ‘halfway to the finish line’ would put him right in the middle of the abyss of non-being. Our contestants will reach the brink of annihilation and at that moment, in a ‘quantum leap’, Achilles will find himself across the line…at last. The introduction of discrete gaps, no matter how tiny, immediately resolves Zeno’s paradox and makes arithmetic linear again. Great, but how can we justify such a move? Real Numbers are called ‘real numbers’ because they’re supposed to be real, right? How can we justify pulling a set of Discrete Numbers out of thin air? If we have to use Unreal Numbers to force the result we want, then Achilles is an unreal champion…which might be worse than simply losing. Better to be humiliated by a tortoise than to go down in history as a cheat! But Achilles is no cheat! It turns out that the physical world in Athens and in New York, on Alpha Centauri and beyond, is discrete . In fact, only ‘discrete math’ (e.g. binary computer language) can adequately model real events. Achilles runs his race and collects his trophy; let everyone hold their peace. We now know, or think we know, that spacetime is made up of very tiny discrete units. How tiny are they? About 10^-35 meters across? We call this the Planck Scale. And how small is that? It’s about 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. So small! Try this : the ratio of the observable universe to your slim and trim body is the same as the ratio of a hydrogen atom to the Planck length. So very, very small, like you, but big enough! Turns out, size doesn’t matter at all ! Regardless of how small we make the unit of discontinuity, the gap between numbers, the possibility of infinite regression immediately disappears and Zeno’s paradox is resolved. So we will die both objectively and subjectively in ‘ordinary (linear) time’. Now, thanks to Owen, I can smugly dust off an iconic slogan from my preteen years: “What, me worry?” (Alfred E. Newman, Mad Magazine) Now we just need to be sure some hot shot physicist doesn’t come along to prove Planck wrong. But I’m no longer losing sleep! We have invoked the aid of Mater Dei (‘now and at the hour of our death’) and we’re told her intervention never fails. Plus the great Achiiles has never lost a road race. Even Usain Bolt could not keep up. Rumor has it, though it is unconfirmed, that Achilles ran a 3.9 40 at the NFL Combine last year. If Planck’s wrong, then the Virgin Mary is a fraud, and Achilles is the World’s Biggest Loser . So I think we’re safe. I can relax. Thank you, Owen! *** Jack Tribeman’s Rise and Fall of Immortality (2014) is a large acrylic-on-canvas painting that contrasts humanity’s spiritual ascent—overcoming instinct to achieve creativity and freedom—with its potential decline under the weight of those same powers. The dual composition reflects both the promise of boundless ingenuity and the fragility of progress, inviting viewers to question whether immortality of spirit is sustainable or destined to erode. 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.

Dive into Aletheia Today's 2024 Beach Read, where philosophy, theology, and culture collide. Explore thought-provoking articles on the nature of God, the authenticity of the Gospel of Mark, and the tension between destiny and fate. Rediscover imagination, resilience, and purpose through reflections on Ruth and Esther. Perfect for thoughtful readers seeking to blend deep contemplation with the relaxed vibe of a beach read. Inside Our 2024 Beach Read Philosophy God Is a Bother! “The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” Moses, Machiavelli, and Morality “The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!” Is the Universe Real? “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” Destiny Versus Fate “Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” Theology Mark’s Marks of Authenticity “There is no single work more important than the Gospel of Mark…the Intellectual History of the West hangs on it, so its authenticity is of paramount importance.” Jeremiah “God places his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. How can this be consistent with Jeremiah’s status as a free and independent entity?” Culture & The Arts The Owl and the Pussycat “The entire story makes no sense…unless there’s something special about that ring, something you can’t get at Harrod’s at any price.” Imagination, Please! "One way helpful in recovering the wonder of childhood and a simpler life, is to become more creative, imaginative, wonder-filled people again." Spirituality Ruth Embraced Resilience and Found Redemption "Ruth demonstrates how resilience can reward us, showing that even in the darkest of times, there is always hope to be found for those who refuse to yield to despair." You Really Were Born for This "Esther’s journey from obscurity to influence exemplifies the profound truth that individuals are often placed in specific circumstances to fulfill significant purposes, even amid uncertainty and peril." 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.