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< Back How Matthew Spins Mark David Cowles “The same facts can take on different ‘meaning’ depending on how they’re presented. Election Day (2024) is just around the corner so there’s no better time for an article on the art of the ‘spin’. However, we’ll be exploring spin as it occurred in the 1st century CE, not the 21st. When we talk about Scripture, the inspired word of God, we don’t expect to find ourselves talking about ‘spin’. After all, we think that spin is unique to our modern era and applies mainly in the realm of politics. And we certainly don’t believe that the inspired word of God can or should be ‘spun’. Do we? But early Christians had a problem. 25 years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Christianity had only one written account of his life and death. And it was a doozie ! The Gospel of Mark presents what we now call ‘the historical Jesus’, warts and all. It is hardly the sort of puff piece you’d expect in Vanity Fair to help kick off a global political campaign. Yet, by 70 CE it was clear that Christianity was here to stay…and grow. But to do so it needed a foundational text, and Mark was not the right ‘fit’ for the job. Fortunately, the authors of Matthew and Luke stepped up…and provided us with a dramatic example of ‘spin’, 1st century style. Mark does a great job of situating Jesus in the local political and religious milieu of 30 CE and in the geographic area known as Galilee and the Levant. But by 70 CE, the Jesus story needed a much broader context. So, Matthew spun Mark for the Jewish audience (and Luke did the same for the Greeks). It is hard to imagine where we’d be today without all three synoptic Gospels. What precisely was ‘wrong’ with Mark? First, the story begins when Jesus was already a full grown man, just setting off on his ministry. People were understandably hungry for a prequel, and by then a considerable body of legend, some helpful, some not, had grown up regarding Jesus’ birth, childhood and adolescence. Somebody needed to set the record straight. Second, by 70 CE, a robust oral tradition of ‘Jesus Sayings’, which scholars now call ‘Q’, had taken root in the culture. The authors of Matthew and Luke wanted to preserve this source and incorporate it into ‘complete portraits’ of Jesus. Finally, there’s the Gospel of Mark itself. Short, dark, written on the fly for a proto-Christian audience, it presented Jesus as ‘the boy next door’. The author of Mark had no need to ‘beautify’ Christ – the Marcan audience already believed. Matthew and Luke , on the other hand, were written for a less familiar and more skeptical audience. These folks were looking for marks of authenticity recognized in their cultures. Matthew and Luke delivered those marks. Most importantly, however, Mark is not ‘politically correct’…which mattered not at all to its proto-Christian audience but mattered mightily to Pharisaic and Academic catechumens. The author of Matthew beautifully adapts Mark to the pastoral needs of a more sophisticated audience. It includes 95% of the Marcan content and it rarely contradicts any of that content. Instead, it positions Mark’s accounts in broader contexts to make them more acceptable to traditional 1st century Jews. Let’s take a look at three specific examples (there are many more): According to Mark, “...He (Jesus) entered a house and once more such a crowd gathered around them that they had no chance to eat. When his family heard of this, they set out to take charge of him; for people were saying he was out of his mind.” (3: 20-21) After this, Jesus was understandably belittled by his former neighbors whenever he returned home: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother (or cousin) of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” (6: 3) It is no wonder then that “he could work no miracles there.” (6: 5) Matthew (13: 54-58) documents Jesus’ cool reception in Nazareth but wisely omits the embarrassing background story relayed by Mark (above). Mark presents Jesus as a ‘man on the run’…often in hiding, eventually leaving Galilee altogether: “…He left that place (Galilee) and went into the territory of Tyre (Lebanon). He found a house to stay in, and he would have liked to remain unrecognized, but that was impossible…On his return journey from Tyrian territory he went by way of Sidon (further north, a roundabout route), through the territory of the Decapolis (10 ‘Greek’ cities to the west), to the Sea of Galilee.” (7: 24-31) Matthew references Jesus’ sojourn in the Levant but reduces it to a single sentence: “Then Jesus went from that place and withdrew to the region to Tyre and Sidon” (15: 21), and he uses this as a way to introduce the story of another miraculous healing. Without directly contradicting Mark, Matthew gives the story a completely different emphasis. In Mark’s hands it is Jesus’ temporary retreat from ministry; per Matthew, it is an elaboration, an extension, of that ministry. Final example: In the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately following the Last Supper, Jesus is at prayer when he is set upon by Judas, the temple guard, and Roman soldiers. One of Jesus’ followers, apparently Peter, reaches for a sword and cuts off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. (Mark 14: 43 – 50) Mark is happy to leave the story there; but Matthew takes pains to situate the event in a context more acceptable to the casual reader. In Matthew Jesus tells the disciple to ‘sheath his sword’; Luke (a physician) goes even further and shows Jesus healing the servant’s wound. So which account of Jesus’ ministry is ‘better’, more ‘accurate’, more ‘true’? The question is wrong headed! There is no significant contradiction between these texts but there is a clear shift of emphasis…and that’s not inappropriate. Mark is written for folks well familiar with the circumstances of Jesus’ life; some of them may even have known Jesus. It makes sense that these people would hunger for more anecdotal detail and be less concerned with political correctness. Matthew’s audience, on the other hand, couldn’t care less whether Jesus had his eggs scrambled or over-easy. That sort of detail might even have turned them off. And re the servant’s ear, Matthew’s readers would want to understand Peter’s actions in the broader context of Jesus’ message of peace; Mark’s readers would have taken that for granted. As we sift through the rhetoric of this (and every) election season, we would do well to keep the example of these Gospels front of mind: the same ‘facts’ can take on different ‘meaning’ depending on how they’re presented. 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 ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back Renga Cycle 1 20th century Western literature familiarized us with a writing style known as ‘stream of consciousness.' In this genre, writers simply record their thoughts (or pretend to). Result: we read as if we were thinking. Seven centuries earlier, Japan began experimenting with a ‘call and response’ style of poetry, created and transcribed collectively by a group of poets. Typically, the Renga-Master kicks-off with a three-verse, 17-syllable Haiku. Then another poet adds either another Haiku or, more traditionally, a Tsukeku (two verses, seven syllables each), as a response. If we credit the 20th century with the ‘stream of consciousness’ (Freud influenced) writing style, we must credit 14th century with a ‘stream of collective consciousness’ writing style (anticipating Jung). The Renga format is not rigid. For example, a second Haiku could occur before the first response. This is what’s happening in the Renga below, kicking off ATM’s Japanese Poetry Slam . Renga Cycle #1 Drip, drip goes the water How I wish I could use it To wash the world away. (Basho) One caw of a crow Turns all of the fallen leaves A deeper yellow. (Wright) (Please add your response in the comment box below. It can either be a 17-syllable Haiku or a 14 syllable Tsukeku.) 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 Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue Your content has been submitted Add to our haiku in the comment box below.

“Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” < Back Causes of the Civil War David Cowles Dec 1, 2024 “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” When I was a bit younger, it was almost guaranteed that any major high school exam covering American History would include the question, “What were the causes of the American Civil War?” In those days, if you wrote “Slavery” across your exam paper, handed it in and headed for the beach, you probably weren’t going to get college credit for your efforts. Today…? But the question is a good one for several reasons: It concerns something we still care about. It allows for weighted consideration of economy, technology, ideology and culture. It encourages the precocious student to reflect on the nature of causality per se , especially in the context of historical process. The American Civil War did not spring unheralded from the head of Medusa but neither did it evolve with billiard-like efficiency. Two hours into exam time, you think, “Everything caused the Civil War…and nothing caused it,” and now you’re on to something! Now you’ve earned that college credit. Marxists call this ‘over-determination’ – events are the intersections of multiple causal chains. Like peaks and troughs on the screen of an oscillator, some waves reinforce, others dampen, and some cancel. You are face to face with the ‘3 Body Problem’, dumbed down for us social science majors. On one hand, history is not magic. It does not rely on spells and incantations; nor does wishing make things so, not even “when you wish upon a star,” Pinocchio. On the other hand, spells and incantations need to be studied as phenomena in their own right and the wishes of various population groups can be a powerful historical force. Yup, it’s the 3 Body Problem, for sure. Everything interacts with everything else. We understand each interaction on its own, but we are flummoxed by the search for an overarching algorithm. For all our erudition, we are ultimately forced to conclude that anything could have happened…and been explained in terms of everything else. This leads to an odd cognitive state in which we can predict nothing…but explain everything. The eyes in back of my head see 20/20; my other eyes…not so much. The 2024 US Presidential election is a case in point. Long expected to be the ‘closest race ever’, it wasn’t close at all. But no one knew that 5 days before. Sure, some may have guessed right, but guessing is not knowing…even if you think it is. It’s impossible to know the future; that’s what makes it future . So no one knew ! No one, that is, except a certain woman in Iowa. She had been polling Iowans for decades and had a reputation for uncanny accuracy. Iowa was not even one of the so-called Battleground States . It was Trump +8% in 2016 and in 2020 and in most 2024 polls. Suddenly, on the weekend before the election, pollster Ann Selzer announced in the Des Moines Register that she had detected a major groundswell of support for Harris: Iowa was now Harris +3%. If that had happened in Iowa, TV networks would have been able to call the nationwide race for Harris by 10PM EST. Suffice to say, they didn’t! The Harris-Walz Wave turned out to be a trough. Iowa ended up Trump +13%. Selzer was off by a whopping 16%. How’s that for a margin of error? The first polls close in some states at 7PM EST. We were on the edge of our seats. If the Selzer Effect were real, it would be evident in the first returns from Indiana and Kentucky. Could one person be so right and everyone else so wrong? 7:05, 7:20, 7:35 – nothing unexpected in the data! No sign of any last minute migration from Trump to Harris…because there wasn’t one. But if there had been such a shift, would that have meant that Selzer was ‘right’? Not necessarily. A broken clock displays the exact time…twice a day; but referring to those moments, we don’t say ‘the clock was right’. A football co-captain calls, “Tails” and it is tails! But we don’t say that the captain ‘got it right’. Being right is more than just being correct. Right is anchored in reason. Why did you think what you thought and was that reasoning valid and/or supported by the relevant evidence? Back to Iowa. Had it gone Harris’ way, folks would have said that Selzer was right. But note, it’s the same Selzer. The outcome , unrelated to her work, just happened to be different. Now libraries are filling up with articles explaining Trump’s triumph; but no one was prepared to publish such a column on the Monday before. The fact is, we are always flying blind into an unknown and undetermined future; looking back, ‘it was always obvious all along’. But to whom? God? Or not even? Science has a name for this state of affairs; it’s called Kaos (chaos)! Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess . Our Civil War exam taker figured it out: if everything causes everything else then nothing causes anything! Anything overdetermined is everything undetermined, and by the exact same amount. Yet events do not seem entirely random either. They relate to one another but not in mutually reinforcing causal waves. But what’s the alternative? Short of pure mysticism, how else can we account for the regularities of experience? Every event is an expression of the entire Universe. It is a synthesis of what has been and what is coming to be. The event itself samples and weights everything that is and projects it forward into what is to become. Every event is a dissipative membrane, templating settled matters of fact with pure possibility. Events live in the space between what has passed away and what may yet come to pass. The event itself includes no past or future but the event swims in a sea of time. ‘Event’ then is what we mean by ‘Present’. As such every event must begin by executing judgment on the world it inherits (the past). To act as judge, our event must include elements of a different ontological order. We can only judge the contingent from the perspective of the necessary, the actual from the perspective of the ideal. This realization was Plato’s greatest gift to Western philosophy, and it is what connects Plato to Nietzsche , strange bedfellows indeed. A box of Cracker Jacks cannot execute judgment on a Beethoven symphony. Judgment must be from the transcendent perspective of eternal and universal values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). Only ‘what is not of this world’ can judge ‘what is of this world’. Jesus nailed it during his brief interview with Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the Truth.” (John 18: 36 – 37) Scripture doesn’t give Pilate his due. He was no slouch. He answered Jesus in his best Oxbridge accent: “What is truth?” thereby earning himself posthumous degrees emeritus from 3 Ivy League colleges. The creative advance is always fueled by the desire for Good. “I set before you life and death; therefore choose life.” (Deut. 30: 19) However, we live in an alienated, entropic, post-utopian world. Our goals are pure, but our pursuit of those goals may not be. We do not always follow through on our good intentions. Because of this, there’s often “a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.” In other words, we can’t get out of our own way. Accordingly, as we pursue our initial objective, we entertain new objectives along the way. We get distracted. “What I wish to do, I do not do; what I hate, I do.” (Romans 7: 19) Our beautiful sweater ends up more like a bundle of yarn. And so the academic discipline known as History is born. 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 Yuletide 2024 Share Previous Next 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. 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Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue Philosophy 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.” 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.” Personae “Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!” Ship of Theseus “There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” Theology 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.” 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." Korach Over Dinner "Like most people of my generation, I cringe when I hear the M word." Eucharist “…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” Culture & The Arts Read on a Beach “Tell us what you did (read) on your summer vacation!” Lord of the Flies Shows How Humans Are Hard-Wired to Help Each Other "We can only speculate what the six boys on the island in the Pacific Ocean would have done if they had run out of food – but whatever it is, I would certainly not draw any conclusions from it in terms of the essence of human nature." What Are My Values? “We live under another emperor today. It is even more insidious than Constantine for it appears that this is all for our good.” How to Think Like a Woman Author Regan Penaluna on female philosophy and the risks of being too smart throughout history... Spirituality Ave Maria “Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession… (but) imagine OJ without his Dream Team.” Burying Biscuit (to Cole Porter) -- a Childhood in a Single Tale "...of course it would be the home of a hamster with a preference for a song about a bunch of sinners on a cruise ship begging for a revival." Summer of Enchantment "This is a rally cry for believers to be the most enchanted people on the planet. Otherwise, what are we even doing here? " Never Skip Over the Miracle "Once upon a time, a grittier version of me roamed barefoot and luxuriated not in material but in emotional response. " Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back The Hunt for Hidden Variables David Cowles Sep 14, 2025 “Perhaps social scientists will be first to identify the elusive factors that drive unexpected results.” Physicists love to talk about ‘hidden variables’, most often to save their classically trained backsides from the vicissitudes of Quantum Mechanics. Even Einstein hoped that particle physics would someday identify hitherto unknown factors that would provide a classical explanation for quantum weirdness: “God does not play dice!” Except, of course, he does! In fact, he’s Head Boss in the Craps Pit at Bellagio. Despite his rather Puritanical facade, there’s nothing God enjoys more than a good game of chance. But how do you get to experience the rush of ‘hitting 6 (or 8) the hard way’ when you’re supposedly omniscient and omnipotent? In the prose prologue to the epic Book of Job , Satan challenges God to a wager and God cannot resist, even though it’s guaranteed to generate a heap of trouble for everyone concerned, including God himself. If there was ever someone in need of an intervention, and a referral to GA, it’s God! Sidebar : God bets on Job’s character…and God wins! Job’s righteousness proves to be unshakeable. But Job is so righteous that he has no qualms about shining the light of Justice back on God himself. “Didn’t see that coming!” So…not so omniscient after all? Turns out, God’s gnosis ends where Job’s praxis (and yours) begins ( aka ‘free will’). Ultimately Job calls out God for his callous disregard and, after a trial lasting almost as long as OJ’s, God changes his plea to nolo contendere . Accordingly he is required to restore Job’s assets, pay punitive damages, and absorb court costs . Prior to his bet on Job, which backfired big time, YHWH went all in on the Big Bang. Right now, he’s ‘white knuckling’ it. Things have not gone exactly as hoped…but we’ve used up less than 12% of our allotted game time; so ‘better days are coming’…and they better come soon! But back to the hunt for hidden variables. Unfortunately for Einstein & Co., no one has put forward a persuasive hidden variable model to account for quantum weirdness. Worse, John Bell, et al. have proven mathematically that any viable hidden variable theory would have to satisfy some very narrow conditions. One such condition: God’s omniscience and omnipotence must include Job’s (and your) praxis – there can be no room whatsoever for free will . But we just demonstrated (above) that this is apparently not how things work in the real world. So we may just have to accept Alfred E. Newman’s Conjecture : Things are weird, so what, me worry? But while physicists have failed miserably in their search for hidden variables, political scientists might be having better luck – a ray of sunshine may be peeking through the dark clouds of chaos theory. Perhaps social scientists will be first to identify the elusive factors that drive unexpected results. The job is two-part: (1) demonstrate that there are unidentified factors that drive unexpected results and (2) identify those factors. For example, election outcomes are notoriously hard to predict . Don’t get me wrong: it’s often possible to forecast results based on last minute snapshots ( aka polls) that measure voters’ intentions ‘on election eve’. But it is impossible to deduce those results from objective (sociological) data. You can ask would be voters who they plan to support on election day, and you may get a straight answer. But absent such a veridical declaration, there is no way you can predict voters’ individual or aggregate behavior. No matter how much you know about a voter, you cannot reliably predict how that individual will vote. Take the last 7 US Presidential Elections, for example. Some proved easy to forecast based on final polling, some not so much, but in no case did voters’ actual behavior validate our predictive models. Anyone who thinks they can predict how Hispanic males will vote in the 2026 midterm elections is whistlin’ Dixie . How come? The answer may lie in hidden variables . Political Science is based on certain assumptions: (1) people will vote according to their ‘best interests’ (as they perceive them), (2) people will vote for candidates they think will do the best job in public office, and (3) people will vote for candidates that agree with them on the issues. Turns out, none of these is true! So we must search for hidden variables if we hope to understand the actual behavior of electorates. Our search spans 66 years and 300 miles, from an Irish Donnybrook in Boston to a Muslim-Jewish standoff in New York City. It’s 1959 and Boston University Political Science professor, Murray Levin, has decided to do a deep dive into Boston’s upcoming mayoral election. It seems a poor career choice. The election is widely viewed as a mere formality. The cognoscente have already sworn-in their candidate. A native of South Boston, President of the Massachusetts State Senate, and runner-up in the previous mayoral election, John E. Powers is the mayor presumptive. But it’s Boston 1959, so the race will not be uncontested. Registrar of Deeds, John Collins, throws his hat in the ring along with several better known denizens of the under card. No matter, a campaign is de rigueur …but proforma . A primary is held and, as expected, Powers gets 50% more votes than his closest rival, who turns out to be Collins (above). November is shaping up to be a snoozefest. Fast forward 6 weeks, “Collins routs Powers!” - 56% to 44%. Powers carried only 4 of Boston’s 22 Wards. Powers doubled his primary vote total, but Collins quadrupled his. Even more shocking, 10% of those who voted for Collins in the finale had voted for Powers in the preliminary. If Powers could have just held on to those voters, the contest would have been a toss-up. (If you’re looking to explore ‘why and how’ Collins was able to turn things around in just 6 weeks, you may want to look at my earlier piece on this race, Political Alienation . On the weekend after the election, Professor Levin and his team interviewed 500 Boston voters, drawn from every corner of the City. Before 1959, demographics had always played the key role in Boston politics. And after the Collins era (8 years later), they would dominate Boston politics again, eventually catapulting the City onto the front page of every American newspaper (resistance to ‘forced busing’); but not in 1959. Levin’s study showed that religion, income, and ethnicity played no significant role in 1959’s results. Collins won the votes of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews (there were no avowed atheists or agnostics in Boston in 1959), high, middle and low income residents, Irish, Italian, Yankee and African American voters. He ran the table. Folks who wouldn’t normally share a sidewalk with each other shared a voting booth. It turned out that Boston voters had something in common that was stronger than their economic, religious and ethnic conflicts. According to Murray Levin, that mysterious X factor was ‘political alienation’. Perhaps Professor Levin’s most astonishing finding was that the majority of voters in Boston’s Mayoral election that year did not think their chosen candidate would do a better job as mayor than his opponent. This tendency was especially prominent among Collins voters! The conclusion is inescapable: people voted for Collins, not because they thought he would do a better job than Powers, but for some other reason: et viola , a ‘hidden variable’! Fast forward to NYC 2025. Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, u pset liberal former Governor, Andrew Cuomo in the Mayoral primary. Not close; in fact, similar to the Powers-Collins first round spread, 66 years earlier and 300 miles Northeast. Now they are scheduled for a rematch this November. The result is unpredictable, but already we see evidence of a hidden variable at work: there is a significant disconnect between voters’ personal positions on issues and their policy prescriptions for the City. A recent NYT survey asked voters to consider 4 issues: (1) raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, (2) hiring 5,000 more police officers, (3) strengthening rent control and focusing its benefits on lower income tenants, (4) making municipal bus service free to all riders. Surprisingly, almost exactly 70% of voters favored each of the first 3 policy changes and 60% favored the 4 th . Any self-respecting poly sci wonk would assume that a voter who favored higher marginal tax rates, more police on the streets, more robust and/or better focused rent control, and free service for all who ride the City’s buses would also think that the City should move to enact these policies. But that wonk would be wrong! Only on the subject of soaking the rich did voters’ policy prescriptions match their personal preferences: c. 70% of all voters favor increasing taxes on the wealthy and 70% think that the City should actually implement this policy. What seemed like a tautology amounts to front page news (or it would if there were still any ‘front pages’). On the other three initiatives (more police, stronger rent control, and free bus service), voters’ public policy prescriptions did not match their personal policy preferences. It turns out, that in spite of a c. 70% personal policy preference, only 63% think the City should actually hire more police officers and only 61% want the city to make proposed changes to its rent control program. Regarding free bus service, 60% personally favor the change but only 45% think the City should actually eliminate fares on City buses. How is that possible? As in Boston 1959, voters in NYC 2025 have something more in mind than personal policy preferences. This unknown quantity may well influence their votes on election day. Only problem: I don’t know what it is that’s top of mind with these voters or how it might influence their votes. I can conclude, however, that ‘scientists’ have finally demonstrated the existence of hidden variables…but it’s social scientists, not physicists! *** Giovanni di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise (1445) is a luminous Sienese panel that unites two episodes from Genesis in a single circular vision. Inside a mandorla of radiant gold and stars, God appears as an architect of the cosmos, surrounded by concentric bands of celestial spheres and the zodiac, signifying His supreme ordering of the universe. At the lower right, Adam and Eve are driven from Eden by a flaming sword, underscoring the fall from perfect creation to human exile and the enduring power of divine decree over both nature and human destiny. 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 Believers Need Not Apply David Cowles We’ve constructed a super-elaborate cosmology to explain how ‘it is’ arose spontaneously from ‘it is not.’ (If that doesn’t make any sense to you, trust me, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) How did the universe come to be? It just did! How did the ratios of the masses of subatomic particles get so finely tuned? They just did! All right already! What’s the big deal? It’s only God after all! We have a God fetish. Since 1700, western intellectual institutions have focused on one thing above all else: the Death of God, or more accurately, the death of the concept of God. Though a theist, Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica became the blueprint for Laplace’s mechanical determinism 100 years later. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species provided a viable framework for a theory of evolution that did not require the divine agency. Quantum mechanics ‘fuzzed-up’ concepts like position and momentum, making ‘divine determinism’ almost as indefensible as ‘mechanical determinism.’ (Yes, Professor Einstein, it turns out God does play dice and to the extent that dice perform as dice are supposed to perform, no model of determinism, mechanical or divine, can account for anything more than probabilities.) We’ve constructed a super-elaborate cosmology to explain how ‘it is’ arose spontaneously from ‘it is not.’ (If that doesn’t make any sense to you, trust me, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) How did the universe come to be? It just did! How did the ratios of the masses of subatomic particles get so finely tuned? They just did! Long suffering Job would not have accepted such an answer. (For more regarding Job’s insistence on tangible, first hand experience, check out The Riddle of Job in issue #1 of AT Magazine .) Job was willing to trade everything, literally anything, for knowledge…and he did. How many of us would make the same trade? Anyhow, today the first test for any proposed cosmology is that it NOT include a role for God, and if you want to disqualify an applicant under consideration for a college teaching post, just send the selection committee irrefutable evidence that the applicant believes in God and doesn’t hide it. (It’s ok to be Peter at the Portico, but it is not ok to be John at the foot of the cross.) But take heart, aspiring professors, in 1950, almost all of the professors at European universities were avowed Marxists. As one of them was reputed to have said, “Of course I’m a Marxist. What else is there?” I wonder how many self-proclaimed Marxists there are today on European faculties. Things can change! Here’s hoping we’ll all live to see that change. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. To never miss a single Thought, subscribe to Aletheia Today. (Subscribe opt-in below.) Previous Next

< Back Should I Vote? David Cowles “What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!” Today (1/15/2024) marks the official ‘opening’ of the 2024 Presidential Election season. It’s the night of the Iowa Caucuses! If you are a US citizen, even if you don’t live in Iowa, sometime in the next few months you will be called upon to make a decision: “Should I vote in my state’s Presidential Primary or Caucus?” Well, why would you? To demonstrate your support for democracy? To ensure that the best (or better) candidate is elected? To advocate for a particular set of public policies? Heck no! These all ‘sound’ like good reasons to vote…but none of them makes any sense! Dictatorships hold elections too. In some countries, folks are required by law to vote in elections. It confers an aura of legitimacy (often where none is deserved) while simultaneously ensuring that the votes of any one person or group are maximally diluted. Saddam Hussein ‘eked out’ a win…with just 99% of the vote. You’re told, “Every vote counts!” But pro-democracy propaganda notwithstanding, no one vote ( your vote) ever elected anyone ! Sure, very occasionally, the ‘official’ tally may reflect a difference of a single vote, but long before we get down to that one ballot, the process has become judicial rather than political. Just ask Al Gore! At some point, the counting of ballots has to stop (e.g., on 12/12/2000) so that judges can take over. A two-word summary of Bush v. Gore : “Stop counting!” You’ve been told that every vote counts; in fact, no vote counts! Voting is one way to communicate a political position – but the signal is usually drowned out by the noise. You don’t get to explain your vote. Maybe you voted for candidate A because she is a staunch defender of personal liberty, or maybe you voted for her because she is a racist. No one will ever know which message you meant to send. “To…to…to,” is it precisely that purposefulness that can make voting meaningless? What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened! “This is a book about…people who have come to believe that voting is meaningless and useless because politicians or those who influence politicians are corrupt, selfish, and beyond popular control.” – Murray Levin, The Alienated Voter . No, Professor Levin’s book is not about the current national political landscape…though it certainly could be. Rather, it’s an analysis of a local election that took place 65 years ago, in Boston! Boston is famous for many things, baked beans, cod, and crème pie, for example. Not to mention Ted Williams, Larry Bird, and the GOAT (Tom Brady). But these Boston icons fade compared to a certain Massacre (1770), Tea Party (1773), and Midnight Ride (1775). After all, Boston was home to the Shot Heard ‘round the World …twice as it turns out, once in 1775 and then again in 1959! If you were a fan of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, perhaps you owe their success to ‘the strange events’ that happened in Boston in 1959. The self-proclaimed ‘Hub of the Universe’ heralded the start of a multi-generational political epoch in the US and beyond. This is what Professor Levin chronicled in his 1960 book. Let’s set the scene. Boston’s popular incumbent mayor (John B. Hynes) is not running for reelection. The runner-up in the previous mayoral race, State Senator John E. Powers, has been designated ‘mayor presumptive’ by the Boston media. Nevertheless, five candidates have entered the non-partisan primary. Perhaps the least well-known is the Registrar of Deeds, John Collins. As expected, Powers won the primary easily, with more than a third of the votes cast. Surprisingly, Collins finished second, but with less than a quarter of the total vote. Powers scored 50% more primary votes than Collins – an insuperable gap to close in just six weeks. Accordingly and appropriately, the Boston media promptly declared the election over and promoted Powers from ‘mayor presumptive’ to ‘mayor elect’…but someone forgot to tell Collins. Still, the outcome of the final election was never in doubt. Every poll, every pundit, told the same tale: “Powers Landslide!” until about 8:45 PM on the evening of November 3. The media pundits had been right all along. The election was not going to be close, not even close to close. Only one problem: the ‘wrong’ candidate had won! Final tally: Collins 56%, Powers 44%. Let’s put this in perspective: FDR averaged 56% of the vote in his four election victories; Eisenhower averaged 56% of the vote in his two campaigns against Stevenson. No US presidential candidate has won 56% of the vote in 40 years - not since Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984. What’s that you say? “So an underdog won a race: big deal; upsets happen all the time!” No, they don’t! Not like this one. Both candidates received more votes in the final election than they had in the preliminary. Powers doubled his primary vote total, and Collins quadrupled his. The Primary voters split 3 to 2 for Powers; the ‘new votes’ split 2 to 1 for Collins. Powers received 50% more votes than Collins in the preliminary…and 20% fewer votes than the same man just 6 weeks later. A stunning turnaround! Most astonishingly, 10% of those who voted for Collins in the final had voted for Powers in the preliminary. Expressed another way, one of every six of Powers’ primary voters switched to Collins sometime during the six weeks leading up to the general election. What had happened to cause such a shift? Nothing! No scandal, no gaff, no new policy proposals, just politics as usual. The verdict of Boston’s voters was loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore. Power elite, take us for granted at your peril.” A few pundits predicted Brexit’s 2016 victory in the UK and a handful predicted Trump’s election, but nobody predicted Collins victory in 1959, not even this overly precocious pro-Collins 12-year-old. Nobody! Sidebar : My father was away on business. He called me from the road. “Who won?” Collins…in a landslide. “No, seriously, tell me the truth.” Collins. “Boy, you are in big trouble when I get home.” I told the truth…but the truth was unthinkable. On the weekend after the election, Professor Levin and his team interviewed 500 Boston voters, drawn from all across the city. Levin’s study showed that religion, income, and ethnicity played no significant role in the election’s results. Collins won the votes of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, high and low-income residents, Irish, Italian, Yankee, and African American voters. Somehow, a consensus emerged without anyone (not even Collins) calling for it. It happened under the radar, at bus stops and in barrooms, and it cut across the city’s fiercely independent neighborhoods. Today, Boston is Yuppie Paradise, and neighborhood identity has by and large vanished, but in 1959, things were very different. At that time, East Boston High (Italians) played South Boston High (Irish) in an annual Thanksgiving Day football game that always ended in a West Side Story rumble. People walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods were routinely assaulted, only to be told that it was their own fault for ‘playing away from home’. These were just the facts of life in Boston in 1959. It turned out that Boston voters had something in common that was strong enough to overcome their past and future animosities, rooted as they are in religion, class, ethnicity and race. According to Murray Levin, that mysterious X factor was ‘political alienation’. May I ask you a question? The last time you voted in an election, did you think your preferred candidate would do a better job in office than their opponent? Not necessarily a ‘good’ job, but at least a ‘better job than the alternative’. Of course, you did…unless the last time you voted was in Boston in 1959. Professor Levin’s most astonishing finding was that the majority of voters in Boston’s Mayoral election that year did not think their chosen candidate would be a better mayor than his opponent. This tendency was especially prominent among Collins voters! And so, ‘wave voting’ was born…in Boston, the Cradle of Liberty! Folks voted for Collins, not because they believed he’d be a better mayor, but because they refused to be taken for granted. Voters didn’t care who won the election; they cared about sending a message. “ This is our chance to poke the power elite in the eye.” And so they did! Where does that leave you? Are you going to tonight’s caucuses…or not? Voting is an existential act. It’s the moral equivalent of a ‘tush push’ or a ‘goal line stand’ in football. It’s not about electing a certain candidate; it’s not even about advancing a certain policy proposal. It’s about drawing a line in the sand: “ No Mas! This far and no farther!” Voting is a matter of taking a stand. It’s about joining a crusade, putting your shoulder to the wheel, ‘taking your place on the great mandala’, (and apparently) compiling an encyclopedia of clichés. R U Blue…or Grey? R U Collins…or Powers? How you answer defines who you are . That’s why you might choose to vote, not just to elect the lesser of two losers! If you decide to vote, don’t do it with your head down; do it waving your arms in the air! (Is that why they call it ‘wave voting’?) And if you decide not to vote, make sure everyone knows why! David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click above to return to Winter 2024. Previous Next

< Back Who Invented the Internet “Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD...” David Cowles The history of Europe is, in some sense, the history of the Franks (now the French). We first met this civilization in 8 th grade Latin when, side by side with Julius Caesar, we fought a Gallic War. (Sad to say, most of us suffered more than Caesar.) We encountered the Franks again during the protracted fall of Rome (476 AD). After Rome, the mysterious Merovingian dynasty appeared and took control of the Frankish empire. The Merovingians ruled until they were gradually replaced in the 2 nd half of the 8 th century by the Carolingians. On Christmas Day, 800 AD, the Carolingian king, Charles I (Charlemagne) was crowed Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (the Western Empire having been without an emperor since 476 AD). Charles dreamed of restoring the military, economic, and cultural power of Rome but he lacked one thing: infra-structure. Recall that in the 9 th century there was no radio, no TV, and no printing press. Following the collapse of Rome, there were few good roads, fewer central markets, and almost no literacy outside of the monasteries; but worst of all, in 800 AD there was no internet! What’s an enterprising young emperor to do? Wait 1200 years for Al Gore to invent it? Or… build it himself! That’s exactly what Charles did! Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD, a few years before Gore was born. Charles revived a moribund Merovingian institution (the Missi ) and made it the cornerstone of his imperial rule. It was a brilliant strategy. Charles acknowledged the natural tendency of his empire to fragment along pre-determined fault lines and he used the Missi to turn those faults to his advantage. Missi were ‘sent’. Just as Jesus sent his apostles two-by-two, so Charles sent his Missi in pairs. Except Charles’ Missi were usually bishops and counts, not fishermen and tax collectors. Their brief was thoroughly pragmatic but based on the fundamental belief that Church and State were ‘one and inseparable’, two hypostatic reflections of the Kingdom of God. For a more detailed treatment of various church/state models, visit " Church And State ." According to the Carolingian model, the relationship of Church and State is complementary . Just as the behavior of subatomic particles only makes sense when they are understood both as waves and as particles, so human society only makes sense when it is understood both as Church and as State. Note, we are not talking here about a quantum behaving first as a wave then as a particle (or vice versa). That’s how we perceive things, but it’s not how things are . To understand the behavior of quanta, we need to accept that a quantum is always both wave and particle, not ‘hare today, goon tomorrow’. Accordingly, to understand the behavior of human society, we need to accept that society is always both Church and State. We may only be able to deal with one Gestalt at a time, but we must recognize that both are operating at all the times. In another stroke of genius, Charles made sure that his Missi didn’t quit their day jobs. He took pains not to create a new, insulated, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Like the ‘citizen legislators’ still governing in a few of our not-so-very-United States, Charles’ counts and bishops were still expected to perform all the duties of their respective stations but now they were also expected to spend a couple of months each year ‘in the district’, carrying the emperor’s water. No doubt, being a Missi was inconvenient at times (months away from home, etc.), but each pair enjoyed power and authority beyond that of any other imperial functionary, save only the emperor himself. As Roman Catholics regard the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, so the Carolingians regarded the Missi as Vicars of the Emperor. Reprising somewhat the role of the Old Testament judges, Charles’ Missi were empowered to right wrongs, adjudicate disputes, and impose the emperor’s will. Short of a rare direct appeal to the emperor himself, there was no way around the judgment of the Missi . The Missi gave the emperor extraordinary power. They were not only his eyes and ears ‘in the neighborhood’ but also his hands and voice. Missi were expected to report back to the emperor at least once a year on the ‘state of the neighborhood’ while communicating the emperor’s will to the ‘neighbors’. Like Charles, we struggle today with the competing values of hierarchy and subsidiarity. We do ourselves a great disservice if we fail to draw on ideas from the past, just because they are ‘past’. Hurry, Charlemagne, a once and future king. 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! Share Previous Next

“I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous.” < Back Do you Know *What I am*? David Cowles Dec 1, 2023 “I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous.” I came to be sometime during the month of December, not nine months later, as is usually supposed. On a cold winter’s day, two chromosome-deficient sex cells, one from a biological woman and one from a biological man, fused to form a single, chromosome-sufficient cell, me . So, I am a unicellular eukaryotic animal (a cell with a nucleus). That nucleus houses my genome (DNA), combining genes inherited from my father's cell and from my mother's cell. Absent random mutations, this DNA molecule contains all the information needed to generate the organism that is currently writing and typing this article. So, I am an organic molecule (DNA). 4 billion years ago, give or take, a bunch of prebiotic molecules on a newly formed planet (Earth) combined to form the first DNA molecule. Every life form on Earth is powered by DNA, and, as far as we know, DNA evolved on Earth only once. All terrestrial organisms, even me, are descended from this one primordial DNA molecule. “Hello Eve! Or would you prefer I called you ‘Granny’?” Unicellular animals usually reproduce asexually. After cell division, there is no more ‘parent cell’ per se , just two ‘daughter cells’, but those daughter cells, ab initio , are both identical to the sublimated parent cell. Therefore, we could just as well say we are left with two ‘parent cells’. So I am the primordial DNA molecule whose clones power all life on earth. According to James Joyce ( Ulysses ) Hamlet was his own father’s ghost; now I find out that I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous. Immediately, primordial DNA used its protein-building capabilities to construct a moat and an outer membrane (cell wall) to protect itself from the environment. The membrane is sufficiently porous to permit alimentation, elimination, respiration, and hydration. We call this fortified entity a cell. All terrestrial life consists of cells, singularly or in various aggregations, and all cells embody copies, however altered, of the primordial DNA molecule. Thus, all cells are direct descendants of the primordial cell, me . The primordial cell was probably a close ancestor of what we now recognize as bacteria. I hear that on the grounds of certain posh primary schools, it is common for bullies to berate their victims, crying, “You bacterium!” Well, I am a bacterium and proud of it – deal with it! I am a bacterium, and I also provide shelter and succor to other bacteria. Billions of Eve’s descendants are swimming around in my intestines right now…and thank God for that! I literally could not leave home without them. About a billion years later—who’s counting?—one bacterium engulfed another, probably with the ‘intention’ of consuming it, but for some reason, it changed its ‘mind’. In the terminology of Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy (c. 500 BCE), these two bacterial cells ‘gave each other reck’. They traded ‘Dog eat Dog’ for ‘Live and Let Live’. The wolf lay down with the lamb, and the Judeo-Christianity ethic was realized. “Blessed are the peacemakers – they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9) Shalom! In the words of Humphrey Bogart ( Casablanca ), this was ‘the start of a beautiful friendship’. The two bacteria formed a symbiotic relationship that ultimately gave the world T-Rex, bonobos, and me ! So, don’t let anyone tell you that Love doesn’t make the world go ‘round; it sure does! When primal great grandad reproduced, he produced cells already fitted with DNA harboring nuclei. Sensing a new lifestyle opportunity, other bacteria wandered across the porous external membranes of eukaryotic cells. Should I compare these host cells to black holes…or to Hotel California? Either way, what goes in does not necessarily come out. Like feudal vassals, these bacteria yearned for the relative safety of life behind cell (manor) walls. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, they willingly traded independence for security. But it was not such a terrible bargain! These late-coming bacteria set up shop in the cytoplasmic sea that surrounds a host cell’s nucleus. Cytoplasm, a biotic soup, is insulated from the cell’s external environment and from its internal nucleus and other organelles by a network of protective lipid membranes. But would these host cells allow these invading freeloaders to enjoy the comforts of intracellular life at no cost? We’ll never know. The hosts’ generosity was never tested because these ‘invaders’, like medieval craftsmen, immediately went to work, making themselves useful to their landlords. Smart cells! This second wave of in-coming bacteria became mitochondria, the primary energy-producing organelles in a modern eukaryotic cell. Numbers vary, but the average cell harbors (and exploits) about 1,000 of these mitochondria. Yet, this is not exactly ‘slavery’. In exchange for their labor, these mitochondrial bacteria are given a lease that covers them and their descendants in perpetuity … i.e., ‘for as long as they both shall live’ (host cell and mitochondria, that is). For better or worse, the fates of the host cell and its tenants are bound together inextricably. As the original host cell divides, each new cell clones the original cell’s nucleus and mitochondria. My career as a solitary unicellular organism lasted only 4 days; then I began to divide: 2 x 2 x 2… I gradually transitioned from a single cell into a ‘society’ of cells, initially in the shape of a hollow ball. I am that ‘Bucky Ball’ . This ball of undifferentiated cells developed into an organism in which different cells perform vastly different functions (e.g., skin cells vs. blood cells), all in service of a common multicellular host. I am that host . I have two cousins: one is an attorney, the other an accountant. The attorney could have been an accountant, and/or the accountant could have been an attorney, but they weren’t. They could both have become accountants…or both attorneys. But in what world do we need more of either? (Do you know…) Most, of course, died long ago, outlived by their superannuated host. Like cells, my cousins differentiated, more or less randomly and more or less unconsciously, to maximize their value to ‘society’. They were not motivated by desire to maximize value; the laws of nature (economics) gently guided them to their choices. Of course, they were both free to join the circus instead, but that’s why evolution works best when a population is large enough to welcome, or at least tolerate and survive, random deviations from the norm. Today, that ‘primal society’ (me) has grown to more than 30 trillion members, i.e., cells, each a fundamentally independent life form, cooperating with one another in service of their meta-host. I am each one of those cells…and now I am their meta-host as well. If I live to normal life expectancy, more than 100 trillion cells will have participated at one time or another in the ‘phenomenon of me’. (Thank you very much!) Most, of course, died long ago, outlived by their superannuated hosts. Did they die of natural causes? Old age? Nope! They killed themselves…and they did it for me. Most of the dearly departed committed a form of suicide called apoptosis . How come? So far as we know (but who really knows?), they were not depressed. Apparently, trillions of my fellow travelers are prepared to sacrifice their lives for me. It’s an awesome responsibility! Cells continually ‘monitor’ themselves, scanning for transcription errors, mutations, and environmental stresses. When they judge a particular flaw to be ‘beyond repair’ or an environmental stress to be ‘life-threatening’, they ‘do the right thing’ for the welfare of the organism as a whole (me); they kill themselves! To be or not to be – it’s the question posed by every cell at every moment of its life. Hamlet thought he was on to something…and he was - too bad, his famous meme had already been copyrighted by a bacterium some billions of years ago. So let’s trace our progress. We started with a single DNA molecule (me); DNA became a cell (also me), and that cell acquired a nucleus and mitochondria and built a network of fortifications for its protection. I’m cooking with gas…but we're not done yet. I reproduced, resulting in millions of more or less exact copies of me . What could be better than that? These related cells formed a society (me). As in other societies, members (cells) of this primordial society differentiated their functions (chose various jobs), all in the service of the society itself (also me). Ultimately, this society evolved into a meta-organism (me), and so our story ends, right? No way! Now it’s time for meta-me (I’m 11 today) to produce my first male sex cells (me); many, many years from now, one of those sex cells may find a female partner and the entire process start over again. Meet Me. Jr. – I’m a little cranky right now; I just woke up from my nap. And what about meta-me? Well, I’m a member of multiple societies. I have a job, I live in a neighborhood, I belong to a town, a state, or a nation, I’m a member of a church and a bowling league, and of course, I am a citizen of the world. If past is prologue, one or more of these societies will evolve into its own meta-organism (me?). So, now do you know ‘What I am’? Hope so…’cause I sure don’t. 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 Yuletide 2023 Share Previous Next 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 Table of Contents, June Issue

"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." < Back A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance Shalvi Waldman Jul 15, 2023 "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." Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

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

< Back 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.” David Cowles Shortly after Niels Bohr produced his quantum model of the atom (1913), Robert Frost wrote (1916) his iconic poem, The Road Not Taken . Apparently a commentary on existential angst and the human condition, Frost’s poem can be read on an entirely different level. It raises questions that haunt the science of Quantum Mechanics (QM) to this day. Of course, that may not have been Frost’s intent; at that time the wide world was just beginning to learn about Relativity. But a poem is a poem is a poem. Once written, it transcends its author and even its milieu. We must meet the text head on, take it on its own terms, regardless of the author’s subjective intent. Bonus : By letting a poem, any poem, speak for itself, we may discover deep connections between consciously intended themes and cosmological intuitions: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them both about the same. And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. A hundred plus years ago it was popular to think of Universe as if it were a finely tuned Swiss timepiece, wound by God ‘in the beginning’ and left running mechanically ever since. But by 1900, a series of observations and experiments had made this view untenable, eventually leading to the discovery of Quantum Mechanics. QM showed that there is no predetermined course of events, that they are more a matter of probability than causality, and that Universe at its most fundamental level is best understood as a perpetual series of choices. In the realm of philosophy, this insight popped up as the Existentialist doctrine of freedom. Jean Paul Sartre, the high priest of Existentialism, divided Universe into en soi , which was perfectly deterministic, and pour soi , which was perfectly free. He skirted the problem of dualism by defining en soi as etre (being) and pour-soi as neant (nothingness). Le neant functioned as the negation of l’etre and in this way diversity was reconciled with solidarity. Sartre understood that freedom, while absolute, could not be unbounded. For example, one is not free to draw a square circle or fly to Mars just by flapping one’s arms. Facticity (‘the real world’) imposes logical and physical limitations but those limitations are external to the agent and do not in any way limit or qualify that agent’s freedom. Limitations are part of en-soi , never pour-soi . In The Road not Taken , Robert Frost confronts a simple choice between two options (0, 1). He has a destination to reach and there are two roads that will take him there. Facticity excludes any other option: he cannot fly, he cannot tunnel, he cannot crawl 10 miles on his hands and knees through underbrush. If he is to accomplish his ‘project’ (arrive at his destination by end of day), he has only two choices. There are only two roads he can take. Frost’s preferred solution: travel both roads and still be one traveler. But with his imagination still bound by the limitations of classical physics, he rejects that notion as impossible. QM, however, suggests that such a strategy is possible. In fact, most current interpretations of QM assert that this is the only possibility. Given the existence of two paths with identical start and stop points, Frost must travel both. But how? One possibility, supported by the various “double slit” experiments that gave QM its start, suggests that a quantum follows two or more paths simultaneously but does not ‘decide’ which path will be its ‘real’ path until it is reaches its destination and is observed (measured) by an external agent. According to this view, Mr. Frost can indeed “travel both and be one traveler”; in fact, he must. There’s no other way to get where he’s going. But when he finally arrives at his destination, it will appear to all observers (including Frost himself who is now his own observer) that he has come by one path only. His observed arrival collapses the Wave Function. According to this model, Frost can experience both walks and then, at the very end, ‘he’ can ‘decide’ which walk was more satisfying, select that walk, and make that his actual experience, his history. This interpretation has massive real world implications. Imagine, for example, how this might play out in a restaurant. “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” Or what about a lifetime? You follow all courses open to you and then, at the end, you get to choose the one path that gets you the best result. How cool would that be! But this option is not all it’s cracked up to be. First, it isn’t really ‘Frost’ who makes the final decision. That decision is made by the whole experimental apparatus and is more a matter of mathematics (probability) than aesthetics (taste). Second, Frost will have no memory whatsoever of ‘the road not taken’. Similarly, I will have no memory of the dishes I decided not to pay for…or the fun but stupid things I did as a kid. Cruel justice! Hugh Everett’s mid-century “Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” modifies this picture. According to Everett, every time the Universe confronts a choice it bifurcates, it splits. In one Universe, Choice A is made; in a second Universe, a perfect copy of the first save for this one decision, Choice B is made. According to this view, Mr. Frost must also “travel both”…but he is no longer “one traveler”. According to Everett’s theory, there are now two Frosts, entirely unaware of one another; sadly, they will never meet again. Both Frosts arrive in the same town…but now it is really two different copies of the same town, each existing in its own Universe. Everett’s theory allows Frost only one set of experiences, but he may perhaps be consoled by the thought that an alternate Frost is having the other set of experiences in an alternate universe. Parenthetically, we have proposed a modification of Everett’s model that allows Frost’s many trajectories to intersect – and recombine - ultimately reducing the proliferation of universes that bedevils Everett’s scheme. This model allows the universe to grow but at its current observed rate, not exponentially as with Everett. Note : this solution is dependent on quantum processes being commutative – which goes against current thinking. According to Richard Feynman’s “Sum over Histories” model, Mr. Frost does indeed travel both paths and he remains one traveler. The two experiences merge when he reaches his destination. His memory of the journey is a blend of both histories. It might be more accurate to say that a part of Frost travels one path and another part travels the other path. Feynman’s model does not double the amount of experience Frost enjoys but it does combine experience from both pathways into a single outcome. According to our restaurant metaphor (above), we get to enjoy all the items on the menu…but as samples, or tapas, not as full meals. Now a new interpretation has come along that builds on Feynman. In this thought experiment, known as the Cheshire Cat , quantum data is understood to show that certain properties of the quantum follow one path while the particle itself follows the other. In Alice in Wonderland , the cat’s grin, a property, can appear separately from the cat itself. In the Cheshire Cat experiment, the particle’s spin travels a different route from the rest of the quantum. In The Road not Taken , perhaps Frost’s gait and affect travel one path while body follows the other. Crazy! I know, but it’s Quantum Mechanics. Bottom line: The Road Not Taken is ground breaking…but wrong! Sorry, Mr. Frost, but you can “travel both and be one traveler”. In fact you must, and you will, whether you wish to or not and whether you are aware of it or not. Still, though, GREAT poem! Image: “Observation of a Quantum Cheshire Cat in a Matter-Wave Interferometer Experiment,” by Tobias Denkmayr et al., in Nature Communications , Vol. 5, Article No. 4492; July 29, 2014 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 Harvest 2024 Previous Next