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< Back Psalm 151 David Cowles “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to the entire prayer. The Book of Psalms consists of 150 songs praising or exhorting God. This essay, however, will suggest that there may be at least one more Psalm in Judeo-Christian scripture. We’ll call it ‘Psalm 151’…but you’ll recognize it as ‘The Lord’s Prayer.’ Even though Jesus gave us this prayer half a millennium after the majority of the Psalms were composed and complied, the Lord’s Prayer has all the defining characteristics of a Psalm. It praises God; it petitions God; and it celebrates God’s active presence in the world. The Old Testament Psalms praise God for being God, exhort God to be God, and celebrate God being God. When we read the Psalms, we seek nothing less than to uncover the mind of God (his values) and discover his will. We seek to conform our minds to God’s values and our actions to his will. The Lord’s Prayer occurs twice in the New Testament, once in Matthew and again in Luke . While the two versions have much in common, there are differences. Furthermore, the form of the prayer most of us recite today is not a literal translation of either scriptural version. But none of that matters! Psalms are meant to be liturgical. The version of the Lord’s Prayer that we recite as part of our various Christian liturgies is the version that concerns us here: Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us, And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. Amen. The Lord’s Prayer begins by addressing God, our Father… Yahweh. We praise God for his transcendent role (“who art in heaven”) and for his immanent role (“hallowed be thy name”). Alfred North Whitehead ( Process and Reality ) points out that the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is not God’s postal address; it’s who God is , transcendentally, i.e., beyond spacetime. Likewise, the ‘name’ of God is not just something he’s called; it is who God is , immanently, i.e. inside spacetime, inside history. The ‘name of God’ is the role God plays in the world. This is why when Moses asks God his name ( Exodus ), God responds, “I AM.” First and foremost, that is how we know God…as Being itself. The Lord’s Prayer begins by praising God for who he is, transcendentally and immanently. From praise, the prayer turns to petition. In fact, the Lord’s Prayer includes three distinct types of petition, all found throughout the Book of Psalms . The first petition is eschatological, the second is social (concerning justice and peace), and the third concerns our own personal salvation. The petitioner is certainly not bashful. Why ask for anything less than everything? The first petition is delivered on behalf of the entire universe: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” In the language of Whitehead, the Kingdom of God will ‘come’ when all entities conform their ‘form’ to God’s Primordial Nature (values) and their ‘aim’ to God’s Consequent Nature (will). When our values conform to God’s values and our actions conform to God’s will, then has the Kingdom of Heaven ‘come,’ then is God’s will ‘done.’ At that moment, Earth and Heaven become one ( I Cor. 15: 24 – 28). The second petition concerns justice and peace, two major themes in Psalms . “Give us this day our daily bread.” Here, we are not praying for some private or transitory advantage. (“O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.” – Janice Joplin.) Rather, we are praying for ‘bread,’ the precondition of all life, and not just for ourselves, but for everyone, and not just for today, but for every day. Implicit in this petition, but unstated, is our commitment to do nothing to interfere with the broadest possible distribution of this ‘bread’ for which we have prayed. We cannot pray for generosity and practice greed. We have conformed our values to God’s values; now we must conform our wills to God’s will. God’s advocacy for the poor and the oppressed and his obsession with justice permeate the Book of Psalms . The Lord’s Prayer echoes Psalms ’ insistence that everyone’s basic human needs be satisfied. A society that follows God’s titular commandments, but does not provide adequately for the legitimate needs of all its members, will find itself very far indeed from God. In fact, nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer is there even a mention of obeying God’s commandments. Psalms generally celebrate God’s law, but they invariably go further: they strive to discover his will. And his will, what God wants for the world, is only hinted at in the law. In the Gospels, much of Jesus’ criticism of his fellow Pharisees is based on this distinction between God’s law and God’s will. This baffles many of his hearers: how can you separate the two? Psalms show us the way: begin by uncovering God’s eternal values, then cultivate an appreciation for his universal law. Only then can you hope to discover his specific will: WWYD? (What would YHWH do?) The physical petition concerned justice, but it is paired with a spiritual petition concerning peace: “And forgive us our trespasses.” Our physical survival is dependent on ‘bread;’ our spiritual survival is dependent on ‘mercy’ or forgiveness. If ‘bread’ is a pre-condition of justice, ‘forgiveness’ is a pre-condition of peace; and justice and peace are both pre-conditions for the full realization of God’s Kingdom on Earth. “Feed us and forgive us!” Isn’t this the baseline prayer that children everywhere direct toward their biological fathers? Why then not all creatures toward their ontological Father? Theology just doesn’t get any more concrete than this! So, we specifically add to our petition, “As we forgive those who trespass against us.” When we pray Psalms, we first and foremost seek to discover and interiorize the mind of God; secondarily, we seek to learn God’s will and project that will into the world through our actions. If compassion is a value in the mind of God, if mercy is an act of God that we praise, then it is imperative that we also practice mercy. We must forgive those who trespass against us, in the same way God forgives us who trespass against him. We prayed first for the coming of God’s Kingdom, the union of Heaven and Earth. Then we prayed for the twin values of justice and peace. Everything is going so well. We are praising the God of Heaven and Earth. We are conforming our minds to his mind, our hearts to his heart. We have agreed to treat no man unjustly and to forgive all trespasses. What could possibly go wrong? Temptation! It is temptation that throws us off our game. We see an opportunity for some private power, profit or pleasure that we can only realize at the expense of another. Perhaps we just don’t care, but more likely, we find a way to rationalize our actions. In either case, we undermine the foundations of justice and peace we just laid down. “And lead us not into temptation.” Our penultimate petition is for God to shield us from such temptations, knowing that we are weak and can’t fend them off for ourselves. Now the climax! “Deliver us from evil.” At the end of the day, all evil comes down to one thing: ‘privation of being.’ Lying, stealing, injuring, all encroach on the being of others, and the ultimate deprivation of being is death itself, mortality! The Old Testament Psalmist is obsessed with mortality, whether it be the risk of personal death in battle or the existential realization that “every man is but a breath (Ps. 39) …his days are like a passing shadow (Ps. 144).” It does no good for God to feed us and forgive us…or for God to share with us his values or teach us his will…if we’re all destined for the ontological scrap pile. The last thing we ask of God, the one thing we MUST ask of God, is not to allow our existence to be erased . Our final plea can be nothing other than “Deliver us from evil!” It sums up all the others. “Does dust give you thanks?” (Psalm 30) The final “Amen,” not found in either scriptural version of the prayer, completes the cycle. We began with “Our Father.” The Father is the ground of all Being, the source of all potentiality, “I AM.” It is from the Father (through the Son and by the Holy Spirit) that everything that is comes to be. When we say, “Our Father,” we celebrate the potentiality of the world. When we close with “Amen,” we celebrate the actuality of world…the world, not just as pure potential, but as a completely realized matter of fact. God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven. Justice (‘bread’) and mercy (‘forgiveness’) do suffuse the world, and our futile, temporal lives are transformed and incorporated into God’s eternal life. Psalm 151 is not just one Psalm among others, it is the prototypical Psalm. It summarizes the 150 Psalms that went before it into one, single, simple theological statement, one universal prayer. That is why the Lord’s Prayer is perhaps the most important collection of words ever written. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . 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< Back Covid 20 David Cowles So we were told that COVID-19 came from bats. By the summer of 2020, it should have been obvious that this was wrong. COVID-19 has behaved in some very unique ways that most probably reflect the effects of ‘human engineering’. Now the scientific consensus is shifting. So we were told that COVID-19 came from bats. By the summer of 2020, it should have been obvious that this was wrong. COVID-19 has behaved in some very unique ways that most probably reflect the effects of ‘human engineering’. Now the scientific consensus is shifting. Even Fauci says that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab and President Biden, to his credit, is aggressively pursuing that hypothesis. If correct, it means that the Chinese are working on biological weapons they could use against the US and other countries in the future. If the uncompleted COVID virus did this much damage, think of what havoc the completed version might bring. Could COVID-20 be around the corner? Previous Next

< Back Job is My Superhero David Cowles "No one has taken a bigger risk than Job, and no one has faced longer odds; and yet, Job has taken God to court and won!" Where can you find a superhero when you need one? In a Marvel movie perhaps…or a DC comic? You probably wouldn’t think to look in the Bible, and certainly not in the Old Testament. Too bad! The Bible is chock-full of superheroes, especially the Old Testament. I mean, Abraham gives up a cushy upper middle-class lifestyle to become a nomad. Moses organizes a rebellion of Hebrew slaves and leads them on a 40-year trek across the wilderness to a new homeland. You get the picture! My personal favorite is Job. The Book of Job was written a mere 2,500 years ago, but the story itself is probably much older than that. Ok, granted, Job’s not your everyday superhero. In fact, on the surface, he’s anything but. We don’t meet him on a mountain top or at the head of a vast army; we meet him lying in the dust, his skin covered with sores, his family gone, his wealth wiped-out and his reputation in tatters. In those days, if you had a streak of ‘bad luck’ (like Job), people assumed that God was punishing you for sins you’d committed. Proof was not required. If you were suffering, then you must have sinned. Case closed! “What need have we for witnesses?” I am reminded of the judicial system in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Lookingglass : The sentence comes first, then the verdict, then the trail, and last of all, the crime itself. Imagine living like this. In our lives, we all have periods of relatively good fortune… and not-so-good fortune. Imagine your so-called friends ghosting you whenever your luck runs dry. Or imagine suffering their unjust accusations and their cruel taunts on top of your grief, your illness, and your poverty. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Certainly, not Job! When he hits rock bottom, his wife tells him to “curse God and die!” His ‘friends’ gather, supposedly to comfort him, but actually to tease him, to shame him, to blame him for his own suffering. Mrs. Job wants him to give up and die. His so-called ‘comforters’ want him to acknowledge his sins and beg God for forgiveness. But Job has other ideas. He won’t give up, and he won’t plead guilty to crimes he did not commit. He’s a superhero, remember? Job’s idea of God is very different from his friends’. Job’s God is not uncaring or cruel; he is just and merciful. Even more importantly, Job’s God is not above the law. In your catalog of superheroes , who else has the chutzpah to do such a thing? Using an ancient Middle Eastern legal formula, Job summons God, and much to everyone’s surprise (except Job’s) God complies with Job’s summons; he appears. At that time, the cornerstone of the law was God’s covenant with his people. Today we would call such a covenant a contract or even a constitution . God authored the covenant and Job expects him to follow it…and he does. From here on, Job’s comforters sit in stunned silence. What manner of man is this that even God obeys him? But God is not obeying Job. God is simply honoring the terms of the covenant. God is obeying God. Even more fundamentally, God is being God. All the characters in this ancient drama see God as fierce and unpredictable, all except Job! Like Abraham and Moses, Job ‘knows God’. He knows that God cannot behave unjustly because he is Justice. He knows that God cannot stop being God. So to recap, Job summons God and God appears. Is this the happy ending we’ve been hoping for? Not even close! The action’s just beginning, so buckle up! Were you expecting God to appear as a meek little lamb, ready to submit to the will of the court, putty in the hands of the plaintiff (Job)? Then you were wrong! God is furious! He has better things to do with his time than hang out in some District Court, answering Job’s impertinent charges. I mean, there’s a universe to run, for cryin’ out loud! God appears, but he’s not happy about it, not one bit. He addresses the court “out of a whirlwind." It’s undoubtedly an eye-catching performance. I mean, you don’t see that every day, do you? Admit it: you’d probably pause your remote to watch such a spectacle. Who could pass up a chance to walk down memory lane with God, exchanging war stories and listening to his tales of creation? Job could, and he does; he ignores God entirely, but then, Job is a superhero after all. He keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the prize (‘judgment for the plaintiff’). God mounts a spirited defense, “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak? Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea and walked on the bottom of the Ocean?” God’s strategy is clear. He will overpower Job. But notice, God’s arguments are off point. They are more a product of frustration than careful legal reasoning. They have nothing to do with justice in general, and even less to do with Job’s particular complaint. God is blurring the line between might and right . Plus, this is not an episode of Law and Order . For one thing, God is both the defendant and the judge. We would never agree to such an arrangement today. We’d call it a ‘conflict of interest’, and for anyone but God, it would be. If you were your own judge, you’d probably find yourself innocent most of the time…ok, all the time. We all would…but not God. He alone can build a true firewall between God-the-Defendant and God-the-Judge. Job ignores God’s bluster. He does not take God’s bait. He won’t be drawn into a school yard game of one-upmanship; he will not show his NFL highlights reel next to God’s. Job hangs tough, “I have spoken once - and I will not repeat. Twice - and I will no more!” Job smells blood. He is going for a directed verdict of not guilty…and he’s going to get it, too - if only he can keep his cool. But not before God takes one last desperate shot: “Can you pull out the Leviathan (a sea monster) with a fishhook? Can you toy with him like a bird? Who has ever confronted him and survived? Even gods live in fear of his majesty; they’re in terror of the ruin he wrecks.” In other words: If you’re not afraid of me, perhaps you’ll be afraid of my creatures. But, of course, God’s threats are empty, and his words fall on deaf ears. Job has the last word: “I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes.” Translation: If I can’t get justice, no one can! Today, Job might be held in contempt of court for such a remark; but God lets him slide. Now on to the verdict. The whole cosmos is of one mind: Job will be found liable and further punishment will be imposed. The whole cosmos…that is, except Job. Job knows he will be acquitted. He knew it from the beginning. Job knows God! God moves from the plaintiff’s chair to the judge’s bench. He puts on his legal robes and prepares to rule. But first, he has a word for Job’s fickle friends: “You did not speak about me honestly, as did my servant Job.” And now…the verdict! God finds Job “not guilty” on all charges and restores to Job all that he had lost and more. What makes a hero? The willingness to do what’s right, to defend one’s values and beliefs, despite overwhelming opposition and with no realistic hope of success. Then what is a superhero? A hero who succeeds, who wins out in the end after all. In the entire history of literature, mythology, and religion, no one has taken a bigger risk than Job and no one has faced longer odds; and yet, Job has taken God to court and won! So, Job is my superhero. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Previous Next

Formal Christian Prayer is a cornucopia of spirituality. Yet in the Roman Catholic tradition at least, two prayers stand out: Jesus' prayer, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary (Ave Maria). < Back The Structure of Prayer David Cowles Jun 1, 2023 Formal Christian Prayer is a cornucopia of spirituality. Yet in the Roman Catholic tradition at least, two prayers stand out: Jesus' prayer, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary (Ave Maria). 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 Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next Share Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to the Table of Contents, June Issue

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

< Back 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. David Cowles Share Previous Next

< Back Chess David Cowles “A recent headline in the 'New York Post' read: King Castles!” Since its emergence in India c. 600 CE and its arrival in Europe c. 1000 CE, chess has strangely resonated with life in the minds of its masters. And why not? It has all the elements: Itinerant Knights Scheming Bishops Hard charging Rooks An idle King and his pompous, profligate Queen Then, of course, there’s a mess of Pawns , always a mess of Pawns – serfs, wage slaves, cattle fodder, grunts – pieces with little power to impact events and even less control over their own fate. Sound familiar? This could well be the pilot for a new series on PBS or BBC. You’re skeptical. How could our vast, complex and multi-dimensional world be meaningfully mapped onto a flat, square board with just 64 potential values? Don’t forget the incredible power of 64: (2³)². A millennia earlier, the Chinese completed a similar Mappa Mundi called I Ching. It records the essential character of all 64 possible states of affairs, i.e., the various combinations of Yin and Yang : (2³)² Nor forget the advisor to the Sultan who asked his employer to pay him his wages in grains of rice. One grain on day one, two grains on day two, four on three, eight on four… You get the picture. Long before day 64, our ambitious acolyte had cornered the world’s supply of rice. Of course, our enterprising entrepreneur is well out of the ‘grain grind’ now. He spends his time lecturing and promoting his two bestsellers: 60 Days from Rags to Riches and, of course, The Power of 64 . Rumor has it, he’s currently negotiating film rights. But back to chess: Knights are the mischievous miscreants, young Turks, corner cutters, disruptors, and change agents of the chess board. Their photos regularly make the cover of Barron’s 40 at 40 . They are the nouvelle riche . Their patron saint is Loki (Norse mythology). One such Knight, bewildered by ESPN’s request for an interview, summed up the plight of his class: “Game? We’re in some sort of game? Nobody told me!” Rooks (from the Persian word for ‘chariot’) represent the military-industrial complex . Masters of War, Captains of Industry, they have the royal couple’s backs. They patrol the perimeter, but they can project their military and economic power with lightning speed anywhere on the board. Rooks are the status quo’s first and last line of defense. They crush upstart Knights as they go about their work with an air of grim determination. Bishops are sly boots. Superficially less powerful than their secular peers, they get things done quietly, unobtrusively. Like Knights , the Bishops have their own agenda – an agenda only obliquely related to the interests of their royal patrons. And the King ? Well, as you would expect, the King is in his counting house, counting out his money. If he leaves his palace at all, he does not go far. From earliest childhood, he has been told that his only really important function is to stay alive. Accordingly, in desperate circumstances, he will occasionally leave the palace and take refuge behind his Rooks . Word of such an event usually spreads; a recent headline in the New York Post read: “King Castles!” The Queen , of course, is in her parlor, eating bread and honey. At least she’s supposed to be; but don’t let the semblance of domestic tranquility fool you! This Queen gets around…if you know what I mean. She travels. Sometimes, she even teams up with a Rook or a Bishop or even an errant Knight to attack another King’s stronghold. The Queen is the quintessential existential hero: she knows who she is, and she knows that she can be whoever she wants to be…well, not quite whoever; she can’t be a Knight . But be a Rook? Or a Bishop ? Or even a lowly Pawn (if she’s playing Princess and Pauper)? Easy-peasy! She could even play at being King…but who would want to? Heavy the head and all that… She parades around the board with nary a care for her own safety; yet her slightest move instantly rallies minions to her defense. Once I overheard her lecturing a young Knight, “I’ll go wherever I want, whenever I want; it’s your job to keep me safe. If you fail, it’s curtains for me, but news flash: it’s almost certainly curtains for you too. Think about that!” The game we call Chess was first played in India some 1,500 years ago. Will the game still be played 1,500 years from now, in 3500 CE? That depends. Will there still be life in the universe? If so, will there be life in our solar system? If so, will it be on Earth? If so, will that life be recognizably human…or otherwise intelligent (‘intelligence’ defined as having the ability to learn and play the game of chess)? Finally, and most importantly, will society still have a social structure that resonates with the pieces and moves of the game? If so, it is entirely possible that our descendants will still be playing a game recognizable to a denizen of our own era as chess. But it is unlikely that they’ll still be playing it on a square, cardboard board manufactured by Parker Brothers. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Next

< Back Is Childhood a Crime? David Cowles “Parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process.” I’m sure Art Linkletter (d. 2010) was a wonderful person. Actually, I’m not sure, but shouldn’t we give people the benefit of the doubt? That said, his iconic TV Show, Kids Say the Darndest Things (‘KSDT’), is emblematic of the criminal institution euphemistically known as ‘childhood’. KSDT assembled a panel of pre-school children; the host then posed questions designed to elicit ‘cute’ responses. If some of these responses were also embarrassing, so much the better! And, of course, those questions were designed to provoke loud laughter from the studio audience. Where was PETA when we needed them? (Even circus animals are treated better than Linkletter’s kids.) There are two things you can say about very young children: They know fewer facts about the world than you do, but they think about that world more frequently and more deeply. Being an adult is thinking you have all the answers when you don’t. Being a child is thinking you don’t have any answers when you do! Children instinctively know things about the world that almost every adult has forgotten; they just don’t know they know. My high school had a motto: mortui vivos docent (“the dead teach the living”). Of course, we interpreted ‘the dead’ as a derisive reference to our still very much alive teachers, not to Homer and Plato as originally intended. But we, too, knew more than we realized! Our motto should have read, “adults teach children.” That could be the motto of every K – 12 school in America. Curious children ask adults to teach them; for the most part, they are told lies. Sometimes the lies are intentional, but most often they are just occasions of well-meaning adults passing on heartfelt but imaginary ‘facts’ about the world. I helped raise 4 children and 10 grandchildren, every one of whom dazzled me with feats of intellectual prowess: A 5-year-old explained the difference between immortality and eternity as well as Augustine. A 6-year-old presented a convincing ontological argument for the real existence of Santa Claus; lie quiet, Anselm. An 8-year-old showed me a model of Trinity, far more cogent than St. Patrick’s famous clover. A 9-year-old pointed out a heresy embedded in a popular Christmas hymn. A 10-year-old came up with a novel and elegant algorithm for calculating the area of a square. An 11-year-old wrote a play. I could go on… and on! If any of my adult friends had done any of these things, they would have immediately sent their work off for peer review…or for publication. Children do these things routinely while playing with Legos and watching Phineas and Ferb . An adult’s world is densely forested with facts. Well-worn paths (memes) facilitate travel. Few adults ever wander off these professionally maintained trails; the forest is thought to be impenetrable…and very, very dangerous. “Here there be monsters!” To continue the metaphor, a child’s world would then be a garden of wildflowers: new shoots rising every night out of rich, moist soil; new buds forming daily on the tips of old stocks. There are no pathways here! In fact, the entire garden is virgin; no one has ever set foot in it before… except perhaps the ‘gardener’ from the Book of Genesis. You are free to wander, and wonder, to your heart’s content (just don’t eat the fruit). It’s no surprise then that kids and adults can’t communicate. They live in the same, but totally different, worlds. Imagine you sitting down for a chinwag with a stoned stone-ager from c. 50,000 BCE. Sorry, that’s what it’s like for a child to talk with you . Adult or child, we each have our patch, and apparently that patch ages as we do. You grow, your garden fills in. By the time you’re an adult, your world is enshrouded by the forest canopy. Today, adults are discouraged from beating children in their charge; if only they were similarly discouraged from humiliating, ridiculing, belittling, and mocking those same children! Older children and adults tease each other from time to time; for the most part, it’s water off a duck’s back. But young children don’t have enough experience to know what’s real and what’s not. If someone says, “you’re stupid,” then that child is stupid, or silly, or naughty, or ‘the bane of my existence’. Almost every adult I know says that their children are their jewels, the loves of their lives, but you’d never know it. In my day, for better or worse, children were largely ignored. For the most part, we only connected with our fathers when we were being disciplined. Today, parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process. It’s a wonder anyone escapes childhood in one piece; many don’t! But it would be too easy to blame the adults. Grown-ups are people too! They have their own lives and their own needs. They are damaged products of their own inadequate upbringings. Plus, supporting a child today, physically and financially, is more than a full-time job. Few adults have any energy left to ‘feed Sally’s spirit’. It has often been said that youth is wasted on the young. That’s like saying that the Titanic was a big boat; it’s just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. (Too soon?) Instead, we are dealing here with a total generational mismatch. Kids are tiny and defenseless and do not always know the ways of the world. Adults are huge and ferocious and know the precise location of every lever. Yet we place our children under the supervision and control of parents, grands, teachers, cops, and social workers. Who says child sacrifice is a thing of the past? Did I mention that I raised 4 children? “I did the best I could,” which means, according to my standards, “I did an absolutely horrible job.” The ‘best I could’ wasn’t even close to ‘good enough’…not even close! Some of my children have forgiven me, “You did as good as could have been expected under the circumstances,” whatever they were; others have not. (I agree with the ‘have-nots’ BTW.) And just for the record, no, I didn’t beat them! Children are not just ‘shorties’; they are not miniature adults. Children are an entirely different phenomenon from parents. A few decades ago (I date myself), it was popular to say that men and women were from ‘different planets’ (e.g., Mars and Venus). Today, we can say something similar about children and adults. What makes one planet different from another? Time, for one thing. A year on Neptune lasts 60,000 Earth days. It’s a long wait from one Christmas to the next. On the other hand, a day on Jupiter or Saturn is only about half as long as a day on Earth. As soon as your head hits the pillow, it’s time to wake up again. It would be foolish not to realize that such massive differences in time measurement affect the way sentient beings live and how they understand their worlds. Children and adults experience time differently. By my calculations, a 75-year-old’s week is subjectively equivalent to a 5-year-old’s day. Failure to understand this simple fact leads to insurmountable conflict. But time measurement is only one difference. I’m sorry to say it, but children are much, much smarter than you…or me. That’s why they’re so much fun to be with…for short bursts of time. Children never shut down. After about 12 hours, their bodies just give out. You on the other hand… Now, if you’re waiting for me to end this article with “How to” fix these problems, you’re going to be disappointed. These problems are evolutionary and anthropological, not political. About the best we can hope for at this point is an awareness of the cultural disconnect and a sensitivity to its consequences. As in many aspects of life, whether we are theists or atheists, we can learn from Scripture: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mt. 18:3) 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 Harvest Issue 2023 Previous Next

< Back 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.” David Cowles Do you ever wish that you’d still be alive when all of life’s biggest questions are finally resolved? Job said that dying without knowledge was the worst fate that could befall a human being. If so, it often seems as if that fate-worse-than-death is in store for all of us. But good news, you can relax! Problem solved; quest completed; target acquired; Grail in hand. You did it. You lived to see perhaps the most pressing problem of philosophy solved, right here, right now, in your lifetime, before your very eyes. But to appreciate that, we need a little background. Who am I and who is my neighbor? Two of the most profound, and contentious, questions in human history. According to Descartes, I am a being that thinks ( cogito ergo sum ). Such cognition must include awareness of an environment and awareness of an awareness of that environment. Cognition is recursive. It is its own object. Logically, then, anyone (or anything) that displays similar ‘recursive awareness’ must be my neighbor. So far so good, but the converse is pernicious: if you are not my neighbor, you cannot have recursive awareness. To our 21st century sensibility, the way forward seems obvious: draw up a list of beings who are capable of ‘recursive awareness’, like me, et violà – meet the neighbors! Instead, though, we begin by drawing up lists of our neighbors. Not on the list? Sorry, you must not possess recursive intelligence. How 20th century! Being neighbors is like belonging to an exclusive country club. To join, you need sponsors, and you need the approval of the other members. “I’m so sorry that you didn’t get in. Better luck in your next reincarnation!” For untold millennia, my neighbors were the members of my tribe . Beginning with my extended family, the concept of ‘tribe’ radiates outward: my village, my culture, my race, my class, my nationality, etc. A defining feature of tribalism is its insistence on dehumanizing, then marginalizing, everyone and everything that does not belong to my tribe. Membership does have its privileges (apologies to American Express). If you’re not my neighbor, then what are you? At best, you are a ‘proto-human’, a neanderthal or perhaps a yeti; less fortunately, you may a ‘beast’ or a ‘zombie’ or an ‘alien’ or even an inanimate object. Pity the lonely, inert paperweight, sitting on my desk. It wanted to join my club but got turned down; now it is forced to interact with me every day knowing that it didn’t measure up. I feel sorry for it but what can I do? A lowly paperweight is just not a member of my tribe! Or is it? On this website ( www.aletheiatoday.com ), we have spent some time visiting with the Piraha , a small, semi-isolated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Although the tribe graciously welcomes “European” traders, missionaries, anthropologists, linguists, etc., they do not regard these visitors as ‘fully human’. Tribalism is a virtually universal phenomenon in human culture. And us today? Are we still tribal? You bet we are! Grade school possies, middle school cliques, college frats (sic), country clubs, the Mafiosi. For all its endearing features, tribalism is a nightmare from which humanity is struggling to awake (apologies to James Joyce). Did Jesus kick-off this awakening some 2,000 years ago when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan? (I mean, if a Samaritan can be my neighbor, who can’t be?) Or was it Mister Rogers? Either way, in our lifetimes, a radical but welcome consensus is finally emerging: all human beings are my neighbors! Even if you don’t share my race, my class, my religion, my political party, or my nationality, you’re still my neighbor, i.e., you are my ontological equal. You exhibit recursive awareness. Red state? Blue state? Still a state! But before we get too self-congratulatory, we need to ask what the meaning of ‘all’ is (apologies to Bill Clinton). For example, does it include the ‘unborn’ and if so, when? At conception? At viability? At birth? How about babies likely to be born with serious birth defects? Does it include the very old? The disabled? The mentally ill? The ‘cognitively challenged’? How about someone who has been declared ‘brain-dead’? Or convicted of a capital crime? Not so simple after all, is it? Still, we have made progress. In fact, in recent decades, we have begun to consider whether the franchise tag (“neighbor”) should be extended beyond the boundaries of our species. What about certain primates (e.g., gorillas)? Sea mammals (e.g., whales)? Corvids (e.g., ravens, parrots)? And what about Spot, the family pet? What of our siblings in the Vegetable Kingdom? For example, how about trees, networked in a forest, that apparently communicate with each other and engage in purposive, collective, and, unlike some humans, consistently eleemosynary behavior? Yup, we’ve come a long way…but we have miles to go before we sleep (apologies to Robert Frost). Below this terrain, “Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man (sic).” (Coleridge) I’m talking metaphorically about the underground river of panpsychism . From Greek philosophy (Anaximander) to Monasticism (St. Francis), to Native American spirituality, to Hasidism (the Baal Shem Tov), to Process Philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead), to modern-day Druids and Greens (Gaia), there have always been people proposing to extend the ‘neighbor tag’ beyond the human species, beyond the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, perhaps even to so-called inanimate objects . If these folks are right, literally everything changes! There is no more we and they ; there is always just us . There are no more subjects and objects ; now there are just entities . There are no more active or passive verbs ; there are only events. Nothing is secular or profane; everything is sacred. Recursive awareness is everywhere. The universe is alive…and conscious! But are these people right? (Smart money says otherwise.) Yet, an article recently appeared in Nature Communications (link below) and was summarized by “Astrobiology”. Let’s sample that summary: From a distance, they looked like clouds of dust. Yet, the swarm of microrobots in author Michael Crichton’s bestseller Prey was self-organized. It acted with rudimentary intelligence, learning, evolving, and communicating with itself to grow more powerful. “Basically, these little nanobots become self-organized and self-aware,” said Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State, explaining the plot of Crichton’s book. A new model…inspired by Crichton’s novel, describes how biological or technical systems form complex structures equipped with signal-processing capabilities that allow the systems to respond to stimulus and perform functional tasks without external guidance… Taken individually, the material has no intelligence or functionality, but collectively, the material is capable of responding to its environment with a kind of emergent intelligence, Aronson explained: “What I’m working on is distributed artificial intelligence. Each element doesn’t have any intelligence, but once they come together, they’re capable of collective response and decision-making… We identify the decision-making machinery of the individual active agents as the driving mechanism for the collectively controlled self-organization of the system.” ( Multi-scale organization in communicating active matter , Nature Communications - open access.) Continuing in my own voice, I have fingernails, I am aware that I have fingernails, and I am aware that I am aware that I have fingernails…and they are to be found at the ends of my fingers. I enjoy recursive awareness (aka consciousness). I am aware that I enjoy recursive awareness, and I am even aware that I am aware that I enjoy recursive awareness. And where is that consciousness located? Not in my brain, not in my neurons, not even in my entire organism per se . Consciousness is an emergent property, an emergent property of a network, in my case, a neural network. It is a process; it is dependent on an underlying structure, but it is neither the structure itself nor the element of that structure. Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location. The entities that form the structures that support awareness are located in spacetime, but the awareness itself is not. Awareness per se is spaceless and timeless, even though the object of that awareness occupies a region in spacetime. So, what’s changed? Only everything! It had been thought that only certain types of entities (e.g., neurons) could network to support awareness. Now it seems that that is not true. A network of entirely inanimate objects can support awareness. Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks. Even the unholy trinity, ‘me, myself and I’, is not aware per se . I am simply the locus of a network that supports awareness. This, in turn, solves a major mystery: how is it that patients under anesthesia are not aware and not aware that they are not aware? For them, an entire region of spacetime has been obliterated. Why? Because the network they house is temporarily shut down. It’s a whole new world out there! And we will need new science and new philosophy to accommodate it. Turns out, this is a great time to be alive after all. 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 Church and State David Cowles Oct 25, 2022 I will write (my law) upon their hearts… At that time, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own mind. At a time when our Atlantic culture has shed almost every vestige of common values, one meme remains largely unchallenged: “The separation of church and state.” While even now, the elaboration and application of this principle remains a subject of controversy, the fundamental concept is widely shared: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Separation of Church and State is so thoroughly engrained in our political culture that it is rarely questioned. Yet, our modern Atlantic model is only one possible expression of this relationship. Let’s look at some ways Church and State may (or may not) co-exist: #1 No Church, All State Religion, any religion, is the ‘opiate of the people’. It is objectively wrong and therefore harmful. It thwarts scientific progress, pays only lip service to reason, and threatens to delay the coming of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It cannot be tolerated. #2 Separation of Church and State An impervious firewall must exist between Church and State. Church has no obligation to State, and State has no obligation to Church. In fact, State is to have no truc whatsoever with any religion or church. If Church is to ‘make it,' it must do so entirely on its own. For its part, State must adopt a strictly neutral position regarding religion in general and churches in particular. #3 Co-existence of Church and State States recognize that the voluntary practice of religion in no way undermines, and may even complement, the wellbeing of the realm. The position of Church is secure; churches enjoy all the same rights, privileges, and obligations as other institutions within the state. #4 Hypostatic Church and State Aka, the Carolingian model. Drawing on Christology, which holds Jesus Christ to be “true God and true man”, this view sees society as “true church and true state," Following the theological conclusions of the Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD), Charles the Great (Charlemagne) imagined the relationship between Church and State to be similar to the relationship between Jesus’ Divine and Human Natures. #5 : Constitutional Theocracy Both Church and State are necessary for the proper functioning of society. Church is sovereign in matters of faith. State, though sovereign in secular matters, governs under the umbrella of God’s Law (as interpreted by the Church). State is expected to promote (but not require) the practice of religion; Church is expected to promote loyalty (but not blind) to the State. Logistical and ideological considerations may lead the State to recognize one church as the “official state religion” without prohibiting the expression and practice of other faiths. #6 : Absolute Theocracy The Law of God, as interpreted by the Church, is normative in all things, civil as well as ecclesiastical. It is the entirety of the law. Therefore, the true theocratic state may have no legislative branch at all; or if it does, the legislative function can only apply to matters on which God’s law is silent, i.e., to the gaps between raindrops. #7 : All Church, No State “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” – Jer. 31:33 “In those days, there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his (sic) own eyes.” – Judges 21:25 We seem to be living in a time when the question of church/state relations is once again taking center stage. We will all inevitably be drawn into the conversation. It may be useful to keep in mind that this is not a simple, binary choice between two discrete models. Church/state relations exist along a continuum. They are analog, not digital. Intellectual history is not a jukebox. You don’t just punch two keys together to play a record. A better analogy would be the hand turned dial (no button pushing, please) of an old-fashioned AM/FM radio. We move along the dial slowly but steadily. Along the way will encounter ‘islands of sound in a static sea’; that’s what we call ‘a station.' Like what you hear? Good, let’s hang out there. Feeling the need for something more, or at least something different, no problem. Just make your way up the dial to the next oasis of sweet sound. 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 Is the Universe Real David Cowles “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” What must it have been like to stare up at the stars c. 2000 BCE? The Universe is your patch! You have qualified dominion over the animals and plants, and you can imagine setting sail on that great whale rode ( Beowulf ) we now know as the Milky Way. It is easy to see how we might have fallen prey to hubris . “I’m the king of this castle!” Things look a bit different now, don’t they? We know so much more, and the most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew. Of course, in absolute terms we have exponentially more data points; but relative to what is available to be known , our noosphere is shrinking. For one thing, much of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong; for another, each new, hard-won kernel of gnosis has shone a spotlight on vast new regions of ignorance. Once upon a time I knew nowt about arithmetic. Then someone showed me that 1 + 1 = 2. Cool beans! Then what about 1 + 1 + 1? Or 2 + 1? Or 2 + 2? In a couple of years I’ll give you Principia Mathematica. Imagine that X stands for everything there is to know, and Y stands for what we do know. In 2000 BCE, Y might have been 10% of X. Wow! But 4,000 years later, things have changed. What we know now is more like 1% of what is available to be known. We are learning what we don’t know faster than we’re learning in the first place. As fast as we learn more about our universe, the faster we learn how much more we don’t know. Sidebar : If this process continues unabated, we may reach the coveted mystic state of absolute unknowing. In 1900 CE, we were like 4-year-olds. We knew everything there was to know. By 1950, we’d learned that there was a lot more to be known than we’d imagined. To make matters worse, we realized that much of what we thought we knew in 1900 wasn’t what we thought it was. By 1950 we’d begun playing with computers; 75 years later, our computers are playing with us. For 50 years, we programed our computers; now computers program themselves. How long before those same computers program us? “What is man (sic) that God should be mindful of him?” Good question, but it was easier to answer when homo sapiens was top dog in a Universe we imagined to be less than half the size of our solar system. Not so easy to answer in the context of a Universe that is 14 billion years old and contains a trillion galaxies. Or in the context of a body that is made up of nothing but 30 trillion independent life forms (cells). Now what is ‘man’ again…? We have absolutely no right to expect our tiny lives to matter. But if that’s so, then all the agony of living has been for naught. In the cosmic context, we are sparks. What is just is. It’s not good, or bad; it just is. It came to be without regard to values of any sort. Even ‘order’, a prerequisite of Value, is in ever dwindling supply. In fact, order max’d out at Big Bang. Like a well wound watch, our universe is slowly running downhill. By some estimates we’re already about 15% of the way to Heat Death. To the extent that order is related to Value, the high point was 14 billion years ago, and every moment thereafter is a step in the ‘wrong’ direction. Look at it another way. The primary values - Beauty, Truth, and Justice – can all be appreciated as different manifestations of ‘order’. Without an ordered background to draw from, none of these values could be operative. Therefore, if they are at all, they must be gradually disappearing. Not much to look forward to, is it? A world which will necessarily become uglier, less truthful, and more unjust over time. (Hmm, sound like somebody’s political system?) Such a Universe is simply a process of self-annihilation. If Being = Good, then Entropy = Evil; and so Jesus taught us to pray, “Deliver us from evil”. And consciousness? According to this model, consciousness is the accidental consequence of increasing entropy (Hawking). It is a trace left behind by the order that is vanishing. Living consciously in this world is like watching your uninsured McMansion burn to the ground. No wonder folks are depressed. Unless none of this is true! Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that consciousness (self-awareness, recursion) is coincident with life itself. Like love and marriage pre-1950, you apparently can’t have one without the other. As far as we know, all life is cellular. It is apparently the minimal condition required for DNA to be expressed, conserved and replicated. According to this model, the DNA molecule evolved only once on Earth, and it evolved in tandem with a cellular superstructure. If and when we discover non-terrestrial life, we may find phenomena that we want to classify as ‘living’ but that has nothing like DNA and/or no such cellular structure; but all that is mere conjecture now. As soon as the Earth had sufficiently cooled, the first DNA molecule was synthesized…and expressed as a conscious cell. As far as we know, in the 4 billion years since that momentous event, not a single new DNA molecule and not a single new cell has formed. Remarkable! That means, as far as we can say with any certainty, life and consciousness are one-offs. But of course, we’ve only surveyed a tiny corner of this vast universe. If Universe came to be accidentally and spontaneously and if it will ultimately self-annihilate, then what is it anyway? Here our academic overlords are split: either (1) the universe is real but has no meaning, no value, no purpose, or (2) what we call ‘universe’ is not real but only virtual. According to this later interpretation, the Universe ‘exists’ in same way virtual particles ‘exist’…it doesn’t. A virtual particle is a particle still born; it has no being . It is a sub-momentary dispensation from the great Neant that ultimately comes to nothing. Turns out though, the two models are identical, one framed in the vocabulary of Idealism, the other in the language of materialism. Gregory Bateson’s seminal contribution to Western philosophy is his insight that ‘being’ applies only to entities that ‘make a difference’. To be is to be different and to make a difference; an actual entity is “a difference that makes a difference”. Whatever is not distinguished from its inherited world and/or does not make a distinguishable contribution to the inheritable worlds of other entities…is not! Camus and Sartre applied such a test to the existence of ‘God’. For them, God is an entity whose existence, or non-existence, makes no difference. Therefore, whether God exists theoretically or not, God does not exist. In the language of symbolic notation (A υ ~A) = ~A. We might say the same of Universe. Whether it’s fully virtual or merely meaningless, it cannot ‘be’ because either way, the events that constitute it make no difference. Alternatively, the Universe is a locus of events, real events because each event is a difference that makes a difference. According to the ‘Standard Model’, events within Universe are actual entities because they are differences that make a difference, but not so Universe per se . That won’t wash! If Universe is annihilated at Heat Death, so are all its constituent events. Therefore, the great chain of difference is broken. In that case events are real only in the context of each other but not in any objective sense. So then, what of Universe itself? Events within Universe are real because they are differences that make a difference. Does Universe? Yes, but if and only if Universe is ‘different’ from the mere collection of events that make it up, and if there is something to which Universe can matter. If so, that ‘something’ must transcend the universe itself. Yet Universe must remain true to its name ( uni ). Only, Universe itself can meet this test. The Universe is a massively non-linear ‘perpetual recursion machine’. Every event shapes the whole as the whole shapes every event. Is this paganism? Or pantheism? Neither. The Universal process of perpetual recursion transcends the Universe itself. It is a manifestation of the Trinitarian God, the paradigm of recursion. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to our 2024 Beach Read Previous Next

Aletheia Today is a collection of essays designed to offer fresh insights into traditional philosophical and theological problems and to apply those insights to contemporary developments in culture, art and the social and physical sciences. About Us What is Aletheia Today? Aletheia Today is where philosophy, theology, and science converge in a collection of critical thought essays and personal reflections intended to provoke constructive dialog among people of varying ideologies, faiths and belief systems. Travel Back in Time... It’s circa 500 B.C. and Parmenides of Elea is teaching science and philosophy all over the Greek speaking world. Today, he is widely recognized as the Father of Western Science and the Father of Western Philosophy. Statement of Faith AT Magazine is dedicated to elucidating and encouraging the 21st century convergence of philosophy, theology, and science. The editors of ATM are people of faith in the Christian tradition. However, ATM is intended to promote respectful, constructive dialog among people of good will, regardless of religious affiliation, if any. Articles from independent contributors to ATM do not necessarily represent the views of its editorial board. Meet our team of writers. Click here for our masthead.