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< Back How and Why David Cowles Oct 18, 2021 Prior to 1600, to be accepted in the West, any new scientific theory had to demonstrate that it was compatible with the basic tenets of Christianity. Since 1600, every religious doctrine has been required to demonstrate that it is compatible with the discoveries of modern science. Prior to 1600, to be accepted in the West, any new scientific theory had to demonstrate that it was compatible with the basic tenets of Christianity. Since 1600, every religious doctrine has been required to demonstrate that it is compatible with the discoveries of modern science. While intellectually interesting, these efforts are fundamentally wrong headed. Truth to tell, for all their apparent intersections, science and religion don’t have a lot to say to one another. For one thing, they answer entirely different questions: Science answers “how” questions. It is skeptical of “why” questions (are they even meaningful, can they have an answer) and, at any rate, it is silent on the subject. Religion, on the other hand, is and should be silent on the “how” of things. Religion is all about the “why”; isn’t that enough? (In fact, major problems have occurred whenever religion has trespassed into the realm of the “how”.) Fundamentally, while science is all about observation and measurement, religion is the belief that what can be seen and measured is not the most important aspect of reality. Science operates in the spatiotemporal realm while religion is all about the eternal. Of course, we do not directly perceive the eternal aspect of things. We do, however, find intimations of eternity in hope and in love. But at the end of the day, the epistemology of religion is faith. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Life is GPS David Cowles Aug 31, 2025 “GPS will point out the optimal route…and keep pointing it out, even as that route changes along the way.” I am heading out this morning for my first face-to-face meeting with Robert, a long time internet interlocutor. His home town is what passes for ‘rural’ in Massachusetts. I expect to see lots of stone walls and wooden fences, perhaps some family farms, and more than a few roadside produce stands. Covered bridges, dirt roads, cows and horses, lions, tigers, and bears – not so much! I need to travel about 50 miles Northwest of my Boston suburb and there are a myriad of routes I could follow. But I’m unfamiliar with the roads in Robert’s neighborhood, so the first thing I do, of course, is enter his address in my GPS. For the next 90 minutes, every move I make, every turn I take, will be scripted. All I need to do is sit back and follow instructions. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. I miss a turn, then there’s road work ahead that my GPS doesn’t know about and then several temporary detours. (Highway reconstruction is 24/365 in MA.) But all is not lost. Each time I fail to execute a directive, for whatever reason, GPS calculates a revised optimal route based on my new ‘current location’. A new set of instructions follows. The ideal continually adjusts to the actual. Who could ask for anything more? Whether you believe in God or Gaia , Fate, Destiny, or Chance, ‘we though many throughout the earth’ and possibly ‘across the universe’, all have a common destination and there exists a unique, optimal route for each of us to reach that destination from our disparate present locations. Of course, we are free to follow that route…or not. We think we know better: “We’ll follow our own path, thank you…and make a few unscheduled stops along the way.” No problem! Or we try to follow the instructions to the letter but ‘error and infrastructure’ continually force us off route. Western philosophy has been dominated by the free will/determinism dichotomy. We’re so used to this debate that we find it hard to imagine that other models might be possible. For example, few would argue that events occur randomly. A periodically persistent alternative, on the other hand, holds that there are a variety of pre-set paths available to us and that we are totally free to choose among them. This idea shows up in strange places; to name just a few: Parmenides of Elea ( On Nature ) - the father of Western phil. Paul of Tarsus ( Ephesians ) – much of Pauline and Johannine literature harks back to the ideas of the pre-Socratics. Robert Frost ( The Road not Taken ) Jean-Paul Sartre ( Being and Nothingness ) – We are 100% free; freedom is our essence, but it can only be exercised within limits established by the material world. Hugh Everett ( Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ) – Every ‘possible’ road is not only permitted…but taken! Robert Frost, meet Jean-Paul Sartre. In On Nature , Parmenides (5th century BCE) wrote about “the much speaking path of the goddess that carries everywhere unscathed the man who knows.” Much speaking ? Parmenides is anticipating James Joyce ( Ulysses ): “signatures of all things I am here to read.” Paul extends Parmenides’ concept of one optimal path to include multiple acceptable paths, “prepared by God so that we may step into them.” Frost follows Paul. Sartre goes further. We create our own paths, and everything is available to us, subject to the restrictions imposed by the material world. Finally, Everett brings the snake full circle. He is the head of the ouroboros . According to Everett everything is not only permitted but realized: the universe follows all possible paths in parallel. Hence, his ‘many, many, many worlds’ - too many for many tastes. “Along this route there are many signs that what-is (e.g. YHWH, Exodus 3: 14) is ungenerated and non-perishable.” The grid, aka the logos , is eternal. “Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, altogether, one, continuous.” (Parmenides) These cosmologies intersect in the technology of GPS. A web of highways and byways constitute our available paths and we build more as needed. We are totally free to pursue any route, but GPS will point out the optimal route…and keep pointing it out, even as that route changes along the way. The opening line of the Gospel of John nails it: “In the beginning (or at the foundation) is the logos .” The ‘grids’ of Parmenides, Paul, Frost, Sartre and Everett are all built on the pre-existent order of things, the logos that makes GPS possible. So welcome to the newest version of the world’s oldest technology! *** Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government (1338–39) spreads across Siena’s city walls as a web of ordered streets and winding roads, an early vision of the civic ‘grid’ that anticipates how GPS embodies the eternal logos guiding us through chaos. 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 Competing Cosmologies David Cowles Mar 7, 2023 “Cosmic phenomena may best be understood by overlaying several incompatible but complementary models.” The Spring Issue (3/1/23) of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) included two articles: Two Faced God , an article on the cross-cultural notion of God as ‘Time Binder’, and Legos and Bells , an article on the cutting edge, non-local cosmology embedded in The Lego Movie . Both articles explored alternative ways of imagining the deep structure of Cosmos. We’ve all been brought up to believe that the Earth is a sphere, suspended in a space ‘full’ of stars, planets, moons and other celestial debris. Fits the data! Makes sense! But this model’s success need not come at the expense of complementary alternatives. We are told that folks used to understand the Earth as a flat surface resting comfortably under a dome (the firmament), in much the same way as a poached fish might be served in a pretentiously expensive restaurant. We have been led to believe that the divergence of these two models is a fundamental ‘event’ in the intellectual history of the West. It isn’t! On the contrary, cosmic phenomena may best be understood by overlaying several incompatible but complementary models. In Two Faced Gods , for example, we explored the idea that the heavens and the earth may simply be alternate orientations on a single, non-orientable surface (a Möbius strip). Sidebar : This is apparently Dante’s dominant cosmological model. He presents Paradiso and Inferno as opposite orientations in a continuous but non-orientable Universe. This model turns the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”) into a cosmological fact. It also accounts for the alleged ‘sympathy’ of terrestrial and astral events ( aka Astrology). Elaborations of this model include the idea of West World, Aran, Finisterre . When Columbus sailed west, he undoubtedly expected to find India; but what did the Vikings expect when they made the crossing many centuries earlier? Probably not India, maybe not even Newfoundland, perhaps the dwellings of the gods, possibly that point on the horizon when heaven and earth meet. Did they expect to sail into the sky? “Look, Ma, there’s daddy, right next to Orion.” We can’t say for sure. Space is time and time is space: ‘that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know’. So, if you can’t afford to buy a ticket to Orion, or even to Newfoundland, no problem. You can just wait for the sun to set. According to William Butler Yeats, ‘on a clear day you can see forever’. Anyone can! Prince or pauper, you can experience the marriage of heaven and earth, thanks in no small measure to the seemingly endless subarctic twilights. Analogy : The Incarnation took place once and for all at a single place and time. BTW, that terrestrial event had its own celestial counterpart: the Star of Bethlehem. Even more importantly, the Incarnation reoccurs every day in the celebration of the Eucharist. As a result, everyone may experience the Incarnation regardless of their location in spacetime…or their financial means. A disturbing variation of the ‘flat earth’ model is the one most often attributed to the ancients, i.e. the idea that Earth has edges: “Eric, don’t wander too far from home or monsters will get you. And don’t sail too close to the edge, or you might fall off!” What parent, ancient or modern, has not occasionally resorted to exaggerated rhetoric to warn a cherished offspring about the dangers afoot in the wide, wide world? Bottom line : we can’t be sure whether educated adults ever actually believed that the world had edges; but we may assume that Eric’s mom’s final instructions to her explorer son went unheeded. Fast-forward to the 3 rd millennium CE. Just when you thought the world had no more use for ‘flat earth’ cosmologies, along comes The Lego Group (Denmark), urging ‘kids (ages 8 to 14)’ to create their own universes…on a finite flat surface (i.e., with edges). No idea is so bad that it can’t be resurrected , including the idea of an earth with edges. Also, no idea is so bad that it can’t be redeemed , and The Lego Movie (2014) does just that. Emmet, the hero of the movie, takes it for granted that his world is suspended in oblivion. He never questions the danger of stepping off the edge. But did I mention that Emmet is a hero? And what is courage but the determination to do what’s right even when there is no hope for a positive outcome? So Emmet risks almost certain annihilation to accomplish his ‘cosmic mission’, i.e., to save the world. However, much to Emmet’s surprise, and ours, Legoland turns out not to be surrounded by oblivion but by a higher dimensional universe populated by large carbon-based organisms (the monsters of mythology?… aka people). The cosmology of Lego Land is indeed flat, but it is both ‘non-orientable’ and ‘entangled’. Events that occur in Legoland are correlated with separate events that occur in the higher dimensional universe that embeds it. As we discussed in Legos and Bells , Legoland and its higher dimensional counterpart constitute neither one world nor two. They constitute 1.4 (the square root of 2) worlds. Thus, they are neither total independent of one another (two worlds) nor total dependent on one another (one world). In the words of John Bell (1964), they are entangled . The fullest possible understanding of reality will not be achieved using any one model, but may be more closely approached with an overlay of multiple complementary models. The Standard Model of Cosmology must be supplemented by non-orientability and by entanglement. 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 Nothing Exists David Cowles Sep 17, 2021 “What’s the good of anything? Nothing!” These 6 words, placed in the mouth of 12 year old Archibald Rennick in a 1892 play, “The New Boy”, may be more philosophically important and ontologically revolutionary than Nietzsche’s entire corpus. How so? “What’s the good of anything? Nothing!” These 6 words, placed in the mouth of 12 year old Archibald Rennick in a 1892 play, “The New Boy”, may be more philosophically important and ontologically revolutionary than Nietzsche’s entire corpus. How so? The bedrock premise of Christian ontology (and many other Western ontologies) is that Being and Good are indissolubly linked. Something is only to the extent that it is good. Conversely, something is not good only to the extent that it’s being is incomplete (or incompletely is). Since we seem to live in a world of perpetual becoming & perishing, it is not too much of a stretch to say that ‘evil is all around us’; yet we cannot pick evil up…or even point to it. It is not a being but a ‘lack’ (in the existential sense). Therefore, ultimate evil is the dissolution of being (mortality, entropy, cosmic heat death). Rennick stands this formulation on its head: there is no good in anything…and therefore nothing exists! 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 Politics or Philosophy? David Cowles Apr 23, 2024 “The philosopher never sees anything she likes…until she does; but when she does, she ceases to do the work of philosophy." Politics is the arena of opinion, of choice. A or ~A. Yet it’s politics, not religion (and certainly not philosophy), that is the opiate of the people. How so? A or ~A. We’ve just covered the entire range of potential options; so pick one! What could be better than this; right? Wrong! We’ve reduced our many-splendored world to just one of its aspects, one variable, its A-ness . How ‘A’ are you? Are you ‘A enough’? Did you say something ‘anti-A’ once when you were in middle school? Like kids with a model train set (do kids even have model trains anymore?), we are mesmerized by the back-and-forth motion of our engines: Red to Blue to Red to Blue, ad infinitum . We oscillate between A and ~A, oblivious of the fact that we are all the time running along a straight, fixed track, utterly heedless of any world ‘beyond the rail bed’ and utterly powerless to alter our trajectory. This is what we call freedom ; in politics this is what we call democracy . What we need now are the services of a good philosopher; know any? A philosopher will ask, “What do A and ~A, supposed opposites, have in common?” Their ‘A-ness’, of course. They both assume that A exists and that it is a meaningful measure of some aspect of reality. In the language of high school math, A-ness is the ‘absolute value’ of A and of ~A . Philosophy is not concerned with A or ~A. That’s the arena of politics. To the philosopher, A = ~A; it is their ‘absolute value’ that is the philosopher’s concern. Not A, not ~A, but ‘A-ness’ per se . Consider a recent political event in a U.S. state, Massachusetts; it was a referendum question on the 2022 ballot: Should the state impose a special 1% surtax on residents who earn $1,000,000 or more in a given tax year? A or ~A. A simple choice. Yes or no? The electorate was pretty evenly split, but to the philosopher, A or ~A is a distinction without a difference. What both sides of this debate must assume, i.e., the absolute value of A, is far more important than either A or ~A. In this case, the absolute value of A, ‘A-ness’, includes the following assumptions: The State (not just a state, but the State) has the right to confiscate a portion of any resident’s income or wealth at any time for any or no reason. It is reasonable and just to ‘classify’ members of society according to their income and/or wealth and to treat some such ‘classes’ differently from others. A simple plurality of a state’s voting electorate has the right to impose a confiscatory scheme on the entire population. Whether you vote A or ~A, you implicitly endorse the underlying premises of ‘A-ness’ (above). These are the assumptions that grab the attention of philosophers. My wife and I resolve a similar dilemma every morning when we eat breakfast at our favorite diner. I always order an English muffin with orange marmalade while my spouse orders toast with strawberry jam. We tease each other about our irrational but intransigent preferences; but the fate of the world hardly hangs in the balance. A philosopher looks at our daily dilemma differently. To her a muffin is toast and marmalade is jam. The questions she’ll ask are of another order entirely: Is it just that my wife and I have sufficient economic resources to eat breakfast, albeit a modest one, in a restaurant, also modest, most every morning? Is the distribution of food via an archipelago of privately held restaurants and franchised fast-food chains just and efficient? Is a breakfast of processed grain and sweetened fruit a healthy way for anyone to begin a day? Of course, these ‘2nd order’ questions can themselves in certain circumstances become the stuff of politics: e.g., should the City of New York permit the sale of super-sized soft drinks? Whenever a question of philosophy becomes a question of politics, philosophy must ask new questions: Should society require all able-bodied members to grow and prepare their own food? Should privately or collectively owned enterprises be permitted to profit from the sale of a basic human necessity, food? Of course, these questions could also be politicized, requiring philosophers to push the level of abstraction yet another notch higher. Theoretically, the process could continue ad infinitum . The only limitation is imagination. The praxis of politics is choice, maya . Either this or that. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a form of spirituality: neti, neti (not this, not that). Bottom line, the philosopher never sees anything she likes…until she does; but when she does, she ceases to do the work of philosophy. 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 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 On your Way to San Jose…Turn Right! David Cowles Aug 6, 2024 “An alliance of positive thinkers against the malaise of wokeism is natural…and most welcome.” In a 7/19/2024 edition of The New York Times , columnist Ross Douthart wrote about the convergence of High Tech and the Religious Right. Natural enemies on culture and lifestyle issues, techno-elites and religious conservatives are surprised to find that they have common ground after all. There’s philosophical overlap on “a set of premises held in common about the nature of the universe and the condition of America today”. First, they share faith in the cosmic order, “a belief that the world is still a puzzle waiting for solutions” and not just a collection of random events or a permanently indecipherable mystery. BTW, these later two gnoses are equivalent – they’re just dressed differently. Second, they share the belief that “human beings have some important cosmic destiny, that we aren’t just doomed to blink out in some entirely meaningless apocalypse”, like Heat Death. Finally, there is a shared recognition of the sorry state of Western civilization. How could we have allowed something so incredibly beautiful and profound to devolve into an amoral collection of trinkets? Business as usual will not produce the cultural earthquake needed to rescue us from the malaise of all pervasive despair which threatens productivity and spirituality alike. As is often the case in politics, the two ends of the spectrum find common ground against the middle. But this goes deeper. Our two groups share a common, if unpopular, anthropology: Human beings matter! It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached a state where this proposition must be stated…with the expectation of strong opposition from the cultural elite: “Dust in the wind/All we are is dust in the wind.” ( Kansas ) Strange as it may seem, this convergence is only ‘new’ now; in prior generations, the confluence of religious and economic interests was taken for granted. While Karl Marx labeled religion ‘the opiate of the people’, JP Morgan never failed to attend Sunday services…with full fanfare, of course. Critics view religion as industrial propaganda: “Work hard and endure privation for you will have your reward (back wages?) in Heaven.” But that is not it at all! The cosmology embedded in most religions spotlights human behavior. Sloth is a waste of God’s great gifts. We have talents and resources, not so we can wallow in them, but so we can put them to use for the glory of God and the service of humanity. The urge to build, to discover, to innovate is innate. Not to do so disrespects not only God but humanity as well. I think most entrepreneurs would agree with this sentiment; at one time the entrepreneurial class and the religious community overlapped (recall Max Weber’s iconic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ); not so much today! But if we are to believe Ross Douthart, that may be changing. Of course, this admittedly facile analysis carefully obscures a number of crucial issues. Marx and his followers went to great lengths to point out these chinks in the argument, but they made the ‘mistake’ (IMHO) of throwing the baby (religion) out with the bath water (injustice). Imagine the impact they might have had if they’d chosen to revolutionize religious institutions, making them the vanguard in the struggle to bring prosperity and justice to the world…just as Moses, Joshua, David and Jesus intended. Instead, communism divided economic revolutionaries from spiritual revolutionaries, turning the Church reactionary and the State totalitarian. Any rapprochement between Silicon Valley and Vatican City (symbol of the institutional locus of Western religions) must be grounded on some basic principles: The ‘work ethic’ cannot be used to conceal or excuse economic injustice. Workers own their labor and are entitled to retain it (for their own benefit) or sell it (for wages) as they see fit. In any case, workers are entitled to a generous share of the fruits of their labor. Work must produce goods and services helpful to other human beings without harming the biosphere…or the planet. As long as these four principles are scrupulously accepted, there is no reason why productivity and spirituality should not converge. The notion that production needs to be rapacious and spirit quiescent is peculiar to the 19th/20th Centuries. An alliance of positive thinkers against the malaise of wokeism is natural…and most welcome…in Century 21. 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. Keep the conversation going. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue Converge This! Jean Paul Sartre and Pope Leo “Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization!” Dante and The Beatles “If a world can or must…self-annihilate…then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist.” Theology Jericho “Some of us were waving copies of Mao’s Little Red Book; we all should have been clutching copies of the Old Testament.” Christian Anarchism "Over the course of history, however, humans have just as often sought to trade their existential liberty for the promise, always ultimately empty, of security and/or prosperity." Philosophy Particularity “The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.” Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” Science 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.” Past, Present, Future "So, it turns out that the universe did not have a lot of options when it came to structuring time." Culture & The Arts Educating Christians “We must teach our children a totally counter-cultural model of nature. We must teach the doctrines of our Faith, not as exceptions to natural law, but as the highest expressions of natural law.” That Time You Told a Sunrise Lie "...words are also just hollowed statements to avoid the truth. It’s far too tempting a cover-up. We love ideals, but we don’t like what they require." The Barrier-Breaking Power of Music "We were both smiling from ear to ear, unable to communicate with words, music our only form of communication." The Crucible Challenge Winner: Integrity vs. Life "At what point is it okay to lie? Is life more important than one’s integrity?" Spirituality How the Saints Taught Me Feminism "Finding footing in a world that appears to condone worshiping men can be incredibly hard, especially when that world extends past every aspect of your being." Escaping Dostoevsky's Polar Bear “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” 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 God David Cowles Oct 12, 2021 The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. The Creation Story in Genesis makes it clear that ‘Adam and Eve’, and by extension the entire cosmos, are entirely free; otherwise, the idea of ‘creation’ would be a sham. If the cosmos is just a figment of God’s imagination, subject to his absolute control, then it is not ‘created’ at all but just ‘dreamed’. Creation implies that a new entity comes into being that is no longer subject to the will or the whims of its creator. Consider music (or art or literature). When we say that Beethoven ‘created’ his 9th Symphony, we understand that Beethoven retains no control over his ‘creation’. It now belongs to its conductors, musicians, audience and critics. Is God any less of a Creator than Beethoven? However, unlike Beethoven, God may still be able to interact with his creation, not in his role as creator, but in his role as comrade-in-arms. In Marxist terms, God is the ultimate ‘fellow traveler’. According to 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, every event impacts God’s ‘Consequent Nature’ while that same ‘Consequent Nature’ influences every event. In Biblical Judaism, this is represented in the constant dialogue between God and the Patriarchs, Moses and the Prophets. In Christianity it is represented in the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. In Hasidic Judaism, it is represented in the Shekinah (sparks of divinity resident in every actual entity, i.e. event or object). In contract to Determinism and Deism, Judeo-Christian theology allows God to play an active role in the unfolding of history and the evolution of the cosmos without compromising in any way the ultimate freedom of that cosmos. 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 Being and Nothingness David Cowles May 12, 2022 But there are holes in this Swiss cheese. First, while it is true that ‘events’ constitute the universe, what we’re calling ‘events’ (above) are rarely primordial events. William H. Gass, in his Introduction to Gertrude Stein’s The Geographical History of America , wrote, “Life is rearrangement.” Gass attributes this idea, if not this exact sentence, to Ms. Stein. According to this view, our lives consist of elements (events) and many of these elements seem to be shared by other people: one other, many others, most others, perhaps even all others. For example, growing up, we may be fed by a mother, punished by a father, taught by a teacher, babysat by a neighbor, etc. These ‘events’ are elements of my human life and, I assume, of many, but not all, other human lives; therefore, they are elements of ‘human life’ per se . The solidarity we experience as ‘society’ may be attributed at least in part to this vast network of shared elemental experiences. How many such elements are there? The number is uncountably large, but it is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of distinct human lives that these elements can generate. “Life is rearrangement.” Think of the events that make up my life as words in a dictionary even larger than the OED. Only a few of these words are involved in the constitution of a single human being, but some of those same words turn up in others. The ‘rules’ by which these events can be combined to form a human life is the syntax of being human, while the number of unique human persons is analogous to an anthology of the complete works of an entire culture. But there are holes in this Swiss cheese. First, while it is true that ‘events’ constitute the universe, what we’re calling ‘events’ (above) are rarely primordial events. Usually a ‘society’ of events come together to share a common ‘superject’, i.e., meaning. So an event in your life, ‘X’, can fulfill the same function in my life, ‘Y’; both event-clusters have a similar meaning, ‘M’, but the route to ‘M’ in ‘X’ is very different from the route to ‘M’ in ‘Y’. While two individual paths may result in a common superject, the differences in those paths will significantly impact the further evolution of ‘X’ and ‘Y’. So,’X’ and ‘Y’ each emerge from their own unique Actual Worlds, they converge along the way to share a common superject, only to diverge again so that in the end, ‘X’ is entirely other than ‘Y’. Second, while both ‘X’ and ‘Y’ project ‘M’ as it is viewed by ‘Z’, ‘M’ has a different function in ‘X’ than it has in ‘Y’. ‘X’, and ‘Y’ share ‘M’ in ‘Z’, but ‘M’ in ‘X’ is radically different from ‘M’ in ‘Y’. Like families on your cul-de-sac , our lives can look very much alike from the outside, but they are always radically different when doors are closed and the shades are pulled down (i.e., on the inside). In fact, ‘M’ in ‘X’ is always different for ‘X’ than ‘M’ in ‘Y’ is for ‘Y’. Therefore, while our lives, considered socially, may overlap, those same lives, considered ontologically, can share no elements in common. Not only is every person unique, every primordial event that constitutes that person is unique; it has a unique function in ‘X’, though it may have a shared function for ‘Z’ (understood as all others, collectively). As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness , being-for-others has nothing to do with being-for-itself. As being-for-others, we are helping to build an all-encompassing web; as being-for-itself, each of us stands, alone, on the edge of Kierkegaard’s abyss and and on that edge, none of us has anything in common with anyone else, except the abyss . 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 Equality or Identity David Cowles Sep 7, 2025 “Both individual justice and collective survival require equality of opportunity; neither benefits from artificially imposed equality of result.” “All men (sic) are created equal.” So wrote our founding fathers (sic) as they birthed a nation that relied on slavery to drive its predominantly agricultural economy. It was a stunning act of hypocrisy! And yet, it is my belief that a majority of the men (sic) present at the signing of the Declaration were on balance reasonably ethical, at least by today’s jaded standards, and some perhaps even virtuous. They would not have condoned such hypocrisy in their private lives. Some were already calling for Abolition; others sensed a contradiction but resolved to live with it, however uneasily. The majority, however, saw no conflict between the language of the Declaration and social reality in the American South. We have rightly rejected the ethos of slavery and the moral hypocrisy that accompanied it. We are still working to dismantle its institutions and correct its social legacy. We are recommitted to equality , and we have learned to apply that concept to everyone, regardless of race or gender. In a justifiable reaction to abuses, historical and ongoing, we are skittish about any residual distinctions based on race or gender. (Look what happened to Larry Summers when, as Harvard’s Head, he listed gender differences as one of a smorgasbord of possible reasons why women statistically seem to lag behind men in STEM studies. He simply wanted to cover every logical possibility regardless of its physical improbability…and that act of intellectual honesty cost him his job.) In our zeal to eliminate any lingering vestiges of discrimination, we run up against a different problem: How do we make sure we don’t compromise the cultural diversity that makes our society, or any society, strong? How do we keep equality from degenerating into homogeneity? As we know from biology, the adaptations needed for species’ survival are normally not invented from whole cloth; rather they come from recessive traits already present in the population. Yesterday’s recessive trait is dominant tomorrow. A healthy genome, or a healthy culture, always has a bunch of untried adaptations on the shelf . In today’s commerce, ‘just in time’ inventory management is all the rage. That may work for Walmart, but it is not Mother Nature’s way. She (sic) was a Depression baby. She’s a hoarder; she hates to throw anything out: “Who knows? It might come in handy someday, e.g. if we need to recover from a thermonuclear holocaust.” Genetic and cultural diversity is essential to the long term survival of a species…or a civilization. Unfortunately, homo sapiens has an unusually low level of genetic variety; to survive we need to make up that shortfall with robust cultural diversity. So how do we avoid homogenizing society into a raceless, sexless monolith? How do we protect the cultural diversity we need to grow and adapt to changes in our environment? Look to Title IX as a paradigm. This 1972 law mandates ‘equal’ treatment in federally funded college athletic programs. Here’s how Claude from Anthropic describes it: “Requires schools to provide equal athletic opportunities for male and female students. This doesn't mean identical programs, but rather equitable treatment in areas like scholarships, facilities, coaching, and support services.” This does not mean that women are automatically allowed to play on men’s teams…or vice versa...or share showers, etc. It does require universities to provide students with ‘equal opportunity’ to develop athletically, regardless of gender. Oft times, government sponsored ‘social engineering’ ends in disaster. Consider, for example, court ordered efforts to achieve racial desegregation in primary and secondary public schools. Known as ‘forced busing’, these initiatives were center stage beginning in the 1960s and continuing well into the ‘90s. Most observers consider these initiatives a disaster. An entire generation of American youth had their educations disrupted and, in the end, it’s unclear whether busing contributed to any meaningful, sustainable, reduction in racial imbalance. Not so, Title IX . These programs have had massively positive effects on university life and the knock-on effects have led to explosive growth in women’s sports far beyond the confines of academia (e.g. the WNBA). Court ordered busing was grounded in Brown v. Board of Education , a 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools. A series of subsequent decisions (2000 – 2010) largely gutted Brown and ‘court ordered busing’ is now seen as a relic of an unhappier time. The Court’s decision in Brown overturned the principle of ‘separate but equal’. The Court quite correctly concluded that involuntary separation of students by race was inherently incompatible with equal educational opportunity. Brown was right, of course; and yet, many cherished educational institutions thrive on ‘concentrating’ their student populations based on race, religion, or gender. Few would suggest, for example, that faith-based schools (e.g. RCC parochial schools) or Historically Black Colleges or non-coed secondary schools be shuttered. Equality is a good thing, homogeneity is not. Mao is famous for saying, “Let 1,000 flowers bloom,” in response to China’s autocratic Cultural Revolution. But how do we ensure genuine equality of opportunity without undermining diversity and without drifting back to the abuses of ‘separate but equal’? Again, Title IX can be a guide. Requiring institutions to demonstrate verifiable equality of opportunity is preferable to enforcing equality of results. “Let 1,000 flowers bloom.” Lest this seem a bit New Agey, it is useful to note that the Title IX ethos goes back more than 3,000 years, to the Old Testament Book of Leviticus . This section of Torah includes a prototypical constitution and perhaps the first ever revolutionary political platform. Leviticus established the principle of Jubilee , the equal redistribution of all productive property every 50 years. Between Jubilees , the economy is laissez-faire , limited only by the ethical guardrails of Torah. This ingenious social program transformed the politics of the Middle East (and arguably of the entire Western world) and led to the establishment of what is still perhaps the longest and most successful theocracy (c. 1300 – 1050 BCE) in Western history. Joshua used the promise of Jubilee , and other social reforms embedded in Torah, to precipitate a popular uprising in Jericho so that its famous ‘walls came tumbling down’. The promise of equal opportunity is powerful, even when equality of result is not guaranteed. Case in point : The Lottery, specifically Powerball. At the time of this writing, the Jackpot stands at just under $2 billion. The eventual winner will have the option of converting the scheduled annuity payout to an immediate lump sum of about $1 billion. Not a bad ROI on a $2 ticket. Of course, the odds of any one ticket winning the Jackpot are 1in 300 million (but the odds of winning a smaller prize are 1 in 25). In Powerball, every $2 has an equal opportunity to win the Jackpot; but in all likelihood, one ticket will win it all. This is a paradigmatic case of rigorous equality of opportunity with no expectation of equal results. So what do we think of something like this? Well, in the last 3 days approximately 80,000,000 tickets have been sold. I guess most folk don’t have a problem with it…at all. Of course, our nannies are telling us not to bet: “It’s a fools’ game, the odds are terrible, you might just as well put a match to your money.” Let alone the fact that much of what they say is blatantly false! For example, because the Jackpot grows with every unsuccessful draw (while the odds remain unchanged), after a certain number of draws, the advantage flips to the players. But what’s more important, it’s not their $1 billion that I’d be risking if I don’t play. Bottom line : I already bought my tickets for the next draw and I suggest you stop reading this article and go do the same. But back to Jubilee. Compare Leviticus to the so-called ‘revolutionary’ programs of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. In a nutshell, these ideologies sought to guarantee ‘equality of result’ but did so at the expense of opportunity. Few of them succeeded and none of them survived, at least not in their intended forms. For better or for worse, today’s Vietnam is not Ho’s nor is the PRC Mao’s. If we are to survive as a species, we need to evolve, both genetically and culturally. Equality of opportunity gives evolution its best chance to succeed, quickly and efficiently; enforced equality of results hobbles evolution, effectively abolishing natural selection and reducing future variation to random fluctuations. Both individual justice and collective survival require equality of opportunity; neither benefits from artificially imposed equality of result. So go exercise your God and Constitution given right to equality of opportunity…right now. Invest in Powerball! *** Jacob Lawrence’s The Library (1960) portrays African American men and women reading in a structured, geometric interior, using bold colors and angular forms to emphasize order and focus. The painting highlights the library as a place of equality, where access to books symbolizes empowerment and collective progress through education. 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 Kaleidoscope David Cowles Jul 23, 2024 “For under $20, I have placed CERN at your fingertips.” For a few of my pre-tween years, my father had a habit of bringing home a small gift at the end of the work week – “A Friday Night Surprise”. One of my favorite recurring items was a kaleidoscope. As far back as the 1950s, I was a budding Hippie in love with bright colors and intriguing designs, but also a budding philosopher. I loved the ability to create new order out of chaotic elements. While other kids played with Erector Sets, I played with Kaleidoscopes. I think even then, I had an idea that something important was afoot here. Fast forward 15 years. Now I’m living the Hippie lifestyle, agitating for political change in the morning, reading philosophy at night. A handful of friends and I formed a sort of informal commune. Within strict limits, we shared what little wealth there was. For example, I had more ‘political responsibilities’ than others; therefore, I was not expected to contribute as much $$$ as my comrades. That said, we were always on the lookout for new revenue opportunities. We espoused socialism but practiced capitalism. Buy a working farm in New Brunswick ($10,000); buy a crowded neighborhood tavern (also $10,000), but who had $10,000 in those days? So no bar, no barn! And still no income. So, how about $1,000? Could we manage that? Maybe. But for what? $1,000 was the estimated cost going into the Kaleidoscope trade. The model was simple: buy a boat load of wholesale scopes, private label them and peddle them on street corners and parks throughout the City (Boston). I don’t remember the 1970 price points, but I do remember that ‘the numbers worked’. Then we learned that we would need a costly and hard to obtain peddler’s license. So much for that idea! Now, 50 years on, I’m back to promoting scopes! For under $20 you can buy a scope through Amazon that includes a metal cylinder with one moving (rotating) part. In this ‘nose cone’ are a collection of brightly colored, translucent bits of glass. The cylinder is lined with mirrors (usually 3). That’s it! For under $20, I have placed CERN (1954) at your fingertips. (They say the price of technology comes down with time…but this is ridiculous.) Take the scope in one hand and look through the eyepiece located at the far end of the cylinder. What do you see? A gorgeous pattern of shapes and colors. If your scope consists of 3 mirrors installed at a 60 degree angle relative to one another, your pattern will display hexagonal symmetry. Am I peering into Dr. Who’s TARDIS? Or am I perhaps looking at an image of the Universe at the moment immediately following Big Bang? Now slowly rotate the ‘nose cone’. The initial pattern morphs gradually, and then, a sudden ‘phase’ change! An entirely new pattern emerges which does not appear to relate in any way to the previous pattern, or to any earlier pattern for that matter, other than sharing the same material substructure of beads and mirrors. While I have not subjected this idea to rigorous mathematical scrutiny or empirical testing, I have the impression that every pattern is novel, that no pattern recurs. In addition, I see no way to predict Pattern N+1 from Pattern N. Now reverse the nose cone’s direction of rotation: clockwise vs. counterclockwise. I had expected the patterns to reappear in reverse order. I thought I could recreate the past. But apparently, I’m no Proust . Stephen Hawking believed that entropy was bound up with the expansion of the cosmos. However, he also believed that entropy would continue to increase even if the direction of cosmic inflation were reversed. Playing with a kaleidoscope suggests that Hawking was right. The same sort of novel patterns occur, regardless of the direction of rotation. The patterns I passively generate are not created ex nihilo ; I am neither Proust nor God! But a bunch of translucent pieces of glass and a mirror are about as close to nihil as we can hope to get in our spatiotemporal world. Only children (or children at heart) could imagine that it might be possible to create a universe with just a bunch of glass beads and a couple of mirrors. That’s why those of us at Aletheia Today say, “Your children are better than you. They’re smarter…MUCH smarter.” Deal with it! You might not be God. You might not even want the awesome responsibility that being God would entail. And you wouldn’t relish being blamed for every earthquake or tornado. But who would not appreciate the opportunity to play God for an hour or two. For less than $20, that experience can be yours! 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 Applied Camus David Cowles Aug 11, 2025 “I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system.” In an earlier post, Camus , we explored the philosophical reasoning behind the philosopher’s version of nihilism: the rejection of concepts like ‘the future, consequences, transcendent values’. With no objective values and no concern for the future, we are left to live life entirely as we wish. “Everything is permitted.” (Nietzsche) Of course, that does not mean that we must behave as libertines. Each of us is free to fashion a code of ethics for herself. But we must not imagine that these private codes have any objective justification or that they constitute a ‘categorical imperative’, i.e. that they are in any way binding on others…or even on one’s self. That said, Camus devotes the second half of The Myth of Sisyphus to sketching styles of life that might be consistent with living out the implications of the Absurd. I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system; for example: “I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation… I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living…value judgments are discarded…A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate…For on the one hand the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences.” Sheer gobbledygook, am I right? Let’s enumerate the errors: (1) “I cannot conceive” – who cares what Camus ‘can conceive’ if we are all independent actors responsible for our own lives; (2) “What counts” – value judgments are not discarded, they are front and center here; (3) “Values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences” – so values do have meaning after all, as long as they are ‘Camus approved’; (4) “All experiences are unimportant” – except that the quantity and variety of those unimportant experiences is what gives life meaning: ∞ * 0 ≠ 0. First, Camus dismisses the possibility that asceticism and the absurd could be compatible. This seems strange. If there is no objective value in the world, why mightn’t someone renounce that world (short of suicide), relish his solitude, and focus on his ‘inner self’? Practitioners of Taoism and Zen, well acquainted with the Absurd, often follow this practice. Even more disturbingly, Camus substitutes ‘quantity’ of experience for the forbidden ‘quality’. But isn’t quantity itself a kind of quality? Is ‘large’ a quality or a quantity? If, as Camus asserts, more of some things is better than less, doesn’t quantity then become a value (a quality) in itself? One recalls a particularly crass expression from the 1980s: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” as well as Gatsby’s famous exclamation: “Living well is the best revenge”. Perhaps not our loftiest values…but values nonetheless! Camus further explains that the quantity of our experience replaces any consideration of quality…only so far as we are conscious of those experiences: “For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our lives…To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them…A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard.” So ‘quantity’ is no longer a variable? Instead, Camus now introduces a new ‘transcendent value’: consciousness! Not the abstract phenomenon of consciousness but the act of being conscious of a particular experience. Conscious experience is certainly different, qualitatively, from unconscious experience (whatever that might be). But is this not precisely the goal of Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and cloistered monastic orders? Is it not the case that many have renounced the world precisely in order to become more conscious ? To immerse one’s self in the hurly-burly of life may not be the best way to heighten consciousness. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) “To the absurd man a premature death is irreparable. Nothing can make up for the sum of the faces and centuries he would otherwise have traversed.” Where are these faces, where are these centuries, where is this sum? They can’t be in the future because, as we show in our earlier essay, Camus rejects the category of ‘future’ entirely. Earlier, Camus referred to experiences as ‘accumulated’. What suggests to Camus that experience can be totalized in this way? And what about the zero term in the equation? (I mean, of course, death.) Doesn’t death automatically multiply all the terms in any equation by itself, i.e., by zero? Isn’t Death the great eraser? ∞ * 0 = 0. Death is not an experience that you ‘add’ to other experiences. In fact, death is not an experience at all. Death is the absence of experience and, even more viciously, the annulment of all experience. “…There is no experience of death…it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths…and it never quite convinces us”. Roman Catholic doctrine does not sanction divorce. Once married, always married. But it does allow annulment, the retroactive ‘erasure’ of the marriage itself. Not married, never married. Isn’t that the role Death plays in Camus’ system? Not living… So how are we to live in an absurd world? Camus details several options, but he makes it clear that this does not constitute an exhaustive catalogue of possibilities. First, Don Juan. “Don Juan” is a collector of experiences. He seeks a long, varied and intense life: “Don Juan has chosen to be nothing”, i.e., to lose himself in himself. In fact, as we shall see, all of Camus’ absurd heroes choose to be nothing. This seems odd. What is choosing to be nothing but suicide…or at least renunciation, two options previously rejected by Camus (above)? Second, the Actor: “The actor has three hours to be Iago…Never has the absurd been so well illustrated…There is no frontier between being and appearing… In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.” We are reminded of Prospero’s iconic speech in The Tempest . Third, the Conqueror. This is the man of action, but Camus acknowledges that the project of the conqueror is ultimately futile: “Nothing of the conqueror lasts, not even his doctrines.” Shall we refer to Ozymandias : “Nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) As Camus repeatedly points out, death is inconsistent with objective values. If death is the final reality, then values are meaningless. On the other hand, if meaningful values are a reality, then death is odd man out. Camus suggests that death is not merely the absence of value but the ‘exaltation of injustice’. Here he’s right: of course it is! It’s the primordial injustice. But this observation is revealing because ‘injustice’ implies ‘justice’. By acknowledging injustice, Camus has once again let the camel’s nose of objective value into the tent of the Absurd. What is Justice if not a transcendent value that gives meaning to existence? Finally, Camus turns to art and the artist. He proposes an ‘absurd aesthetic’: “An art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself… The absurd creator…must give the void its colors.” Is Camus distinguishing representational from ‘abstract’ art? I doubt it. I think it more likely that Camus denies that any art is representational, i.e. it is always abstract. Camus is to be praised for his analysis of the Absurd. His description of the human condition takes a back seat to no one’s. Yet his project, in the end, fails. Try as he might, he cannot escape the need to let values seep into his scheme. This raises a question: Is it possible to talk about the world in any non-trivial way without making reference to Value? And if not, does that mean that values are indeed real or is this merely an invitation to remain silent? “My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence.” (Dylan) In the course of our lives, we are confronted with facts we think we know, people we think we meet and judgments we think we make. From these nearly universal experiences, three great philosophical questions organically emerge: What is the nature of ‘knowledge’? What is the nature of ‘the other’? What is the nature of ‘value’? These questions form the basis of Philosophy’s Big Three : epistemology, ontology and ethics/aesthetics. They also give rise to the three great ‘null hypotheses’: skepticism, solipsism, nihilism. Camus incorporates the null hypothesis: “The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated…” Here he is channeling Parmenides’ contrast of Aletheia (Truth) with Doxa (Appearances ). “In one of its aspects, eternal nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours…” Camus is on to something here! Is he anticipating Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ? Or is he summarizing Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken ? In either case, the World consists solely of possibilities: ‘pure potentiality’ ( Aristotle), ‘the wave function’ (Schrödinger), ‘the sum of all histories’ (Feynmann). When we actualize any one potentiality, when we collapse the wave function, we consign the alternative paths to ‘eternal nothingness’. “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds. (Oppenheimer…misquoting the Bhagavad Gita .) So life as we know it, like monogamy, consists of actualizing one path and ‘forsaking all others’. In brining one reality to life, we destroy all potentiality. E pluribus unum – is that the real absurdity of life? “In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences.” In that case Camus’ world cannot be absurd after all, littered as it is with scales of values, value driven choices, and value based preferences. So give Albert an A in Ontology but, sadly, a D in Ethics, or as Sister Martha Mary used to write at the bottom of my report cards: “Needs improvement.” 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.