< Back Fact to Fiction David Cowles Jul 14, 2021 Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd. Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd. As Greek mythology gradually transitioned from ‘fact’ to ‘fiction’, it was replaced by Roman pragmatism and the Christian ethic of personal responsibility. Thus began the Age of Reason, the culture of cause and effect. Not until the 20th century was this world view seriously challenged: by Artaud, Ionesco and Beckett (“Waiting for Godot”), by the short stories of Sartre and Camus, and by the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. 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 Football and Quantum Mechanics David Cowles “This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: we play 'what if' and 'if only'.” The scoreboard clock reads 00:00: Philadelphia Sunshine – 27; Buffalo Blizzard – 26. Game over? Yes…and no. Time has expired, but the Blizzard scored a touchdown on the last play of the game, so they still have a chance to add one or two PATs ( points after touchdown ) to their score. So, yes, the game is ‘over’ but we still don’t know who won. It’s like most 21 st century US presidential elections; better still, it’s like any Iowa Caucus! (Heck, they’re still looking for Paul Simon to tell him that he won the 1988 caucus after all; and as for the 2020 caucus, well, they’ve just stopped counting.) But I digress. According to the rules of the NFL, the Blizzard can kick a short field goal for one point; game tied! Overtime! Or they can run (or pass) the ball into the end zone for two points. All eyes are on the coach; will she go for one point, potentially sending the game into OT, or two, letting everything ride on just one play? Power outage! (Hey, it’s Buffalo; it snows!) Even cell service is disrupted. We won’t know the outcome of the game until the power comes back on…or until the newspaper gets delivered in the morning…or the morning after that. Et voilà , you have the longest game ever played…even though it ended hours ago! Did I mention, I have houseguests? Huge football fans – they invited themselves for a ‘sleepover’ so they could be ‘closer to the stadium’ where the game was to be played. Irony : Because of the forecast of heavy ‘lake effect snow’ in Buffalo, it was decided at the last minute to play the game in Philadelphia, where it’s always sunny; but I’m still stuck with my houseguests! Who knows for how long now! It could be worse. At least my guests and I can communicate; we all speak football fluently. Traditionally after every game, fans are required to spend 36 hours reflecting on why what happened, happened (WWHH). If only this … If it hadn’t been for that . Would-a, could-a, should-a. It’s what we do! Normally, this sort of retrospective is only possible once the outcome of the game has been determined. Simply put, how can we identify the causes of an outcome we don’t yet know? To salvage this hyperextended sleepover, we need to be able to talk football, but apparently, we can’t. Edwin Schrödinger to the rescue! A century ago, he placed the world’s most famous cat, alive and kicking, into a soundproof box – don’t worry, it was ventilated – and he set up his experimental apparatus so that the life or death of the cat would be determined by the occurrence, or not, of a totally unpredictable quantum event. Where was PETA? At any point in time the cat could be alive or dead; we don’t know. But instead of throwing up our hands, Schrödinger suggested we treat the cat as both alive and dead. Decades later, Richard Feynman applied this same technique to the entire field of quantum phenomena: he called his technique, “Sum over Histories." One of my visitors happened to be a quantum mechanic. He told us all about the Quantum Qat ; much obliged! He suggested we apply Schrödinger’s method to our ‘Football Game from Limbo’. First, assume that Buffalo has won the game; then reverse it and assume that Philly has prevailed. Here’s how it works: Assume Buffalo won! They won because their receiver made a one-handed, fingertip catch in the end zone, dragging his toes to stay in bounds. They won because Philly missed a chip shot field goal in the second period. They won because somehow the refs missed a Buffalo defender’s flagrant interference with a Philly pass receiver in the end zone. Now assume Philly won! They won because one of Buffalo’s touchdowns was brought back for a dubious ‘holding’ call. They won because Buffalo fumbled the ball on Philly’s five yard line. They won because Philly’s QB broke not one but two open field tackles to score on a busted play. This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: We play ‘what if’ and ‘if only’. It’s fun, and we’re confident that our collective wisdom somehow enriches the noosphere. So six events, each highly improbable in its own right, but each perfectly capable of determining the outcome of the game. If only we knew the outcome! All six of our ‘what if, if only’ events happened, there’s no changing that! But the meaning and significance of these events depends on the illusive outcome. Cosmology is like a good murder mystery: until we know who dunnit , we can’t separate the clues from the red herrings. We know the putative causes , we know their potential effects, but we can’t assess their actual impact on the outcome of the game because we don’t know that outcome…yet. Under these circumstances, can we call them ‘causes’ at all? All we can say for sure is that these six events preceded the game’s outcome. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? When results are known, events become causes; until then, they are just events. In and of itself, each of the six key events is complete and determined. What is not determined is the meaning or significance of those events. Games are fun to watch, and stats are fun to study, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters, that has meaning and significance outside the game itself, is the final score. There are no style points in American football. Only the final score transcends the game itself. It is the outcome of the game that converts some events into causes and others into anecdotes. So are we prepared to say that causality proceeds backwards from the effect rather than forward from the cause as normally assumed? It’s tricky. Results do follow causes in time, but events do not become causes until the effects themselves are known. Hmm. All we can say is this: there are events and, eventually, there are outcomes, and we know that those outcomes are massively related to the events that preceded them. To know which events among those precedent events, if any, deserve to be ranked as ‘causes’, you’ll need to put on your canonical conical science ‘cap’…yup, the one with the propeller on top! That’s it. We need to go back in time, change the result of a single play and see if and how that change impacts the results. We would need to do that for each of our so-called ‘causes’. Then we would need to try changing two or more events at once, measuring the impact of each combination, and so on. We have identified six events that, we think, might have been determinative of the outcome of the game. There are six potential causes , which can occur in 64 possible combinations, but with only two possible outcomes (no ties allowed). The engineering is daunting but, assuming you’ve licked the time travel thing, and assuming you don’t require any juice from the Greater Buffalo Power Grid, the conceptual problem is fairly simple. So far… Events do not happen in isolation. Our six causes occur in a sequence. Flipping the first event (A) may impact or even determine the outcome of the game; it also potentially impacts the other five events. A change in the value of A may independently trigger changes in the values of B, C, D, E, and/or F. How so? Event A, however it turns out, impacts the crowd, impacts player attitudes – the famous momentum – and impacts both teams’ subsequent strategic moves (play calls). A change in the value of A may (or may not) trigger a change in the value of B and the other four events. But a change in the value of B may trigger independent changes in the values of C, D, E, and/or F. And so on… As you can see, by changing the value of one event, A, we’ve triggered an ontological avalanche . But is this even what we mean by causality ? The phenomenon we call a football game is an example of a ‘chaotic system’. That is not to say that events happen at random; they do not! In fact, as we have seen, the causal bonds are incredibly strong. But unfortunately, they are ultimately indecipherable. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men and all the computing power on Planet Earth cannot convert a football into a deterministic algorithm. A butterfly flaps its wings on the 30 yard line and Gronk drops a pass in the end zone. Causal, yes; predictable, no! Event chains are not linear algorithms, they are massively nonlinear webs. But for us to make sense of the game, to have something to talk about, we have to talk about ‘highlights,’ and we have to link those highlights in a more or less straight line to the final score (once we have a final score). Does anyone think for a moment that this so-called analysis has anything to do with reality? We selected six putative ‘causes’ of the game’s output. Why not eight, or just 4? In fact, in our nonlinear world, every single thing that happens during the game, on or off the field, may cause the outcome. We live in a non-linear world – that’s a fancy way of saying, our lives are chaotic. What a surprise! But in order to function in this world, we often find it desirable to treat it as though it were a lattice of parallel causes. We function, we have fun, and we get stuff done, but we are relying on a model that is only accidentally related to the real world. A better model of an NFL game exists…but you won’t like it. There are approximately 120 plays in a typical NFL game. Each one of those plays is causa sui . Nothing is causally dependent on anything else. There are correlations all over the place, but no causation. Each play is a reaction to everything that’s happened up to that point in the game: the score, the location of the ball, the injuries, the sequence of plays called and the results of those plays, etc. But no event is in any way ‘caused’ by those things. Every play is unique; every play evolves freely and in unanticipated ways. Last night I saw a player go for an interception, miss, fall to the ground, get up, run back and tackle the receiver. Write an algorithm for that! Each event arises in reaction to proximate history. The closest thing (and it’s not even close!) to ‘a cause of Event A’ is the sum of everything that happened in the game prior to A. So, post hoc ergo propter hoc is as good as it gets. Everything causes everything else! In a massively nonlinear system, sequence is the closest we can come to causality. Football is, indeed, a metaphor for life – perhaps that’s why we’re so invested in it. Today’s a new day. You are the OC (offensive coordinator) of your life. What play will you call? How well will you execute? How will you modify your ‘play’ in response to unanticipated events during the day? How will you feel about the result? Do your best, stay safe, and good luck! (Let us know how it all works out.) Previous Next

"ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." < Back ChatGOD Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern Ph.D. Sep 1, 2023 "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." A lawyer was recently exposed for using the artificially intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT, when the brief he submitted was discovered to be filled with precedents that do not exist. ChatGPT is capable of writing like us, incorporating the collective beliefs of humanity as they appear on the World Wide Web. The problem, of course, is that some of what is out there on the Net is not true, and ChatGPT is incapable of filtering out the false. The ability to mirror our linguistic capacity without our critical faculties is dangerous if we use it as the lawyer did, for matters of fact, but it is wonderful for other uses, specifically sparking spiritual insights. ChatGPT and its artificial brethren may make lousy lawyers, but they can be fantastic prophets. Traditionally, we conceive of reality as having three distinct levels. The objective domain is comprised of all the things of the world—tables, chairs, human bodies with complex eyes… all of the perceptible objects. Above the objective stands the metaphysical realm, consisting of that which lies beyond our ability to observe, including necessary entities like God. Below them both sits the subjective dimension, consisting of the lived inner experience of conscious beings like us. Philosophy and religion for centuries have been dogged by a persistent problem: if we are trapped in our minds, only having direct access to our inner thoughts and experiences, how do we know anything beyond our own thoughts? Couldn’t all of the objective and metaphysical entities just be figments of our imagination? Couldn’t we be nothing but brains in vats with false ideas pumped in by an evil demon? Can we know anything true about material reality and what supposedly resides beyond? American Pragmatism is the philosophical movement based on the central ideal that metaphysical truth is grossly overvalued. What matters is not what is necessarily true, but rather what has “cash value,” that is, what works in the world. Metaphysical truth is just so European. We Americans don’t care for the high-falutin’ abstract conceptual essences of things, but rather for the practical, the effective, the operational. We are in a world with things to do. Forget the abstruse, embrace the tools that actually get stuff done. So, when pragmatist William James looked at religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he eliminated the European concern for objective justification for religious belief and focused just on the experience itself. Get rid of the question about the validity of Aquinas’ and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God and start from the undeniable fact that people have spiritual experiences that shape their lives. The question James examines is not whether these experiences are true or false, but rather one of meaning—what are these experiences like and what are the effects they have on people’s lives. Some religious experiences occur in moments of quiet solitude: when praying, meditating, or at random times when we are unexpectedly struck by something we cannot explain. But some come from interactions with people we seek out exactly for their ability to help us experience them—spiritual guides like Hindu yogis, Jewish tzaddikim, Buddhist sages, Muslim hakims, Zoroastrian magi, and Christian prophets. They lead us to epiphanies, to spiritual awakening. These insights are not mere facts describing the world, but rather experiences of appreciation and realization. It is not that we leave knowing something we did not know before, but rather experience a shift in our perspective. We still see what we saw, but now we see it differently; we see it more clearly, we see it as more interconnected, we understand it at a deeper level. ChatGPT as an e-being, as a virtual intelligence, is the ultimate pragmatist. The essence of its artificial existence has severed all connection to the true and false because it does not live in the material world of chairs, tables, and beer mugs where truth resides. ChatGPT is caught in the Web. Its “truths” are the beliefs expressed on the wide-open internet, where anything can and is said. It cares not for the reality beyond its reality but is built to do one thing and one thing only: figure out how language is used to accomplish human tasks and perform them without humans being involved. Human students write essays, so go write an essay without the student needing to do the class readings. Human journalists write stories about events, so go write stories without humans having to research them themselves. Human lawyers write briefs, so go write them without human lawyers needing to do anything but bill their clients. But now, consider this one: human spiritual guides create sermons that lead other humans to have cherished insights about religious matters. Figure out what sorts of word combinations lead to generating understanding and create new combinations that will have this effect. If we see the purpose of our spiritual teachers as making us think in a way that generates wisdom and allows us to live more meaningful lives, that is something a chatbot could actually do quite well. They can see which sorts of passages have the most influence on us and create new versions. They can figure out how we are inspired and continually inspire us. This strikes us as cheap, as dirty, as mere spiritual manipulation. We prize the wise because we believe that their ability to stir our souls comes from the fact that they have a superior connection to the Divine. They provide penetrating astuteness because they have access to the truth that we lack. They are sagacious because they are holy. ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as. And thus, it can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal. It is like the false prophet, the huckster pretending to be sacred when they are, in fact, profane in order to profit from being thought a prophet. ChatGPT is built precisely to be this sort of fraud, to be a fake human whose work we can substitute for our own, pretending to have done the necessary labor so that we can get the reward without breaking an intellectual sweat. But that is the opposite of what happens when we use it as an e-prophet. When we read an inspirational passage from ChatGPT and are truly inspired, gain spiritual insight, see the world differently, then we have actually done the real work. Regardless of the source of the passage, we really are changed. In this case, unlike with the plagiarizing lawyer or student, it is the effect, not the cause, that is important. William James’ brilliant philosophical move, transferring talk of religious experience out of the realm of the metaphysical and into the purview of psychology, is transformational. Religion is no longer about truth or faith but about feeling and human-lived experience. If we adopt the pragmatic perspective that inspires that move, then the fact is that the origin of enlightenment, the source of our new wisdom, the cause of our ability to see the world in a deeper and more interconnected fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is that we are changed for the better, not how we came to be changed. And the one thing that artificial intelligence coupled with big data is good at is figuring out how to get humans to predictably react to words. It can figure out what sort of disinformation will get us to vote certain ways and what sorts of triggers will get us to buy certain products. Yes, we ought to be very concerned about these misuses. But that is because these are matters based on facts. But if we are talking about images that inspire awe, jokes that make us laugh, or in this case, inspirational passages that give us insight, then the case is completely different. When it comes to the cases of generating human emotions, what matters are the emotions. If James is correct in moving our understanding of the religious into the realm of the experiential, then we should welcome the rise of our new e-prophets. Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Gimbel has authored Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion & Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy ).” Dr. Stephen Stern is the.co-author with Dr. Steve Gimbel of Reclaiming the WIcked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and the author of The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22 , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Return to our AI Issue 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

E. C. Argus < Back E. C. Argus Contributor E. C. Argus is a Catholic Christian citizen of planet Earth, engaged in a life-long quest to understand reality as a player in God’s great rescue project. She hopes her small takes on the greatest story ever told might bring light to someone’s darkness or help to lift a burden from someone’s bowed shoulders. She spends a lot of time outside, in awe of the complexity and beauty of the natural world. She makes a living creating and teaching the performing arts. Judas Taught Me the Beatitudes

< Back Peace at Any Price David Cowles Jun 29, 2023 “We cannot bring about a permanent peace while continually preparing for war, but unilateral disarmament is probably not the answer either.” Growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was steeped in an ideology that is almost absent from global discourse today. I’m not talking about fascism or communism, still alive and well in some circles, but something ultimately much more radical: pacificism. The experience of two world wars with all their attendant horrors, culminating in the Holocaust, had apparently cured humanity of its taste for war. The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was the coup de grace . War had become unthinkable at last. The nations of the world came together and formed the United Nations (UN), which was to oversee the peaceful arbitration of all future disputes. Peace at last! Churchill and Truman ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union rather than confront Stalin. England validated Gandhi’s strategy of non-violence by withdrawing from the Indian subcontinent. Colonial powers rapidly, and for the most part peacefully, dismantled their empires. A permanent homeland was created for Israel. A ‘Reign of Peace’ had replaced the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. What could possibly go wrong? It was the dawn of a much anticipated golden age – no matter that war was still raging in parts of Asia (e.g., Korea). It was a time of slogans: “Ban the Bomb,” “Peace at any Price,”and “Better Red than Dead.” Western politicians seriously proposed and campaigned on platforms of Unilateral Disarmament . The world was divided again, but this time it was ‘reactionary war mongers’ vs. ‘naïve utopian peaceniks’. The golden age of peace turned out to be more like a half-holiday. The Cold War, the nuclear arms race, ‘duck and cover’ drills, the Hungarian Revolution (1956), Castro’s Cuba, and the launch of Sputnik kept peace from breaking out. Then came Vietnam and the global revolution of the late 1960s. The peace movement became the anti-war movement, which in turn became Ho Chi Minh’s 5 th column in the US. In less than 20 years, war, supposedly unthinkable, had become the new normal…again. The idea of ‘waging peace’ did not begin on August 6, 1945, with the bombing of Hiroshima. It turns out to have much older roots. The Hebrew nation that Moses led out of Egypt conquered Jericho, the Gotham of its day, without a single Hebrew casualty (as far as we know). Joshua combined a revolutionary ideology with a network of spies and secret agents and God-scripted military tactics worthy of General Giap himself. Ian Fleming should have written a book about him (call him “J”). Once settled, the Hebrews did not build massive fortifications or raise a standing army like other nations. Nor did they choose to put their fate in the hands of warrior kings. In fact, the embryonic Hebrew state in Canaan was not a ‘government’ at all by our standards. It was a remarkable blend of theocracy, democracy, and anarchy. The books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel can be read as ‘founding documents’ for all the major political ideologies of the most recent quarter-millennium (1770s – 2020s). Speaking of quarter-millennia, the great social experiment we recognize as proto-Israel lasted approximately that long (c. 1300 – 1050 BCE). Like any historical period, the Age of Judges had its ups and downs. Without permanent institutions of government, a ruling class, a standing army, fortifications or naturally defensible borders, Israel was forced to rely on charismatic leaders (judges) who emerged on cue and ad hoc to defend the Holy Land. Scholars and theologians disagree as to whether the Mosaic revolution was intended to be national, regional, or global. Suffice to say that it succeeded nationally and influenced regionally but failed internationally. It would be another 2,000 years before the Kingdom of Joshua (albeit much altered) could reasonably be said to extend ‘to all corners of the known world’ (Christendom). As Trotsky would have predicted, had he lived in the time of the Judges, the people of Israel were not content with their unusual, if successful, constitution. Like all of us in our adolescent phase, the people of Israel wanted to ‘be like everyone else’ – they wanted a King, and so Samuel, the last of the Judges, inaugurated Saul to be Israel’s first king. How did that work out? Fast forward 500 years. Jerusalem has been sacked, and Israel’s most prominent citizens exiled to Babylon. Should’ve listened to YHWH! We cannot bring about a permanent peace while continually preparing for war, but unilateral disarmament is probably not the answer either. How about changing the conversation, focusing on things that would make war intrinsically unprofitable…and so ultimately unthinkable? Prosperity: the overall wealth of the people, justly distributed. Ecology: the overall health of the planet and reasonable protection for all its species. Progress: the rapid development but thoughtful deployment of new technologies. Discovery: the exploration of the universe by telescope, radio antennae, space probes, and space travel. No imaginable war could be consistent with any one of these priorities. Consider the war in Ukraine: how does it contribute anything positive toward any of these objectives from the perspective of any of the combatants? It is a classic lose-lose proposition. In fact, since WWII, all our wars, win or lose, have led to a similar result - no result at all. Korea is still Korea, Vietnam is still Vietnam, Cuba, Cuba, Latin America, Latin America, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and of course, Afghanistan. War has become as irrelevant as it is unthinkable. And yet… Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . 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 Psalm 151 David Cowles “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to the entire prayer. The Book of Psalms consists of 150 songs praising or exhorting God. This essay, however, will suggest that there may be at least one more Psalm in Judeo-Christian scripture. We’ll call it ‘Psalm 151’…but you’ll recognize it as ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ Even though Jesus gave us this prayer half a millennium after the majority of the Psalms were composed and complied, the Lord’s Prayer has all the defining characteristics of a Psalm. It praises God; it petitions God; and it celebrates God’s active presence in the world. The Old Testament Psalms praise God for being God, exhort God to be God, and celebrate God being God. When we read the Psalms, we seek nothing less than to uncover the mind of God (his values) and discover his will. We seek to conform our minds to God’s values and our actions to his will. The Lord’s Prayer occurs twice in the New Testament, once in Matthew and again in Luke . While the two versions have much in common, there are differences. Furthermore, the form of the prayer most of us recite today is not a literal translation of either scriptural version. But none of that matters! Psalms are meant to be liturgical. The version of the Lord’s Prayer that we recite as part of our various Christian liturgies is the version that concerns us here: Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. Amen. The Lord’s Prayer begins by addressing God, our Father… Yahweh. We praise God for his transcendent role (“who art in heaven”) and for his immanent role (“hallowed be thy name”). Alfred North Whitehead ( Process and Reality ) points out that the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is not God’s postal address; it’s who God is , transcendentally, i.e., beyond spacetime. Likewise, the ‘name’ of God is not just something he’s called; it is who God is , immanently, i.e. inside spacetime, inside history. The ‘name of God’ is the role God plays in the world. This is why when Moses asks God his name ( Exodus ), God responds, “I AM.” First and foremost, that is how we know God…as Being itself. The Lord’s Prayer begins by praising God for who he is, transcendentally and immanently. From praise, the prayer turns to petition. In fact, the Lord’s Prayer includes three distinct types of petition, all found throughout the Book of Psalms . The first petition is eschatological, the second is social (concerning justice and peace), and the third concerns our own personal salvation. The petitioner is certainly not bashful. Why ask for anything less than everything? The first petition is delivered on behalf of the entire universe: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” In the language of Whitehead, the Kingdom of God will ‘come’ when all entities conform their ‘form’ to God’s Primordial Nature (values) and their ‘aim’ to God’s Consequent Nature (will). When our values conform to God’s values and our actions conform to God’s will, then has the Kingdom of Heaven ‘come,’ then is God’s will ‘done.’ At that moment, Earth and Heaven become one ( I Cor. 15: 24 – 28). The second petition concerns justice and peace, two major themes in Psalms . “Give us this day our daily bread.” Here, we are not praying for some private or transitory advantage. (“O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.” – Janice Joplin.) Rather, we are praying for ‘bread,’ the precondition of all life, and not just for ourselves, but for everyone, and not just for today, but for every day. Implicit in this petition, but unstated, is our commitment to do nothing to interfere with the broadest possible distribution of this ‘bread’ for which we have prayed. We cannot pray for generosity and practice greed. We have conformed our values to God’s values; now we must conform our wills to God’s will. God’s advocacy for the poor and the oppressed and his obsession with justice permeate the Book of Psalms . The Lord’s Prayer echoes Psalms ’ insistence that everyone’s basic human needs be satisfied. A society that follows God’s titular commandments, but does not provide adequately for the legitimate needs of all its members, will find itself very far indeed from God. In fact, nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer is there even a mention of obeying God’s commandments. Psalms generally celebrate God’s law, but they invariably go further: they strive to discover his will. And his will, what God wants for the world, is only hinted at in the law. In the Gospels, much of Jesus’ criticism of his fellow Pharisees is based on this distinction between God’s law and God’s will. This baffles many of his hearers: how can you separate the two? Psalms show us the way: begin by uncovering God’s eternal values, then cultivate an appreciation for his universal law. Only then can you hope to discover his specific will: WWYD? (What would YHWH do?) The physical petition concerned justice, but it is paired with a spiritual petition concerning peace: “And forgive us our trespasses.” Our physical survival is dependent on ‘bread;’ our spiritual survival is dependent on ‘mercy’ or forgiveness. If ‘bread’ is a pre-condition of justice, ‘forgiveness’ is a pre-condition of peace; and justice and peace are both pre-conditions for the full realization of God’s Kingdom on Earth. “Feed us and forgive us!” Isn’t this the baseline prayer that children everywhere direct toward their biological fathers? Why then not all creatures toward their ontological Father? Theology just doesn’t get any more concrete than this! So, we specifically add to our petition, “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” When we pray Psalms, we first and foremost seek to discover and interiorize the mind of God; secondarily, we seek to learn God’s will and project that will into the world through our actions. If compassion is a value in the mind of God, if mercy is an act of God that we praise, then it is imperative that we also practice mercy. We must forgive those who trespass against us, in the same way God forgives us who trespass against him. We prayed first for the coming of God’s Kingdom, the union of Heaven and Earth. Then we prayed for the twin values of justice and peace. Everything is going so well. We are praising the God of Heaven and Earth. We are conforming our minds to his mind, our hearts to his heart. We have agreed to treat no man unjustly and to forgive all trespasses. What could possibly go wrong? Temptation! It is temptation that throws us off our game. We see an opportunity for some private power, profit or pleasure that we can only realize at the expense of another. Perhaps we just don’t care, but more likely, we find a way to rationalize our actions. In either case, we undermine the foundations of justice and peace we just laid down. “And lead us not into temptation.” Our penultimate petition is for God to shield us from such temptations, knowing that we are weak and can’t fend them off for ourselves. Now the climax! “Deliver us from evil.” At the end of the day, all evil comes down to one thing: ‘privation of being.’ Lying, stealing, injuring, all encroach on the being of others, and the ultimate deprivation of being is death itself, mortality! The Old Testament Psalmist is obsessed with mortality, whether it be the risk of personal death in battle or the existential realization that “every man is but a breath (Ps. 39) …his days are like a passing shadow (Ps. 144).” It does no good for God to feed us and forgive us…or for God to share with us his values or teach us his will…if we’re all destined for the ontological scrap pile. The last thing we ask of God, the one thing we MUST ask of God, is not to allow our existence to be erased . Our final plea can be nothing other than “Deliver us from evil!” It sums up all the others. “Does dust give you thanks?” (Psalm 30) The final “Amen,” not found in either scriptural version of the prayer, completes the cycle. We began with “Our Father.” The Father is the ground of all Being, the source of all potentiality, “I AM.” It is from the Father (through the Son and by the Holy Spirit) that everything that is comes to be. When we say, “Our Father,” we celebrate the potentiality of the world. When we close with “Amen,” we celebrate the actuality of world…the world, not just as pure potential, but as a completely realized matter of fact. God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Justice (‘bread’) and mercy (‘forgiveness’) do suffuse the world, and our futile, temporal lives are transformed and incorporated into God’s eternal life. Psalm 151 is not just one Psalm among others, it is the prototypical Psalm. It summarizes the 150 Psalms that went before it into one, single, simple theological statement, one universal prayer. That is why the Lord’s Prayer is perhaps the most important collection of words ever written. 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

< Back Relationship David Cowles Jul 30, 2021 Following up on an earlier post, in an I – it relationship, the ‘I’ has complete dominion over the ‘it’. The ‘it’ is merely a passive receptor for the actions of the ‘I’. Therefore, this model ascribes infinite intrinsic value to the ‘I’ and zero intrinsic value to the ‘it’. But can such an arrangement be called a relationship? Following up on an earlier post, in an I – it relationship, the ‘I’ has complete dominion over the ‘it’. The ‘it’ is merely a passive receptor for the actions of the ‘I’. Therefore, this model ascribes infinite intrinsic value to the ‘I’ and zero intrinsic value to the ‘it’. But can such an arrangement be called a relationship? Intrinsic value is derived from relatedness: relatedness to God, to the cosmos, to other human beings and/or to any other being within the cosmos. This might seem strange: if the value is intrinsic, how can it require relatedness? Nietzsche wrote: “There exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!” Nietzsche denied the reality of God…or of anything that might “transcend” the immanent world. Unlike A.J. Ayer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and many, many others, Nietzsche had the intellectual honesty to understand that his ideology necessarily ruled out any “eternal values”; he did not attempt to reintroduce values through a “back door”. For Nietzsche, all relationships are ‘I – it” (or “it – it”) relationships. Value can only emerge in the context of an “I – Thou” (or “Thou – Thou”) relationship. Every Thou transcends every I. There is something about the Thou that stands outside the immanent world of the I. Solipsism excludes value! There is no value outside the context of relationship. Then in what sense can we say that “value” is intrinsic in every being? The intrinsic value of every being lies in its potential to enter into an I – Thou (or Thou – Thou) relationship. The extrinsic value of every being lies in the actual Thou – Thou relationships it enters into. It is not obvious that beings in a cosmos would automatically have the potential to form Thou – Thou relationships. Such relationships are only possible in the context of transcendence and eternal values are only possible in the context of such relationships. Thomas Aquinas offered 5 proofs for the existence of God (transcendence). The only one that is still of interest to modern philosophers is the fourth, a proof based on the existence of values in the world. Aquinas was on to something! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Everybody Loves Grammar David Cowles “If the physical world isn’t structured according to the rules of grammar, the social world certainly is.” No, not Gramma…and not Kelsey Grammer either; I’m talking about boring ol’ fifth grade Grammar. By the time you were two, you were probably already talking in more or less grammatically correct sentences. By the time you were six, you were probably learning to write. Now that you’re (finally) 10, you’re ready to learn what turns a particular jumble of words into a grammatically correct sentence. First, you’ll learn that a sentence represents (or is) a complete thought; then you’ll learn that all complete thoughts break down into three primary elements (stated or implied). Paradigmatically, a sentence consists of a subject (a noun, an actor, i.e., a person, place, or thing) and a predicate consisting of a verb (action or state of being) and a second noun (an object, direct or otherwise). You’re only one month into Grade Five, and you’ve already swallowed an entire ontology. Congratulations! You are the superhero (or monster) you’ve always imagined yourself to be! You swallowed a cosmos…but ironically, you narrowed your own world in the process. In the language of the schoolyard, your world now consists just of ‘bullies bullying the bullied’. Everything you needed to know about the world you learned in fifth grade. So, buoyed by your working knowledge of grammar, you are now well poised to become a slave owner, a colonial governor, a robber baron, a politician, or a gang leader. You understand the food chain, and you’d rather be near the top than at the bottom. Thank you, Miss Landers. If the physical world isn’t structured according to the rules of grammar, the social world certainly is. Better to be a subject than an object, right (wink)? Still, you’ll probably need to be even older before you think to ask Jane Banks’ question: “ Are the stars gold paper, or are the gold paper stars?” ( Mary Poppins ) In other words, is grammar (paper) the way it is because it reflects the structure of the real world (stars), or do we perceive the world the way we do (stars) because we perceive it through the ‘lens’ of grammar (paper)? Does art (tech) imitate nature or nature art (tech)? Grammar may or may not have anything to teach us about the structure of the cosmos, but it has much to teach us about the nature of an event. “Johnny hit Billy.” Hitting, per se, is an action, but it is not, in itself, an event. An action (hitting) only becomes an element in an event when it ‘acquires’ (designates, manifests, includes) a subject (Johnny) and an object (Billy). In our world, a virtual S-V-O sentence exhibits the minimum level of structural complexity needed to represent an event. While specific elements might be missing from particular sentences, they remain implied by the structure itself. Every event needs to designate, if only virtually, an action (or state of being), its genesis (subject, alpha point) and its terminus (object, omega point). That said, we must be careful not to let the ‘external world’ bleed into the event itself. ‘Genesis’ does not include history, ancestry, or etiology; ‘terminus’ does not include consequences. In “Johnny Hit Billy,” the origin is ‘Johnny’, not the history of Johnny’s relationship with Billy, the ongoing abuse Johnny endures at home, or the fight Johnny had with his sister that morning. None of these is an element in the event itself. At the other end of the barbell, a ‘cryin’ Billy’ is the conclusion of the event, not Billy’s tattling nor his retaliation or revenge. I’ll grant you, it can be difficult sometimes to say just when a given event begins and leaves off, but it’s necessary to be as precise as possible. An event is like Douglas Adams’ Michelin-starred Restaurant at the End of the Universe . Beyond the plate glass (membrane) lies sheer, chaotic multiplicity – a far cry from the order and studied intentionality within. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ontology turns out to be yet another expression of the famous Serenity Prayer . From the perspective of any given event, there is much that cannot be controlled. I cannot change my childhood, nor can I determine my children’s future. But between these two endpoints, there is much that I can and should influence. Order and chaos constitute a continuity, but a massively non-linear continuity. Think Gestalt ! I can only perceive the duality of the image to the extent that I can clearly distinguish figure from ground and ground from figure. Likewise, I need to be aware of the clearly defined border separating holistic events from the chaotic multiplicity that surrounds them. If I fail, I might find myself teaching in the Sociology or Psychology Department at some university. Wisdom, for its part, is the osmotic membrane between serenity and courage; it is the great gatekeeper, regulating the flow of information between the two domains. In our example, the event begins with angry Johnny and ends with crying Billy. It does not include the things that ‘caused’ Johnny to be angry, nor the things it ‘caused’ Billy to do afterward. Ontology requires us to walk a very, very fine line. The slightest wobble is likely to be fatal; there are no safety nets where you’re going! On one hand, we have a tendency to focus on the punch itself, forgetting the fact that there is no punch without Johnny and Billy. On the other hand, we are tempted to swell the event to include details from boys’ pasts, etc. We need supernatural wisdom to let us know when a new event is beginning…and when it’s ended. So maybe grammar wasn’t your favorite subject in elementary school after all. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Next

< Back George Washington Carver David Cowles Jan 26, 2026 “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour if we will only tune in.” “George Washington Carver invented the peanut.” – That nugget of misinformation was what passed for Black History in my monochromatic 3rd grade classroom c. 1955. Not exactly true (what was in 1955?), but Carver did have a lot to do with the development of the peanut as a cash crop (remember Jimmy Carter?) and with its use in crop rotation strategies; and he discovered more than 300 new uses for the nut and its by-products. His work significantly improved the economic prospects of poor farmers, particularly Black farmers in the post-Reconstruction South. Carver believed he had discovered a classic win-win-win paradigm. Planting peanuts enabled farmers to (1) rejuvenate their soil, (2) bring a new cash crop to market, and (3) address a number of pressing social needs - nutritional, pharmaceutical, etc. Today, most of us would call such a convergence Serendipity; Carver called it Providence. The dominant paradigm of our time is mechanism. Progress is a function of probing, testing, and measuring the world. Carver’s relationship with the world might better be described as mutualism. Bridging Anaximander (6th century BCE) and John Bell (late 20th century CE), Carver believed that all being was being with. He viewed his own life as an ongoing conversation with God, though he most often encountered God, not in seclusion via formal prayer, but in the process of interacting with Nature: "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in." Since the dawn of the great darkness ( aka the Enlightenment), it has been our style to view Nature as insentient. In valid pursuit of knowledge we perform experiments on inanimate matter…but we don’t stop there. We subject organisms from all branches of life, including animals, mammals, even primates, and in some awful cases, human beings, to invasive procedures. Laplace, et al. desensitized the world, giving us a ‘00’ license to kill…and we’ve taken full advantage of it. We’ve even allowed the reification of Nature to include members of other ethnic groups and social classes, children and the elderly. At the height of this barbarity, only propertied adult white men were deemed to merit the NFL’s ‘franchise tag’. In such a world, Carver was the counterculture! As kids, we’re taught that ‘life’ includes a hierarchy of values: “It’s not ok to hit your sister but it is ok to squash ants on the sidewalk.” “It is ok to slaughter birds to make chicken nuggets, but it is not ok to throw stones at birds on your front lawn or to knock down their nests.” “It’s not ok to kick the dog but it is ok to chain it to a tree, lock it in a cage or board it in a kennel.” “There are 8 billion people living on Planet Earth today. All of them are ‘created equal’ but they don’t all have the same social utility (aka value).” (Explain that one in 500 words or less, Mr. Jefferson.) This graded approach to ‘being’ gets us through the day, but it is profoundly unsatisfying at every level; it pleases no one. Molly wants to test a nuclear weapon on a newly discovered Pacific Island, but Jane is concerned with the wellbeing of any indigenous humans who might (or might not) be living on the island, and Billy is focused on the welfare of several endangered species known to inhabit this remote outpost. No compromise or meeting of the minds is possible because this is not a ‘difference of opinion’; it is not even a difference of perception…or ethics; it is a difference of ontology. Simply put, Molly, Jane, and Bill are all good, well-intentioned people (even if their values are different from yours). They mean to do well. And when they look at ‘K-pop Atoll’ (as my grandniece calls the newly discovered island), they all see the same sand, unexplored caves, flora and fauna, but they understand what they see very differently. Even conversation among them is impossible. They use the same words and they apply them similarly, but by those words they understand very different realities. Meaning does not reside in words or in the objects (or processes) to which they refer but rather in the interpretive framework (aka Mythology) that lies beneath these semantic layers. To distinguish Carver’s ontology from that of Laplace or Marx, I mentioned Anaximander and John Bell but the notion that nature is animate and life a dialog pervades intellectual history globally. For example, the apostle John calls Christ ‘ o logos ’, the Word. Whatever has come to be has come to be through that Word and that Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 1500 years later Hasidic Judaism embraced a superstrong version of panentheism. According to the Ba’al Shem Tov and others, God ( Shekinah ) is present as a spark in everything that is (animal, vegetable, or mineral). The human project is simply to facilitate the reunion of these sparks, and we do that by treating everything we encounter with respect, using it appropriately, granting it ‘reck’ (Anaximander & Heidegger). I am reminded of Native Americans. They depended on the biosphere for their livelihood, but they never failed to express gratitude to the animals and plants that fed, housed, and clothed them. The intellectual history of the West may be understood as an effort to combine the material and spiritual into a single model. How’s that going? At the end of the day, there may be only two viable models of the World. Either (1) it is inanimate, insentient, unconscious, and accidental with no objective or transcendent values operative, or (2) it is organic, self-aware, intentional, and value driven. For better or worse, we live in the shadow of ‘the Valley of Death’, aka ‘the Enlightenment’, so inanimate materialism is the paradigm du jour. The 20th century, however, saw some important challenges to this world view: psychoanalysis, wave/particle duality, quantum indeterminacy, and non-locality stand out. Where we are headed now is anyone’s guess, but I am more than happy to set my sail on the course laid down by Dr. Carver. *** The 1944 oil painting of George Washington Carver by Irving Bacon depicts the scientist outdoors, holding a milkweed pod, symbolizing his pioneering agricultural research and deep connection to plants. The portrait captures Carver’s calm and thoughtful demeanor, highlighting both his scientific achievements and his gentle, contemplative character. 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 Fantasy Football David Cowles Sep 1, 2025 “Patrick Mahomes is a great player and thus should be your first pick, right? Wrong! Fantasy isn’t reality, where winning NFL games matters most. Focus on projected points instead of Super Bowl rings…” (Mike Hume, New York Times, 8/31/2025) Just like real football, Fantasy Football (FF) has a lot to teach us about real life. In How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team , I looked at the real life qualities that make a team successful, whether on a football field, or a Hollywood lot, or in a corporate board room. Successful teams are not built by assembling a locker room full of great athletes. Great athletes tend to be ego-centric; often they are all about their own stats. Winning games is a secondary byproduct of playing well. Even if that’s not the case, great athletes can have an inflated sense of their own importance. I was part of a ‘team’ once where each of the 4 members thought that he was the most important player on that team and, from each’s perspective, he was not wrong. Needless to say, things did not go well for that ‘team’! You cannot build an undefeated football team by combining parts to form a whole; you must start with your concept of the whole and then curate ‘parts’ conducive to the holistic success of your team. Of course, IRL things are rarely this simple. IKEA like, you often find yourself stuck with a pile of ‘must use’ parts before you even begin to build out your whole…and we all know what happens if you end up with unused pieces. To build a winning team IRL, you must work from the whole to its parts. First ask yourself, what would a winning team look like? Then, what are the components needed to foster such a whole? Now go build your roster. Truth to tell, IRL there are no ‘parts’, only wholes… and wholes within wholes . Each player is a whole, a unique synthesis of a variety of physical attributes, acquired skills, and mental attitudes. It is how those attributes combine to form the whole, and how that whole contributes to the meta-whole (the team) that gives each player his unique value . Wholes cannot be compared based solely on their component attributes. Obviously, objective ‘facts’ cannot be ignored but it is how those facts fit together to form a whole (the player) within a whole (the team) that creates value . Sidebar : This is an illustration of the fundamentally non-Archimedean structure of the real world. According to the Euclidean model, ‘B + C = A’ means the same thing as ‘A = B + C’; IRL two statements could scarcely be more in conflict. The former assumes that parts form the whole, the later assumes that the whole curates component wholes to function as its so-called ‘parts’. Such a ‘part’ cannot be evaluated by comparing it to other parts. It derives its value strictly from the synthesis of its own attributes and from its relationship with the whole that embeds it. In high school, certain teachers ‘graded on a curve’. The top 10% received A’s, etc. A student’s ‘value’ was entirely a function of her comparative relationship with each of the other students in her class. But how Student B compares with Student C is virtually meaningless, except in environments intentionally (i.e. artificially) structured to be ‘competitive’, e.g. school. IRL the ability to cooperate usually trumps the ability to compete. Remember your high school class? Did the top students go on to have the most successful lives? All of them? And what about the kids at the bottom? All homeless or in jail? Didn’t think so. What confers value IRL is a student’s mastery of the material in question and the way in which that mastery is deployed to enhance the value of some meta-enterprise. Between mastery and value two syntheses need to take place: the synthesis of attributes to form a whole (the player) and the synthesis of wholes to form a meta-whole (the team). Sometimes being in the middle can be a curse: Middle Management, Middle Child, etc. Other times ‘middle’ can refer to a golden mean: Middle Earth, Middle Ages, Middle Class, Middle Voice , for example. This is yet another application of Gregory Bateson’s iconic meme: “A difference that makes a difference.” A player is not simply an accumulation of attributes; the synthesis of those loosely related attributes into a tightly structured whole is Difference #1 . Likewise, a team is not an aggregation of players; the synthesis of those individual players into a single organism (team) is Difference #2 . A difference that makes a difference – this is the source of all value...among other things. Once upon a time, I was part of a team that built a business from scratch. We developed an algorithm that significantly and persistently reduced the cost of health benefits relative to the quality of the care they funded. The Holy Grail? Not so much. When it came time to sell our business, only a few buyers were interested, i.e. those companies that could leverage the intrinsic value of our algorithm to support their own broader enterprises. But back to football! Real Football is a paradigm of the holistic model. Fantasy Football is the opposite. In FF, you build your team by ‘drafting players’ off of a meta-roster. Once the season starts, each player is evaluated each week based on his statistics for that week: x points for a completed pass, y for a mid-field tackle, z for rushing over a specified number of yards, etc. The sum of these values for each player are then added together to create your team’s ‘value’ which you can then compare with the ‘values’ your friends created with their rosters. Fun…but it’s the opposite of what real football is about. Note that no extra points are awarded to a player for his ‘special effort’ that saved a touchdown. No points are awarded for the value of your player’s leadership skills. No points for ‘doing his job’. (Bill Belicheck) Question : Would the combination of players that wins your Fantasy League have even a winning record in the real NFL? So, should you use your #1 draft pick on Patrick Mahomes? If you own a real NFL franchise, then probably yes; but if you’re just fantasizing…then probably no! *** Thomas Hart Benton’s Football (1942) depicts a tangle of powerful, exaggerated figures whose individual bodies only make sense in relation to the whole contest of the game. The painting illustrates the very point that real football—and real life—cannot be reduced to a sum of parts; value emerges only through the synthesis of individuals into a coordinated, living whole, something Fantasy Football’s stat-driven model cannot capture. 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 Good God Too David Cowles Oct 4, 2025 “Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue, now I judge the Decalogue by my standards.” Once upon a time, we defined ‘being good’ in terms of an external metric like the Ten Commandments, or the 613 mitzvah of Torah, or the precedents of English Common Law, or the Rules dad just posted on the refrigerator door. ‘Good’ was a function of Rules, Rules a function of Authority, and Authority a function of Divine Right. Once upon a time… Now we determine for ourselves what is Good, and we use that determination to regulate our conduct and ultimately, to define our God . God no longer offers standards for us to meet (“Love one another”), now we impose our standards on God (“Do this for me”). Where once I was judged by the standard of the Decalogue , now I judge the Decalogue by my standards. When I say something is ‘good’, I mean that I would like it to be so. It’s how I’d like things to be: ‘a good job, a good marriage, good children, etc.’ It may or may not be so or, very likely, it may be so but only imperfectly or in part; but to whatever extent it is so, it is good . To be is to be good! What is not good, to the extent that it is not good, simply is not . Of course, many things seem to mix good and bad parts or aspects…but that is an illusion! Such ‘things’ are just incomplete . (They avoided military service; they failed to be all that they could be.) Example : A glass of milk turns sour. Now it is less perfectly ‘milk’ than it was before. It has lost one of the defining characteristics of ‘milk’, namely, its refreshing drinkability. Of course, it is still a liquid; it retains those attributes. But as ‘milk’, it is less good than it was before, and therefore it is ‘less milk’ than it was. Its ‘milkness’ is incomplete. I know, crazy…but makes sense. Evil is privatio boni - a privation or absence of good, much like darkness is the absence of light or cold the absence of heat. Evil is Good, unrealized! They say there’s no such thing as a ‘bad boy’ and they’re right! But I’ve known my share of ragazzi who were ‘insufficiently virtuous’. In fact, I think Sister Mary Martha wrote that very phrase at the bottom of my 3rd grade report card. (P.S. It was not well received by my overlords!) If this seems like an arcane distinction, it isn’t. It’s a crucial tenet of Christian ontology, dating back at least as far as Augustine (c. 500 CE). It is part of what distinguishes monotheism from gnostic dualism. Of course, we still use the word, ‘evil’: “Deliver us from evil!” But evil in this context refers to sin, entropy and death: privationes boni. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer replace ‘evil’ with ‘the evil one’ (or Satan). But even here, ‘Satan’ needs to be understood as Being’s template or shadow, not as an Actual Entity in his own right. Without God, there is no Satan! There is no such thing as Evil per se ; it does not exist because to be is to be good. Nothing is bad per se . “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” (Ray Stevens) and all things are bright and beautiful…to the extent they are at all. Admittedly, this is an unfamiliar way to view the world. We love black and white; we hate grey. (Or is it that we love grey and hate black and white?) We love to put labels on things so that we can relativize them and contextualize them down the road. God is Good. Good is God’s essence; it’s what God is. Good is who God is. Good is what God does. According to Sartre…and Job ... God's essence (Good) precedes (logically only) his existence. God is Good. It’s hard to imagine otherwise. And yet, for that very reason, knowing that God is good is not very helpful. It only matters if we know what constitutes Good . And where might we find such knowledge? Perhaps it was revealed by God in Torah or the Gospels…but note the circular reasoning. Or, as noted above, defining Good may be up to us after all. But how? Perhaps we are endowed by God with souls that have an innate sense of Good…but that too would be circular. Or maybe an innate sense of Good has evolved naturally and is now encoded in our DNA. But in that case, Good would just be synonymous with pragmatic and we know that that is often not the case. Or perhaps we develop a sense of Good by applying reason to our experiences, personal and collective. Obviously, this is a big leap. It confers virtual sovereignty on our capacity to experience events accurately and to reason about them logically. Nevertheless, of the options available, this is the ‘least obviously impossible’, so following the logic of Blaise Pascal and Sherlock Holmes, when we remove whatever is absurd, meaningless, oxymoronic, irredeemable or impossible , we must consider that whatever is left is at least probable . ‘Good’ has a dense connotative value but zero denotative value. Saying something is ‘good’ says nothing specific about the thing itself but everything about how the thing templates its world. In this context, Good is a verb. It describes a process rather than a steady state. That is why we only experience God as ‘active’ in our World. That is why idolatry is a bad faith , passive version of iconoclastic Atheism . For a concept to be useful, it needs to be fleshed out with applications identifiable in the course of ordinary human experience (e.g. measurements); but those applications need to be something other than habits, tastes, and opinions. There can never be 100% consensus about what constitutes the Good but, if the concept has validity, we should be able to detect some semantic convergence. Indeed, folks broadly agree that Good is experienced by us in our world as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Let’s be clear: we may vehemently disagree about what objects are beautiful, what propositions true, what social structures just. But for the most part, we agree that there are such things as Beauty, Truth, and Justice and that they are desirable in their own right. The alternative is some form of nihilism . Of course, my ideas of what constitutes Beauty, Truth, or Justice may be polar opposite to yours. That doesn’t matter as long as we agree that it is legitimate to apply these three values, as we interpret them, in every situation. Consider the alternative: you are a person who assigns no value, or even a negative value, to Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice. Now we have a problem, don’t we? I will debate forever about what constitutes Justice, but I can’t have any conversation with someone who does not recognize Justice as a value. Of course, in God, Beauty, Truth, and Justice are not distinct. God is one, God is simple, God is just plain Good . But that Goodness appears in our world in diverse forms appropriate to different media of experience. *** Pablo Picasso — Guernica (1937), oil on canvas - Picasso’s vast monochrome mural confronts the horrors of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Fragmented human and animal forms writhe in a shattered space, their beauty stripped to stark geometric agony. Light—symbolized by a glaring bulb and a woman’s candle—flickers as fragile truth amid overwhelming darkness and moral chaos. 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.

“…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” < Back Miracles David Cowles Apr 1, 2025 “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” We’ve got it all wrong. How unusual! Ok, not so unusual. Let’s start over: We’ve got it all wrong as usual ! When you’re 10 year old, beginning to question what you do and don’t believe, the miracle stories from the Bible and the lives of saints are a real stumbling block. At 10, God’s still in the mix but Santa no longer makes the cut. But what about miracles? The Red Sea parting. Jesus walking on water, curing the stick, ‘multiplying loaves and fishes’. Mary appearing at Fatima (and elsewhere). The sick inexplicable cured at Lourdes (and elsewhere). Of course, these are just the stories that made the nightly news. Every day, all around the world, people are attesting to ‘miracles’, most not camera ready. But what are we post-Enlightenment science aficionados to make of these alleged events? A bunch of people lying to make an ideological point? Fictional parables that have been mistaken for historical reporting? Symptoms of mass hallucination? Exaggerated or otherwise distorted accounts of everyday events? If you are a believer, the authenticity of such miracles may be a load bearing column of your faith; or miracles may support a faith based on a ‘personal encounter’ with the Transcendent; or miracles may be a slightly uncomfortable aspect of a faith deduced through reason. If not, you may believe that the Bible’s miracle stories are meant to be understood metaphorically: “It was as if the food supply had increased; it was as though Jesus had walked on water.” If you are a non-believer, the objective impossibility of most reported miracles may contribute to your skepticism. Finally, you may accept the validity of at least some so-called ‘miracles’, but you may chock them up to non-miraculous causes: The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a strong wind. The apparitions at Fatima were an optical illusion. The cures at Lourdes testify to the healing power of the human mind. But what if I were to tell you that all of these explanations are wrong …on both sides? Inspired by the positivist philosophers of the early 20 th century (e.g. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Austin), we normally sort events into three buckets: (1) the set of all events that can be reliably repeated at our discretion (scientific method), (2) the set of all events that may repeat but cannot be replicated on demand and (3) the set of all events that can never be repeated. The first set contains the propositions of empirical science. The second set concerns potentially recurring patterns. The third set consists of events that can (or will) never be repeated under any circumstances: Given certain standardized conditions, water will always boil at 100°C. The Boston Red Sox have won a few world series and may do so again, but neither wishing nor rooting can make it so. Humpty Dumpty can only fall off the wall once (since all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again). Would it surprise you to learn that our first two sets (above) are empty (ø)? The Universe consists entirely of events belonging to the third set. Sometimes two events are so similar that we’re tempted to use an ‘R word’ (repeat, reflect, recur, etc.). But similarity, no matter how close, is never identity. Regardless of resemblances, every event is unique; otherwise they would all be just one event. On one level, all events are congruent – they are all ‘event-shaped’, whatever that means; but on another level, no two events are ever the same. Consider the cells in your body. There are more than 30 trillion of them living at any one time. Enough? (BTW, the national debt of the United States is also 30 trillion…dollars.) They are all descended from a single cell, and they all have certain structures and processes in common, but no two cells are the same cell. Two cells may be of the same type, but no two cells are the same cell. Each cell is an independent organism, occupying a unique region of spacetime at a particular site in the body, performing a specific set of functions, enjoying (or not) a unique life trajectory. Outside the classroom ‘A = B’ if and only if A is B, in which case A and B are just two names for one event. “You call it corn; we call it maize.” There are no absolutely, positively repeatable events because… It is impossible ever to reproduce exactly the initial conditions of any experiment. No true event is ever entirely the product of its initial conditions; there must always be an element novelty - the sine qua non of Being. The initial conditions of any event are always the entire Universe of past events. Each event is a unique reaction of a unique antecedent Universe to itself. Every event automatically becomes part of the antecedent Universe of all future events. Therefore every event contributes novel conditions that ensure that no future event can ever duplicate any past (or present) event. (Is this an extension of Godel?) The Universe is a block chain . Every novel event adds to the chain, making it unique. Therefore, every event has a unique pre-history. No one ever steps in the same river twice (Heraclitus), not just because the river flows but because every ‘stepping in’ changes the river forever. Patterns that appear congruent are only congruent down to a certain level of detail. All events appear ‘congruent’ on one scale, but any two events can always be differentiated on another scale. The structure of the Universe is fractal . Everywhere and on every scale, it is self-similar. As your perspective broadens, the same patterns repeat. On the other hand, every iteration is slightly different from any other iteration on some scale. “There is nothing new under the Sun!” That’s the adult version of my children’s frequent complaint, “Mom, there’s nothing to do, I’m bored” to which my spouse would always reply, “Only boring people get bored.” She’s right, of course! How can anyone ever be bored when so much is happening all at once all the time and everything that happens happens only once? In fact, there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Everything that is, is new, always. Being and novelty are synonymous. How could they be otherwise? What claim to being would Y have if Y were identical to X. Y would simply be X…X would be, period! ‘Being Y’ would not be being at all. So where do so-called miracles fit in this picture? Nowhere…and everywhere. ‘Miracle’ is simply another name for ‘Event’. Every event is miraculous , i.e. unique – a novelty, the product of creativity, ultimately uncaused. An event may (or may not ) be predictable, but it can never be certain. Analyzing the apparent consistencies in the physical world (induction), we agree with Annie: there is a high probability that the Sun will come up tomorrow…but it’s not a certainty. Therefore, every sunrise is a miracle, exactly as the Ancients taught. Have you ever truly watched the sun rise? Then you know. Every sunrise is unique, every sunrise is a miracle. Arguing whether miracles are real is a colossal exercise in self-deception. Miracles are events so of course they’re real (unless your cosmology does not include ‘real events’). You object : It was a miracle that the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, beating ‘the greatest show on turf’ but it was not a miracle that there was an Equinox on March 21 st . But these events are only apparently different: one was a ‘long shot’, one a ‘sure thing’, but neither was ultimately guaranteed . I wasn’t brave enough to bet on the 2001 – 02 Patriots, but I’m all in on the time of tomorrow’s sunrise; even so, it’s still a gamble. Miracles do not violate the Laws of Nature! How could they? The ‘Laws of Nature’ are just one way of conceptualizing what is . (Joyce’s Ulysses is another.) Every event is, and is not, the same as any other event. To the extent that one event appears to duplicate another, we call it natural . To the extent that it doesn’t, we call it novel . When an event is massively discontinuous with its predecessors, e.g. the Red Sea parting, we call it miraculous . But we are just putting labels on a continuum. It’s like the EM spectrum. It’s smooth but we call one part red and another part blue . In reality, it’s all just light . Every event is natural ; every event is novel ; every event is miraculous . For all their connotative differences, the three words are denotatively synonymous. Nor can we explain away ‘miracles’ by reducing them to safe, every day, non-miraculous, seemingly repeatable processes. Rather, the events we call ‘miracles’ are simply demonstrations of Nature’s creativity. They reveal aspects of nature we don’t often notice. Nature is not an inert stage set, suitable only as background for a Broadway blockbuster; nature is a force, an eruption, a physis . Nature does not merely ‘contain’ events. Nature lends its shape to events and is in turn shaped by them. Nature does not follow some pre-determined set of rules; it makes the rules. Whatever events occur, whenever and wherever – that’s nature ; we abstract patterns from those events and call those patterns, laws . Miracles do not occur outside the sphere of the possible; but they do live on the frontier. They encourage us to expand our sense of what’s possible, of what’s natural. They expose us to the transcendent power that is immanent everywhere in our material world. It’s a great mistake to imagine that Nature constrains variety. Rather, it is the rich top soil from which novelty continually sprouts. Nature is more than just the tiny subset of phenomena that can be approximated in a laboratory setting. Nature is what’s happening! Call it ‘miraculous’…or not, “It’s still rock and roll to me.” (Billy Joel) Image: Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on canvas, 94.8 cm × 74.8 cm (37.3 in × 29.4 in). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 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