< Back Christianity David Cowles Jun 11, 2021 In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms. For example, I own a pair of socks. For the most part, I wear them “outside-out and inside-in”. But thanks to the miracle of topology, we have the option to reverse this relationship. If we choose, we can wear our socks “inside-out”. My grandfather, for reasons known only to him, did this on a daily basis; and I must admit I’ve done it more than once merely out of carelessness. On a much deeper level, the topology of the sock is also the topology of the universe. ‘God’ (however you understand that term) is either the totality – not the sum – of all the entities and events that we call universe OR God is a transcendent being in whom that we call universe subsists. This formulation is characteristic of almost all the world’s religions. Christianity, however, turns the sock inside out. God (“The Father”) is still the entity that transcends or totalizes the events we call universe. But God (“The Son”) is a quantum entity within that universe. That is why Catholics, rightly in my view, call Mary “the mother of God”. Here’s where complementarianism comes into play. Christian theology ‘asks’ (or demands) that believe that the sock is at all times simultaneously both outside-out and inside-out. That reality itself is also God (“The Spirit”), which is God manifest (not always perfectly but always to some extent) in each and every event in our universe. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Everything Exists! David Cowles Mar 25, 2026 “Intelligent agents (us)…decide what exists. But defining what ‘what exists’ is – that’s another matter entirely.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Was it a million years ago or just yesterday? As usual, my 5 year old grandson is debating with his older brother. The proposition this morning? Resolved : That Santa Claus exists. I won’t take you through the intricacies of the argument, but jumping to the conclusion, the younger one ends the debate with, “Everything exists! QED” (Ok, so I added the QED part; I mean, he’s precocious but even that has its limits). In an earlier article on this site we discussed the Dark Universe . No one knows what it is. That’s why we call it dark . But most everyone agrees that it does exist. But according to Stevie Wonder (1972), “When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.” We are used to reasoning from a known cause to a projected effect. Depending on the precision of the projection, we are talking infinitesimal chance, real number probability, or super-determinism. In the case of the Dark Universe we reason from a known effect (gravity) to a retrojected cause. All that we really know is that we can’t account for observed topology relying solely on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. There’s got to be something more, even though we have no idea what. There’s always got to be something more! A fancier bottle of wine, a faster car, a fatter 401k. Once upon a time, there had to be gods to account for celestial motion and the processes of nature, there had to be empty space (a receptacle) to permit the emergence of matter/energy, there had to be a universe-pervading aether to hold things together, and there had to be hidden variables to account for ‘spooky action at a distance’. (Einstein) Except, as far as we know, there are none of these things…and we’re ok with that, now . *** Imagine you are God. According to the English language translation of Genesis 1:3, you said, “Let there be light and there was light.” According to most interpretations, there was void and the word of God created energy/matter. But the full text also supports a minority interpretation: There was an insensible, chaotic medium out of which God culled related elements, which he labeled ‘light’, thereby injecting primal order into primordial chaos. The remainder of Genesis 1 details the unfolding of that order into the many splendored worlds we love. Defenders of this minority view have found themselves on the wrong side of Roman Catholic dogma: i.e. creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. But that doesn’t have to be so. The eminent 20th century theologian, Bill Clinton, summarized the dilemma: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Is chaos something…or nothing? Without order, does anything exist? We believe, for example, that entropy (disorder) was minimal at Big Bang and that it will be maximal at Heat Death. We have no problem saying that nothing ( nihilo ) existed ‘prior’ to Big Bang, not even time itself; we should have no problem saying that nothing will exist ‘after’ Heat Death. Therefore, maximum entropy can be synonymous with nihilo and so the two interpretations of ontogenesis converge…in orthodoxy. Light exists because God said it exists. Same for sky (1:8), earth and sea (1:10), plant life (1:11), celestial bodies (1:14), and animal life (1:24). In Genesis 2, God shares his power of creation (i.e. ordering, naming) with humans, resulting in speciation (2:20) and socialization (2:23), in other words, the world as we know it today. The Dark Universe exists because we say it exists. Light, etc. exists because God says it exists. Society exists, again, because we say so. Working with God, we too inject order (local) into the chaotic medium (universal); we are co-creators. The Dark Universe exists, God exists, Santa Claus exists! We know they exist because we see their effects. Gravity exists, the universe exists, and once every year presents appear under the Christmas tree. We know nothing of the Dark Universe, God, or Santa Claus per se . We only know that there are phenomena we cannot currently account for in any other way. Most adults will tell you that they don’t believe in Santa Claus. They say that because they believe they can account for the annual appearance of presents under a tree by other means. They cite an unholy (secular) trinity (Family, Amazon, and MasterCard) to explain the unmistakable phenomena we know as Christmas . They might just as well say, “Of course Santa Claus exists. What we call ‘Santa Claus’ is a confluence of kinship, commerce, and finance.” But out of respect for Occam’s Razor, they don’t. But in 1897, Francis Church, looking at exactly the same phenomena, did! He famously wrote, “ Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound…” Mr. Church looks at a confluence of love, generosity, and devotion and chooses to call it ‘Santa Claus’; other adults look at the same phenomena and find no reason to ‘name’ an additional entity. Likewise, folks who ‘don’t believe in God’ claim they can explain the existence and character of our universe without hypothesizing a responsible entity. They combine physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology to account for “Heaven and Earth and all things, visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed) The Dark Universe poses a slightly different problem. There are currently no proposals that convincingly account for cosmic phenomena based solely on today’s catalogue of particles and forces. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be. So my grandson was right, the younger that is: everything does exist! The Dark Universe, God, and Santa. The challenge is defining what it is that exists. When we use language to describe reality, we arbitrarily shatter the uniform glass sphere into a million shards. In the end, it doesn’t much matter how the crystal crumbles…as long as we can reassemble the pieces to recreate a smooth globe. A jigsaw puzzle might be an even better analogy. One image, divisible into indefinitely many, randomly shaped pieces that can be reassembled to recreate the image on the box. We , i.e. intelligent agents, aka ‘God, his angels, and (us) his saints’, decide what exists ( Dasein , Heidegger). But defining what ‘what exists’ is ( Wassein ) – that’s another matter entirely. *** Rembrandt’s 1632 oil on canvas uses dramatic chiaroscuro to depict a scholar seated in a vast, sun-drenched interior, symbolizing the light of human reason amidst the shadows of the unknown. The composition is anchored by a prominent winding staircase that suggests the complex, spiraling depths of philosophical thought and the search for hidden truths. While a second figure quietly tends a fire in the background, the painting remains a profound meditation on the internal struggle to understand the nature of existence and the divine. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back “ It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." (Ex-9:12) What is our excuse? Deborah Kornfeld Apr 4, 2023 "...despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us?" I always look forward to the plagues. That part of the Haggadah recited in a singsong ritualistic manner is accompanied by the small thrill of putting my finger into the wine cup and marking my plate. It carries with it a memory that despite the power and might and Technicolor special effects accompanying our redemption, we need to be mindful that the Egyptians suffered. In the exquisite theatre of the Seder, every participant has an active role in this custom. To make out seders lively and fun for the children, we often decorate our table with frogs and beasts and lice- a real table-top menagerie. Yet despite the few drops of wine, what do the plagues have to teach us? Consider the first plague- “blood”. The Torah reads: “God said to Moses,” Tell Aaron to take his staff and extend his hand over the waters of Egypt- over their rivers, their canals, their reservoirs, and every place where water is kept- and the water shall turn into blood. There will be blood throughout all Egypt, even in wooden barrels and stone jars. Moses and Aaron did exactly as God had instructed, and Aaron held the staff up and then struck the Nile’s water in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials. The Nile’s water was transformed into blood. The fish in the Nile died, and the river became so polluted that the Egyptians were no longer able to drink the Nile’s water. There was blood everywhere in Egypt…. The Egyptians dug around the Nile for drinking water, since they could not drink any water from the river. After God struck the Nile, it remained that way for seven full days (Ex 7:19-231). They could have certainly applied for extra aid and qualified as a national disaster. It must have been horrific. People and wild life must have died. How could Pharaoh have been so stubborn and entrenched in his way of thinking? How could he have ignored this beginning of such a great wave of suffering? Now the answer regarding Pharaoh is found in Exodus 9:12-“It was God who made Pharaoh obstinate." There are many explanations and interpretations concerning the plagues. A midrash suggests that the Egyptians were punished measure for measure for the cruelty and indifference to the suffering of their Israelite slaves. Rav Kook explained that God brought the plagues upon the Egyptians in order that they should understand the essence of God’s presence in the world. His influence over everything. His intimate relationship with His world and His ability to do anything.” Another modern scholar explains the plagues as emblematic of our greatest fears. Shai Zarhi, an Israeli Educator, writes: “The plagues Gode visited on the Egyptians in Egypt seem to be a parade of people’s greatest fears. They are a mythological show of the power of the living vs. primal fear. Starting from the blood of birth and of death, through primal human fears of small creatures (lice) and large ones (wild beasts), fear of financial ruin (locusts), fear of the dark (losing direction and meaning), we face the greatest fear, the fear for our children’s lives-loss of the future. Tonight, a night to commemorate the past, we see the mercy of God’s protections, look out from our places at a world full of fears and dangers and pray for another quiet year.” The term used to describe Pharaoh’s indifference in the face of these disasters is “Kaved Lev “which is translated as meaning obstinate, stubbornly refusing to change his opinion or course of action despite the attempts to persuade him to do so. We are told in the Torah that God made Pharaoh obstinate so that this redemption would be spectacular with an abundance of special effects and everyone involved would know that it was God himself who orchestrated this redemption. In the time of the Egyptians, many of the plagues were reversible. The bloody Nile was returned to clear potable water, the boils disappeared, and the frogs went away. We are not so lucky with our man-made plagues. When we pollute the waterways or impact on our climate or waste precious resources simply because of greed and/or indifference, we cannot always reverse the consequences of our actions and the consequences might endanger our most precious commodity, that being our future. This year when I dip my finger into my wine cup as we recite the names of the Biblical plagues, I will remember that these plagues did have grave consequences on the Egyptians, but I will also see each stain on my plate as a promise of action to protect the next generations. Unlike Pharaoh, I can’t blame God, this time it is in our hands. This is a republication with permission from The Jewish Pluralist . The author of this essay, Deborah Kornfeld, is a retired pediatric occupational therapist, aspiring climate and social justice activist, occasional essayist, shul chesed coordinator, loving mother, and safta. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back And Then... David Cowles Apr 19, 2022 This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Back to the year 1000 AD! Millennial years are special years…I mean they only come once every thousand years or so…so they’re pretty rare. Most folks never experience a change of Millennia during their lifetimes. I did, and no doubt many of you did too. Think back to the year 2000 AD! Planes fell from the sky, the power grid collapsed, virtually all electronics, including computers, failed. Except, of course, none of these things actually happened. December 31 went, and January 1 came…thud. December 31, 999: it is likely that the majority of Western Europeans believe that the world would end in the coming hours. Huge crowds filled the Vatican and the streets of Rome; they awaited the Apocalypse. But AD 1000 is important for other reasons. Otto III, the boy king, is Emperor. Riding into battle at the age of 6, leading an army at the age of 12, crowned king of the Germans at 14 and Holy Roman Emperor at 16; Otto was still only 20 years-old in the year 1000. Otto’s lifelong tutor and mentor, Gerbert, sits on the Papal Throne, reigning as Pope Sylvester II. Gerbert was pope, but he may have been better known as the leading scientist and mathematician of his age. This was perhaps the last time we could say, “God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.” Church and state, the sacred and the secular, science and religion, faith and curiosity all flowed together and co-existed peacefully. And then… Image: Otto III from The Gospels of Otto Thoughts While Shaving is published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To subscribe to our newsletter, complete the form below (bottom right) and never miss a single Thought. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” David Cowles On Friday, September 1, Aletheia Today Magazine will be releasing our Fall Issue dedicated exclusively to AI – its philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications. In researching material for this issue, I came across something terrifying online ( quelle surprise! ): “Prompt engineering involves more than just typing in a query. It's about understanding the AI's underlying logic…and sometimes even 'thinking like the AI'… (For example) Generate five innovative product ideas for the eco-friendly industry focusing on renewable energy." Why frightening? First, as human beings, we like to think that we create technology to serve our purposes; we bristle at the idea that it is technology that creates us. But over the past 10,000 years or so, it has become increasingly obvious that we are products of our own technique . According to Genesis, God created the world in 6 or 7 ‘days’ (or epochs); technology is creating us in a similar succession of stages. The first transformation occurred with the rise of spoken language. Originally invented to help us accomplish our projects, language has increasingly worked to determine the nature and scope of those projects. Imagine a Stone Age father lecturing his teenage son: “If you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Perhaps surprisingly, our Stone Agers were not entirely unaware of their dilemma. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an early, if somewhat confused, attempt to showcase the relationship between speech and act. Minimally, the story makes it clear that ‘saying and doing’ (language and production) are intimately related. Next came the invention of writing. It only happened once in human history, but like Pokémon, Kid Rock, and Pet Rock, it caught on. Written communication greatly expanded the scope of enterprise…but at the same time it further limited the scope of that enterprise. Imagine a Bronze Age mother lecturing her teenage daughter: “ If you can’t write it , you can’t say it, and if you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Now technology is about what we can’t do rather than what we can. Our modern Indo-European (IE) languages are semantic minefields seeded over-generously with nouns (subjects & objects) and active voice verbs. If your project doesn’t fit comfortably within this syntactical framework, you’re S.O.L. That’s not a problem for you? Perhaps that is the problem! Have you lost the ability (or inclination) to conceive of a project outside the limits imposed by IE syntax? Writing kept us busy for several millennia. I mean come on, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe! What more could anyone want? Then came the next great tectonic shift – the Industrial Revolution (IR). The technique involved in large-scale manufacture, and its impact on human life, has been identified by countless individuals and celebrated (or castigated) in various media. To cite just a few examples: Prudhomme, Marx, Legere, Chaplin, Brazil , McLuhan and Ellul. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “Today, we measure out our lives with coffee spoons.” Following IR…DR, the Digital Revolution. Consider the massive change in communication that has occurred since ‘I’ invented the internet. E-mail, Text, Excel, PowerPoint have all changed the way we express our thoughts…and therefore how and what we think. Begin with the obliteration of orthography (spelling) and grammar, the atrophy of sentence structure, the disappearance of complex verb forms, and, of course, the rise of internet slang and emojis. We’ve witnessed the reduction of mathematics to spread sheeting and rhetoric to bullet points. When PowerPoint first came out, I was resistant. I didn’t like the oversimplification and non-sequiturs I noticed in others’ work products. I wouldn’t use it…until I couldn’t not use it. Now, of course, I use it every day. “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Now we appear to be riding on the first swell of another technological tidal wave: first language, writing, manufacture, computerization, and now…(drum roll please) Artificial Intelligence. All of which brings us back to what I found so terrifying : “…thinking like the AI.” We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential, of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…but that may be exactly what we’re doing…which leads me to my second concern: “Generate five innovative product ideas.” Talk about begging the question. Can AI truly innovate? That may be the dominant intellectual question of our time; but according to the quote at the beginning of this article, it’s already a settled matter of fact: AI can innovate! If so, we need to consider our Bots conscious …and therefore entitled to certain civil rights; if not, we need to consider how far we’ve dumbed-down our understanding of innovation . Implicit in ‘in/nova/tion’ is ‘novum’, new. Rearranging deck chairs is not new, but I don’t doubt that AI can do it brilliantly. That’s not the same thing as inventing a new, iceberg-proof hull. On the other hand, where do we draw the line? When does mere novelty become true innovation? Is there any fundamental difference? What a time to be alive! We are at the ‘question forming’ stage of a new anthropological era. Should aquatic organisms colonize dry land? The Iron Age is history; welcome to the Age of Bots. I can’t wait to see where we go from here! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next

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

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

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

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

< Back Messiah Redux David Cowles “Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries?... It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces.” Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) Issue #5, our Holiday Issue , included a performance of Handel’s most famous oratorio … minus the soloists, the chorus, and the orchestra, of course. Some performance! But the critics loved it. In this, our Holy Days Issue , we dig deeper into the political (vs. the theological) message of this masterpiece. To understand Messiah , it is helpful to view it in historical context. The House of Stuart ruled England, more or less continuously, from 1603 to 1714. The first two kings of this dynasty, James I and Charles I, were ideological royalists. They believed in the divine right of kings . Philosophical nominalists, they believed that God and his royal avatars were free to act however they wished. Le loi c’est moi! George Frideric Handel wrote his Messiah in 1741, and it was first performed in Dublin in 1742 during the Easter season. ( Messiah was intended, not to celebrate Christmas, but Easter.) Easter is resurrection, spring, the celebration of new life. But first, ‘the winter of our discontent’, leading to crucifixion and burial in an unmarked grave. Messiah ‘opens’ sometime between sundown on Good Friday and sunrise on Easter Sunday. Dante’s Divine Comedy does the same. This is the time, according to Roman Catholic theology, when Christ himself ‘descended into hell’ to liberate the souls trapped in Hades. In other words, Messiah begins in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’, but it begins with a whisper of hope : Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. These verses from Isaiah meet all of us, from Jesus’ apostles to today’s ATMers, right where we stand, even if that’s in the pit of despair. For centuries it was believed that revolution took root in and sprung-up out of the depths of human misery. Not so! We learned in the 20 th century that revolution is ignited by ‘a spark of hope’, and it was just such a spark that Handel and his librettist, Jennens, hoped their Messiah might light. The libretto comes almost exclusively from Old and New Testament texts. The selection and arrangement of these texts rest squarely with the composer and his librettist. The oratorio consists of an interwoven series of flashbacks and flash-forwards. As you move through the narrative, notice how an 18th century political message has been woven into historical and spiritual details from the Bible. Building on the message of hope, Messiah proceeds to present its ‘revolutionary program’. It’s not a political platform (like the Communist Manifesto ). It’s not a utopian wish list. It’s a ‘How To’ manual, Jennens’ version of V.I. Lenin’s What is to be Done? (I am tempted to compare it to the famous Anarchists’ Cookbook from the 1960s – but that might be a stretch.) The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway to our God. What is revolution but turning society upside-down like an hourglass a nd inside-out, like a sock? What was peripheral becomes central, and vice versa. The stone rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Thus, saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts: Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come. The Lord shakes all nations? This is very different from the expectations of James and Charles. But more importantly, the result will satisfy the ‘desire of all nations’. This is a brand-new test of political legitimacy, and it presages the eruption of democratic movements later in the 18 th century. According to Locke, Rousseau, et al., secular government evolved to secure peace, justice, and prosperity for its people. According to Messiah , those values will only be fully realized once the Kingdom of God replaces the kingdoms of men (sic), but in the meantime they may be reflected to varying degrees in various secular states. The scene is set. Now…”Action!” (P.S. Please don’t shoot anyone.) Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call His name Emmanuel, God with us. If we didn’t already know the story by heart, this line would be a real ‘cart-tipper’: A virgin conceive? A baby be God? God be with us ? Say unto the cities of Judah: Behold your God! Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the ‘government’ shall be upon his shoulders; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Messiah makes it clear that the legitimacy and sovereignty of all government is rooted in Christ. Its sovereignty is just a reflection of his sovereignty. Christ is the foundation of all political authority, including that of the British monarchy.At this juncture, we can imagine the royal party being quite pleased with itself. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be God’s ‘avatar’ on Earth. But grounding temporal authority in Christology can lead to unintended consequences for secular rulers. Remember, we’re less than 50 years from the Bastille and the bloody guillotine. There were shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night… And the angel said unto them, “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, thy King cometh unto thee; he is the righteous Savior, and he shall speak peace to the heathen. Then shall ‘the eyes of the blind be opened’ and ‘the ears of the deaf unstopped’. Then shall ‘the lame leap’ as a hart, and ’the tongue of the dumb shall sing’. These are the traditional marks of divine favor, an indication that God is ‘well pleased’ with his temporal rulers. End Part One, Begin Part Two . What an auspicious beginning! Shepherds were the first to acknowledge Christ’s kingship. Magi notwithstanding, this was to be a revolution led by the proletariat (shepherds and fishermen). Jesus welcomed support from elements of the elite ( fellow travelers like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea) , but he never lost sight of his roots: he was the red-headed stepchild of a displaced carpenter, born in an ox’s stable and swaddled in its manger . And from there, it was all downhill. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off his hair: he hid not His face from shame and spitting. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way. Handel and Jennens are no anarchists. In a vague reference to the Book of Judges (21: 25), our ‘Sacco & Vanzetti’ make it clear that they are not prepared to entrust social order to the conscience of individuals. Authority is necessary, but that authority must reflect the sovereignty of Christ. The exercise of secular authority must reflect Jesus’ values (‘WWJD’). The final triumph of the Kingdom of God will not happen suddenly or spontaneously. We have a role to play as well, and that roll requires full-on effort on our part: The Lord gave the word; great was the company of the preachers. How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things . Their sound is gone out into all lands, and their words unto the ends of the world. We are the preachers! How beautiful are our feet! We are charged to bring ‘glad tidings of good things…unto the ends of the world’. Now, appropriately, Handel and Jennens double back. We have our marching orders. Now we need to refocus on the task at hand: Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth rise-up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed. Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their yokes from us… Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. The oratorio has built to this moment: an overt call to revolution! Break bonds asunder, cast away yokes, break them with a rod of iron, dash them like so many shards of pottery. Not the language of constitutional debate.The message is clear: it is the kings of the earth who are responsible for these bonds and yokes, and it is we, the people, working with the Lord, who must break them. Thought experiment : it’s March 1752, and you have a small printing press in your basement. You’ve printed these very same words (above) onto flyers which you are now distributing outside London’s Covent Garden Theater, scene of the Messiah’s London debut. Would you escape imprisonment…or worse? But lifted from scripture and embedded in the middle of a musical masterwork, the political import of the Messiah’s message can escape notice. Is this an early version of subliminal messaging? Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries? All of which brings us to the famous Hallelujah Chorus , perhaps the best-known chorus in all of Western music, save only the Ode to Joy : Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. ‘The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ’; and he shall reign for ever and ever. ‘King of kings’, and Lord of lords. Hallelujah: for the Lord God Omnipotent ‘reigneth’. If Handel had been playing in the NFL, he would have been called for a personal foul: “taunting.” It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces. But it quite another thing altogether to celebrate prospectively the obliteration of the secular order. According to Handel and Jennens, the secular state (per Marx) has already withered away ! The essence of Christian social teaching is that that state withered away at the birth of Christ. (Is the Adoration of the Magi symbolic of this event?) Now we just have to wait for history to catch up to theology. End Part Two, Begin Part III, the Celebration. Here we can take off the training wheels. From here on, let Jennens’ libretto speak for itself. No more intrusions from the Peanut Gallery (you’re welcome): Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Share Previous Next

< Back The Sovereignty of God David Cowles Jul 7, 2022 God’s sovereignty is absolute; it is part of God’s essential nature and therefore cannot be subdivided, shared, or delegated…it can only be reflected. Our two most recent TWS posts have focused on government: contemporary, historical, and primordial. ( TWS 6/30 and TWS 7/5 ) Let’s give this general subject one more tour around the dance floor, in honor of Independence Day (7/4) and Bastille Day (7/14); I promise we’ll move on to other subjects next week! Theocracy’s claim to legitimacy is rooted in Revelation (Written Torah) and Natural Law (Oral Torah); Anarchy’s claim is rooted in personal conscience. But Revelation, Natural Law and Conscience are three different expressions of a single reality: the Will of God. In a Theocracy, all authority is vested in God. Note that the first 5 books of the Old Testament are fittingly called ‘Torah,’ which means ‘Law.’ God’s sovereignty is absolute; it is part of God’s essential nature and therefore cannot be subdivided, shared, or delegated…it can only be reflected. Any sovereignty other than God’s is in fact God’s sovereignty, reflected . God’s sovereignty is a double-edged sword. Because God’s sovereignty is absolute, our claims to sovereignty are vacated. On the other hand, the eternal equality of all members of a class of ‘beings,’ e.g., all human beings, is now guaranteed. We are asked to ‘trade’ power for freedom – for my money, a good deal any day! Any claim by anyone to sovereignty over another is usurpation of God’s authority. All human beings are equal – not just ‘created equal’ but ‘equal,’ always, now, and forever. Apparent gradations of sovereignty among humans, real in spacetime, are utterly unreal in eternity. God is no ‘respecter of persons’; but what if he were? What if God did acknowledge the authority of one or some human beings over others? To do so would be to cede some portion of his sovereignty to selected human institutions or persons. But even God cannot do that! Sovereignty is a hardwired aspect of God’s essential nature. It is part of what it means to be God, he cannot deny it, waive it, or barter it away. Therefore, since God’s sovereignty is absolute, no competing claim of sovereignty can be credible. Few, if any, of us has ever lived in either a Theocratic or an Anarchic society. Ask almost any member of the Atlantic Community what makes law legitimate, and they will likely talk about ‘the consent of the governed,’ ‘our democratic institutions,’ ‘our constitutional system,’ military might, the power of the police, etc. As a result of this, we are up to our eyeballs in rules and regulations. Under the cover of law, society reserves the right to review, renegotiate, and negate commercial transactions, confiscate personal property, charge fees, impose fines, levy taxes, deprive individuals of their freedom and, in some cases, their lives. The power of government is immense, but the justifications for that power are wafer thin, at best. The truth is that all of these ‘sources of power’ are merely smoke screens. Once God is removed from his legislative office, we are left with laws, crafted by the rich and powerful, usually for their own benefit, always at our expense. It can be no other way. Why? Because State of Nature minus God equals Plutocracy . How does the process unfold? Someone somehow sometime gains some advantage over another. They leverage this advantage to amass greater wealth, to concentrate their power, and to extend their ‘sphere of influence.’ Wealth increases power and power increases wealth – a vicious circle, or better, a vicious spiral at work! This is Plutocracy, the rule of wealth. Of course, we don’t call it that! When we’re traveling and someone asks us to describe our system of government, we mostly just answer, “Oh, we live in a democracy” or “a constitutional monarchy”. We ordinarily don’t tell people that we live in a Plutocracy…but (whisper) everyone already knows! You can maintain the veneer of ‘democracy’ and suffer your shame alone and in silence; or you can take responsibility for things as they are and own up to what is. “I live in a Plutocracy!” There I said it. …But shh, so do you (I won’t tell unless you want me to). The question is, “Do we want to change it?” If we do, we can’t hide behind the notion of “Democratization”. ‘Democracy’ is simply ‘Plutocracy by democratic means.’ The only viable alternatives to Plutocracy are Theocracy and Anarchy. Both reflect the Will of God, as it is written in Scripture, Nature, and Conscience: “signs of all things I am here to read.” (James Joyce) Image: Augustus as Jupiter , holding scepter and orb (first half of 1st century AD). [1] 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 Philosophy’s 10 Fatal Fallacies David Cowles Aug 19, 2025 “We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality.” Western philosophy is sick. It’s coming up on 100 years since Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre published the last great comprehensive philosophical systems ( Process and Reality and Being and Nothingness ). They did so at a time when most of their contemporaries had concluded that ‘systematic philosophy’ was an oxymoron and that the proper purview of philosophy was limited to analysis . No wonder! 2400 years after Plato, we were still debating the same tired issues…with no resolution in sight. It is only sensible that folks began to ask whether the very notion of philosophical inquiry was flawed, whether ultimate or even relative truth was discoverable, whether metaphysics could ever be meaningful. My own superannuated contemporaries, the ones who kept me up all night in college dorm room bull sessions, have apparently given up. They are content that existence has no extrinsic meaning : “Cultivate your own garden.” (Voltaire) “A man should eat and drink and enjoy himself.” ( Ecclesiastes ) The fault, however, lies not in the stars but in ourselves. We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality! The intellectual and spiritual diseases of the 21 st century – cynicism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism, secularism, relativism, hedonism, et al. – stem in large part from 10 fundamental philosophical fallacies. Scattered across multiple academic disciplines – math, topology, physics, logic, ethics, linguistics, theology et al., these fallacies share one feature in common: they are all intellectually descended from Horatio…not Hamlet. Fallacy #1 – Geometry Euclid taught us that parallel lines do not intersect; well and good! But in the real world, all lines intersect. What originates at a singularity (Big Bang) converges at a singularity (Heat Death: Big Crunch or Big Freeze). Frost’s two roads both lead home and ultimately all roads do lead to ‘Rome’. Euclidean geometry is orientable . A sheet of paper has two sides that never meet. Even if we join two ends of the sheet to make a loop (a BK crown), obverse and reverse remain distinct. In fact, now they also permanently split the world in two: ‘inside the loop’ vs. ‘outside the loop’. Closed geometric figures (circles, triangles, etc.) divide 2 dimensional planes into inside and outside areas separated by an impermeable one dimensional perimeter. Likewise, spheres and polyhedra divide 3-d space into inside and outside volumes, separated by a two dimensional surface. We’ve trained ourselves to take these things for granted. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like this. At least since Heraclitus (5 th century BCE), we’ve known that in the real world ‘everything flows’. Nothing corresponding to Euclid’s orientable model exists anywhere ! Every ‘impermeable’ boundary is in fact a dissipative membrane: Ultimately there are no insides or outsides. All bifurcations are local (temporary) and ‘imperfect’: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Frost) Even protons eventually decay. Consider a living cell, for example. It takes 30 trillion of them to form just one adult human body. Each cell is separated from every other cell and from the rest of its external world by a membrane we misleadingly call a ‘cell wall’. We have developed a complex science to account for the dissipative behavior of this membrane: once thought impermeable, more than a billion molecules cross it every second. The cell ‘wall’ is biology’s Maginot Line…or its ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. In the Real World, all lines intersect, therefore all planes form loops. Conforming to the fundamental topology of the Universe, all loops ‘twist’ to form one-sided Mobius Strips, and every higher dimensional ‘object’ (e.g. a Klein Bottle ) includes an embedded Mobius Strip. The geometry of the Real World is non-orientable . Orientable , Euclidean Geometry assumes 360° symmetry. Rightly so, but only in certain ‘special cases’, e.g. circular shapes and electromagnetic fields. Let X be a point on a circle. Move X 360° in either direction, et voila , X-again. More fundamentally, though, the Real World exhibits 720° symmetry, a characteristic of non-orientable geometries. Tetrahedra, the foundation of all structure (Plato, Fuller), consist of 4 triangles whose interior angles each add up to 180° (180 x 4 = 720). A tetrahedron is the union of two 360° circles (360 x 2 = 720), twisted relative to each other, so that it is impossible to trace the sides of the tetrahedron without going over one side twice. Fermions, the building blocks of all matter, exhibit symmetry only after rotating through 720°. 360° symmetry gives us access to only half a world (one circle) – we’re like Alice before she stepped through the looking-glass. The Higgs Field creates a ‘mirror world’, unknown to the pioneers of Western mathematics: Euclid, Archimedes, et al., through which all matter must pass. Orientability (flatness) is a fundamentally ‘local’ phenomenon. Just as the round Earth appears locally flat, the non-orientable Cosmos appears locally orientable . If you smashed any globally non-orientable Klein Bottle into pieces, each piece (local) would be orientable …but the whole is not. What is true of the Whole is not true of any of its so-called Parts. Parts are always orientable , Wholes never are. (This distinction may define Wholes vs. Parts.) But as we shall soon see ( Fallacy #2 ), there are no Parts, only Wholes exist, Wholes embedded in other Wholes. Fallacy #2 – Topology We are accustomed to thinking of the material world as a hierarchy of Wholes and Parts: “A whole is equal to the sum of its parts”, or is it “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, or “the sum of the parts is greater than the whole?” But in the case of a Klein Bottle ( Fallacy #1 ), what is true of the Whole is true of none of its so-called Parts, taken individually or even collectively. This degree of ambiguity alone should be a clue: something is wrong with this picture! If contradictory propositions about Wholes and Parts are all true, then everything is ‘true’ and therefore nothing is True . In fact, there are no Parts, only Wholes. To be is to be whole and to be a Whole. Some Wholes are embedded in other Wholes but embedded Wholes are not Parts; they are Wholes in their own right, symbiotically embedded. The nucleus of a cell is an independent organism, symbiotically embedded in its host. Same with mitochondria. A human cell in turn is not ‘part’ of a body, it is an independent organism, a Whole, embedded in a broader Whole. These observations lead to four wildly counter-intuitive corollaries: (1) “No two events intersect” unless one is entirely embedded in the other. Unless B and C are entirely disjoint, either B is embedded in C or C is embedded in B. But if one event is embedded in another then they function as a single event. (2) However, if B and C are disjoint, each may be embedded, independently, in A. But in that case, there is no consistent arithmetic relationship (common metric) spanning the volumes of C, B, and A. Even though B and C are embedded in A they are not ‘parts’ of A; so it is not necessarily the case that A > B or A > C or A ≥ (B+C). A, B, and C are independent Wholes, each with its own unique metric. Therefore, the volume(s) of B and/or C and/or (B+C) can be greater than A. The volume of A can even be infinitesimal (hyperreal), or zero, or negative while the volumes(s) of B and C and (B+C) ‘stay positive’…and real. (3) B and C can influence A and A can influence B and/or C but B and C cannot influence each other except through the intermediation of A. A causal relationship ( Fallacy #4 ) is the only relationship between entities (B ↔ C) that is not permitted IRL. The Real World is truly the inverse of the Euclidean World in which all of us live our daily lives. (4) “…it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” (O. C. Smith) We imagine that the Universe pulls itself up by its ‘bootstraps’, that fundamental particles assemble themselves into ever more complex structures: electron → atom → molecule → cell → organism → community → society → the United Federation of Planets ( Star Trek ). In fact there is no pulling up, there are no bootstraps and nothing assembles. There are only Wholes that construct themselves by incorporating qualities manifested by other Wholes. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, “It’s Wholes all the way down.” Fallacy #3 – Space, Time & Scale We are transfixed by the enormity of space and time and by the c. 60 orders of magnitude separating the cosmic event horizon from Planck’s measurements. In fact, however, space, time and scale are just three different axes on which we can conveniently arrange events to illustrate various pathways of inherited order. Time, for example, allows us to arrange events on a grid that corresponds to a desired ordering principle, e.g. increasing entropy. Until 1964, following Einstein et al., we were certain that the speed of light placed an absolute bound on the degree of integration possible in any universe. In fact, we now know that most events (particles) are entangled with other events across vast tracts of spacetime; and between entangled events, spacetime is annihilated – not that information travels faster than ‘c’ but that spatiotemporal separation is simply irrelevant. It is epiphenomenal in relation to substructural entanglement. Space is an ordering principle that allows us to quantify the strength at which various forces are felt by various entities. Re Scale , 60 orders of magnitude may be just what we need to house all the bits of information that currently constitute the universe. Fortunately, the universe is making room for more; it’s expanding. Speculation : Does the rate of cosmic expansion put a limit on our ability to generate new bits of information? Or does the rate of information generation determine the rate of cosmic expansion? Does the advent of AI mean that we could be headed for a new period of hyperinflation? But all of this is purely relative. According to George Macdonald, “Form is much but size is nothing.” And before him, William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” But just exactly how ‘relative’ is it? According to Roger Penrose’s CCC model of cosmology, the isolated photons characteristic of the Big Freeze may be the primordial fluctuations in the CMB that become/became the seeds that drive/drove the formation of galaxies. In fact, the fundamental structure of the World is neither spatiotemporal nor scalar; it’s fractal . There are patterns that occupy regions of spacetime and repeat over and over again with slight variations - at every scale, in every place, in every timeframe. The rotations of the galaxies around their black holes recapitulate the revolutions of the solar system; the nucleated structure of the Eukaryotic cell recapitulates 20 th century models of the atom. Patterns persist; the universe is a many layered onion. Fallacy #4 - Causality “Everything has a cause.” From physics to theology, this premise was virtually unchallenged (lie quiet, David Hume) prior to the 20 th century’s discovery of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos and entanglement. Causality and Ontogenesis have become virtual synonyms. In fact, however, there are no ‘causes’, and therefore no ‘effects’; there are only events . Every event is causa sui and sui generis . Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. in the context of its own unique Actual World. “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot) Every event is a cosmos-filling field, a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for The Good, i.e. for Eternal Values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The probability of any specific event occurring in the Real World is infinitesimal. Yet events do occur. Is this not just another way of saying that every event is miraculous – not a suspension of physical law but the most dramatic possible expression of that law? In every event, the Actual World is both the subject and the object of the event, but it is never the event itself: “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!” (Carroll) But without Causality , how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First , all events are motivated by a bundle of shared values (above) that naturally lead toward a convergent future. Second , while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the Eternal Values. Third , while every event is novel, no event is entirely new. As noted above, every event is causa sui and sui generis , but no event (except God?) creates ex nihilo . No two events are entirely the same: Creativity is the spark of difference. No two events are entirely different: Solidarity provides a shared foundation. Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are massively enhanced by Stability and Continuity. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values while maximizing Intensity of Experience. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity) as it meets the objective interests (value) of the wider World. The two interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. Intensity and value both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.” Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives: Value, Intensity, Consistency. What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethics: “Accomplish as much as possible by changing as little as possible!” Qualia are conserved without the phantasm of Causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. Fourth , we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). Within that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. But we don’t see things that way. We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy. We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. Sometimes we affix labels like ‘intention’ or ‘tone’, ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ to various frame sequences. But in reality these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon (the event itself). Finally , we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ with ‘cause’. It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and backtrack through an imagined sequence of ‘quantum changes’, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached the ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. Fallacy #5 - Set Theory Around the dawn of the 20 th century, logic and sets met…and it was love at first sight. Suddenly, everything had to be described in terms of sets. By the time my children were ready for school, even basic arithmetic was taught as set theory. They learned symbolic notation before they learned addition. This was not necessarily a bad thing! Set Theory is a powerful tool. But then Bertrand Russell discovered an apparent ‘paradox’ in ‘naïve set theory’ and ‘fixed it’ by adding a ludicrous new axiom (The Axiom of Foundation). AF states that no set can be a subset (or member) of itself. There are valid sets that are not members of themselves. For example, the set of Real Numbers is not itself a real number. But these sets tend to be inert collections, baseball cards gathering dust on a closet shelf. More fundamentally, the Universe consists of sets that are recursive, i.e. that are members of themselves. Example : the set of physical laws is itself a physical law (a meta-law ). Criteria : (1) Changing the ‘value’ (defined as broadly as possible, perhaps similar to ‘qualia’) of any one member normally changes the ‘value’ of the set itself; and (2) changing the ‘value’ of the set potentially changes the ‘value’ of every member of that set. Rule of thumb : Recursion is characteristic of sets that model organic processes. A universe without recursion is sterile…and very likely impossible. What does it mean ‘to be’, Prince Hamlet? To be a difference that makes a difference. (Gregory Bateson) To be many in one and one among many. (Whitehead); all for one and one for all (Dumas). In pursuit of consistency, Russell sacrificed relevance. IRL, every action is recursive, every action is self-modifying, every action acts on the actor. Fallacy #6 - Arithmetic The rules of arithmetic are powerful, but they are also pernicious. 2500 years ago Zeno proved that arithmetic cannot account for even the simplest real world phenomenon (e.g. the flight of an arrow). The next 2000 years of Western intellectual history may be understood as a coordinated assault on Zeno, triumphantly culminating in the simultaneous discovery of Calculus by Leibniz and Newton c. 1700 CE. Alleluia! The multiplication tables, scourge of 8 year olds everywhere, were finally vindicated. Until they weren’t. 200 years after Newton, Bertrand Russell pointed out that calculus does not resolve Zeno’s paradox after all. Both arithmetic and calculus assume that the real world is continuous, which it is not; it’s discrete, it’s quantized. It’s a foam, not a fluid! Later Godel showed that arithmetic is also incomplete: it inevitably labels certain well-formed propositions ‘undecidable’. I wish I had known about Godel’s work when I was in 3 rd grade. Whenever I encountered a problem too big for my Pooh brain I would have written ‘undecidable’ on the answer sheet (with predictable consequences). According to the rules of arithmetic, ‘operations’ are transitive, commutative, associative and distributive. Translation: a quantity is a quantity is a quantity…regardless of its context. Of course, this is only true in the classroom. IRL, the order of operations makes a big difference. Whenever X + Y = Y + X, it is strictly a matter of coincidence. IRL, nothing is ever divorced from its context and no operation is oblivious to its order. Fallacy #7 - Language We take it for granted that language provides a reasonably accurate map of the real world. It doesn’t! Our contemporary Indo-European languages are almost entirely dependent on action/passive verb forms: i.e. action divorced from reaction. In fact, we’ve known for centuries that “every action entails an equal and opposite reaction” (the very same Mr. Newton), that “what goes around comes around”, that “karma is a b*tch”. Action isolated from reaction imitates the sound of one hand clapping. Once upon a time our Indo-European languages were dominated by a verb form that expressed the reflexivity and interactivity of real process (i.e. the Middle Voice ). However, the technological advances of the bronze and iron ages coopted language into the service of engineering and Middle Voice verb forms atrophied. Who needs the interpersonal when we are exploring the interplanetary? As described in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), we are left with languages that no longer communicate anything of existential significance. Bummer! Fallacy #8 – Consciousness Some of us imagine that consciousness is a feature of experience unique to human beings. Some think it is associated with an ephemeral substance like the ‘soul’, Gilbert Grape’s famous Ghost in the Machine (Ryle). Still others think that consciousness can be reduced to electrochemical processes. None of these models is even remotely on point. Consciousness occurs whenever one discrete region of the ontological field becomes aware of another such region. I am aware of the people, places, and things around me. A cell is aware of the molecular bath in which it is immersed, a nucleus is aware of the cytoplasm surrounding it, a proton is aware of its companion electron, two entangled photons are simultaneously aware of one another even ‘across the universe’. (Beatles) Contrary to pre-20 th century assumptions, there is no such thing as unconscious awareness (sensation, perhaps, awareness, not). Tweens, relax, there are no zombies! Whenever one region of the ontological field is aware of another region, it automatically becomes aware of itself being aware of that region. Ultimately, all awareness includes self-awareness, so all awareness is conscious. In the real world every ‘actual entity’ (event) is both directly and indirectly aware of its environment – indirectly through being aware of itself being aware. There is an infinitesimal difference between the object of direct awareness and the mediated object of indirect awareness. This is equivalent to what Jacques Derrida called differance . We see the world stereoscopically, resulting in two slightly skew images with a quantum of difference between them. That is where consciousness lives; this is what we call ‘identity’. Therefore, consciousness does not reside in any subject, object, or process; it transcends them all. It is Sartre’s universal Neant (Negation). When Roger Penrose (c. 2010) first proposed that consciousness was a quantum phenomenon, he didn’t know the half of it. We have grown up with the assumption that awareness and consciousness are two different things – and that’s right, sort of. Being conscious is not the same thing as being aware; but awareness automatically entails consciousness. Every action acts on both its subject and its object. An ‘act of awareness’ is no different. When I am aware of X, I am the apparent subject (active voice) of that awareness and X is the apparent object (passive voice). ( Fallacy #7 ) But in fact, as I am aware of X, X is also ‘aware’ of me (Middle Voice). But since I have no access to X’s subjective experience, I experience X’s experience of me as me being aware of myself being aware. I become ‘self-conscious’; I am shy . I channel ‘the other’ (Sartre). Therefore, a conscious being is inherently interpersonal, even if ‘the other person’ turns out to be a stone; been there! (Anaximander, Buber, et al.) The object of my awareness (the world) is in a state of perpetual flux (Heraclitus’ flow); it is coincident with time. The subject of that awareness (‘I’) is in a state of permanent stasis (Parmenides’ Aletheia ); it is atemporal. The object of my awareness is perceived through its qualia ; the subject of my awareness has no qualia : it is one, simple, featureless, eternal. I (object) am different than I was a nanosecond ago; I (subject) am the same as I was at the moment of my conception, the same as I will be at the moment of my death. There is no ‘preferred time’. Self-help gurus notwithstanding, Now is no more real than Then . I am simultaneously and instantaneously who I was, who I am, and who I will be at every moment of my life. I do not need to die to ‘see my life flash before my eyes’; I live that, here and now. YHWH said, “I am what am” (Exodus 3: 14). Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum.” I say, “ I am I” period, a quantum manifestation of eternal, universal Being. I have no ‘hair’ (Hawking). I am Odysseus, I am Nemo, I am Everyman ! I am Consciousness per se but only as it is experienced over a certain ‘defined set of related events’ which Whitehead called a Personal Society…or a Person. Fallacy #9 – Ethics Admit it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment and so we are direct descendants of Machiavelli, no matter how many ‘times removed’. Regardless of what we profess, we all behave as if ‘ends justify means’. And perhaps they would…if they existed. We’ll work a 60 hour week at a job we detest if it enables us to feed our families…or go to Disney World; but would we do so if we learned that our spouse had just won the lottery…or that Disney World was closing? We’ll move to a Ritzy neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to the best schools. Would we do so if we learned that the school committee was about to fire all the teachers and open a series of open air academies in the Athenian tradition? (Well, maybe I would do that!) And unfortunately, some of us will shoot a passer-by in the street if it gives us the cash we need to feed our tastes, habits, or addictions. But even we might think twice if we knew the passer-by was skint . In fact there are no ends…and so there are no means. Of course, there are prior events and subsequent events but that doesn’t make the former a means or the latter an end . Without Causality ( Fallacy #4 ) nothing can be a means to anything. “Evening came and morning followed, the first day,” (Genesis 1: 5) doesn’t mean that the darkness caused the dawn. But even if you insist on preserving the idea of causality, Machiavelli won’t wash. For something to be a ‘means to an end’ there has to be some sort of ‘intentionality’, i.e. the end must be in sight, if only virtually, at the moment of means . But in fact, the relationship between specific prior events and specific subsequent events is chaotic and therefore essentially unproveable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Would you raise a colony of butterflies in Borneo so that a certain Cubs game would be rained out? Neither would I. And yet, unlike Indianapolis, it does rain in Chicago in the summertime! It is entirely possible that Bornean butterflies cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series but there is absolutely no way to know that, much less predict it, much less control it. All we can say is (1) there are butterflies in Borneo, (2) a Cubs game got rained out in the 4 th inning with the Cubs leading 10 – 0, (3) the game had to be replayed, and the Cubs lost, (4) the Cubs missed the post season by a single game. So, “Mission Accomplished, Butterfly?” Because there is no knowable, predictable, controllable relationship between prior events and subsequent events, there are no ends . Therefore Ethics , at least since 1500, is not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘absurd’. Imagine a frustrated parent trying to rein-in a houseful of mischievous preteens. Dad decides to post a new set of house rules on the refrigerator door, and he warns of dire consequences if even one of the new rules is broken. However, the rules are purposely written to ensure they will be unintelligible. Welcome to the Enlightenment! There is only one valid ethical imperative: Create beauty, disseminate truth, act justly…all regardless of any so-called consequences. Fallacy #10 – God Our final faux pas, Fallacy #10 , is fittingly a catch-all for a google of fallacies, i.e. the set of all affirmative propositions, actual or potential, that identify God with any specific predicate. The list is endless, because God is ineffable. That said, it is possible to make meaningful statements about God using metaphorical language. It is as if God were Being, Good, Beauty, Truth, Justice, Love, Freedom, etc. Reason allows us to identify these as Divine Qualities and experience shows us that these qualities permeate, however incompletely and imperfectly, the material world. Therefore, they are an epistemologically valid way for us to talk about ‘ineffable God’ using metaphors grounded in human experience. That said, the millennia old debate, “Does God Exist?” is misconceived. First, God is not an existent among existents; ‘God’ is what all existents share in common, God is their foundation. Second, God does not ‘exist’ so much as ‘occur’; like everything else, God is an event. ‘God’ is the name we give to the ‘Bundle’ of ontological features that all actual entities exhibit, i.e. that underlies the phenomenon of Being itself. ( Grammatical Note : All actual entities share certain ontological features, but it is the Bundle itself that underlies Being per se .) Of course, this turns the matter of God’s existence into a tautology. Est ergo Deus Est , or for the Narcissists among us, Sum ergo Deus Est , and for the more spiritually developed, Es Ergo Deus Est . But is that a good thing or bad? Can ‘analytic’ propositions be meaningful? How many angels do stand on the head of a pin? The entire Bible can be read as God’s ongoing but often unsuccessful effort to communicate his nature to the world, climaxing when his “Word (logos) became flesh ( Xpristos ) and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 14) In the end, no one is more misunderstood than God. We pray for signs, for miracles, for God’s intervention in history and in our personal lives, and when we don’t get what we think we’re due, we accuse God of suborning evil . In point of fact, we have substituted an avatar for God, and we have fashioned it in our own image and likeness. We have set up a straw man (‘God is like us’ replaces ‘we are like God’) so that we can indict God when he does not conform to our own ‘high’ standards of conduct. But “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55: 58 – 59) We are agents, we act, we make stuff happen. God does not make things happen; he removes barriers so that good things can happen of their own accord. God is a liberator, not an engineer; like Jeremiah and John the Baptist, we are God’s engineers. Look at Genesis . God said, “ Let there be light;” then God “ saw that it was good.” And only then “evening came and morning followed, the first day.” This is not to limit or demean God in any way. God is everything God could possibly be…consistent with the created world being what it is, i.e. totally and completely free (Sartre). I am not speaking here only of human free will ; I am talking about the existential freedom enjoyed by every single event in Universe. It is through the intermediation of God that the Eternal Values are available to the World as lures for feeling and motives for action. But only we can answer, “Yes!” History is entirely in our hands…and what a mess we’ve made so far. The Eternal Values, God’s essence, are why (not how) there are events. And it is in so far as those fleeting events manifest Eternal Values that the events themselves are timeless. God motivates actions, curates experiences, and redeems results. Cain founds cities, Noah builds boats, Moses leads an insurrection; Joshua fights battles, Solomon builds a temple, Jesus saves! Judeo-Hellenic civilization goes back almost 3,500 years. Ironically, some of the most philosophically impactful works came early: The Book of Job , Ecclesiastes , Parmenides’ On Nature , Plato’s Timaeus , the Gospel of John , and a selection of canonical Epistles, including Colossians , Ephesians , Corinthians , Romans , Hebrews , James , and the letters of John and Peter. A case can be made that the Golden Age of speculative philosophy ended with Augustine of Hippo c. 500 CE. 1500 years later, we’re still debating a lot of the same issues: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Who R U? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad or morally indifferent people? And, of course, why is there something rather than nothing? What else would you expect? We’ve been looking at these problems through some seriously dysfunctional lenses. Coke bottle bottoms would work better! It’s no wonder that academic philosophy is held in such low repute. For the most part, it takes for granted characterizations of reality that are obviously (above) false. We pretty much need to start over again. But first somebody has to say it out loud, “The Emperor is seriously underdressed.” *** Rodin, Auguste. The Thinker. 1902. Bronze sculpture. Musée Rodin, Paris. 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.