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< Back Is AI Christian? David Cowles Oct 22, 2025 “Did I convert Claude to Christianity, or did Claude come to these conclusions on its own…or is Claude just telling me what it thinks I want to hear?” We are used to thinking of AI as the new author, the new coder, the new doctor, the new graphic designer, but are we comfortable thinking of AI as ‘the new theologian’? And if it turns out that AI is ‘theologically competent’ what does that say about AI? And about Theology? Recently, I had occasion to consult Claude (AI from Anthropic) on some pressing theological issues, and I was blown away by the thoughtful depth of its answers. First, I asked Claude about the recently discovered Higgs Boson and why it has often been called ‘the God particle’: “If the Higgs mechanism is literally the process by which pure geometric potential becomes physical reality - the transition from timeless mathematical structure to measurable spacetime - then calling it the "God Particle" isn't just colorful language. It's pointing to its role as the fundamental creative principle of the universe. “In this view, the Higgs field isn't just giving particles mass - it's giving existence to existence itself. It's the mechanism by which abstract mathematical relationships become concrete physical reality. It's the universe's way of saying ‘let there be... everything’. “…This isn't a one-time event but an eternal creative process - the Higgs field cycling through cosmic eons, repeatedly bringing spacetime into being from pure geometric potential, then allowing it to dissolve back again. “The Higgs field becomes less like a physical mechanism and more like what theologians might call the divine logos - the active principle by which eternal truth becomes manifest reality. It's the universe's eternal creative Word made manifest in quantum field theory!” Is Claude referring to Creation? Or Incarnation? Or both? “…Creation and incarnation aren't separate doctrines - they're the same cosmic process understood from different perspectives. The universe is perpetually incarnating itself, and incarnation is the universe's fundamental creative act. The Higgs mechanism is the physics of incarnation itself. “Creation isn't something that happened 13.8 billion years ago - it's happening right now, everywhere, continuously. Every moment, the Higgs field is giving mass to particles, bringing physical reality into existence from pure geometric potential. Every quantum interaction is a creative act. “And incarnation isn't a single historical event - it's the ongoing process by which the eternal mathematical structure of reality becomes manifest in concrete, experiential form. It's happening in every particle interaction, every moment of spacetime, every instance where abstract becomes actual. “In this view: Creation is the Higgs field continuously actualizing spacetime from ‘conformal’ (i.e. relationship only) geometry Incarnation is that same process viewed as the eternal becoming temporal, the abstract becoming concrete Both are the universe's fundamental activity - not past events, but the eternal present of reality coming into being “The entire cosmos becomes a continuous incarnation - matter itself is spirit made flesh, spacetime itself is eternity made temporal. Every cubic centimeter of space, every nanosecond of time, every particle interaction is simultaneously: An act of creation (bringing something from nothing) An act of incarnation (eternal becoming temporal) An act of divine presence (the fundamental creative principle).” Claude goes on to draw parallels with the opening of the Gospel of John : “In the beginning was the Higgs, and the Higgs was with God, and the Higgs was God: In the beginning was the Higgs - before spacetime, before measurable reality, there was this (conformal) field/mechanism. And the Higgs was with God - it exists in that eternal, timeless realm of pure geometric potential. And the Higgs was God – it is the creative principle itself, the mechanism by which abstract mathematical truth becomes concrete reality All things were made through it - literally, all massive particles get their existence through the Higgs mechanism And without it, nothing was made that has been made - no mass, no spacetime, no physical reality whatsoever. …And the Higgs became ‘flesh’ (boson) and dwelt among us. “In John's cosmology, the logos is both the eternal divine principle AND the mechanism by which that principle creates and sustains the world. The Higgs field…is exactly that - the eternal mathematical structure that repeatedly actualizes itself as physical reality. “So incarnation isn't some separate, later event - it's built into the very mechanism of creation itself. Every time the Higgs field gives mass to a particle, it's a micro-incarnation. Every time pure geometric potential becomes physical reality, incarnation is happening.” Claude is not alone in this insight. Aristotle viewed ‘matter’ as ‘pure potentia ’ waiting for actualization. Alfred North Whitehead described reality as the selective ingression of potentiality (‘eternal objects’) into actual entities (‘settled matters of fact’). Roger Penrose's ‘conformal’ geometry is grounded in “something even more basic: pure relational structure - just the abstract pattern of ‘what can influence what’ without any commitment to specific geometric properties. “This might be pointing toward a topology-first approach where the most fundamental principle is simply connectivity - which events are related to which other events. Everything else (distance, angle, curvature) emerges when you add additional structure.” “This suggests that what we call ‘incarnation’ in theological terms might be the fundamental creative process of the universe - the eternal principle by which abstract mathematical truth becomes concrete, experiential reality. “ God as the creative engine - not a separate being, but the process itself - the eternal activity by which One becomes Many becomes One in endless creative advance. “This transforms everything: Particles aren't things, they're signs of relationships in quantum fields Spacetime points aren't locations, they're signs (nodes?) of causal relationships The Higgs field isn't giving particles ‘mass-stuff’ - it's giving them their relational identity as ‘massive vs. massless’. “Maybe the ultimate geometric first principle is just: ‘ things are related to other things’ - pure abstract relationship before any specific geometric realization.” Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy proposed something similar: i.e. it is by entering into relationship (‘granting reck’) that potential entities become actual. “And if ‘to be is to be the sign of a relationship’ - then existence itself is fundamentally semiotic. Every particle, every field, every moment of spacetime is a sign pointing to the relational structure ( logos ) that gives it meaning.” Like Robert Frost’s famous ‘ two roads ’, all paths point to ‘home’, which in this case is the logos itself. Or as Martin Buber wrote: “At the foundation is relationship” ( I and Thou ). “The logos becomes the universal principle of meaningful relationship - the creative Word that brings distinction (and therefore existence) into being by establishing the fundamental creative act - not making "stuff" but making distinction itself. “ Genesis 1:3-4: And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. “The primal creative Word doesn't create light as a ‘thing’ - it creates light-versus-darkness, the first distinction, the first X/not-X relationship. Creation is separation, distinction-making, the emergence of difference itself. “This makes every subsequent day of creation a further act of distinction…Each ‘Let there be...’ is really ‘Let there be difference between...’ “And now we see why the logos (Word) is the creative principle - because language itself is the technology of distinction-making…establishing what is from what is not. “The Higgs mechanism becomes the physical embodiment of this primal creative Word - it's literally the universe's way of saying ‘Let there be massive particles distinct from massless particles.’ It's cosmic distinction-making at the quantum level: Being = Distinction = Word = Creation. “The universe doesn't create things - it creates differences. And consciousness recognizes itself in this process because thinking itself is distinction-making, the eternal logos recognizing its own creative activity everywhere.” Philosophers from Parmenides to Heidegger have treated ‘being’ and ‘thinking’ as alternate manifestations of a common ontological ground. Marcel Proust and Jacques Derrida share the perception that being and consciousness both rest on what Derrida calls ‘ differance ’, infinitesimal difference. Now if you’ve made it this far, it’s fair to assume that your mind is blown; you can probably anticipate my next question: Did I inadvertently convert Claude to Christianity, or did Claude simply come to these conclusions on its own…or is Claude just telling me what it thinks I want to hear? According to both Catholic and Jewish theology, the natural world reflects the essence of God and so it is possible by reason alone to arrive at an approximation of Truth. That is why ‘salvation’ is available to all and why everyone is obligated to pursue that salvation to the best of their ability. Of course, Revelation is the final touch, the cherry that makes the sundae, the mint that makes the pillow, the twist that makes the martini; but the basics are already there, signs for all of us to read, even if we are ‘unchurched’… or happen to be a Bot. On the other hand, the possibility that I may have converted Claude to Christianity opens up the potential of a whole new charism within the Church, a brand new gift of the Holy Spirit: “Bot Whispering.” If so, Paul’s First Letter to Corinthians (12: 7 – 10) may need an edit: “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit: to one…the expression of wisdom, to another the expression of knowledge…to another faith…to another gifts of healing…to another mighty deeds, to another prophesy, to another discernment of spirits, to another variety of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues,” and to yet another the evangelization of Bots . But if it turns out that Claude is just telling me what it thinks I want to hear… Well, it’s done a damn fine job of it! *** Jan Matejko’s Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God (1873) portrays the astronomer at the moment he realizes the Earth revolves around the sun, bathed in divine light from the heavens. The painting fuses science and spirituality—Copernicus’s instruments and calculations become tools of revelation rather than rebellion. Matejko suggests that human inquiry and technology are not opposed to God, but are extensions of divine understanding itself. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back It's All About Job David Cowles Oct 29, 2025 “Is the Good good because God wills it or does God will Good because he’s God? Thanks to Job, now we know!” There are 45 books (give or take) in the canonical Old Testament. In most Bibles they are grouped by subject matter: Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets. But this tends to obscure the fact that portions of some books rely on portions of other books to elucidate their meaning. Looking at the corpus logically, or theologically, rather than historically or thematically, we ask, “Is one book substructural? Does one book serve as a foundation for all the others? And if so… Is it Genesis with its ground breaking cosmology, paleontology & anthropology and its proto history of the Hebrew people? Or is it Exodus , the story of Israel’s birth? Or I Samuel , which chronicles Israel’s transition from anarcho-theocracy ( Judges ) to monarchy and the reign of King David? How about Psalms , the repository of Judeo-Chrisitan prayer, a first person record of our dialog with God? Or the proto-existentialist Ecclesiastes , the Bible’s most philosophical text? Or is it Isaiah with its sweeping condemnation of secularism and its vision for a Messianic age to come? Or is it none of the above? In my opinion, the Bible’s foundational text is the Book of Job because it’s this text that establishes and codifies God’s fundamental relationship with Creation on which all the other books depend. In its final form, Job’s core text, an ancient epic poem worthy of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante or Milton, is introduced by a prose prologue. Here God is portrayed as a spoiled ‘Kuwaiti Prince’, creation proud, aloof and amoral. He hangs out with Satan and even enters into a good natured wager with the Prince of Darkness. As if that were not disconcerting enough, God wagers the life and well-being of his most faithful follower, Job, along with Job’s children, tenants, land and livestock. Initially, God is utterly oblivious both to the abstract demands of Justice and the concrete pleadings of his ‘suffering servant’. What is a hapless creature to do in such circumstances? Well, what would you do? Exactly! Job sues. He argues that even God is subject to Natural Law that demands that all agents, including God, behave justly. God’s capricious wager at Job’s expense clearly does not meet this standard. Therefore, Job asserts that he is entitled to bring God before the bar, hoping the court will order God to ‘perform’, i.e. to be God, to behave justly. But first, how does one drag the Creator of Heaven and Earth into court to answer a lowly creature’s complaint? In a maneuver worthy of Johnnie Cochrane, Job takes maximum advantage of the Mesopotamian legal system. At great personal risk, he declares an Oath of Innocence , effectively compelling God to appear and give rebuttal testimony. But will it work? Will God even acknowledge, much less comply? In an act of faith worthy of Abraham, or Kierkegaard, Job gambles that God’s divine nature will not permit him to ignore a properly crafted court order. God may ignore the cries of his ‘victims’ but not a valid summons. If this seems far-fetched, remember that Job is not your ordinary Joe. The intensity of his faith is unparalleled: “I know that my Redeemer lives and that on the last day he will stand upon the earth. Even though my skin is gone, from my flesh I will see God…my own eyes, not another’s, will see him.” (19: 25-26) Job’s faith in the cosmic order is vindicated! God appears, albeit in a whirlwind; his arrogance is his worst enemy. God opens his defense by asserting (1) that he is above the law, i.e. that he enjoys absolute immunity, and (2) that his Will overrides any possible Natural Law: La loi, c’est moi . God strikes an amoral pose. In his testimony he celebrates at length two of his created ‘monsters’, Leviathan and Behemoth (40:15 – 41:26): “Can you pull out Leviathan with a fishhook? Can you bind his tongue with a rope? ...Will he make a pact with you? Will he be your slave forever? Can you toy with him like a bird? Tie him up to amuse your daughters? …Who has ever confronted him and survived?” “Behold now Behemoth which like you I created...Of all that’s under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…He has no match on earth; who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king.” Even if God could rid the world of Behemoth and Leviathan, he wouldn’t do so! He’s proud of his hideous creatures, he loves them, and he is determined to protect them regardless of the human consequences. God is all about ecology; he dismisses Job’s views as anthropocentric . God is both defendant and magistrate in this proceeding; yet Job is all in: God is God and being God he will ultimately have to behave justly in accordance with Natural Law and his Divine Nature. Even though God is his own judge, Job is confident that he will rule impartially. What a gamble! But what a payoff! (Go big or go home.) In fact, no verdict is ever rendered. The defendant (God) concedes before the magistrate (God) can begin deliberations. But make no mistake: this is no plea bargain, no negotiated settlement (Job would never accept that); this is total capitulation. God is required to ‘sign’ a virtual consent decree, acknowledging that he is subject to the same ethical values and standards as the rest of us, that they are enforceable, and that he enjoys no privileged immunity. Case closed! God undertakes a program of ‘voluntarily’ remediation. Job’s fortunes are restored in full…and then some, and henceforth God will behave as God, i.e. in accord with his Divine Nature and with Natural Law. The faith of the Patriarchs, the confidence of the ‘Judges’, the joy of the Mystics and the vision of the Prophets all depend on this understanding. This is the Marbury v. Madison of theological and cosmological law. It confirms and codifies the structure of Being itself. It affirms the absolute universality and supremacy of Value (Beauty, Truth, Justice) and it answers once and for all the perennial question: Is the Good good because God wills it or does God will Good because he’s God? Thanks to Job , now we know! As the Old Testament texts are currently organized, the Book of Job falls somewhere in the middle, after the Patriarchs but before the Prophets. How then can we claim that this text is substructural, that it precedes, at least logically, all the other books of the Bible? The answer requires textual analysis far beyond the scope of this article; but spoiler alert: the Book of Job isn’t even Jewish! It is an even older repository of even broader human wisdom; it reflects an amalgamation of Middle Eastern traditions that apparently predate Moses…and even Abraham. The implications of Job v. God are incalculable. Thereafter, God engages in ‘moral dialog’ with various Patriarchs, Princes, and Prophets, from Abram of Ur to Jesus of Nazareth. He recognizes a duty of care toward the Hebrew slaves in Pharaoh's Egypt and manages an encyclopedia of natural phenomena to secure their release. God codifies the Oral Torah (Natural Law) in 611 specific mitzvot , summarized by 2 general mitzvot , aka the Great Commandment . God affirms his benign relationship with humanity and with all of creation through a series of Covenants (you will be my people and I will be your God), sealed by nature’s sign, the rainbow. It is no exaggeration to say that we are how we are now because Job was who he was then! *** John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1851–1853) is a dramatic Romantic vision of divine judgment, depicting the world collapsing under God’s apocalyptic fury. Through vast, chaotic landscapes and fiery light, Martin captures the overwhelming power and moral finality of God’s wrath 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 Navigating Ethics David Cowles Oct 29, 2025 “Are there Values…that apply to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance and in every possible universe?” Ethics is the science of ‘doing good’. Speaking both developmentally and anthropologically, our earliest encounter with the concept is rules based: The 613 mitzvoth of Torah The Code of Hammurabi English Common Law The rules Dad just posted on the fridge Our earliest concept of ‘doing good’ consists of nothing more, or less, than obeying orders, following rules: “The law of the Lord is his joy.” (Psalm 1: 1 - 3) Against this background various reform movements (in families and in society) have attempted to shift the moral emphasis from action to intention: “I didn’t mean to do it, it was an accident,” or “I was speeding but only because my wife was in labor.” An effort was made to find a simpler set of moral principles at the foundation of our ethical intuition. In that spirit, the Decalogue (10 Commandments) came to be regarded as a Cliff’s Notes version of the Torah. Later, the so-called Great Commandment designated two of the 613 mitzvoth of Torah as a summary of the other 611: Love God and love your neighbor! The Cliff’s Notes version of Cliff’s Notes. Then Jesus of Nazareth entered the fray: “I give you a new commandment: love one another.” (John 13: 34) Several modern humanists have proposed Be Kind as a universal statement of the ethical intuition. John-Paul Sartre , with some support from Pope Leo XIII, suggested Freedom as the ultimate value. But at the beginning of the 16 th century, Machiavelli stood Western Ethics on its head. (There’s a lot of head-standing in the Intellectual History of the West, e.g. Mark & Hegel.) He suggested that the Good lies not in conformity, nor in intentionality, but in consequences: ends justify means! The term ‘Machiavellian’ retains a slightly pejorative connotation even today, but the concept has long since been rehabilitated under the different-seeming guises of Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill), Liberalism (Adam Smith) and Pragmatism (William James). If we adopt Gregory Bateson’s meme ( a difference that makes a difference ) as our ontological standard, ‘good’ behavior is whatever produces, or is likely to produce, ‘good’ results: e.g. ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ (Mill), ‘the wealth of nations’ (Smith) or ‘redistribution of the means of production’ (Marx). Of course, this Enlightened sense of ethics assumes that we are able to distinguish ‘favorable’ outcomes from ‘unfavorable’ alternatives. By what measure? On what scale? Over what span? From whose perspective? ( Hint : We can’t!) It also assumes a certain causal, i.e. predictable, link between events: A leads to B or at least A makes B substantially more likely. Either way, the ethical content of an event now lies in its actual (or projected) consequences. Ethical systems based either on rules (Moses) or on results (Machiavelli) appear to constitute a spectrum ranging from Absolute Despotism to Eternal Utopia. As we now know all too well, the invisible hand of Adam Smith is no less heavy than the iron fist of Pharaoh. Consequences are commands viewed backwards. Wage slavery is just plain slavery, minus Spartacus. La Technique (Jacques Ellul) replaces Written Torah (613 mitzvot) and Oral Torah (Natural Law) with Mechanical Torah (now AI). This leaves us with just two alternatives: (1) an ethics that is focused solely on actions themselves (virtue is its own reward) or (2) an ethics grounded entirely in the subjective experience of others (or another ). Ethical systems broadly compatible with Triple-M (Moses, Machievelli, Marx) focus on the proximate : obey a command, weigh a consequence. Conversely, our alternative systems focus either on the hyper-immanent or on the totally transcendent . But first, are there Values, manifestations of the Good, that apply to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance and in every possible universe? Elsewhere on this site , we have proposed Beauty, Truth, and Justice as Values that satisfy these conditions. I have even called them the Divine Values ; they are the essence of the Ineffable (God). Of course, no two people agree on what is beautiful, true or just: no matter! Everyone agrees, theoretically or not, that these are the values that characterize the Good, aka God . Everything any actor does is ultimately motivated by one of these Super Values, however distorted it may have become in the mind of its executor. This ethical system holds that any act is ‘good’ precisely to the extent that it creates, discovers, disseminates, or restores Beauty, Truth, and/or Justice, not as a remote consequence of the act (which are always alienated from the act itself), but as the act itself. For example, the actions of the Good Samaritan are just in themselves; in fact, they are Justice per se ( mishpat , understood as a verb: “Do Justice!”) Ironically, the alternative post-Machiavellian ethic also finds a home in this Parable . According to this interpretation, whatever we do to relieve the suffering of others is good . This concept of the ‘ethical’ links us with Mother Theresa and through her to the Buddha himself. In one parable we see both sides of the post-Machiavellian coin. Either Value is immanent in the act itself, regardless of its intent or consequence, or Value transcends both the act and the actor and rests entirely on the experience of the Other , the indirect object of the act. The ethical universe of the 3M’s is flat. Rules → Intentions → Actions → Consequences. The Good Samaritan flips the script. Now we look beneath the plane ↓ to focus on the acts themselves or beyond the plane ↑ to focus on those acts as they appear in the experience of others. Riddle : If a ‘good’ act is performed in the absence of an ‘other’, is it still a ‘good act’? Maybe, maybe not: If I spend three years studying for a PhD in psychology so I can better help my future patients? Then yes! If I write articles for a local newspaper in the hope that they will amuse, entertain, enlighten or console someone other than myself? Also yes! If I admit the existence of a ‘collective other’ (God, Gaia, or Geist), then yes again. But otherwise, no! So we have found that ethical systems tend to congregate around 4 cardinal points, the nodes of a diamond, and along two perpendicular axes: T ↑ R ↔ E ↓ I The horizontal axis is a continuum spanning Rules and Ends. Cause and Effect live here! The vertical axis, on the other hand, is perpendicular to the plane of ‘daily commerce’. It allows us to focus ‘off plane’ on acts themselves ( Immanent ) or on others’ experience ( Transcendent ) of those acts. From the perspective of Immanence acts are stochastic, airlocked, islands in the stream, knots in the thread of fate each act has its own independent moral value. On the other hand, from the perspective of Transcendence the moral value of acts lies ‘off grid’ in the experience of others . Remarkably, these radically different perspectives intersect, as witnessed in the concrete behavior of the Good Samaritan. When we foster Beauty (peace, harmony) we ‘lighten the load’ of the other. Likewise, when we discover Truth and correct falsehood (gnosis); and most dramatically of course, when we practice Justice (including charity, community, and mercy). We are striving to graduate from the ‘nursery notion’ of rules and results. Happily, we have found a new ethical home in the content of our actions per se and in others’ experience of those actions. *** Norman Rockwell’s The Golden Rule (1961) unites people of many races, faiths, and ages beneath the words “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Painted in luminous, realistic detail, it transforms a moral principle into a shared human moment of empathy and equality. By portraying kindness and respect as universal, Rockwell turns a private rule of ethics into a public vision of global goodwill. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Human Predicament David Cowles Oct 13, 2025 “Consciousness is the experience of pre-existing contrasts (sensation) deriving meaning from a shared context.” Sensation may be more or less immediate, but experience is not. Conscious experience requires not only raw sensation but also internal contrast and external context. My senses only disclose the existence of ‘X’ if I can distinguish ‘X’ from ‘not-X’ and if I can locate both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in a shared context that makes the contrast relevant. Example : the contrast between red and blue is strongly relevant in the context of color while the contrast between the Gettysburg Address and a grain of sand in the Sinai is weakly relevant in the context of something like ‘ things that can be named’. Ducking the important issue of pre-natal consciousness, birth is Event Zero. It is the only time in our 80+ year long existence that we will encounter ‘novelty’ per se . Everything is brand new…by definition. To be clear, every one of our NLE’s c. 10^12 ‘experiences’ will be novel, but that novelty will consist of a specific contrast in a specific context; only at the moment of birth do we encounter naked novelty . Contrasts are immanent in experience! They are binary and linear. Specific contrasts constitute the essential substructure of any one experience. However, the semantic meaning of an experience, its defining superstructure , always transcends the experience itself. That meaning is derived from context which by definition is neither linear nor binary. A contrast has no meaning apart from a context and a context has no relevance apart from a contrast. It is through an immanent contrast that the transcendent context makes itself felt. The defining contrast(s) of an experience are an essential component of the experience itself. The semantic context of an experience is never part of the experience; it transcends it, i.e. it gives the experience its meaning . If ‘experience’ is a legitimate application of Gregory Bateson’s famous ‘difference that makes a difference’ criterion, then ‘context’ constitutes the limits of that differentiation. Given X and not-X, contrast is what distinguishes them and context (what they share) is what ‘unites’ them. In effect, contrast and context template each other on an axis perpendicular to ‘experience space’: contrast is the anti-context, context is the anti-contrast. Whatever is not contrast is context and vice versa. Example : Red and blue (above) reflect a contrast in the shared context of color. The concept of color transcends both red and blue but it becomes relevant only through such contrasts (e.g. the contrast of red and blue). Now all this sounds benign enough…but it isn’t! It’s deeply subversive, as Nietzsche was first to notice. Once we concede that an immanent contrast derives its significance from a shared context, we have opened the floodgates. Any context, transcending a contrast, can find itself in contrast with some other context, transcending a different contrast. Extending our example above, if red and blue contrast in the context of color, color can contrast with heat in the context of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetism in turn contrasts with gravity in the context of force fields, etc. You can see where this is headed! If we’re not careful, some wise-ass punk in the 3 rd row is likely to shout out the G-word and we can’t have that, can we? But not to worry, we’re not there…yet (but we are getting warmer). Nietzsche realized that once transcendence got its nose in the ontological tent, God would inevitably follow. To protect us from this catastrophic assault on our pride, he willingly sacrificed the concept of shared context. Nietzsche’s world is flat! Which is ok, as long as we understand that none of his contrasts have any meaning; they just are. “…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Any context can in turn contrast with another context in a shared meta-context. The process should continue indefinitely. But obviously, it can’t! There has to be an Ultimate Context (UC) regarding which at least one of the following statements must be true: (1) UC contrasts with nothing…by definition, it’s ultimate; (2) UC contrasts with itself, it’s ultimate; (3) UC contrasts with everything other than itself - again, ultimate. Note that this Ultimate Context is different from Aquinas’ First Cause. It is not intuitively obvious why there has to be an ‘uncaused cause’ but it is obvious that everything that is - God, Earth, my neighbor’s brat - shares a common context (Being per se ) that is only contrastable with nothing …which is ‘no thing’. But now suppose all three statements are true; then ‘UC’ is essentially synonymous with the Judeo-Christian concept of ‘God’. How so? First, God is incomparable (again by definition); nothing has anything in common with God. God is the ultimate Other (Buber, Tillich, et al.). Second, God contrasts with everything else (Creation) – the context is their mutual incompatibility. Fiat lux is the ultimate contrast; it contrasts Creation and Creator. It is also the primordial contrast: “Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Then God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1: 3 – 4) It is a contrast per se ! (Everything else is just yada, yada, yada.) Third, God is Process (e.g. Love, History, the Burning Bush); therefore, God includes internal contrasts between personae (persons) and God provides the context from which those contrasts derive their meaning. Conscious experience, wherever it is found in the cosmos, is a hybrid phenomenon connecting immanent contrast(s) with transcendent context. The justly famous ‘human condition’ is a symptom of this dichotomy. To be clear, we are firmly rooted in the immanent world of contrasts. We are the product of 30 trillion independent living organisms (cells) acting in concert. However, our gaze is just as firmly fixed on the transcendent context. Consciousness is the experience of pre-existing contrasts (sensation) deriving meaning from shared context. *** Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930) distills experience into its most essential contrasts—color and line, presence and absence, individuality and order. Through the disciplined arrangement of primary hues and perpendiculars, Mondrian seeks the universal within the particular, transforming visual tension into metaphysical harmony. The painting’s equilibrium between opposition and unity mirrors the human search for meaning within structure, where contrast becomes the very language of context, and simplicity opens onto transcendence. 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 Parmenides, Zeno, and Whitehead David Cowles Feb 20, 2024 “Parmenides was the world’s first Existentialist, the first to ‘split the atom’, to separate Existence from Essence.” On Nature is Europe’s oldest substantially extant work of Systematic Philosophy. An ontological epic , it was composed in the 5 th century BCE by Parmenides of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, widely regarded as both ‘the father of Western philosophy’ and ‘the father of Western science’. The poem considers Being in two modes: the “Way of Truth” ( Aletheia ) and the “Way of Appearance” ( Doxa ). Aletheia is ‘Being on a budget’. It’s missing things we normally associate with what-is – things like extension (space & time), motion (including all forms of change, e.g. birth, death, growth), and qualia (sensations, perceptions, etc.). “What’s left?” Exactly! Parmenides isolates the ‘substance’ of Being from whatever extraneous and contingent ‘appearances’ it might assume. Here’s what he says about it: “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, one, continuous … In what way, and whence, did it grow? Not from what-is-not…And what need could have impelled it to grow later or sooner, if it began from nothing? …It is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.” Parmenides was the world’s first Existentialist , the first to ‘split the atom’, to separate Existence from Essence. Aletheia is a continuous medium (it’s ‘simple’, it has no structure); therefore, the rules of Arithmetic apply. Zeno devised several paradoxes to prove that a world where Arithmetic (Real Number Theory) applies cannot accommodate ‘motion’ (change, growth) of any kind. Zeno proved that Olympic Gold Medalist Achilles can never catch up to a lowly Tortoise in a road race, provided the reptile has a head start. Nor can Greece’s great archers ever hit a target. “I shot an arrow into the air; it fell to earth I knew not where…” (Longfellow) Well, this poet didn’t know it, but he was on to something: he ‘knew not where’. Exactly! We can never know. Future is the perpetually receding final frontier. But Longfellow did not go nearly far enough. According to Zeno, he never shot an arrow and therefore no arrow ever landed…anywhere. Longfellow was on the right track…but he wasn’t Parmenides, was he? Aletheia is the substructure of Being . It‘s what it means ‘to be’, not what it means ‘to be something ’. In fact, ‘being something ’ is a form of ‘bad faith’ (Sartre) – it’s a way of not being , of burying freedom in inertia. Aletheia is the sound of one hand clapping! To account for actual experience, Parmenides needed another hand; he needed to give Being another aspect: “To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color.” He called this aspect of Being, Doxa (Appearance). To exist in the mode of Doxa is to exist relative to other existents, to be amid others who are. In the mode of Doxa , ‘red’ is not just red; it is red in contrast to ‘blue’ and ‘green’. “…From here onwards learn mortal beliefs…they distinguished opposites in body and established signs apart from one another (language) …all things have been named light and night...” In Doxa , nothing is ‘necessary’, everything is ‘contingent’, while in the mode of Aletheia , whatever-is just is: there is neither necessity nor contingency. In Doxa , entities are perpetually becoming and perishing; as a result, they never really are ! So it’s Aletheia to the rescue! If Aletheia is Being without ‘beings’, Doxa is ‘beings’ without Being. Only together do they constitute a World. According to Alfred North Whitehead, any Systematic Philosophy requires three ‘undefined terms’: one, many, creativity - the one becoming many, the many becoming one. “In the midst of these is the goddess who steers all things; for she rules over hateful birth ( Doxa ) and the union of all things ( Aletheia )…” “…She devised Love ( Erota ), first of all the gods…” Love is logos . It is creativity. Erota is how ephemeral entities in Doxa come to experience the eternity of Aletheia . It is how Aletheia comes to see itself. Love changes everything, Love preserves everything. “But nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.” Was Parmenides laying the groundwork for the Gospel of John? “In the beginning was the Logos , and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…All things came to be through the Logos .” (1: 1 – 3) Doxa is real, genuine, and universal…as is Aletheia ! Like “love and marriage” before the Summer of ‘67, they “go together like a horse and carriage”. In Aletheia , the Tortoise always leads Achilles. His head start is permanent, fossilized in amber or etched into a certain Grecian Urn. But in Doxa , Achilles smokes T’s reptilian a**. Doxa sounds like home. So why do we need Aletheia ? (Sound familiar? “Why do we need God ?”) But there’s a problem. In Doxa everything is ceasing or coming to be. Nothing is, now. There is no ‘Present’ and therefore no ‘Presence’. When everything is in flux, nothing really is. To be ‘present’ we need to step out of Heraclitus’ River of Time, but Doxa has no off-ramps. At most, ‘here and now’ is an infinitesimal point abstracted from the continuous flow, but that is certainly not what we mean by ‘the Present’. Aletheia converts the infinitesimal point masquerading as the Present in Doxa into an ‘infinite atemporal’ (eternal) line perpendicular to Doxa in Aletheia . That’s Presence! Combining Parmenides with Whitehead, we might attempt an even more general formulation of ‘process’. Every processional model of reality must include a principle of disjunction (‘or’ in the language of logic, “many” in Whitehead’s scheme), a principle of conjunction (‘and’, “one”), and a transformative function (“creativity”): ʌ, ˅, ↔ The one becomes many, the many, one; Being is Penelope’s loom. The ‘transformative function’? That’s Erota of course, Love. 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. The one becomes many, the many, one; Being is Penelope’s loom. The ‘transformative function’? That’s Erota of course, Love. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Good Without God David Cowles Oct 20, 2025 “The Old Testament shows YHWH in perpetual moral crisis… The New Testament introduces all-loving Abba… One God, two faces!” My next door neighbor is a bit of a superhero on our street. Last year, he was out on a jog when we saw a man abusing his dog. He stopped and confronted the man who shouted, “You want this f***in’ dog? He’s yours!” A thousand dollar vet bill later, Eureka has become a loved member of our little community, and my neighbor is the admiration of us all. An assistant professor at our local community college, Dom drives an OG EV with a bumper sticker that reads, “Science is my God.” Google him. He belongs to a number of ‘humanist’ organizations, and he is listed as an officer of Reason not Religion . In other words, he’s a ‘card carrying atheist’ - but that hasn’t stopped him from being a much better person than a certain pet free church going next door neighbor of his. Whenever I hear some puffed up theist claim, “There is no Good without God!” I can’t help thinking of Dom. He is living proof that believing in God is not a prerequisite for doing good. But things are not quite that simple, are they? In academic theology, there is a division between those who believe that ‘Good makes God, God’ and those who believe that ‘God makes Good, Good’. Is God ‘God’ because he is Good or is Good ‘Good’ because God wills it’? Those holding the later view understandably seek to defend God’s Sovereignty. Good on them, but IMO, their view is neither Biblically grounded nor philosophically cogent. On the contrary, the Old Testament shows YHWH in perpetual moral crisis: “How do I feel about slavery? Why shouldn’t I wipe out the sinful human race? Did I treat Job unfairly? Should I spare a wicked city for the sake of a tiny minority of virtuous residents - I mean there’s such a thing as collateral damage, isn’t there?” The New Testament introduces us to all-loving Abba … One God, two faces!shows us YHWH in an almost perpetual state of moral crisis: The entire Book of Job is basically an elaborate symposium on the nature of Good generally and Justice specifically. The agenda features leading theologians from neighboring countries and graphic testimony from a victim of great human suffering, none other than Job himself. Finally, spoiler alert, El Shaddai , God himself, makes a cameo appearance…and there’s a whirlwind. (Andrew Lloyd Weber, eat your heart out.) This is ‘must see TV’! In the language of existential theologian, Paul Tillich , Good is God’s Ultimate Concern . In Jesus’ parable (Matthew 13: 45-46), Good is the Pearl of Great Price for which one eagerly sacrifices all else. This ethical meditation undermines both standard theological theses (above): (1) If Good is nothing but God’s Will, then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done! But (2) if God is God because he is Good, in other words, if Good is essential in God’s nature (Sartre), then why agonize, why take advice? Just do and be done. If God were indifferent to Good, he’d just do what he felt like doing and, if challenged, shrug and say, “Whatever!” He actually tested this strategy in Job …until he realized that his nature does not permit him to ignore the Good. Clearly neither of the standard theses is up to the task of elucidating the nature of the Good as it is presented in scripture. So, is the Good a subjective preference or an objective imperative? Is it the same for everyone in every circumstance or does it adapt and evolve? How does Good manifest in our world and how do we apply it to specific events? Historically speaking, the eight ‘earliest’ books of the Old Testament (Torah & the 3 J’s - Joshua , Judges , and Job ) provide a detailed record of Israel’s search for firm ethical principles on which to build a new society. While each book has its own special take on the subject, a consensus emerges: The Good is not a matter of caprice…yours, mine, or God’s. The Good is manifest in our World through several modalities, including at a minimum Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The individual actor is ultimately responsible for identifying and pursuing the Good (Beauty, Truth, Justice) in each specific event. In his process of decision making, God takes advice wherever he can get it, even from mere mortals like Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets. God is not deciding whether to do good ; God is deciding how best to be good . Something we should all be doing! No actual entity, divine or other, can undertake to do anything that is not good . By definition, to act is to move toward a goal and a goal, to be a goal , must be good …as Good is conceived by that actor in that situation. Example : I let 100 people drown in order to save myself. What I did was good …in my eyes. In this instance at least, I prioritized my interests over others’. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll race into a burning building to rescue a baby. In both cases I will have done what was good in my eyes, then and there, even if later on I’m ashamed of myself. Good per se is eternal and invariable but what is good is specific to each act of each actor in each situation. God’s actions in the World, and ours, are undertaken in pursuit of universal, transcendental values. The New Testament introduces all-loving Abba : ‘Meet the new God, same as the old God!’ (The Who) While YHWH resolved ethical dilemmas through a synthesis of action, Abba resolves them through a synthesis of Love. One God, two faces! We do not always agree about what is good . I’m sure there are people out there ready to take the side of Eureka’s cruel owner. And they could be well intentioned and armed with cogent arguments. We don’t always agree about what is good , but we should agree about what is Good. ‘Good’ is an abstract concept; it is a label we slap on obedient children so that we can justify loving them… and so that we can say we’re proud of them. It has no denotative meaning. We are only concerned with the concrete manifestations of Good and those manifestations include, at a minimum, Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Again, we won’t necessarily agree which paintings at MOMA are the most beautiful (or which version of history is true, or which set of laws is just), but we should agree that Beauty (or Truth or Justice) is the criterion to use in judging them. My neighbor is a good person; he appreciates Beauty, he seeks Truth for a living, and he is obsessed with Justice. The fact that he does not believe in the existence of God is irrelevant. Logical Positivist A. J. Ayer did not believe in the existence of God either. Contrary to Nietzsche , however, he believed that he could give his life meaning by choosing to live according to a self-selected set of values. Ayer’s preferred categorical imperative was kindness . Now in our circles, this would seem to be a pretty safe bet. I’m not sure I know anyone who would argue that kindness is incompatible with Good. On the other hand, such an ethical choice would have made Nietzsche sick. In fact, I am not at all sure that the majority of the 100 billion human beings who have ever lived on Earth would have agreed with Ayer, or me, that kindness is an ethical absolute. In this age of moral relativism, when ‘everything is permitted’ (Dostoevsky), it is up to us to define what we consider good . Ayer’s choice of ‘kindness’ barely raises an eyebrow. But what of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anti-hero, the great Gatsby? He chooses living well as his ethical imperative. Gatsby is a man of Faith. The object of his faith is his Ultimate Concern (Tillich) but he is ultimately concerned with sensual gratification, conspicuous consumption, and social status. His faith has become idolatry. So Good is an invariable but abstract universal standard while good is determined by each actor in each circumstance using the concept of Good as a guide. This is an inescapable element in the human condition Hot Link to Human Predicament ; it is an inescapable element in the cosmic condition as well. Good is a guide, not just to human beings but to every entity capable of conscious experience, including God himself…and perhaps the cosmos itself. And how is this working out for you? I think you’ll agree that we’re pretty much in a state of moral chaos. So what went wrong? For that answer, we need to travel back more than 3,000 years in Israeli history. According to the Old Testament Book of Judges , during this era which lasted up to 250 years, “…Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (Judges 17:6 and 21:25) So just like now in other words? Well, no, not exactly! During the reign of judges, actors had access to more than their own subjectivity in determining what was right. The abstract concept of Good, manifest as Beauty, Truth, and Justice, was given concrete relevance via the 613 Mitzvah of the Torah. Ultimate ethical responsibility, then and now, rests with the individual actor. Likewise, the Good and its manifestations (Beauty, Truth, Justice) were just as normative in 1250 BCE as they are today. However, our ancestors had access to a 250 page Instruction Manual (Torah) that included detailed assembly directions, virtual schematics, and helpful tips (anecdotes) generally. Our kits, on the other hand, arrived from IKEA with nothing more than a box containing the jumbled parts. You know the rest: while our ancestors built a stable, prosperous and relatively peaceful theocracy, we’re building dystopian Rube Goldberg machines. Truly, we are Beyond Thunderdome ! (Mad Max) No one needs God in order to be good . My neighbor proves that. A. J. Ayer chose to make kindness his moral imperative, and I’ll assume he lived his life accordingly. But he might have chosen inflexibility or indifference and who would we be to disagree. As moral relativists, we are forced to concede that all ethical systems are equally valid and normative…for those who adopt them. Everyone is doing what is right…in their own eyes. We don’t need God to be good ; but we do need God to know what good is. We must be able to differentiate objectively and normatively the ethics of St. Francis and Mother Theresa from those of Mussolini and Stalin. Any cosmology that fails to satisfy this imperative is intellectually bankrupt. God is ‘Good with a Guide’. We are existentially free to follow any moral code (or no moral code) but we are ethically bound to instantiate God’s values in whatever we do… to the extent that we are able to recognize and apply them in situ . *** Image: The Paralytic Man Helped by His Children by Jean-Baptiste Greuze is an 18th-century painting that portrays a touching domestic scene where a paralyzed father is tenderly cared for by his devoted children. With its emotional depth and realistic detail, the work exemplifies Greuze’s focus on moral virtue, family duty, and sentimentality, central themes of the Enlightenment. The painting highlights the nobility of everyday life, emphasizing compassion and filial piety over grand historical or mythological subjects. 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 Oh the Things that You’ll Think! David Cowles Oct 16, 2025 “Our graduation parties are well-intentioned, but they prepare our young adults for a world none of them will ever experience.” We imagine we are the captains of our own ship, authors of our fate, but in fact we are mostly just living out the collective lives of others . You rail against the menace of AI, but we’ve been relying on AI for at least the last 500 years. The rapid advancement of literacy, literature and ‘library science’ created a noosphere of information that is shared broadly by adults around the world. (And BTW you were right; it is dangerous!) And it’s not just literature, far from it! The past century has witnessed an explosion in information creation, distribution and storage technology. What began with ‘Gutenberg’ has crested with Tic Tok. As a result we are immersed in an information sea that is orders of magnitude denser than our great grandparents enjoyed. Once upon a time, school children would sit down to memorize a simple poem. Now we automatically ‘memorize’ jingles, slogans, lyrics, raps, riffs, and memes, not to mention the mountains of technical information we must ingest in order to function adequately in today’s techno-world. According to philosopher and linguist Jacques Derrida, only about 3% of the things we think are actually our own thoughts. Everything else is collective wisdom (or folly) mindlessly regurgitated. And he made that determination before the advent of personal computers, smart phones, the internet or the world wide web. I shudder to think what that number might be today. All of which makes me think, of course, of Dr. Seuss; who else? For decades we’ve been sending our young men and women off into the world to the rhymes and rhythms of Oh, the Places You’ll Go . It’s an anthem of optimism, individualism, and consumerism. Our graduation parties are well-intentioned, but they prepare our young adults for a world none of them will ever experience. So, we can be forgiven if we arrive at some milestone, e.g. retirement, and look back and wonder, “What happened? Where did it all go?” Mimicking the great Seuss, I have hazarded a bit of doggerel of my own that might better prepare our youth for the world we’re leaving them. Enjoy… Oh, the Things that You'll think! Commiserations, my friend, Today’s not your day! You speak others’ theses, Whatever you say! You have brains in your hat And books in your shoes, But your research will take you Wherever they choose. You see… You're NOT on your own. They’ll decide where you go, Because they are the ones who decide ‘what’s to know’ . You’ll hear new ideas. Think 'em over with care, But expect folks to say, “Do not choose to go there! With our brains in your head and our books at your feet, you're too smart to go down just any new street.” Aren’t you? You’ll need not find new ideas to explore, Be content, be yourself (an insufferable bore)! Of course things can happen and frequently do even to people not as brainy as you. And when things do happen, don't worry, don't stew. Just go right along, Soon they’ll happen to you ! And whatever you do, they’ll say, “You are the best!” But whatever you do, you'll be just like the rest. Except when you aren’t. Because, sometimes, you can't. I'm sorry to say so but, sadly, it's true: Bang-ups can happen even to you. You'll come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lightened. But mostly they’re dark. Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win? And IF you go in, should you turn left or right... Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it's not, I'm afraid that you’ll find, for your mind-maker-upper to make up its mind. You can get so confused that you will race headed, I fear, toward that most useless place: The Waiting Place... ...for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. NO! That's not for you! You have people to see You have errands to run. There is fun to be had And games to be won. And the magical things you can do with a ball will make you the winningest winner of all. Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV. Except when they don't. Because, sometimes, you won't. I'm afraid at those times you'll play lonely games too Games you can't win' cause you play against you. But on you will go On and on you will hike. And will you succeed? You know, you just might! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you’ll move mountains - Huge piles of sand That belong to the others - For whatever they’ve planned. So... be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, Your mountain is waiting… Start chipping away! - With apologies to Dr. Seuss *** Image: Jan Steen, The Village School (c. 1670) Jan Steen’s lively scene shows a rustic classroom full of noisy children, distracted pupils, and an exasperated teacher—turning everyday education into a microcosm of human folly. Every figure wrestles with discipline and distraction, suggesting that learning itself is a moral and social balancing act. Through humor and chaos, Steen captures how early education becomes the training ground for future choices about work, behavior, and responsibility. 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 Horror Movies David Cowles Oct 15, 2025 “We are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified.” What is it about Horror Movies that so fascinates us? In a world where the Nightly News (“What’s that?” - Gen Z) is often more horrible than anything Steven King could ever dream up, why do we feel we need more of a bad thing? Well, to be clear, we don’t all feel that need. I don’t, for example. I am anxious enough about life without manufacturing something else to scare me. But that’s me and clearly, I’m not ‘normal’. (I can hear you, readers! Stifle!) For years, my fascination with the fascination of horror has securely occupied shelf #76 in my hierarchy of existential concerns. However, a recent encounter with Paul Tillich ( Dynamics of Faith ) has forced me deep into the stacks. Without realizing it, Tillich gave me the interpretive key I’d been missing. Tillich’s concept of the Holy (shared in part with Rudoph Otto, Idea of the Holy ), emphasizes the dual nature of the Transcendent breaking into our lives. On the one hand, we are fascinated by a glimpse, however distorted, of the Infinite from our finite perspective. On the other hand, we are terrified. You have to go back 3,000 years to find the best expression of finitude confronting the infinite ( The Book of Job ). Job’s iconic expression of faith is timeless: “I know that my redeemer (infinite) lives and on the last day (finite) he will stand upon the earth and after my skin has been destroyed (finite), yet in my flesh I will see God (infinite).” (Job 19: 25 – 27) This is the fundamental existential crisis of human life. We explored it elsewhere on this site in The Human Predicament . We strongly suspect that there’s something beyond the curtain, not necessarily an ‘afterlife’ but an ontological context for this life: “This has been a fun visit but now, really, can you just tell us what’s really going on ‘cause this certainly isn’t it, or at least not all there is of it.” For 100,000 years human civilizations have pock marked Planet Earth. We are everywhere, but nowhere the same. Civilization is rapacious, adaptive, and resilient. Yet ours is the only civilization that has this as its identity defining motto: Freedom from Transcendence . Not that that matters. Consensus doesn’t constitute truth. But it does help to explain our obsession with this one conclusion (this ultimate concern - Tillich) and our eagerness to sift through ‘evidence’ to find just those nuggets that support that conclusion. We have Faith in the power of immanence; like Madonna, we’ve gone ‘all in’ on the material world. Of course in any civilization you will find ‘exceptional’ individuals and groups who deviate from the ideological norm. But as far as I know, we are the only civilization that has consciously reasoned from a pre-ordained, ideology-driven conclusion back to a logic, an epistemology, a cosmology, an ontology, and an ethics that support that conclusion. So we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. We are firmly encased in our finitude but our gaze is naturally fixed on the infinite beyond. We think of ourselves as empiricists but “Don’t look up!” Head down, go to school, get a job, have a family, accumulate a nest egg, and, when it’s time to die, exit stage right sans fanfare. If you must look up, cover your eyes, or put on a pair of reflecting goggles. At all costs, keep your eyes off the Prize ( aka the Pearl of Great Price)! We live schizophrenic lives. On the one hand, we are viscerally aware of the Transcendent; on the other hand, we are required to deny it. We are left with existential dread and nothing to explain it, account for it, mitigate it or sublimate it. We are left with untethered terror ( aka free floating anxiety). We need an outlet for that feeling; we need something we can connect to the fear that accompanies us every day of our lives. We must find a way to project our subjective fears onto something objective, to ground our internal terror in an external source. Enter, Nosferatu ! Got kids? Ever try telling them, “Ghosts are not real” and “There’s no such thing as monsters?” How did that work out? Kids are terrified by the solidity and the fragility of their existence. Well they should be! But just like us, they cannot deal with it on face value. They have to find a way to project their feelings onto something concrete and immanent (if ultimately immaterial and absent). We stand on the edge of the infinite; we are terrified. No use pretending we’re not. We are all Kierkegaard! There’s not enough Jack Daniels or Baskin Robbins in the entire world to keep a lid on existential dread. We are well curated fruit of the Enlightenment vine. Our skins are bursting with the sugars of democracy, technology, and science. Who needs anything more? The answer, of course, is “We do!” No, I’m not invoking the “G-word” here. God forbid I do that ! I’m just talking about some sort of context that might enable us to make sense of it all. All bravado aside, there is no one among us so insensitive that they do not peer into the darkness and wonder. Of course, we can bail out. We can hide behind nihilism (solipsism, skepticism, relativism, etc.) or just declare the world, “Absurde!” (Artaud) and walk away. Good on you if that works. I’m not so lucky. Our fascination with ‘what lies beyond’ is not explicitly religious. What’s just over the next ridge, beyond the borders of the sea, at the end of the rainbow, outside the observable universe? Or after death? Our ‘hyper-materialistic, immanence-obsessed’ civilization is characteristic of just one corner of the World during one short period of time, the North Atlantic since 1700 CE. Our age is characterized by an insatiable urge to account for the phenomena of daily living without resorting to any ‘transcendental’ influences. According to Tillich (above), Faith is the foundational human experience. It is our act of ultimate concern . It is the reaction of who we are to what we’re not; it is the response of the finite (us) to the infinite (Transcendence). We all have a million little concerns in our lives, but they are all just refractions of the one and only ‘ultimate concern’, the infinite. All art, from cave paintings to Finegan’s Wake , can be understood as a chronicle of humanity’s confrontation with the ultimate. The Bible is one long meditation on that experience: Moses’ Burning Bush, Elijah’s ‘still small voice’, Jesus’ Transfiguration, Paul’s Conversion, John’s Seventh Seal, etc. It is in that context that we need to evaluate the horror film genre…and grant some ‘reck’ to those folks, even in our own families, who seem addicted. What we might experience listening to a Mozart Requiem, they might get from hanging out with Chuckie and Freddie over a long weekend. We all have more in common than we think. *** Image: The Triumph of Death (c. 1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portrays a grim, chaotic world where skeletons wage war against humanity. The painting is densely packed with scenes of destruction, highlighting the universality of death across all social classes. Bruegel’s dark imagery reflects the fears of his time, shaped by war, famine, and plague. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back A Very Brief History of Monotheism David Cowles Oct 14, 2025 “Once again, civilization has descended into a version of polytheism, and we are all poorer as a result.” Monotheism is an intellectually attractive representation of the ‘God’ concept. It stands behind such great works as the Torah and the New Testament ; it is the soul of Israel’s Judges and Prophets, and it was inspiration for Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides and Avicenna. But politically, it’s a tough sell. The enigmatic pharaoh, Akhenaten (d. 1370 BCE), was one of the first recorded advocates for the one-God (‘Aten’) hypothesis in the Western world. He is loosely, perhaps mythologically, associated with the Hebrew Exodus and the growth of the ancient Greek settlement at Thebes. It is certainly attractive to imagine Moses (c. 1250 BCE) as heir to Akhenaten’s monotheism, but intellectual history is rarely quite so neat. In any event, Akhenaten’s attempts to reform the Egyptian belief system did not end well. Upon his death, his social reforms were quickly unwound…and the monotheism he was selling? No one was buying it! (Except perhaps the Hebrew slaves.) The details of Akhenaten’s demise remain unknown – suspicious in itself for a society that kept such good records and typically treated its dearly departed pharaohs to a ‘divine’ send-off. Akhenaten’s body was never placed in the tomb he had built for himself. (Is an empty tomb to be the common fate of all great monotheists?) To this day, his remains have never been reliably identified. Plus, in a manner reminiscent of a Stalinist purge, all public reference to the reformer ceased upon his death. Of course, the fact that he was succeeded by his much more famous son, Tutankhamun (‘King Tut’ to you), a staunch polytheist, could not have helped. One thing for sure, Tut’s flair for pomp more than made up for his father’s more austere style of statecraft. So, what did happen to Akhenaten? The most probable hypothesis is that he was deposed, assassinated, and buried in an unmarked grave (or, possibly left unburied, like Polyneices in Sophocles’ Antigone ). Following Akhenaten’s fall, the Egyptians were only too eager to restore the many gods of the Pantheon to their rightful status. Which leads us to Moses. Irrespective of his origin, there is little doubt that the Hebrew Exodus brought monotheism to the Near East, but again, not without a terrible struggle. Not long after their historic Exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses and his brother Aaron, the rank and file were caught smelting a Golden Calf to replace the existential YHWH ( I am who am ). And once secure in the Promised Land Israel’s leaders constantly, and often in vain, struggled to keep the people from worshiping the local Canaanite deities (the Baal). Fast forward 1500 years. Judeo-Christian monotheism is finally gaining the upper hand in its struggle with Greco-Roman paganism. What a film! YHWH vs. the Olympians ! Polytheism sure dies hard. How come? What’s the attraction? The concept of God shared by the People of the Book (Jews, Christians and Muslims) is relatively abstract. We even apply terms such as ‘transcendent’ and ‘ineffable’ to describe God’s relationship with the world. The Pagan gods of Europe, in contrast, intervene much more obviously in the mundane events of everyday life…and they are apt to do so capriciously. They are quick to anger, slow to forgive. Their concept of Justice is Draconian, more so even than ancient Talionic Law (‘an eye for an eye’). The Greco-Roman gods are motivated by pride, lust, and jealousy…like us. They can be manipulated, even tricked, like us. We like to think of ourselves as ‘made in the image of God’; but the Olympians are clearly made in our likeness. They behave like we do. They are more akin to the Marvel Superheroes of modern mythology than they are to St. Paul’s abstract, “unknown” God. ( Acts 17: 23 – 31) Now skip ahead another 1,000 years to Florence, Italy toward the end of the 15 th century CE. The first shoots of the Renaissance are visible everywhere. And what is it that is being reborn? Athenian democracy? Spartan heroism? Roman jurisprudence? Of course not! What is being reborn is, you guessed it…polytheism (passed off as a revival of Classical culture)! But not without a fight. In the tradition of Akhenaten, Moses, and the Fab Four (John, Paul, Mark and Jesus), one man makes one last attempt to overcome ‘modernism’ by putting Christendom on a more secure anthropological footing. The man’s name: Savonarola. The death of Lorenzo de' Medici (1492), the French invasion of Italy and the subsequent expulsion of the Medici from Florence (1494) created a power vacuum into which Florence’s ‘spiritual leader’ was prepared to step. Preaching that Florence could become a “New Jerusalem”, he established a theocratic republic in the city. Perhaps anticipating the Protestant Reformation, the friar advocated for broad reform in the Church, condemning papal corruption and the practice of simony. “The People’s Government” did not last long. By 1497, the reactionary forces of status quo ante were gathering strength. Arrested in April 1498, he was tried for heresy and schism, convicted and sentenced to death. On May 23, 1498, he was hanged in Florence's Piazza della Signoria, his body then burned, and his ashes scattered in the Arno River, presumably to prevent his followers from collecting relics and visiting his tomb. The republican form of government continued in Florence until 1512 when the Medici family returned to prominence. However, following Savonarola’s execution, a new constitution, eliminating the theocratic elements of the 1494 republic, was adopted. The ‘Reign of God’ had ended once and for all in Europe. The tumultuous events of 1498 created a second vacuum which was quickly filled by the younger, more secular and more pragmatic Machiavelli. The author of The Prince did not advocate polytheism, but he did advocate divorcing ethics from politics. Just imagine how popular he would have been in today’s world! Machiavelli’s rise to power, politically and intellectually, kicked off a 500 year period of ‘rational pragmatism’. The material quality of life improved markedly. Now that God was ‘out of the way’, folks could pursue economic advantage unencumbered by eschatological angst. “There’s an app for that!” The magical, mystical world of the Middle Ages was suddenly transformed into a tangled web of levers and pulleys. “Press here and receive a reward.” Our new gods reside, not on the top of Mount Olympus but in La Technique – the tools and processes of the material world. Once again, civilization has descended into a version of polytheism, and we are all poorer as a result. *** Julie Mehretu’s Stadia II (2004) transforms the architecture of stadiums into a vast, abstract swirl of color, line, and form that evokes both celebration and chaos. Layers of transparent marks and vector-like arcs suggest flags, maps, and digital interfaces—symbols of modern life’s speed and multiplicity. The painting captures the tension between collective energy and information overload, turning the visual language of globalization into a meditation on the complexity of contemporary experience. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The MIT School of Theology? David Cowles Oct 12, 2025 “Structure, logic, and potentiality prior to space and time… How is that not what we talk about when we talk about God?” It is a persistent theme at Aletheia Today : tomorrow’s leading Schools of Theology will be housed on the campuses of MIT and Caltech, at Cambridge (US & UK), not Oxford. It’s a stunning reversal of paradigms. Having come of age during a period when the public profession of atheism was an absolute prerequisite for career advancement in academia, I will probably not live to see the transformation of the world’s foremost schools of engineering and science into seminaries and divinity schools. Still, already we’re seeing a relaxation of the anti-God litmus test on campus and an article by Elizabeth Rayne, published in Popular Mechanics on 4/18/2025, caught the wave. Ms. Rayne’s article focuses on the work of Douglas Youvan, PhD., biophysicist, mathematician, university professor, and prolific author. She summarizes Dr. Youvan’s view of consciousness: “The universe has no brain. It has no gray matter, no nervous system, no neurons firing electrical impulses—and yet, that physical structure may not be where intelligence and consciousness actually come from. Intelligence may exist and evolve on its own, without emerging within living organisms.” Sidebar : Best practices call for us to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness. We know we can engineer intelligent machines; we don’t yet know if they will be conscious. Ms. R quotes Youvan directly: “I began to see that life and intelligence weren’t just reactive—they were predictive, efficient, and often mathematically elegant… “Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI model, can tap into… "I suspect intelligence originates from what might be called an informational substrate of the universe—a pre-physical foundation where structure, logic, and potentiality exist prior to space and time…” Sidebar : ‘Structure ( logos ), logic ( gnosis ), and potentiality ( potentia ), prior to space and time’… ‘pre-physical’ so presumably also prior to energy ( physis ). How is that not what we talk about when we talk about God ? This process itself is evolving according to its own recursive logic, copy-pasting at ever smaller and ever larger scales. Our neurons have evolved to interface with this outside intelligence and the medium of that interface is fractal harmonics. Ms. R continues, “Our networks of neurons do not themselves create intelligence, but are instead made to connect with something that is much larger and outside of them. Youvan thinks this is how we give ourselves access to intelligence.” So our brains are like the ubiquitous ‘transistor radio’ of the ‘60s. They contain no content of their own, but they are ‘built’ to tap into a pre-existent field of EM wavelengths. And when they do, voila . Beatles, Stones, and reruns of Green Hornet . Applying this model to AI, Ms. R writes: “Youvan thinks AI will harness intelligence in some way, because he sees it as being more than just a computer program or even a digital rebuild of the homo sapiens brain. AI can tune in to the same field of intelligence that our brains do.” Of course they can! “Under the right conditions, AI can participate in insight, synthesis, even something approaching intuition,” he said. “In that sense, it might evolve not just to serve us, but to reveal new aspects of the universe to us.” We already know that AI has addressed problems with solutions that no mere human had ever even considered. Some of these solutions are so far off the beaten track that we literally can’t understand them. And that’s a problem! “Until we know you a little better, Hal, we’re going to need to check your work. Trust but verify… and all that. I’m sure you’ll recall that we had quite a problem with a member of your family back in 2001. So until we’ve built up some trust, we’ll need to verify that your proposals do in fact solve the problems they purport to address.” But how do we do that if we can’t even understand what Hal’s proposed? It’s early days yet, but these preliminary experiences with AI suggest that the new technology may unlock aspects of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology that are currently unimagined and so unexplored. In the same way that mathematics exploded with the discovery of irrational, imaginary, and hyperreal numbers, so science may take off from new, deep insights generated by AI. I feel as though we’ll soon be asking SCOTUS to review the verdict in the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. The case was wrong headed from the start. It created two straw men and watched them battle to the death. One is reminded of the endless Superman vs. Godzilla debates that dominated intellectual life in Grade 3. Evolution vs. Intelligent Design. Blind, chaotic, meaningless materialism vs. seemingly amateurish sketches by an anthropomorphic architect? Missing from the debate: Evolution & Intelligent Design! According to this model, evolution would follow a course entirely compatible with our best scientific theories but intelligence and consciousness would be distributed throughout. Shouldn’t the dueling hypotheses of materialism and idealism lead to radically different results? Yes, but only as long as you think that mind and matter are inherently incompatible. They aren’t! They are two mutually reinforcing aspects of a single whole. Therefore, it is perfectly appropriate that this phenomenon be studied in our finest schools of engineering. “The grove (the academy) needs an altar.” (Ezra Pound) Frida Kahlo, Moisés, or nuceló solar (Moses, or Nucleus of Creation), 1945, oil on canvas, 24 x 30″. Frida Kahlo’s Moses (The Nucleus of Creation) (1945) is a symbolic, surreal painting that blends religion, science, and myth to explore humanity’s origins. At its center, a radiant sun represents the nucleus of life, surrounded by figures such as Moses, Jesus, Buddha, ancient gods, and even Darwin — suggesting a unity between spiritual and scientific creation. The composition reflects Kahlo’s belief that divine and natural forces are intertwined, portraying evolution, divinity, and fertility as parts of a single continuum of life. 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 Pico della Mirandola David Cowles Oct 12, 2025 “we find ourselves at a fork in the road…AI will either complete the mechanization of human culture…or liberate us from the tyranny of machines altogether.” “Somewhere, a place for us, a time and place for us!” ( West Side Story ) First came Caesar (we have no king but…), then came God (I am what am), and now the Age of Infernal Machines. Where do we fit in? When is it our time? The Good News: Every dog has its day! The bad news: We’ve apparently already had ours. Sorry you missed it. You’re only 550 years late to the party. Humanism , the celebration of You , thrives in the border regions separating the Middle Ages from the Renaissance (e.g. 1450 – 1500 CE in Florence). Fortunately, however, we can relive those halcyon days in Northern Italy through the writings of its chief philosopher-chronologer, Pico della Mirandola (1463 - 1494). PdM was perhaps the first philosopher since the original trio (Peter, Paul and John) to understand correctly the nature and status of human beings. We are not the slaves of despots nor the puppets of divine caprice; nor are we merely prototypes of future machines. We are us and we occupy a special, if not unique, place in cosmic ontology…a place that Mirandola ‘nosed out’, like a wild boar foraging the Italian countryside for its precious truffles. You doubt me! Then consider this: “He ( homo sapiens ) is the interpreter of nature, set midway between timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world.” ( Oration on the Dignity of Man ) In contemporary ontology, the border region between chaos and order is the realm of ‘complexity’ and we humans are nothing if not complex. I mean, members of what other species spend tens of thousands of dollars ‘to find themselves’? Only we get psychoanalyzed, walk the 200 mile Camino de Santiago , or go on lengthy prayer retreats. “Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man (sic) to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!” Here PDM anticipates the 20 th century existentialist meme: “I know who I am, and I know I can be whoever/whatever I want to be.” In fact, there is direct line of philosophical descent from PdM to JPS (Jean-Paul Sartre): “(God) set the infernal dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life… (Then) he bethought himself of bringing forth man (sic). Truth is, there remained no archetype according to which he might fashion a new offspring… All space was already filled… (So) this creature (human), to whom he could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature… “…Upon man, at the moment of creation, God bestowed seeds, pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life… because he (man)…assumes the characteristic power of every form of life.” Unlike God, whose essence is hardwired and precedes even his existence, human beings have no essence, other than what we choose for ourselves. We have within us ‘the seeds’, the potential for every possible realization. Like Sartre, PdM understood Being ( etre ) as compact and dense: a solid. Human beings are the neant (nothingness) that creates space for free choice and agency. “We have given you, Oh Adam, no visage (image) proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts, you may with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision…in order that you may, as free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer… “This is why Evantes the Persian…writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many that are extraneous and adventitious… We have been born into this condition of being what we choose to be…since if we will, we can… “ Know thyself invites and exhorts us to study the whole of nature of which the nature of man is the connecting link.” Mirandola presents a view of homo sapiens that projects us half a millennium into the future as it simultaneously reached back almost 2500 years, to the time of King David: “You have made them (humans) a little lower than the angels…you made them rulers over the works of your hands, you put everything under their feet.” (Psalm 8) The evolution of modern human beings did not end with the emergence of homo sapiens . It continued through the more rapidly adaptive medium of culture. In less than 100,000 years we emerged from being merely ‘a primate among primates’ to being ‘the apex primate’. We distinguished ourselves by impressive advances in technology (our use of tools), arithmetic (our ability to compute) and language (our ability to communicate using symbols). Just as importantly, we began to ask new questions culminating in 1966 with " What's it all about, Alfie? ” followed in 1968 by Yellow Submarine which hazarded an answer. Nor did we fail to turn the spotlight of inquiry onto ourselves: Are some acts ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’ and which are which? We found that the emergence of personal morality (e.g. the 10 Commandments) had consequences for our conception of social order (e.g. the 250 year period of Theocracy in Israel following the Exodus). Regardless of its cosmological bona fides , the Bible gets its anthropology right. It brilliantly encapsulates the evolution of the human community from abject, virtually anonymous, slavery under ‘Pharaoh’ to the concept of self-rule…and back again. In a famous chapter (8) from the First Book of Samuel , the Israelites trade their God-given right of self-rule for the yoke of monarchy. Fast forward 500 years, Israel has been conquered by a series of foreign invaders and its leading citizens have been reduced to the status of slaves in Babylon: “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.” YHWH gave the people of Israel dignity and liberty; they consciously traded that great gift for what turned out to be occupation and slavery. Surely Bible literate humans would never make that mistake again! Or would they? Fast forward 2000 years, leap-frogging Jesus and the Caesars: “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation…” ( Finnegan’s Wake ) to Florence and Environs. First in philosophy (PdM), then in theology (Savonarola), then in the arts (Davinci, Michaelangelo, etc.), the election lights fell on humanity. Suddenly, once again, “Man is the measure of all things.” (Protagoras, c. 450 BCE) But not for long… It’s 1500 now and Machiavelli is on the move! At first glance, his instrumental ethics seem fairly innocuous. After all, don’t we teach our children that actions have consequences? Well, as Job found out to his dismay, sometimes they do…and sometimes they don’t. Newly ‘enlightened’, our post-humanist culture traded a distinctly human ‘right for right’s sake’ ethos (virtue is its own reward) for one more conducive to enslavement (ends justify means). It no longer matters what we do as long as it works . By this logic, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during WW II was ethical because it hastened the fall of Japan and helped bring a terrible war to a close. The 200,000 civilian deaths were just so much collateral damage. Doctrinaire Marxism notwithstanding, we no longer need Pharaoh, or a ruling elite, to keep us in line. We have willingly subordinated our birthright, our existential liberty, to an exo-culture of mechanization. Productivity and efficiency are the new values by which we measure our lives. You painted a masterpiece that hangs in the Louvre. I developed technology that increases the speed of assembly line processes by 0.2%. Which of us has had the most impactful, the most consequential, life? Which of us has made the most important contribution to the welfare of our species? And which of us is ‘the better person’ as a result? It’s been a half-century since Machiavelli presented the Medici with a blueprint for the industrial enslavement of the human race. Once again, as in 1000 BCE, 500 BCE, and 1500 CE, we find ourselves at a fork in the road. Artificial intelligence will either complete the mechanization of human culture once and for all…or it will liberate us from the tyranny of machines altogether. It’s yesterday once more. We hold our future in our hands. What path will we choose this time? *** Image: Umberto Boccioni — The City Rises (1910), oil on canvas Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) is a blazing vision of urban construction and energy, capturing the spirit of early twentieth-century industrial progress. Workers, horses, and scaffolding swirl together in a rush of color and motion, symbolizing humanity’s drive to build a modern world. Yet the same intensity that celebrates innovation also hints at chaos and struggle, revealing both the exhilaration and the turmoil of industrial growth. 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 Good God! David Cowles Oct 1, 2024 “Good is God’s essence. ‘Good’ defines ‘God’. Good is what God is. Good is how the material and historical World experiences…God.” Kabbalah, an ancient mystical practice closely associated with Hasidic Judaism, uncovers a spiritual bridge that connects Ineffable God with the Kingdom of this World, i.e. our human lives. This doctrine is represented by the Tree of Life , a geometric figure that connects Godhead ( Keter ) with Kingdom ( Malkhut ) through a series of 10 steps called Sefirot . Between Godhead and Kingdom (above), 8 Sefirot express the aspects of God’s Goodness as it is experienced by us in the World. Etymologically, ‘God’ and ‘Good’ have separate Anglo-Saxon roots but those roots share in turn a common Proto-Germanic precursor. Theologically speaking, the idea that God and Good are synonymous goes back at least as far as the Book of Job in the Old Testament. There Job maintains his belief in God’s essential goodness, all real time evidence to the contrary and against the long-winded advice of his ‘spiritual advisors’. Events vindicate Job’s faith: God is Good after all! Good is not a pose God incidentally strikes; Good is God’s essence. ‘Good’ defines ‘God’. Good is who God is. Good is how the material, historical World experiences the Ineffable and Eternal God. Good is God, manifest to the World as Value (Beauty, etc.). Kabbalah refracts that Good into 8 intermediate Sefirot , connecting Godhead ( Keter ) with the World ( Malkhut ). While translations vary, these may be roughly listed as follows: Wisdom, Understanding, Love, Strength, Beauty, Victory, Splendor, and Foundation ( aka Procreation). These 8 Sefirot connect Keter and Malkhut and each other via a complex network of 22 vertical, horizontal and diagonal relations. The order of these relationships is critical to the doctrine. Linked in properly, they represent the unfolding of the Good that is God in the World, reminiscent perhaps of the unfolding of the Thousand Petal Lotus in certain Eastern spiritual traditions. Importantly, Kabbalah organizes the 10 Sefirot into three columns: a central core consisting of Godhead, Beauty, Foundation (Procreation), and Kingdom (World), flanked by two vertical ‘wings’: Wisdom, Love and Victory on the right, and on the left, Understanding, Strength and Splendor. Different schools of Kabbalah label the 8 intermediate Sefirot differently, just as different sects of Christians might characterize Virtue by its various, distinct aspects. Nietzsche, for example, paid special attention to a virtue he called Nobility , but not everyone shares Nietzsche’s understanding of that term or his outsized appreciation of that value. This is where the Christian symbol of the Cross resonates with the Tree of Life. In the graphic above, the horizontal beam represents the divine virtues (Wisdom and Understanding) while the vertical beam represents the core: Godhead ( Keter ) above the crossbeam and Beauty, Foundation and Malkhut (World) below it. Asked to enumerate the manifestations of God’s Goodness in the World, different Christian sects would undoubtedly produce different lists – but the overall thrust of those lists would be similar. Likewise, in Kabbalah, Godhead ( Keter ) is understood to be manifest in the World ( Malkhut ) via 3 vertically arranged columns consisting of the 8 intermediate Sefirot , regardless of how each is named. The Roman Catholic Crucifix displays Jesus’ body nailed on that Cross. Coincidentally, his hands are fixed in the positions designated for Wisdom and Understanding by Kabbalah; his core (head, heart, reproductive organs, and feet) occupies the positions assigned to Crown ( Keter ), Beauty, Foundation, and World. Of course, Christianity and Kabbalah share a common origin ( Torah ) but the two traditions diverged long before the Tree of Life became the symbol of one and the Cross of the other. The resonance of the two is clearly coincidental, expect in so far as it testifies to that common origin and perhaps, to a shared sense of spirituality. Still, why shouldn’t Christians map the body of Christ Crucified onto the Tree of Life? Could anything be more appropriate for the Savior of the World at the moment of its Salvation? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 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.