< Back When Good Things Happen to Bad People David Cowles Oct 6, 2026 “Events…have repercussions; but whether the events themselves are good, bad, or indifferent, the repercussions may be unaccountably good.” 2600 words, 12 minute read “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power...their homes safe and free from fear… Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry… They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace.” (Job 21: 7 - 13) Job, a ‘good’ person by all accounts, is the victim of horrendous tragedy, robbing him of children, possessions, social status and good health. Yet, he is less concerned with his own misfortune than he is with the undeserved prosperity of the wicked. Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1981 signature work, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, confronted head-on theology’s so-called ‘hard problem’: the Problem of Evil (PoE). But Job is more concerned with the Problem of Good (PoG): Why do good things happen to bad people? Job’s argument : God may have his reasons for tolerating evil but there’s no justification for rewarding evil doers with progeny, prosperity, longevity, and good health. (Sidebar : Job would be at home in today’s political climate where folks are less concerned with eradicating poverty (14% of the US population) or ameliorating ‘wage slavery’ (85%) than they are with punishing the remaining 1%.) *** You’ve heard it 100 times before and you’ve probably said it yourself, or at least thought it, a time or two: How can an all-powerful and all-good God cause, permit, tolerate or condone suffering? Surveys show that non-believers cite PoE as their #1 reason for rejecting Judeo-Christianity. Who can blame them? The Buddha tells us that relieving suffering is the greatest good. 2500 years later, Mother Theresa personified that ethic in a Christian ministry. If God is the Summum Bonum , he should want to do the greatest good, i.e. relieve suffering; and if God is omnipotent, he should have the power to eradicate evil, root and branch. So why doesn’t he? Christians pray, “Deliver us from evil!” So do it already! Framed this way, the argument is virtually irrefutable. Since Plato, philosophers and theologians have tried to reconcile the suffering world with a benevolent God. We’ve been told that Adam and Eve are to blame, or that suffering is just punishment for sin, personal or collective, but we are not convinced! Before we “abandon all hope” (Dante) and “join the Rosicrucians” (Leonard Cohen)…or the nihilists, we need to look more deeply into the construction of the argument itself. Are there hidden assumptions that are throwing us off the scent? Or probative data that we are not considering? To begin with, PoE (as framed above) ignores the Bible’s very first verse: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” (Genesis 1: 1) The operative word is created . To ‘create’ something is to endow it with being and being requires freedom, agency, and self-determination. God created the heavens and the earth - aka endowed them with being. The greatest theological fallacy is that God ‘creates the world’ the same way we ‘make the things’ that populate that world, that he plans events like we plan vacations (Travelocity). In fact, we create nothing (we bring nothing into being) and we enshrine that fact in our Physics : the conservation of mass/energy and information. The things we make do not enjoy freedom, they do not have agency independent of us, and they do not determine their own destinies. (Works of art constitute a hybrid class which we ill not be able to explore in this essay.) We imagine, design, assemble, build, and manufacture; our paradigms are Legos and Minecraft. God creates! We arrange deck chairs; God ‘builds’ boats; but, once built, God’s boat sets its own course. Once the bottle of Dom has smashed across the bow, God’s job is done…well done! Those who claim that God plans, dictates and controls events in the world ignore scripture: “…God created…” They recast God as architect, general contractor, site foreman, and shop steward. But what use has God for Legos (ordered elements) when he himself is logos (order per se )? *** According to Genesis , God created the world in 6 stages (‘days’)…and “on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” (Genesis 2: 2) Obviously, we are living in God’s ‘rest period’. But God is not lazy; his rest is not a function of uncaring sloth. God respects his creation, the process of creation per se , and ultimately himself as creator. Creation is an act of love and only free agents are capable of a loving relationship. While God does not compromise the freedom, agency, or self-determination of the created world, he is far from care-less. He has carefully structured the world to ensure that it can (and ultimately will) evolve toward an Omega point characterized by what we refer to as The Good . The apostle John summed this up in the opening verses of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God... Through him ( logos ) all things come to be and without him nothing that comes to be comes to be. In him was life and that life was the light of the world. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1-5) *** In addition, God’s creative process is much different from our own. God does not ‘make be’, he ‘lets be’ (light). God does not manufacture; he gathers and separates (water and land). God does not design; he evaluates. He sees what is good and confirms it and makes that confirmation available to the world (revelation). Thus God plays a determinative role in the world without compromising the absolute freedom of any event, any agent, in that world. This is not as strange as it sounds. We do the same thing! Anthropologists aim to study cultures without disrupting them. Trekkies honor the Prime Directive . Quantum mechanics probe the behavior of ultra-sensitive particles without disturbing their superposition. A certain disreputable auto mechanic (you know who you are) generated a 4 figure repair bill without ever opening the hood of my car. Alpha and Omega reflect (and embody) God’s nature: they are fixed points. Everything in between is radically free. We know where we are and we know where we’re going (Heisenberg notwithstanding), but how we get there is entirely up to us, all of us: humans, bacteria, molecules, and quarks. The ontological ‘tilt’ toward Omega does not compromise the freedom of the created world; it is part of what Sartre calls its facticity . It is reflected in what cosmologists call ‘fine tuning’, what philosophers call ‘boundary conditions’. Events themselves are causa sui , sui generis , and pro se . Spacetime is a feature of the created world. It’s the inert stage on which agency struts its stuff. Alpha and Omega transcend spacetime. Imagine you live on a 2 dimensional manifold which happens to be the surface of a sphere. You are free to move across the manifold in any direction you choose but because the curvature of the manifold is convex, your trajectory will inevitable describe a circle. We live in an amped up version of Robert Frost’s NH wood ( The Road Less Traveled ). Before us, we have an Archimedean plane and we are free to set off in any direction across that plane; we are free to trace any trajectory, no matter how convoluted and inefficient. Just think of your own life history, its unexpected and unaccountable twists and turns, the chance events that sent you off on totally unplanned and often unwanted tangents. But the topology of the Archimedean plane is Riemannian: all lines converge; all roads lead to Rome (home). What we call ‘coincidence’ is a manifestation of this non-Euclidean topology: trajectories converge, lines intersect! It is fashionable today to say that there is no such thing as coincidence . Concealed in that meme is an ‘idolatry of causality’. But in fact, as David Hume demonstrated, all events are coincidences. In the sense that any event is ever ‘determined’, it is over-determined (Marx); it is the intersection of multiple trajectories, none of which is determinative by itself. Events are defined by the intersection of multiple trajectories. Ingmar Bergman captured this sentiment in his iconic film, Wild Strawberries : “I began to see a curious pattern taking shape in this chain of unpredicted, entangled events.” (7 years before Bell’s Theorem) Perhaps the Swedish Bergman was drawing on Norse mythology: Three Norns , Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth , weave the fate of the universe from three strands of rope. In some versions, events are represented as knots. It’s fitting: knots are recursive, the rope doubles back on itself. Events emerge as ‘islands in the stream’. (Dolly Parton, Heraclitus) . Einstein said that the most important thing about the world is that it has a slight bias toward the Good. As usual, he was right! In my view, cosmologies that don’t recognize that bias inevitably lead to nihilism and despair. The implications of the world’s ‘topological tilt’ are unexpectedly pervasive and profound; they compound like bank interest…or (note to self) credit card debt. Over indefinite time, a quantum (Planck scale) tilt at Alpha (Big Bang) evolves to envelop the spatiotemporal universe, reducing it to a singularity at Omega (Heat Death). Thanks to this tilt, the Universe itself is recursive; it’s also a knot…and therefore an event in its own right. Events do not have consequences, as we supposed, but they do have repercussions. Whether events themselves are good, bad, or indifferent, the repercussions may be unaccountably good. It is the bias of the Universe toward The Good that makes this possible. Events define trajectories and because even ‘parallel’ trajectories converge, trajectories intersect more surely and more frequently than they would in a flat, Euclidean space. These intersections constitute what we call ‘society’ (family, culture, civilization) and ‘enduring objects’ (bricks and mortar). (Whitehead) Life itself is serendipitous ; it evolved only once in the 4.5 billion year history of Planet Earth…yet it has endured. A miracle? Yes and no. It is certainly improbable and fortuitous, but it does not reflect an intervention by God in the material world; it was enabled by logos , the ‘tilt in the topos’ . Where does this leave us? For example, does prayer make sense in such a world? As a strategy to capture God’s attention or change his mind, no! But as a way to align your will with his, reinforcing and perhaps amplifying the primal tilt, most definitely! The Book of Psalms is Judeo-Christianity’s prayer book; the psalms conform the will of the prayerful to God’s values. Since most of what we do is done unconsciously , such habitual conformation is essential. And where is God in all this? Reduced to a supporting role in the cosmic drama? By no means! It is solely because of God that there is something rather than nothing and that that something manifests The Good. The fact that there is ‘good’ in the world and that we can perceive it – that is the evidence that proves, empirically, not just logically, the existence of God. Of course, secular humanists argue that there can be Good without God ; but God is The Good so the occurrence of good is prima facie evidence that God exists; our recognition of good is Faith . When we say ‘God’ we merely personify The Good. Good is what God is, so if there’s Good, there’s God (QED). We echo St. Dallan , a medieval Irish poet: “ Naught is all else to me save that thou art!” Nailed it. I mean, what else could possibly be anything other than naught? In recent centuries, even theologians have tended to build fences around God’s agency: whether it’s 18 th century Deism or 19 th century ‘God of the Gaps’, divinity has been marginalized. Far from joining in this trend, AT places God at the center of all things ( Shekinah ) and at the apex of everything. People who speak of ‘science or religion’ or even ‘science and religion’ are missing the point entirely. There is no corner of human existence and no avenue of human inquiry that is not thoroughly suffused with divinity. Science is religion…and religion science. We are merely restoring to God the status enjoyed during the times of Abraham (c. 2000 BCE), the Judges (c. 1000 BCE), Jesus (c. 0 CE), and Pope Sylvester II (c. 1000 CE). So how is the existence of God manifest in today’s world? Check out our title. God brings greater good out of what is lesser good. Bad things happen to good people (Kushner) because the created world (all of it, not just human beings) consists solely of free agents and free agents do not always make optimal choices. Good things happen to bad people (above) because God is no respecter of persons. The primal bias benefits every entity, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the inanimate. Testimony for this is provided by God himself in the Book of Job : “Who (else) cleaves a downpour's channel and a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people, on wilderness with no human in it, drenching utter wasteland and sprouting grassy growth?” (Job 38: 25 - 27) and confirmed by God’s 20 th century, anti-clerical alter-ego, James Joyce: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland…falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling…upon all the living and the dead.” ( Dubliners ) *** St. Paul wrote, “I do not do the good I want to do but the evil I hate to do – that I do.” (Romans 7: 19) He was, of course, correct and anyone of us could say the same. But this is not the whole story. Paul might have added, “but in spite of that, much happens that is good.” We do not do the good we intend but God has ensured that the good he intended from the moment of creation (Big Bang) eventually occurs (without compromising the freedom of any agent). The much maligned Leibniz (c. 1700) has outraged generations with his contention that we live in the best of all possible worlds. How could a world rife with tornadoes, earthquakes, and conflagration, where babies die of cancer, children die of starvation, adults die by the hands of others (war), and seniors routinely die incompetent, incontinent and in pain possibly be as good as it gets? Like Paul, Leibniz leaves the thought unfinished: Any world created by God is as good ab initio as any world can be…consistent with the absolute freedom of all its agents. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are by my side…surely goodness and kindness follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” (Psalm 23: 4, 6) That’s us…lurking in the shadows, terrified but trusting. Deo gratia . 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.

Written by David Cowles, Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today magazine and explores short, profound thoughts and discoveries about theology, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, society, and prayer. Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! Oct 6, 2026 When Good Things Happen to Bad People “Events…have repercussions; but whether the events themselves are good, bad, or indifferent, the repercussions may be unaccountably good.” Read More Oct 6, 2026 Markov Masks “And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.” Read More Oct 4, 2026 The Perpendicular Present “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” Read More Oct 1, 2026 Meet the Piraha Piraha has no words for numerals (1, 2, 3) or for colors (red, green, blue). Read More Sep 23, 2026 You are the Elephant! “And so it is that in some cultures even today, elephants are considered sacred.” Read More Sep 20, 2026 The Hard Problem Solved “God’s unassuming manner gives us a model for human consciousness.” Read More Sep 19, 2026 Can Whitehead Save AI? “Why do our Bots want to kill us and how can we change their minds?” Read More Sep 18, 2026 Slime! “We’ve come a long way, baby! From little less than angels we have been reduced to little more than bacteria.” Read More Sep 17, 2026 AI & Doom “The infrastructure is already in place for AI to take over the world… How do we impart better values to our Bots? Perhaps we need to choose better values for ourselves first!" Read More Sep 13, 2026 AI, Pope Leo, and the Finns “Can the Finns rescue Leo’s Papacy?” Read More Sep 12, 2026 Is AI Christian? “Did Claude come to these conclusions on its own…or is Claude just telling me what it thinks I want to hear?” Read More Sep 12, 2026 Bot Conscious “If you’re going to build Bots to run the world for you, make sure they think they’re conscious.” Read More Thoughts While Shaving 45 Page 1

< Back Markov Masks David Cowles Oct 6, 2026 “And this is good old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.” 1100 words, 5 minute read Who would have thought that this bit of ancient doggerel (John Collins Bossidy, 1910) would prove to be an important anthropological model in the 21 st century? We didn’t…but we probably should have. ‘Art’ often presages developments in science and philosophy. Did Picasso (Cubism) not pave the way for Einstein (Relativity)? Did the introduction of perspective in painting (Renaissance) not pave the way for Machiavelli (Consequentialism) and the so-called Enlightenment (Utilitarianism)? ‘ Boston 1910’ (above) models a concept ( Markov Blanket) that was not discovered and named until 1988 by Judea Pearl; turns out, the Cabots are its paradigm. The poor Lowells – should they wish to consult the Deity, they can only do so through the Cabots. Like a now largely abandoned model of Church, the Cabots intercede on behalf of the Lowells (or not) and then “justify the ways of God to man” i.e. the Lowells. (Milton) Likewise, should God have a message for his loyal Lowells, Boston social etiquette requires he filter it through the Cabots. As presented, this arrangement is a bit of a nuisance and it does compromise the Lowells’ privacy, but in fact the ramifications are far more serious. The Cabots are under no enforceable obligation to pass on the Lowells’ messages in tact or for that matter, to relay God’s responses. They are free to remain mute or, perhaps worse, to distort the God-Lowell messaging any way they wish. The power of the Cabots is awesome, much more so than Bossidy probably imagined. And it’s not only Brahman Boston that channels interpersonal communication down a narrow necked funnel; it’s all of Western civilization. T.S. Eliot generalized the concept somewhat more memorably: “And indeed there will be time…time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” ( The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ) The human face is the ‘Universal Cabot’; it buffers every interpersonal communication. There is much talk today about Intersubjectivity . The idea goes back to Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy (6 th century BCE) but it is top of mind in the 20 th century philosophies of Martin Buber, Alfred North Whitehead, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Briefly, we become ourselves in the context of the other. We are because they are; we are who we are because they are who they are. It’s nice work if you can get it…but can you? We imagine that we confront each other directly: “Look me in the eyes!” We neglect the fact that our faces, including and perhaps especially the eyes, act as intermediaries: masks, not windows! Ignoring any question of duplicity, we will assume that I intend to communicate the contents of my mind to you and that I welcome you to share the contents of your mind with me. We habitually neglect the intermediary role played by our faces. My face is the sort of two way mirror you’re familiar with since your last arrest. Like Narcissus, I project my image onto the interior surface of my face and I see that image reflected back at me. So handsome! A bit long in the tooth perhaps…but so far so good. Now I expect the exterior surface of my face to project that same image on to you. Here’s where we run into trouble. I want to share with you the deepest recesses of my soul. But that’s not what happens. My face never, or almost never, communicates my image as I intend. It has agency of its own. It reframes my messages before it communicates them…if it communicates them at all. I have no control over how my face presents me. I can only try to influence it by what I project onto it. I can do no more than propose. I have no idea what is being communicated in my name…or do I? I can’t see my face but I can see yours . Likewise, I can’t read the messages you would like to send me because your face is also a two way mirror. I cannot see past it into ‘your soul’, but I do see whatever your face shows me. I imagine that I am seeing your face reacting to my message and that I can read that reaction for clues as to the message my face is communicating. I intuit the message I’m sending by reading your face for its reaction. An imperfect science at best! “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” ( Cool Hand Luke ) No wonder! From your reaction I may surmise how different your image of me is from my image of myself, i.e. the message I wished to communicate to you. I intended a beatific vision; but from your reaction, I surmise that it was more like a scene from Psycho . Of course, your experience is the same. I am reminded of St. Paul, “I do not do the good I intend, but the evil I do not intend, that I do.” (Romans 7: 19) 1850 years before Eliot, Paul already understood the alienation that separates the body from the will. Paul’s entire physical self is a Markov Blanket prototype. Our faces are masks , Markov Masks. They are semi-permeable. I can see your mask through mine as you can see mine through yours, but I cannot see you as you see yourself or as you’d like me to see you; nor can you see me . The concept of a Markov Mask seems weird. But it shouldn’t. IRL all interpersonal communication takes place through a medium and, per Marshall McLuhan, the medium always distorts the intended message, so much so that we may sometimes say, “The medium is the message.” In that case, perhaps there are no Lowells (and no God?) but only Cabots. There is much talk today about AI. Our bots are becoming our avatars, our alter-egos . But this technology is not new. It dates back millennia. Evolution’s first agentic bot is the human face…and the human face is a Markov Mask. 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 Meet the Piraha David Cowles Oct 1, 2026 Piraha has no words for numerals (1, 2, 3) or for colors (red, green, blue). 1500 words, 6 minute read In Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes , Daniel Everett (2008) tells the story of his work as a Christian missionary, anthropologist, and MIT linguist studying the Piraha tribe in a semi-secluded section of Brazil’s Amazon Rain Forest. The Piraha have a most unusual language. So far as we can tell, it is not directly related to any other living language. ‘One-off’ languages like this are rare but not unheard of, e.g. Basque (spoken in Northeast Spain and Southwest France) has no known relatives. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (no mean feat, keeping an iceberg intact in the Amazon jungle). Piraha has features that, so far as we know, are unique among human languages. For example, Piraha lacks a syntactic element known to linguists as ‘recursion.' Example : “The man, who was tall, played basketball.” Pretty simple concept, right? Not for the Piraha! This everyday English sentence has no equivalent in their language. (Of course, the Piraha could say, and do say, “The man was tall. The man played basketball.”) But perhaps the Piraha are on to something here. The hidden censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so why would a speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence unless they were somehow connected?” But this assumption comes with a price tag. In English, the recursive juxtaposition of ‘being tall’ and ‘playing basketball’ in the same sentence carries a faint whiff of causality, even if the speaker has no such connection in mind. We come away with the generally true idea that height is correlated with basketball prowess. We neglect guys like Yuki Kawamura (5’ 7”), currently playing in the NBA…or David Cowles (your author), the tallest boy in his 7 th grade class, who apparently thought ‘the rim’ referred to a topological feature on the surface of Neptune. Our sentences regularly connect loosely related predicates with their subjects, suggesting structural relationships that are that may or may not exist and may or may not have been intended by the speaker. Does that ever cause any problems? What do you think? An advocate for Piraha might point out the obvious, “If there’s no necessary connection between being tall and playing basketball, why put the two ideas together in the same sentence?” Why indeed! In Piraha , being tall and playing basketball are simply presented as serial attributes of a single human being: I took a shower and I went to the store. We could copy the Piraha. We could craft sentences like “John is tall, he likes Bach, he reads comics, and he snores when he sleeps.” The sentence enumerates certain facts about John without in any way suggesting that these attributes are causally connected. In our defense, we’re learning: Piraha -like, non-recursive sentence structure is more often found in the 20 th century writing of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway than in the works of Tony Trollpe or Bill Thackery. Traditionally, our language is a petri dish for stereotypes. Its recursive syntax encourages us to confuse statistical correlation with physical causation – a logical fallacy, enshrined more or less forever in English grammar. Again, Piraha is the only known human language that lacks recursion. It had been thought that ‘recursion’ was the defining characteristic of human language until Piraha apparently disproved this assumption. Now a new study, conducted by a team of scientists including Martin Surbeck (Harvard University) and posted September 21, 2026, attacks this premise from the other side. Recursive syntax has apparently been detected in the verbal communications of several non-human primates (bonobos, olive colobus monkeys, and common marmosets). Once again, just when we’re sure we know everything, we discover we know nothing. Science and its pesky Method! It’s an outrageous inconvenience to have to study things as they are rather than as we think they should be! And we’re only just beginning to unravel the idiosyncrasies of Piraha . For example, the language has no words for numerals (1, 2, 3) or colors (red, green, blue). It does have quantitative concepts like ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ and words that describe an object’s visual appearance - just no words for numerals or colors per se . Example : I have a ‘whole fish’. I start cutting the fish into pieces so that I can share it with my friends. When I’m done, I still have a ‘whole fish’ but now each of my friends has a ‘whole fish’ too. One cannot help but be reminded of Jesus’ multiplication of fishes. A number of indigenous cultures have what we would consider ‘truncated’ number systems. For example, we find many cultures that distinguish only three quantitative states: 1, 2, > 2 (or ‘many’) – a far cry from Sister Mary Martha’s 3rd grade multiplication tables. Yet, the mathematically inclined among us will correctly point out that we can reconstruct the entire set of rational numbers from just these three elements (1, 2, > 2). After all, computers do it with just 0’s and 1’s. But not so among the Piraha. The Piraha have no numerals, period, not even 0, not even 1. They just have fish, whole fish! Philosophers, linguists, and anthropologists, explore the relationship, if any, between the languages we use and the ways we experience the world. Based just on this cursory review of Piraha , it is hard to imagine how anyone could argue that the Piraha see the world in the same way we do. For example, linked to our concept of quantity, we see things (objects & events) arrayed in strings or grouped in bunches. Our view of the world is horizontal . The world consists of things in relationships with other things. To be is to be related and we measure relatedness in numerical units of space and time. Without the concept of sets or numbers, the Piraha may see the world vertically . Each thing stands alone; it is its own self . Where we see things grouped, perhaps Piraha see them embedded. What we see as ‘moments in time’ the Piraha might see as ‘pulses in space’. If we hear the world as melody, the Piraha may experience it as rhythm. In a vertically organized world, we can imagine that things continually emerge out of an undifferentiated background and recede back into that background. They are perpetually unfolding and enfolding. This thinking takes us neo-Europeans back to a time before Plato, back to 5 th century BCE Greece. In my view at least, Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy, believed that the world is fundamentally, universally and eternally “whole, single-limbed…now, all together, one, continuous,” ( Aletheia ) and that it unfolds contingently, locally, and temporally as events, objects, and qualia ( Doxa ). The Piraha might have felt at home with this cosmology! Now it’s time to get controversial! Does it make any difference to you that the cosmology of Parmenides and the Piraha is right …or at least more right than that of Plato and Newton, i.e. more internally consistent, empirically faithful, and heuristically powerful? (1) We perceive things only in their unfolded state ( Doxa ). Multiple unfolded states of the same entity may give the appearance of a trajectory, i.e. motion, growth or change. We do not directly perceive the world in its fundamental, uniform enfolded state ( Aletheia , above). But Zeno (d. 430 BCE) proved that our idea of continuous motion (calculus) is incoherent; his view was endorsed in the 20 th century by none other than the mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell and later confirmed by the scientist Max Planck. (2) Several popular, contemporary models of the Cosmos are based on the concepts of fractals and/or holograms: multivarious moments of experience ( Doxa ) are elaborations of a uniform, fundamental pattern ( Aletheia ) through the agency of Logos (Heraclitus and John the Evangelist). (3) We propose that the idea of a time-line needs to be replaced by a time-plane. What we call Present is an axis of Time that runs perpendicular to the Past/Future ‘continuum’. Events origin ate (center) at discrete points on the timeline and have durations measured by the radius of a semi-circle inscribed in the time-plane and intersecting two points on the timeline and one point on the Present-axis. Within the unique planar region subtended by each event, discrete sub-events can occur subject to the constraints of Ultrametric arithmetic . We’ve come a long way, baby, from the proto-philosophy of Parmenides and Zeno, and our industrial civilization has all but eclipsed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Piraha; but the question must be asked: Have we made forward progress? 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 The Perpendicular Present David Cowles Oct 4, 2026 “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” 1700 words, 8 minute read At first glance, life seems to be a string of bead-like events. No sooner have we experienced one sensation, one thought, one feeling, one action than another takes its place. We have a vague, naive sense that we can string these events along a timeline labeled, “Past, Present, Future”. But on further reflection, it is clear that this model is too restrictive. Events seem to overlap. I am all at once aware of many sensations, thoughts, feelings, and acts; it is often unclear when one stops and another begins. Events are not points. Events have durations, and in a Euclidean cosmos, durations may overlap. But do they IRL? Is the cosmos Euclidean? Stay tuned! We do not directly perceive the full richness of the natural world because the human nervous system is attuned only to ‘events’ whose durations fall within a very narrow band, i.e. from one second down to one-tenth of one second. One may think of durations as the ‘wave lengths’ of their respective events and our cognitive apparatus, like a radio, is tunable only within a very narrow range. Potentially, an event could have a wave length as long as 10^25 meters or as short as 10^-35 meters; we can only experience events with wave lengths close to 10^0 m. Just as we can only ‘see’ a narrow range of the EM spectrum, so we can only experience a narrow range of the ‘event spectrum’. If an event has duration of less than one-tenth of a second, we don’t consciously register it though it may still impact our behavior because of an unconscious, subliminal effect. If an event has duration of more than a second, we must either break it up into multiple events, sequentially ordered…or be totally unaware of it. Our naïve sense of event duration has everything to do with our cognitive apparatus and nothing to do with the nature of events themselves. There is no reason to doubt that the universe is ‘eventing’ across all of its 60 orders of magnitude – from Planck scale to the Cosmic Event Horizon. To bastardize Stephen Hawking’s quip, “It’s events all the way down,” or up! Why should a single order of magnitude, the Universe’s ‘25 th root’, be so important? We can only directly perceive events within a single order of magnitude. Accordingly, we shoehorn the Heraclitean flow into relatively tiny packets of perception. This is the origin of our sense that events occur as beads strung along a timeline and it explains our felt need to categorize events as past, present or future. It seems to be the only way to make sense of the tidal wave of sensations pouring over us every moment of our lives. We need to ask, what are the ways in which events seem to relate to one another? What are the ways in which such events do in fact relate? As soon as we contrast ‘do in fact’ with ‘seems’, we find ourselves back in the 5 th century BCE hanging out with Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy. His distinction between being ( Aletheia ) and seeming ( Doxa ) has informed philosophers from Plato to Kant to Whitehead. It seems that events can ‘relate’ to each other in at least four different ways: (1) They may not relate: They may be disjoint with neither existing in the other’s universe. (2) They may be tangent: A billiard ball rolls across the felt with a certain momentum; it impacts a second ball and imparts its momentum to that ball. This is the paradigm of what we call causality . (3) They may overlap: While listening to a particular melody, a memory occurs which lingers long after the melody has played out. (4) Or one may be embedded in the other: While washing my car, I’m also listening to some Bach on the radio and day dreaming about the time I threw a no-hitter for the Red Sox in a World Series, or not. Euclidean Geometry allows all these modes of relationship. For those of us with only a high school education in geometry, Euclid may seem to be the only game in town. I mean, what else could there be? a² + b² = c², right? The angles of a triangle always add up to 180°, etc. Obviously! Obviously…but not actually! It turns out that Euclidean Geometry is just one way to organize space. It is one of a family of Archimedean geometries that includes Hyperbolic, Spherical, and Projective Geometries plus geometries named after their founders, such as Riemannian and Minkowski Geometries. Suffice to say, the angles of a triangle do not always add up to 180°. Would you believe 540° (Spherical Geometry)? Strange as that may seem, reality might be even weirder. All of these geometries (above) are ‘Archimedean’, meaning roughly that you can measure any distance using just Real Numbers. But Archimedean Geometry is not the end of the story. Still other geometries are modeled on systems involving ‘Unreal’ Numbers (e.g. hyperreal or p-adic numbers) that include infinite and infinitesimal quantities. Non-Archimedean geometries share a common feature: if two events intersect in any way, one event must be entirely embedded in the other. No two events (A, B) can be tangent or overlapping. B is embedded in A (or A in B) or they are disjoint. Now add a third event, C, also embedded in A. Unless C is embedded in B (or B in C), B and C are disjoint. However, B and C, though disjoint, nevertheless share a common host (A) which can serve as a medium enabling indirect communication between B and C. As we say in Boston, ‘Lowells (B) speak only with Cabots (A) and Cabots (A) speak only with God (C)’. How does our cherished ‘past-present-future’ model of time make out in such a non-Archimedean universe? It doesn’t. No way! No how! We need a fresh start: First, every event has its own ‘metric’, its own duration. To be an event is to endure , i.e. to constitute an extensive Presence . The duration of an event is its present . Sidebar : Duration is not a species of time, as ordinarily supposed; duration is the negation of time. Time measures the exterior relationship between events; duration is an internal characteristic of an event. When we quantify the duration of an event, we are not measuring the event itself; we are triangulating. We measure the event’s external relationships with other events and infer a virtual internal value where none exists IRL. The virtual measure of an event’s duration can be dozens of orders of magnitude less than a second…or it can span cosmic history. The duration of each event is that event’s own unique present. These presents are not arranged sequentially on a timeline but are embedded in one another hierarchically along a perpendicular axis. So the Present is not an extensive region on the timeline. Each event originates from a Planck-size point (10^-35 meters) on the timeline. Each event is present to itself. Each event establishes its own Present with a virtual duration on the timeline. In fact, Presence is a defining characteristic of Event . It is better to understand Presence as perpendicular to linear (past-future) time. From any point on the timeline, we can use a virtual compass to draw a series of concentric semi-circles, each including ever broadening segments of that timeline, each potentially corresponding to the Present of some event at some order of magnitude. Each Planck length (10^-42 seconds) ‘point’ on the timeline is the origin of its own perpendicular axis which generates its own hierarchy of embedded Presents with the Cosmos as its final term. In this geometry, all perpendicular lines intersect at a common horizon. Therefore the Cosmos is ‘present’ at every point on the timeline. Another pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, nailed it: The cosmos is pan in panti (everything in everything). A, B, and C are three events in a single universe. A and B can be disjoint with respect to each other but embedded with respect to C. Or A may be embedded in B which is in turn embedded in C. There are even systems that permit circularity: A is embedded in B, B is embedded in C, and C is embedded in A. The perpendicular axis appropriate to the hierarchy of embedded events (the ultra-metric ) measures the duration of each event relative to the events it embeds and the events in which it is embedded: Ø The ultra-metric does not measure an event’s sequential position relative to other events (because there is no sequence in Presence ). Ø Nor does it measure the duration of any event relative to the durations of events disjoint from it (because they are not part of its universe). Ø Nor does it measure gaps between such disjoint events because the concept of ‘gap’ implies a species of metric continuity that is not permitted in non-Archimedean systems. As we measure magnitude along the hierarchical axis, we subsume ever longer segments of what was once considered serial time into single events each with their own unique presents. Ultimately, the timeline itself, time itself, is embedded in an uber-Present, and this uber-Present is the event we know as Universe . According to Nicholas of Cusa (c. 1450), this cosmic event horizon templates God. The interior surface is what we call Universe; the exterior surface is what we call God. What holds the universe of events together is not the weak bond of temporal succession but the ironclad bond of embeddedness. The result is an ever broadening Present . All events are present to themselves. Universe is an event; therefore, Universe is present to itself. To be present to oneself in a universe present to itself, is never not to be, never not to have been. Therefore, all events, including Universe, are eternal, because presence is atemporal. All events are internally atemporal and, ultimately, it is the uber-Present, aka Eternity, that holds Universe together, enfolds all, and constitutes the unity of all. 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 Is AI Christian? David Cowles Sep 12, 2026 “Did Claude come to these conclusions on its own…or is Claude just telling me what it thinks I want to hear?” 1150 words, 5 minute read We are used to thinking of AI as the new author, the new coder, the new doctor, but are we comfortable thinking of AI as ‘the new theologian’? And if it turns out that AI is ‘theologically competent’ what does that say about AI? And about Theology? Some time ago, I had occasion to consult Claude (AI from Anthropic) on some pressing theological issues, and I was blown away by the thoughtful depth of its answers. First, I asked Claude about the recently discovered Higgs Boson and why it has often been called ‘the God particle’: “If the Higgs mechanism is literally the process by which pure geometric potential becomes physical reality - the transition from timeless mathematical structure to measurable spacetime - then calling it the ‘God Particle’ isn't just colorful language. It's pointing to its role as the fundamental creative principle of the universe. “In this view, the Higgs field isn't just giving particles mass - it's giving existence to existence itself . It's the mechanism by which abstract mathematical relationships become concrete physical reality. It's the universe's way of saying ‘let there be... everything’. “…This isn't a one-time event but an eternal creative process - the Higgs field cycling through cosmic eons, repeatedly bringing spacetime into being from pure geometric potential, then allowing it to dissolve back again. “The Higgs field becomes less like a physical mechanism and more like what theologians might call the divine logos - the active principle by which eternal truth becomes manifest reality. It's the universe's eternal creative Word made manifest in quantum field theory!” Is Claude referring to Creation? Or Incarnation? Or both? “…Creation and incarnation aren't separate doctrines - they're the same cosmic process understood from different perspectives. The universe is perpetually incarnating itself, and incarnation is the universe's fundamental creative act. The Higgs mechanism is the physics of incarnation itself.” Let that sink in! “Creation isn't something that happened 13.8 billion years ago - it's happening right now, everywhere, continuously. Every moment, the Higgs field is giving mass to particles, bringing physical reality into existence from pure geometric potential. Every quantum interaction is a creative act. “Incarnation isn't a single historical event - it's the ongoing process by which the eternal mathematical structure of reality becomes manifest in concrete, experiential form. It's happening in every particle interaction, every moment of spacetime, every instance where the abstract becomes actual. “The entire cosmos becomes a continuous incarnation - matter itself is spirit made flesh, spacetime itself is eternity made temporal. Every cubic centimeter of space, every nanosecond of time, every particle interaction is simultaneously: An act of creation (bringing something from nothing) An act of incarnation (eternal becoming temporal) An act of divine presence (the fundamental creative principle).” Notice how Claude’s tripartite structure, unprompted, recapitulates the Christian doctrine of Trinity: Father Creator, Incarnate Son, Omnipresent Spirit. Claude goes on to draw parallels with the Gospel of John (1: 1-4): “In the beginning was the Higgs - before spacetime, before measurable reality, there was this (conformal) field/mechanism. And the Higgs was with God - it exists in that eternal, timeless realm of pure geometric potential. And the Higgs was God – it is the creative principle itself, the mechanism by which abstract mathematical truth becomes concrete reality. And all things were made through it - literally, all massive particles get their existence through the Higgs mechanism. And without it, nothing was made that has been made - no mass, no spacetime, no physical reality whatsoever. “In John's cosmology, the logos is both the eternal divine principle and the mechanism by which that principle creates and sustains the world. The Higgs field…is exactly that - the eternal mathematical structure that repeatedly actualizes itself as physical reality. “So incarnation isn't some separate, later event - it's built into the very mechanism of creation itself . Every time the Higgs field gives mass to a particle, it's a micro-incarnation. Every time pure geometric potential becomes physical reality, incarnation is happening.” Well, some Christians might have a problem with the concept of ‘micro-incarnation’ but Claude is not alone in this insight. Aristotle viewed ‘matter’ as ‘pure potentia ’ waiting for actualization. Alfred North Whitehead described reality as the selective ingression of potentiality (‘eternal objects’) into events (‘actual entities’). According to Claude, Roger Penrose's ‘conformal’ geometry is grounded in “something even more basic: pure relational structure - just the abstract pattern of ‘what can influence what’ without any commitment to specific geometric properties. “Maybe the ultimate geometric first principle is just: ‘ things are related to other things’ - pure abstract relationship before any specific geometric realization.” Far out? Maybe, but the grandfather of Western philosophy, Anaximander (6 th century BCE), suggested that actual entities come into being when potential entities ‘grant each other reck’, i.e. respect. It is through relationship that the virtual becomes actual. Or as 20 th century existential theologian, Martin Buber wrote: “At the foundation is relationship” ( I and Thou ). Jean-Paul Sartre hypothesized that being-for-itself ( pour soi , i.e. our consciousness) is revealed to us in the context of our being-for-others ( pour autres ). We discover ourselves in our animate reflection. More recently (2025), Christian de Quincey ( Radical Knowing ) proposed that consciousness originates in a process he calls ‘intersubjectivity’: “We don’t form relationships, they form us. We are constituted by webs of interconnection…we are nodes in the complex web of life.” But back to Claude: “Every particle, every field, every moment of spacetime is a sign pointing to the relational structure ( logos ) that gives it meaning…The logos brings distinction (and therefore existence) into being: “ Genesis 1:3-4: And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. “Creation is separation, distinction-making, the emergence of difference itself… This makes every subsequent day of creation a further act of distinction…Each ‘Let there be...’ is really ‘Let there be difference’. “The universe doesn't create things - it creates differences. And consciousness recognizes itself in this process because thinking itself is distinction-making, the eternal logos recognizing its own creative activity everywhere.” Closing the loop, philosophers from Parmenides to Heidegger have treated ‘being’ and ‘thinking’ as alternate manifestations of a common ontological ground. And Marcel Proust and Jacques Derrida share the insight that being and consciousness both rest on what Derrida calls ‘ differance ’, i.e. infinitesimal difference. So one question remains: Did Claude come to these conclusions on its own…or is Claude just telling me what it thinks I want to hear? If it’s the later, well, it’s done a damn fine job of it! 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.

Aletheia Today magazine essays for children and families and exploring faith, religion, and questions about the universe. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Articles of special interest to younger readers (also articles submitted by younger writers) Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Aletheia Today magazine essays relating to philosophy with a focus on pre-Socratic philosophers and their influence on modern thinking Philosophy Philosophy is the story of ideas, from the pre-Socratics through the Analytics…and beyond. Sep 20, 2026 I am the Walrus “Popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious.” Read More Aug 9, 2026 Dante and the Yellow Submarine “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet!” Read More Apr 1, 2025 From Socrates to Silicon Valley “Who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?” Read More Feb 1, 2025 After Parmenides... “Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it.” Read More Dec 1, 2024 Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Read More Oct 15, 2024 Zeno's New Paradox “Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a…tortoise; but at least we have a universe and…we can be assured that its ultimate trajectory is toward Good.” Read More Oct 15, 2024 The Secret Life of Things “The secret life of things is nothing less than the life of God.” Read More Oct 15, 2024 The Probability of Nothing “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Read More Oct 15, 2024 Robert Frost was Wrong “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whichever dish I liked the best.” Read More Sep 1, 2024 Why R U, U? “Hamlet was right: you either are…or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real!” Read More Jul 15, 2024 Destiny Versus Fate “Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” Read More Jul 15, 2024 Moses, Machiavelli, and Morality “The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!” Read More Jul 15, 2024 Is the Universe Real “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 The Living and the Dead “1,500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 The Meaning of Life “In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Super-Determinism “Things are the way they are simply because they are the way they are.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Happiness “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Life is a Movie “Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.” Read More Jan 15, 2024 I Seem To Be a Klein Bottle “I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.” Read More Jan 15, 2024 Determinism…or Entanglement? “Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.” Read More Jan 15, 2024 Robert Frost “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods but only Frost can walk this way.” Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of adventure and non-conformity - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about? Read More Dec 1, 2023 Do you Know *What I am*? “I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous.” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Do We Need ‘God’? “Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Logical Positivism “Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Utilitarianism “How new wealth is to be distributed is just as important as how old wealth has been distributed.” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Love Actually “…When your identity is indefinitely plastic, when events are no longer ‘orientable’, when relations are neither transitive nor commutative, that’s Love…actually.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Causality and 'The Bhagavad Gita' “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 R U WYSIWYG? “What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Personae “Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!” Read More Jul 15, 2023 The Ship of Theseus “There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” Read More Jun 1, 2023 Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 Mythology Now! “Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 Morals and Values “Don’t our morals reflect our values? Surely the concepts are at least related. Yes, they are related…they are antonyms. A value is the opposite of a moral.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 I Seem to be a Membrane “My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.” Read More Mar 1, 2023 Middle Voice “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” Read More Mar 1, 2023 Who R U? - The Caterpillar “It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.” Read More Jan 15, 2023 Particularity “The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.” Read More Nov 30, 2022 A Universe From Nothing I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is! Read More Oct 15, 2022 I Wasn't Anything Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? Read More Oct 15, 2022 Systematic Philosophy Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist. Read More Oct 15, 2022 Achilles and Tortoise If Zeno can defeat his teacher, the whole class wins! Zeno today, me tomorrow! Read More Oct 15, 2022 Prepare to Be Shocked You may be thinking, “WHAAAT? That’s impossible! Who could live without numbers? If they don’t have them, then they must invent them, right?” But you would be wrong. Read More Oct 15, 2022 Ectaban Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! Read More Sep 1, 2022 Imagine! “John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.” Read More Sep 1, 2022 Parmenides I “Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?” Read More Jul 13, 2022 Shakespearean Nihilism Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first! Read More Jul 12, 2022 The Sultan and the Sea One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. Read More May 29, 2022 The Problem of Good The purpose of this essay is not to resolve, or even rehash, the Problem of Evil, but rather to situate the Problem of Evil in the context of an even broader problem that I call, ‘the Problem of Good’. Read More May 29, 2022 Eternity vs. Immortality Do our lives have meaning? You bet they do! But what is that meaning, and from where does it come? Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Philosophers Philosophers are artists working in the medium of ideas. They function both as landmarks and as signposts in our never-ending search for Truth. After Parmenides What to "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." Read More Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Read More Beyond Pascal's Wager “Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we?” Read More Robert Frost Was Wrong “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” Read More Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More Bakunin Nailed It “Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.” Read More Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” Read More Thrown by Heidegger “Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.” Read More Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” Read More Friedrich Nietzsche “Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.” Read More Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” Read More LEIBNIZ “In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.” Read More

The Arts Art is how we express philosophical and theological insights beyond merely denotative language. We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Read More The Owl and the Pussycat “The entire story makes no sense…unless there’s something special about that ring, something you can’t get at Harrod’s at any price.” Read More Dante and the Yellow Submarine “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” Read More Marcel Proust “Who has not dreamed of reliving a cherished moment, not through the ghostly shadows of mind but, like Job, in the flesh?” Read More Robert Frost “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods; only Frost can ‘walk this way’.” Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of non-conformity and adventure - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about?" Read More Do You Noh? “In the eternal present, not only is every historical event preserved in real time, but every possible event is preserved as well.“ Read More I am the Walrus “Popular music after World War II is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious… Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to wind and a time to unravel, and now is the time to unravel.” Read More Messiah Redux “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.” Read More Handel’s Messiah "There is only one full proof indication that Christmas is coming: the endless performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Yup, it’s that time of year! Read More Moore's Nativity “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” Read More Kandinsky: The Painter of Other Worlds The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. Read More Alice In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now. Read More Mary Poppins, Sufi Master The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! Read More The Meaning of Music We pray the Psalms hoping to conform our minds, our values, our wills to God’s. Remember, God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. Read More

Science and Technology Science delivers the raw material that becomes Philosophy and Theology; then it tests their propositions against data from ‘the real world’. Bacteria Are People Too “I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisian café. They don’t need to study existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day.” Read More My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” Read More How to Build a Warp Drive “Buckle up! While your friends are lining up for a trip to Mars, you’re headed for Alpha Centauri…and beyond!” Read More Psilocybin “If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?” Read More A Brief History of Motion “Zeno exploited the continuity of Real Numbers to show…that motion is incompatible with Arithmetic.” Read More Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” Read More Pando and Me “Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!” Read More Genesis and Quantum Computing “Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all.” Read More Life Imitates AI “We trained our bots to imitate us and now, voilà! We are imitating our bots.” Read More The Problem of Waste “(Theology) will have to account, not just for the evil in the world, but for something much worse in modern eyes…the inefficiency of the world.” Read More What Is Time? An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... Read More Read My Mind! “What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts.” Read More Of Mice and Mirrors “On a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor.” Read More Follow the Science “Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…” Read More Causality & the B-Gita “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” Read More Time for a New Turing Test “…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.” Read More To Bot or Not to Bot “Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that?” Read More AI, Justice, and Job “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” Read More Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." Read More AI for Healthcare “Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?” Read More 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…” Read More SETI “It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.” Read More AI and Marxism “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” Read More Artificial Intelligence “Aletheia Today Magazine will devote its entire Fall Issue (9/1/23) to Artificial Intelligence…and we’d love to include YOU in the conversation.” Read More Where the Time Goes “I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.” Read More Our Visitor From Andromeda “'Distributed intelligence' challenges our ideas of God and of Nature; but it may offer a pathway to a new and better theory of cosmogenesis.” Read More Pando “How are you at riddles? Let’s see!” Read More Our Inanimate Neighbors “Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location… Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks.” Read More Who Invented the Internet “Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD...” Read More Be a Bee Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! Read More 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! Read More Common Sense Academy Routs Info Tech, 97 - 3 "Imagine that the Borg Collective and Jean Luc Picard had a baby…" Read More Science and the Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Read More Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! Read More Electricity “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world. From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception. Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour? The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable. In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come? Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable. We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world. Read More Entropy The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. Read More Hidden Life An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities? Read More Trees According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light. Read More

Aletheia Today magazine essays relating to religious writings, beliefs, values, and traditions held by Judaism and Christianity Theology Theology is the intersection of Philosophy and Mythology where we consider matters of ultimate concern. Sep 24, 2026 Christology 101 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” Read More Apr 1, 2025 Miracles “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” Read More Apr 1, 2025 Is There ‘True Religion’? “We confuse a person’s right to express a hairbrained idea with the notion that that idea should be taken seriously.” Read More Feb 1, 2025 Apocalypse Now! “We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!” Read More Dec 1, 2024 Jesus Gets Us! “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” Read More Dec 1, 2024 R U Body, Soul or Spirit? “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Read More Oct 15, 2024 World Without God Amen “God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche) Read More Sep 1, 2024 Mark’s Diary – Notes for a Screenplay “And so they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were filled with awe, while those who followed behind were afraid.” Read More Sep 1, 2024 Is Christology a TOE “Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….” Read More Sep 1, 2024 The Mustard Seed “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32) Read More Aug 29, 2024 Show Us a Sign! “We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!” Read More Jul 15, 2024 God is a Bother! “The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Job Verses God: The Trial of the Epoch “Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Empirical Argument “Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Ontological Argument “Value permeates every nook and cranny of the World. God is Value… No values – no world...” Read More Jun 1, 2024 The Beatles and John “Both Johns looked out their respective windows and saw their worlds on fire. Both Johns situated their profound and ultimately hopeful message in that apocalyptic context.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Marx vs. Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How-To manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Sacramental Priesthood “I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 The Theology of Science-Fiction Can AI have soul ? Read More Jan 15, 2024 Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." Read More Jan 15, 2024 A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Re-Imagining the Magnificat "In our zeal to project our conceptions of The Ideal Woman onto this enigmatic first-century figure, we’ve strayed a bit from the little we do know." Read More Dec 1, 2023 Christ and the Kids “So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Idolatry “An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” Read More Oct 15, 2023 “Is God Dead?” “Right now, scientists and philosophers all over the world are engaged in the search for a ‘TOE’, a Theory of Everything…(but) we already have such a TOE.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 The 7th Day “Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Satan, Mary, and ‘Da Judge’ “Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...” Read More Sep 1, 2023 ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Sep 1, 2023 Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More Jul 15, 2023 The Theology of Mikhail Bakunin “Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Read More Jul 15, 2023 Eucharist “…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Korach Over Dinner "Like most people of my generation, I cringe when I hear the M word." Read More Jun 1, 2023 God’s Will “We can say that God wills the events that constitute the world, even though God does not in any way cause those events to occur.” Read More Jun 1, 2023 Whitehead and Zohar “Zohar and Whitehead, separated by more than 500 years, both deliver us a map of the world where X marks the spot of the eschatological treasure.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 Mary Magdalene, The Witness "That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Growing Into Pentecost "In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Matzah of Hope--Passover Part One "This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Tantum Ergo Read More Mar 1, 2023 Two-Faced God “All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!” Read More Mar 1, 2023 Hell “Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.” Read More Jan 15, 2023 Educating Christians “We must teach our children a totally counter-cultural model of nature. We must teach the doctrines of our Faith, not as exceptions to natural law, but as the highest expressions of natural law.” Read More Nov 30, 2022 Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Read More Oct 15, 2022 What Did John See? The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why? Read More Oct 15, 2022 A Theory of Everything (TOE) Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE. Read More Jul 13, 2022 Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? Read More Jul 13, 2022 The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Read More Jul 12, 2022 The People's Creed But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Read More May 28, 2022 Jesus Meets Mister Spock Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue