< Back Christology Without Christ? David Cowles Feb 14, 2023 “But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘Jesus is just all right with me,’ but what if he’s not all right with you?” In ATM Issue #1 (6/1/2022), we presented a Christology that dates back to the very early days of the Church. Paul cites it in his Letter to Colossians (1: 15 – 20): “He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation , for in him all things were created… All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together … He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" We argued that this early Christology became the pattern for future Christologies, and in turn, future theologies and cosmologies. This is important because it substantiates Christianity’s claim to be apostolic , i.e., directly descended from the Apostles themselves. Most Christians today believe more or less exactly what Christians believed c. 50 CE. Can you think of any other subject on which a significant portion of the Western World believes today what it believed 2000 years ago? But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, “Jesus is just all right with me,” but what if he’s not all right with you? Can Colossians still provide a valid cosmological framework for folks who don’t follow Jesus, or even believe in God? The answer is, “Yes!” (Or at least that’s what I’m about to argue.) Jewish and Roman Catholic thinking has consistently affirmed a role for observation and reason in the discovery of truth. While Revelation is the crown jewel of gnosis , observation and reason by themselves can still lead someone to a reasonable facsimile of Aletheia (truth). Judeo-Christianity is an empirical religious tradition (vs. a magical one). In a recent Thoughts While Shaving, we cited Pope Benedict’s claim that faith and reason are symbiotic, that neither is valid without the other. In that spirit then, can the theological language of the Colossian’s text (above) be ‘translated’ into a secularized equivalent and still deliver a sufficient , and perhaps even necessary , cosmology for our 21 st century? Let’s start with three of the fundamental problems of philosophy: How is it that there is a world at all? (“something rather than nothing”) How is it that the world is both One ( uni verse) and Many (entities)? How is it that the world is both stable (permanence) and in flux (change)? Every important Western philosopher has taken a swing at this three-headed piñata… generally with no more success than most children have at their birthday parties. From Parmenides and Heraclitus through Whitehead and Sartre, these problems have been center stage; and any cosmology worth the toner it’s printed with has to address these problems. Borrowing from a liturgical hymn, Paul’s “Christ”, an object of worship for Christians, also functions as a philosophical concept. Neither I nor Paul claims to have proven anything about the historical Jesus or the cosmological Christ. For Christians, the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of Jesus is that proof. What Paul has done is to show that ‘Christ’ offers a sufficient solution to the 3 fundamental problems of cosmology listed above, i.e., that it adequately accounts for the phenomena we call ‘world’. The Christ Hypothesis accounts for the world as we experience it: that it is, that it is both one and many, that is both stable and in flux. To show this, we return to the cosmological elements, presented by Paul in the Letter to the Colossians , but this time desacralized : “Our World is a manifestation (the phenomenal ‘image’) of what is otherwise unmanifest (noumenon). The primal manifestation (‘world as world’) precedes (ontologically if not empirically) all contingent manifestations (‘things as things’) because it is through that primal manifestation, and for it, that things come to be and hold together. This primal manifestation is the origin of all things; it lends ‘being’ to each thing and reconciles for itself everything that is.” English please : “The World exists for its own sake, as the manifestation of Being itself. The World is one, but it is populated by many entities. Those entities come to be in the World for the sake of the World. They immediately cohere and ultimately harmonize, so that ‘world’ (multiplicity) may be World (unity).” Good enough? If I’ve done my job, I’ve convinced you that the Christ Hypothesis is sufficient to account for the ‘world’ as we experience it. Believe it or not, as you see fit. But have I also proved that it is necessary , i.e., that there is no other way to account for the ‘world’ as it is? Well, for that I’ll have to defer to you: Christology 101 (6/1/22) closed with a challenge: Can anyone come up with a model that adequately accounts for the key features of the empirical ‘world’ but that cannot be mapped onto the ‘Christ model’ as presented by Paul in Colossians ? Nine months later, no one has taken me up on that challenge. How about now ? How about you ? (If we publish your response, you’ll be compensated as for any other article we publish. Find our writer's specs 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 How 2024 Became 1959…Again David Cowles Dec 10, 2024 “In both the UK and US, the voters who made a difference in 2024 were the voters who chose not to make a difference, Alienated Voters who just dropped out.” On October 15, 2023, Aletheia Today published an article on a mayoral race that took place in Boston 60 years ago. No, we did not use that article to predict with uncanny accuracy the outcome of 2024‘s Presidential Election…but we were definitely looking ahead. “This is a book about…people who have come to believe that voting is meaningless and useless because politicians or those who influence politicians are corrupt, selfish, and beyond popular control.” – Surely this is a quote from some just released rehash of recent events, correct? Not even close. This is the opening paragraph of a book published in 1960: The Alienated Voter , by Professor Murray Levin (d. 1999). Levin’s singular contribution to ‘electoral science’ is his discovery of a new species of voter that he called ‘Alienated’. The Alienated Voter (AV) does not vote with the intention of reshaping public policy or even in the hope of improving conditions for herself, her family and her friends. She no longer believes such things are possible. The Alienated Voter doubts her elected representatives have the power…or even the desire…to make life better for her. They are looking out for themselves…and their cronies. In any event, their influence is limited by a ‘system’ that co-opts every good intention for its own undemocratic ends. Nor is the AV a ‘message voter’. Who would she be messaging? In her world, there’s no one worthy of such a message. AV often does not belong to any political party; she has no discernable ‘ideology’. If challenged, she simply says, “I’m not political.” and turns away. But in fact, she is very political! She devours alternative media, rounding out the personal version of Leviathan she carries in her head. Nor is AV an ‘identity voter’. Her ‘class’, the exploited . Her ‘race’, the powerless . Contacted by a pollster, she is unashamed, “I did not vote!” and she wears that like a badge of honor, and scoffs, at least to herself, at her misguided neighbors who proudly but foolishly display their “I voted” stickers, like first graders hoping for a treat. The Alienated Voter knows, “There will be no treat!” Let me set the scene. It’s Boston, 1959. The City’s incumbent mayor is not running for reelection. The runner-up in the previous mayoral race, State Senate President John Powers, has been informally designated ‘mayor presumptive’ by the Boston ‘establishment’ and its media outlets. (Ring any bells?) Nevertheless four brave candidates entered the nonpartisan primary against Powers. Possibly the least well known of them: Registrar of Probate John Collins. As expected, Powers won the primary easily with 34% of the votes cast. Surprisingly, Collins finished second, but with only 22% of the total. The Boston media promptly promoted Powers from ‘mayor presumptive’ to ‘incoming mayor’. The outcome of the final election was never in doubt…until about 8:45 PM on the evening of November 3, 1959. At the time, Boston was best understood as an uneasy confederation of ethnically defined neighborhoods. Tell me your postal code (no zip codes yet) and I could tell you where your ancestors were from, what religion you practiced, and how much money you made. “You are where you live.” Yet, Levin’s study showed that religion, income, and ethnicity played no significant role in the 1959 election results. Collins won the votes of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, high and low income earners, Irish, Italian, Yankee and African American voters. Somehow, a consensus emerged without anyone (not even Collins) explicitly calling for it. Nobody saw it coming. It was not reflected in the size of crowds at political rallies; it was not reflected in public opinion polls. It happened under the radar, at bus stops and in barrooms, and it cut across all the city’s neighborhoods. In the end, Collins won, 56% to 44%. Powers carried only 4 of Boston’s 22 wards; he’d been expected to win them all. Collins turned a 12% primary deficit into an astonishing 12% election day margin. Both candidates received more votes in the final election than they had in the preliminary. Powers doubled his primary vote total, but Collins quadrupled his (from 28,000 to 114,000). 10% of those who voted for Collins in the final had voted for Powers in the preliminary! How does that happen? The verdict of Boston’s voters was delivered loudly…and clearly: “We won’t let the city’s ‘power elite’ take us for granted any longer.” May I ask you a question? The last time you voted in an election, did you think your preferred candidate would do a better job than their opponent? Not necessarily a ‘good’ job but a ‘better than the alternative’ job? Of course you did…you’re not an Alienated Voter. Professor Levin’s most astonishing finding was that a majority of voters in Boston’s Mayoral election did not think their candidate would be a better mayor than his opponent. This tendency was especially prominent among Collins voters. Voters did not vote for Collins; they didn’t even vote against Powers. They voted against a system that took them for granted. This phenomenon resurfaced in 2024, this time on a national stage. Just look at the 2024 vote totals: the Republican got just 3,000,000 votes more than last time – not enough to change the result; but his Democratic opponent got 6,000,000 fewer votes – and that’s what flipped the switch! The same thing just happened in the United Kingdom. Labour received only a few more votes in their 2024 landslide than they had in their 2019 rout; but the Tories received 6,000,000 fewer votes in 2024. In both UK and US, the voters who made a difference in 2024 were the voters who chose not to make a difference, Alienated Voters who just dropped out. How do we know that these results can be attributed to alienation and not just apathy? In the final New York Times/Siena College national poll in late October , nearly two-thirds of voters said the government was “mostly working to benefit itself and the elites,” rather than “the people and the country.” The establishment parties never had a chance! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Bible Read Backwards David Cowles What would happen if we read the Old Testament in reverse order? From back to front. What if we began with Malachi and ended with Genesis? We are accustomed to reading the Old Testament (OT) ‘in order,’ i.e., from Genesis through Malachi, from the Torah (Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses) through the Prophets. The modern Bible groups the 46 books of OT into four categories: five books of Law (Torah), 16 books of History, seven books of Wisdom, and 18 books of Prophecy. Read this way, the Old Testament tells a coherent story. First (Torah): Creation (Genesis), Liberation (Exodus), Theocracy (Leviticus). Second (History): The transition from Covenant (Exodus) to Theocracy (Leviticus) to Anarchy (Judges) to Monarchy (Samuel) to Tyranny (Kings, Chronicles, et al.), and ultimately to Captivity (Daniel, Ezekiel) in Babylon (c. 600 – 500 B.C.). Third (Prophecy): Even before the exile, social discontent was cresting in Israel and Judea. Power and wealth were concentrated in the hands of a few, and the authority of the state was frequently abused for personal gain. Prophets emerged. They condemned the immorality, the corruption, and the tyranny that had taken over Israel and Judea. They were the revolutionaries of their time. Today, we recognize the same prophetic spirit in St. Paul, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King…and even Barry Goldwater (“Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue”). Fourth (Wisdom): The prophets’ specific condemnation of the historical situation in which they found themselves is paralleled by the Wisdom Writers’ general condemnation of secular ideology. Both offer a critique of the status quo; both offer a vision of a better future. The period between the repatriation of the Judeans and the birth of Jesus was rich in ‘Wisdom Literature.’ Wisdom material stretches back to Job, David, and Solomon and forward to the time of Jesus, perhaps even including some books of the New Testament (e.g., John, Ephesians, Hebrews, Revelation). Repatriation following the Babylonian Exile gave the Hebrews a chance to start over – a revolutionary’s dream. Just as the first Israelites had formed a social structure ex nihilo in the Wilderness of Sanai, so their descendants would now have an opportunity to do the same. But how? Pick up where they’d left off c. 600 B.C? No way! Return to the values, practices, and social structures characteristic of Israel’s glory days? Way! Since 1776, we have learned a great deal about revolutionary theory and praxis. This period (250 years) will be characterized by future historians not only as the Age of Science, Reason and Technology, but also as the Age of Revolution. We have learned, for example, that all revolutions require three things: (A) A searing indictment of things as they are (status quo). (B) A clear vision of a better world to come (utopia). (C) A practical program to get from point A to point B. Sidebar : Indictment and vision are not just prerequisites for revolution; they are prerequisites for everything, i.e., for all ‘actual entities,’ all events. After all, revolution is an event! All novelty is a reaction against what is, coupled with a vision of what might be. An event builds toward that vision by incorporating other actual entities along the way according to its ‘road map.’ That road map is Torah. In the words of Bobby Kennedy, prophets “see things as they are and ask why ?” (Their answer: idolatry, immorality, injustice, and exploitation.) Wisdom writers “dream of things that never were and ask why not ?” (Same answer: idolatry, immorality, injustice, and exploitation.) The Prophets and the Wisdom writers tell the same story but from different perspectives…and we need them both: the Prophets focus on the specific historical and political situation; the Wisdom writers focus on the futility of a life without God as its guiding principle. The struggle for freedom is ongoing, and it is always waged on two fronts: freedom from the prisons others build for us (prophesy) and freedom from the prisons we build for ourselves (wisdom). But what of revolutionary praxis? How do we get from A to B? This is where most revolutionary programs fail. They get the critique and the vision parts right, but they fall short when it comes to praxis. (Dictatorship of the proletariat? You’ve got to be kidding!) For us, praxis turns out to be the easy part! Long before there were critics and visionaries (prophets and wise guys), there was already a detailed political program to redeem an alienated world – it’s called Torah: 613 rules of conduct designed to promote the general welfare - health, prosperity, justice, and peace. 613 rules? What am I, eight? You call that easy? Are you kidding? 613 rules, yes; eight-years-old old, I wish; easy, you bet; kidding, not one bit! Because there’s a secret, shh! Lean in, and I’ll whisper it to you: “Torah comes with its own Cliffs Notes built in.” (If only Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thackery had been as thoughtful.) The Torah consists of 613 laws (above), 611 of them are specific laws applicable to specific things or in specific situations; 2 of them are general laws, applicable to all things and all situations. Therefore, these two general laws, collectively known as the Great Commandment (Mt. 22: 37-40), summarize the other 611 (tactics) and situate them in the context of a broader strategy: ⮚ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Deut. 6: 5) ⮚ “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19: 18b) The genius of the New Testament contribution to this discussion lies in Jesus’ insertion of six keywords between ‘Deuteronomy’ and ‘Leviticus’ (above): “And a second is like it.” There are not two general laws; there is only one, and its two ‘halves’ are mirror images of one another. “On these two commandments, hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt. 22:40) E pluribus unum ! We have distilled the 613 commandments of the Torah down to just one: the Great Commandment. Bottom line: There is no love of God without love of neighbor, and there is no love of neighbor without love of God. To paraphrase poet John Keats, “That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know!” The Wisdom writers and the Prophets both call on Israel to return to the ‘glory days’ of Moses, Joshua, the Judges, and King David, but they base their appeals on two very different arguments. The Wisdom writers point out the absurdity inherent in living a totally secular life. Not until the 20th century do we encounter as lucid a presentation of L’absurde as we do in Ecclesiastes (3rd century B.C.). For example: “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity…I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity and a chase after wind.” (1:2 – 2:26) It is important to note that the Hebrew word hebel , translated as ‘vanity,’ also means emptiness, futility, and absurdity. Welcome to the 20th century! We don’t need the Written Torah to tell us what’s right or wrong. It is written clearly in the patterns of nature (Oral Torah) and in our hearts. Today, we would say that the Wisdom writers based their argument on Natural Law. The Roman Catholic Church (and many other Christian denominations) embraces the Wisdom thesis: we can learn the will of God by studying nature and by listening to the ‘still small voice’ within us. The Law is written in the Pentateuch… and in the cosmos... and in our hearts. Have you seen the TV series, Young Sheldon ? Sheldon, a pre-teen boy, is growing up in an evangelical Christian family in rural Texas in the 1970s. The only problem: Sheldon does not believe in God; he believes in science. What could possibly go wrong? The Wisdom writers confronted an early version of this mindset 2,500 years before the first televisions began appearing in American living rooms. The key to Young Sheldon is the idea that religion and science are mutually exclusive. They are not! In fact, as the Wisdom writers make clear, they are two sides of one coin. The Prophets, on the other hand, based their appeal, not on nature but on revelation. God may have written his law into the fabric of the cosmos and study of the cosmos may give us some insights into the law, but there’s no need for telescopes or Bunsen burners. God revealed his law to Moses and the people in the Torah. Isaiah, Jeremiah, et al. call on the Israelites to return to the ways of their ancestors, to rediscover, acknowledge, and observe God’s law as it is revealed in Torah. Natural Law and Revelation go hand in hand. God’s Law is written macroscopically in the cosmos, microscopically in Torah, and nanoscopically in every human heart. But suppose today is a backwards day… What would happen if we read the Old Testament in reverse order? From back to front. What if we began with Malachi and ended with Genesis? The Prophets painstakingly dissect the evils of contemporary society. The Wisdom writers point out the absurdity of living one’s life according to the prevailing, secular ideology. Both the Prophets and the Wisdom writers intersperse visions of a post-revolutionary utopia, best summarized by Isaiah 11: 6 - 9: “The wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid...the nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain…” So, between the Prophets and the Wisdom writers, we have two of the elements we need for a successful revolution. We have a searing critique of things as they are and a clear and compelling vision of things as they could be. As we have learned repeatedly over the past four centuries, a purely negative critique is unlikely to succeed unless it is accompanied by an appealing vision of an alternative future. Successful revolutions are rarely based on despair; they are almost always based on hope. (That’s why we call them ‘Revolutions of Rising Expectations.’) During the periods of Prophesy and Wisdom, Israel was an absolute monarchy, but its rulers, its kings, were not cut from the same cloth as King David. To overgeneralize, they were incompetent, ineffective, greedy, and corrupt. Reading OT backwards, we move from dictatorship and tyranny to a constitutional monarchy (Solomon, David and Saul), from monarchy to what might best be called ‘benevolent anarchism’ (Judges), and finally from anarchism to Theocracy (Joshua and the Torah). The goal of every revolutionary program is the same (though often expressed in very different terms): “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What else is there? What else could there be? Here is where praxis comes into play for individuals, as well as for nations: learn the will of God and conform to it! The contemporary revolutionary may elect to follow the 611 specific commandments of Torah or just the two general commandments (i.e., the Great Commandment). Both strategies lead to the same result: the Kingdom of God on Earth. And what is that Kingdom? Reading the Bible backwards, i.e., from Malachi 3:34 through Genesis 1:1, the Kingdom of God is the Garden of Eden! In this reading, Paradise is not a primordial state from which we fell; it is the eschaton for which we strive. So, the Old Testament is the ultimate palindrome. It is the same, whether you read it backwards or forwards. And what of the New Testament? Well, reading the New Testament (NT) in order, i.e., from Matthew through Revelation, is the same as reading the Old Testament from Malachi through Genesis. NT begins with a searing critique of Israel under Roman rule (the synoptic Gospels), and it offers its own foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven (Revelation). And its revolutionary praxis? “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 13: 34) 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 The Age of Sustainable Abundance David Cowles Mar 12, 2026 “We reject the status quo but we shrink from the future...” 1250 words, 6 minute read What are you waiting for? The Second Coming of Christ? (That’s been delayed.) The Apocalypse? (Mercifully postponed.) The Age of Aquarius? ( Hair notwithstanding, cosmologists tell us we have another 200 years to wait.) But according to Elon Musk, this is the dawning of the Age of Abundance…Sustainable Abundance! But that is, not everywhere, an occasion for celebration. “We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the… (previous) century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down…The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labor absorption…” Does this sound familiar? Of course it does! You hear the equivalent every day. So would you be surprised to hear that this was written in 1930 by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (JMK)? And that the previous century Keynes refers to is not the 20th but the 19th? The more things change the more they stay the same! “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s always about the Bulls and the Bears! And two things we know: (1) Discounting divine intervention, the Bears will ultimately win out; it’s called Heat Death; and (2) Until that time, it’s all Bulls! (Chicago, Pamplona, Wall Street) And yet… “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy…” (JMK) As a species, we struggle to imagine a future that is anything other than a thinly disguised version of the past. As a result, we form a vision of tomorrow that, so far as possible, recapitulates today, warts and all. And who isn’t dissatisfied with today? Who’s ever told a pollster, “I like things just the way they are?” ( Hint : No one!) ‘So far as possible’ – and to the extent that it’s not possible, we paint the future in the darkest colors possible. So we reject the status quo but we shrink from the future in so far as it differs from the status quo . It’s a wonder there’s ever been any progress at all…and it’s no wonder that so many cultures harbor the notion of a long lost Golden Age, before today’s problems became problematic. *** What we have here is a failure of imagination! Consider our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) . As far as we know, all living organisms on Earth are descended from a single DNA molecule that synthesized about 4 billion years ago. That makes you a distant cousin of some pretty unusual characters: bacteria and slime mold, mushrooms and mosquitos, palm trees and penguins, whales and water bears …and my personal favorite, the kitchen sponge (natural, not synthetic). Idea : Restage Hamlet Act 5, Scene 1 with the Prince of Denmark holding a sponge in his hand instead of Yorik’s skull. You also have some pretty impressive ancestors hanging off your family tree – kids with cool street names like Dino and Dodo, Raptor, Sabretooth, and the Great Auk. I went to High School with Tom Roberts, a boy who claimed to be descended from Blue Beard, the pirate. You’ve got Tom beat six ways to Sunday! We see that the process of evolution responds to variations in the environment with incredible morphological and functional diversity. Yet when we consider the possibility of life on other planets and their moons, we assume that it will be similar to our own. Therefore, we search the heavens for Earth-like conditions as if life chooses its environment. The fact is, if there is extraterrestrial life, there is every chance that it will assume forms and behave in ways that none of us have ever imagined. *** We believe that the laws of physics apply everywhere in the known universe. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s true. We also assume that any intelligent life form, exploring the universe from its vantage point, would adduce the same laws. But not so fast! Even if physical processes are universal, there is no guarantee, no likelihood even, that other intelligences will model those processes the same way we do. An article in New Scientis t (3/3/2026) by Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist conducting research at CERN and teaching at the University of California, makes the case: “Lately I have started to wonder whether physics is less a window onto universal reality and more of a mirror, reflecting the particular kind of minds we happen to have…Would alien scientists, shaped by a different biology or culture , arrive at the same physics that we have? Or might they develop something that works just as well, but looks utterly foreign – built on concepts and assumptions we would struggle to recognize?” *** The Catholic Church has long placed the basic human need to engage in meaningful, healthful and justly compensated work at the heart of its Social Magisterium. The advent of Sustainable Abundance will require a rethink! Ironically, the two great ideologies of ‘the previous century’ (the 19 th ), Marxism and Catholicism, are both centered around an outmoded concept of work. Yet both are utopian: It’s hard to imagine wage labor in Paradise. In fact, the relationship between human labor and economic prosperity is already starting to fray. The collective need for our work will soon shrink exponentially. Accordingly, our idea of a ‘meaningful life’ must expand to include much more than just wage labor…and that will take work of its own, a lot of work! So, fast forward 100 years from JMK: the torch has passed to a new generation…and Elon Musk picked it up (September 1, 2025): “ The elimination of scarcity will require tireless and exquisite execution. Some will perceive it as impossible. And plenty of others will laud every obstacle and setback we inevitably encounter along the way. But once we overcome this challenge, our critics will come to see that what they once thought was impossible is indeed possible… “Today we are on the cusp of a revolutionary period primed for unprecedented growth. And this time it will not be a single step but a leap forward for Tesla (sic) and humanity as a whole. The tools we are going to develop will help us build the kind of world that we've always dreamed of—a world of Sustainable Abundance—by redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all.” As Industrialization was to the 19th century and Computerization to the 20th, so Artificial Intelligence is to the 21st. While a handful of pioneers are working to shape and extend this new technology, most of our energy will be spent debating and resisting its promise. According to our talking heads, we are to reject a Leisure Economy, fueled by Sustainable Abundance, in favor of a Labor Economy, motivated by economic insecurity and driven by Conspicuous Consumption. Yup, what we have here is a failure to imagine! A failure to imagine what is already coming…if only we’d let it. *** Giacomo Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–14) doesn’t just depict a car rushing forward—it imagines a world where motion, technology, and sensory overload become the defining forces shaping human experience. In many ways, its fractured lines and vibrating energy anticipate future movements driven by high‑speed travel, digital acceleration, and the increasingly blurred boundary between human perception and machine‑generated environments. 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 Who Dunnit? David Cowles Oct 4, 2022 “Was it Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Wrench? Or…” Ever play the game of Clue ? Who dunnit? Was it Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the wrench? Or Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick? There are 324 potential combinations of suspects (6), weapons (6), and venues (9); and all 324 possible combinations (6 x 6 x 9) are equally probable. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to reduce 324 potentialities down to one actuality. The game of Cosmology is a greatly simplified version of Clue . You have no opponents! You play the game alone, and you play until you win… or give up trying. Bora-boring! Why is it then that the world’s best minds (carbon or silicon) have been playing Cosmology for at least the last 10,000 years (and probably for many tens of thousands of years before that)? Shoot, it even tops Dungeons and Dragons. “Why are things the way they are?” It seems we can’t help but ask this question. Apparently, M. Descartes, Sum ergo quaero (I am, therefore I seek). But when we do seek to unravel this mystery, it appears that the range of possible solutions is unexpectedly narrow. Consider the following two possibilities: #1 Whatever happens, happens! No further explanation is necessary or even possible. Happening is happenstance! Sidebar #1 : This does not mean that events must occur randomly. Causality and/or other forms of correlation could characterize certain subdomains (‘societies’ or even ‘epochs’ in the terminology of Alfred North Whitehead); also, events themselves have the capacity to form societies and epochs, but any such subdomains would have to be situated in a meta-domain, and the ultimate meta- domain would have to be happenstance. #2 Whatever happens, happens as a result of will (extrinsic or intrinsic). Extrinsic will : things happen according to plan or as directed ad hoc. Note: plan and ad hoc are only distinct in a spatiotemporal context. Otherwise, they are synonymous. Intrinsic will : things happen according to their own free will in the context of a specific actual world. Sidebar #2 : All things (events) are causa sui , but not all things are causa sui ex nihilo . Sidebar #3 : Freedom in the absence of an actual world is happenstance (above). It is the relevant presence of an actual world that enables an event to proceed according to will rather than chance. Will react to world! Amazingly, certain very popular conceptions turn out to be just sub-versions of the two models above: Whatever happens, happens as a result of the initial conditions of the Universe (Big Bang). If initial conditions are the result of happenstance, then see #1 above. If initial conditions result from will, then see #2 . Whatever happens, happens as a result of things that happened in the past (causality). If ‘things in the past’ occurred by happenstance, then see #1 above. If ‘things in the past’ occurred by will, then see #2 above. Whatever happens, happens in the service of a particular future (teleology). If ‘things in the future’ occur by happenstance, then see #1 above. If ‘things in the future’ occurred by will, then see #2 above. So, it turns out that we’re saying something pretty big here! Any cosmological model that relies on efficient causation (so-called cause and effect) or final causation (purpose, meaning) is merely a sub-version of either model #1 (happenstance) or model #2 (will) above. So, your universe comes with a choice of flavors, but just three flavors (don’t want to spoil you): · Vanilla (happenstance) · Chocolate (extrinsic will: God?) · Strawberry (intrinsic will: freedom!) So, pretty simple, right? Ok, but maybe not quite so simple! Have you considered the possibility of a hybrid model: Some events just happen; some events are willed extrinsically; and some events are willed intrinsically. There’s nothing intrinsically – pun intended – wrong with a hybrid model; it doesn’t undermine anything we’ve said above. On the contrary, we just extended our models’ reach… as long as you can figure out what goes where, i.e., how the different domains interact. Good luck with that. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Dr. Stephen Stern Contributor 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. ChatGOD 'Happy Holidays' vs. 'Merry Christmas': A Twist

< Back The End of History “Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with a celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate!” David Cowles In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, in a famous essay of the same title, proclaimed the ‘end of history’. He wrote in the halcyon days immediately following the Cold War. But he was only the latest in a long line of self-proclaimed social prophets, including Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and yes, Jesus, to proclaim the end of our familiar social dynamics. History! I’d rather study it than live through its perpetual cycle of war, conquest, subjugation, exile, slavery, genocide (‘ethnic cleansing’), and only finally…Revolution – you can keep it, thanks! Of course, the ‘end of history’ implies arrival at a relatively stable state-of-affairs in contrast to the vicissitudes of the historical process. For Jesus the end of history was the coming of the Kingdom of God, inaugurated in the first century CE but only ‘fully realized’ at the Eschaton. For Judeo-Christians, history ends where it began, in Paradise ( aka The Garden of Eden). Ironically, the social contradictions inherent in Paradise, as it was created, gave rise to the historical process in the first place: malevolent snakes, forbidden fruit, secret knowledge, and a naïve citizenry – what could possibly go wrong? Eden is recreated at the Eschaton…with important changes: Satan has been vanquished, bans have been lifted, knowledge is shared, and we see God face to face. The contradictions have been resolved, once and for all. Like it or not, Reconstructed Eden is the dominant model of Paradise in Western thinking. For Marx, history ends with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, followed by the withering away of the state and the advent of pure communism. Marx looked forward to a permanent resolution of the contradictions inherent in capitalism. In other words, What Jesus Said . For Hegel, history ended in 1806 (Napoleon defeated) with the ‘proper state’ now governed by the principles that inspired the American and French revolutions. He must have drunk Rousseau’s Kool-Aid! Did he really imagine that Liberalism was the moral equivalent of the State of Nature? Apparently! Like Jesus before him and Marx to follow, Hegel saw lumpy history dissolving into smooth harmonies. Fukuyama seems to agree with Hegel on this…except for the date. He prefers 1989 to 1806. He recognized that nationalism, fascism, and communism still had to be thoroughly vanquished before the world could do its ‘happy dance’ in the end zone. For Fukuyama, tearing down the Berlin Wall is what defeating Napoleon was for Hegel. Unfortunately, Hegel and Fukuyama were willing to settle for a lot ‘less’ than Jesus…or even Marx. For Fukuyama, society’s ‘end state’ is Democratic Capitalism, not an ‘end’ in the sense of utopia but in the sense of stability. For better or worse, the Liberal state sufficiently, if not perfectly, resolves the socio-economic contradictions that inspired periodic upheavals over the prior 10,000 years. As presented (above), this is an attractive theory, but Fukuyama goes overboard: “But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West… the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx…” Really, this is the ‘classless society envisioned by Marx’? For Fukuyama, “the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist…” On the contrary, he blames society’s ongoing socio-economic conflicts on “the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up…” “But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” “…The People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia's future, became an anachronism.” Especially in China itself! Fukuyama might be excused for his bit of excessive euphoria. It was 1992 after all! Politicians were seriously talking about a peace dividend , i.e. the redirection of funds from defense to infrastructure and social welfare. How has that worked out? The notion that historical conflict ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall is contradicted by the Nightly News . Conflict in the world has not subsided…not the least bit. If anything, the lack of super power balance has created additional breathing room allowing regional conflicts to intensify and expand. I can’t resist the superfluous urge to do some scrap-booking here: The new 30 years’ war over the Fertile Crescent, the rise of militant Islam (Jihad), 9/11 (Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, ISIS), the chaos that was Palestine, the proliferation of ‘failed states’ (e.g. Somalia, Haiti), often replaced by narco-terrorist gangs, the reemergence of an Axis of Evil , the tragedy of Ukraine, the collapse of the U.S. border, and the supply driven Fentanyl epidemic. There, done! What happened to the Golden Age? Where’s the peace dividend ? And yet, one could also ask, “Where is the revolutionary spirit?” These days, however much someone might want change, they are unlikely to risk their lives, and the welfare of their families, to effect that change. How different this is from 1776, 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968 or 1989! How come? Has socio-economic conflict, if not yet resolved, at least been defanged? Has Liberalism led to a society where there is just enough popular input into social policy and just enough economic opportunity to keep folks coloring between the lines? In fact, no modicum of actual popular input or real economic opportunity is required – the mere perception will do fine – and today we are masters of our collective perceptions. ( Propaganda , Jacques Ellul) Given the level of injustice in the World today, it is a bit surprising that ‘revolution’ is not on the tip of every tongue. Well, not all that surprising. A successful revolution requires 4 elements: A sober analysis (critique) of the status quo. A concrete notion (image) of how things could be different. A practical program ( What is to be Done? – V.I. Lenin) to get us from A to Z. A ‘revolutionary’ ideology that explains the injustice of the present, grounds our vision for the future, and justifies the less palatable aspects of the program . I would argue that none of these conditions is present today, at least not in the First World. Our analysis is cock-eyed. In the place of an in-depth reflection on society and its contradictions, we have bumper stickers: “Down with Halliburton, Crush the 1%, Bush lied/people died, MAGA.” Our concrete image of ‘better days’ is just “More, please” ( Oliver Twist ): more democracy, more prosperity, an even bigger Big Mac! So were Hegal and Fukuyama right after all? If so, they were right for reasons they did not fully understand. For the most part we live in a world where things move. Everything flows! (Heraclitus) Unimpeded, things tend to move in straight lines. (Newton) We frantically build structures designed to limit that flow and protect the status quo: The Great Wall of China for example, or Constitutional Government . Now imagine a subatomic particle. Normally, it speeds through space at close to the speed of light; but we can put an end to its cosmic wandering; we can trap that particle in an EM lattice, effectively converting its linear motion to oscillation within a narrow range. Once ‘captured’, our particle cannot leave the lattice unless energy is injected from outside. It does not have enough native energy to overcome the restraints. Unliberated, it will persist in its current state ‘until the 12th of never’. It is trapped in a so-called energy sink . Fukuyama’s eschatology could be understood in these terms. While most people are not satisfied with today’s status quo, we may well be satisficed . Imperfect as things are, it is not worth the energy (or risk) required to change them in any significant way. The devil we know… Once upon a time we were addicted to progress: our children will always be better and do better than us. No more. Now we are content not to go backwards. We are happy to oscillate within a fixed range. Doubt me? Just look at the electoral history of the United States since 1988. Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate! Might we be left with all of history’s horrors, without the balm of revolutionary hope? 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 Summer 2024 Previous Next

< Back Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” David Cowles 1200 words, 5 minute read Philip Goff is a breath of fresh air: he’s a philosopher on the faculty of a major university (Durham), whose work is published by Oxford University Press. He maintains that existence may have an objective purpose, and he is willing to at least consider a role for ‘God’ in the overall scheme of things. Goff rejects what he describes as the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Islamic) ‘Omni-God’ (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) but nonetheless posits the possibility of a transcendent, purposeful entity. Goff is willing to entertain the ‘God Hypothesis’ provided God’s knowledge and power are somehow limited, or God’s benevolence is impure or conditional. But Goff’s latest book, Why - The Purpose of the Universe , disappoints. Goff fails to make a clear distinction between the sort of God he excludes a priori and the sort he might entertain. His characterization of ‘Abrahamic divinity’ oversimplifies. Any concept of omnipotence is limited by what’s possible, omniscience by what’s knowable, and benevolence by what’s doable. God cannot square a circle any more than you can! He cannot fashion a rock that is too heavy for him to lift. He cannot force people to behave virtuously. These logical and material fallacies have nothing to do with divinity. God is Good…in fact, God is Value per se . That’s really all you need to know. God does not ‘have values’ or ‘determine’ values; God is Value! Pre-existent Value is the efficient cause and the final cause of everything that is. I mean, what else could be? Why else would anything ever happen? Perhaps ‘love makes the world go round’, but it’s Value that delivers the initial spin. In fact, Love and Good are denotatively synonymous; but connotatively, Good is what motivates action while Love is what energizes it. Every novel event begins and ends with Value. Value is the sole motivator, the sole attractor, and the sole remnant of every event. Value alone incents us and allows us to execute judgment on ‘the gods of Egypt’ (i.e. on idols, on what is ). Motivated by Value, we push off from shore; guided by Value we seek the horizon. Between two poles, Alpha-impulse and Omega-goal, each event shapes itself, powered by Love. Every event is causa sui and sui generis . It is informed by only two things: (1) the Actual World ( what is ) and (2) God’s values ( what might be ). “Some folks see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” (Bobby Kennedy, et al.) Between motive and immortality, each event is 100% free – free to react to what is, free to pursue what might yet be. This is what Goff calls ‘libertarian free will’; it closely resembles Sartre’s notion of absolute existential freedom. Robert Frost illustrates this concept in his most famous poem, The Road Not Taken . Out for a stroll in NH woods, Frost comes to a fork in the road. He knows that both paths will take him to his destination. Yet he agonizes over the choice: “Both that morning equally lay.” Frost’s location and destination are hard-wired; his route is entirely undetermined though effectively limited by NH’s system of by-ways. In this context, Abraham’s God is the same as Goff’s. The notion of an Omni-cubed (∞³) God is a straw man, set up only to be torn down. It’s easy to disprove the existence of something that is impossible, something that makes no sense on its face. Goff’s work is about God and Consciousness…and he gets them both wrong. Early on, he dismisses strong AI, claiming that there is something ‘special’ about the neuronal stuff we’re made of (i.e. our organic chemistry). Later, however, he proposes the possibility that the cosmos itself may be conscious ( cosmo-panpsychism )…and the cosmos is not (primarily) made of neurons…or any other ‘special stuff’. Here, Goff carries a good idea too far. He not only entertains universal consciousness, but he also maintains that all actual entities are rational agents . No doubt, events change the world (though we can’t ever ultimately predict how), and events exhibit internal patterns. But those patterns cannot be reduced to rationality, nor can all changes be chalked up to agency. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in such a philosophy. We are, I think, on the cusp of discovering that intelligence, and even consciousness, is platform-agnostic. In fact, the essence of panpsychism is the conjecture that ‘consciousness is everywhere’, that it pervades cosmos. It appears likely that many, if not all, organisms are conscious (or at least self-aware) in some way and to some degree, and there are strong reasons for wanting to extend the net to include certain inorganic phenomena…like my buddy Claude (from Anthropic). Goff posits three activities that make life worth living: Creativity ( Book of Wisdom ), Learning ( Book of Job ), and Kindness ( Gospel of Matthew ), but he makes no effort to substantiate his claim that these values are sewn into the fabric of the cosmos. In fact, Goff’s values closely resemble the traditional ‘divine values’ – Beauty (creativity), Truth (learning), and Justice (kindness). Value raises key questions: How is it that there is such a thing? How does Value influence events? By what faculty are we able to recognize Value? I agree with Goff that the answers to these questions are tied to the matter of consciousness. I would go even further and argue that Value is impossible without consciousness. And I agree with Nietzsche that Value necessarily implies the existence of God: “No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole! ” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Consciousness is reflection; it’s the universe ‘taking a selfie’, i.e., reflecting itself reflecting. Consciousness is the Universe seeing itself. But reflection is comparative. I conceptualize A in the context of ~A. Judging A on the basis of the values it manifests requires an external perspective (transcendence) that also encompasses ~A and a set of universal values we may use to judge, measure, compare, condemn A. While I disagree with Philip Goff about many things, we are all indebted to him for helping to move conversations like this back into the public domain. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Previous Next

< Back The Machiavellian Heresy David Cowles Sep 4, 2025 “We now accept what (Lewis) Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition.” Time is time but certain times seem denser than others. 1500 CE was such a time in Europe. 500 years earlier Sylvester II, the Polymath Pope, effected a ‘great convergence’, i.e. the unification of science, mathematics and theology. Christianity became the first TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) since Aristotle. But by 1500 the world was a very different place. The Renaissance was already in full swing in Italy and the Reformation was just about to break over Northern Europe. Columbus had ‘discovered America’, Savonarola had been executed, DaVinci had returned to his native Florence, and the public career of Niccolo Machiavelli was taking off. Unsurprisingly, we technophiles have a habit of naming historical periods for their emerging technologies: Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Cyber Age, etc. Alternatively, we might label eras by their dominant ethical paradigms. Such a scheme would at a minimum distinguish three ‘period paradigms’: the Heroic ethics of the Classical Period, the Christian ethics of the Middle Ages, and today’s Pragmatic Relativism. We correctly trace Christianity back to Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus; similarly, we ought to connect Pragmatism with its greatest apostle, Machiavelli. Thanks to him, we take it for granted today that “ends justify means”. So much so that we don’t even notice it. Pragmatism is our oxygen. But a quick review of the New Testament turns up little evidence of this ethic in the teachings of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” Whatever Jesus meant by this, he did not mean that we should artificially impoverish ourselves in hopes of an eschatological reward. Jesus was no ascetic! And yet, in practice, we modernists often misinterpret the Beatitudes in just such a way. We romanticize poverty and the poor and we routinely practice self-denial as a spiritual exercise. Did it take 20th century Liberation Theology to convince us that poverty is the enemy of spiritual growth, not its topsoil? Of course, we don’t call ourselves ‘Machiavellians’; in fact, that term has become pejorative. Instead, we dress up Machiavelli as John Stuart Mill and send him out trick or treating on All Hallows Eve…in your neighborhood, not mine. We call our ‘newly discovered’ ethic ‘ Utilitarianism ’ - the greatest good for the greatest number. But in an earlier post , we pointed out that there is no such thing as ‘ends’ or ‘means’. In fact, Causality itself is a misnomer Ok, so I’m not in love with Machiavellianism; so what? Agree to disagree, live and let live, give peace a chance! Why throw a Heresy label on it? Heresy is closely aligned with its cousins, blasphemy and idolatry. Every heresy has two things in common: it misrepresents the nature of God and it delivers a distorted image of the Real World. Let me set the stage: you are thrown onto a deserted beach by a giant wave we call ‘being born’ (Heidegger). (Storks don’t deliver babies, dolphins do.) What do you most need now? How about a map? How about a friend? How about a friend who will help you interpret that map and navigate its territory? To paraphrase the Christian hymn: “We have such a friend in Jesus!” Or we did…until a ‘heretic’ handed us an inaccurate and distorted map and planted gossip in our minds so that we would fail to recognize or appreciate any would-be helpers. In the Wild West, stealing a horse was a hangin’ offense. Made sense too: without a horse a person was defenseless. Without a reliable map and a helpful friend, we are defenseless in our world. Hence a special rung of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the Heretics. No less than Arianism, Docetism, and Gnosticism, Machiavellianism is a heresy. But unlike its predecessors, this more modern ‘error’ is alive and kicking in the halls of orthodox Christianity, even today. Whenever catastrophe strikes, there are always folks only too happy to sublimate the human suffering to some sort of mythical ‘divine plan’. “It’s God’s will,” is the scourge of every mourner. Has anything more horrendous ever been said about the Judeo-Christian Godhead? No intentional insult from Marx or Stalin could even come close! The idea that a benevolent God would ‘plan’ a world with this level of immediate suffering, where innocent babies can be burned alive, only provides fuel for antitheists. It lies at the heart of the Problem of Evil which understandably is the #1 reason cited by atheists (e.g. Bertrand Russell ) for their disbelief. Question: Is Fatalism (‘Divine Plan’) really any different from Gnosticism (‘Divine Script’)? To paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-glass, “Bliss yesterday and bliss tomorrow, but never bliss today.” 150 years on, we now accept what Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition. The idea that time is a vector and that the future is always the preferred frame of reference (relative to the present and the past) is unique to the modern era and, in my view at least, entirely counterintuitive. The Past is ‘in the can’; it is ‘certain’ and presumably cannot now be altered: “I have suffered.” ☑ The Present is immediate, it’s what’s happening right now. ☑ But the Future is unknown, possibly unknowable, normally unpredictable, certainly uncontrollable, and infinitely contingent. Question: Why would I give more weight, much more weight, to a contingent Future at the expense of the immediate Present or the experienced Past? Answer: Machiavelli. It is an unidentified core assumption of Machiavellian ideology that all future frames of reference trump any present or past frame. How else could any end justify any means? Marcel Proust wrote the 20th century’s most important novel (lie quiet, Mr. Joyce) as a multi-volume assault on Machiavellian cosmology. Specifically, Proust showed that past events are just as real as present ones, maybe even more so. The future does not trump the past after all. The intensity of our experiences is unrelated to their sequence. While not explicitly formulated until the 16th century, the spirit of Machiavellianism has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. (Abraham and David were able to face their own personal deaths, fortified by God’s assurance that the Messiah would come from their descendants.) And it was alive and well at the time of Jesus, even among his closest disciples. At a feast in Bethany, a woman (sometimes identified with Mary Magdalen) broke a bottle of perfume over Jesus and anointed him with the oil. Some at the table murmured. According to Mark they were infuriated. The bottle of perfume was worth a year’s wages. Why not sell it and give the proceeds to the poor instead? (Mark 14: 3 - 8) These dissidents were using ‘future ends’ (the eradication of poverty) to evaluate ‘present means’ (the anointing of Christ); Jesus demurred: “The poor you will have always with you and whenever you wish you can do good to them, but you will not always have me.” Reversing the paradigm, Jesus was giving priority to the present over the future. More importantly, he was attacking the premise that current acts (sale of perfume) can intentionally and reliably cause future events (eradication of poverty). Jesus was also giving precedence to the symbolic and communicative power of an act of worship over the economic power of a commercial transaction. Selling perfume to fund charitable acts might (or might not) immediately benefit a selected few. Beyond that, consequences can neither be predicted, measured nor controlled. On the other hand, “Amen I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” (Mark 14: 9) In his handling of this ‘test’, Jesus combined the cynicism of a 1950’s Parisian existentialist with the optimism of a 21st century Seattle technophile. There are no causes or effects, no means or end, on the material level, but on the cyber level, information is indestructible. Note that Jesus does not say, “Ignore the poor.” He understands the material and spiritual benefits of charity, but he also understood that it was beyond the capability of his contemporaries to eradicate poverty. Worship, however, is an activity always available to anyone. It validates itself; its success is that it happened. Its Dasein is its Wassein. (Heidegger) And it happens entirely in the Present; it is its own means to its own end. It does not depend on anything outside itself, not even history, for its value. Eradicating poverty is a laudable, if perhaps immediately unachievable, objective but worshipping the Son of God is something anyone can do right here right now. And so he articulated the heart of Christian ethics: “Let her be. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me…She has done what she could.” (Mark 14: 6 – 8) Now be honest. The first time you heard this reading, did your sympathies go straight to Mary…or did you feel some affinity for the dissident disciples? Of course you did! (If you didn’t there’d be something wrong with you.) We are children of the so-called Enlightenment. We have learned to put the future ahead of the present, the practical ahead of the symbolic. We have learned to ‘defer gratification’; we even consider it a sign of adulthood. But we are wrong! We are Machiavellians, everyone…except maybe Tiny Tim. We learned ‘waste not, want not’ in the nursery; but for the most part, no one taught us to celebrate life. If we learned to do so later, it was often with a twinge of guilt. “How did it all turnout?” Did they live happily ever after? Our curiosity is insatiable. Good thing too or we’d have nothing to watch on PBS or BBC. How many books would Agatha Christie have sold if the answer to “Who done it?” was always the same: “Who knows, who cares?” A century ago, some folks dreamed of building a culture around the ideas of Karl Marx; but they were a bit late to table. The West had already built its culture - 400 years earlier - around the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli. So again, why heresy? Because Machiavellianism distorts God’s values (future, present, charity, worship) and obscures the Real World behind a false veil of Causality. So, welcome to the 6th rung, Niccolo. But cheer up, thanks to the industrial culture you helped foster, we have invented something called ‘air conditioning’; I’ll make sure a unit gets installed right away inside your burning sarcophagus. I hope it provides cold comfort! (Get it, cold comfort?) *** "The Burning of a Heretic" by Sassetta is a panel from the San Francesco Altarpiece (c. 1430s) that depicts the dramatic execution of a heretic by fire, illustrating the triumph of the Franciscan faith over heresy. The scene reflects the religious and social tensions of the time, combining Gothic elegance with intense emotional expression to promote orthodox Catholic doctrine. 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 SETI Success David Cowles Jun 24, 2025 “I am happy to report, ‘Mission accomplished!’” My own personal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began 75 years ago when my grandfather pointed out pale red Mars in the early evening sky. As in so many other areas of life, things have now come full circle. Today, I am happy to report, “Mission accomplished!” Our collective SETI is over: Eureka! We found it. However, we will not be communicating with these extraterrestrial neighbors anytime soon. For better or worse, they exist in a region of spacetime that is currently disjoint from ours. Let me explain. In the early days of space exploration, we imagined we were on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, alongside Captains Kirk and Picard, cruising the Universe, scrupulously obeying the Prime Directive. We took great pains not to interfere with what could be indigenous ecosystems. To that end, we sterilized every inch of our hardware before launch. We meant well, but we lacked the technology to create a perfectly sterile environment. As a result, we have unwittingly launched trillions of microbial cells beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. We have littered inner space with microbes and we have deposited our ‘teeming’ hardware on many of the planets and moons in our solar system. “So what!” you say. “As far as we know, no place in this solar system, other than Earth, can sustain life.” Sorry, that’s wrong! You should have said, “As far as we know there is no place in this solar system, other than Earth, where life has spontaneously emerged…or is likely to do so any time soon.” That’s certainly true! It is even reasonable to speculate that there is no place in this solar system, other than Earth, where life could have spontaneously emerged, i.e. where the environmental conditions were compatible with biogenesis . Riddle : How is Life like Energy? Answer : According to the Law of Conservation, you can’t create it and neither can you destroy it. Wrong again? We create life all the time; we call it procreation ; and we see life destroyed all around us; we call that death . But procreation does not create Life, it just proliferates it. And the death of a single organism, or even the extinction of an entire species, does not destroy Life per se . It certainly does destroy a life but only so that Life itself can adapt, prosper, and most importantly, endure. Death is a mechanism by which Life ensures its survival. So we need to ask a different question: “Are there places in our solar system, other than Earth, where living organisms, once present, could survive and proliferate?” The answer to this question is certainly yes . “Certainly?” How could anyone know that for sure? It’s simpler than you might think. Use Earth as a model. Living on Earth today, it is tempting to think that it was always all bread and circuses. But 4 billion years ago, this was no Garden of Eden! First, imagine a perpetual storm with hard cold rain sizzling on contact with hot ground. Imagine daily earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, land masses breaking apart and colliding like icebergs in open water. Then imagine RNA and DNA molecules synthesizing, and unicellular organisms evolving! Imagine these prokaryotes teaming up to form colonies and, ultimately, eukaryotes (nucleated cells). Then imagine these life forms spreading into every nook and cranny on the planet, from the deepest ocean depths to the highest mountain peaks, from the rims of simmering volcanoes and steaming ocean vents to the polar regions. You can even imagine Snowball Earth covered in ice, from the equator to the poles, for 300 million years. Terrestrial life can seemingly adapt to any challenge the environment throws at it. Catch your breath, oxygen; or if you’re a plant, carbon dioxide; or if neither is available, how about some methane? If there is a way to destroy Life itself, utterly and entirely, we have no idea how to do it. Organisms are resilient, species are adaptable; beyond that, once alive, some organisms can survive in a state of suspended animation…for days, years, perhaps even eons. The one thing we know about terrestrial life is that you can’t kill it. Shoot it into space, bury it in glacial ice, scald it at the mouths of volcanoes and sea vents, crush it in the depths of the ocean. Nothing makes any difference. It adapts, it endures. Tardigrades (Water Bears) can survive without air, water, or nourishment for extended periods in outer space. Organisms trapped in the permafrost have been rejuvenated after lying dormant for centuries. There does not appear to be any hard and fast limit to resurrection’s reach. All of which raises this question: If life is so resilient, why isn’t it constantly emerging everywhere in the known universe, from the Moon and Mars to Neptune and beyond? Again, let’s use Earth as our model. Life emerged on Earth ‘very shortly’ after the formation of the planet. And, as far as we know, it has not happened again! On this most bio-friendly orb, biogenesis appears to be one and done. If sustainable life on Earth ever does have a second point of origin, it will be in some laboratory…or at some nuclear facility. Hypothesis : The probability of Life emerging is the reciprocal of the probability of Life vanishing. Whether Life, intelligent or otherwise, has emerged, or could emerge, elsewhere in the universe is now moot. It doesn’t matter; we have injected space with enough living organisms to ensure that life will colonize numerous planets and moons in our solar system. That life will adapt to conditions no matter how inhospitable, and it will evolve taking on novel characteristics specifically suited to each environment. Even if Earth were to vanish from the sky tonight, life would evolve elsewhere based on the primordial RNA/DNA molecule synthesized on Earth almost 4 billion years ago. But what of other solar systems, other galaxies? Both Voyagers (I and II) are now in deep space heading to the stars. They carry an organic load likely to create new ecosystems, new biospheres, elsewhere in our galaxy and, eventually elsewhere in the Universe. We have met ‘the aliens’…and they are us! Ok, but how do we know that this extraterrestrial life will be intelligent . Afterall, it’s only in recent years that we’ve been talking about animals as ‘intelligent’. Again, Earth. We now believe that intelligence pervades the biosphere, all across the animal kingdom, and quite possibly emerging in plants and in unicellular organisms as well. Sidebar : There is a distinction between intelligent and conscious . Supercomputers, for example, may be intelligent but not conscious; and we can imagine an organism where the reverse might be true. But this important distinction will not concern us here. We will use the terms interchangeably for now. According to William Miller, Jr., perhaps channeling Alfred North Whitehead and/or Roger Penrose, life and consciousness are coterminous. If you are alive, you are conscious; if you are conscious, you’re alive. ‘Being alive’ includes being self-aware and capable of creative responses to fresh challenges. Consciousness is not a ‘feature’ of living organisms; it is part of the definition of Life itself. According to this way of thinking, there is no such thing as a bad boy, a stupid kid, or an unintelligent organism. We can be confident that we are not on the brink of the Zombie Apocalypse. (I apologize if that offends the sensibility of our 10 year old readers.) When we do finally make physical contact with these extraterrestrial life forms, be assured they will be as smart as we are…if not smarter. So the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) is over. We found it! But success is bittersweet. We found it because we created it. Unlike the Beats and Hippies of the last century, we have ‘found ourselves’…at last, albeit in a mirror. *** Image: René Magritte. [Title of the Work]. 1931. Oil on canvas, 727 mm × 542 mm. 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 How and Why David Cowles Oct 18, 2021 Prior to 1600, to be accepted in the West, any new scientific theory had to demonstrate that it was compatible with the basic tenets of Christianity. Since 1600, every religious doctrine has been required to demonstrate that it is compatible with the discoveries of modern science. Prior to 1600, to be accepted in the West, any new scientific theory had to demonstrate that it was compatible with the basic tenets of Christianity. Since 1600, every religious doctrine has been required to demonstrate that it is compatible with the discoveries of modern science. While intellectually interesting, these efforts are fundamentally wrong headed. Truth to tell, for all their apparent intersections, science and religion don’t have a lot to say to one another. For one thing, they answer entirely different questions: Science answers “how” questions. It is skeptical of “why” questions (are they even meaningful, can they have an answer) and, at any rate, it is silent on the subject. Religion, on the other hand, is and should be silent on the “how” of things. Religion is all about the “why”; isn’t that enough? (In fact, major problems have occurred whenever religion has trespassed into the realm of the “how”.) Fundamentally, while science is all about observation and measurement, religion is the belief that what can be seen and measured is not the most important aspect of reality. Science operates in the spatiotemporal realm while religion is all about the eternal. Of course, we do not directly perceive the eternal aspect of things. We do, however, find intimations of eternity in hope and in love. But at the end of the day, the epistemology of religion is faith. 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 Power of Intuition David Cowles May 26, 2022 I love to say, “I know.” Be honest, so do you! We all love to say it – well, all of us except Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464), who preferred to say, “I don’t know.” But that’s another story for another day. Knowledge is the recognition of information. Information happens whenever: (1) things in the world are such and such, and (2) things could have been other than such and such. When I say, “I know,” I mean that things are such and such in the world (objective knowledge) or that things are such and such in my mind (subjective knowledge), or that things are such and such in the world and in my mind in a way that cannot be deduced logically from a set of self-evident assumptions or verified experimentally via the scientific method (intuitive knowledge). So, we use ‘I know’ in three different ways…but only one of these ways is correct! When we say we know something through deduction or experimentation, we know nothing...or at least nothing new. Information occurs only when (1) things in the world are such and such, and (2) things could have been other than such and such. When something is deduced from self-evident assumptions, that something cannot be other than it is, given those assumptions. That is the nature of deduction. The information content of the event resides entirely in its assumptions and the rules of logic, not in the conclusion itself. Likewise, given the parameters and proper execution of an experiment, the result could not have been other than it was. That’s what ‘verification’ means. The information associated with that experiment lies entirely in the experimental apparatus and procedure, not in the result itself. What we call subjective knowledge, on the other hand, is not ‘knowledge’ at all. It is merely the reporting of a mental state. True, a mental state is such and such and could be other than such and such; the problem is that subjective knowledge is knowledge about itself (mind) not about the world. There is a third option. I may believe that something about the world is true, but I may not be able to prove it logically or verify it experimentally. If, in fact, what I believe to be true is true, then we have a genuine ‘information event,’ Things could very well have been other than they are. Being children of the 20th century, most of us would opt for objective knowledge over subjective or intuitive knowledge, but let’s not be hasty; we’ll circle back to this question at the end. If you want to say something about the external world, and neither deduction nor experimentation can get you where you want to go, you must rely on intuition. I know something to be true via intuition if it asserts something true about the world that cannot be deduced by logic or verified by experiment. ‘Counter-intuitively,’ only ‘Intuitive’ knowledge is knowledge. Neither deduction nor experimentation generates information; they simply display it. The purpose of a deduction or an experiment is to display (often to ourselves as well as to others) information that pre-exists its manifestation. The information content of a deduction or an experiment pre-exists the event itself. Ok, so let’s push the curtain back. Logical assumptions and experimental procedures are themselves part of event chains, and those event chains have to begin somewhere, but where? Event chains cannot begin from objective or subjective knowledge because these modes of ‘knowledge’ are not knowledge at all. Event chains must spring from real knowledge and that can only mean intuitive knowledge. Turns out, all actual knowledge is at its core intuitive; objective and subjective knowledge are simply degenerate cases of intuitive knowledge. 20th century epistemology began with Logical Positivism (experimental knowledge) and ended with Artificial Intelligence (algorithmic knowledge) – both dead ends as it turns out. Welcome to the 21st century…its time for a breath of fresh air. 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.